To most, Paris evokes Hollywood images of the Eiffel Tower, good wine, streets lined with sidewalk cafés, and a beret clad Frenchman with a thin mustache and rude demeanor.
But for Fort High student Heather Pattison, France, and more specifically Paris, filled her heart with warmer images—for the most part.
Pattison spent three months in a suburb just outside Paris going to school, learning the language, and enjoying the city not as a tourist but as a Parisian.
Well, make that two months.
“The first week I got there I was sick,” Pattison said of the rocky start her exchange got off to. “I got my appendix out.”
Pattison took nearly a month to recover from the surgery and begin to feel like herself. She explained it was her first time under the knife and she was nervous, especially with her family across the “pond.”
“I’d never had surgery before,” she said. “It was kinda scary.”
To make matters worse, she couldn’t reach her parents before the surgery. Thankfully, her billet was able to.
Pattison’s billet was Cindy Mbadi and her family. Cindy came to Fort Frances as an exchange student last fall and stayed with the Pattisons, so the pair already were friends.
“I missed having my parents there. I didn’t even know it was that bad,” Pattison said.
She spent time in a private French hospital which she described as very similar to a Canadian facility—though she admits the medication limited her memory of the experience.
She then spent the rest of the first month out of school and indoors recovering. “After the first month, I picked up French pretty quick,” Pattison remarked.
She noted she got by on her limited high school French, but noticed that what she had learned was different from what was spoken in France.
“The accent threw me completely,” she said. “It was hard to understand what they were saying. Once I got over that, it was okay.”
Pattison said her lack of a French accent also caused confusion, forcing many to ask her to repeat things over and over.
And when she got sick of speaking French, she would hang out with English speakers.
“I met a girl from Tennessee,” she noted. “When the French go to be too much, we’d go out.”
Pattison had many people speak English to her, too, when they knew she didn’t speak French. Despite that, she feels she picked up a lot.
“I learned quite a bit of French,” she said, adding the first new phrase she learned was while in the hospital. “It probably was asking for a needle because I was in pain.”
The focus of her trip to France, especially by the teachers at the school she attended, was not to learn the subjects and get good grades but to learn the language.
“The teachers there were more focused on my learning the French than completing the work,” she explained, adding the classes she took were what her billet was interested in.
“I took Cindy’s courses and she was more into business.”
Pattison noted school in France is much different than here. In Grade 9, students are forced to choose an education stream to follow out of four choices, such as business.
“They don’t have art or music,” she remarked, adding she found that to be strange since those are two things one might associate with French culture.
“They don’t have organized extracurricular activities, like football,” or other sports or activities, she said. “Their schools are more aimed at [academics].
“I noticed the history—once I started understanding the language—was stuff I’d already learned.”
Pattison also noticed the school was different to attend physically, especially since there were only 400 students there compared to the more than 1,000 at Fort High.
She also found it strange the school wasn’t housed in one building—it took her several weeks to find the library, which was in its own building.
“It was really different than here,” she said of the class structure. “Classes changed every day and the hours were different. Two days went to 6:30 p.m. . . . [and] there was classes Saturday mornings.”
But the odd school structure benefited Pattison as she emerged from her recovery from surgery. The first two weeks she was ready to attend school, it was on holiday, so that meant she could explore Paris and the French countryside.
“I liked the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower and stuff like that,” she said of the more tourist-oriented destinations. “I saw Euro-Disney.
“It was fun,” she added. “It was a lot like Disney World [only smaller]. And it was all in English.”
Like a refuge.
Pattison also really enjoyed exploring the French countryside and seeing rural France and the centuries’ old chateaux. She described it as having an “Old World feel.”
That, and shopping.
“We went shopping like all the time,” she said, adding it was an easy 10 minutes to Paris. “It was kinda neat because you get to see it from their perspective because they live there.”
Pattison said much of the rest of France was a lot like here, including the fashion and food.
“Some of it was different, but lots of it was the same,” she said of French cuisine. “I had some African food, too, so that was kinda interesting.”
Her billet’s family originally was from Africa so she was really exposed to two different cultures.
Pattison really enjoyed her time in France.
“It was so nice,” she said of Paris in the springtime. “It was pretty much what you’d expect. Everybody was nice so that was good.
“As soon as they find out you’re not American, it’s okay,” she added. “They really don’t like Americans.”
Pattison was in France during the war in Iraq so she got a unique perspective while over there. “It was so different,” she said of the coverage of the war on the English and French CNN.
“My parents were kinda nervous about that,” she said of her being overseas during the war. “It was in all the newspapers everyday.
“Then SARS hit, and they’d say, ‘Why did you have to go away now?’” she related.
“It’s a really good experience,” Pattison said of the exchange. “You meet so many new people. It’s so interesting.
“If you can handle being away from your family,” she added. “That was kinda hard at first. If I didn’t get sick, I’d do it again.”
Fort Frances Times
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