Ah, the French world...

Cover of My Fair Lady

Mostly having lived in an anglo-saxon environment for the past 18 years, for me, adjusting to the 'Francophone' world is not so simple.


Quite often a quotation from my favorite musicals "My Fair Lady" pops up in my mind; 


"The French don't care what they do actually
As long as they pronounce it properly"


And there are so many contradictories... Taking for example the French language. The letter endings in French are at least a half a page long, sometimes longer than the actual message it self:


"Veuillez agréer, Madame, l’expression de mes salutations distinguées."


The English version would be "Kind regards".


But on the other end, french people love to use abbreviations.  And those abbreviations are used in every day life as well as in newspapers, or the news and political discussion. 


So talking to french people can be quite frustrating because  they bomb you with abbreviations, rarely making an effort 'decoding' them for you (or in most cases because they don't speak any other language, they don't even realize the difficulty for non French people to understand those 'codes').


Conversations like these can get stressful: "Let's meet at CCF and there I will explain you how to go to CMF but first I must pass by a GAB." Hellooooo????


Translation:
CCF = Centre Culturel Français
CMF = Centre Medical Français
GAB = guichet automatique de banque (ATM, cash dispenser)


The other day I went to a "Bamako Accueil" meeting, the French version of the "International Women's Club" which by the way I'm still trying to discover here in Bamako. I met a few nice people at this meeting but somehow I still felt an outsider. We are so different in many ways. For example, French people (even if they are between friends) can talk for a half an hour just to make you understand that they don't like your new haircut. If you ask me, it's such a waist of time. Just say what you want to say and go on with your life. 


But the best remark of the meeting was when a French lady asked me if I'm Russian. Me?!?! With my olive oil skin and dark hair I was taken for Italian, Spanish, Turkish, Lebanese, Albanian ... but never before for RUSSIAN!!!  And when I asked why she thought that I was Russian, she told me, because of my accent (which is Hungarian, by the way). According to her, as I was not African black, I must be Russian. 
When I said to an other French woman that I'm hungarian, she said: "Great, than you can give us some EXOTIC cooking recipes."


And when someone asked me if I spoke English and I said that I did, among 7 other languages, she just looked at me like she just met an extraterrestrial. 


And one more frustrating episode: 
Canalsat/Canal+, is (to my knowledge and I'm still hoping that I'm wrong) the only one satellite provider in Mali and even buying the most expensive package with about 100 channels, except Euronews and CNN in English, there is not one single program in an other language than FRENCH. Not even BBC World!!! Heeeeeeelp!