Reciprocity in Bureaucracy

It came to my attention around the beginning of the visa application process that, in fact, students never used to need to even bother with the visa process as recently as give or take five years ago and that this policy has been enacted by many (most?) member states of the EU/Schengen Area on a policy of reciprocity. This means that because the United States makes everyone else, even in Western, closely allied countries, fill out endless paperwork and jump through stringent hoops, well, so too are Americans going to have to do exactly the same if they want in those countries for longer than 90 days. This renders the visa process a little bit less serious, as evidenced by the terribly translated and proofread visa application form (among other documents), and a lot more tedious. I'm not saying I don't get it, but thanks for that one, America, all of us going to these countries are so terribly grateful.

Upon learning that a girl going on the program to Germany doesn't need the same kind of visa and can just show up and register herself, I threw in a joke about how this is really just Europe's geopolitical South's revenge for all of their duress. I'm not so sure that needs to be a joke.

I am still waiting for my background check to come back from the FBI so that I can submit all of my visa materials. Six weeks and counting.

The timeline for visa approval is apparently three to six weeks, but often shorter because the process isn't actually that strict for American citizens provided you aren't, say, a felon. That's great, at least in theory, except that there is ambiguity over whether or not we send in our passports from the get-go and then it's approved and mailed back to us, or whether we send in a copy, get the visa approved, and then send in our passports. In typical Latin style, no one really knows except for the contacts at the consulate that only our study abroad office seems to have contact with. You could otherwise be waiting approximately forever for clarification. This becomes problematic only when the lack of start and end dates for the semester in Lisbon is factored in, because Católica doesn't feel like it's necessary to let that information out except in officially signed and sealed documents. Add to that the necessity of this information for filling out the visa application form itself and being able to book travel, for which must be accounted as part of the documentation, and you have a nice, big clusterfuck mess that doesn't get any better when you realize that the days and weeks are melting away, leaving the deadlines significantly tighter for getting the visa and getting the hell out of this country.

Our documentation from Católica, semester dates and all, came in finally, so we happily (joy!) no longer need to worry about that.

In related news, all of my hyperventilation over the course of this process over housing and the fact that I don't want to end up living in a suitcase on cobblestone sidewalks by a river because I can't afford housing and no one bothered to lend a helping hand in finding lodging arrangements and I'm going to starve because everything is expensive and what if the airline loses my luggage and I have no clothes, then I'll be really screwed and then what if ... where was I? Oh, right. So we had an orientation meeting to go over the various bureaucratic processes that getting there entails, from the university to the government and everything in between, and we also met with one of the students on exchange here from the same program. I can now rest assured that Portugal is nowhere near as expensive as Alpine France (or Paris, for that matter), I will not have to worry about living in a hovel 2 kilometers from a transit stop an hour and a half away from anything of interest, and plenty of other information that will no doubt come in handy. This is the point where normally I would be excited, but I can't get the background check out of my head, and so all of the elves and faeries shitting themselves joy will have to sit contained until I mail off my visa application, at which point I'm sure I will spend all of my time learning as much about Lisbon and Portugal (and Portuguese) as possible in my impatience to leave.

At least even the Germans had a difficult process with their visas.

Continue Dreaming, or Verification that I Am Not Completely Insane

When I wrote about returning to Europe, the only caveat to the post was that while the probability was strong enough not to leave any room for doubt, it hadn't been officially confirmed that I would be going, getting the grant, and studying at Católica. Happily, within the past week, that has been verified and accepted, and I will be going with one other student from CU who applied in a similar timeframe as I did. There is apparently one other prospective person, but that is not at all set in stone, and more unlikely than not at this point. I imagine the scrambling to get all of the documentation, how it takes so long, for the visa alone would be enough to nullify it. Basically, this means that all of the work that I've put into this process has paid off in an official capacity, and so I can breathe with slightly less anxiety than before. I don't have to worry that this whole thing was some kind of cruel, sick joke played on me in some kind of elaborate dream, from which I will wake up in a cold sweat of terror at 5 AM on some night where it is not only snowing, but also wherein my every means of leaving the house are broken and useless. With small children crying and country music playing just a little bit too loudly in the background. I am working for something tangible after all.

This should be exciting, right? Except that I've been dealing with sinuses that have been trying their absolute best to explode inside of my skull and eject themselves forcibly out. I was more excited about eating the pho soup that I was having for dinner the night that I got the email that my application status had changed than I was for the fact that, well, it's set and I'm going in January. That soup was divine. I really couldn't think of anything better than consuming that soup in solitude in that moment.

Not to say that it isn't exciting, but I think it hasn't hit me because of the haze I've been in courtesy of my sinuses. Other people are far more congratulatory and excited than I am, which can be attested by 28 "likes" to this very news being reported on Facebook, something I have never gotten and didn't really expect. My opinions on Facebook and how I would prefer to be using social media aside, the fact that 28 people on the internet, people with whom I am somehow acquainted, thought it worthy enough to click their approval of what I posted is still pretty nifty. I felt certainly more excited about it after seeing that, and then I went to sleep, because I am exhausted all the time.

As each day goes on and I feel a little better, because each semester the same pattern occurs and I spend one to two weeks feeling abnormal, I realize the gravity of things getting put in motion in a formal, bureaucratic way, and how there are really only a few months left until departure. My excitement is still dampened, though, because there is an endless amount of somewhat mindless work to be done for the procuration of the long-stay student visa. There are 12 time-sensitive things to be gathered together and shipped off to San Francisco, where they will sit for approximately three weeks before the granting (well, with sensible and good luck) of the visa, after which my actual passport will have to get mailed along with an envelope that is prepaid and trackable. Some of these documents are straightforward, others are ambiguous and I am not really sure what exactly they're asking for, and so I'm going to meet with people at CU to clarify it all before I start dreaming about paperwork and bureaucracy. On top of that, we still have to sort out our housing options, which means I have to figure out what exactly the options are actually going to be and all of the various information that goes with that, oh, and classes. I have to figure out which classes of the list provided by the program are going to be offered, are compatible with the certificate, and applicable to my major. I was planning on doing all of this in November, but November is on Tuesday, so that means I don't really have time to be excited about being formally accepted.

But hey, there are 89 days or less until I leave! (Not that I have a countdown...)

The Saga of the Run-on Sentences

We take a brief break here to describe a fictional account of routine life as a college student, based on a collective experience familiar to many. The run-on sentences are deliberate. It came about during a Skype chat with M one evening.

...I think the periods of greatest stress are when you overdo the coffee and then even the last refuge is gone and you must simply plug through whatever mindless crap you were working on or scheduled to work on anyway. This is done knowing that your sleep schedule will never right itself and that the semester will literally ingest you and then spit you out, as you run off to tests haggardly and hoping not to fail, extra-shot Americano in hand (because they took pity on you that morning and you're such a regular that they just throw it in for free sometimes), shaking.

You arrive at your tests, and the competency required falls short of your expectations, causing dissonance, which causes greater stress, which causes you to feel as though you're actually going to have a stroke, because you have four shots of espresso coursing through your veins, your digits are shaking, and you have eaten only a small portion of an insufficiently large morsel that morning. You then pause, contemplating briefly the four and a half hours of sleep you got, convincing yourself that it was in fact an accomplishment and a victory that you peeled yourself off of your bed that morning and schlepped yourself to class, facing the world, only to have everything crash down as you realize that everyone around you doesn't actually care because they expect you to be as you normally are because the extent of your physical dolor is invisible to the world, the weight of social expectations suddenly is put into perspective, and you close your bag and exit the test.

As you exit your test, suddenly the pangs of hunger hit your cognitive functioning and you attempt to kick a blonde girl in the shins as you walk unnecessarily quickly toward your next class, biding time until lunch and sustenance arrives, unprepared for the class because you had no time to do the reading because you had to study for the test you had taken. You arrive at your class, inadvertently glaring at all who enter the room after you. The professor comes in and inquires to your well-being. Are you feeling all right, sick perhaps? No, you want to scream, no, I am fine, but I might hurl the sharpest of the pencils in my possesion at your eye if you continue to ask me further. Your class continues on and boredom sinks in, masked by the insatiable vitriol and irrational thought provoked, seemingly, by the only person in the room who dares to open their mouth and get participation credit that day.

You leave, shuffling as quickly as possible out of the class toward the end destination: lunch. This is inhibited by the lolling pace of the hundreds of other students walking between their classes, conveniently scheduled at the same time as yours, each and every one of them in your way, deliberately, as though they derive great pleasure in inhibiting you on your way to the end destination. A bicyclist passes, you contemplate taking a book and pushing him off of his wheels, or perhaps breaking a branch from the tree adjacent to jam the tires, thinking about the great joy and satisfaction you would get out of watching someone on one of those wretched sets of wheels suffer.

It's always them, the bicyclists trying to ride through the crowd at a thousand miles per hour, treating the pedestrians like an obstacle course, laughing at their feebleness when they have no clue where to move so as not to get maimed by the wheels racing toward them. Or maybe it's the skateboarders and longboarders, you dislike them just as much, possibly more still because they have even less of an excuse to have mounted their means of transportation through the wandering, schlepping sea of students in the first place. You wonder why other people always seem to pick up their feet but never move their legs, rendering the physical act of walking completely, utterly useless. You could walk twice as fast, easily, and god dammit, you're going to show them just exactly how you will, walking off of the pathway and onto the grass for a moment, allowing some dew to spray gently on their shoes, realizing that a useless metal rail is coming quickly upon you and not finding any opening in the sluggish mass to allow you to continue along to the next building.

Your hands shake, and your fury at the way the wind blows gently to the south and the sun glares in your eyes at just that particular moment grows.

You grab the handle of the door to the building you are entering and recoil as it slips slightly, slick from the sweat of a thousand other students before you that day. The lack of sanitation alerts you to the hand sanitizer situated in the bottom of your bag, underneath all of the books, papers, and the computer you schlep but seldom use outside of the house anyway, causing undue stress as you try desperately to think of how you might most efficiently retrieve it without contaminating your other belongings. Something drops out of your bag as you attempt to do what you have just thought of, followed by a pen you forgot you had, an assignment handed back to you in class, mindlessly stuffed in your bag as quickly as possible, and your keys.

Suddenly, you feel something in your pocket. You think to yourself, what the FUCK is that, I don't have anything there, not that I can remember, I put my phone in my bag for class, of this I am sure, it is silent right now, and there's nothing else that produces that. You grasp at your pocket and it is indeed empty, souring your mood further, your hands shaking as you march on, not spotting a table and observing a line of a dozen people all waiting to heat their food in the same filthy microwave that you were intending to.

Your mother calls, producing a real vibration in your other pocket, irritating you further because your initial assumption that your phone was stowed safely away was wrong. "What are you doing, are you busy?" she asks, oblivious to your schedule and unaware that anyone could be doing anything during the day. "I just wanted to see if you locked the door. I was just thinking about it, and I worry. A thief could break into the house and steal everything, and then we wouldn't even get insurance money to rebuild! Oh, but your father is home, I suppose. Did he go to work today? What time are you going to be home? What do you mean you don't know, what are you doing that I ought not know about? Whatever. Listen, I've got to go, there's a meeting." The banality of her conversation inspires the act of slamming your phone at the brick wall to your side, but you know that ultimately, she will talk to you, brick wall or not. Your mother will talk to you when you are dead, right when you least expect it, when the coffin is lowered into the ground, and she will whisper "Why don't you call your mother?" directly in your ear, and you will roll in your grave before it has even been filled back in, stricken with the guilt that comes from not having called your mother because you died.

At last, your food is heated! You grasp at your food, peering into the microwave, encrusted with food exploded inside of it for many months prior, never touched by the janitors, who recoil at the thought of touching it possibly more than the bathrooms of the building, and you heard once that a girl got a life-threatening disease from that one on the obscure floor upstairs that only the most socially outcast ever bother to visit. You studied there once, but it put you to sleep, and so you resumed your studying at the library, like everyone else on the campus, wondering why you ended up there and why it smells so peculiarly different each time you visit. You burn your finger on one of the corners of the container, swearing quietly at yourself under your breath, wondering why it is that we need fingers in the first place, and where the hell are the napkins in this god-forsaken building, anyway?

Upon realizing that the napkins are directly adjacent the microwave, you take seven, six for the sake of grabbing your container and one for eating, because the environment be damned, you are not bringing pot holders to class. No one does that. You exit the building with restored clarity, thinking about theories you heard about in class and whether you should get another coffee before going home. There's a test to study for.

Return from (Not Quite) Whence Thou Came

I found an answer to the question looming over my head at the end of the summer, jolting the reality of leaving France as I flew across the Atlantic on an Air Canada flight in which the stewards didn't bother to speak French to anyone. The question left open was that of a return to Europe, the desire to relocate after studying, but having an ambiguous and at most unformed idea of how actually to achieve that. Part of the problems that continue to plague my readjustment to my native country and city stem indeed from the lack of certainty over how, and when, I might be able to return for more than a brief stay. My bond to and impression of France, amid all of the good and bad that comes from the experience of living there, is that of being at home, and my sense of comfort in other places and cultures in Europe is unparalleled in the United States.

The answer to this question comes in the form of studying, yet again, but studying in a different capacity than I have studied abroad before. I will be spending four and a half months in Lisbon, Portugal from February through the middle of June for the sake of studying the development of political theory as relating to citizenship on a grant program run by one of my professors at CU. This is the way in which it is different from my previous jaunts; my studies will relate directly to the work I am doing toward my degree and toward my goal of ultimately finding work in the political sphere of Europe, with the intent of relocation, after graduation. The opportunity to engage with similar people in the Western European sphere and therefore establish connections to promote my competency toward finding substantive opportunities on the continent, whether in the academic or professional spheres, is very tangible. This represents the opportunity for which I have been seeking for the greater part of my college career, and in some ways, the development of my own capacity for seeking out and finding opportunities that match the ambitions of an intellectual renaissance that I have fostered for a similar period of time.

For the sake of not embellishing too much, for I consider this endeavor to be as much work as it is an exciting opportunity, it is important to put into perspective my utter lack of familiarity with any aspect of Portuguese culture. I know effectively no Portuguese, I have not spent any significant amount of time studying the culture, and really my only basis in either one could probably be summarized in the handful of fado songs that I have on my computer. The implicit point is that, to say the least, my time in Portugal will not be like an extended mirror image of France. There will be much more actual work involved, and nothing will be quite as comfortable without a solid basis in the language and the assimilation that provides. I am not concerned by the process of learning Portuguese, because it is not proving terribly difficult given my linguistic background, but I do recognize that these are things that are potential stressors. I hold no pretenses of living in Portugal as some kind of magical wonderland.

As far as work is concerned, it is the continuation of a process that has kicked into full gear in the three months since I arrived back. I have read now 13 books in that period, all relevant in some form to solidifying my knowledge of what I want to study in political science and advancing my understanding of theoretical and cultural concepts that will help me to develop firm ideas for research at the graduate level. Naturally, this spans a wide range of topics, including economics, political theory, religion, and so on, but there is still much to be done. I am sure that this process will be much the same in Portugal, with the access to an even greater pool of resources and recommendations that will provide. I feel like I am making up for lost time at this point, and I have plenty of literature to get through before I can really say I'm at a point of a somewhat erudite understanding of the field I am attempting to pursue. It's work, and there is no shortage of a time commitment involved, reflected in the diminishing of my social life in this period. That will not change because the scenery around me has.

There are 15 weeks, give or take, until I'm slated to leave. The countdown starts now.

Reflections Unfit for Just a Week

All of my experiences and ideas from Annecy in five weeks are such that I could probably see and do in two weeks in Paris. That is what a mere handful of days in this city has done to me, with every emotion, feeling, and thought possible occurring all amid meeting new people (hello, ridiculously attractive Parisian men!), seeing touristic sights, seeing other sights, eating, and somehow finding the time to also appreciate the boat I am staying in. I have seen and done more in these short days than I perhaps did the entire time I was in Annecy, if we're not including the trips to other places that happened in the same time period. This probably has more to do with Annecy being small than it does anything else, but the effect that it produces is sort of remarkable, a sudden reminder that there is in fact a world of things to do and see and that there are places where news actually happens, instead of is heard about and remarked upon. There is a sense of real life and the real world in Paris that I like, but that has the price of being a little bit overwhelming to get used to.

While I can say that I connected to the people in Annecy, I have done so all the more in Paris, perhaps out of necessity. Here there is no institute to be comforted by socially, there is nothing social for me at all unless I find and do it myself, so it has become some kind of game or art while I've been here. It's worked well. What I have found is that the stereotype of the rude Parisian is almost absurdly unfounded, perhaps aided by fluid French, and that if you just talk to them frankly and friendly, they genuinely appreciate what you have to say and listen to you. I have talked to dozens, if not hundreds of people in Paris. Perhaps more than Annecy, in fact, something that stuns me and also serves as a reminder that I am actually in a metropolis that has twice the population of the entire state from which I hail. There's so much energy and so much life that it's almost jarring. People are out and about, living their lives, being tourists, spending money, begging for it, working, partying, laughing, and doing everything imaginable at all hours of the day. They are always going and going and going. And they're still French, because the line they walk while they're going makes no sense. Heh.

I read that the city is the most visited city on the planet, with roughly 2 million people in it any given month of the year, and that is only taking the famed center of town within the Boulevard Périphérique into account. That is a lot of people coming from everywhere in the world. A lot. And you can totally see it everywhere you go. You hear English almost as much as French in some places, and then you hear a little bit of everything else in between. African languages with which I am unfamiliar, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew, Italian, Spanish, Russian, and so on. They're all there, they're all seeing the same things that everyone else comes to Paris to see, of which there seems to be no end. There is always something else to see and do in Paris, and I am convinced that even Parisians never actually see or fully understand and appreciate all of the monuments and colossal artifacts of history laid out for them throughout this city. To list all of the things I have seen or done would perhaps take an entirely new blog. I don't have that kind of time.

What I do have the time for, though, is to say that despite all of that, despite the rocky start and all of the tourists and the occasionally sharp French man and all of the negative things, and indeed despite all of the magically positive things that I've seen and done so far, the city of Paris works itself into your conscience and doesn't let go. You want to stay in this city, you love this city, you "synergize" with this city because this city is so human it's hard to believe. Paris lives, sleeps, eats, and breathes the human element of its existence. Everything about it, from the way the city was built and rebuilt, to the monuments signifying victory in a human conflict, to the museums for human enrichment, to the world class universities for human development - everything is human, in a way that is difficult to explain to the inhabitants of motorized, vehicle-driven elsewhere. Very few places have I been where I feel so at ease walking the streets at any hour of the day, where I don't get lost until after getting along the same route a few times, where nothing is familiar and everything seems it all the same. I have had the sensation while walking around town of a certain déjà vu, that I never actually left my home town and that I am in my appropriate place, more than once. It happened once and then it never stopped happening. I don't truly know this city, but it feels right. It must have felt right to hundreds of thousands of other people too, because that is what it is famed and storied for. Hemingway understood, and now I and countless other people are coming to the same understanding as well.

Perhaps that is the purpose of engaging so fully in a place and time, perhaps that, in and of itself, was the reason I came to France.

The Paris Saga, the Worst Kind of Debut

Paris, gay old Paris. Or so they say. Having left Annecy, I have to pinch myself when I find that I am actually sitting on a boat in Paris, a massive, historic city that I did not previously know. Leaving Annecy happened extremely quickly, with Valérie (the second host mother, because I moved and oops didn't write about it) helping me get to the train station and my platform and N arriving to say goodbye and see you in Boulder and so on. The train itself was a smooth ride, as much as the TGV is or can be, and it took exactly as long as anticipated. When we got to Gare de Lyon, it was almost surreal, because all of the surroundings were already familiar from arriving, and I had a sense that this wasn't such a mortifyingly huge city after all. I schlepped the good schlep back to the boat, had an awkward encounter with the owner as he went over all of the details of staying there, signed a contract, and then the day was started.

Except, was it? Where do we go from here? That is the question I asked myself, thinking about what to do with the days by myself that I have before my parents arrive and everything changes yet again.

So I was supposed to meet one of the girls, B, who was studying at IFALPES in Annecy in my class and also happened to be coming to Paris the same weekend as I was because she was leaving to go home (to Colombia!) the next week. We decided to meet in Paris, naturally, and hang out, because exploring new places with friends is nearly always more fun than doing it solo. The problem with this plan is that we were planning on meeting by the metro station Bastille, which is right where my house boat was located. Me being a dumbass smart person and not realizing that oh wait, metro systems usually have multiple entrances for large, connecting stations, I overlooked this, and we ended up not finding each other. She didn't get a French phone, so it was always going to be more difficult. This ordeal went on for about 45 minutes before I went back to the boat and the wifi thereupon, hoping that perhaps she would have internet on her iPod as well, where miraculously we found each other and reworked our plans in order to meet at Notre Dame cathedral. Find the horse monument, she said, you can't miss it, and we will meet there. Done.

I was glad that we were able to successfully rework our plans and find each other, because I had already developed a lot of unanticipated stress from the change of scenery, not being completely familiar with where I was, not particularly knowing anyone in the city, not knowing anyone in the city (for the duration I would be there) that spoke the language I was more comfortable with, and so on. Much as this trip has been about being by myself, any new change of scenery amounts to starting over and it can get to be a bit much rather quickly.

So we met at Notre Dame as planned, me finally seeing her as I was literally sitting on the statue that she told me about so that there would be no chance of getting lost again, and we took a boat tour on the Seine, wherein we learned about the numerous bridges of Paris and saw monuments and generally went delirious with hunger. When we got off the boat, we were practically nonfunctional, so we started walking around looking for somewhere to eat. We crossed the bridge off of Île de la Cité and moved onto the area around métro Saint Michel, where there is a great wealth of food options, and we ended up stumbling upon an extremely busy and extremely small Lebanese to-go place. They specialize in shawarma, which was perfect for both of us, being starving and not fed enough meat throughout most of the trip. After a short ordeal paying for it, we got our food and sat down by the Seine, finally truly enjoying Paris and pinching ourselves that we had been in Annecy mere hours earlier.

We made it! We made it!

We got on the metro after our food, it finally getting dark out, and discovered how to get to the Eiffel tower, walking along the quai to get there and taking many, many photos. We spent enough time to get as many photos as possible and ended up walking through Champ de Mars toward the metro again, where we decided to go to the Louvre area and see what was around. After more photos, we decided not to walk all the way back, because it was late and there were enough drunk people out on the streets to convince us that the metro would be the better option. This is where we decided that tomorrow we would meet at the tower of Gare de Lyon, it being a famous monument on the outside of the building, and that if for some reason we couldn't find each other again, we would go straight to the Eiffel Tower and find each other there, in the middle, underneath it.

The Louvre at night is pretty! But dead. Let's continue to get our tourist on.

So I woke up early the next morning, excited for the day, and definitely hungry. I ran out of the boat, getting through the metro to Gare de Lyon as was planned, and then waited for the amount of time we said without finding B, so I decided to go back into the metro and I would find her at the Eiffel Tower. With a stroke of luck, I actually found her wandering around inside the metro station, which at Gare de Lyon is ridiculously confusing, a labyrinth of repeated entry and exit points just to get onto the metro or change lines. We were both relieved, but also starving, and so we headed out toward the Eiffel Tower together, excited to be touring the city with a friend for the day. The stops on the itinerary were to go up to the top of the Eiffel Tower, go to the Louvre, and then take a walking tour around the city. It was going to be a good day of touring. We got through Champ de Mars again, pausing to take photos, and then we went up to the Eiffel Tower and got in line.

This is where everything in Paris came crashing down and the whole day and the trip up to that point turned to complete and utter shit hell.

We decided to grab some food at the kiosk we saw just across the way from us one at a time, I would go grab something and tell her what was on the menu and then she would come back and we would be able to hold our place in line. There were two lines forming at that point, so it shouldn't have been too bad, but then I went for my coffee and beignet, and I came back and B was absolutely nowhere to be found. I scaled both lines up and down twice to no avail, feeling caffeinated and desperate. All of the stress of Paris from arriving amplified beyond my own comprehension when I realized that we weren't going to find each other again, and so I got in line and went up, hoping that she might have stayed in line and that we would either find each other on the tower or at the exit. With no such luck, I went over to the Louvre area, realizing that I was probably not going to find her there either, and then I went back to the boat and lost my shit broke down from the turn of events. I knew a couple of French men living in Paris, so I texted them and got unnecessarily cold replies back about not being able to see each other that day, which only made matters worse, and so it was that I ended up getting myself together and traversing the town on foot by myself, not knowing what to do or where to go.

I walked through the Saint-Germain-des-Près neighborhood, a well-known artsy and upscale neighborhood of Paris, where I found a small bookstore and got a gift for one of my friends, had lunch at a hole in the wall there, and saw plenty of interesting things, public art and otherwise. I went from there to Île de la Cité, where I went back to Notre Dame and saw more of it, strolled through all of the old streets there, and then went to Hôtel de Ville and saw the things there were to see on that side of the river. It wasn't such a bad tour, but I was distraught and my nerves were frayed, so I could only appreciate it so much. I knew that she needed to go back to her hotel later in the day and then catch a train back to Annecy, so I decided that perhaps I would run into her and went out to look for her, where I ended up finding her on the metro on her way back to the train station. We took the metro together and I showed her where her train was going to be departing from, having taken it both ways already before from the same place, and we said our goodbyes, laughing about getting lost at the Eiffel Tower. From there I voyaged on to Sacré Coeur at the top of the hill in Montmartre, having to wriggle my way out of one of the famed scams by a random African man and some yarn, and got home at the end of the day completely exhausted.

Well, at least they know what they're selling, right?

I wasn't kidding. Interesting, and also disturbing.

Things ended okay and justified, but I'm not sure if I love Paris yet.

Outro, Perspective

I leave Annecy with a certain sense that I've crossed a threshold in life and discovered a little bit better what it means to live as someone independent of all that is familiar from the comfort zone of growing up. I came here alone, knowing no one and being unsure of how well my French would hold up at first and, indeed, it was surprising to find that I can somehow still manage to take advantage of this brilliant opportunity thrust at me in every way imaginable. I hold no particular nostalgia for the town itself, it being very small and certainly provincial, but the situation of the town in the Alps and the unique culture that comes from that is something that I appreciate at a basic level, having had the opportunity to try and experience as many things "Savoyard" as one could in the short amount of time given.

Ciao, joli little town.

When one day L, N, and I decided to go to a cafe and sit and have a drink together, because at some point we have to realize that we are technically in a group studying abroad together, but also that we're genuinely curious to make further acquaintance with each other, we talked about something that stuck with me, a thought that I've come back to repeatedly in the space of us being in Annecy.

There is a concept that we as people tend to romanticize places, objects, and other things of varying levels of permanence in our lives, because these places and things become attached in our memory to the emotions and feelings that we have experienced in or with them. Conversely, we also romanticize places and things that are seemingly nice, but that we don't know, precisely for the reason that we are unfamiliar with them. Many people go to Europe because they have a romantic notion of European life, cities, and people, overlooking the differences between countries and not necessarily realizing that people live similarly there to how we do elsewhere. When you travel for short periods of time in these places, the romantic notion of them gets reinforced, because you don't spend enough time to see the banal, everyday things that people have to do to pass the time and to function in society. We hold onto our mythical idea of Europe as a magical wonderland because we are ultimately too ignorant to say or feel otherwise about it.

We are sheltered in the United States by the umbrella of national unity, of a culture that does not differ so profoundly from state to state and region to region as most areas of the rest of the world in a similar geographic footprint do. We go back and forth between our cities with no barriers, with an ease that is a uniquely North American concept. In this way, there is a certain idea that to cross a national boundary is a special thing, that to go between historic cities implies a drastic change in how life functions, as though culture produces fundamental differences in how we perform basic things such as cooking or sleeping. The idea that we carry in the US that cities are cities and to move between them is "normal" or not particularly eventful is something altogether lost in Europe; that is to say, the idea that cities are just cities and it is necessary to engage with people, things, and concepts other than the built form of somewhere to truly discover what makes that place special doesn't really exist. We consider Europe special for the sake of being special.

This isn't to say that Europe isn't nice or that life in European countries is bad, in fact, it has no bearing on that whatsoever. It is to say, however, that the complexities of life make everything more difficult than they appear on the surface, and that within the walls of the beautiful aged buildings real life happens that we can not possibly as outsiders comprehend without thrusting ourselves into it. Everything is more gritty than it first appears, whether that is for better or worse.

The more I travel, the more time I spend in such remarkably different corners of the world (Russia, Miami, now France), the more the concept of romanticism for a place is a little bit unfounded, although a draw to particular places is certainly founded. My lack of nostalgia for the town of Annecy itself perhaps stems from the fact that I carry an understanding with me of the idea that we are all actually remarkably similar as human beings, working, eating, sleeping, wishing, dreaming, and playing all in similar ways and certainly to an end that would appear to be the same. This seems to be true even of places that are drastically different in their socioeconomic character, although it is certainly easier to observe the similarities between Western nations. It is for that reason that Annecy is not a place that has become romanticized in my mind, somewhere I will truly yearn to experience again the way I have these five weeks. I have a fondness for the Alps, the Savoy region, and indeed the way that life functions here, but I also have a strong sense that I will return and it will be "normal" all the same. If I end up in Geneva or Lausanne as I would like to, life will continue normally, and I will engage in things that will make me appreciate those cities, but in parting from the region I don't objectify it as something marvelous for the sake of being marvelous. The connections and contacts I have made in Annecy will remain and I will revisit them with pleasure, and that is what I feel a connection to.

It is also necessary to say that the atmosphere of being one in a group of international students, people who have come to do the same thing in the same place from every different corner of the world, is something that I appreciated profoundly in Annecy. Making contacts with people from places I do not know and becoming friends with them, learning about how our cultures effect minute differences in our day to day quirks and patterns of habit is something that I will never stop appreciating. The unique set of circumstances that allows this to happen, for all of us students to communicate in a patois of all of our different languages, going out on the town all together and enjoying ourselves...it is moving. I can't appreciate the homogeneity of my home city, and indeed many American cities. Diversity exists, and there are people from everywhere, but it is a patchwork and not the utter diffusion of people that inspires all of my sensibilities.

I may not miss the built form, but I will miss the people and the experiences that I had with them.

"En Allemagne" As Paroxysm, or What Happened?

Let's fast forward to the next day after the road trip saga and for the same reasons as before, the decision was made that N and I would skip class to go to Allemagne, this time with just E, because C wanted to see other places and they were getting travel fatigue with each other. It was a wise decision all around, quite frankly, and so I met up with J and E to take advantage of the national sales week dubbed "les soldes" at Zara. It ended up being the last time I would get to see J in France as well, because she was leaving for Germany for a week the same day. It's a large enough country, though, that we wouldn't be seeing each other in Germany either. E and I found things, me being the more effective shopper and spending significantly less on the same amount of items. There's a Jewish joke in there somewhere, but we both are, and so it doesn't really work. Somehow upon returning home I managed to meet my host father and N at the same time driving in opposite directions at the entry of the cul-de-sac, which worked out well, because I had yet again forgotten to get the host family any kind of gift (oops) and didn't really want to leave a note.

Note to self: don't attempt to drive through Switzerland on a Friday afternoon when everyone is getting on vacances. It doesn't work.

Our 5 hour drive ended up taking 8 1/2 hours, rendering us tired and willing to laugh at stupid shit almost anything, that is, until we got to Lake Constance and N's GPS system decided that it was going to be absolutely retarded and refuse not to route us to the ferry that takes cars across it, saving a decent chunk of time, but also bottlenecking in high traffic periods (go figure). N is a remarkably laid back guy, laughs at anything, tones down the seriousness of most moments, and always find a bright side to anything, because he doesn't like it when people bitch too much. At the lake, however, after already having sat in traffic for six hours all the way through Switzerland, all bets were off. We weren't sure if he was going to break the GPS or not, but he gave it a punch and seemingly tried, silencing the passengers as he called his father for advice (who was in India!) and proceeded to laugh about doing just that. Much relief on the side of a German road after we all waited a few hours between restroom breaks as first footsteps in Deutschland, an Autobahn experience, and heavily aggressive driving around the lake later and we arrived. To say it wasn't fun would be a terrible lie.

We arrived to this. Justification for our drive? I think so.

So we got there, settled in, changed our clothes, and then all realized that we were absolutely starving. So hungry. We needed some hearty food to nourish our travel-fatigued souls, and N wanted to show us (one of) his hometown, so we headed out, where we discovered that in that particular region of southern Germany, chives grow wild in the forest. It smells amazing. I had such dissonance as we were walking down the path down the hill, smelling the hearty fragrance of what looked like regular grass (which N proceeded to pluck and point out was in fact chives as one would grow in a garden anywhere else), being hungry, but then realizing we still had more to go, to see, and do before eating.

The town itself is nice and very small, but it is (or seems, to one who is otherwise unfamiliar) very typical and German, being very clean and the people friendly, but to the point. This is where Germany and France differ. There is a concept of dolce far niente in Italian, or the sweetness of doing nothing. In French there is joie de vivre or bien-être (joy of living/well being), sure, but I think the real analog would be something like "joie de s'occuper de rien", or "the joy of caring about nothing", reflected in the dirty state of French cities, the illogical lines in which French people walk, and the attitude of Parisians famously stereotyped the world over. I don't know any German, but on the contrary, the town itself was remarkably clean, everything in its proper place, and they seem to take things like service and public well-being a little bit more seriously. I enjoy it, but it's foreign still.

Oh, and there's a market too. Pretzel, anyone?

Our dinner was amazing. The quality of German food was surprising, and the extent to which German baguette is better than French baguette is both ironic and stunning. We had weiner schnitzel, some kind of spätzle, and other food that was all hearty, heavy, and delicious. Finally having good German beer instead of the same pitiful selection of Belgian beers that we were accustomed to in Annecy was not so bad, either. The smallest amount on offer anywhere is 0.5L too, so that was a nice perk. The town is also considerably cheaper than anywhere I've been in France or Switzerland, so the good just kept rolling in. We went out to get more beer afterward and soak in the German atmosphere, having good conversation with good company in new places. It was great, and then our walk up the hill back to N's house was aided in great part by the liter of beer consumed prior. We got back, classed down the great quantities of champagne we drank by doing so in regular glasses, and the night was done.

The next day was the day we were going to take E to Zurich so that he could catch his train, but N wanted to make sure we had time to see the market in full and eat breakfast before heading out, and so we did that. We had a real breakfast, with good coffee, and eggs! Real eggs! The breakfast E and I got was called, suitably, the "American" and included French toast ("lawl") too. It was a much-needed relief from the stale baguette, confiture, and nasty coffee of France. After discovering the town on foot a little bit, finally purchasing my host family a gift (right before leaving! great timing.) of strange German chocolates, it was time to leave the land of many letters German and efficiency. Goodbye, language I don't understand, goodbye magical new land.

Did you really think I was not going to take a photo?

This sums up our sentiments.

Cultural Saturation as Converse to Cultural Fatigue

There is always an upside to things that go poorly, or almost always, just as there is an inevitable drop from any summit that we reach. The polarity of our emotions and the things that happen for us is actually somewhat predictable to the extent that it seems random, that is to say that our swings in mood and fortune are entirely normal and we can expect them like we can expect the weather to change at a moment's notice, without given reason or explanation.

So it goes that what happened after reaching an apparent rock bottom, being unable to speak to anyone in French except with rudimentary words and grammatical structure, lots of gesticulation, and more than a little bit of stress. Lots of drinking involved, lots of seeking out English speakers, and then a sudden realization that I should probably not actually be doing either of those things to the extent that it was happening, because studying abroad is not intended to be speaking drunken English abroad, like so many of the assholes from Tufts that study in the region are so eagerly willing to demonstrate. Our decisions to go to Geneva and Germany coincided with precisely all of those things and are not as accidental as they initially seem to be.

So we left both times, each time stepping into the car feeling like complete relief from the monotony and downturn of Annecy. What I was not expecting was that when we got back from Germany (another day, another post, blah blah blah), something happened to change everything, and suddenly I found myself conversing fluidly with momma having nothing but strong coffee in my system. No aperitif or anything. It was a first, and then it kept happening. A brief conversation without any major hitches, and then an order placed in French without the French person getting frustrated about foreign French. The cashier at Zara switching back into French after I found myself instinctually speaking relaxed French (and only French) with her in the middle of holding an English conversation. The people on the street never assuming that I didn't speak French when I encountered them by myself. So many little instances of being integrated just a little bit more into the language, sinking a little further into the culture, as though the words were all in there before but just needed something there to arrange themselves properly.

And that's the thing. I have no idea what that something is or was, but something happened after we spent roughly a day in an area where I know absolutely none of the language surrounding me. Perhaps the synapses in my brain needed down time to allow themselves to rearrange to fire more efficiently. Perhaps my chakras lined up correctly ("lawl"). I don't know. What I do know is that I came back and suddenly everything was not so bad anymore. I didn't need to be sick of France anymore, because finally I could connect in it again. I call it "cultural saturation", because that's what it feels like. There's no sharpness to the transition, I just sort of woke up one morning and there I found myself. All of the stress of the previous week or two was not necessarily lifted, but the little things were certainly for their part not nearly so irritating. Once again I could be elated in the rare moments I had to myself and feel as though I was, in fact, in elysium, and that this could not possibly be real. Reality has come back a little more in the period afterward, but it was a breakthrough that there's no coming back from.

A pinch later, and this is real.

The Day the Food Died and Other Reflections

Sometimes, things work out brilliantly well in life, you feel like you're on top of the world, nothing can go wrong, you have the best contacts and plans for life, you're going places, everything is amazing. Sometimes it all comes crashing down and you feel like you're actually a living dead person, in other words, a zombie. We go through these ups and downs fairly routinely in life, but when you spend time getting habituated in a foreign country, these ups and downs are significantly more acute and bipolar, happening with such frequency that you end up incredibly stressed out and you have no idea what you want or what to do.

I was having a bit of a down week with my cultural fatigue and N was starting to get a little burned out as well. We went to a cheese factory in the morning with our host director Babette (do you love her name already? because I do.), which is awesome for all of the lactose intolerant people in our group. I swear, there's something about CU students and studying abroad in France that just synergizes with being totally incapable of digesting lactose. Useful! So N tried the cheeses that he could and I tried a little bit of everything, it smelled abhorrently foul, we got some free souvenirs and take-home cheese, and then we left to get lunch and hang out for a bit. It's not that the cheese factory wasn't really cool, but it was a little underwhelming, and thus not the point of this post.

So that's when our day soured as we settled into a flamboyant café for, well, a café. We got two absurdly bad coffees so typical of France in general, but particularly Annecy, and sat in the sun, so it was a little less than ideal. The quality of the coffee was perhaps the worst in the whole city, but you know, sometimes you can't let the little details get you down. So after a couple of minutes of coffee, N finishing his, me choking mine down in desperate need of caffeine, he threw his newspaper at me, saying "I think there's a tennis article, why don't you read it?" and proceeded to run to allow his lactose intolerance to take its inevitable course. Brilliant. Twenty minutes of almost blinding myself trying to read an article in the sun without sunglasses on (quel jour to wear regular glasses) later and N sits back down, and we proceed to wait approximately forever to pay. The café manager/owner didn't come back out again, so I ended up going inside to pay, wherein I discovered that to compensate for the awful coffee, they only charge people half-price for it. That works, sort of. Not that I would go back.

So then we started to wander around Annecy looking for something to eat, none of the sandwiches we passed looking particularly appealing, with both of us hungry and a little hypoglycemic. N was getting particularly sick of being a ringleader, that is to say making decisions, and so we ended up sitting at a crêperie that had a decent-looking menu but was unfortunately situated on the most touristic side of the river. Oh well, lunch was to be had. So we took our sweet, sweet time trying to find something palatable on the menu to eat and finally ordered. Without really paying too much attention, as happens when I get too hungry, I ordered a Danish crepe, and N ordered a Niçoise salad. Now, here's the deal, in France, normally a Danish crepe means that you have salmon, a light, tasteless cream sauce, and citrus in your crepe. We got our food to discover, lo and behold, that N's Niçoise salad was actually a cream dressing-covered monstrosity and that my crepe was perhaps the worst piece of food ever. It was death on a plate.

Let me describe this for you. Imagine you are eating a crepe. Now imagine that crepe to be just a little bit too thick, a little bit rubbery, and a little bit spongy all at the same time. It's probably not extremely fresh, or was simply not well looked after while cooking. It's a little too brown. You've squeezed a healthy amount of citrus on it, expecting it to add the perfect, fresh zest to your bite. You bite into the crepe, only to discover that it is the textural equivalent of the combination of insulation packing foam and flan, has a mild hint of lemon mixed into an almost untraceable cream sauce...followed by the saltiest black caviar ever known to man. We're talking more salt than the Dead Sea here. One bite and you might go into cardiac arrest because of your blood pressure.

It was bad. So bad, in fact, that I managed to con N into taking a bite, which he physically gagged on. We had a moment of understanding without looking at each other and knew that we could not possibly eat that food. There was no way. The problem with this is that sending the food back was also not an option, we were going to have to pay for it and leave, because there was no turning around. This is extremely rude even in America, the land of the nagging asshole customer, but an almost ideological affront to French culture. You're offending everyone and everything by doing so. After what seemed like an eternity of waiting in almost maniacal laughter, we finally got the waitress, who was every bit as displeased as we had anticipated she would be. We weren't necessarily anticipating our bill to be thrown at us, but we could accept it. We paid, N left a 7€ tip, something unheard of in France, and then we ended up getting a sandwich anyway.

Lesson learned.

Lyon, or Why Must I Hike Unexpectedly?

There was another IFALPES-led excursion to a major city that I have yet to visit in my limited experience out in the world, so naturally for the cost of 36€, there was no way I could turn up the opportunity to go to Lyon and a medieval village for the day. There was going to be a big group of 25+ people going, but ultimately IFALPES didn't get enough people to sign up in order to rent the larger bus for the day, leaving the group at a humble 8. Our first stop was in a charming, but cold, medieval city called Pérouges, so named for the Italians from Perugia who settled there for quality of life reasons several centuries ago but who also wanted to retain their identity of place. It was interesting, it was small, I tried a flat cake (gallette) from the town, and it was a little boring. It's nice to see, but the differences between that medieval village and, say, Yvoire are superficial at best. Perhaps we could say that about cities in general, given the sense that occurs to people who spend their lives traveling around that everywhere is roughly similar and people want and do the same things.

Things changed, however, upon our arrival in Lyon. Or at least, upon waking up and seeing that we were actually in a large city. For real. Civilization! We arrived not far from the river in a square that is apparently rather large and historic, but the details of which I don't really remember. Oops. So we arrived and were promptly advised to go eat lunch and discover the city, which is when the world's longest lunch happened. First it took a while to find a place that would work for 6 people, and then we spent two hours sitting there and eating. Two. Hours. What the fuck? So it wasn't ideal, and left us with just enough time to rush through discovering the city ourselves. I was a little bit disappointed, but not overly so, because the vibe I get from Lyon is one that I don't completely click with. The city is rather nice, and perhaps it was the group dynamic, but there was something about it that didn't feel quite like it suited me.

Don't let the bitching fool you, I had fun.

What we did see of the city I enjoyed, however, and we took a tour through a pedestrian zone so familiar to so many: the pedestrian street mall. We have plenty of examples in the Denver agglomeration, notably 16th St. downtown and Pearl St. in Boulder, but they exist pretty much everywhere and are not special unless there is good shopping or dining to accompany them. The shopping on offer in Lyon, however, is incredible, and definitely something worth seeing (and doing) if you have the resources for it. We went through the streets of the city quickly, but what we did see was nice.

One thing to note: Lyon appears to be a less-heavily touristed city than others that I have seen on this séjour, all of the tourists appeared to be either of French or random Asian origin, neither of which being a good indicator of the popularity of the city with tourists. I'm sure they exist, but they certainly don't make themselves visible, and that's perhaps a good thing. The city is beautiful, historic, and ...a place that the locals "profitent" of for themselves. Bien.

So we rushed back to the square where we had arrived so that we could take the promised walking tour à la Genève and ended up being approximately 11 minutes late. This I blame on the member of the group who was late arriving, prolonged the restaurant selection process, and ended up with disgusting food and thus prolonged our lunch. Not that I'm saying he's existentially late, but I'm saying he's existentially late. The walking tour was great, consisting of visits on the other side of the other river in town, thus through the center of town (dating to circa 19th century) and into the old town (dating older), including the traboules, or secret passages, a quick peek in a museum of miniature things, and so on. What followed was a surprise hike, announced by our guide who so helpfully put it "Now I hope you're in good shape, because we're going to walk up 500 stairs!" In the fresh heat of the afternoon.

Great.

We complained to each other until we looked behind us and realized what a magnificent view we could enjoy on the stairs of death of hazard.

No shit, seriously. It makes the thigh burn hurt so good.

So we somehow made it to the summit and were rewarded by the basilica of the city and the most magnificent vista in all of France. The view would only be better if there were the Alps in the background for it.

Voilà.

There wasn't a lot more substance to the rest of the trip, other than retrieving a bottle of water for 2€, feeling somewhat comical taking pictures inside of a church, and then getting back into the oven minibus to go back to Annecy. Another day, another city. After a nice nap, we arrived back into town, thanked Philippe for guiding us, and got ready to go out later that night.

The Normalization of the Domicile

Relations in the household are normalized here after the cousins from Luxembourg left and a more regular routine resumed. We've had plenty of time to get used to each other and have settled into a routine that allows me to be my young adult self without disturbing the suburban family unit too much and that allows them to distance themselves a little bit more without actually disengaging from showing the American student their world. Part of the way I can tell that this is the case is that the parents are speaking a little faster among each other and the kids have reached an even greater equilibrium in their interactions and dealings with me. Jules is a little bit more social and Clément is a little bit less social. I can deal with that.

This comfort was probably best manifest one day when I had gotten home from class like normal and Laurence was home as well from grocery shopping. She asked me to assist her with getting stuff inside the house and was courteous in talking to me, but it was pretty obvious she was distracted by anything and everything else going on in her world. I went upstairs to my room like normal, organized my things a little bit, the kids and Christian came home, and then...

Momma on the warpath.

She would not let up on any of them. It was as though the entire world was falling apart and it was everyone else's fault, because why can't you tidy your room or do your homework or get the things done around the house like I asked you? Her voice got not-French loud and Christian had to ask her to tone it down a little more than once, and her favorite target seemed to be Jules, who bore her wrath for not cleaning his room, not doing his homework, and not getting as good of grades as he should. I have never heard such "real", fast, and angry French as I did then. Happily, I was spared any of it, and in fact she was perfectly nice to me the whole time when I bothered to venture downstairs.

Momma (as I've been referring to her ever since, given italicized text above) got her drink on drank plenty of wine at dinner and restored her more amicable spirits, but I couldn't help but feel like this, indeed, is a snapshot of how regular life functions in this household. All of the newness of the student coming to stay with them for a month wore off, and so the increased politesse dulled somewhat too. I'm mostly happy for that, because it's better for my French, and it means that I'm doing something right, because I didn't have any complaints or qualms thrust at me. This is great, but I should probably keep working on improving my French speaking abilities.

In a humorous twist of fate, my best French conversing has been with Momma. Cause and effect, or correlation? You decide.

Lessons in French Adventure, or a Crash Course in Speaking Awkwardly

There are moments where I discover exactly how much French I know, where I feel on top of the world and I am understanding everything, and can sort of converse in the language. There are other moments where I discover exactly how much French I do not know, I do not understand anything, and my conversation is reduced to gesticulation and rudimentary usage of the same words over and over in no particular grammatical pattern. In the case of meeting local French men, the latter is what happens when I am not en écrivant on my iPod or Facebook or some other means of chatting and am actually faced with the situation of dining and associating with someone who speaks, at best, broken English.

How terrifying.

So I decided that life was too short to reduce all of my going out and interacting with people to Americans and other people who speak English and broken French the way that I do, because I remembered how I don't actually like being insular when I'm abroad. Life is too short not to be awkward, and so it was that I decided to grab some food and hang out with a French guy who lives not too far from Geneva. Everyone here seems to drive, and it is definitely more of a necessity than in bigger cities, but that's not really a problem. The idea was to get some food and figure out what else to do afterward, probably hanging out at the lake or something if the weather was nice. It wasn't, so it ended up being in the air.

This is the point that I discovered that I am absolutely terrified of talking on the telephone in French. In Russian I can sort of get by and I have done such things as ordering taxis with no particular difficulty. The way that the French murmur and slur their language, as though the whole country is drunk absolutely constantly, I can not bear to attempt to talk on the phone in it. Not going to happen. So we exchanged confusing text messages and finally figured out where we were and ended up eating in an "Italian" chain that is remarkably similar to any that you could think of and name in the United States. It seems that pizza and pasta are done pretty much exactly the same way the world over. I bet you could probably find such chains even in Italy, except that they would probably call it "American". They would have good reason for that.

The combination of the extremely loud restaurant, mumbling flamboyant Frenchman, and natural shyness upon first meeting anyone created the perfect storm for my French to absolutely shit itself fall apart, and I was rendered pretty much unable to say anything confidently or particularly coherently. All of my written fluency flew right out the window, and there I found myself, eating my not particularly kosher pizza, wondering exactly how long this meal was going to last. Given the nature of any and all service sectors in France not caring particularly much to work together, that turned into an hour or so longer than it needed to, with the kitchen staff forgetting our dessert order, his dessert arriving cold, and then the bill taking longer than necessary to get paid. It was painful.

Yet, reflecting on it afterward, I feel like this is how people really do end up learning how to communicate properly in a language. If you want to speak fluidly (if not fluently), you kind of just have to do it. Eventually the words will come, and you'll be able to remember the right things to express the more nuanced subjects that you think of in your native language. Or I have it all wrong, and there's a LOLcats for that. I just have to actually do that more. If I were staying in France for longer than six weeks I would push myself a little bit harder, especially given the element of needing to make more lasting social contacts, but I am still thrust into situations like this, and I think it's good.

The evening ended up going better, and we walked around the old town and pedestrian zones for quite a while, seeing some things I hadn't before and in general scaling the entire city. It was good, and I got more comfortable, but I don't mark it as so much of a linguistic success at it could have been. Perhaps next time.

The iPhone got flash, horrible photo quality commenced the world over.

Everything is Different and Nothing Has Changed, a Chronicle in Two Parts: "1er"

Having arrived, everything is, as was previously noted, extremely nice. The family has treated me to a very warm welcome and I have come to discover that their house is, in fact, nicer than my own at home. But it's also a cookie-cutter and one half of a (very) large duplex in the middle of a French gated community, a "queer" hybrid of cultures the least of which I would not have expected here. That isn't a complaint, however, and I'm relishing the experience.

Très moderne la cuisine, non?

They eat like extremely typical French people do, the children drinking their milk out of a bowl in the morning and dunking their sliced "American" bread avec Nutella in it, the adults consuming extra strong coffee while partaking in "real" bread with lots and lots of butter (Paula Deen would be proud) and "confiture" (preserves/jam) that they make themselves. In fact, they have a garden, so a lot of the things they eat they make or produce in some way or another themselves. It's pretty sweet. Everything from the potatoes to the lettuce to the herbs is grown chez nous. We have aperitifs before dinner usually including some form of interesting Italian liqueur, white or rosé wine, dinner with red wine, salad after dinner, and assorted regional cheeses and cherries after dinner.

Do you have vertigo and envy yet? Voilà the garden.

I must also note that everything in this country tastes significantly better than its counterpart in both Russia and the US, for reasons entirely unknown to me, but totally unimportant regardless. I understand that this family is a little more wealthy than your average French person and that we (they) therefore eat a little better as well, but even still, I have found everything from the street sandwiches to the food in restaurants to be of a much better quality overall.

The family themselves are rather nice, a married couple the same age (almost exactly) as my own parents who do some sort of miscellaneous work in banks and commerce. Their kids are 11 and 14 and thus at that awkward tween/early teen age of being curious who the strange person come to visit them is but also not exactly sure what, if anything, to say. The younger one is much more antisocial, the older one much more talkative. They're both boys, and thus it is a very male household, very obsessed with rugby. They fucking love their rugby here. Two thirds of their conversations are about rugby. I know way more about rugby than I ever thought I would now. The mother, on the other hand, is a little quiet, rather inquisitive, and seems to be fond of good drink.

They drive Renaults, which in their neighborhood, the little cul-de-sac style street they live on and the surrounding vicinity, means that they're not quite in the upper strata of income. It is ridiculous seeing some of the vehicles around here, especially because in France, they are much more expensive. Audi, Mercedes, Porsche, you name it and it's here. The thing is, in this part of town, it's not really considered a flash of income to drive such cars, because everyone has brand new vehicles and they're all of a nice make, so it's just the normal thing to see.

They drive the kids to their private schools (the same place that Babette's daughter goes, hence why she knew them and contacted them to be a host family) in the morning and pick them up for rugby and swimming practice afterward. I got driven to class the first day and they showed me where the stop for the bus is, which turns out is only a short walk past a field with horses away. I got lost and wandered into the wrong gated cul-de-sac the first time around getting back, but no problem. I just want to find a grocery store or some point of commerce nearby, though. Is that too much to ask? You can see how this is all extremely familiar already. Culture shock? What's that?

This is my view every day. Have envy.

On Modern Convenience, or What is French for "Easy"?

So I got on my plane after the encounter with that fine, fine Middle Eastern man, perfectly content and a little surprised to be boarding already. The flight was completely normal fare, except the stewards and stewardesses on the plane were unquestionably French and not French Canadian. Everything from their coldness to those unfamiliar and their accents gave it away. Not bad though, I must say, even two not-Jack and (Diet) Cokes later.

They're a little behind the times in Montreal, it appears.

Some observations of note:

First I thought I was terribly unlucky, not only to have not been on the same flight as G, but also because I had the very last row. Again. Always. Turns out it was not the last row, but the next to last. Clearly a significant upgrade.

Then I thought I was in fact terribly lucky, because not only did I have the aisle seat, a two seat row, but there was no one sitting next to me! Yay, no one else's bacteria to share immediately adjacent myself for 6 1/2 hours in a pressurized metal tube! Except then no, a young and antisocial girl sat down next to me. Shit. Plan thwarted, the bacteria...not so much.

The girl was a Muslim girl of unidentified southeast Asian origins. Malaysian? Indonesian? I didn't ask. She looked like she was 12, but I could see from her homework that she was in college. I have never seen a more efficient use of 6 1/2 hours. She whipped out her iPad and a keyboard, some paper, and a highlighter and made even the most studious of my acquaintances look absolutely lazy. I sat there reading Jen Lancaster's My Fair Lazy feeling less than erudite. (But laughing more. A lot more.)

Real food! Real food! They gave us real food! Suck it, LOT. And ...oh, that's not Diet Coke.

Laughing to yourself while drunk reading a book with pink slippers on the cover on a plane is one really great way to make French people think you're absolutely insane.

The blue lights were for when we were supposed to sleep. Like Virgin Airlines, Canada-style.

The drunken epiphany that I was, in fact, "tout seul" on a plane flying to France somehow produced a happiness of being as far as things go within myself in relation to F that I haven't had since all of the problems began in November. It's interesting, and sad, that it would have to take so many months to come full circle with problems that are not working themselves out in my favor, which I am not entirely convinced is not willingly so. The realization that I can have "rencontres" with people like G and that life isn't actually completely static perhaps aided in this. And the whiskey.

Arriving in France was perhaps easier than even Russia, something that surprised me, not having been used to western Europe previously. The utter lack of red tape from getting off the plane and into an Air France coach to my train terminal was as bizarre as it was delightful.

Attempting to use Russian words when you don't remember French words because they are the first to come to mind is never a good idea.

The Air France coaches are a little too easy and convenient. I found my bus before I found my ATM. Crisis averted, a walk almost entirely around Charles de Gaulle Terminal 2 and half an hour later. My delight at not being immediately recognized as an American knows no bounds. An American girl wanted to sit next to me and spoke in bad French, I simply nodded my head, and then one "oh, uh, mer see" later we were well on our way to Gare de Lyon.

Hello, train station that is almost as old as my home town.

Three hours of waiting around a Parisian train station with no internet and plenty of luggage is not made any more pleasant having gotten just two hours of sleep in transit prior. It is made nicer by taking photos of the old scenery like a typical gawking American tourist.

Of course I had to arrive the one day the Virgin store was closed, meaning I had to wait to get a mobile phone.

I was so tired that my joints actually started to hurt. I'm not sure I remember the last time that happened. Perhaps I am malnourished? That would probably be my own fault.

The TGV is spectacular. It is smooth, the cabins are quiet, it is modern...and then I slept. I slept so much. I missed all of the French countryside, and only a little bit of the Carrefours that dot it. I woke up only to have my ticket verified and at Aix-les-Bains, the second to last stop en route.

Tu me trouves sexy après le voyage un peu long? Un peu gras? Non? Si?

I was so tired that I almost walked entirely out of the station looking for my host family when in fact I exited the train right past them. They are extremely nice, own a vehicle (!), and live in what really does amount to a French-style suburb. Their house is modern, sleek, extremely nice, and made out of ticky-tacky and looks just the same as every other house in Annecy-le-Vieux. Despite my exhaustion, I managed to speak decent French, refresh myself in a real shower (до свидания Russian-style shower heads!), impress the family, and then sleep for 11 hours straight, right through dinner and the company that came over for it. I awoke at an absurdly early hour to another barrage of French, which has not stopped since.