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Showing posts from April, 2014

Why Getting Sick Is Different in France

After several days of a sore throat and increasingly creaky voice, I decided today it was time to go to the doctor. This wasn’t the first time I’ve been sick in France, or the first time I’ve gone to the doctor. But in coming home from the pharmacy, I got to thinking about how illness, something which seems straightforward, is actually viewed differently from country to country. First thing’s first-I’ve found that many of the actual illnesses I’ve had since I’ve been in France are different from what I’ve had in the US recently. In other words, the germs here are different. I’ve had infections and illnesses in the past several years that I’ve either never had before, or haven’t experienced since I was a child. This also leads to the next difficulty: vocabulary. I quickly learned that it’s not as simple as only translating whatever symptom or illness I had in English into French. This was evident right away when I tried to understand the difference between a ‘rhume’ and ‘enrhum