On My Own... Well, Almost

T and his colleague left for a trip through Niger this morning. They'll be gone until Sunday evening, so I thought I'd be on my own for the next few days, something I felt both sad and a little relieved about. Now I'd be able to really focus on learning French without the mandatory 2 hour lunch break from 13.00 to 15.00 when the guys come home, a relic from Benin's communist past. And I'd have the flat totally to myself in the evenings, a welcomed opportunity to get comfortable here and start feeling at home by sprawling out on the living room couch and watching chick flicks.

But it turns out that this isn't exactly the case. Instead, I spent the day with the wife of another man at the office, C. Actually, she works there too but has taken the next few days as holiday. C and her husband ate dinner with us last night (we had the Danish-style roast pork Elisabeth makes and that we've been hearing so much about), and she invited me to spend today with her. First we took a walk around the neighbourhood. After having lunch at her place we went for a drive around the city and she took me to two of the best stores in town for getting general household items. I got myself a pillow. This was the triumph of the day. The pillows we've been using are overstuffed so that they are at least twice as full as they should be and as dense and hard as a sack of pebbles. And C knows a man who makes shoes. Custom. She's clearly a good person to know ;)

Elisabeth is also still here. She is wonderful. It's very, very strange having someone wait on you and clean the house while you're still there. I don't like it at all. But I'm doing my best to get used to it and we're working out a good friendship/business balance in our relationship. And I know at least one French lady who will be very happy to know that she's helping me learn French. As soon as I have enough of the basics down (hopefully about 2 weeks from now) she will speak only French to me as often as we can afford to not totally understand one another. She helped the man who lived here before us in this way and is very enthusiastic about it. And she's given me some educational materials and has offered to help read them to me so that I get the pronunciation down. If I manage to pull off a life down here, it will be in large part due to her.

I've been plugging away at the few Pimsleur tapes I bought and I know enough now to say hello, thank you, goodbye and tell people that I can't understand them. Hardly enough to really even get by, but I've just found another good resource, free FSI French developed by the U.S. government from http://www.fsi-language-courses.com/French.aspx. They also have courses for a whole bunch of other languages if you're interested and I've heard they are really effective, if a little dry. I plan to finish the Pimsleur introduction and then combine the FSI course and the free online Rosetta Stone course offered by the Keene Public Library for my self study. Four to six hours of that every day combined with practising with Elisabeth and maybe two hours of private lessons a week with a qualified teacher here and I ought to be able to do this. I will do this.