This week, I went on a student exchange into the suburbs of Paris. I think my host family were expecting a student younger than 37. They didn’t exactly ask for their money back, but they didn’t exchange anyone for me either.

There was a Maman and a Papa, and three kids aged 14, 12 and 5. Every morning, the first thing you do in France is say hello to everyone by kissing them and/or shaking hands with them. You only kiss other men if you know them very well. No tongues. I don’t think they believed me when I said I was excited to be in France because I was always the last one up. Everyone would be waiting in the kitchen to kiss me and shake my hand. Even though it was after 11, this really made me feel like I had achieved something just by getting up.

Due to the global credit crunch, I had mainly been having muesli for breakfast in Paris. So breakfast with my host family was a real treat. First we had bowls of Bannania, which is chocolate-flavoured milk. Then we had French Coco Pops and Nutella. I had never had Nutella before. It is the chocolate version of cocaine. We were supposed to spread it on bread but pretty soon I was just spooning it from the jar – until Sophie, the five year old, started crying because she was worried I was eating all of it. Kids. After her mum took the jar away, I got Sophie back by dipping her doll’s head in the plum conserve.

Afterwards, even though it was still just after 11, I had to lie down because my body had gone into a kind of Cocopoplyptic shock. Thankfully, it was les vacances (school holidays) so we could all watch cartoons together. People had suggested kids’ TV was a good way to pick up some French. Unfortunately, the show we watched was about a character who travels through a ‘magical door’ back in time to a medieval village being attacked by UFOs, which personally I found totally implausible. Even for  SpongeBob Squarepants.

None of the kids smoked, so I had to go outside to smoke. Actually, I don’t smoke either. I would just go outside to ‘pretend smoke’ everytime the kids started asking what I did when it wasn’t holidays. Which, as any real smoker will tell you, is a real pain when it’s raining.

Things got a bit rocky when Papa started asking about my book. I told him I had written an uncompromising, hard-hitting New Zealand social commentary – but it turned out he’d already read Once Were Warriors. He said Alan Duff had a column in Le Monde during the World Cup. French people are fascinated with indigenous cultures, Polynesian especially. The haka for example is far more famous here than the All Blacks. Thankfully, he hadn’t heard of my new book, The Bone People.

As my contribution to this cultural exchange, I gave everyone one of the Pineapple Lumps mum had sent me. Sophie started crying because she didn’t like the taste… I think she was just getting me back for her doll’s new plum-coloured haircut. As Maman threw Sophie’s chewed up piece away, I offered to have it but everyone laughed. They all thought I was joking. I wasn’t joking.

That afternoon, as a kind of typical French experience, we all went to Ikea. It’s like the Warehouse, except the red Swedish designers use is softer on the eyes. And it’s bigger. Heaps bigger. You can buy entire rooms; mix n’ match apartments. There was a hall just for lamps and another hall for dining tables. In the hall of duvets, you could put your ear close to a pillowcase – like a seashell – and hear the bladders of Chinese sweatshop workers bursting. Everywhere, shoppers were in a mild state of panic, as though any moment now the shop was going to run out of something they didn’t really need in the first place. 

I brought a chopping board. In mauve. At the checkout, the family helped me fill out a form for an Ikea fidelity card. This means I can’t sleep with  anyone else but Ikea for at least 12 months. Plus if I buy 200 more chopping boards I get a free ginsu knife. Plus… they send a catalogue to my house. I hope I am outside pretending to smoke when it arrives.