Never Skip Leg Day

Captain's bLog: 14 weeks.

Given our travel itinerary, we did not sign up for language classes during our trip, and when we realized we had forgotten our phrasebooks at home it became even more clear that we were never going to become fabulously fluent in any new languages this trip. Truthfully, I was more or less planning to smile and say gracias a lot, relying on my abundant natural charm** to get by.

** More to the point: my tourist dollars. I'm not actually all that charming.

I am ashamed to report that I have failed to meet even this low bar. I'm so shy and afraid of making mistakes that the ugly reality has been frequent bouts of social paralysis. There were times early in the trip when I couldn't even bring myself to walk into a boulangerie and request a baguette - it seemed too overwhelming. Instead, I scurried home and breathed into a paper bag for a while.

Our side trips to Germany and Switzerland were freaking terrifying - I won't even talk about how badly I bombed my interactions in German. But just as I was starting to get my French language-legs under me (like sea-legs, but Gravol doesn't help), we moved to Italy. We practiced Italian words and phrases together until we were confident we could at least squeak out some basics, and I pep-talked myself and practiced scripts in my head endlessly, but in reality I mostly collapsed under pressure again. Looking back, I think it was the ambiguity of the term prego that initially threw me for a loop, and I never fully recovered. Again, just as I was getting the hang of things - even throwing around an occasional prego myself! - we headed back to France.

Oh my gawd was I happy to be back in France, because even if I sortof suck at French, my deep and profound suckage in Italian helped me realize that just mostly sucking at a language still leaves you something to work with. I began braving boulangeries with aplomb, and rarely had to retreat home to breathe into a bag. Baby steps, right?

Just as I was starting to gain some confidence - even patting myself on the back a bit here and there for my mastery of the brief retail interaction - a blind dude asked me for directions. That's not a joke: an actual blind man, who apparently noticed I was walking beside him by the sound of my footsteps because he definitely could not see the directions I tried acting out. He had passed his intended turn at the Rue du Chapeau Rouge by about five metres, but for the life of me I could not think of how to convey this simple fact in French in the moment. I panicked a smidge at first but recovered with some directional charades, then really panicked when I realised he couldn't see me at all, and my brain shut completely down. In retrospect, even without the right words I could have taken his arm and guided him to the turn, but instead I/we had to be saved by a local fellow who watched my entire shameful performance from his doorstep. (But not until he was finished his cigarette, of course.)

I'm sharing this tale of my pathetic-ness because it brought me to one of my New Year's Resolutions: putting myself out there. But for realsies this time, because telling funny little stories about times I did something silly in a controlled narrative that supports my idea of myself isn't ego threatening the way actually fucking up in real time, in person, is. My "out there" has to include the risk of genuinely looking stupid, with no way to airbrush the rough edges of the mistake out. To this end, I have thus far in 2020 completed the following bag-breathing scary tasks, all in French (with some supplemental charades as necessary):

- Helped an elderly couple with directions.
- Helped a woman figure out the machines at the laundromat.
- Braved Sephora in search of a new brow pencil.
- Braved the pharmacy in search of face cream appropriate for my sensitive skin.
- Braved La Poste to mail a parcel home. (Side note: Canada Post is SO helpful and SO cheap compared to La Poste and Poste Italiane - please hug a letter carrier for me.)
- Booked an appointment for and obtained a hair cut, which entailed making small talk for over an hour. (No paper bag, but I did feel like I needed a nap afterward.)
- Lied - presumably convincingly - about Small Fry's age to get him into a cat cafe.

As seems to be the trend, just as I am finally making real strides en francais, we are moving to Spain tomorrow, where we will be staying for eight weeks. But that's okay, because I am 100% committed to making these genuine efforts at communicating in a new language, fear of failure be damned. I am going to train my language-legs until they are as admirably solid, yet shapely!, as my regular meat-legs. And if they get a little hairy along the way at times, well that's just part and parcel of it sometimes, now isn't it?