Half a chicken, part 3

This French/Russian guy was certainly keen to start a language exchange. During our first phone call he'd suggested meeting up in a bar that same evening, but I, feeling vaguely horrified, had hastily invented an excuse. I needed more time to prepare myself.

It was clear from our halting telephone conversations that we had a lot of work ahead of us. I'd begun learning Russian only two years earlier, on a 'start from scratch' university course, and what I had learnt had been eroded by two months in France. I was finding it almost impossible to unpick the dense stream of gobbledegook that washed over me. How could I have doubted him? He was as Russian as the goose-stepping soldiers outside Lenin's Mausoleum.

By this time I had fallen back on saying 'da' (yes) in any pauses and listening intently for the general tone of the response. It was only when he switched to French and said, 'A tout à l'heure' that I realised that I had agreed to meet up in a bar that evening, and not the next evening as I had thought. This time it would be harder to back out.

Two hours later I was hurrying along the Boulevard de Strasbourg in Toulouse towards the centre of town, wearing my huge sheepskin coat, purple jeans with one arse cheek hanging out of a large rip at the back, and a black chunky jumper to cover the arse cheek up. Let me explain. For recognition purposes, I had described what I would be wearing based on my predicted wardrobe for the following evening. I thought that promising to wear my favourite purple jeans would force me finally to mend them. But on hanging up, I had had to haul tomorrow night's wardrobe out of the laundry basket, scrape the food stains off it, and pour myself into it. Nobody in the house had a needle and thread.

Nobody tells you about this kind of potential misunderstanding in language lessons, nor have I ever found it in any text book. As I felt the draught gusting around my nether regions, I questioned what the hell I had got myself into. I was sure that my flatmates were also doubting my sanity. It was about that time that one of them, a buttoned-up type with an obsessive cleaning problem, started avoiding me.

I was nervous, which surprised me. At that time, in my first months as a foreign student in a large town, I was meeting new people every single day. I had already met other French-English conversation exchanges, and was used to taking things like this in my stride. The morbid way my flatmates waved me off, goggling at me as if they might never see me again, didn't help. This was before the days of mobile phones, and if someone didn't want to be found, it was pretty much adieu.

It was already dark as I approached the fountain in the town centre. The place was badly lit but I could see someone sitting there. It was a man, but he hadn't seen me. I slowly walked towards him, unsure of the etiquette in these situations. Then he turned, stood up, and hesitantly began to walk towards me...