OMG CROWNING ACHIEVEMENT OF MY FRENCH CAREER...but still a fail.

So today I realized I might need a Ghanaian visa since I'll be passing through Accra to get on another flight to Lomé (it's kind of a long story) but I'm not sure that I'll have the time to get my passport processed before I leave for Europe next week.  So I had the brilliant idea to call the Ghanaian embassy in Paris to see if I could possibly get a visa from them while I'm there.

ANYWAY, long story short is that I had talk to Parisians in Paris for the first time...ever and I was super nervous slash excited.  I had everything I was going to say all planned out in flawless French.  You know how you do that in class.  You compose perfect sentences in your head so that when you get the chance to talk, you sound so intelligent and poised.  Yeah. So anyway, I called the embassy.  Well...I tried to call the embassy.  It took like 5 tries to finally get the right combinations of numbers to make an international call to Paris, but I finally got it.

Imagine: my heart was beating so loud I thought my mother in the other room could hear it.  A real conversation with a real Parisian.  Nevermind that my TA's from the past year were all from Paris.  They taught me in the classrooms of dank New Haven, not sunny Paris.  So before the woman on the other line could finish her bored (but very Parisian-sounding) "Allô?" I lurched straight into my preplanned monologue.  She sat silent on the other line while I explained to her my question using words I had wordreference.com-ed just minutes before.  I interpreted her silence to mean one of several important things.  She was either:

• understanding what I was saying,
• awed by my subtle use of the subjunctive in my second sentence,
• trying to decipher what this stupid American could be trying to say, or
• wondering what she was going to have for dinner that night

So I finished my short monologue and she said to me (in French), "Sorry, but we can only give visas to residents of the area."  

SHE UNDERSTOOD WHAT I SAID!!!!! I noticed not her rather curt response nor the ennui in her voice but her tacit recognition that my French was passable!!!!!!! Omg. It was so exciting. She could have easily said "Wow, American, your use of the subjunctive in your second sentence was subtle and impressive" and I would have been as happy. 

In any case, I had a follow-up question for her but it was kind of complicated, so I resigned myself to ask "Y a-t-il quelqu'un là-bas qui parle anglais??" (is there anyone who speaks English?) to which she responded even more curtly: "Oui, monsieur, nous parlons tous anglais puisque le Ghana est un pays anglophone." 

...which roughly translates to: "Yes, you idiot, we all speak English since Ghana is, you know, an English-speaking country." 

Fail.