Let The Countdown Begin

A week from right now, I will be on a plane on my way to Paris. I will have left the house I grew up in for the last time and will not set foot anywhere in America again for more than seven months—at least. It could be more, because I have a one-way ticket and no idea where I'm going or what I'm doing after my contract is over.

Twenty-two and a recent grad is a scary thing to be anyway. Nothing is certain, nothing is permanent. Even my friends who are now in grad school don't have anything planned for their lives beyond the next couple of years until they have their next degree. To be twenty-two and a recent grad and on your way to another country with a temporary work visa and nowhere to go when it's up is scarier still. We're not just venturing into adulthood, with all its usual challenges and uncertainties; we're doing it in a foreign language, thousands of miles from our family and friends, with nothing more than what we can carry in a suitcase or two, and we don't know when—or if—we'll be “home” again. We don't even know where home is anymore.

It's exciting, too—I know the freedom I have right now is just as fleeting as everything else, and I intend to make the most of it—but still very unsettling.

The things I'm most excited about mostly involve the traveling I plan to do. I want to thoroughly explore France, and I'd like to do at least some of it on foot. Brittany has fabulous mountain and coastal scenery, France as a whole has one of the best systems of long-distance walking paths anywhere in the world, and I have a brand-new backpack, a good pair of boots, and a love of being outside. I loved seeing Ireland from buses and trains, but I also loved my mini-adventures on foot, and I gained enough solo traveling experience that semester that I'm ready to cut some of the buses and spend more time on the ground. I also want to visit college friends in Copenhagen and Senegal, and take trips to Amsterdam and Prague. I'd like to go back to Ireland, and England, and I desperately want to take an extended trip to Scotland, maybe by saving up some money and planning to go in the spring, after I'm done teaching. And that's all just the beginning, and I know I won't even be able to do all of that. So we'll see.

And I won't lie; I'm also looking forward to drinking nothing but cheap wine and gorging myself on crepes and pastries.

Things I'm extremely, perhaps irrationally, concerned about include, but are not limited to: getting to Brest, my first interactions with my contact person and others at the school, figuring out everything I need to do in the first few days and when to do it and who to talk to to get it done, getting a SIM card and some kind of internet, and opening a French bank account (for that last one, concerned times a million).

My correspondence with my “personne contact” (see, French isn't always hard for English speakers!), the teacher at my school who's basically in charge of answering my questions and making sure I know what I'm supposed to be doing as far as my actual job is concerned, has been reassuring, but also a source of some additional stress. On the one hand, she's been very available and reasonably good at answering most of my sometimes-numerous questions, and even gone so far as to give me her personal email address and phone numbers to make sure I can reach her. From what I hear, some assistants are unable to get in touch with their contacts at all over the summer, so I feel very fortunate in that regard. Reading between the lines, she also seems very nice—she's even offered to come to meet me at the train station when I get into Brest, which is definitely going beyond what's expected of her. I say “reading between the lines,” though, because the French are notoriously reserved, and although her emails to me have been cordial, they've not been overly friendly. Of course, my first email to her was probably unnecessarily formal, and therein lies part of my concern—I'm also naturally a pretty reserved person, partly because I'm also a private person and partly because I'm shy and tend to err on the side of distance when it comes to people I don't know well. I'm slow to make friends (among other things) because I tend to wait for someone else to make the first move. I have a feeling the French and I will be edging around one another for quite some time.

Also, there's the fact that French, like most Romance languages, has two different words for “you”. To put it very simply, there is the informal “you”, used with family and friends, and the formal (or plural, but that's not the confusing part) “you”, used with strangers/casual acquaintances and with people to whom one should show extra respect. In practice, the boundaries are much murkier, despite the fact that the French do not use the word “friend” as casually as most Americans—most young people would not use the formal “you” with anyone their own age, for example, and co-workers are likely to use the informal “you” among themselves even if they are really no more than acquaintances. And so the questions of whether and/or at what point to begin to “tutoyer”—that is, to use the informal form of “you”—with someone with whom you do not have a clearly defined relationship is one that tends to cause considerable anxiety among non-native speakers. Not only do we lack the cultural context for determining what's appropriate, English speakers don't have a linguistic reference point because our language does not make such a distinction. I had not fully appreciated the extent of the ambiguity until now, having never had much occasion NOT to use the formal except with my friends and classmates. Obviously, my first email to my contact at the lycée used the formal “you”. She wrote back addressing me with the informal. I could take this one of two ways: The fact that she is being casual is an invitation for me to do the same, OR the fact that she is being casual but did not explicitly invite me to do the same is indicative of our age and status difference and I should continue to be extra-respectful.

Thus far I've gone with the latter. In theory, we are fellow teachers now and should be able to be informal with each other, even if I'm only an assistant. But she's not just a teacher; she's the head of the department, and I don't know enough yet about French schools to have any idea how much weight that distinction carries or whether it has any bearing on her relationship with other teachers.

The “you” debate is a continual topic of internet conversation among language assistants, but there are few answers to be had. Experiences and attitudes seem to range widely, and the advice follows suit. Many people seem to have/have had contacts who were puzzled if they continued to address them formally and/or who insisted almost immediately that that was unnecessary. Nearly everyone who wasn't so lucky seems to be in a position of uncertainty similar to mine. Some people say “if they're 'tutoie-ing' you, it's okay to do it back,” (as is normally a good rule of thumb, but as I mentioned above, there's the added complication in this case of my being kinda-sorta a subordinate) others say to wait until you've met in person, still others say to wait to be asked or to just ask them outright if it's okay. There are even a few who say, “meh, it doesn't matter anyway, we can get away with not knowing the rules because we're dumb foreigners and no one expects much of us anyway.” (I don't like that last one very much.) I think I've decided to just wait until I get there and observe how other teachers interact for a few days, assuming I'm not invited to tutoyer up front.

As for the actual teaching, which I sometimes forget is the reason I'm going, I go back and forth between being ridiculously excited and ridiculously scared. There's not a lot of in between or a lot of simultaneous mixed feelings. When I'm brainstorming activities and games that I can do with my classes or sorting through things like maps and photos and card games and planning how I might be able to use them in lessons, I get really super excited. There is a part of me that's wanted to be a teacher ever since I was a little kid, despite my shyness and my inability to improvise and my horror of public speaking and my awkwardness with children. I know that this could be a lot of fun for me. But then I remember the shyness and awkwardness and fear, etc., and wonder if I'll actually be able to keep a roomful of students entertained productively or, perhaps more importantly, keep them at bay when there are discipline problems (which, from what I hear, there almost certainly will be, especially at the high school level and especially because I'm a woman with mostly male students). Part of me thinks this is going to be amazing, and the rest thinks it's going to be awful and uncomfortable and I'm going to hate it. I guess there's really no way to know until I've actually started.

Which will be in two weeks.

Life is crazy.

Obnoxious And Terrifying Visa Process Is Obnoxious And Terrifying

So about that visa appointment.

After several weeks of slowly gathering documents and paperwork (some of which my parents had to bring to me when they came to visit last month... including my passport [fail]), printing out forms at the local library at ten cents a pop because I decided I didn't need to bring my printer with me for the summer (fail), having passport photos taken for at least the eighth time in the last two years (Passport photos: they're not just for passports anymore. In fact, you need them for EVERYTHING YOU APPLY TO DO EVER.), and making copies of everything because the French are as obsessive about that as my mother, I had everything I thought I would need together and somewhat organized and was as ready as I was going to get for my appearance at the French Embassy in Washington, D.C.

I was living about three hours away from D.C., so I drove up on Monday night before my Tuesday appointment time and spent the night with a friend in an outer suburb so I could be slightly less anxious about getting delayed. Getting to and finding a parking spot at the nearest metro station the following morning was still a harrowing experience, despite having left really early (relative to my appointment time, that is). Then I had to purchase a new metro card (that saga isn't worth telling right now, so suffice it to say that I got one on my first trip to D.C. several years ago and it is no longer in my possession), which took me a few tries to figure out because for some stupid reason you can't buy them from the same machines you use to add money to them or vice versa. And yes, I could have just bought a regular paper farecard or a day pass, but I like having the card I can [hopefully] keep to use in the future, plus I could use it to pay my parking fee at the end of the day. Anyway, the next major annoyance, though I knew about this one in advance, was that the French Embassy is not on Embassy Row. It's not anywhere near Embassy Row. In fact, you can't even get there on the metro. I had to take a half hour trip into central Washington on the metro and then get on a bus two blocks away to take another half hour trip to the Embassy. Now, I haven't spent a lot of time in Washington, but I've been there enough that I'm reasonably comfortable getting around by myself... but I'd never taken a bus before, mostly because I've never strayed too far beyond the realm of the metro. I prefer trains to buses in general, and one of the reasons for that is that as far as I can tell, when you take a bus in an unfamiliar place, there's pretty much no way to know where all the stops are in advance. And it doesn't usually occur to me to ask the driver where I should get off—not that I'd be likely to do that even if it did. Of course, for a trip this specific and time-dependent, I'd used the trip planner on the metro website and let it tell me exactly what route to take, but for some reason it failed to mention the existence of a bus stop literally right next to the Embassy, leading me to get off at least two stops sooner than was actually necessary and walk a third of a mile down the road for no discernible reason whatsoever.

Whatever. It was a nice day, and a safe neighborhood, and I was an hour and a half early regardless, so no real harm done.

Then the real fun began.

The gate to the Embassy is locked, understandably, but there's no buzzer, at least not that I saw, so I guess you just have to hope that the person in the guardhouse sees you standing there and decides to trust you. She did. However, said guardhouse is in the middle of the driveway, not really anywhere near the pedestrian entrance, and if you enter on foot there is nothing blocking your path and no sign indicating that you should cross the driveway to the guardhouse instead of just following the sign beyond it pointing towards the consulate, so that's exactly what I did, before being called back by the woman on duty because apparently you're supposed to check in at the gate and apparently you're supposed to be either clairvoyant or just not very self-sufficient.

There followed an awkward conversation wherein I was speaking French (and not even badly) and the woman in the guardhouse was insisting on speaking to me in English despite having initially called out to me in French. I relinquished my driver's license in exchange for a badge that said "visa section", wondered how I was supposed to present my ID at the visa office if they took it from me at the gate, and headed up the hill to the consulate. Inside, I took no chances on repeating my faux pas from outside, and approached the woman sitting at the desk in the lobby to ask for the visa section despite the fact that the door was right next to her and clearly marked.

Beyond that door was a large waiting area full of rows of plastic chairs. If you don't have an appointment, you get in line to get a number and then wait until you're called, which I guess is just whenever they get a chance, since most people have appointments (I was told it was required, so I'm not really clear on what circumstances would bring someone to the visa office without one). If you have an appointment, you just sit and wait until they call your name "at your appointment time", or ten or thirty or ninety minutes late, depending on how far behind they are that day. They were running way behind the morning I was there, but then there were several people who apparently failed to show up for their appointments (WTF?)*, so I got called up only a little bit late.

Before that, however, I'd already been forewarned of the next annoyance by others in the waiting area. Along with the visa application form, we were theoretically supposed to have filled out part of a form that gets completed after we arrive in France and sent to the local immigration office to finalize our visa status. Said form is available as a PDF on the Embassy's website along with the application form, so pretty much everyone present had printed it out and filled in what we were supposed to have filled in, not realizing that the form on the website was outdated because A) there are no dates on the form itself, just one in some fine print in the corner of the page that seems to just indicate the year the form was created, and B) there's no reason to think there should need to be any changes made to a basic name/birthdate/passport-number type form. But apparently it gets updated every year, somehow. And apparently the one on the website was last year's.

Now, it seems to me that if you're going to make the form available online, you should update it as needed to keep EVERY SINGLE PERSON from having to fill it out twice. Or, if you're not going to update it, you should just take it off the website. I mean, it's not like it's January and they just haven't gotten around to changing it. It's August. At this point, why bother?

So I was irritated about that, because I'd spent ten cents and wasted two sheets of paper on a form that no one wanted.

Oh, but it got better.

I should mention here that there are some questions on the visa application form that it's not immediately clear how one should answer ("occupation", for example—the vast majority of assistants seem to be in the same position as me: no longer students, but not really anything else yet, either) and others that most people can't answer ("address in France", for example—we're not there yet, and the vast majority of assistants are not provided with housing and won't have a physical address in France for several weeks after arriving). Not wanting to screw anything up, I had found a page on one of the help websites for language assistants that spelled out how one should fill out the form to make things simple for everyone.

But Lesson #3 about French bureaucracy (right after "Everything moves slowly" and "Make copies of everything, not just to be safe, but because someone will want them") is "Do not expect consistency." From anyone. Ever.

The woman who called me up to her window in the visa office when it came to my appointment time was in a bad mood (or was just generally unpleasant, it's hard to tell sometimes) and I'd already overheard her being fairly curt with everyone she's dealt with previously. I handed over my passport and application form and she looked them over, then asked, "Are you returning to continue your work as a language assistant?"

And that's when I knew I was in trouble. The website I'd looked at had recommended writing "language assistant" under "occupation" and using our assigned school as "current employer" as well as "employer in France".

"... No, it's my first time as a language assistant."

"Well, then you've put down false information." She shoved my forms back under the window. "You' are not a language assistant until you've begun your contract. You need to cross all this out and put down your current employer."

I pondered that for a second or two. Leaving aside the fact that that sounds ridiculous (Have you ever had a job where someone said, "Okay, you're hired, but you're not allowed to say you have a job here until after your first day, even though everything's already official. Oh, and you especially can't say you work here on the forms that will allow you to come work here."? Because I haven't.), I didn't really have an alternate answer. Would my unpaid summer internship count as employment? Probably not, and even if it did, it was six hours away from the address I was already hoping not to have to prove was really my address (having already overheard someone else being told that the same parent's-driver's-license-and-a-utility-bill-in-their-name solution I'd been told to use was not actually valid), and I did not want to raise any eyebrows about that.

So I said, "I don't have one."

"Then you need to cross this out and write 'unemployed'."

Now THAT sounds like false information to me. Because I AM employed. My job just hasn't started yet because it's still summer.

So I did that and handed the forms back to her.

"And I see you've also put down false information here." She pointed to the "address in France" section, where I'd repeated the information for the school yet again. "I don't think you're going to be staying in a spare classroom."

She seemed to think she was funny, or my attempt to sneak past her was laughable, or something, but that one I could argue, and I did. "Actually, I AM going to have lodging at the school." She looked confused. "It's a boarding school; they have housing at the school and they've set aside a place for me."

"Well, then you need to put that address."

I gave the address for the ENTIRE SCHOOL. Even if that's not specifically the building where my room is, wherever I'm actually living is associated with that address and I can totally be reached there.

"That's the only address I've been given." I was starting to get frustrated with her at that point.

"Then you need to indicate that you don't know your specific address."

I'm pretty sure that by now she was just making shit up to keep me from being right about anything, because what could possibly be the point of that when it's a perfectly valid address and I've just explained the situation to her in person.

She accepted my form after that, and things went pretty smoothly from there. I had the other documents she asked for, which mercifully did not include proof of my American address, I filled out a new copy of the "outdated" immigration form, I was electronically fingerprinted and had my picture taken (so I was asked to procure and bring additional passport photos... why?), and I handed over the prepaid envelope in which my passport was to be returned to me when the visa was ready, and that was that. I was dismissed and left to hope that not being told otherwise meant I would, in fact, be receiving a visa. I remained mildly worried about the alternative until I was able to confirm a week later that the package had been delivered to my parents' house.

But now I have a visa. And a plane ticket.

I'm moving to France.

* As much as I don't understand missing your hard-to-get visa appointment without even bothering to cancel or reschedule it, that's nothing compared to the girl who didn't even have a visa application form and acted like she had no idea she needed one. I REALLY don't understand how that's possible—it's been in all the information we've received from the program, it was all over the appointment-scheduling website, and it and other visa requirements have been a major topic of online discussion all summer. I don't know how you can be oblivious to that many opportunities for you to become aware of something you need to do. Life must be exceptionally difficult for people like that.

I Like Counting. (AH AH AH.)

On Saturday, I am moving out of the apartment I've lived in for most of this summer. Saturday is also, if I remember correctly, the one-year anniversary of my departure for Ireland. I find myself missing Dublin lately (and Cork, and all of Ireland, but Dublin specifically for some reason), and it's crazy to think it's been almost exactly a year since those first three days I spent there alone. Nothing like diving right in to all that independence you experience as a young person living abroad...

It's also crazy that just one year later, I'm preparing to move abroad again. Which brings me back to my original point: My move to France at the end of September will be my seventh move in just over thirteen months. Granted, I've mostly been merely moving back and forth from my parents house to temporary locales, but to put it in perspective, I moved about the same number of times in the THREE YEARS before that, and it was always between home and school, with no additional places. So after the last year, I'm honestly almost as excited just to live in the same place for more than four months at a time as I am to live in Europe.

This will be the sixth time I've left the U.S. in my twenty-two years (assuming two days in Canada even counts), and the third time it's been for more than a short vacation. The second time in my life (and in a row, actually) I haven't been home for Thanksgiving, and the first for Christmas.

It will be the second time I've been to France (although the first time to Brittany), and that raises an issue I have managed not to give a lot of thought to until now. My first trip to France was in high school, the summer before my senior year, with some of my classmates on an ostensibly educational trip organized by my French teacher. My boyfriend at the time also went, having fought his parents tooth and nail to be allowed and worked his butt off to pay for part of it himself, and we had a fantastically romantic trip despite being in a group and under pretty constant supervision. I have a blurry photo of us kissing on an upper level of the Eiffel Tower (we kissed in front of my teacher!), with the lights of Paris spread out below and the rose he'd bought me minutes before in my hand. At the time, he and I had been together for about nine months, which was long enough, even at sixteen, for us to start to function more or less as a single social unit and to convince ourselves and everyone around us that we were going to finish growing up together and stay together through college and get married young and have beautiful babies.

To make a long story short, that didn't happen, but only after three more years and a truly devastating breakup. I know couples that have gotten divorced with less emotional bloodshed. That was almost two years ago now and I'm basically over it, but I have yet to return to a lot of places and do a lot of things that I associate with that relationship—including going back to France. And Brittany should be fine, but I wonder what it's going to be like to travel to places we did go together, if I'll be able to enjoy places like Nice and Tours where I have strong, wonderful memories about being young and in love with someone who's no longer in my life. I want to go back to the places I loved then, but I wonder if it's too soon to revisit them while I'm still so young and still very single.

But anyway. I suppose I can't cross that bridge until I come to it. In the meantime, this upcoming voyage is also the first time I've actually needed to go through the process of obtaining a visa, which will be the subject of my next post...

Mini-Update: Documents and Dilemmas

Things are progressing. The Great International Move of 2011 still feels very far away (in actuality, we're down to about two and a half months), but here are some developments:

* I have a visa appointment at the consulate in D.C. next month. I am already paranoid about being late, and it requires an absurd number of documents—not just the obvious things like my work papers and my passport, but also, for example, proof of address. Let's recall for a moment that I am a nomadic recent grad (as are many many many of my thousands of fellow teaching assistants, making this all the more absurd). My permanent address (which is not where I currently reside, complicating matters even further), and the one listed on my driver's license, is my parents' address (or one of them, as they are in the process of moving, but let's not even get into that difficulty right now). Is my driver's license valid proof of address? Nope. Is a bank statement or a tuition bill or SOMETHING among the very few things actually in my name that gets sent to that address? Nope. Voter registration card? Nope. My packet of paperwork FROM THE FRENCH GOVERNMENT was actually sent to a different address, but would it work even in theory? NOPE. Has to be a rent bill or a utility bill (from a very specific list of utilities, mind you). I do not even have those things in my name for the place I'm currently living, let alone my parents' house. A quick search of the TAPIF forums revealed a convoluted solution: take proof of address in a parent's name, plus a copy of their driver's license to prove who they are, plus a copy of my birth certificate to prove they're my parent. All of this... and when I go to the appointment they might not even ask for proof of my address at all. The bureaucracy nightmare is already well underway and I'm not even in France yet. And let's not even talk about how I [might] need to be able to prove where I live solely so that they can give me a piece of paper whose entire reason for existing is to allow me to move somewhere else.

* Speaking of the moving somewhere else, I have also been in touch with both the head English teacher at the school where I've been assigned and the girl who had this assistant position last year, and among other things have learned that *dun dun dun* my school does provide housing for me! Remember how I mentioned that that was less likely because of the urban location? I subsequently discovered that it's a boarding school and got slightly optimistic again—apparently with good cause. There are still some significant cons: It's a single tiny room, a fifth-floor walk-up, and shares a "prison-like" (according to the former assistant, who didn't actually live there and encouraged me not to, either...) shower and toilet with three other rooms. While it has, at least, a stove and possibly a microwave, no one has mentioned a refrigerator, which I'm not sure I can realistically live without for a whole school year, and while I could theoretically buy a mini-fridge, there's still the issue of getting it up six flights of stairs. I would also be at a distinct disadvantage in meeting/interacting with other people due to the lack of French flatmates (or any flatmates, for that matter). But... 0% of my salary would be going towards rent, effectively eliminating financial restrictions on my weekend/vacation activities. So I'm torn. I'd be stupid not to give it a shot, but I'm afraid once I get there it will seem stupid to live there for seven or eight months when there are better options, albeit not free ones. I guess I'll just have to see.

Actually Having Information Is Awesome

My arrêté de nomination (the paperwork I need to get my visa, which includes all the info I didn't have before about things like WHERE I'M GOING) finally arrived earlier this week. I say finally because it's been a frustrating and suspenseful wait for me, but that's actually a bit unfair considering I am somewhat lucky to have it this early. I know, you're saying "You're leaving the country in three months; how is this early?!", but the French bureaucracy is notoriously slow, on top of which it's the individual académies (school districts, more or less) that are responsible for these contracts, rather than some central administration, so they come in clusters (all of the assistants posted to Brittany seem to have gotten theirs this week, for example), but those clusters happen at totally different times. Some really lucky folks got theirs in late May, but many won't know anything for another month or so, and some truly unfortunate individuals still won't have their arrêtés until August, pretty much right at the time they should be applying for visas, which is cutting it pretty close.

Anyway, I still don't actually have mine in hand, because I am in Williamsburg for the summer doing an internship, but when I filled out the pre-arrêté forms six or eight weeks ago I gave my parents' address because I didn't know yet where I'd be living now. (It's just generally been a stressful, not-knowing-anything, making-it-up-as-I-go couple of months.) But I was informed of the arrêté's arrival and it is on it's way to me via registered mail as we speak.

Also, my parents opened it and told me where I'm going, so the suspense is more or less over even before I actually receive the package.

So, the answer to the question everyone has been asking me for weeks is: Brest. I got very excited to be assigned to someplace I had already heard of before, especially after having heard many assistants saying things like, "I've been posted to [insert small town here]. I have no idea where that is, haha." I also got excited about some other stuff, enumerated below—some of which I already knew and some of which I learned after talking to my parents and immediately heading for Wikipedia.

Pros:
1. It's an actual city. By which I mean not only is it technically considered a city, but it has what I would consider a substantial population. It's not a huge metropolis, but it's relatively comparable to what I grew up with and what I experienced in Cork. I'm satisfied with that. I didn't particularly want to live someplace like Paris or Lyon or Marseilles, but I also desperately didn't want to wind up in some little village with only a few thousand people. I'd love to visit places like that, but living there, more or less alone, for a minimum of seven months, would make me miserable at least some of the time. A medium-sized city will hopefully be perfect.
2. It's a harbor city on the western coast. I won't just be near the ocean, I'll be at it. Even if it's in a region that will be fairly cold for most of the year, that makes me incredibly happy.
3. Allegedly, it's an important university town, which hopefully means there will be fun things to do, it will be easy* to meet young people other than other teaching assistants, and it won't be too hard to find affordable housing (see below).
4. Brest, and Brittany in general, really, is super close to the U.K. and Ireland, which is hopefully going to facilitate travel. (My other travel priorities are admittedly much farther afield, but at least I'm close to something.)

Cons:
1. Being on the western coast, essentially at the westernmost point in all of continental Europe, in fact, unfortunately means that I will be as far as possible from everything in France that's not in western Brittany—including my friend who's going to be teaching in a suburb of Paris. On the plus side, the size of the city should make finding transportation to other places relatively easy... but still.
2. This is a biggie. One of the things that appeals to me the most about living and/or traveling in Europe is the pervasiveness of the past. I may be going to France to teach, but I'm an archaeologist and a historian, and being able to wander medieval streets and gaze up at buildings that have stood for centuries—buildings that predate my entire home country—is fascinating to me no matter how much I do it. So naturally, I'm going to live in a city that was pretty much razed during World War II and has been almost entirely rebuilt in the last sixty years.
3. According to Wikipedia (yeah, I know), Brest was a French-speaking city even when everywhere else in western Brittany wasn't. That makes me far less optimistic about being exposed to a lot of Breton language and culture without having to go look for it.
4. The one major downside to living in a city rather than a more rural area is that the school I'm working at will be significantly less likely to be able to offer free or cheap housing to its assistants. I won't know for sure until I actually contact someone at my school personally, but I'm not particularly optimistic. I was rather hoping I wouldn't have to deal with that particular hassle.

The other news I now have is that I am going to be teaching lycée (high school), which is exactly what I wanted because A) they will probably already have some background in English, and B) their primary teacher will therefore probably also speak English, both of which are hopefully going to make my job a lot less stressful. Also, C) I was marginally terrified of getting little children, both because of the unlikelihood of either of the above circumstances and because although I like children, I often cannot seem to figure out how to relate to them, which makes me awkward and ineffective as any kind of authority figure.**

Next steps: Get all my important documents together and procure a visa appointment at the French Embassy in D.C., ideally for sometime in early August when I'm still living here in VA but mostly done with my internships, so I can take a day or two to go to Washington without it being a huge pain. Start looking at flight options and researching potential places to live. And start thinking about things to do with teenage students... and I'll admit I'm just a little disappointed that the little-kid stuff—cute stickers and maps and activity books—I was looking at in the education section of Barnes & Noble the other day won't be necessary after all.

* in general, not necessarily for me...
** It is one of the crueler ironies in my life that I would love to be good with kids but don't seem to be, while my sister is generally indifferent to kids but they flock to her.

Hark! A [Temporary] Life Plan!

I think it's way past time for a new post.

I actually meant to make one while I was "home" in January, but it turned out I wasn't actually home that much in January after all, and once I got back to Oberlin in early February and started classes again, free time became a fond memory at best. (Honestly, I don't really have time to be writing now...) I started writing a post at one point but never finished it, and now it's pretty outdated. So I'm starting over.

Readjusting to life in America took longer than I expected in some surprising ways. I did not realize how acclimated I had become to traveling on the other side of the road. Fortunately I never got confused while I was the one driving; however, returning to driving after four months of walking and buses was something of a rude awakening. It turns out having a car is a lot of expense and hassle, for all its convenience. The other major readjustment was my American schedule. My workload at Oberlin is several times what I experienced at UCC (and, to be fair, what's experienced by many of my friends and acquaintances at other U.S. institutions as well), my classes always meet at the same times of day and in the same places, so my days are fairly uniform, and instead of the vast pockets of free time during the day that I had on some weekdays in Ireland, I'm usually solidly booked from morning to late afternoon (or evening, in some cases). That means I no longer have the luxury of saying "Oh, it's 9 p.m., I'm done working for the day." Nope. More often than not that's about when I get started. Which is normal in the context of my last few semesters at Oberlin, but was hard to get used to again after both a rather leisurely semester abroad and a break of more than six weeks.

Also, I drink about a zillion times more coffee and tea than I used to, which I attribute entirely to a cold wet semester in a country that relishes both of those to an even greater degree than the U.S.. (And also to the fact that I spent a lot of that semester in my apartment, which had an electric kettle, which is a luxury I had never owned before that. I do now.)

Anyway, I am nearing the end (much to my astonishment) of what has probably been my busiest/craziest semester yet, but, perhaps paradoxically, not the most stressful. In fact, I've been incredibly happy the last couple of months, despite the unrelenting workload and the increasing awareness that I have not the slightest clue what I'm doing when I'm officially released into the adult world on May 31. I think the semester away has really made me appreciate my friends and my awesome job*, but also, almost everything I'm doing on the academic front this semester is something I truly enjoy and want to be doing, and a lot of it is with my advisor, whom I absolutely adore, as a professor and as a person.

I've also been dancing a lot, which is incidental but has definitely contributed to my sanity, especially since the one truly shitty thing that happened when I got back to campus was that the new choir director decided I wasn't good enough for him, which effectively took away the one artistic thing I'd previously kept doing in college.

Anyway, the real purpose of this post is an update on Expat Erica: One of the things my abortive January update would have mentioned is that I had applied for this program: http://www.frenchculture.org/spip.php?rubrique424&tout=ok. In a nutshell, the French Ministry of Education recruits native English speakers from North America on one-year contracts to work as language assistants in the French public school system. (Because, you know, in France they actually value multilingualism enough to A, see the importance of hearing native speakers, and B, start teaching second or third languages during the window where kids are still young enough to legitimately become fluent if they have enough exposure.**)

So that happened.

And a couple of weeks ago, it also happened that I received an acceptance letter from said program offering me a position.

So... in about five months I'm going to be moving to France.

My assignment is somewhere in Brittany (that peninsula in the northwest corner of the country, south of Britain), which was my first choice of placement when I filled out the application (although that was admittedly a tough choice to make), but I don't yet know a more specific location or what age group I'll be teaching or, well, anything other than that there's going to be a lot of paperwork in my future and that as of October I'll be an employee of the French government.

But that's pretty cool, I think.

It's especially cool because one of my best friends, who spent last summer in Paris learning French from scratch by immersion, was also offered an assistantship and is going to be just outside Paris, which is only a few hours east of where I'll be. Another of my best friends has an internship at the school in Copenhagen where she studied abroad two years ago.

So let Euroadventure Round 2 begin—and this time, I won't be so alone, because when I travel I can travel to places where there are people I know.

Also, yet another of my best friends is currently serving in the Peace Corps in Senegal, and I miss her terribly, and a trip to visit her would be substantially shorter and less expensive from Europe than from here. So on one of my three or four vacations (French schools take shorter summers but get more time off during the school year), I'm totally going to Africa.

Looks like this blog isn't dead yet.

EDIT: I didn't realize until after I'd clicked "Publish" that my account was still set to Ireland time. Fixing it was sad.

* I'm the student assistant for the Anthropology Department. On paper, my job is to make copies and hang fliers and run errands. On the ground, I do those things, but I also do a lot of substantially more awesome things, ranging from equally menial to things that give me a surprising amount of responsibility. The department head tends to give me projects in the form of half-formed ideas and thereby give me a lot of free rein in figuring out how to proceed, which makes me feel important. My advisor, meanwhile, is awesome at (in addition to never running out of things for me to do) finding things for me to do that are mutually beneficial--work gets done for her, and I have to learn about things that already interest me in order to do it.
** I started learning French in middle school, which is on the young side for the U.S., but already starting to verge on being older than the ideal language-learning window. And indeed, I'm proficient in terms of grammar, but my accent and my grasp of nuance remain lamentable.

The Town I Loved So Well

There are posters all over town for a play: Sinbad and the Sea Pirates. As opposed to what, exactly? Mountain pirates? I know, savanna pirates.

The other day I was sitting in a café down the street from the university reading the textbook for my Viking archaeology class, and who should walk in but the lecturer for said class, who is also the editor of said book. I waved, and he came over to my table, saw the book, and laughed. I bet I'd get bonus points on this essay if he knew what my name was.

It snowed last night. I mean it snowed hard-core, albeit for less than an hour/about an inch. I spent most of my last day in Cork trooping around to music stores on a bodhrán quest (mostly for a friend, although I also bought a small cheap one for myself, because I thought it might lessen the pain of the nice one not being for me) through a layer of snow I had not expected to see while I was here. The pond in Fitzgerald's Park, near the river in between my apartment and the city centre, was frozen solid where a day or two ago it was mostly water with some slushy ice. The ducks and terns had fled, presumably to the river. I was one of several people walking back and forth to photograph the snow-covered rose garden from multiple angles.

My last walk by the river. Farewell my lovely swans, my awkward terns, my elusive cormorants. Farewell my funny/creepy rooks. And farewell my herons, even though there was a good deal of love lost between us after I discovered this: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1064669/Pictured-The-moment-grey-heron-catches-baby-rabbit-ears-drowns-swallows-thing-whole.html. (I just couldn't look at them the same way after that.) It's funny, I never though I cared much about birds, but I may have spent more time this semester watching birds than in all my time before now.

I meant to mention before, I think, that I count swans compulsively. I like the way they're so often in even numbers. When they're not, sometimes if you watch them for a bit you can guess which is the odd one out.

It took me a month or two, but eventually I saw exactly six in the same place at the same time.*

I also don't think I realized how much I cared about water. Everywhere I have gone this semester, I have gravitated toward rivers and bays and the open ocean.

I am very sad I did not get to go back to Killarney. There is a lot that I didn't have time for, but I think that is my biggest regret.

I feel like there is so much more I wanted to say here on my last night in Cork. I could say it's strange to think I won't walk down the Western Road again, or hike up the ridiculous hill to the music building, or see the spires of a cathedral from my living room in the early morning. I could rejoice that I no longer have to live with the slovenly roommates who after a semester of unabashed disgustingness left yet more for the two of us here until today to clean up. I could mourn that I will no longer drink a pint in The Gallows on Wednesday nights, or find live trad music whenever I want it, or be able to get on a bus and be any of a several dozen beautiful and interesting (and preferably by the sea) places in less than an hour or two. I already miss some of my classes and lecturers, and I already miss MedRen and O'Bhéal and assorted friends and acquaintances, some of whom live here and some of whom have already left for wherever they came from. (And to those I would have seen if I'd made it to Tom Barry's on Friday night—I'm sorry I missed you. I hope it was fun, and I wish you all the best.)

But I don't think any of that is what I really wanted to say.

I've never been good at goodbyes. They're always awkward. And in ten minutes there's going to be a taxi outside waiting to take me to the bus that's going to take me to the plane that's going to take me to New York.

So goodbye, Cork. Goodbye, Ireland. It's been quite a ride. I hope we will meet again someday.

Good night [morning?], and joy be to you all.

* This is a geeky fairy tale reference. Look up "The Six Swans" by the Brothers Grimm, or "The Wild Swans" by Hans Christian Anderson, which as far as I can tell is based on the Grimms' story and which I think might be the only happy thing Anderson ever wrote. One of my favorite novels ever is a retelling of these tales, set in medieval Ulster. (I think. Maybe Leinster. But probably Ulster.)