On the other end of the complex is a three-story carousel, representing the different layers of the ocean. The larger animals are controlled by puppeteers and I was shocked at how well the pilots could mimic the animals natural movements.

They have everything from a giant heron and giant spider that fly/climb using industrial cranes to delicate (but still certainly oversized) ants and hummingbirds. First off, there’s the Machines d’Ile, a collection of steampunk, Jules Verne-esque animals. There are a couple of attractions I’ve been to in the past month which not only strike me as very French, but also as the kind of thing that wouldn’t be nearly as popular in the U.S. We laughed and joked about it, of course! (Next, they were having me drink a whole bottle of wine and eating the entire pie which was that night’s dessert!) But, I honestly think that if I had done that in some classy restaurant or at a more uptight family’s table, I might be thrown out for breaking the sacred ritual that is cheese! As you look down at what you’ve just done, they’ll probably burst out into laughter too! This was my fate. You might also notice that your host parents have stopped talking and are looking at you with a sense of honest shock, not malicious in any way, just genuinely surprised. That is, of course, unless you’re an American student who’s exhausted after hours of living and learning in a different language! If you happen to find yourself in that situation, you might absent-mindedly take the cheese out of its bag and then proceed to place it on your personal plate. If your cheese comes in a bag or box, you would remove the wrapping, set it aside, and then place the cheese on the cutting board. Traditionally, this is also done without any sort of packaging present on the board. It’s also always served communally, with each person cutting pieces off of larger blocks of cheese sat atop a cutting board in the center of the table. Cheese, in the case of my story, is primarily served as its own course between a dinner’s main plate and dessert.

Likewise, each of these items commands a special place of decorum at the French dinner table. That means the cool kids on the streets are running around saying “Dude, that’s so owl!” We do it in English too-when I say something is cool, I mean that it’s interesting, not that its temperature is somewhere between warm and chilly! But I can’t help but laugh that “owl” has somehow become “cool” in French!įor my second story, I must confess that I have committed a cardinal sin of the French culinary experience! France is really well known for three major foods: wine, bread, and cheese.

Someone said that in French and one girl responded by saying “super owl”! I was rather confused, but then it dawned on me. So, being cool kids, me and my fellow students have been calling things chouette a lot! Last Friday, we were baking a cake and, of course, it was hyper chouette. The French also say “cool” and its not uncommon to modify cool or chouette with a “hyper” or “super” to drive home the meaning. (Surprisingly, French people don’t talk like textbooks!) One such slang term is ' chouette', meaning cool. I think it was the second day of orientation that we learned some slang words so that we could better understand the people we talked to. Just like in English, French has a number of slang words which don’t represent “proper” language. So I thought I’d start this blog post with a couple of goofy, culture-related anecdotes!

Faux pas translation