class reunion

Last night I was invited to I-ju’s for dinner. She is one of my school buddies. I don’t attend my French school anymore, and neither do any of the other guests who were at the dinner party, so it was a kind of “class reunion”. And what a fascinating night it was!

I ran into the Japanese couple (two former students who are now “together”) at the metro station and we rode together to the stop near I-ju’s place. They were pretty bad French students when we had class together and seems they haven’t improved much since then!

At the final metro destination, I-ju’s boyfriend met us and took us to their apartment. He spoke to me in English and I was a bit surprised since I was the only one among the Japanese crowd who knew English. So we followed him through narrow streets and up lots of stairs to the dinner party.

I-ju and her Taiwanese roommate were working hard to finish the cooking when we arrived. She prepared quite a spread with Sushi and Tofu and a few other things that I actually recognized. (like rice)

Our hostess speaks Japanese, English, (weak French) and Chinese so she could talk to everyone there. Her boyfriend is Taiwanese and speaks English and French. The conversations through the course of the evening were fascinating as we all tried to communicate. I brought my dictionary and someone else brought a pen and paper and (of course) all the Japanese had their little computer-thingys that tells you everything you could ever want to know about a word, its usage, its conjugation, and how to say it in 5 other languages.

The CPE manifestation (protests) are the topic of the day in France and were also the topic at our dinner party. Japanese, Taiwanese and Americans just don’t grasp the concept of this strike… I guess because we have a cultural “do your best… work real hard” mentality. The boyfriend is a student in a French university and his take on all of this is that the French are simply “self centered.” Interesting observation….

About halfway through the evening, the Japanese could no longer hold their cameras in their pockets and so we had the picture-taking session. It was lots of fun! Like a good American, I forgot my camera. Sorry… no pictures of this great event.