Bowling for Friends

People who move to a new country on their own, whether to work or study, must find it really lonely. With no one around they know or can talk to, it would be very scary. I was lucky, I had Michael. However, in another way I think we were unlucky in that we were a couple. It seems to be harder to make friends if you have your partner with you. Anyone who is on their own is immediately taken under the wing of the people around them and they quickly form friendships. This is what we experienced anyway. Maybe we arrived with the wrong attitude to making friends in the first place. Whatever the reasons, the fact is that we didn’t really have anything more than acquaintances in the first few months living in Dijon.

When we first arrived, Michael and I hadn’t gone looking for English speaking friends. We’d wanted to speak as much French as possible and making mostly French friends would ensure this. So one thing we did was to have lunch with French post-graduate students, lecturers and professors from the Psychology department almost every day (we lived on campus after all). We even went so far as to speak French with Freya, an English girl doing a post-doc in Michael’s lab, until we all realised it was a bit stupid! When one of the PhD students suggested a group of us go bowling, we were delighted. We were in! Bowling nights would lead to evenings at the pub and dinners at each other’s houses. And friends!

The first bowling night was when we were living à la fac. The whole experience was a novelty because we hadn’t played for a while and playing in French could turn out to be a challenge. We soon found out that bowling in French goes a little something like this: “Oui! C’est un strike!” and “Oui! C’est un spare!”. The only real French vocab we had to learn was the word for gutter, lagoutière (My 300 scores were a thing of the past and gutter balls were all I could muster!).

Not only did we learn some French vocabulary but we also picked up how to exclaim in French. It’s probably one of the hardest things to learn in a language because it feels so stupid yelling out exclamations that sound strange and meaningless in your own language. The exclamation of the day was “Super!” when someone made a good bowl and “Ahh, dommage!” when a bowl was not so good.

As for the following bowling nights, which only happened 2 or 3 more times during our stay, they were pretty uneventful compared to the first. It was the same ritual. First we’d get a lift to the bowling centre, then we’d wait for stragglers to arrive. We’d all sit down for a quick meal before getting our clown shoes on ready to play. We formed two teams and the competition between them was fierce. The team that had the Aussies on it either cheered for our bowling excellence or got harassed by the other team for our lack of bowling talent, which seemed to be all based on luck of the evening rather than any particular level of proficiency.

Over time, the group of people changed a little but bowling was all we ever did. No one suggested we become close amis over a few beers at the pub and no one invited us to dinner. It seemed we just didn’t know how to turn French acquaintances into French friendships.