The thing about living abroad is the entire experience can sometimes feel like a dream, or, more often, like an alternate reality. The entire cultural paradigm is shifted, and the rituals and caveats of daily life that come with the familiarity of home are easily swept away, having more habitual value than intrinsic necessity. However, my research involving cheese, ravishing dark chocolate cakes every night with dinner, red wine, sausage and elaborate cream filled pastries has confirmed my suspicion that the calories consumed versus calories burned rule still applies, no matter where you are in the world.
So, I signed up for the gym, or the “sport room” if you translated the expression directly from French. This might seem to imply that I wanted to get some exercise, lose weight, or introduce a healthy balance into my life, none of which I give a foutre about. If I did care, I would have gotten a gym membership five months ago and abstained from regularly eating portions that would hardly fit into my carry-on suitcase. But who wants to do that? I signed up with two of my French girlfriends, thereby snagging another opportunity to speak French, hang out, and not do my homework. All three of those things are decidedly more French than working out, so I felt culturally justified in signing up. I even sprang out of bed on a Sunday morning (the day allotted the most homework, and therefore the most motivation to do something, anything, else) only to find that the gym is CLOSED on SUNDAYS!
…which leads me to French Person Obsession #1: Not Doing Work. This national pastime is swell when you’re the one not doing work, and infuriating when other people aren’t doing work. Like when gym owners don’t open their gyms on Sundays. But honestly, the fact that I tried to go to the gym on a Sunday was so American of me. Any French person could explain to you that this was not only incomprehensible but abominable because a) why would I think the gym would be open, b) why would I want to exercise, and most importantly, c) why would I try to do anything on a Sunday? What French person is going to work on a Sunday? What French person is going to go to the gym on a Sunday?
This decidedly secular country has clung on to the Catholic traditions of it’s past, closing everything on Sundays and taking three- to four-day weekends for obscure Catholic holidays practically every other weekend. Everyone, from university students to people with actual jobs, nearly riots if anyone suggests that they take one hour and fifty minutes for their lunch break instead of two hours each weekday. And less than an hour and a half for lunch? How can anyone be expected to eat in that amount of time!? It would be physically impossible, not to mention degrading. My classmates groan and protest if they are assigned a whopping ten pages of homework reading a week. I’m not exaggerating: this happened each of the three times a professor ever tried to give homework at French university. Nor am I exaggerating about the length of the French lunch break. Now compare the idea of going to work on a Sunday to all that.
I should have chain smoked and watched rugby games on TV.