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underneath my feet, was a whole new, deliciously French
wonderland waiting to be explored. I started taking daily
walks, altering my route a little each day - seeing
something entirely new, and finding something new in a
place I had already visited. I couldn't wait to get home
from class, drop my notebooks and pens, grab a hunk of a
baguette spread with chevre, and step back out into the
city. I took Emile's advice, and left my earbuds at home.
The soundtracks to my walks were the buskers on the
street corners, their lyrics comprised of the lisped
consonants of bicycle wheels, the curlicued vowels of
eavesdropped conversations. My worn flats kept time on
the paving stones as Dijon wove harmonies around me.

As my confidence grew, the population of my new
wonderland grew as well. I had been so terrified to speak
French to an actual French person - I worried that my
accent was horrible, that I would forget an essential word,
that I wouldn't be able to make myself understood - that
I only used the bare minimum, mumbling my bonjours
and s'iJ vous plaits and bonne journees as quickly as I
could, getting them out so as to escape the necessity of
actually speaking the language I so loved. Then, mid-July,
something happened. In class, we'd been having debates
about random subjects to practice our speaking skills.
Emile was playing devil's advocate - arguing, in his
irritatingly Bourguignon fashion, that social media has
been the ruin of social interaction. I listened to my
classmates struggling with syntax, their lips and tongues
battling the syllables, trying to make them bend to their
will and express their disagreement. Malika, the small,
dark, perpetually sneering Russian that I so disliked,
finished speaking; without thinking, I opened my mouth.
It was as if I had rehearsed these exact words for months,
vowels pouring from my mouth in a liquid, mildly
incensed stream. When I finished, I was not quite sure
what I had just said, but I was aware that Emile and my

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