What, were you expecting brackets? Cheerleaders? An explanation of why I picked Richmond to go to the final four last year? We’ll you’re not going to find anything like that here. This is France, and the only connection they have to the glorious madness that is the NCAA basketball tourney is the half-French Joakim Noah. And he left for the NBA (Zzzzzzzzzzz) years ago.
Nope, I’ll have to resign myself to watching live updates of the first round games and living vicariously through my old office pool until I get can home and hopefully catch the 2nd and 3rd rounds on TV, preferably with a stack of Matchbox mini-burgers in front of me. In the meantime, I’m gearing up for a whole different kind of March Madness– also known as Parisian weather in the springtime.
It starts off innocently enough: suspiciously long streaks of sunshine, a few days that hover in the 50s, a few daffodils poking up through the defrosting ground. But right when you’ve been lulled into thinking it’s OK to leave the umbrella at home BAM! The wind picks up and the sky lets loose with a barrage of hail. Yes, I said hail.
Five minutes later it’s blindingly sunny again, albeit 20 degrees colder. All of a sudden you can see your breath and want nothing more than to seek shelter and a nice bowl of onion soup. But before you can get to the nearest cafe, the wind starts howling again, this time bringing black clouds and a gush of rain.
By the time you make it home, soaking wet and thoroughly confused, the sun is back to mock you. So you hunker down inside, turn up the radiators, and vow not to step foot outside until May. Except that you wake up sweating to death because the temperature has swung completely in the opposite direction, and when you open the windows for relief a swarm of mosquitos blows in along with a cloud of pollen.
And when you ask your French teacher what the hell is going on, all she can muster is “C’est printemps à Paris. Et les moustiques n’existe pas ici.”
That’s springtime in Paris. And oh, mosquitoes don’t exist here.
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Here are a few critical words you’ll need to survive here during the madness that is March:
1. la grêle
Pronunciation: la grell
Definition: Hail
2. le vent
Pronunciation: le vehn
Definition: Wind
3. le soleil
Pronunciation: le so-lay
Definition: Sun
4. les nuages
Pronunciation: ley noo-age
Definition: Clouds.
5. les jonquilles
Pronunciation: ley jon-keeyeh
Definition: Daffodils
Unlikely Diplomat 