Chartreuse

While living in France is an adventure, it is an adventure that takes place in reality. I am distant from my home and I encounter new situations to deal with every day, but the newness is minor and mostly more difficult than interesting. I have had to use my Frankenstein French to ask about Internet prices; I have never fought a dragon or chased a witch. The mettle of my character has never been tested in a battle to the end. My daily life is pretty comfortable. Being a teaching assistant isn't really that hard. But every once in a while, I find myself in a situation that is new in a way that lets me feel the newness; every once in a while, I do find myself in a fairy tale.

Yesterday was one such while. I was already feeling happy because I was in the company of a really delightful couple, family friends. We were driving in the foothills of the Alps near Grenoble, in the southeastern region of France. After two and a half months in the relatively flat Garonne valley, I was thrilled to be surrounded by hills and to have beautiful snow-tipped mountains in the background. As we got farther from the city, the snow we started to see on the ground put me in mind happy trips to the Sierras. By the time we parked to go on a walk we were quite high in the mountains. We parked in a little valley protected on three sides by raggedy hilltops. It was cold, but clear, and the trees that lined the path at regular intervals (in a very French fashion) were bare of leaves but covered in thick moss. Before we had walked a hundred meters up the path, my hosts pointed out the steep slate roofs of the Chartreuse monastery among the trees.

We continued to climb up the path alongside a little brook, talking of other pleasant spots in the world we had visited; we walked up alongside the walls of the monastery until the path steepened up a grassy hillside. We stopped at the base of a statue of Jesus on the cross and the two Marys at the base that was alone upon the hillside. I felt a childish joy at tromping through the mud to get there. What I felt at the top upon seeing the view was not magic or infinity, though it smelt of both. It was quiet contentment at seeing a truly beautiful thing in a distant corner of the world that nevertheless resembled what I am used to calling beauty at home.

I cannot finish this post without attempting to describe that view. Below me was the monastery: orderly rows and squares of buildings, gray and rectangular. I could most easily see their steeply pointed dark slate roofs: tented triangles and thin pointy geometric towers. Smoke rose from several chimneys, and I could just see between two walls the carefully cropped hedges of a garden à la française. The orderly blue roofs made a sharp contrast to the ragged rock tops of the hills above. The sun was setting as we observed, making the tops of the hills pure gold, and then rosy-gold. Back the way we had come, the moss shone green in the sunlight above the deep shadows that the branches made and the shadows in the crevice of the brook; above, in the distance, the snowy tops of the mountains shone white.

The Bilingual Dinner: An Examination

Last night I went to a dinner with a group of friends: three other American language assistants and three French students. A dinner among seven people has its social particularities to begin with: for example, distance limits conversation between the whole group in a way that makes divisions spring up. Tension arises between areas of lively conversation and areas of silence; one person may have to strain to hear the conversation she is interested in or may find herself between two people who are very interested in a subject she cares not at all for. You might think having two languages in which to carry out our discourses would make the dinner more interesting, as having more tools at our disposal expands the possibilities; and in a removed, intellectual way, it does. In practice, however, it complicates things by adding new decisions. You have to figure out which language you're going to start in every time you try to defeat the silence. Should I speak in a language that is easier for me, or should I risk embarrassing mistakes by being polite and speaking my listener's native language? And then when you're speaking to a person of your same native language, do you do what's easy and speak in that language at the risk of alienating the people around you, or do you limit the depth of subject and wittiness of your utterances in the effort to be polite? Or should it be a matter of geography - should the whole group stick exclusively to French since we are, after all, physically situated in France?

I watched my companions struggle with these questions again and again last night, and they came up with many solutions. A friend who is weaker in French began speaking in English to avoid getting mired down with problems of expression because she judged that her listener's English was better than her French. In conversation with a French person I had never met before, I spoke in French since I didn't know his level of English and we were limited to surface topics anyway since we had just met. In the end, I believe we migrated toward a pattern of using the language that is most likely to be understood. That is the point of language, after all; it is more worth having your listener comprehend your meaning than expressing that meaning in a pleasantly ego-inflating way.

After living in Nantes for four months and now Toulouse for two and a half, I have attended many, many bilingual dinners of various shapes and sizes. It is a skill to do it elegantly. But even if you can't do it elegantly, it is a successful dinner if you have fought that language barrier and understood a little something about the person you sat next to.

The Many Faces of Toulouse

Toulouse is an animated city: with more than four hundred thousand occupants and three major universities, it is always in motion. Like any city, it is more than its buildings, streets, and metro system. It has a personality. Native Toulousains know this, and over the centuries they have adorned its walls and parks with faces, as if to give body to their home city's personality.

Toulouse takes on the faces of Greek deities and of the great writers and architects it has nurtured. Other statues remember the suffering and deaths of Toulouse's soldiers. The face of the lady of the République Française marks Toulouse as part of a larger nation, and the figure of Jesus on the cross shows that it is part of a larger religious culture. Nor does the city forget its intellectual and artistic culture: the faces of thinkers and artists from all over France make an appearance. Some figures represent Toulouse's geographical wealth: the rivers Ariège and Garonne adorn the walls of Toulouse in the forms of women. Other statues have less symbolic meaning, but express various attitudes that crop up in Toulouse's life.

All of these photos were taken from the street.

Barberesses

There are many things that are glamorous about living in France. My job as a teacher is not among them. I am an English assistant at a high school and a middle school in a little town about half an hour north of Toulouse, but as it turns out, that job description covers a lot of ground. Between the two schools, I work with ten English teachers, and since I'm an unusual resource there is no prescribed way to integrate me into their classrooms. As a result, my work life is unpredictable and varied, though it all focuses on teaching French students to hear and understand an American accent and on getting them to practice speaking. Sometimes I act as nothing more than a voice: I read the texts the teachers give me into a recorder or to the class. More often, though, I lead or co-lead class sessions, which requires a much larger skill set. A loud voice and an ability to understand English spoken with a thick French accent are key, as is the ability to quickly formulate questions that are not yes-or-no but that are nevertheless easy to respond to with a limited vocabulary. (Didn't know that was a skill, did you?)

So far the most satisfying class sessions have been ones during which the students had to struggle to understand what I was saying and I had to struggle to get them to understand. I know those students learned something. They may not remember how to say "Pilgrim," or what it means, but they will remember which sort of questions they can ask to get an answer they can understand. The hardest classes are those during which the students refuse to speak. Getting French teenagers who are tired or lazy to speak English to me instead of French to their friends is not fun. Challenging as it can be, I've learned to count any class where most students speak some English and prove that they have understood some English as a success.

Teaching English can also be pretty amusing, especially to someone who has spent eight years in classrooms trying to learn French. It is gratifying to hear that French students don't pronounce endings that should be pronounced; that they agree adjectives that shouldn't be agreed; that they confuse tenses. They struggle with the same things as American students do learning French, except inversely. Their logic can also have entertaining results; when asked, what is a person called who cuts women's hair?, one student responded, "a barberess." They also have a tendency to add h's at the beginning of words that begin with a vowel, out of precaution, I suppose, so I've been hearing a lot about "hairplanes" and "hair pressure."

I would like to end this post on a note of absurdity: just yesterday I stood in the front of the classroom reading a not-quite-authentic American menu out loud to a class of twelve-year-olds and having them repeat after me. It was a logical exercise -- it got everyone to practice pronunciation, and ordering off a menu is an important skill when you're in a foreign country. But man was it weird to watch a classroom full of many earnest voices intone "barbeque chicken sandwich -- deluxe club sandwich -- bacon cheddar burger" at me.

Carcassonne

I had the good fortune this past weekend to go to the medieval village of Carcassonne accompanied by a very nice history teacher from my school in Fronton. Carcassonne is the largest medieval village in Europe. Positioned high upon a promontory, it is enclosed by two ramparts and boasts a basilica and a castle (which has a wall of its own). Construction began there in Roman times, but it continued to be an important castle because of its position in the frontier between France and Spain. In the 1200s it was a stronghold of a group of religious dissenters called Cathars, and the village was abandoned when the French throne became strong enough to take power away from the provincial lords there. It also ceased to be a strategically important position when the border between Spain and France, which had been right next to the castle, moved south. It deteriorated little by little after that through neglect, until the reconstructive efforts of Eugène Viollet-le-Duc in the mid 19th century made it into the functioning tourist attraction it is now. That is not to say that it has been polished to false perfection; the charm of the village is that bits from every part of its history are visible. The basilica Saint-Nazaire et Sainte-Celse, for example, has both roman arches and gothic arches, and just below it there is an outdoor amphitheatre where concerts are held in the summertime. And the walls still taunt historians with their mysteries: in the castle’s main courtyard, a doorway mid-way up the wall shows where a stairway in the castle once led to a second storey above the courtyard that has since burned or crumbled. No one knows anymore what that storey looked like or what purpose exactly it served.

My favorite part of the village, though, is the legend of its name. It is said that an Arabic princess named Carcas ruled over the town. Charlemagne wanted to take it in his efforts to expand his empire south and besieged the city. After five years, things were looking pretty grim for Carcas and her people. They were almost out of food, and would not be able to withstand Charlemagne's siege much longer. But Carcas had an idea: they would feed all their remaining food, all the flour they could scrape together, to the one pig. Then, once it was nice and fat, they would catapult it over the wall onto the soldiers' encampment. The plan was successful: they hurled the fattened hog, their only hope, onto their besiegers, who, seeing that the town had such a well-fed pig to spare, thought that their cause was hopeless. If they had enough food on the inside to fling fat pigs willy-nilly, it would be years before they gave in. So Charlemagne and his men packed up camp and left. As they were leaving, the princess Carcas sounded her victory on the bells of the basilica: in French, "Carcas sonne" les cloches de la victoire.

Albi

Due to my electricity unexpectedly being cut off, I spent last weekend with a friend living in Albi, a town (on the same river as Villemur, incidentally) about an hour north east of Toulouse by train. The cause of my stay was unfortunate, but the trip itself was delightful. Albi (pronounced just like “well, I’ll be”) is lovely and my hosts were both kind and entertaining. The weekend took us on many adventures, sight-seeing, social, and culinary.

Albi is a UNESCO world heritage site because of its incredible cathedral and its sinuous medieval streets: exactly the things that are so intriguing and charming to me as an American (although not uninteresting to French and German sight-seers, of which there were so many in the streets on this sunny weekend that my hosts, English assistants from California, complained constantly about tourists). I got to play the tourist on Saturday afternoon, when we went to explore the Cathédrale Sainte-Cécile. The cathedral is enormous, and it’s placed in an open square in the middle of town so you can see the whole building in all its imposing elegance. The exterior is a solid mass of brick, excluding the delicately carved white stone entrance, which makes the brightly colored interior all the more incredible to behold. The ceiling is blue and gold, the walls many different patterns of blue, yellow, and red. But most impressive to me was the front wall where the organ was, because the whole height of it was covered in a mural of Heaven, Earth, and Hell. The demons of Hell were imaginatively painted and all the more evil-looking for being at eye-level.

After an evening that was surprisingly eventful for a town with only one pub, on Sunday we went to the covered market where we found delicious herb sausages and cheese that tasted just like a petting zoo. (That’s one of my favorite things about France: at markets, you can get high-quality meat, cheese, and produce that are less expensive than the products at the grocery store.) In the afternoon, I went to the Musée Toulouse-Lautrec, which houses a permanent collection of the paintings and lithographs of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, the avant-garde artist famous for depicting the nightlife of Paris’s cabaret scene. I was not allowed to take pictures, but I was much impressed by his intense palate heavy on green and deep purple, and by his style of painting portraits that are so expressive they’re almost caricatures. The work that made the biggest impression on me, though, was a black and white lithograph of a woman in her bed (below). The way the simple lines portray such languish, such delicate fatigue and fear and sadness, made me return to that picture twice after I initially moved on, and I was disappointed when I could find no poster or even post card of it in the gift shop.

It was fun to be a traveler again and not the confused outsider trying to settle into a new city I normally am for a few days. When I returned to Toulouse, though, I was glad to be surrounded by its now-familiar tree-lined streets and bright metro system.

From October 19, 2011

This street is right next to the Capitole and is usually packed with shoppers and other adventure seekers, but on Sunday it's eerily empty.

"It Was All a Hilarious Misunderstanding"

Thanks to the help of teachers and my decent level of French, my endeavors have met only normal problems for the most part. There have, however, been certain moments when cultural differences become only too apparent. I like to think of them as problems of rhythm: even though my body adjusted to the nine-hour time difference three weeks ago, my mind is only now becoming comfortable with the French approach to time.

The subtle variation in thinking about life comes out most obviously in hours of operation. In the U.S., most stores are open from 8 or 9 till 6ish, with maybe shorter hours on the weekend or closed Sunday or Monday if it's a nicer sort of boutique. Offices are generally open from 8 to 5, and grocery stores are open all the time. This is not the case in France. To me, the outsider, there doesn't appear to be a rule at all: even something as specific as the post office or bakeries don't all keep the same hours, and they're closed more often than stores in the U.S.

I have divined a few general rules by now, though I still think of schedules on a gradient: boutiques are more likely to be open from about 10am to about 7pm (with the possibility of closure from noon to 2 for lunch); bakeries and cafés from 7am to 7pm (though they run out of baguettes around 6); and restaurants are open at lunch time and again around 6pm for dinner (though nicer restaurants won't begin serving food until 8). Things are less likely to be open on Monday. I assume nothing is going to be open on Sunday, though I have passed the occasional open restaurant or boutique in the afternoon. Open-air markets, such as I go to for fresh produce, may be in operation every morning, while smaller ones are only open on the weekend.

The other way I access French rhythm and need to adjust is by public transportation. The bus, for example, may leave a minute or two early, but never arrives more than 5 minutes late. The metro comes every 3 or so minutes during peak hours – around 9am and again around 6pm – but only every 10 minutes at 6:00am.

It seems like a simple matter of keeping track of which stores have what I need and when they are open, but even that is more complicated than it sounds: I’m really starting from scratch, so I frequently have to go to several stores to find what I want, and then I have to remember which had the thing, and remember to note the hours. It involves a whole change of mind-set, an adjustment of rhythm. I am clumsily making my way now, but the goal is, with more time, to be able to dance à la française.

In the Margins of Nationality

To my great pleasure, I have found that being an American living in France is a way to access not only French culture, but also cultures from all over the world. My location naturally forces me to eat French food, listen to French radio (which, strangely, consists mostly of American and British music), read French newspapers, and observe French architecture; my social interactions, on the other hand, have been delightfully varied.

My first evening on the town, for example, occurred when an American friend I met while looking for an apartment invited me to dinner with the Muslim family she stayed with when she studied here in high school. I was nervous about it to begin with because I had only met one of the girls in the family one time and that for the briefest of moments, and when we were the first to arrive at the Moroccan restaurant at a table reserved for eleven I realized it was going to be a long evening. But the event reached the level of full-on fiasco when groups of two and three kept attaching themselves to our table, until there was one person too many to fit at the table. And then, low and behold, yet another group showed up. The upshot is that our party of fifteen was packed into a confined space for upwards of three hours, so we had some time to chat. The girl I happened to be sitting next to was from Ethiopia. She showed me the alphabet of the official language of Ethiopia, a cousin of Arabic called Amharican. Her boyfriend from Djibouti (yes, I did explain to him why that word is funny in English) was fascinated by American culture.

Though that evening was exceptional (it's not every day that I'm invited to humungous family dinners), I don't even have to go out to interact with people with different backgrounds. I live in an apartment complex close to downtown. My most immediate neighbors, who live on the second storey with me, are two young men, one whose father from the Republic of Mauritius (in the southwest of the Indian Ocean) frequently visits, and the other is a student from Holland. My landlord is Iranian. All of them speak English, to varying degrees, so with all of them I speak a sort of bastardization of English and French.

It is an utter joy to live in this way, not only because making friends when I'm lonely and missing my people at home is hugely comforting, but also because I'm learning so much! After three weeks in France I know more about Colombia than I ever thought I would because I've met three people from Colombia (and not all on the same occasion).

Part of the reason I've met so many people from outside of France is geographic: I am living in a big city where there are a lot of people from all over the world to meet. Home to three large universities, Toulouse has the most students of any city in France, and so attracts international students eager to learn French and explore the world. But at the same time my own strangeness brings out the strangeness in others; our very lack of experiences in common is a commonality and a place to start a conversation. They understand what it's like to be isolated in an unfamiliar country and culture. Furthermore, the people who do travel are those who are interested in learning about the world, and who therefore want to ask me about my culture, compare what we think about France, and introduce me to the other non-native people they know. It is an experience I would never have at home because I already have a (fantastic!) social support network at home; here, my support is the goodness and curiosity of being human that connects total strangers.

Villemur sur Tarn

One of the French teachers at the middle school where I'm going to teach very kindly offered to let me stay with her and her family, and it has been a pleasure to stay with them. Not only is the family absurdly kind to me, and the food they serve tasty and healthful, and their house spacious and comfortable; they live in a charming little village called Villemur-sur-Tarn about ten minutes outside of Fronton and even smaller. The literal translation of "Villemur" is "wall-town," and when you see it from across the river the name makes perfect sense, for it has been built atop a wall rising up from the river Tarn. It's a medieval village, built at a time when defense was a high priority. From that point of view, Villemur is in a very good location since it borders a river on one side and is protected by a ridge on the other. Geography prevented the town from spreading, so the medieval village is still visible. The most notable building is the Tour de la Defense, built in the 12th century and into the 13th. Right on the river and just next to the main bridge, the circular tower and attached rectangular building are the first things you see coming into town. Once across the river, looking back, the mill from the early 20th century is also visually striking, along with the columns in the park on the other side of the bridge.

As a woman from the West Coast of the U.S., where even the oldest buildings are from maybe the 19th century, I was enamored with the appearance of the town, but its charm does not stop there. The local Sunday market was filled with groups of women, families, and old couples chatting in the sun as well as local produce, dried fruits and meats, and flowers. When I opened a bank account the banker was extremely friendly: he was happy to explain things simply and repeatedly in his thick southern accent. I felt even more content when I heard from a friend of mine about her banking experience in Toulouse, where she found the banker abrupt and frankly rude. I am excited about the opportunities to socialize and go to museums in Toulouse, but I feel lucky to have happened across the anachronistic peace of Villemur first.

A Grand Entrance

It’s now been a week since I arrived in France, and I can no longer claim the excuse that I don’t have anything to write about. So here it goes…a real, live blog, written by a real, live traveler.

My observations thus far have been filtered by my jet-lagged and displaced perception, and as anyone who has known me for even a small amount of time can attest, my powers of observation are pretty limited anyway. With so many new things to see, however, I can’t help but have noticed a few things about my surroundings.

First off, I’m teaching at two schools in Fronton, a town about half an hour north of Toulouse and well into the French countryside. I don’t start working until next week, so I’ve only seen each school for a few hours, but my first impression is that they have much in common with American schools. Both schools have about 1,000 students, which is over capacity; both schools use portables and the high school is heavily under construction. The subjects were also familiar: English, Spanish, French, economics, geography, biology, math, etc. The one aspect that seemed foreign to me was the lunch served at the cafeteria. Instead of the greasy piece of pizza or chicken nuggets or deli sandwich with chips I would expect, I had salmon with boiled vegetables, a choice of salad or fresh fruit, and a choice of yogurt, melon, or tart for dessert. Plus the obligatory French roll. And when I mentioned it to a class I was introduced to later, the students complained about the quality of food. I hope I am so spoiled by the time I leave.

I have made two trips into Toulouse, and I have more say about it than I could elegantly cram into one blog post, so I’ll stick to a few highlights. It is important to mention in recounting my Toulouse adventures that they’re having an unusually hot September here, and it has been in the eighties and sunny the vast majority of this week. The metro is the primary system of transportation downtown, and it is very convenient, but in the afternoon the heat packed between bodies is almost suffocating. There is much to see within walking distance of the mairie (the capital building), however, including the beautiful Basilique St. Sernin and the botanical garden, not to mention the mairie itself. The broad river Garonne runs along downtown, and the buildings remind me of those in Paris – about five stories, with tall windows and little wrought-iron balconies – except in Toulouse they are largely made of brick or pink and orange stone. The effect, especially in the big avenues lined with trees, is quite beautiful in the sunlight. I will be very pleased when I have found an apartment and I can spend more energy exploring this city!