In five days, I will be departing for Paris to take part in the EAMA Composition program for the month of July.  I quite literally have no idea what to expect from the program, from the trip, or even from myself, but what I do know is that I’m going to be spending a month in Paris, so how bad can it be?

As with most travels, prep work always needs to be done, though usually it’s simply in the form of packing a bag and buying a plane ticket.  This trip, however, is going to abroad, by myself, and for the longest duration I’ve spent in a single location that cannot be considered home.  On top of all of that, it’s for something that can be considered school, thus most of my prep work has been gathering up the needed materials.  Manuscript paper, choral music, and about 400 orchestral scores later, I’m down to needing only to pack, but here’s the dilemma:  how does one pack for a month long trip?

If Paris is anything like past foreign country experiences (French Canada and Germany), there will be no laundromats anywhere.  So, do I combat this by bringing a month’s worth of clothing (which I surprisingly have)? or hope that I have a sink in the dorm I’m staying in and subject my roommate to my boxer shorts hanging in the window on a weekly basis?  Both options are plausible, and I think washing clothes in a sink is actually better than having to lug a massive amount of clothes across the Atlantic.

An alternate side of the travel preparations was attempting to learn a little bit of French.  Wanting not to live the stories told by journalist Dave Barry about mixing up his words and telling a waiter he wanted snails on his head, I acquired a Lonely Planet phrase book, which I was told was one of the better ones to use, and quickly went to work attempting to learn some French.  Opening the book to a random page, I read the first phrase that came to my eye:

J’ai été violenté!

This apparently means “I have been assaulted,” which I hope never to have an opportunity to use during my stay, but is none the less a useful phrase.  I flipped to another page and read another phrase:

J’ai besoin d’un contraceptif.

It was about this time that I realized I was in a massive portion of the phrase book entitled “Pick Up Lines,” and that the phrase I just read meant “I need contraception.”  Apparently Lonely Planet is geared toward helping people score in foreign countries, and being safe while doing so.  As helpful as these phrases may have been, I started to specifically look for things like, “Where is the restroom?” or, “How do I get to the train station?” both of which were hidden in two completely different, much smaller sections of the book.

If my phrasebook skills weren’t bad enough, you should have heard me speaking it.  I took German all through high school, and haven’t had to worry about a foreign language since then, and, though much of my German has surprisingly stuck with me after not being regularly used for the last six years, it has completely obliterated my ability to pronounce Romantic languages of any type.  My earliest attempt at speaking French in prep for this trip resulted in my being asked if I was studying Mongolian, which would be cool.  It was not, however, my goal in the slightest.

To work on this, my roommate decided that I needed to listen to French a little bit to get it into my ear.  His way of doing this was to get me to watch various movies that I knew in English, and watch them in French with English subtitles.  The first movie he pulled off the shelf was “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” which is not nearly as good in French as it is in English.  I also watched “The Matrix,” as well as a few episodes of Seinfeld (I found out these can also be watched in German and Portuguese!).  I was later informed that my French was slightly better in pronunciation, as I sounded more like I was speaking Romanian than Mongolian…

With only five days left, this language thing is showing no hope of improving, thus I think I may just show up and take my falls as they come.  Who knows?  Maybe this phrasebook will come in handy, as I whip it out at the perfect time to tell someone that “my duck is in [their] elevator.”