* “Wed-nes-day”

 Tuesday, July 3, 2007

Since we have company “from the new world” coming tomorrow, we go down to the village to make a reservation for dinner. I try my best to use only French, but don’t quite make it. Je voudrais faire un reservation pour quatre personnes pour se sois …..?

I don’t know the word for Wednesday. Pat points to the word in French (Mercredi ) and asks the waiter who is making the reservation, “How do you pronounce this word?”  He immediately answers … “Wed-nes-day.”

* our inability to speak French

Of course not everything goes as planned.

Two of the most frustrating experiences in our first summer abroad concerned our telephone/internet connections (France Telecom and Wanadoo) and our new sofa (IKEA).

A big part of the problems, in both cases, was our inability to speak French. If we had been able to communicate fully, I think we would have overcome what appears to be an underlying French aversion to customer service.