je suis desolee, madame lander . . .

I can understand quite a bit of French. I can read it pretty well. When I try to speak, though, a lump rises in my throat and I start to look more like Marcel Marceau than like a person who studied French for 5 years, then spent another month in the Cote de Azur brushing up on it. It's infuriating, isolating.

When I'm not pointing and grunting, I tend to answer in Spanish when someone speaks to me in French, which is particularly ridiculous given that whomever I am speaking with is much more likely to know English.

"Voudrais un croissant?"
"Si."

"Comment allez-vous?"
"Muy bien."

"L'hotel est la, madame."
"Gracias."

The short words, the niceties, almost always come out in Spanish. "Oui" and "merci" are awkward in my mouth. As I write this, my waiter brought me a check, to which I replied "gracias."

Sigh.

There is a part of me that wants to flee to Spain. There, I can easily flirt with children, ask for the right kind of coffee, and chat about el Camino de Santiago instead of this weird le Chemin de St.-Jacques people keep wanting to talk about.

This seems like a fine time to show my favorite museum sighting in London:

From london