mind your language

Lalala. I am still waiting for the Berlin pictures so the Berlin post will have to wait. Anyway, this is a short picture-less post about some problems I had with the french language.

Swimming lesson
This week is handicap awareness week. For swimming lesson today, we had to stuff cotton wool into our googles to impede our vision. We went through what swimming lessons would be like for the blind.

Well, it was quite horrible for me. Blindness was not my only disability; I was blind, essentially deaf (because I could not comprehend 80% of what the instructor was saying), and partially mute (because I couldn't speak to anyone). Throw a tri-disabled person into a pool and you'll get a swimming mess. Yea, that was me for 1 hour.

It got so bad that at one point I was begging the instructor to speak in English, which he didn't. My korean friend was lucky because her instructor spoke english to her, but mine didn't. I was very very lost and I could imagine the instructors laughing at me because I was so lost, wandering aimlessly around the pool and probably doing some other random stuff that everyone else wasn't doing (because I couldn't understand anything).

I could also feel myself swimming in a zigzag manner while doing laps, regularly bumping into the side barriers.

It was an interesting yet horrible horrible experience.


Rhone-Alpes Forum
There was a Rhone-Alpes forum last week, which is the equivalent of our NUS career fair, only bigger. There were companies such as Alstom, Yahoo!, SNCF, PwC, Renault, Societe Generale, Bosch, Shell, JP morgan, Esso, Toyota, Total, blablabla.

Anyway, I went to some booths to check out internship opportunities.

- One lady from some company told me they wanted to expand and asked if I could speak "canto". I said "errr... un peu ( a bit, because I thought it was cantonese ), and she told me they wanted to expand to "Canton". I responded "Canton? Not Hongkong? (since people in Hongkong speak Cantonese and there is no such place called Canton in my vocabulary).

Anyway, I thanked her and walked away not knowing what the heck Canton was until a few hours later when I asked my french friends.

APPARENTLY CANTON IS GUANGZHOU. FREAK!!!! I CAN SPEAK MANDARIN!!!!!! What a wasted opportunity, no thanks to my lousy french. They also call Beijing Peking here.

- I met some mean people during the forum too.

I approached one of the booths asking for an internship. There were 2 guys manning that particular booth, and one of them was nice to me. However, the other dude said "do you know how to do 'logiciel'? It's not easy, you know?"

Me, know knowing what the heck "Logiciel" was, decided I was probably not up for the job and left.

It was also later on after asking my french friends that I realized "Logiciel" means programming!!!!!!!!!!! AGHHHHHHHH!!! Tell me which engineer don't know how to programme?!?!?!? *FAINTS*

The last booth I went was the last straw for me. I just couldn't go on trying to second guess wth these people were saying. The lady at the last booth was asking which "batiment" I was from, and when I asked her to explain what "batiment" meant, she just shrugged and said "batiment". That was it; I said "fine, merci, au revoir" and left.

After this experience, I will think twice about working in France. Why? Because I feel that we etrangers are not very welcomed, not very needed. Anyway they have a huge population to support the economy, unlike singapore (don't get me started on our *&(*^ foreign talent scheme).

I also won't do my internship here because 1) I need to do a french CV (even PwC wants a french CV), 2) I only can work for 2 months, meaning I only can do operator work.