Loyd, you still bitter about france??
"I see from your odd previous reply that you speak French. Now, I'm
spending five months in France doing a space-related simulation project,
and I don't speak French at all. Half my friends have told me that the
easiest way to learn French is to have a French girlfriend as motivation.
The other half said that to get a French girlfriend I must first learn
French. And my family has started asking 'have you met any nice French
girls yet?', too.
Since my friends graduated and got married while I went on to do more
study, and my parents were married at my age, I think Big Things are being
expected of me. I'm under pressure to conform here. If I did speak French,
they would be asking me why I haven't got a French girlfriend yet.
All of this girlfriend pressure is completely unprompted by me (other than
by my Not Having a Girlfriend At Present), but it is apparently the Done
Thing When You Go To France. Whereas the French here ask me questions
about English girls and talk about visiting England to get an English
girlfriend. I just wish both nations would just SHUT UP about foreign
girlfriends and LEAVE ME IN PEACE to run my simulations, but I've given up
trying to tell them that.
As far as I'm concerned this placement is just a room with computers in
that happens to be in France and if they knew anything about computer
networks I'd be sitting in England, running exactly the same simulations,
not being hassled about getting a girlfriend since English computer geeks
don't have girlfriends, and I wouldn't have this painful sunburn from
going climbing in the Pyrenees or red eyes from all the swimming or the
bruises from being hit by tennis balls or all these interesting friends of
loads of different nationalities either. I wouldn't know how to say
'hello' in fifteen languages, I wouldn't have to worry about how to tell
the French-speaking computer operators that everything here is broken and
that they really don't know what they're doing, and I wouldn't have to
agonize over which three cheeses to have with my lunch. Life would be a
lot simpler, and I'd have done a lot more work, too.
And I haven't been drizzled on by miserable weather in weeks. Still, I
guess I've got to try to make the best of a bad lot while I'm here.
So, do you know any nice English-speaking French girls in Toulouse who are
really interested in talking about my space simulation projects and
playing Doom? I'm not going to meet any in this aerospace university now
it's shut down for the summer, so you're my last remaining hope for
keeping my friends and parents happy.
And since you've been married for years and years, it's obvious who you'll
side with.
L. "