Comment dit-on “this is awkward?”

This is what I asked my French teacher today. I’m finding that I’m in need of more everyday kinds of phrases and this is one I anticipated coming in useful as the French school year began and us awkward, foreign Americans found ourselves trying to claim our space in studio. She didn’t have an answer.

Claiming studio space, as we’ve been led to believe by our faculty, works in a very feudal way. Those with the most seniority receive the lofted spaces which look out over the rest of the studio space and the plebeians within it. The more highly ranked of the common class receive the window seats which look out onto the chateau, the lowest years get whatever is left. This leaves little for us and forces us to, in the words of Alex our program director, “conquer,” whatever we can. We get the choice of studios 13, 14 and 19. 13 has the reputation for being the partiers, 14 the more laid back and 19 the more studious.

The process of working our way into the student culture, as it turned out, isn’t quite as cutthroat as it might sound. It began tonight with the studio meetings which aren’t so much meetings as they are house parties. The best word I could think of to describe the night was “fratty.” It really turned out to be a good ice breaker. For the first half of the night Americans and French had conversations in broken forms of their respective languages until, in the second half, everyone settled on a common understanding of booze and loud music.