One of my gym friends has been pushing me to do the cycling (spinning) class with her and last night I finally caved in. I was reluctant because I did it once before in Australia and was sore for about a week after! I swore I’d never do it again. Never say never I guess.
So I got to the class early and the prof explained how to set up the bike. I hadn’t done any classes with this guy before and as soon as he realised that I’m not French, he started speaking to me in English.
Just before the class started he said to the whole class how he was going to speak in both French and English during the class – just for me! I was pretty embarrassed and it was completely unnecessary as I do understand perfectly but it was nice of him to try to help me out.
What I didn’t expect was the looks of outrage on half the people in the class. They we’re like, ‘no, pourquoi’ and one stupid cow said, ‘on est en France, on parle francais ici!’. It didn’t really bother me at the time so I just said to him to speak in French and he did for the most part.
Thinking about it after, I got really pissed off. He was just trying to be nice, to include me, and she was being a bitch about it. It’s not like she said it as a joke, she was seriously annoyed.
Yeah, we are in France and I should speak French and I do speak French, albeit not very well. But what seemed to escape her is that he was being nice. Some people seem to have forgotten what that means.
As for the class, it was great. It wasn’t as difficult as I remembered. I’m obviously much fitter now than I was then. I’ll be doing it again for sure.
