Encore le lecon

French class as usual this week doing ‘social situations’ asking for food in the market, booking rooms etc. It all started seriously enough: our table was doing ‘saying sorry for being late’ and then the giggles started from the next table, getting progressively louder. We wondered what was going on till we all changed round and we got The Food Bag.

Our teacher, mindful no doubt of all the directives about multi style learning, hands on experience etc had brought along some plastic toy food to help with ‘aller au marche’ . All well and good except – well, we think it was made in China so perhaps they weren’t too sure about some of the items or perhaps the makers just had a perverted sense of humour – you wouldn’t have believed plastic food could look so rude. It really was extraordinary how they had managed to make all kinds of perfectly innocent vegetables look so suggestive. There was an outsized garlic that looked for all the world like a scrotum, a double fried egg like 2 shiny bare breasts, two ‘saucisses’ looking like dead penises and a couple of dreadful small oval pinkish ham slices which I leave you to imagine. The ‘pain au chocolat’ looked so much like a shiny dog turd none of the girls wanted to touch it at all. There was also this flattened brownish greenish mass…….we didn’t discover what that was supposed to be but none of us would touch that either!

The trouble was once you’d thought of ‘it’ it was impossible to not to think of ‘it’ if you know what I mean. It didn’t help that the guys in our class (all 40+ respectable managerial types) all seem to revert to 8 year old schoolboys once they get in the door. They talk while the teacher’s talking, make silly comments and rock on their chairs- I half expect them to start passing messages under the tables or flicking pellets soon. So you can imagine what this lot did for them.

Me and the other lady on the table did our best to ignore them. We discussed solemnly whether it was a tranche of concombre or une roulade? (‘ho ho je vous donne un grand concombre!’ ) and was it beaucoup d’ouefs or beaucoup des ouefs? ‘ha ha ha donnez moi des ouffs au topless toujours!’ all the while the guys are getting more and hysterical. They did rude things with the saucisses and the ham slices, stuck the ‘oueffs au plat’ on their jumpers and made suggestive comments about the aubergines and the asparagus. They made faces with all the various bits, stuck the jambon slices behind their ears saying ‘live long and prosper’ and poked the pain au dog turd at each other.
Of course it was impossible to explain to ‘le prof’ (a sweet and serious young lady and an excellent teacher) what the problem was, even if we’d known the French for most of it. I managed not to giggle till the lesson finished (I wasn’t going to give them the satisfaction) got outside and laughed till I cried all the way home.
But what happens when I eventually get to France? Will I ever be able to look une celere in the face, or ask for a slice of jambon without giggling…? And whatever will she bring us when we do ‘aller au medicin’ ??