Bonjour Paris (part 1)

About French (the language)

I took French in high school and in college although Spanish is much more common. I didn't like the sound of machine-gun talk of Spanish as seen in Channel 26 or 44. Upside down question mark and exclamation is too wierd looking. French is fairly close to English. English readers can probably guess some French sentences because of such similarity, for example, sandwich == sandwich. Watch out for same spelling with different meaning though. You will see "pain" all over the place, it means bread. But it is not the bread Americans are used to, "pain" are the long bread. Waita minute, "buffet" is not all-you-can-eat?

A beginning foreign language course is also a great fun way to increase GPA. A beginning class with textbooks full of pictures can't be too difficult.
Studying foreign languages may startle you: adjectives don't have to go in front of the noun it modifies (as in French). Heck, you don't even have to write from left to right (as in Chinese or Hebrew or Arabic).

Even the globally accepted numeric symbols 0..9 don't have to be written the same way. The French prefers to lengthen the little, optional slash in the number 1 so it looks like a captial A without the horizontal line. The 7 needs to have a dash across to distinguish 1 and 7. Oh my they don't use the decimal point! They use a comma instead. So π is approximately 3,14159. They simply use a space for thousands separator. Ok, they are not afraid of people inserting an extra number there.
They prefer 24 hour clock over 12 hour clock. They don't even use the colon between hour and minutes even though it is in every alarm clock I've seen. So they write 6:00pm as 18h00.
I already know this before I go to Paris. Still some more culture shocks to come after getting there...

Need some l'argent (money)

The franc is gone, now they do Euros. US dollar is at all time low, so 100 US dollars is equivalent to 70 something Euro, according to some websites I've seen. I went to my trusty savings account bank in US, "Do you have Euro?", The answer is no. "Ok, do you know where is a currency exchange?", so I got pointed to the nearest one. "Do you have Euro?", The answer is also no. Ok, all you have is Mexican Peso? So I relied on my credit card. But yikes do I even have a PIN for credit card? No I don't. I don't allow myself to cash advance on 19.8% interest. I'm glad the ATM card work fine. The current exchanges in Paris, marked by "Change", will only give me 57 euros! I know my numbers en francais (in French)... but when the lady tells me, I must go, "combien, en anglais s'il vous plait" (How much, in English please). My listening skills in French needs some work. Another culture shock: they use the euro in the BACK of the amount, like 20€, or use as a decimal point: 20€10. Many people in Paris speak English, but not all.

Train to the city
Paris's Charles de Galle airport is about 40 minutes from the main city. Show the address of your hotel and the Information guy should be able to tell you what train or bus to take. We took the RER train, and it costed about 8 Euros. The trains are not as new and cool as I expected. I can see graffiti all over the city from the train. Another culture shock: you must press a button to get off the train at the station! (or flip a switch in regular trains within the city).
Paris's metro system is way cool. It can take you anywhere within the main Paris region, with a total of 14 lines. You should have a street map with train station clearly marked to get around... You can use credit card to buy tickets. But yikes, no English at all on the ticket machine. "Vous parlez anglais?" at the train station returns a "non!" I'm glad I can read/guess the instructions.

(To be continued)