Goodbye Toulouse

For my last trick I'm going to present the classic blog fallback (gotta save time for packing!): top 5 lists.

My Top 5 Things I will miss about Toulouse/France in general (a prediction):
1. Easily accessible and cheap public transportation
2. The constant challenge of learning a second language
3. Delicious pastries beautifully presented on every street corner
4. Their attitude regarding vacation (out of my seven month contract I got eight weeks of it)
5. The ATMs, which distribute a variety of bills and sometimes ask you which combination of ten-, twenty-, and fifty-euro bills you would like
6. Meeting new people from all over the world on a regular basis
7. The four public parks with flowerbeds and fountains and statues I walk through to get to work
8. Cheese, Gromit!
9. People who understand the French words I no longer remember how to say in English

My Top 5 Things I WILL NOT miss about Toulouse/France (also a prediction):
1. People don't talk to you unless they have a reason to know you
2. Five signed and dated documents with photocopies of your passport, work contract, and birth certificate are required to do anything as much as pick your nose
3. Stores are closed frequently and at unpredictable hours
4. Reliable wifi is hard to come by
5. The << crotte de chien >> that pollutes the sidewalks
6. The fifteen-minute walk to the nearest Laundromat, and the seven euros it costs to do one load
7. My freezing cold apartment

My Top 5 Things I can't wait to return to in the US! (an actuality)
1. My People!
2. My Family
3. My Friends
4. Other people I kind of know through said friends and family
5. Speaking my native language without being self-conscious about it
6. Root beer
7. People I've known for longer than six months
8. The beautiful San Francisco Bay
9. The similarly beautiful Sierra Nevada mountains
10. Cheddar cheese, bagels, milkshakes, cinnamon rolls, smoothies, brown sugar, and Adam's peanut butter
11. Reliable Internet
12. A familiar house
13. Real showers (the kind that have fixed heads and are fully enclosed)

France, adieu! Hello, California.

Exploring the French Riviera

From Pisa in Italy, the train runs along the coast all the way to Narbonne, France (with only a short jog inland from Saint-Raphael to (some other place), which I traveled by boat and bus). Taking this train, I got to see many, many miles of Mediterranean coast, from small villages clinging to the hills of Tuscany to the wild red rocky outcroppings near Fréjus to the proud white halls and abundant graffiti of Marseille. Along the way I stopped in Nice, Eze-sur-Mer, Monaco, Antibes, Fréjus, Saint-Rafaël, Saint-Tropez, Toulon, and Marseille before heading inland to Aix-en-Provence and finally back to Toulouse (all pictured in the slideshow except Saint-Raphaël).

Live from Florence

I find myself once again taken away from any context I understand. This time I've journeyed to the Mecca of Renaissance art: Florence ("Firenze" in Italian). I've been here for less than a day, and already I've admired Michelangelo's David, read the inscription on Dante's tomb, and eaten bona fide Italian gelato. I've seen so many early Renaissance paintings my eyes hurt.

As most of the few hours I've spent here have been nighttime hours, however, I've spent the most time in the hostel. The hostel is clearly a converted apartment near the center of downtown, and the conversion hasn't been all that extensive. It appears that most of the converting effort went into taking out the dining tables, sofas, and pianos that might have filled the four rooms before and replacing them with many single beds. The bathroom, shared by eight people, is divided into two adjacent rooms: one with a shower, toilet, and lavabo, and the other with bathtub, sink, mirror, and second lavabo. In spite of its quirks, the place is clean and there are kitchen and Internet facilities, so as a place to base my exploration of Florence out of I'm satisfied with it. It also has the obligatory Australian traveler, who in this case seems never to leave the hostel and who is friendly as can be.

Staying at such an establishment makes me feel like I'm truly living the life of the young adult wanderer. Part of the fun of traveling is meeting unexpected challenges. And there is a kind of harmony or rightness in staying in the company of literal travelers, all trying to understand what human life means by seeing much of it geographically and culturally. I am, after all, exploring a city positively brimming with art trying to encompass and portray something essential about the human journey. Human life is complicated, and there is MUCH to see and many challenges, but there is some comfort in knowing being alive is challenging to everyone.

Improvising to Learn

Last week I was getting a drink in a bar with a friend (like you do on Wednesday evening when you're in Europe) when an improvisation group popped out of the ether. They asked for donations of theme ideas from every patron in the bar before introducing themselves as the improv class from a local university and informing us that they would be in charge of entertainment for the next hour or so. They were very funny; they succeeded even in entertaining me, a non-native French speaker. This is partially because they were relying heavily on facial expressions and gestures to communicate, but also because they would announce the theme -- usually a combination of an event or situation and an adjective not usually associated with that situation -- before the action commenced, so that I went into the scene expecting a certain set of vocabulary. The theme for one scene, for example, was a college party at an ice-skating rink that was also a zoo. Once they said that (in relatively simple phrases) I had context for interpreting their conversations. I could recognize the social insecurities they made funny by exaggerating them into the characteristics of animals.

In real life, it's not so easy. People rarely announce in a loud voice the next subject they wish to discuss. There is sometimes that one person ready to state the obvious -- and for that I am grateful -- as in, "My, it looks like the fountain has flooded. Look at the water running all over the place!" Then I've got the word for "fountain" and which verb is used to express water in the act of spreading over a flat surface. (These statements are even more helpful when they have to do with people or social states. I can see when I'm in danger of getting my shoes wet, but I have a harder time knowing why a friend is upset to see that a party is going on until she tells me later that no one invited her.) Oftentimes I can only find out the correct verb for "to spread" in the fountain situation by playing the confused American and asking, "Is all that water being propagated from the fountain?" Usually some kind soul will patiently explain that I've used the wrong word. That situation has come up so many times at this point that it's stopped bothering me; if I jump in without being afraid of making a mistake I get to learn the correct word, and most people understand it's hard to learn a second language anyway. Plus, if they can give me the right word that means they knew what I meant, which is, after all, the primary use of language. My misuse may even cause them to smile.

Stranger at the Seaside

What are you doing when you visit a place for the first time? You are a stranger. Your only business there is to be there. You don't know the best spots for lunch or the best activities available, so you eat lunch at the first restaurant in the right price range and you do the things that other people seem to be enjoying. You walk around and you learn quickly. That's the fun of visiting a new place really: without prior information, you get the chance to apply your judgment and your whimsical fancies to a totally unfamiliar landscape and just see what happens.

In my case, when I visited the small town of Biarritz on the southern Atlantic coast of France, I spent most of my time walking up and down the beach. I found that was all I wanted. The ocean had been missing from my life more than I had thought, and to me, the feeling of the cool and salty breeze on my skin and the rhythmic sound of the waves was peace.

Toulouse Gelée

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m from California, where extreme weather is a few days of rain or a night in the low twenties. I’ve always had a romantic idea of winter: the peaceful snow that blankets the city and clear cold night walks when you can look up at the twinkling stars from a scarved and hatted bundle and then go home to hot chocolate next to the fire. There would be snow days when you could frolic in the snow.

Oh boy, did I have a thing or two to learn about winter.

Perhaps I could have enjoyed the snow if my apartment had a lower ceiling, or a more modern heating system, or if I had the proper clothing for snow. But as it was, the advent of snow in Toulouse meant cold like I could never have imagined. Cold that lasts. Cold that gets into your bones. Going outside was miserable even after I figured out to wear seven layers and gloves because you never can cover your nose and the sidewalks got treacherously slippery with ice. Staying inside was miserable because my heater wasn’t powerful enough to banish the seven layers. Frolicking wasn’t an option during my four snow days because there would be no way to dry off or warm up afterwards if I lost the weak flicker of heat I was able to maintain. I felt paralyzed anew after I had finally gotten some level of familiarity with life in France.

On the up side, the snow and ice did give Toulouse a sparkling, highlighted face, and I did get some pretty awesome photos.

Now, after two weeks of abnormally cold weather, the city has thawed and the sun is out again. The sun already seems warmer than ever, and I will appreciate the coming of spring on a more visceral level than I ever have before.

The English Invasion

I see Toulouse with an outsider’s eyes, and particularly with the eyes of an American. And, contrary to what you might think, the observations that stand out the most to me are not those things that are different. Everything is different. If my brain picked out every single new and different thing I saw when I got here it would have burst into a soggy whizzing mess. (Actually, according to what jet lag felt like, my brain may have tried to identify every difference before quickly realizing the impossibility of that endeavor.) Instead, what stand out the most to me are the flashes of familiarity in this strange landscape, things I thought I left when I jumped continents.

American culture has a definite presence in France. The most obvious examples are fast-food restaurants. There are two MacDonald’s in downtown Toulouse and at least two Domino’s. We do hear about the prevalence of low-quality American chains all over the world in the U.S. though, so I was less shocked and more generally depressed to see it was true when I encountered these restaurants. The same sentiment resurged when I saw how many French restaurants the American style inspired (including Quick and Boum Burger). It really did come as a shock to discover that the popularity of American culture goes further than fast-food restaurants. English words appear frequently in advertisements and cutesy store and restaurant names. The French are prickly about their language – the Académie Française still closely regulates the appropriation of new words – but despite the Académie’s insistence on tradition, the world of marketing has accepted English words with alacrity.

That English appears to the outsider most often in advertising indicates a fascination with American culture that I find exceedingly difficult to understand. To me it’s the presence of history, the fact that you can see the results of ancient tastes and events alongside present life, that makes France appealing. I love the constant acknowledgement of the past. But to the French, old buildings and tradition are only normal. They are proud, and they love their Frenchness, but what’s intriguing to them is America’s focus on the future. I’ve spoken to many French people on this subject, and they all communicate the same point of view. They say things like, “la culture de la France est en train de mourir;” “La France dort;” “Mais qu’est-ce que vous faites ici si vous êtes de San Francisco?” French culture is dying; France sleeps; what are you doing here if you’re from San Francisco? They say France does everything America does, only ten years behind. The same American determination to look forward and be productive and create the future that I find frustrating and artificial they find exciting. And so it is that I see my native language and culture bounced around playfully and used to sell things. It’s more than a little bizarre.

A World Below

The streets of Toulouse are beautiful. I never tire of peering up at the stained art deco windows or the pointed and crenellated towers built by rich 17th century dye merchants. The sight of many wrought-iron balconies and tall, thin windows gleaming in the afternoon sun is a sight as pleasing to the eye as one can reasonably hope for in one day. Even so, my favorite part of everyday life in Toulouse lies underground: my metro ride.

Toulouse's metro system is clean, efficient, and highly accessible. With a student rate of 10 euros per month, it is more student-friendly than any other city in France. Each station boasts a unique and artistic architectural plan: for example, the one I use to access the train most often has a giant black tree statue made out of shiny black mosaic tiles that reaches all the way up the wall. It looks quite impressive contrasted against the wall's white rectangualr tiles. Another station has an enormous display of glass panels that resemble the heavens as it curves over you above the escalator. Each station is also unique in its particular combination of staircases and escalators and number of floors. The network reaches much of the city, so even without a car I can reach most any part of the city easily. That one freedom makes a huge difference!

The metro is practical and convenient, but it is also a significant landscape in my everyday life. I don't live downtown, so outside of groceries and laundry I take the metro to get everywhere, work- or play-related. It's never a task, however: I enjoy the experience of riding the metro as much as I like the freedom it affords me. In contrast to the chaotic, preoccupied, unfriendly, fashion-obsessed and generally unsatisfying world of human concerns it contains, the system itself is sleek and efficient. Since the rules of polite metro conduct forbid eye contact, touching strangers more than absolutely necessary, commenting on rude sounds and unusual baggage, or asking questions, it's easy (and indeed encouraged) to pretend that world has temporarily ceased to exist. When you descend the escalator to the underground platform, you escape to a world of bright, shiny white tile, steel rails, and concrete tunnels. Once the train has come rushing up, a strictly timed mechanism opens all the doors at once and spews commuters out. A buzz informs those ascending that the doors are about to close and the train takes off, zooming at exactly the prescribed speed. And since the trains have windows and the tunnels are lit with white lights every couple of meters, a passenger at the very back of the train may watch the tracks fall away behind her in long, gentle curves outlined in parallel tracks. She will see a passing train speed away with its human cargo packed in yellow plastic train cars as if they were lunch packed in fast-moving tupperware. She may observe platform after glass-insulated platform arrive and disappear around a twist or rise of the tunnel and imagine she has found order at last.

On every thrilling ride, the time comes when you hear the recording of a melodious female voice announce your stop (in French and then in Occitan, the dialect native to Southern France). The moment of peace and excitement ends abruptly as you fight the inelegant throng crowding out of the car and up the escalator and you surface, thrown once again into the uncertain world of turmoil and decisions.

A Night at the Théâtre

Though there are many theatres in Toulouse and spectacles are well publicized, I was not motivated to track one down and buy a ticket until I saw a poster for Paroles Gelées, a stage adaptation of the works of François Rabelais playing at the Théâtre Nationale de Toulouse. You may be waiting for the rest of the information I had about this play that made it leap out as something I could not miss, but for me that was enough: you see, I spent my last semester of college working on an independent study, the subject of which was one of Rabelais's works. I was already familiar, nay enamored with Rabelais's imagination, corporal frankness, and word-level humor. So when I, amateur Rabelais scholar and lover of words, saw that a theatre in downtown Toulouse happened to be staging what they announced to be a "theatrical adventure" based on that author and called "Frozen Words," I thought I had finally found the reason for my coming to France.

I may have exaggerated in the over-excited state the poster inspired, but the sentiment was rekindled as I watched the opening of the spectacle. The director, Jean Bellorini, adapted the series of novels by extracting the central adventure and having the cast narrate it while acting out key scenes. The narrative moved the story along, but by inserting comic conversations among the characters and repetitive monologues, Bellorini managed to preserve Rabelais's light-hearted style and habit of going into absurdly colorful and precise detail.

The set design also helped to preserve Rabelais's lexical opulence by reflecting the referential abundance with an abundance of color, light, and movement. For example, in the beginning of the play when one character invited the others to a feast, the black curtain lifted to reveal a collection of women in colorful dresses and rain boots playing miss-matched accordions on top of a table, which stood in about three inches of water. The water covered the whole stage within a large sandbox-like container and turned the stage into a moving mirror of the copper-colored and blue lighting. A man in a kilt danced sensuously as he listed off foodstuffs that might have laden a dining table.

Bellorini even did a good job of preserving Rabelais's language. He represented the difficulty every reader of Rabelais has in wrangling the antiquated and liberal prose by devoting a character to translation and interpretation, like a Rabelais expert, who explained words that Rabelais made up and who gave information as needed about the context the play was written in. Because the other characters hopped in and out, sometimes a part of the action and sometimes narrating the action, the translator figure was a natural addition. He interacted with the other characters and the audience with ease and humor.

To my frustration, my brain could only absorb the French words for about two-thirds of the performance, and after two and a half hours I was confused and tired. I watched the characters arrive in the land of frozen words with very little intellectual energy left to understand how the words got there or why they were frozen. Nevertheless, I thoroughly enjoyed myself and only wished I could see it a second time.

Foix and California

The similarities between France and California come up often in conversation. People note that both have a gently warm and dry climate, and then that both regions produce wine. They remark that San Francisco is a very European city (what they mean by this is not always clear, but I think they're pointing to the liberal political views and the appreciation of good food). This link may be true theoretically, but Toulouse has never particularly resembled my birth state in my eyes. In practice, the linguistic difference is pretty significant. So is the lack of family and old friends. The geographical differences, though slight perhaps on the scale of possible landscapes over the Earth, are still jarring to me. Toulouse is far from the ocean - there is no cool cloud layer in the morning, no hint of salt in the air, no watery vistas. There is no threat of earthquakes here, so, far from avoiding brick as a potentially hazardous building material, the people of Toulouse use brick so much it has become a point of pride. And compared to the rises of the Oakland hills, Toulouse is totally flat.

The lack of hills in my immediate context has been getting to me, so I decided to take the train to the little town of Foix (pronounced "Fwa") for the afternoon. Foix is situated at the base of the Pyrénée mountains, so I was prepared for cold with three sweaters, but I was lucky: it was sunny out, almost warm even. Perfect weather for a hike. I identified a trailhead using a map of the village posted by the train station and started walking. And I found something I wasn't expecting: the longer I walked, the more I felt at home. The path was a steep climb -- a good beginning for my hill-deprived legs -- through a wood of oak trees. As I got higher I could look across the valley where the town is situated to a display of other hills, and the mountains behind them. Near the top I passed grassy pastures where cows might graze. The act of hiking itself contributed to the feeling that I had somehow closed the gap to home, since when I'm at home I hike the hills frequently with my family or alone. It seemed strange that not only was the highway below me not I-5 or 101, I didn't even know what combination of letters and numbers might designate it as a highway.

I didn't come to France looking for California, and I didn't find it. But finding a familiar landscape was comforting -- my eyes, which grew up expecting to see the world arranged in a certain way, sighed with relief. Though it's exciting to see for myself that the world is not all arrayed in the same way, and though I've gotten used to the brick-lined streets that just won't descend, my eyes are still Californian eyes.

Christmas Magic European Style

I had never heard of a Christmas market before I was in Nantes studying during the month of December. At that time, two years ago, I was very surprised to see rows upon rows of little wooden cabins materialize in two of Nantes's biggest squares and fill with toys, jewelry, colored lamps and scarves, dried fruit, mulled wine, sausage, and pretzels. But upon returning to Europe, I see that such a public collection of holiday festivity is the standard approach to winter: during my travels in the end of December I witnessed Christmas markets (or "les marchés de noël") in Toulouse, Luxembourg, Wiesbaden (in Germany), and London. Though they shared enough characteristics to safely huddle together in the same category of event, I'm glad to have seen so many because they are by no means the same.

Toulouse's market was only one step in a whole slew of Christmas festivities. In addition to the enormous light display over the hut village, the passage through the capitol building (passage Henri IV) had transformed into a carnival complete with a display of a gypsy camp and posters for attractions such as a magician professor who can make demons appear. On the other side of the passage a temporary indoor theatre had been set up where a fairy-tale spectacle took place every hour all afternoon the two Saturdays before Christmas. I missed the spectacle, unfortunately, but I did get a look at two displays on either side of the theatre, both tacky yet enchanting. The first one showed water and earth fairies frozen in various positions upon their branches. The second showed miniature geese arranged in human attitudes in winter scenes, like a camp amid a snowy forest and an ice cavern with little glittering icicles. I also caught a performance of three of La Fontaine's fables in shadow puppets with musical accompaniment. Pictures with Santa, personalized hats made out of junk, face painting, and random sightings of brass musicians on bicycles were also available.

I had the most time to enjoy the Toulouse market, so there I got to experience a whole range of events. But it was by no means a paltry thing to walk through the Christmas market in Luxembourg. Since the tradition originates in the northeastern region of France, Alsace, even the Toulouse market had a northern, mountainous theme; in Luxembourg, which is much closer geographically to Alsace, that theme resonates. In the relatively small market there, I ate authentic sausages (mettwurst and white grillwurscht) and authentic glühwein (warm mulled wine) in a covered area filled with high tables and people talking from underneath their bundles of scarves and hats. I was especially impressed by the stage near the covered area from which a choir and a performer with a guitar took turns serenading the crowd.

In Wiesbaden, Germany, the lights were exceptionally well done. Unlike Toulouse's sheets of lights draped down the front of city hall and over the center of the market like a tunnel, the lights in Wiesbaden were shaped like giant flowers or bunches of leaves sheltering the market stalls. Here, too, there was a stage where schoolchildren sang, and here I enjoyed more glühwein (you can't have too much around Christmas) with a meal of kartoffelpuffer, a delicious potato pancake almost exactly like latkes, and apple sauce. The gorgeous red neo-gothic church of Saint Bonifatius just next to the market square contrasted pleasantly with the blue-roofed retail huts.

Given the Christmas market's continental origin, I was surprised to see that London, too, puts on a market for Christmas. The tradition lost some of its charm over the Channel, I fear: London's market struck me as commercial and touristy. Perhaps that effect is due to the sheer size of the city. In any case, even though the market in Hyde Park was larger than those in Luxembourg or Wiesbaden, it was packed. Its wooden huts were decorated with evergreen garlands and little silver reindeer, but the effect was not pleasant enough to make up for the tight rows of people. Since I had already tried sausage and mulled wine in the heart of sausage country, I did not try the sausage offered there. I did try a different sort of local specialty, however: gummy beer. I didn't believe it at first -- I thought the glass-shaped candy must be soda flavored - but no, it clearly said BEER printed on the candy itself. Sadly, they had not figured out how to make a gummy candy taste like delicious British ale, and I could not even swallow it. I was relieved to get out.

By the time I got back to Toulouse, the Christmas market had been taken down and the lights extinguished. It was back to normal life -- the next magic to illuminate the city will be the coming of spring.

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.