Before coming back to France, we had been asked to participate in the Day of European Languages by organizing a “french day” in a small school in the seaside village of Neeme. Inga, one of our friends is a teacher there and had prepared this small event with the children. We were surprised to see drawings of the Eiffel Tower and proverbs in french and estonian when we entered the school. “To be great, one has to have been little” was the schools motto. Our mission was to give the 27 children in this school a better idea about differences and similarities in France and try to show them that though there are 25 national languages in Europe, we could still find ways to communicate.
What we did not know, or hadn’t realized was that Inga had planned to leave us alone for three times 45 minutes in the morning, with the children and two hours with all the school to entertain in the afternoon. It was as much a challenge for the children to understand us as it was challenging for us to use all the estonian we had ever learned and put it to use at last.
Through games, short movie extracts (in french, which they thought they would not understand if there were no subtitles), dances, songs and best of all through the tasting of some of our most famous stereotype food (baguette, salted butter, croissants, and false champagne). We gave our best to be good embassadors of french culture. We spoke about different regions and they asked questions like “you said you lived in Versailles, do you live in the palace ?” One of the most popular games was “Do we eat this in France ?” That’s when they discovered for the first time that we have very strange eating customs : first, we do not eat moose (as in Estonia), but snails, pigeons, frogs, oysters (live !), horses even, rabit, we all do. A little bit of culture shock can’t really hurt, can it ?
