I don't speak the French

I am in France now, and the interesting/scary thing about that is that most of people here speak French. I know, who would have thought? Yet apparently, I was in denial because instead of spending the last three weeks of my summer practicing my French, I sat around on my ass, occasionally leaving the house to buy a smoothie.

When I arrived in Paris, I had no problem traveling to Saint-Omer despite the two trains and three train stations I had to deal with to get here. In fact, I gave myself a mental pat on the back (Aluma-style) for doing so without any problems. It wasn't until Marianne, a teacher from my school, met me at the train station that I realized the sad truth: I don't actually speak that much French. My grammar is pretty good after all the Spanish I have taken, but along the way, I managed to miss out on a lot of vital vocabularly words.

A perfect example of this occurred earlier this morning. My roommate had to leave for work at 7:45 this morning, so the noise of her getting ready in our tiny apartment woke me. Sometime after she left, our doorbell rang, and I opened it to find a repair man who was there to fix our leaky sink. Seeing as I had a good two hours before I needed to start getting ready for work, I figured he'd have plenty of time to finish before I needed to shower. I went ahead and ate my cereal while he got to work, and then took out a book to read. Meanwhile, he discovered that he had forgotten various tools and wandered off at least three times to go get them. I continued to read while keeping an eye on the clock.

The repair man seemed to notice that I was waiting around and he asked if I needed to take a shower. Since I don't speak French, I'm not positive, but I'm pretty sure that he told me I could go ahead and do it. Seriously?? No way was I going to shower with some random guy holding a wrench just on the other side of the shower curtain. Maybe I haven't seen the movie Psycho myself, but I have heard of the infamous shower scene!

An hour later, he was still there. Finally, I got up the courage to ask him if he was almost done, and thankfully, he was. I was worried that I was going to have to explain to him that I wasn't comfortable with him being in the apartment while I showered. Fingers crossed that the sink continues to work, or that it at least holds together until I can learn how to handle awkward situations like that.