Seattle/Grants Pass

There are three conditions which often look alike
Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow:
Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment
From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them, indifference
Which resembles the others as death resembles life,
Being between two lives—unflowering, between
The live and the dead nettle. This is the use of memory:
For liberation—not less of love but expanding
Of love beyond desire, and so liberation
From the future as well as the past. Thus, love of a country
Begins as attachment to our own field of action
And comes to find that action of little importance
Though never indifferent. History may be servitude,
History may be freedom. See, now they vanish,
The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them,
To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern...

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from...

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

"Little Gidding," The Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot

Ball of Arts and Metiers 2008!

Tiraillée

Tonight, as I was walking home from the bus to my home here in the country, I felt sick to my stomach. I've been having moments like this a lot lately - moments where I pause to reflect on how beautiful something is, how I love the way the Christmas decorations look in the city or the stars shining over the fields by my house or the way French sounds when it's spoken, and then I feel a little jolt of panic at the thought that I barely have two weeks left. I do not want to leave.

Yesterday I went to search for the Christmas tree with my host dad, brother, and sister. We found the fattest, ugliest, most oddly shaped tree in the lot, and my dad insisted on buying it. It took four or five of the poor Christmas tree guys to stuff it into a plastic net and then the car while the entire lot watched. "Il est pas beau," said a little boy watching us while sipping his coke. "That's not a pretty tree." My dad pretended to be all offended at this. "It's like going to the pound and saving the ugliest dog there to bring home with you," he said.

Anne-Camille and I smushed ourselves in the backseat with the tree, and when we got home, my host mom shook her head at us. "This is all because I wasn't there to help," she said, as Eric lay on his back beneath the tree and tethered it down with wires to make it stand up, all while yelling at my host brother to keep the fat thing from toppling on him and Vodka the dog delicately stepped on his face to sniff the branches.

Sunday was an interesting day, mainly because we had stayed out until four in the morning the previous night to go to the winter ball at the huge university of engineering in Aix. As far as dancing, I've had better times at some of the clubs in town, but it was mainly just fun toget dressed up and then observe the other French. In one part of the ball, there was a live rock band of students from the university. I cannot even begin to describe the feelin gof how weird ti was to watch a hardcore rock band singer sing in French, and then yell French at the crowd of hopping students. "Vous allez bien ce soir? J'ai dit - vous allez BIEN ce soir??" he screamed into the mike. Literally translated this means - 3You all are doing well this evening? I said - you all are doing WELL this evening??" I do have to say that I think that screaming wildly into microphones comes a little bit more naturally to the Americans.

Today I went to my classes in the morning, then headed to a cafe to theoretically catch up on the piles of homework that are beginning to grow, but instead ended up writing in my journal the whole time. I feel so unmotivated to do any homework - I'd rather hang out with my friends, go out with my language partner, relax with my family, wander around teh city some more. This is going to be a problem for finals next week.

Afterwards I took the bus over to my travail benevole - my community service where I help tutor little kids in their English. For dinner at the house tonight we made crepes at the table, and I contributed by making hot chocolate that a friend sent me in a care package from home.

Nothing grand happened today, but in the evening, as I already said, I just felt so sad. I feel more sad than when i first came to France - for me, this is more of a struggle now than the beginning was - this knowing that I am leaving, just when I've found my niche and my rhythm. I am going to miss hearing French all around me. I love the way it sounds when it's spoken. I feel like I've finally reached a level of comprehension wheere I can be head-over-heels in love with the way it sounds, the expressions, the inflections. Plus, I can't speak English very well anymore. Now I struggle with both French and my native tongue.

Thanksgiving

Thursday I woke up and realized how happy I am here. Not that I haven’t been realizing this all along, but it was just one of those days when I realized how grateful I am, and then I remembered that – oh yeah, it’s Thanksgiving. That’s why I feel grateful, maybe. Even the French really don’t give a rip about Thanksgiving.

“What’s the point?” a French student asked me this weekend. “To eat as much as you possibly can and then get sick afterwards,” I replied. “Oh,” he said, looking extremely confused by this thought. Eating until you feel sick is not a very French thing to do.

Don’t worry, though: I did actually explain the real reason for Thanksgiving, one that doesn’t make Americans sound like fat pigs. “No, really it’s about family,” I said. “And being thankful.”

Anyways. Thursday I was thankful. I headed to my favorite café bookstore in Aix to spend the morning writing and avoiding my homework, since I have no class on Thursdays. I sipped small French café crème, wrote letters to friends I should have written to a long time ago, wrote some of my story, looked through books, and listened in on people’s conversations around me. For a while, I listened to another American (weird!) talking about trying to find a turkey to eat that night. I watched the bookstore cat on the chair next to me violently cough and sneeze, and the little boy whine to his father in French about wanting more chocolate. I thought about where, exactly, I am in the world – like, if I was to put my finger on a globe and find Aix, then examine how far this is from the Pacific Northwest. I am far away, and it’s rare that I actually have an opportunity to think about this, because I’m always going and going and going here.

Last night, Friday, I had four girlfriends over to my house to make a Thanksgiving dinner for my host parents. We successfully made dinner all by ourselves, despite the fact that we had no idea what we were doing.

“How do we eat this?” my host dad asked. “Should we start with the salad and then move through the courses?”

I laughed at his silliness. “Oh, no, no, no, my dear French host father. This is an American meal. That means that you heap all of the food onto the table and once and then proceed to shovel it all into your mouth at once, as quickly as possible. Flavor, style, art don’t matter. The only thing that matters is eating as much as you can, as quickly as you can, and then feeling horrible afterwards as you retire to the sofa to miserably watch football or A Christmas Story for the billionth time.”

“How strange,” my host mom said, “to be eating something so sugary for dinner…are you sure the sweet potatoes aren’t some sort of pudding for dessert?”

It was one of the most enjoyable Thanksgivings I’ve ever had.

November, up until about a week ago, had actually been a rather weary month for me. I still felt content to be in France, but homesickness hit me off and on in waves for the first time since I came here at the beginning of September. I felt a bit more tired than usual, a bit more antisocial at times, wanting to just curl up in a café and write all the time, a bit more worried about trying to control things. I’ve been worried about money off and on, since things are getting thin and I had a lot of traveling incidents this month where I had to unexpectedly shell out twenty or eighty euros to fix it. (Another eighty for another train ticket, even though I already bought one two days ago for the same train? Sure, why not! Just take it! Really – I have no use for money!) For the first time ever, I had a slightly twing-y aching feeling of wanting to go home. I was having trouble; I was slipping mentally/emotionally in and out of Aix to return to Seattle and Linfield.

But, I took a long train ride by myself to Geneva last weekend, to meet Marty Bode and explore the city, to get in one last weekend of traveling before my money really runs out and before I leave. I love taking trains by myself, because I love to space out while staring out the window. I love the long quiet stretch of time where I really have nothing else to do – no interruptions – so I can write. Something clicked back into place last weekend, some sort of gear that had become slightly off this past month, and I felt better. This week, I feel joy again to be living here. I’m looking forward to going back to the States, but also really don’t want to leave France. I actually had a dream last night that took place three weeks from now, and I was leaving, and I was feeling this horrible sense of panic.

When I stop to think about it – it really doesn’t make sense to leave; it’s not fair. I feel horribly, horribly sad. I feel even a little pissed sometimes, that after so much work at becoming French, I'm getting yanked out of it. Here, we have been living very intensely in France all semester, completely submerged in the French life for nearly four months, and we have turned away from American things partly because we were at first told to, and then because we wanted to – limited our internet, limited our contact with family and friends back home, rarely spoke English – and now, voila. Look what’s happened. I’m not American only anymore (well – I am and always will be first and foremost American, since I do not have a tiny bone structure and sound nasally and loud when I speak), but a little French as well, or, at least, a little something different. Look what’s happened – we have established a rhythm here, and we have changed. We have finally slid, not without a lot of struggling first, seamlessly into a place abroad. Now, I don’t want to go back because I don’t know how I will fit in back home anymore. Three weeks left!

Duality

Last week, while speaking English, I asked someone if they wanted to go take a coffee with me. “You mean have a coffee?” she replied, looking at me blankly. “Go have a coffee?” Yes – that. Have a coffee, that’s what I meant. In French, one says prendre un café (literally take a coffee.)

This is such a perfect illustration of the duality I’ve been developing this semester. I am living in two worlds now, or rather – I am living in one world and soon will return to the other, and just the fact that I know I’m going to return soon can be difficult to process sometimes. I’m here in France, but I also feel like I need to keep one foot in the door at all times to keep it open – don’t want it to shut and not be able to get back in again when I need to return to the States! There is a kind of desperation when studying abroad – to make the most of your time and become immersed in the culture, and also to cling tightly to back home so that you won’t be forgotten.

My mom came to visit last week, and it was the strangest feeling, watching my two very separate worlds merge in a surprisingly natural way. Also, I spoke a tiny bit of English for the first time ever with my host family, and this seriously weirded me out. I realized how much language has a hand in the ideas we form about people, the images we have of them in our heads. I felt like I could be completely myself, for once at total ease! Oh, the things I learned while speaking English with them! For instance: I finally learned what my host dad does for a living. I’ve asked him at least two or three times this semester and never quite understood, though I knew it was big and important. I thought he worked with boats. Eric does not work with boats though; he sells robotics to international companies to dissemble nuclear power plants.

On Tuesday, Armistice Day here in France, I didn’t have school and so we woke up early to my host dad running off to search for croissants and pain-au-chocolat and brioche for breakfast. We feasted on them over coffee, and then my host mom took my real mom and me with her to the market in town to buy food for our picnic. We all drove to a little village on the Mediterranean called Saint-Mairie-de-la-Mer, which happens to be my favorite town here in Provence. I think I’ve already mentioned this in another entry, but it’s worth mentioning again. This town has it all – gypsies, pirates, a church, literary folklore, the sea, flamingoes, good coffee. We all huddled in a little café to take some coffee, because it was drizzling outside, and when my mom got up to go to the bathroom, my host parents leaned in and told me how happy they were to meet her. “Now we can send you back home,” they said, “because we know that you will be ok there.” That one little comment meant so much to me. Even though there is such a delicate balance to strike with one’s host family here, between getting to know them – trying to be more than just a boarder – and also not interfering in or interrupting their usual lives, I adore my host family. My experience here without them would have been so much emptier. I definitely feel my foreignness, some days more than others, but despite the delicacy of the balance, and despite my American solitude, I’m slowly finding ways to form a home. This is where the duality gets hard. My home is here, and it is also not.

Yesterday was Saturday and magnificent, because our architecture professor didn’t show up to meet us at the cathedral for our excursion around Aix. Instead we wandered around the market, took a leisurely lunch, and then discovered the most amazing thing ever. Really. When I walked inside, I almost cried because I was so sorry I hadn’t found it sooner in the semester. It is a little book shop/café, frequented by a lot of international students, where one can just sit for hours and read or drink coffee. They had a bulletin board with ways to meet people. They have poetry readings! And other kinds of readings! I am so excited. This is exactly what I had been missing so much from my beloved Seattle and Portland – a place to just sit and write and write and read and drink coffee. I feel like Aix is complete now. I sat there for five hours, all Saturday afternoon, until they closed.

Another example of duality: last week I told Anne-Camille yet again that she needed to come visit me in Seattle, and my host dad said that when I got married, they would all come out for the wedding. “No, no,” said Anne-Camille. “Ansley’s going to get married in Aix!” Yes, to Paul to crepe-man. I could get married in Aix, I thought. Not because I particularly have always wanted to get married in France, but because that way I could come back here.

I feel like I’m trying to hold on even more tightly to the slippery days falling through my fingers, because I have just barely over a month left here. I feel like this semester is ending just as quickly as it started.

(On a side note, I had a charming little adventure in Avignon Friday morning when it was time to see Mom off at the train station, where she was going to take a train to Paris to catch her plane. I got on the train with her briefly, stupidly, to help her find her seat and get settled. When I hurried back to get off, the doors were shut and would not open. Then, the train started moving! Everything seemed to be in slow motion, or not really – because to my horror, the train was beginning to move very quickly. I turned around, panicked, trying to figure out what to do. A guy standing by the doors in between the compartments, seeing me look at him with a wild and desperate expression, looked at me with a mixture of amusement and pity. I rushed back to my mom. “Coucou, maman,” I said. “I’m still here!” Frightened of the ticket inspectors because I obviously did not have a ticket, I hid in the bathroom until the train stopped at Avignon about twenty minutes later. I dashed off. I obtained another ticket for a train back to Aix an hour later, just in time to make my morning class.
“I’ve just been to Avignon this morning!” I declared cheerily, as I stumbled into the American Center looking frazzled and somewhat deranged.
“How was it?” the others asked.
“The train station was very beautiful,” I replied.
I had sat huddled there for over an hour waiting for the next train, my hoodie pulled up to keep my head warm in the frigidly clear morning, feeling very much like the worst kind of train bum.
“How did that happen?” my French Woman Writers professor asked me. “Did you get on the train with your mom? Oh, you must never do that! The train stops way for much too short of a time.”
Yes, yes, thank you. I now am aware of that.
What an adventure. A twenty euro adventure, but an adventure nonetheless.)

Paris

Beau Smoking Man.
Beau Chocolat.Beau Eiffel Tower.

Belle Femme.


Beau Oscar Wilde's grave, which kissing supposedly gives artists good inspiration. I would kiss it all day long if it meant I could become an artist.