French in Greece- Non Majority Culture Blog

 The majority of people in Greece are Greek. They're pretty chill for the most part but they are irrelevant as far as this blog is concerned. While I interacted with many Greek people, I also interacted a couple different times with French people. Whenever I had the chance to interact with people from France I got excited because it made me feel like studying French for seven years was worth it. The two interactions with French people in Greece are the only times I have actually held a French conversation out of the classroom. I even had two French speakers from Rwanda living in my house in high school and I only tried to speak French with them once before realizing it was pointless. I have a hard enough time understanding English. People's words get mixed up in my brain, especially when someone is speaking fast. It's especially bad in music, I once had a teacher call me "lyrically challenged." As a little kid, I thought the John Mayer song that says "say what you need to say" was saying "sandwich and neecisay (Nee-si-say)." I thought "neecisay" was some up-scale sandwich meat for families who could afford power wheels for their kids. 

I always wanted power wheels. Look how sick they look in that truck. I would've loved to play with that as a kid, or now, for like two weeks before breaking it.

I rely a lot on reading lips but that doesn't really help when I'm listening to a song or foreign language. French is very fast and slurred in general, making it quite hard for me to follow despite speaking it fairly well. I tend to worry so much about understanding every particular word that I often miss the main idea of what someone is saying. There was one thing that helped me a lot hold conversations abroad that I did not have access to back home, alcohol. But that is not important, what is important is how the "world" showed up in the local Athens community. 

According to an article on Worldatlas.com, Greece is 98% Greek. It's not as diverse as many European countries and the United States as well. However, Athens does attract a lot of tourists. The majority of the time I met someone of a different ethnic background they were just visiting. Here they were part of the outside world outside of the majority culture in Athens, like all the abroad students and I. There was one night a couple kids from Paris hung out with my friends and me for most of the night. I spoke French with them for a while, but their English was much better than my French so we ended up speaking mostly English. It's fun being able to use French abroad, as I studied it for so long but have not had a lot of opportunities to use it back home. Studying abroad presented me with the opportunity to use my French with native speakers, even if they are not a part of the majority.