Next? Existential Crises, Part 1

[Not a lot of "travel" in this post, but feel free to read on for the
latest personal crap.]

"All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us."
– J.R.R. Tolkien

But that's SO HARD.

With January came the inevitable realization that my time in France is
almost half over already, and with it the inevitable mounting pressure
to figure out what happens after that. I have absolutely no idea. I
was supposed to be using my time here to figure it out, which hasn't
really happened for a number of reasons—not least of which is that the
fact that I didn't immediately hate my job made me revisit the idea of
trying serious teaching for a while.

Yesterday, I paid the bill for an online course that's going to result
in my having TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages)
certification.

I'd been thinking about this for a while, A) because I need to be
using my time more wisely and this is something productive I can be
doing, and B) because it seems like a way to give my employability a
boost, even if it's not exactly job insurance. I talked to my mom
about it before Christmas (a conversation that was more or less a long
series of variations on me saying "But I don't know if this is really
what I want to do, and I might end up never using it," and her saying,
"But you have the time now, and then you'll HAVE it if you need it."),
and mentioned the idea to some friends, but it still took me a while
to commit.

Some people have trouble committing to relationships. I have trouble
committing to life decisions, even relatively small and flexible ones.
I put off declaring a major until I absolutely had to, even though I
knew what I was going to do for months. I put off applying to TAPIF
until the very last minute, and still wasn't sure I wanted to do it if
I got accepted.

It's not so much the decision to take the course that I was balking
at, it's what taking the course represents to me. I had to admit that
I wanted to do it because I want to use that certification. Not just
because it was something to do, and not even just because it seemed
like a good idea. Because I want it.

I won't get into the details about my mixed feelings about teaching,
because I'm pretty sure I already wrote about that before I came to
France. The update is that I still feel awkward and uncertain, and I
definitely have days where I dread going to class and/or hate the way
a lesson goes (not to mention days where I just want certain students
to just disappear), but there are times where I really enjoy planning
my lessons and have a lot of fun in the classroom. And now I'm
thinking, maybe this isn't so bad, and maybe I'm not so terrible at
it, and maybe I could do this again/more/for real/somewhere else.
(Interestingly, this seems to be the opposite reaction to the one many
of my friends here have had.) So I've begun thinking about finding an
English teaching job somewhere else for a year or two, in addition to
my plan to re-apply to this program next year and hopefully get an
assistant placement in one of France's overseas departments, ideally
French Guiana (I miss the jungle; have I mentioned that enough
times?). Even more serious, [read: frightening] I've begun seriously
revisiting the idea of applying to the Teach For America program, an
idea I had toyed with several years ago and subsequently abandoned
because I'd become so sure I didn't want to be a teacher. I've
mentioned to my parents that I'm reconsidering it, and I even went so
far as to discuss it with Sam, which I know means it's a big deal,
because I'm a private-bordering-on-secretive person and I normally
wouldn't bring something like that up with a friend unless I was
pretty sure about it.

The problem? Actually, there are two of them, but I'll deal with the
other in a later post. The problem I'm concerned with here is that
it's a diversion, and a pretty major one. Pursuing this certificate,
pursuing teaching at all, represents turning away from where I was
supposed to be going. If we can assume/pretend that I was even loosely
following some vague impression of a path before now, this is
definitely a step in a totally different direction. I'm going to be an
archaeologist, I keep telling people. I'm going to grad school for
archaeology. But that was originally supposed to happen two or three
years after college. It's already been pushed back to at least three,
because I have to wait at least a year before I can do what I'm going
now again (unless I want to renew my contract and stay in this region,
which I don't—no offense, Bretagne). Teach For America is a two-year
commitment; that's at least four years. If I start looking for other
jobs in other places—if I try to find somewhere to put this TESOL
certificate to use—how many years will that be? Then there are so many
other things I was wanting to try before applying to go back to
school. What if I just keep pushing back grad school and don't go
until I'm thirty?

What if I don't go at all?

And yet, if I'm honest with myself, and with everyone around me, I
have to admit that I really meant it when I said this year was a
litmus test of sorts, to see if I enjoy teaching and if I'm cut out
for it. I'm still not sure about the latter, but I now know the former
is at least sometimes true.

And if I'm even more honest with myself, I have to admit that there's
a part of me that feels a little guilty for pursuing archaeology
instead of doing something that makes a difference. Not that I don't
think archaeology makes a difference, not that I don't think
archaeology is important—obviously I do. Honestly, what I'd really
love to teach is social studies or history and get kids thinking about
the past. I'm just not convinced that archaeology is the same kind of
meaningful that teaching, or at least good teaching, is. I guess
someone has to do the research before anyone can teach it, but...

Clearly I can't express what I'm trying to there, so let's move on.
Last spring I counseled some friends a year younger than me against
going to graduate school immediately after college if they were unsure
about what they wanted. I told them about how I went straight to
college from high school even though I wasn't sure about it, and what
a disaster that turned out to be (aside from the fact that it led me
to some of my best friends), and I told them why I wasn't going
straight to grad school. I wasn't sure what I wanted to do yet, I
said, and I needed some time to figure it out. Just as importantly, I
had a lot of other things I wanted to do that had nothing to do with
school or my intended career path, and I was afraid if I didn't do
them before grad school, I'd get bogged down and never do them at all.

One of the examples I cited was this year teaching in France. Because
I was totally planning to do this and then be done and go right back
to archaeology, or at least on to the next irrelevant thing to check
off the list.

What happens when the things that aren't relevant become a new set of plans?

Before Christmas, I wrote about detours. This is either a very long
detour or it's a fork in the road. I'm afraid I might have to walk
pretty far before I find out which one. I know which one I want it to
be, but that might not mean much in the end. Because things are always
changing, and I just keep moving forward. Hell, I thought I was going
to be an English major. I thought I was going to marry my last
boyfriend and settle down young, like my mother. I thought I was going
to spend this year being lonely and speaking mostly French. Who ever
knows where anything is going.

So I'm taking this course...

Post-Holiday Post

Bonne année! [Happy New Year!]

Clearly, I failed at blogging while in transit. I also failed at many other things I intended to do, and have continued failing at them since I got back (though I did manage to find some video-hosting websites that aren't blocked on the school server and have thus spent several hours catching up on How I Met Your Mother and watching the newest installment of Sherlock...). It's amazing how many things I can find to do when I don't really have anything to do. If that makes sense. I have unrealistic expectations for life, and my free time fills up astonishingly quickly even when it looks like there's more of it than I know what to do with. (Also, I sometimes don't use it particularly wisely--see previous parenthetical.)

Anyway, I remain behind on emails, postcards, and other forms of correspondence as well as blogging. I have managed to post some pictures to my Facebook and will hopefully begin adding some to the blog soon-ish, though I'm not making any promises, especially given how inconvenient doing anything with the blog is here. I'm also halfway through knitting another new hat--not that I need it right now. Since returning to Brest, after nearly freezing to death in Prague and having my first encounter of the winter with ice outside of Paris, I've gone back to wearing my fall jacket and put away the hats and gloves. I grew up in PA and spent my college winters in northern Ohio, so it's very very strange to me to experience such a warm winter. This is what my family in North Carolina calls cold, not what's actually cold! Even if this week has been unseasonably warm for Brest, as I suspect is the case, the average here is still a far cry from what I'm used to.

Still, I am much farther north in the world than you might think I am. The winter sun doesn't rise as late or set as early as it does in, say, Scandinavia, or even in Ireland for that matter, but there's still an awful lot of darkness here. I can't count on much more than eight hours of daylight (beginning long after I get up on some days), and in some places on my travels it was even less than that.

Speaking of travels, I WILL write about them, though it might take a while, and I might decide to intersperse posts about my adventures à l'étranger with more posts about life in Brest--because there IS plenty to say there and I don't want to give the impression there isn't! We'll see.

For the moment, the bottom line: Two days in Paris included a fantastic house party with fellow expats and my first trip to Montmartre. The long day's journey to Amsterdam was sometimes stressful, but overall incredibly fun and definitely worth it, since we stopped in places I might never have seen otherwise. Amsterdam was phenomenal. I fell completely head over heels for the city, and it didn't hurt that my traveling companions are wonderful people and friends. I cannot gush enough about what a great time we had. (Or I had, at least.) My journey to Prague did not set a good tone for the rest of the trip, especially given my reluctance to leave Amsterdam and separate from my friends. I don't think I'd be far off in saying it was one of the most miserable travel experiences of my life. BUT I got there, and being in Prague made me happy again. It's a lovely, lively city, and the two other assistants I met up with there are both very nice and great fun to be around. My three days in Prague were not long enough, so I guess I'll just have to go back again someday. My return to France was far more pleasant than going to Prague had been, and once back in the Paris area I spent three days hanging out with one of my best friends from college, who was kind enough to put me up and who tagged along while I did touristy things in the city. I came away liking Paris more than I thought I did, though I still resent the crowds and how ridiculously expensive everything is.

On New Year's Eve I came back to Brest. My Amsterdam buddies were already back, and Jimena (who is Mexican but spent several years living in England as a teenager) had a British friend visiting her. I had dinner with the two of them and we went to one of our usual bars--after having tried to go someplace less usual and discovered, to our surprise, that an absurd number of the bars in Brest were actually closed! On New Year's Eve! Ridicule. Apparently, house parties are more the norm here, and people go out well after midnight if they go out at all. Still, we had a nice, albeit fairly quiet, evening in our corner of the pub, along with another assistant who happened to be there along with two of her friends who were visiting from Quimper. We encountered a number of drunk men, both inside and outside the bar, but none of them really posed a problem. There was one who called us something rather unflattering after we ignored him shouting at us from across the street, but these things happen. I will say, though, that that night was probably the only time since I got settled in Brest that I was actually a little afraid walking home, even though nothing happened. I have no doubt that I'm probably safer here than in parts of my hometown, but something about the sheer number and exuberance of drunks wandering around, coupled with the fact that French men are somewhat notorious (at least among Anglophone women) for being aggressively forward made me more unsettled than I'm accustomed to being, especially in a familiar place. I want to say again, though, that there weren't actually any problems either while I was with the other girls or on my way home that night.

We (the same three plus Sam, a fellow American assistant and my other travel companion for the first part of the break) had a lazy New Year's Day, at Jimena's house, snuggled up on the couch watching movies and eating junk food. I had spent the morning unpacking and adding some of the art postcards I bought on my trip to the decorations in my room, so I was able to feel productive and still have some fun downtime.

So, nothing particularly French about my celebrations (other than the price of the wine I drank!), but it was a pleasant end to the holidays nonetheless.

I'm back at work now, with some new classes and some of the same. More on teaching and more trip details to come!

A Love Letter to... Life, I Guess

I wrote most of this a while ago and never posted it anywhere, because it seemed out of place on this mostly-not-super-personal blog--and because I was already planning to make an unusually personal post that covers some of what's in this. But it hasn't left my mind, and now that I am currently on an amazing multi-country trip with two of the most amazing new friends a girl could ask for, I figured there was no better time to express some of these thoughts.

Seven months and one week ago, as I was scrambling to finish one of the most hectic and stressful and WONDERFUL semesters of my college career--one where my readings were never quite done, where almost-all-nighters and dashing off short assignments just before class were commonplace practices, and where I was constantly frustrated not so much by the amount I had to do but by the fact that I loved absolutely all of it and just didn't have enough hours in the day to give any of it the devotion I wanted to--I learned that upon graduating I was going to receive substantial monetary awards from two of the departments in which I'd studied. It was the last day of classes and just a few days before my birthday, and I can't imagine a better present for either occasion. I cried tears of joy all afternoon, and I think my advisor must have thought something terrible had happened when I burst into tears AGAIN in her office at the end of the day.

Disclaimer: I don't believe that I deserved either of those awards. I don't think I excelled in either department. That's honesty, not modesty. There were always classmates who were smarter than me, and I never worked as hard as I probably should have at anything because I always wanted to learn and to do everything and was always spread too thin. I worked hard, but in the sense that it it took effort for me to do enough to get by in everything at once. I guess I was more successful at it than I felt, but I still think my professors let me get away with an awful lot.

Regardless, that money allowed me to pursue the internship of my dreams full-time, for the whole summer, without having to depend on my parents and/or kill myself finding and keeping a minimum-wage second job at night. I spent the whole summer dirty and sunburned and mosquito-bitten, digging in the dirt, talking to tourists, sorting through piles of animal bones in the lab. Even the bad days were good days, because I was surrounded by the most wonderful crew of people I've ever had the privilege of working with--people who made me feel included both on- and off-site, who were patient with my mistakes, and whose camaraderie and good humor never failed to make the time go faster even when I was already having fun. In my free time I went hiking, made the rounds of other historical sites, and yes, voluntarily studied eighteenth-century ceramics. My first two and a half months as a "real adult", post-college, were among the best in my life. I don't think I'd ever before been so consistently aware of how wonderful life is or so grateful for everything and everyone around me. (And it must have shown, because someone called me "perky" last summer for what I think had to have been the first time in twenty-two years.)

Now I'm a teaching assistant living on the Western coast of France. Everything about that sentence sounds ridiculous to me, but it's true. I write lesson plans, have awkward off-campus encounters with my students, and marvel at the irony of being an authority on learning a second language in a place where my mastery of my own second language is constantly (and rightly) called into question. And when I tell people I'm an archaeologist, or at least that I'm GOING to be an archaeologist, it feels like I should preface the statement with "Back in my real life..." In fact, I've even begun to consider following another path, at least for a while, making my life even more divided... but more on that later.

I guess in a way it's true that I've lived a bit of three different lives in the past seven months since I opened that award letter on a rainy Friday afternoon. Three dramatically different occupations in three dramatically different places, and I wouldn't trade any of them for anything else. As much as they feel like three entirely disparate experiences, they're all part of me and none of them would be the same without the others.

And a year ago, I had just returned from Ireland, where I simultaneously rediscovered a past self and embarked on an assortment of new adventures. I was still a student, was still trying to grasp the fact that I'd just applied to graduate this year, still hadn't decided yet whether to apply for a job in France or an archaeology internship for the summer. I was too busy learning to be self-reliant, pondering what it means to become an expat, and finding the nerve to do things I'd never even dreamed of doing, from going to pubs alone and talking to strangers to going zip-lining and learning to fight with a spear.

So, four lives. Four places.

I've known for a very long time that I was going to be a nomad. With four moves (and several road trips) in the last seven months and six in the last year (plus several more road trips and not counting the fact that I'd moved TO Ireland in the first place), I guess I'm there. I am practiced in the art of living out of my car, out of a suitcase, out of my backpack; the vast majority of my possessions are packed away in boxes in my parents' house waiting for me to be settled long enough to have a use for them.

Sometimes it's frustrating to think about those things sitting there waiting for circumstances that might not come, for all I know, for years. It's stressful to be always moving on, leaving behind what's become familiar and loved. It's painful not to see and sometimes not even to talk to my family and friends for long stretches of time. It's even more painful to lose friends in all the moving, and of course to feel alone, to be aware that if I needed help or a favor or a shoulder to cry on, there is not always someone physically close by that I could call. True, I am always meeting new people, but too often it's because I'm starting over somewhere where I don't know anyone. To be constantly uprooting oneself like that must be stressful for anyone; for someone pathologically shy and glacially slow to make close friends, it borders on masochistic.

I appreciate home more than I did ten years ago. I miss my hometown more than I could have imagined as a teenager. But it's not that simple. I also miss Oberlin more than I anticipated (although I did anticipate correctly that what I would miss would be the people and the atmosphere rather than the place). I miss the place I lived last summer, too. I miss Cork so much sometimes it literally distracts me from getting things done. Perhaps, next summer, I will miss Brest. I know I will miss the friends I've made there, probably for the rest of my life. It's the price one pays to wander. I can't stop, because there are too many places I want to see and too many things I want to do before I can think about settling down. But along the way I fall in love with everywhere. I meet wonderful people (and sometimes I fall in love with them, too). I amaze myself with new discoveries about what I'm capable of doing on my own. It's a blessing and a curse: the world is amazing and I want to know it all, but that means letting go of things I love time and again. Sometimes it doesn't even seem like there's a reason I should have to let go. Often, even usually, I don't want to. But there's always something else to do, somewhere else, and I can't stop until I've satisfied the urge to keep moving. Right now, I can't imagine when or even how that's going to happen.

I spend a lot of time walking. I walk as a simple mode of transport, to get from place to place. I walk to explore, because I think the best way to learn a new place, both to get your bearings and to gauge its personality, is on the ground. I walk because I like it, because a couple of hours of hiking brings me a kind of peace that nothing else does. And sometimes I walk simply because it hurts not to, because I need to walk until I'm too tired or my feet hurt too much for me to care anymore why I was sad or angry or upset before I started walking. Whatever the reason for a given walk, I have long held the philosophy that if you get lost, the only thing for it is to keep walking. You can keep walking forward until you eventually come across a map or a signpost or at least a bus stop and a way out. Or you can turn around and go back the way you came until things start to look familiar and you can find a different road to take. Either way, you have to keep moving. You can't just sit down where you are and hope that somehow you'll stop being lost. You pick a direction, and you put one foot in front of the other until you figure it out.

I couldn't have articulated it that way at the time, but I think that's why I started college at the traditional moment in time like everyone else I knew. I wasn't sure that was the right direction, but I didn't know where else to go, so I moved forward. It's also why I left college after my first semester, when it became clear that that was indeed the wrong path (or rather, the right path at the wrong time) and staying on it right then was going to get me nowhere fast. It's why I all but drowned myself in college when I went back the following year, after a friend of mine died and my world was turned upside down. It's [very consciously] why I started trying to build a new life for myself--new friends, new hobbies, new fearlessness--after my ex-boyfriend and I broke up (though there's no denying I did sit still and feel sorry for myself for a long time first).

And it's why I'm in France this year, doing something so far removed from everything else I was doing before. A lot of people observe that this teaching gig is not particularly connected to my original career goals. I've often explained it as being my plan to put off making plans--I came to France because I'm not ready to make big decisions about the future, and this temporary job is an excellent excuse to live abroad for a while before I have to make those decisions and then get too settled in my life to have another chance. It's something I needed to do. Maybe I needed a break. Maybe I just needed to prove that I could do this. Maybe I'm not exactly lost; I'm taking a detour. The scenic route to real life. Who knows, maybe it's going to end up taking me down a different road I didn't know was lurking there, out of sight. And maybe it's just going to loop around and drop me right back off where I started, but I certainly don't think I'll be any worse off for it. I'll have everything I saw and learned and found and became along the way to help me figure out which way to go next.

It's why I retitled my blog "Seeking El Dorado". "'Ride, boldly ride,'/ The shade replied/ 'If you seek for Eldorado!'" I don't believe this year is going to be the only detour.

I don't know what I'm looking for, exactly, but I do know this: I really do believe that every day is an opportunity, and when I sat in the lab seven months ago trying not to get tears all over my award letter from the history department, I was crying because I was overwhelmed by how lucky I am. Not just about the money or even the internship, but for the same reason I moved through my whole summer in awe and the same reason I sometimes pause on the sidewalk in Brest to cherish the cold wind off the sea or the smell of wood smoke in the air. Because life is awesome and I want to love every minute of it.

"Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? Every, every minute?"

I try. I acted in that play (Our Town by Thornton Wilder) the same semester I applied to college, and every word of it rang true to me in the midst of my seventeen-year-old self's existential crises. And I started trying to do just that. Sometimes, I almost do.

Greetings From Not France

It's Christmas break! Huzzah!

I have a lot of back updating to do and will try to do some of it in the evenings over this break. It's more convenient than usual because I'm traveling and have unfiltered internet access--but it's also less convenient than usual because I'm traveling and have less time to sit around on the internet.

My itinerary is as follows:
Last Saturday: Brest to Paris
Saturday night to yesterday morning: Paris
Yesterday: Paris to Amsterdam via Amiens, Lille, and Antwerp
Last night to Friday: Amsterdam
Friday to Saturday: night train to Prague
Saturday to Tuesday: Prague
Tuesday to ?: getting back to Paris from Prague, somehow, sometime...
? to New Year's Eve: Paris/Etampes, where my friend lives
New Year's in Brest!

I'm in Amsterdam with two of the other assistants from Brest, an American guy and a Mexican girl. They're both going to Bruges for Christmas, while I'm making my pilgrimage to Prague, where I'll be meeting up with the assistant from Guingamp that I took the train out from Paris with on our first day in France. On the way back I'm stopping in Paris again to visit with my college friend, the one who went to Rennes with me in October, and see the sights, since I've now lived in France for almost three months without spending any time in Paris until this past weekend, which is just sad.

It's dinnertime here in our AWESOME hostel in Amsterdam, but I'll post more later about our adventures. This is my first time country hopping, and so far I'm having a fantastic time.

Lists

(This is a work in progress for the moment.)

Life Lessons I've Learned This Week:

1. Make travel plans in Europe well in advance.
2. #1 goes double if you intend to travel with a Eurail pass. Why? Because the "limited number of seats able to be reserved by Eurail pass holders" on any given train must be about three. Two weeks out, they're all gone.
3. That said, if you're very nice and look disappointed enough, the ladies at the train station will do their best to help you, even if it takes forever and they're less than happy about it. (Understanding French probably helps, too.)
4. THAT said, where there's a will, there really is a way (even if the ladies at the train station give up). We are going to Amsterdam before Christmas, and we are taking the scenic route, and high-speed, mandatory-reservation trains be damned.
5. Young women should not sit in the Place de la Liberté alone. Especially not in the evening. Two times now, and two awkward encounters. (The first time I was totally alone and the guy was much creepier, but it was still light out and I just told him off and moved away. This time I was with a friend and the guy was much drunker and we had a couple of big male friends coming to meet us, so I was a lot less freaked out.)
6. There is no public place in Brest ideally suited for meeting with a tutee, at least not that I've found yet. This poses a problem as I am due to meet with my first tutee tomorrow.
7. If you write a tongue twister on the board, your students will speak. They might just mutter it to themselves because they don't want to risk being laughed at, but they will speak nonetheless.
8. Hot chocolate, spiced wine, and a cookie do not a dinner make. Especially not after a long, stressful afternoon/evening. They do, however, go a long way towards making one feel Christmasy.

Other Facts I've Learned This Week:

1. It's impossible to be angry while looking at a penguin. (Allegedly.)
2. There's a chocolate museum in Bruges.
3. French Christmas markets close almost as early in the evening as everything else in France. What's up with that?
4. It would be cheaper for me to get TESOL certification (the most widely recognized ESL teaching certificate) than it would be for me to go to bartending school, and wouldn't necessarily take any more time. What's up with that?
5. English is a "timed-stress" language, while French is a syllabic language. And apparently pointing this out can improve the English pronunciation skills of native speakers of syllabic languages. It's really interesting, trust me. I can't believe I never noticed before how different the rhythms are. I guess it's less obvious going from English to French than the other way around.
6. When everyone told me it rains all the time in Brest, they were not, in fact, exaggerating and/or referring to the drizzle that normally passed for rain during my first two months here. Sometimes it rains as heavily as it does in the tropics. Sometimes it does so for days at a time.

Two Related Lists:

Things I Had Planned To Do With My Wealth Of Free Time This Year:

1. Journal religiously and write lots of letters and postcards to my friends in other places.
2. Read lots of books.
3. Write a book, or two or three.
4. Figure out where I'm going to go from here.
5. Hone my stovetop cooking skills.
6. Drink lots of wine.

Things I Actually Do:

1. Carry around a mostly empty journal, be constantly behind on updating my blog, put off answering emails, and buy postcards I don't get around to sending.
2. Read lots of Wikipedia articles and entertaining blogs.
3. Think about writing a lot. Mostly when I'm lying in bed at night or walking down the street by myself.
4. Think about life possibilities that have nothing to do with going back to archaeology, and thereby induce entirely new existential crises instead of solving the old ones.
5. Eat like a hobbit. (And only sometimes use the stove.)
6. Drink lots of wine. (And coffee.)

Visa Adventures: Terminated

Last Thursday, I had to take the day off to go to the immigration office in Rennes for the mandatory medical visit that's the last step to validate a long-stay visa. This is a story that's been told over and over and over again by language assistants, students, and anyone else who's ever had reason to live in France temporarily, and I'm very glad to say that I don't really have anything particularly interesting to add to the ongoing narrative. I received my appointment within a few weeks of submitting all the ridiculous paperwork after I arrived here, in contrast to some people in other places and/or years who don't hear anything for months, or even who leave before the OFII ever actually gets around to dealing with them. Everyone at the office was very nice and friendly, and the appointment itself went smoothly, wasn't awkward, and didn't turn into any of the horror stories I'd heard. Really, the worst thing I can say about the experience is that the dumb timing (my appointment was at 1:30, and of course it also takes over two hours each way to get to Rennes and back in the first place) and the icky weather prevented me from enjoying the rest of the day in Rennes, and I couldn't stay because I teach at 8 o'clock on Friday mornings. (How I envy the people who had Friday appointments and could just take a long weekend and be done with it!)

Miguel, my Spanish-language counterpart and pseudo*-roommate, had the same appointment time as me, which was either a bizarre coincidence or an unusually efficient bit of organization on the part of the faceless French bureaucracy, so we were able to take the same train that morning and have lunch and find the office together after we got to Rennes, so that was nice.

Here's how the visit went down, for those of you who haven't already heard a dozen or more similar tales from other people, or who are just interested in how ridiculously different the same freaking process can be in different regions even though in theory it should be the same for everyone. As far as I can see, these visits exist mostly to make sure people are healthy enough to work, have had all their shots, and don't have anything contagious. There were a lot of HIV/AIDS awareness posters hanging around the office, but they're specifically really keen on making sure you don't have TB. I was asked once if I've been exposed to TB and twice if I've been vaccinated and/or recently tested, and of course, I had an x-ray taken of my chest. (I got to keep the x-ray. It creeps me out a little.) That's usually the highlight of the OFII medical visit story, especially for women, because you obviously have to strip to the waist, and you aren't given anything to cover yourself with—you just have to awkwardly stand around half-naked for a few minutes. Fortunately, I'm a lot less uncomfortable with nudity than a lot of girls I know, and I was also lucky enough to have a female radiologist, so it really wasn't that bad as far as I was concerned. And the fact of the x-ray made the inevitable “Is there any chance you could be pregnant?” a lot less irrelevant and invasive than it might otherwise have been. 

After I was allowed to put my clothes back on, I was escorted to a different room by a different person who asked me whether I'd had a series of vaccinations (note that I didn't have to provide even approximate dates or offer any proof, just answer “yes” to everything on her list) and then weighed me and gave me a vision test (I'm considering getting new glasses here while I have really nice health insurance...). Then my x-ray came back and I was taken to yet another room to see the actual doctor, who looked at the x-ray for about five seconds and asked me again about tuberculosis, then proceeded to collect some really cursory information about medications, whether I exercise, and whether my parents have any health problems, and then make small talk about where I work and whether I like it and the weather in Brest**. And that was that. I went back to the waiting room until I was called into a fourth office by a fourth person who looked at my papers, gave me the signed and stamped document stating that I'd passed the medical exam, and put the sticker in my passport that indicates I've successfully gone through all the necessary rigmarole to finalize the validity of the visa I first applied for almost four months ago.

So, I am now officially and 100% legally a resident worker in the Republic of France. For the next six months, I am free to come and go as I please, I'm entitled to take advantage of various government services, and other than straightening out a snafu with Social Security (either they don't have my birth certificate, which I don't think is true or is not my fault if it is, or they don't like the copy they got, so I think I'm going to have to have it professionally translated and send them that) in the next couple of weeks, I'm finally done with paperwork and stressful bureaucratic formalities. For the rest of my stay, I can [hopefully] be as carefree as the European assistants who don't have to deal with any of that crap.

* since we live in neighboring rooms in a weird sort of mini-dorm, rather than sharing an actual apartment

** Allegedly the worst in all of France. We have a city that's almost-universally viewed as ugly AND unpleasant. GOOOO BREST.

Mon Nouveau Monde

Here's another post that's been long delayed. I started writing it no more than a couple of weeks after arriving and have edited it bit by bit over the last two months, but always seemed to have something more pressing to post. So here, at last, are some observations about my day-to-day life in France.

I currently live in a place where wine is cheaper than Coke (yes, really), Nutella is cheaper than jam, baguettes and croissants alike can be had for less than a euro, and the tea selection at my small inner-city supermarket is as good as any I've seen elsewhere. Also, the ubiquitous ham sandwiches come with butter instead of mayonnaise, and the butchers' case at that same supermarket always has a stack of rabbits (I'm going to do it this year, I swear), and there's a whole section of shelves of hard cider to choose from (I intend to take a systematic approach and work my way through all of them). I buy soup not in cans, but in "bricks"—little waxed-cardboard cartons—and it tastes so much better. The biggest food-related drawbacks for me so far are the prevalence of mushrooms and seafood, the fact that the French do not seem to be as fond as I am of putting milk in their coffee (thank goodness I learned to drink it black this summer, if not to enjoy it quite so much), and an inexplicable preference for UHT milk over fresh—blergh. I suppose it's a little unfortunate that the amazing plethora of cheeses is mostly lost on me, but I am more than willing to sample the many pastries and saucissons.

There are more crepe restaurants than there are bakeries... and there are many, many bakeries.

I think I overestimated the extent of my food vocabulary, if I ever gave it much thought at all. That might even be the area in which I've made the biggest gains in improving my French in the time I've been here. When I first arrived to find that previous assistants had left behind some dry goods ("extra virgin", as in olive oil, is a literal translation, which I for some reason found kind of amusing), including an assortment of spices, it took me a while to go through them and figure out what everything was. My pocket dictionary was less than helpful for such a specific task, and I wound up identifying several bottles by taking off lids and smelling. Even that experience did not really prepare me for how overwhelming my first trip to a French supermarket was going to be. Now, I stand studying packages and reading labels without shame, but in those first days I was too awkward about being foreign and too horrified by how little I knew or understood not to feel like there was no way I'd ever learn to navigate the vast world of food in French.

I've got things mostly figured out now, but I still haven't quite worked up to buying, say, cuts of meat. I'm still working on sausages, which are a really big deal here and of which there are an astonishing number of varieties. I am proceeding cautiously in my experiments, however; one of the first things I bought here to actually cook myself was a pair of fat Andouille sausages that were the source of my first major disillusionment with France and nearly put me off trying to cook French food altogether. They looked and smelled and tasted like entrails (which they are, to be fair), and I totally couldn't handle it. I really tried and felt really guilty, but in the end I threw the first one away half-eaten and didn't even bother to cook the other. Black pudding any day, even if it makes me feel creepy, but no more organ meat ever again.

Anyway, other things I quickly discovered I didn't/don't have words for include kitchen gadgets/pots and pans, bedding, and toiletries. I assume that I will continue to cross those bridges as I come to them. Things I didn't/don't know how to find in French stores, regardless of having the correct vocabulary words, include greeting cards, computers, and yarn. It took me an inordinate amount of effort to find a birthday card for my father the week after I got here, and although I eventually found both a newsstand-type shop that sold some and an actual card store in one of the shopping centers, those remained for some time the only two places I know of. I've now seen them in some other newstands and have noticed that you can also buy them in grocery stores. As for computers, while I've found an Apple store and a couple of very small shops that sell and repair computers and accessories, I have yet to discover the French equivalent of say, Best Buy or Staples. Not that I need a computer at the moment, but it seems like it might be good knowledge to have, and seemed especially important earlier in my stay when I thought I might need to replace my laptop while I'm here. As for yarn, I've now discovered a few shops from which to buy it, but there don't seem to be any general craft stores here that cater to people with a variety of artsy hobbies. Not really a problem for me, exactly, but still very different from what I'm used to.

I have been a little astonished by the amount of English I've encountered—not just from people I meet who speak at least a little and are eager to practice and/or show off, but also on signs, in advertising slogans, in product names... it's everywhere. More on that later.

Breton is everywhere here, too. Not as much as I'd hoped, perhaps, but I knew once I was placed in a big city that I wasn't likely to hear it spoken. (French has been just as merciless as English, if not more so, in overpowering the other languages within its sphere of influence.) But many traffic signs and most informational signs are bilingual, and many businesses have Breton names or use Breton in their advertising. I understand very little of it, and forget pronunciation. One of the assistants from Britain told me his father speaks fluent Welsh and can often figure out what signs in Breton mean. That makes sense, because Breton and Welsh are in the same branch of the same language family and in theory are quite similar, but I was still impressed because when I first got here, none of it seemed familiar to me from my little exposure to Welsh. (Not that I remember much Welsh at this point, either, to be fair.) Now that I've had time to come to recognize more of it and to think more about it, I have started to see some similarities, but Breton seems to me to have a lot more Zs and Ks than Welsh, and a lot more vowels to go with its consonants. I still think I'd really like to take a Breton language class, or at least audit one at the university (although I've learned that the fee for auditing classes is pretty steep, so I'm still undecided). Imagine the linguistic havoc I could wreak armed with a Breton-French dictionary to pair with my French-English dictionary.

Meanwhile, it is blatantly untrue that there are no fat French people, no loud French people, that French people do not wear bright colors, and that French women do not bare their shoulders or shave the same places American women do. It is also untrue that they hate Americans (here, at least, it seems we're exciting) or speakers of bad French (most are very patient, and even those who might be somewhat annoyed are generally at least polite). Scarves are ubiquitous, for both men and women, but if you mention berets, the French will laugh just as hard as Americans would.

It is true that nearly everyone smokes, or so it seems. Men and women, young and old, native- and foreign-born. They smoke on the street and at the bus stop, in smoking rooms in bars and at the outdoor tables at cafes and in the doorways of their own shops and restaurants when business is slow. It also seems to be true that nearly everyone has a dog (or two or three). Not just fluffy little stereotypically French dogs, either, even here in the city where so many people must live in apartments or tiny little rowhouses, but dogs of all shapes and sizes. Some of the biggest dogs I've ever seen I've seen in the centre of Brest. I'm not sure I've ever seen so many dogs in one place consistently, day after day, before, and certainly not so many trotting along without leashes. I desperately need to find out if it's socially acceptable to ask to pet someone's dog, and how one would ask that in the first place. 

In the meantime, it unfortunately seems that cleaning up after one's dog is not a social mandate to the same degree that it is in the US. Poop everywhere.

It's also at least a little bit true that the French take themselves very seriously and aren't as willing to laugh at themselves as Americans or the Irish. (They'll joke about themselves sometimes; that's fine. And they'll joke about you. But if you try to joke with them about them, suddenly that's not funny at all.)

The greeting-by-kissing custom still confuses me. It varies regionally, for one thing. (I might have said this before, but I don't remember...) In Brittany, most people do one kiss, usually on the right cheek. It in other places, it might be two or three. All of the Spanish assistants (the ones from Spain, I mean) do two, one on each cheek, as does the occasional French person who's not originally from this region. This leads to many an awkward situation wherein I either go in for the second when the other person wasn't planning to, or pull away after the first while the other person is trying to do a second. I never seem to know what I'm supposed to do. Further complicating matters is the fact that many of the other teachers want to do the bises with me sometimes, but don't do it all the time, and the inconsistency means I'm constantly either being surprised by it or being poised to do it when we're not going to (I never, ever initiate it except very occasionally with other assistants or with French friends-of-friends my own age). I think at this point it's been long enough that I can say I don't like this particular custom, and it's not just because it's new to me. Despite the fact that I otherwise tend to be pretty reserved when it comes to physical contact, I much prefer hugging to bise-ing. And much like wanting milk in my coffee and wanting businesses to be open in the middle of the day, that's one of the ways in which I'm extremely aware of my American-ness and not really ashamed of it.*

On a partially related note, the French, or many of them, at least, have a very different idea from mine of what constitutes personal space. I think this is interesting given that they are also more reserved, in general, than I'm used to--although they are sometimes very open about topics that I think in America tend to be things you don't really discuss except with family or close friends, and certainly things you don't ask people about unless you know them quite well. Although generally polite, the French have a tendency to be incredibly blunt. The people of Brest are quick to call their own city ugly, and the teachers at my school did not mince words in informing me that the school across the river where one of the other English assistants works has a very bad reputation. Sometimes this level of honesty just makes me uncomfortable (as when I told my responsable, "You have a lovely house," and she replied, "Yes, it is quite nice." What do you say to that?). Other times it's great that everyone just gets right to the point. I saw a movie poster for the American movie "Friends With Benefits"; its French title is "Sex Between Friends." I had to venture into the shampoo aisle at the supermarket the other day, where I discovered that the word for conditioner is “après-shampooing”. So beautifully straightforward. When asked on my first day what I thought of the teacher's lounge, whether it was nice, I shrugged awkwardly and said "Oui," upon which the whole table started laughing and my responsable said, "She's polite. But then, it is nicer than her bedroom." On my introduction-to-new-classes days, when students won't speak up, I try to joke and ask them if I'm boring**, but their regular teachers have no qualms about telling them I'm going to think they're stupid if they just sit there and stare at me. Just this morning, in fact, when I was trying to explain a game to a group of fifteen year olds, one team seemed to understand, but the other was confused and all talking at once amongst themselves instead of asking me questions. The teacher's reaction was "What a stupid team, you don't listen to anything!"***

A cultural point that may or may not be related this straightforwardness: One of the first things of which I was informed by one of my fellow American girls, who studied abroad in France two years ago, is that if a woman smiles too much, she's assumed to be easy. Well, $#!&. I smile all the time, and if anything I'm inclined to smile more here—for me, it's an instinctive way of showing that I'm happy to be here and eager to try and to learn and to generally be agreeable. It's a way of trying to compensate for my poor language skills. ("I have no idea what you just said to me, but look, I'm cute and friendly and trying really hard!") As an American, it's ingrained in me that smiling at people, even strangers, is a gesture of goodwill and friendliness. Apparently, for French men it shows a little too much friendliness—and after the first unwanted advances I received from a French man seemed to have been a direct result of my forgetting the warning and smiling at a stranger as he walked by, I don't want to take a lot of chances with that particular cultural signal. For a long time, I tried really hard to cut back; mostly, I just avoided making eye contact with anyone outside the teacher's lounge that I wasn't not actually trying to talk to. Part of the problem, I think, is that I haven't really figured out what the rules are—is it just strange men I'm not allowed to smile at, specifically because it sends signals I'd rather not send? Or will old women at the bus stop and mothers of adorable small children in the park also think it's weird if I smile at them for no reason? Are there particular places or contexts in which it's okay? I'm sure that the old man who absolutely insisted that I go ahead of him in the supermarket check-out line deserved the big smile he got, as did the one who helped me with my train ticket when I couldn't get the stupid stamping machine thing to accept it. Maybe I'm overthinking this, but that's what the socially awkward do. We smile a lot, and we obsess over whether we're sending the right signals. So when smiling becomes not the right signal… #&@%. 

I'm not trying as hard not to smile anymore as I was at first. I've gotten less self-conscious about it, partly as a result of incidents like the aforementioned, partly as a result of my positive people experiences while hiking, and partly just because I've gotten less self-conscious in general. I'm going to stand out no matter what, and I'm going to do some things that seem weird to the French (and sometimes to anybody, for that matter), and that's just going to have to be how it is.

* Fun fact: There is no word for hugging in French. Also, as I'm sure you can imagine, the mixture of huggers and bise-rs among the language assistants leads to just as many awkward greetings as the confusion over how many kisses are necessary.

** In the first class where I did that, several of them smiled and said no(!), which made me really happy. But the next time I tried it, I got blank stares. Sigh.
*** Stay tuned for more on the joys of a French education.