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.