Les Faux Pas

There are some things I keep messing up. Like for example, any time I meet someone, I automatically go to shake their hand. I know the French do the kissing cheeks thing, I've known this forever, but for some reason I still instinctively just reach for hands. And...it gets a little awkward. Either everyone in the room silently stares at me, or I'll go for the hand while they lean in to kiss me and I end up kind of punching them in the stomach. Maybe tomorrow I will get this right.

I also confuse the formal and non formal ways to talk to people. In general, I thought that to be polite, you use the formal tense, but really for people you interact with a lot (even if they are new to you, and older than you) you use the informal tense. And lots of times, I have learned a phrase as a whole, instead of in grammatical pieces, and if I learn it the formal way, it comes out the formal way. Even when I talk to an 8 year old kid. oops.

And when I go to public beaches, like today, I cannot seem to stop staring at all the women who are not wearing tops. I was not expecting that for some reason. It doesn't bother me at all (no tan lines!), but wow did I unexpectedly see a lot of breasts today.

Speaking of the beaches....wow.....

Stephanie, her boyfriend Jerome, and Jeremy took me to meet up with their friends. The first beach we went to had no lagoon, and went straight into the ocean. Researchers around the area are all trying to figure out why there has been such a dramatic increase in shark attacks on the island, so at this beach, where there were 5 attacks and 2 were deadly, swimming is no longer allowed. This morning at breakfast, Nathalie told me it was kind of eerie...for years people were swimming and surfing from sun up to sun down on the beach and now you don't see a single person in the water.

We didn't stay there long. Instead we went to Coco Beach, where there is a large section of water from the shore on where there are no waves and people can swim. They call it a lagoon. The waves break like a half mile away from the shore. And when I say waves...I mean like WALLS of water. They got so big at one point all the people on the beach crowded to the shore to watch them...and even cheered and applauded as they crashed!

Stephanie had maybe 5 other couples join us, which definitely made me miss Brian. Everyone of course was exceptionally nice to me...speaking English when they could to help me out at my seemingly constant loss for words ( I was still on Texas time last night and slept for like an hour and a half....too tired to speak French all day today!!) For lunch we went to a sandwich shack on the beach and I had some kind of crazy baguette with french cheese and these things they call bouchons...which means cork but also means little chinese noodle meatball things. It was pretty delicious.

So the weirdest thing about today was that I totally fell in love with Jeremy. (They also call him Loulou but I am not sure why). If you know me...you know I am not the biggest fan of children. It's not that I hate them, I just don't have the patience and have been in the presence of some really bratty kids before. Loulou is seriously the coolest kid in the world. He is a really well behaved, chill, just happy and having fun kind of guy. He's also a genious. He reads french, and knows a lot of English and Spanish. Oh and he's 5.

By the end of the day, when we crossed the street, he reached for my hand, which made me smile. And then he asked me to sit next to him on the way home, and the entire way we made animal faces at each other and danced and played cars. It was so funny because we played the whole time with no words...I was super tired and burnt out on french and he had given up trying to slow down his speech for me. haha. it was a good moment. and it gave me hope!! I may make a good maman one day after all :-) Or maybe I just like French kids. Who knows?