When I first saw this commercial, I thought the woman was nervous because she was going to a Muslim’s house for dinner. But then as the commercial evolved, I saw that there was so much more to it.
This commercial #eattogether made me think of the friendships I have formed with most of my neighbors. There are only two families that I don’t know very well because they both live on the top floor and our paths rarely cross. We do say Bonjour though, when we do see each other but nothing more than that. For the rest of my neighbors, we exchange plates of food or delish treats at least a few times a week or for some every few months or so. My golden girl neighbors that’s what I call them, or my three older Jewish sisters that live on the first floor in English or rez-de-chausee in French have made us macaroons, chocolates, bread and hanaukah cookies amongst other things. I have happily made cupckades, muffins, cookies and lots of other American delights for my neighbors since American desserts have been all the rage in France recently. For the exceptional few, though, I’ll send them baklava when it’s around the two Muslim Eids. Once I have given out my plates, I anxiously wait for their return with my neighbor’s delish goodies.
Homemade Vanilla Pudding with Fresh cow’s milk
Just like in the commercial #eattogether, my neighbors are not all the same nationality either ; there are French, Turks, African, American, Haitian, Kurds, Algerian, and maybe Portuguese. Recently, I have come to the conclusion that most of my neighbors are bilingual and that most of their children if they try enough hard in school could become trilingual or multilingual. Just as I have decided that most of my neighborhood is bilingual or trilingual. Once I had a little boy come for an English class, the same age as my little boy of 2 years, who was learning Arabic, French and the native language of Mali (unsure of it’s name) plus English ! So there actually might be neighbors of mine who are multilingual that I have not found yet.For the most part, we are one big happy family. We will tell each other flat out if they are bother us or are making too much noise. For example, a little over a month ago, my downstairs neighbors complained for the first time in the four years that we’ve been living here, that the kids were making too much noise like rolling marbles on the tile floor around at 9pm. So we used that incident as a golden learning opportunity to explain to the kids that we needed to start practicing our inside and outisde voices / noises. It’s still a work in progress, but we will get the hang of it, I’m sure.
This video I think reiterates that we need to try to be nice and friendly to our neighbors, no matter how nice and friendly they are to us. Just like the golden verse says “Treat others with the respect that you would like to be treated.” We often need to remembering that everyone’s time is precious and to make sure not to bother the other too much. I’ve seen signs in other apartment buildings saying “Please don’t run the washing machine after 10pm” or “we are not your mother, please throw your trash in the right spot”.
This video has encouraged me to start a spotlight feature (like a humans of newyork) of telling a story from people we’ve met in our many adventures.
This is one of my last posts for awhile as I will be renouvating our blog and transferring everything over to a new offical website to highlight better our multilingual family adventures in culture, food, language, learning, religion and travel.
Who’d like to hear one of the Golden girl’s adventures ? Do you have any stories to tell ?
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