Je Suis Arrivé

Our First Night in France

1 Octobre 2008

We have only been in France a few hours and we have already committed our first faux pas.

A representative from Coloc met us at the airport and, after renting a car, we followed her to the Michelin headquarters to pick up the keys to our home for the next month. We were met there by another Coloc employee who will try to help us find a house or apartment to live in while we are in France. We followed them to our apartment. I was pleasantly surprised at the size of it. There are high ceilings and 3 large floor-to-ceiling windows in the living/dining/kitchen. There is also an enormous tub/shower area. After showering for the first time in about 40 hours, Matthew and I headed out to check out our neighborhood. We are in a great location, only about 5 blocks from the Place de Jaude.

We decide on a restaurant where we will eat our first meal in France. It is crowded, which seems to us a good sign. Matthew decides on a “steak et frites” and I choose a salad that has a cheese on it that Matthew says is really good. We order a ½ bottle of wine and toast ourselves on successfully ordering our meal. About 10 minutes later the waitress sets plates down in front of us. On each plate is a small salad, a covered pot containing something that looks like mashed potatoes, and several thin slices of a meat that looks like a mixture of ham and bacon. We look at each other, questioning why we were given this- is it an appetizer??? Like at Olive Garden, where you get salad and breadsticks??? We are not sure, but oh well, we start eating. About 5 minutes later- our food comes out, but the waitress is confused because we already have plates in front of us. Apparently we took the dinner of the table next to us (and by the way, the tables are very close together). The couple apparently had already figured out that we were eating their meal, but had not said anything. Our waitress comes over and starts speaking rapid French. Matthew tries to answer, but she does not seem to understand. So she turns to me, as if I could fluently explain to her that we thought it was a first course. In the end they take the meals we ordered back to the kitchen and leave us with what we were already eating, and go back to make the poor couple beside us their dinner…again. Although it was their fault for serving the food to the wrong table, we feel like fools for eating food that we had not ordered. To top it all off, they charged us for what we ate, which turned out to be a lot more expensive that what we had originally ordered!

Tired, and still hungry, we headed back to our apartment to get some much needed sleep. Tomorrow we will start the hunt for our permanent home in France!