Ca va être trop facile

- It's going to be so easy -

When Hubby and I told our family, friends and colleagues back in Paris that we were moving to London the reactions varied depending on the audience. Some people were very happy and excited for us, some weren't. Some didn't understand our decision while others thought it was not going to change anything. And then there were those who simply didn't care (you know who you are ;)).

The one thing that everyone seemed to agree about was that moving to London was going to be really easy for us because we already mastered the language of the country we were moving to...



Ha!


Although it's true that we are not starting from scratch and that it was relatively "easy" (I could debate on this but I'll blog about it later on) to get settled here, the truth is that for both Hubby and me simply speaking English doesn't mean that we are 100% fluent here!

On the one hand there are all these accents! The city of London is way more multi cultured than Paris and we weren't expecting to have trouble simply understanding sometimes what people are saying. I absolutely love this about the city but I confess I had no idea that there were so many different ways to pronounce the same letters of the alphabet within the same language!!! And this sometimes makes it confusing and even hard to communicate at times.....

As an example, Hubby's currently leading a team of about 15 people covering 12 different nationalities and over 3 different countries !!! So he's got people having to communicate over the phone or during conference calls with very different accents ranging from Brazilian to Check, from German to Scottish, from Indian to Italian, from Portuguese to Pakistani.... sometimes he comes home with a dazzled look on his face and worriedly confesses he didn't quite catch everything that was said that day!!

In my case, most of my team is British or Australian so my problems have been of a different nature. I started my professional career in France and this meant that I learned all my technical terms in French. Of course of lot of the times we also had the English version of these terms, but now that I am here I realize that knowing the terms isn't necessarily enough. A lot of the procedures, or organizational methods that are used here are unfamiliar to me because I know how they are said/done/explained in French..... so I find myself wondering if "raising a contract" means writing up a contract, agreeing on a contract or sending out a contract. And asking for clarification is met with an incredulous and somewhat frightening "is this girl really as competent as we thought?" look.

And then there is just the plain old British terms which can vary from the American terms which both Hubby and I are more familiar with. Talking about wellies and trainers instead of rubber boots and sneakers can be funny at first but it can get quite frustrating when you're trying to be serious or fix a problem and the person in front of you hasn't a clue of what you mean. On this issue though, I really liked Garydenness' excellent blog post about how British people speak with the more modernized version of the English accent while Americans actually speak with an accent of Shakesperean times! Made me chuckle and certainly feel.... like more.... like posh! :)

Anyway, y'all might find that we're drowning in a glass of water... "oh... look at Fned and Hubby, whining and complaining on not being able to understand the chap over the phone during a conference call or the difference between "email" and "message electronique" when some people can't even go into a Starbucks in Paris an order a cup of coffee.... what a pair of conceited losers!"....

But the thing is, and Kyle explained it in the exact same way that I had come up with in my head but hadn't written down yet (that doesn't surprise me one bit, we realized ages ago that she and I are twin sisters from a parallel universe separated at birth):

...sometimes, I think that being an expat in Japan or China would actually be easier, because you'd at least be expecting not to fit in. In Chile or the UK, because the culture seems so similar upon a first glance, I think it's normal to expect things to be a piece of cake!....

And that's exactly it! People are expecting us to be completely fluent, not only in language but in culture as well! And the thing is, language and culture go hand in hand.

Yet Hubby learned the language but not the culture and I know the language of another culture!

So basically we find ourselves in a strange situation: we are both starting out new jobs and, as for anyone else, we are trying to do our very best at them. And yet at times we feel like complete idiots because although we speak the language, sometimes we don't understand the language.....


Mais bon, c'est comme ça......

Fned.