Intro posts don't have to have creative titles.

Hello everyone (and by "everyone," I mostly mean my immediate family, at this point), and welcome to my France blog. For those of you who read my previous blog about Belgium, it's probably going to be a lot like that, but set about 120 miles south.

First thing's first! I really struggled to come up with a title and URL for this. Alliterative puns are nice, but after racking my brain and consulting my mother, I still didn't have anything I really liked. Here were some options that I came up with:

• Floundering in France -- This one, though likely accurate, was a little more self-deprecating than I really wanted it to be.
• All Up in Europe -- Taken! :(
• pluspain -- For the URL. It means more bread in French, but when read in English it looks significantly less pleasant.
• Sometimes You're Down and Sometimes Europe -- This made me laugh a lot, but it's kind of a mouthful.

Finally, I settled on Fake it 'til You Frank it for the blog title, with Frank being a (somewhat outdated) word for a French person. I also played with the idea of using franc instead, like the currency, but they don't even use that anymore, so there you go.

And for the URL, I decided to pay homage to my first France experience, which is really what got me interested in teaching English there in the first place. In my junior year of high school I went on a trip to France with my French class. On that trip, Emily, Nikki, Amanda, Jake, and I made a bit of a habit of taking extra bread from dinner back to our rooms and playing hide-and-seek with it. We called it Où est le pain?, or Where is the bread? If I remember correctly, whoever found the bread took a bite and then hid it somewhere else. And so on.

So. Now that that wholly unnecessary explanation for my titling decisions is out of the way, let's get started!

Things I'm Excited About:

• Being back in Europe! Reasons for this include, but are not limited to: delicious sandwiches (still not for breakfast), pain au chocolat, crêpes, old buildings, casually taking trains, the general European feel everything has, and the ease of walking everywhere. 
• Being in a less long-distance relationship! I will be two hours south of Gent, where Tom lives, but that's only a train ride away! And the same time zone and everything!
• Traveling. Ideally, I would like to do more of that this time than last time.
• Not living where I work. That made for a very confusing dynamic when I was in Belgium. But in France, I will work set hours at the school and the rest of the time will be mine. So that'll be nice, I think.

Things I'm Nervous About:

• I have hardly spoken French in the last couple years, and that is about to be all I am speaking. In Belgium, everyone spoke English, but in France, outside of the really touristy areas, people really do not speak English. I know this, yet I am consistently surprised by it. My spoken French is decent, and even pretty good once I get back into the rhythm of it, but my listening comprehension is awful. So the idea of going to a place, trying to find an apartment, set up a phone plan, open a bank account, etc., all in a language that is not my own is a bit scary. Administrative things scare me even in English. I honestly feel like I somehow fooled them into thinking I was far more competent than I am and will have to keep up that charade until I reach said perceived level of competence (hence the title of the blog). 
• I have no money. Like, I am profoundly broke right now, and it is really stressing me out. At this point, I think the best I can hope for is one of those "I moved to this country with a cardboard suitcase and a dollar in my pocket, and look at me now!" success stories. 

So we'll see how this goes!