Francais Pour Une Journée

Yesterday, I accepted a challenge. A page was held up to my face - in delicate script it read: "I declare that I will speak nothing but the French language until 5:00pm". Without really thinking about what I was getting myself into, my roomate and I signed our names on the line. In the begginning of the day went by rather smoothly. It was of course easy to get by sans-Anglais for our morning French class, and le petit déjeuner avec mon camarade de chambre who is practicaly fluent in French. However, after French class, we had lunch. That day, I ate lunch with two of my other friends who haven't taken French as long as I have. Oh no. My roommate and I started to realize that we couldn't converse about anything solid or funny without the utilization of our native tongue. Allow me to include a snippet of our lunch conversation:

"Ah, c'est bon, n'est pas" (This is good, isn't it)

"oui! J'adore le fromage avec confiture sur une baguette" (Yes! I love the cheese with jam on top of the baguette)

and then...what do you talk about! It was so hard to have a solid conversation in a language that isn't yours - after a while of shallow banter, we just sat in silence because there was literarly nothing we could talk about. At this moment, I thought to myself that the ship was going down. I actually felt like I knew no french beacuse I just couldn't maintain conversation here. Here we are, four friends who are always way too loud, sitting in complete silence.

And then, there was laughter.

We just started laughing. And we couldn't stop.

And from that point onwards, the french just rolled off the tounge - completely effortless. My roomate and I even gossiped about people in french - c'était très magnifique!