How to sound like you have been speaking French all your life

Here are some phrases I learned that became very helpful on my travels.

Tiens (pronounced TEE-an) - here it is
I kept hearing this over and over and came up with what I thought it meant. I was right. I asked Adelaide and she said it's like "here it is." So there ya go.

On y va! (pronounced own-EE-vah) - let's go!
J'arrive! (pronounced zyha-REEVE) - I'm coming!
Don't keep them waiting.

Je n'ai plus faim (pronounced zhuh-nay-ploo-FAm) - I am not hungry anymore
Okay, so the food in France is excellent but keep this one in mind or else they will keep on feeding you and you will get fat like Matt did. :)

Pardon (pronounced par-DOHn) - pardon me
In Paris, they used this a lot more than excusez-moi. So, you should too so that you don't sound like a foreigner, always a plus.

Ca ne marche pas (pronounced sah-nhuh-marsh-pah) - It does not work
Helpful when you are at a hotel and your keys don't work. Make sure to actually say your entire room number. Don't say four-four-one, they don't get it. Say four-hundred-forty-one and they will understand.

Quel etage (pronounced kell-AY-tahge) - which floor
Helpful if you want to impress some French people in the elevator. It's very polite, but you kinda have to understand the responses for it to actually help you.

Bonne journee (pronounced bun-zhoor-NAY) - have a nice day
Bonne soiree (pronounced bun-swarrr-AY) - have a nice night
These two are used when you say goodbye. I used them when exiting the elevator at the hotel.

Je sais pas (pronounced zhuh-say-pah) - I don't know
The proper way to say it would be je ne sais pas but no one really says that. Use this if someone asks you something and you really just don't know.

J'aime pas (pronounced zhem-pah) - I don't like
Use this when they are trying to feed you something that you don't like. Just sound polite and they will understand.

Comment on dit (pronounced como-tohn-dee) - how do you say
Useful when you don't know how to say something in either language.

Tu n'as pas les cours? (pronounced two-nah-pah-lay-coor) - you don't have school?
Don't pronounce the last part with an "S" or you will get a confused ten-year-old staring at you funny. That means "you don't have shopping?"

Qu'est que c'est? (pronounced kess-kuh-say) -  what is this?
Use this when you aren't sure about what you are about to eat.

C'est pas grave (pronounced say-pah-grahv) -  it doesn't matter/it isn't serious
Use this when you just wanna drop the subject because it doesn't matter.

A village from a painting

The first Sunday I was in Malans, Pauline's family took me to see Ornans, which is literally a town out of a painting. This famous artist guy, Gustave Courbet, lived there and painted all the scenery, as well as the ordinary people.

This is Eglise St Laurent, very beautiful.

The town

The view from the Chateau that isn't really a chateau.

Me at the "Chateau"

Often called Little Venice, the river Loue runs throughout the entire town.

Here are some pics of my favorite paintings inside the Courbet museum.

I'd have to say that this one is my favorite.

Oh and sorry about the picture quality. it's hard to take pictures of pictures in a museum with bad lighting and no flash.

Old history, and I mean OLD

So, I really LOVE history. And I was glad that France was full of history. We got to visit Alesia on our way to Besancon. It is the site where the Romans conquered the Gauls (French). The famous Gaul leader Vercingetorix is super famous because he surrendered instead of letting the women and children starve and die during the Gallic Wars circa 52 BC. That's a long time ago!

This was inside the museum. We had to listen to these device things because everything was in German or French. This was a cool hallway though. Men fighting. Cool.

These are some of the Roman shoes I think. They aren't authentic ones though. The spikes on the shelf are real ones found in the ruins.

This is a reconstruction of the Roman defense system which involved moats, spikes and trenches.

Yikes, I would not want to climb over those terrifying spikes. (sarcasm intended)

These guys were doing a reenactment of how the soldiers trained for battle. It was all in French but I got most of it, even a joke one of them made.

These are the actual Roman ruins.

Maureen and Matt found the lizards a bit more interesting and tried to catch one, with no success.

Vercingetorix

Oh, and on the way there, we saw a castle that has started cracking. 

And we passed some toll booths. You have to pay a toll every time you get on and off the freeway with is called APRR which stands for Autoroute Paris Rhin Rhone. And we saw Charolais cows which are used for beef. I couldn't take a whole bunch of pics because we were in the car moving. But the land once we got out of Paris looked a lot like Kansas except for the occasional castles, hills and valleys we would see. Yes, Kansas has none of this. Everything was very green which was a nice change to the crazy city.

Oh and these were pretty cool. They were like posts on the side of the road painted like eyes.

Oh Champs Élysées!

While everyone else went to Giverny to see Monet's gardens, a small group of us went to downtown Paris, right behind the Louvre and split up. I went with Matt and we walked up and down the Champs Élysées,

 pronounced Shawn's Ay-Lee-zay, 

which is the famous street in Paris that connects the Obelisk with the Arc de Triomphe.

This is my tomato and mozzarella panini I got from a street vendor.

This was a car display store type thing. There was a different race car on each floor, but me and Matt were too lazy to walk all the way up. I was also hesitant to take pictures because on the way, a guy outside a Rolex store wouldn't let Matt take pictures of really expensive watches.

We went inside this cool store that had lots of retro toys and stuff. This was a purse that I should have bought. The knobs for the radio even turned. It'd be cool if you could like plug in an MP3 and play music.

This was a Beatles telephone booth inside the same store. 

I think you could listen to music inside of it or something like that.

Not sure why, but there was a flag hanging from the Arch. It wasn't like a holiday or anything and it wasn't hanging on the day we visited it before, but it was cool. Matt really thought it was awesome. It was also pretty cool that it was there because when we visited it before, both of our cameras were dead.

This is the tomb of the unknown soldier of WWI. It says "Ici repose un soldat francais mort pour la patrie. 1914 - 1918" which means "Here lies a French soldier who died for the fatherland. 1914 - 1918." By fatherland, I mean like the homeland sorta.

Jeanne d'Arc

This was a church directly behind the Louvre.

The clouds were really pretty at that time. But an hour earlier, the sky was super cloudy and it was POURING rain. Like, I have never seen so much rain in my life. It started raining on the way to the Champs Élysées and then it poured when we started walking back. We only had one umbrella. My shoes were like puddles and Matt's moccasins were super hot (for his feet) and wet. Then, it was like someone decided to fill up buckets of water and dump them on us. As we were crossing the Place de la Concorde, it was crazy rain. OMG, it was terrible, and we were walking in the middle of a plaza where there are no roofs. Wow, we got so wet. I could literally wring out my hoodie and hair. It was bad, but fun. we got to experience true Paris rain. Cold and all. Ruthless and all.

This was a store we went into after we couldn't find gelato. It is strictly for frozen foods. We got a box of like four popsicles for like 3 Euros. Not bad!

This was my dinner that night. It was like a crepe with vegetables and an egg and some lettuce and potatoes. There were too many mushrooms for me to really enjoy it.

On the way back to the hotel I took a picture of the stadium we passed everyday. The lights looked like the tops of guitars to me.

This was our bathroom in the hotel. There was literally no door for the shower, which is why my clothes got super wet if I left them on the floor. And it was nice that the maid replaced our towels everyday even though we left them hanging up.

The rest of the room was pretty small. There was a desk area, a bench thing and some shelves and a closet. 

Our mattress was pretty much a foam pad with sheets on it on top of a box spring. It wasn't too comfy but I survived. The hotel wasn't technically a hostel because we didn't have like community bathrooms or just bread for breakfast but everything was pretty small and simple. I'd like to stay in a hostel though, and go backpacking all around Europe. Ya know how much fun that would be?