Explaining “Plastic Disposable Spoon” to a French guy… without English or Google Translate!

Before we came to France, I knew that communicating in French might be our biggest barrier… with our 2 year old (busy body) Reuben breathing in communication’s neck in second place – but I didn’t realize just how big the barrier would be.

For some reason I thought that we would only struggle to find English speaking people in the small, rural villages… 

Assumptions, assumptions – even in the bigger towns we barely hear a word of English!

But none the less, we do somehow succeed to communicate – even if it takes (now-and-then when we have data) Google Translate, some giggles, and a few minutes per sentence!

I am proud to say that I did manage – on our first day here – to communicate a sentence to a French guy in a Supermarket without using Google Translate or French.

For your entertainment, please see the sentence and my explanation of it below:

• Sentence:  Where can I find a disposable plastic spoon?
• How it went down:
  • I tried to use English…
  • I tried to use English with a French accent…
  • Then I tried to use English with a French accent and added some hand gestures…
  • Eventually – after many attempts – I acted out an “eating play/demonstration”…
  • When the demo didn’t work, I added some sound effects, like “hmmm hmmm, njom njom njom”…
  • Then I saw in the corner of my eye a stainless steel spoon (a huge one by the way) and showed it to the guy…
  • That wasn’t enough so I pointed to a plastic plate…
  • …and threw the stainless steel spoon into the garbage bin (which was on sale – and made of stainless steel, so it made a terrifying noise!)

Well – it worked.  Thank goodness my husband wasn’t close by with a video camera!

I eventually left the store with a packet of 50 disposable plastic spoons (I didn’t have the guts to try and explain “smaller packet”) – so for the rest of our trip, we’re sorted 🙂