"Sneef," Fabrice said when I asked him who his favorite team "du foot" is. We were practicing questions, and I was trying to make it interesting, incorporating soccer everywhere I could, since I know the kid lives and breathes it.
"Sneef?" I repeated, having no idea what he had just said. He looked up at me with his little blond face and said, "Oui, sneef," which is probably spelled "sniff," and is, as I know now, the sound you make when you are sad.
"Comme, sneef sneef, quand tu pleures," "Like, sniff sniff when you cry, you know?"
"Oh, right..." I said, laughing. Then I realized he is a great source for useless knowledge like that, so I made him tell me what all the animals I could think of say.
"Le Chien (Dog)?"
"Wof Wof."
"Le Chat (Cat)?"
"Miaou." This sounds the same as our ‘meow,’ but I’ve seen it written out before, and this is always how it’s spelled.
French cows are the same as in America. Boring.
The word in French for "frog" is extremely different for me to pronounce (look at it and tell me you could do better: grenouille), but I asked anyway, and just got a look from Fabrice. So I said,
in French, "Umm, grenouilles? You know, they are small green animals that live in... [here I realized I didn’t know the word for pond OR lily pad]... lakes and they jump?"
"Fish?"
"No, they jump?" (Imagine me making Mitch Hedberg-esque frog motions, realizing there is nothing else I can say to better explain it, since my ‘grenouille’ is not working, and I mean, honestly, what else do I know about frogs? Not much except that I am rapidly becoming one.)
Eventually he figured it out and began the french version of "ribbit ribbit," which sounds like "Quok Quok."
The chicken noise he made for me was completely different from the English one too, but I have no idea how to even begin to spell it. He was boggled that ours is as simple as "cock-a-doodle-do."
So how did you spend Tuesday morning? Because I spent it sitting on a couch making animal noises for an 11-year-old foreign kid.

After that I went straight to my architectural design class, where I sat being intimidated by my prof the whole time, because this week we were supposed to draw a plan of a Baroque façade he showed us, but the catch was that the photo of it was at an angle, so we had all this PERSPECTIVE to deal with, which threw me off completely. The professor is... well, if you just passed him in the supermarket or something, you would KNOW he is a college professor, without a doubt. But I have had a lot of art history professors, and I wouldn’t have pegged him as that– I’d have thought upper-level math (not MFD) or perhaps some weird science class, like
Global Earth Systems or How Things Work or something... He seems like the kind of guy who would be best friends with my brother’s namesake, who is a college math prof, but happens to be much less intimidating. So anyway, this prof is balding on top, but there is not enough hair for a combover or even to style it, so the random bits of hair on top fly around in tufts that appear to have never seen a brush. His hands are always covered in chalkdust and red ink, he speaks faster than any French person I have ever met, and his hands are always fluttering in front of him like a butterfly he can’t control. He is constantly making fun of the students only half-jokingly; there’s a German guy in the class that is always late, and one day he walked in ten minutes into the lecture, and the prof stopped everything, stood up, and said in French, "Ahh, long live Germany!" and then bowed to the student. He’s always in a sports coat, which he never removes, no matter how warm the room is. When it’s cold, he shows up in a trench coat and scarf with his briefcase, and despite the fact that the room is equipped with an LCD projector, he only uses slides. So now you have an idea of what he is like... and this incident will be much more meaningful.
I am leaving the class to make my frantic trans-Paris commute to my next class, when I pass him and notice he is wearing white Nike sneakers with black polka dots.
I stopped walking and just stood there for a second staring, thinking I must be imagining it. The German guy behind me bumped into me hard, startling me from my reverie, and I got a grip on myself and walked out of the class giggling out loud.
~B

P.S. Everyone in the US is always saying to me "Oh, don’t find yourself a man and decide to stay in Paris forever!" and "Promise you won’t find some frenchman over there and get married!" and things like that... I just want to throw this thought out there:
It might not take a guy to make me like Paris enough to want to stay forever.
I’m only 21, marriage is the last thing on my mind, right behind the effect of chlorofluorocarbons on the ozone layer and the latest publicity stunt Britney Spears has pulled. But Paris... I could live here forever, even if the only way was to be a nun in an orphanage a la Miss Clavel in the Madeleine books.