This past Monday I started my first day in our Paris office. There are about fifteen people that work there. The Legal portion consists of three attorneys (one Brazilian, another German and the third Polish, but she’s currently in Chicago) and one assistant, who is British. The other people in the office, I think, are mainly French. Everyone speaks several languages, including English, but pretty much everyone speaks French to each other. Mainly people speak English when I’m around, but sometimes they forget and will speak to French. When they see my vacant stare they remember and switch back to English.

English is spoken so much in the office that sometimes I forget I'm in France. The second day I was in the elevator on my way to lunch and started talking in English to the person riding with me. I saw the vacant stare and remembered that I wasn't in Kansas (or Chicago) anymore.

I thought that the French were known for their long lunches and short work days…not so much in my office. Usually people just grab lunch and bring it back or eat a quick lunch in a grab and go place (kind of like Pret a Manger in the States). I’m actually glad, because work has been so busy that I’d get stressed out if we had two hour lunches, as I’ve been trying to get home at a decent hour so I can enjoy the city a bit in the evenings.

Working in an office where everything is in a foreign language definitely affects your efficiency. For example, I spent a good ten minutes staring at the scanner trying to figure out how to scan a two-sided document (turns out that the scanner here doesn’t have that function). Everyone in the office has been so nice and has been really helpful, but I’m sure having an American in the office who is constantly asking you how to translate things doesn’t help their efficiency either.

Hopefully next week I’ll have gotten into the swing of things a bit more and will spend less time navigating the office and more time navigating the streets of Paris.