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.