This weekend, I was blessed enough to have my parents and brother fly to Paris to visit me and take me to Disneyland Paris. It was such a lovely time – both my family and the park gave me little snippets of home to cherish with me in my last few weeks as a French-American student – but it was also an enlightening experience as well. Even now, as I enter my third and final month of study abroad, I still feel like a tourist: I’m still a beginner in the language, I’m still discovering new things about Aix, and I still haven’t hit up all the major tourist spots. Being with my family, however – who have never been to Europe or lived anywhere else but Florida for as long as I’ve been gone – made me realize just how accustomed I’d become to the French life. I have distinctive knowledge on the workings of Aix. I know the right responses for key French phrases. I eat cheese and bread like it’s all I breathe. So I’m not a tourist after all, at least not as much. I’m a functioning French-American student who knows the customs and knows the streets of Aix like the back of my hand. The quirks I see in French culture don’t seem strange to me the way they seem strange to my dad. Now, it’s strange to think of them as anything else.
