Adventures Abroad

(Caught up! Phew.)

Spring is here in the North of France. I might be speaking a bit prematurely, but the sun is out for the second day in a row, and the trees outside my open window are covered in rosy buds. It’s amazing how much something as simple as the weather can completely change my outlook on life.

I’ve been pretty sick for the past few days, since I got back from Amsterdam. I managed to get bronchitis for the first time in my life, which, honestly, just amuses me at this point. My first visit to Amsterdam results in my becoming relatively ill and bedridden. Ah, the life of an assistant. Always thrillingly bizarre.

In any case, Amsterdam was awesome. After unsuccessfully searching for couchsurfing hosts for a few weeks (I only received a couple of responses to my multitude of requests, one of which apologetically declined because she would be busy hitchhiking to Paris that weekend…alrighty then), we decided to settle for the typical hostel experience, which was nice enough, as I actually hadn’t done it for a while.

Rather than flying, we opted for the cheaper and, in this case, more efficient travel mode of taking the bus, which brought back loads of memories of taking the Greyhound from Tacoma to Pullman. Except, instead of journeying under a mountain-snagged sky, and a landscape full of sprawling evergreens, the scenery consisted of the never-ending green fields of Nord-Pas de Calais, small French towns, with brown-topped houses clustered around chapels, and, the tell-tale windmills of the Netherlands. These windmills, which I had only before seen on postcards, and in movies were monstrous. I don’t think I ever fully grasped how giant they are. Images of Don Quixote charging towards their spinning arms inevitably ran through my head, as we neared Amsterdam.

Throughout our five day stay, we managed to explore the majority of the city’s famous quarters and monuments, including the Van Gogh museum (a dreams-come-true sort of moment), the beautiful Vondel Park, the Anne Frank house, and the Red Light District. We spent a good deal of our time just wandering through the streets, across canals, dodging the plethora of bicyclists, and, additionally, trams, cars, buses, and mopeds. Seriously. This city has a traffic lane for every possibly imaginable mode of transportation. For the entirety of my time there, we joked about the inevitability of death by collision. Funnily enough, I actually ran into a bicyclist at one point, as I was crossing a bridge late at night. Both of our reactions were to turn and shout, “Sorry!” a few times (a word, like “Yeah,” which is exactly the same in Dutch and English). Good times.

After five days, it was time to head back home, and for me to head to the doctor (an incredibly frustrating, if not ridiculously absurd experience in a foreign country). I went to my appointment armed with a list of my symptoms, translated from English to French, all of my identification (including photocopies), and  insurance information (both American and French). The doctor, my friend, and I ended up talking about the difference between the French, Scottish, and American medical care systems. Always fun to discuss politically-charged topics when you have a fever.

Well, I’m off to wander a bit and soak up some Vitamin D.

A bientot.

(Almost caught up…)

Believe it or not, after having finally (more or less) caught you up on my adventures from the last paid vacation, I’m about to go on another. T-minus 11 days until Amsterdam. City of canals, art museums, and…coffeehouses.  Until then, work and play.

This week, I’ve worked a total of six hours. And I’m already completely exhausted. It’s a bit pathetic really. I went from sleeping a majority of three hours per night, juggling a full class load, a part-time job, and a couple of extra-curricular activities at U.P.S., to working one 12 hour-a-week position.

An attempt to justify my fatigue: I haven’t actually slept a full night in the foyer. The walls are paper thin, and my bed is riiiight next to my neighbor’s door, which tends to squeak and scrape open every couple of hours during the night. Additionally, I have the sneaking suspicion that the intersection right outside my window is frequented by drag racers. Or at least motorcycle enthusiasts.

It also takes a wee bit of effort to get to and from school, a two-hour round trip that begins with squeezing myself onto the metro with the business crowd, the moms soothing the perturbed children, and students of various ages, energetically slapping at each other, and gossiping in low, raspy whispers. From the metro, I follow the busy morning stream of travellers through the station labyrinth, up to the train platforms, purchase my ticket, and huddle next to the enormous space heater until my train arrives (if it does-my train line seems to be cursed with an inordinate amount of repair work). Once on the train, I have anywhere from 15 to 40 minutes to relax (normally 15, but the trains have recently taken to randomly stopping due to various vague technical reasons), and enjoy the sunrise over the foggy French countryside, before I arrive at my school.

Once there, I spend all day attempting to wrangle classrooms of screaming French kids for half hour periods of time. (Okay, that might be a slight misrepresentation. The kids are, for the most part, eager and bright, and at worst, overly-enthusiastic. There are only a few classes filled with opportunists who choose to simply disregard my presence. But they are, after all, middle schoolers).  

Justified or not, by the time I get home around 7 pm, and even on the days when I only work until 12:30, it’s pretty darn difficult to resist the urge to go straight to bed. Most days, I cave. Afternoon naps, along with scoping out the perfect pain au chocolat, have become one of my specialties. Especially now that the skies are clearing up nicely, and the air’s a bit warmer. Half work-days usually end with me coming home, throwing my window open, and crawling back under my duvet with a trashy book for a couple of hours, recharging in the sun-spot that has conveniently taken up residence in my bed.

This week, at my bigger middle school (the one with 900 plus students in Orchies), I’ve spent the majority of my time doing one on one interviews with 6eme kids. This means that for two hours on Monday, I sat in the language lab, tape recorder in one hand, coffee mug in the other, asking one student after another the basic questions (“What’s your name?”, “How are you?”, etc.). While the majority of these interviews went pretty smoothly, some of them yielded pretty amusing results. The most entertaining response: a look of utter incredulity, quickly followed by “What?!” Most aggravating response: a look of disinterest (from a 10 year old, mind you), followed by (in French) “I don’t understand anything,” and then the now oh-so-familiar-French noise of dismissal “Pfft.” Most common response: a look of comprehension, followed by an eager nod and a “Yes,” which would be an acceptable answer, if it wasn’t trailing every question, including “Where do you live?” and “How old are you?”. At my smaller school, I’ve been able to work mainly with the 6emes as well, in smaller groups, full of adorable kids, eager to learn. So far, so good.

As far as playing goes, the weeks since break have mostly been filled with afternoons spent in cafes, nights in pubs, and dinner with friends. One of the cool things about being an English assistant in France is encountering a variety of Anglophonic cultures. Three other English assistants live in my foyer, one of them American, and the other two Scottish. The Scottish girls have done a pretty awesome job introducing me to their traditions. Quite recently, we celebrated Robert Burns night, an evening devoted to the influential Scottish poet, wherein the participants eat haggis, turnips, and mashed potatoes, recite Burns poetry, and dance. During the last week, I’ve also been introduced to rugby, a game that I’ve always been vaguely interested in, but have never watched. At the moment, the Six Nations tournament is going on, which means that every weekend the best rugby teams in the world are currently playing in matches against each other. This last weekend, I went to an Irish pub in Lille, entitled Tir na Nog (the name for the mythical land of the youth), to watch the Ireland versus Italy game, and then the Scotland versus France game, with some of my Irish and Scottish friends. We were definitely the only patrons in the pub cheering for Scotland on Saturday evening, and I feel that we did a pretty respectable job, considering that the majority of us didn’t really understand the rules, and a few of us hadn’t ever watched a rugby match before. It was fantastically captivating, and pretty easy to get into. Unlike American Football, rugby is all about keeping the game going. The ball hits the ground? Pick it up. A player gets severely injured during a tackle? Take them off the pitch, patch them up, and send them back on.

Today, I’m not scheduled to work, so I’m planning on taking care of (surprise, surprise) more paperwork at the bank, my health insurance agency, and the financial aid company. It’s sometimes hard to actually take care of this kind of business, as for the majority of the time here, I don’t really feel like I’m living in the real world. True, I do pay for real things, like rent, groceries, and bills. But, it’s with a currency that still reminds me of monopoly money. I do work, but only for 12 hours a week doing a job that’s usually pretty fun, where any actual problems are taken care of the “real” teachers. Unfortunately, reality catches up with you, no matter where you go. And today is a catch-up day.

A bientot.

(And a third time).

And then we went to Paris: that beautiful, old city.

We arrived pretty early on New Year’s Eve, without a map, or a place to stay for that night. To further complicate/ confuse things, as we were eating breakfast at the train station, and in the process of attempting to wake up enough to figure out how best to proceed, a police official walked into the café and told all of the customers that we had to evacuate immediately. I couldn’t complete grasp the reasons for the sudden evacuation, but the sudden presence of a dozen heavily armed members of the military, and the words “suspected” and “attempt,” were enough to make my friends and I grab our bags and head for the door.

The next hour and a half was a miraculous blur. We went from being lost and stranded in one of the biggest cities in the world, to tracking down a map, and finding a fantastically located and unbelievably cheap apartment that had just become available for temporary rent the morning that we arrived. Additionally, when we went to the apartment renting agency to pay, pick up the keys, sign the papers, etc., the agent that I had been talking with all morning told me that he didn’t realize I wasn’t French until I handed him my American passport! (Hello, ego boost). A mere half an hour later, we found ourselves in our furnished apartment, complete with a fully-equipped kitchen, bathroom, and bedroom, about ten minutes off of the Champs Elysées.

After an attempt at an afternoon cat nap, we all wandered out into the city, making our way from the Arc de Triomphe down to the Seine, and across to the glittering Eiffel Tour. Elbowing our way through the giant groups of tourists, some with champagne bottles already cracked open, we eventually managed to find our friend’s apartment. From there, our group set off for a night full of bars, wandering the packed streets, toasting new friends made on the metro, and utter chaos.

Needless to say, the following couple of days were a bit tamer. On New Year’s day, we did a respectable amount of wandering, walking down to the Eiffel Tower, crossing the Seine, and doubling back around the Christmas market.

The day after, we headed to the Notre Dame, which is still probably one of my favorite places in Paris. I somehow always manage to go when there’s a mass taking place, and the giant cathedral is filled with the smell of incense, the echo of Latin prayers, and the deep hum of the organ. This time, I lit a candle for Joan of Arc, who’s been one of my heroes since third grade.

Afterwards, we crossed the Seine for a visit to Shakespeare and Company, the famous bookstore frequented by Hemingway and Joyce, to name a couple, back in those classy days. We spent a while there, wedged between the hipsters of various nationalities, shelves of old books, and antique typewriters (one of which my friend decided to repair-a process that somewhat disrupted the dusty quiet of the bookstore, much to some/all of the other patrons’ annoyance, and to my amusement).

After trekking up to the Sacre Coeur, watching the sun set over the Parisian skyline, and one more night in our flat, it was time for me to return to Lille, and to work.

For the last few weeks, life has returned to its slow rhythm. Work, small trips, afternoons spent in cafés, tutoring sessions, and completing the never-ending stream of administrative paperwork (I’ve found that most establishments here have a habit of asking for the same documentation multiple times).

A bientot!

PS. These blogs will start being accompanied by pictures again. I finally got new batteries for my camera!

(And again).

Having lived in this region for a few months now, I have become quite acclimated to the stillness that permeates all of France on Sunday afternoons. Shops, cafes, and most restaurants close, shutters snap shut in front of bakery windows, and by 3:00, the cobblestone streets are empty, save for a few families and elderly couples, out for afternoon walks. For most assistants that I know, Sundays have become a sort of dreaded day. If not long and empty, Sundays in France are certainly lonely for the foreigner. We have, of course, all found ways to fill the Sunday hours by now, hanging out with friends, visiting museums, picking up hobbies, and of course, reading, reading, reading, but I think that on some level, the feeling of loneliness and out-of-place-ness still exists.

Christmas in France is like a thousand Sundays packed into one. I don’t mean this in an absolutely negative way. I had the opportunity to see and experience French Christmas traditions firsthand, to walk through the empty, snow-covered streets, ride the Ferris wheel at the Christmas market under a cold cloudless sky, and wander around the city with cup after cup of mulled wine; to walk through uuthe silent city, as the last cafés were closing, the soft crunch of the snow underneath our feet, and the echo of our laughs permeating the stillness. But, there was a part of me that missed participating in my fantastically cheesy family traditions, that wished that I was in a home somewhere, drinking hot chocolate and opening presents. My French Christmas, like my French Sundays, was cultural, beautiful, quiet, and, even though I spent it with friends (eating cookies, watching movies, etc.), a bit lonely. Greener grass syndrome strikes especially hard this time of the year. More on that later.

In any case, a few days later, my friends and I were on a train, headed south to Strasbourg. I’ve visited the city once before, when I was studying abroad. I had fallen in love with the city then, and was eager to show it to my friends. Our days in Strasbourg were spent wandering about, getting lost between countless canals, cathedrals, and Christmas markets, sampling the local cuisine, beer, and pastries, and having late-night conversations with our unbelievably cool Polish Couchsurfing host (a physics doctorate student at one of the schools in Strasbourg). What was perhaps my favorite day in Strasbourg was spent wandering around for a couple of hours in the morning, then making the last-minute decision to go to Germany for the day. A thirty minute train ride through the Franco-German countryside later, we arrived in the smallish city of Offenburg, with no greater ambitions in mind than finding the nearest coffeehouse. It was only after finding one, and installing ourselves at a free table when we realized that none of us spoke German. Luckily, most of the shopkeepers, baristas, and barkeeps spoke English. (That night, after the fact, I asked our Couchsurfing host, who speaks a variety of languages, to teach me a few words for future reference: numbers, greetings, etc.). Happy to be the only tourists, and certainly the only Anglophones in this small town, we spent the day tromping about, popping into music stores and camera shops, and eating the best pastries I’ve ever ever ever tasted. Ever. One was a bit like an elevated version of a pain au chocolate (a chocolate-filled croissant), and the other was a sort of raspberry jelly-filled pastry, covered in the lightest powdered sugar in existence.

The Strasbourg trip ended with a four a.m. trek through the treacherously icy streets, thanks to a conveniently timed tram strike which happened to start the morning of our scheduled departure. A very memorable trip.

More (late) recapping of my Holiday adventures:

The Scotland-Dusseldorf adventure started with the very simple, sweet idea of going home with one of my Scottish friends for a few days mid-December, have a fake family Christmas with her, and head back to France after the weekend.

And then a snowstorm hit Northern Europe and the UK. I heard a variety of reports on its extremity, ranging from the worst in a few years, to a decade, to a few decades. Whatever the record it set, the snowstorm stranded me in Scotland for another few days with my friend’s incredibly gracious and understanding family.

It was fantastic being in a home again. Wandering around in a bathrobe with a mug of coffee, watching bad sitcoms on TV, eating meals around the dinner table. It honestly made me feel as if I was back in college, and I had just gone home with one of my friends for the weekend. Only, instead of going to a different city, I flew to a different…country. An absolutely lovely weekend, full of meeting friends and family, taking the dogs for walks, overly enjoying being in Starbucks land again (I missed big mugs of coffee. Don’t judge.), and baking. My friend’s parents even put together a traditional Christmas dinner for me to experience, complete with holiday crackers (just like in Harry Potter!).

Though I spent most of my time hanging out with my friend’s family and friends in a variety of towns and cities between Edinburgh and Glasgow, tagging along for coffee dates and last-minute Christmas shopping days, or driving through the snow-covered castle-studded Scottish countryside, we did visit Edinburgh for a day-trip. It was weird revisiting the city that I found so hard to leave almost two years ago, and even more bizarre to visit it without my college travelling buddy. Blankets of snow and Christmas lights covered the vivid green that I so often associated with Scotland in my memories. The garden trees, nestled under the castle, were bare and glittering with ice. A Christmas Market was set across the street from the shops that I frequented. Even the bagpipers were different, wearing extra layers. Everything had changed, but it was just as beautiful.

That night, I went to the theatre to witness another Scottish Christmas tradition: the Pantomime, an inexplicably hilarious production. Part musical, drag-show, comedy sketch, slapstick routine, political and pop-culture commentary and satire, with a plot vaguely based on a classic fairy tale, driven by audience participation, and brought to a close with a theatre-wide dance party, the Pantomime is a hodgepodge of culture and tradition, mixing the new with the old. Fantastic.

The time eventually came for me to leave Scotland and return to France. While the weather had cleared up on the British side of the channel, continental Europe was still having some snow issues. About thirty minutes after we should have landed in the Brussels Charleroi airport, a jumbled announcement crackled out over the intercom, explaining that the Charleroi airport was closed, and that the plane would have to make a slight detour to a nearby airport. Key words: slight and nearby. The stewardesses assured us, before ushering us off of the plane, that we were about one or two hours away from Brussels, and that a bus would be arranged to take us all to “where we needed to be.” It was only then that I noticed that all of the airport signs and announcements were in German and that I started to feel a bit nervous.

Turns out that we had landed in Dusseldorf, Germany, a six hour trip from Brussels. My reaction? To laugh darkly to myself, before wandering off to find the person who was supposedly arranging transportation. That, of course, turned out to be a bluff. The incredibly un-helpful personnel at the information desk first told us that a bus would not be coming, and that it would be a good idea to take a taxi to Belgium, or to book a hotel for the night. After inquiring further about finding a taxi, we discovered that no taxi drivers would be willing to drive us to Brussels, let alone to the Dusseldorf city center in the middle of the night, and, additionally, under the current extreme weather conditions. Legitimate sentiments.

As the night progressed, we learned that a bus was, in fact, coming, and that we were just waiting on a driver courageous enough to brave the blizzard. As the hours trickled by, we passengers began to form small circles around the arrival gates, checking emails, sleeping, munching on surprisingly delicious airport sandwiches, sipping Scottish whisky, and sharing travelling horror stories in a mixture of French and English. Early in the morning, the buses arrived, and we started the long trek across the German countryside to Belgium. I tried to stay awake, wanting to see as much of the beautiful, dark landscape as I could. Country cottages, dark evergreens, drifts of snow, smoke billowing out of stone chimneys. We finally made it back to Brussels, and from there, I hitched a ride with my new Scottish friend back to Lille. On the way, we blasted REM and Mumford and Sons, drinking Belgian chocolate milk and nibbling at sandwiches, as another gray dawn broke over the French countryside.

Tune in next time for: Strasbourg and Paris.