My roommate is French, and she doesn’t always understand me when I speak English. We had a bit of a rocky start regarding the fact that she wanted to share the costs for food and I didn’t understand what she wanted, but everything is worked out now.
Because she doesn’t speak English very well, and also because she is missing home, she prefers the company of other French girls. Today I joined them for dinner and we played cards afterwards. It was a nice night.
The food in Norway is expensive. Meat is obscenely expensive. So, everyone is trying to make food on a limited budget and not much meat. So, dinner consisted of pesto sauce with macaroni, apple juice, hot dogs with mayonnaise, and a “French Salad”. The French salad was a cold salad consisting of corn, tomatoes, zucchini, and other vegetables I can’t remember in balsamic vinegar. It was tasted innately different from the cold salads I am used to at home, with cut up apples and mayonnaise and sunflower seeds, but that didn’t change the fact that it was good. I am going to have to find out the recipe.
The first card game we played was Egyptian Rats Crew, and the other French girls were taught the game at a barbecue last Saturday by some American girls, and didn’t remember the name. This card game is fast and furious and involves slapping the table, so everyone quickly obtained twitchy hands from trying to slap the cards at the right time.
The second card game was a game I taught them– Kings in the Corners. The cards we played with didn’t have the alternating colors of black and red and were instead all an obscene color of pink, so it was interesting trying to remember what suite was what color. The game was picked up fast enough, and everyone had a good time.
The second game was more interesting from the first, not just because it was slower, but also because of the implications of what happens when people have time to think. Whenever my family plays this game, we are all competitive. If someone misses an opportunity to move some cards around, no one sweats about taking advantage of that fact. It’s a part of the game to see what other people miss. When we played Kings in the Corners tonight, L and the other French girls would help each other and point it out if one of them missed a play. The game wasn’t competitive, it was just a game to relax and spend time with other people. So Americans are competitive. We know this. However, the fact that it is such an ingrained behavior that we are competitive in our leisure time suggests that this is an innate difference between French and American culture.
I wonder at what point we (Americans) truly enjoy games if winning isn’t attached. It is different for everyone– that is the conflict between culture and individualism– but something is lost if we only play games to win.
April's Norway Excursion 