St. Laurent du Pont

The five of us went on an impromptu trip to St. Laurent du Pont, a little village at the foot of the Chartreuse Mountains to visit Pierre's sister. Finally stuck my shoes in some real snow.

Vizille

This last weekend I finally decided I needed to move my butt and go somewhere. A couple of friends and I decided to visit Vizille, a small town about 25 minutes away, with a chateau that doubles as a French Revolution Museum, and really nice park surrounding it. I won't bore you with the detailed history (i.e. I don't feel like Googling it) but, in short, it was the place where the 1788 tennis court meeting was held, during which and a meeting of the estates general was demanded, which subsequently led to the revolution, bloodshed, guillotines, etc. You get it. 

Putting up a "Je Suis Charlie" sign

Park in front of the Chateau/museum

Just for the record, she attacked me

Le Retour

A few days ago I finally started to look for tickets back home to Seattle. I was surprised at how nervous it made me.

I've gotten used to my life here: I know how the public transportation system works, I have my favorite places to run/wander, I finally have something of a system when it comes to planning lessons, I feel completely normal kissing strangers on the cheek, I have my favorite brand of cereal, I've even managed to find a group of people I hang out with, etc. It'll be weird going back after all the work I did to adjust.

But it's more than that. In fact, giving up French crackers and running trails are the least of my worries. When I chose to do this program I had two big reasons: I wanted to travel and I wanted to give myself time to seriously reflect on what I want to pursue in life after college. I've been here for nearly four months and I'm ashamed to admit I haven't really made much progress in that latter area. I've had many nights of lost sleep because of this, and they seem to be getting more frequent as I think more about going home. I put my head on my pillow and try to sleep, but my brain refuses to shut off, so I relent and search for jobs, I browse random graduate programs, I wonder if I should teach English somewhere else...

I'm scared I'll go back and stop progressing. I'm going to be honest, my life of 20-hour work weeks and frequent two-week breaks is pretty lax, and by normal standards my life is pretty stationary. But progress here isn't the same as progress back home. Every time I have a remotely fluent conversation with somebody I feel like I've had a small success, when I learn new words and plug them into a sentence, that's success, when I manage to navigate French bureaucracy, well...for that I deserve a medal. You can't really help but progress when you're in a different country, whether you take notice of it or not.

I really really like being in situations where "success" is very well defined. Here it's getting over the language barrier and learning to effectively plan lessons, in college it was getting good grades and internships, in high school it was getting into college, when I did sports it was about winning... What I'm realizing is that one of the hardest things about "real life" is that you really have to define success yourself, whether that means doing good in the world, making money, traveling, etc.

And that, to a large extent, is why I am nervous to go home, because being here creates the sort of safety bubble I had in college. And the moment I get off that plane the bubble bursts.

At the same time there's always a bit of...disappointment, I would call it, upon returning somewhere you've been missing for a while. Somehow that thing that you couldn't wait to eat doesn't quite taste the way you had been imagining it for months.

All that being said, lately I have been finding myself thinking about the things I miss from home. The coffee, the coffee made by that beautiful machine that stands in my kitchen. Almond milk. It exists here but it tastes like water, I guess there aren't enough hippies here to create a large enough demand for the good stuff. My dog. Lounging around my house like a hobo without judgement. Costco and Trader Joes. Stores being open on Sunday. Good crackers.

So I'm a bit torn, as you can see.

Tu versus Vous: The Never Ending Struggle

In French, like in nearly every other language, there is a formal and an informal way of addressing people: vous and tu respectively. I've been learning this language for more than a third of my life and I still sometimes have difficulty knowing when to use what. As an anglophone I'm not naturally wired with this distinction. As a basic rule, when in doubt, use vous, but it's not that simple. It's more polite, but it also creates a certain distance between you the the person you're addressing and can make you seem cold, and in certain situations (from what I can tell) it can be considered almost insulting.

Sometimes it's easy to feel it out:

Meet a random old lady on the street: Vous 

Talk to a small child: Tu

In a job interview: Vous

Among friends of friends at a party: Tu

But often you run into gray area, which is what I face at my schools. The principle vous me, I vous him, it's all good. But the teachers all tu each other, and they all tu me. I started off by vousing all of them, and only one of them specifically told me I could tu him and all the other 4th grade teachers. Problem: I deal with 17 or 18 different teachers a week, I have no clue who teaches fourth grade, and during that first week I didn't want to deal with remembering who I called what. At the same time I would have felt weird saying vous to some of the teachers and tu to the other ones. So I did what I probably shouldn't and kept right on vousing him and all the other teachers, even though it's starting to feel weird and way too formal, and it makes me something of an outsider. Today another teacher told me to tu her... shoot I don't remember which one it was.  

English, why you no prepare me for this? 

Poland for Christmas

This year I finally got to spend Christmas with my family in Poland. Overall it was really relaxed and relatively uneventful and filled with lots of cake. I talked with my grandma a lot, filled up on good tea and food, watched TV, missed WiFi, got groceries, etc.

Getting to Poland was quite the journey. I took a tram to Grenoble, train to Paris, bus to airport, flight to Modlin, bus to Warsaw, and then a train to Bydgoszcz. Overall I think it was something like 19 hours. And then coming home I had to do it all over again. At some point on the first train I put instant coffee in my yogurt because I was so tired and had no hot water. That was a low point. And yes, that does mean I brought my own instant coffee. It's an addiction, leave me alone.

I spent the first couple of days with my cousin and his wife in Warsaw, where we ordered the biggest pizza known to man, visited Stalin's gift to Poland (the Palace of Culture), and hung around drawing family trees and talking a lot. It was really great, not only because these are literally the two nicest people I know, but because I was able to speak my native language with them: mostly-Polish-with-random-English-thrown-in (they both lived in England for 10 years), not many people speak it. Although for the first few days my brain kept trying to say things in French, I kept popping out random pardons, d'accords and ouais. It took a few days before I didn't have to consciously think of what I was going to say before I said it.

On my way to Bydgoszcz I learned that my great-uncle had died at the age of 94, and I ended up going to his funeral and seeing loads of extended family I never thought I'd see again, and a lot more I didn't know existed.

I met my baby nephew for the first time.

I caught some sort of a virus and spent nearly a week too tired to do anything besides sit and watch TV. Talking was a struggle, which was annoying since most of what I did there was talk to people. I had absolutely no appetite and anything I ate made me feel sick (but it was the holidays and I was surrounded by Polish food so naturally I still ended up gaining 6 pounds, no joke). My grandma finally made me go to the doctor. I reluctantly went. I don't like doctors.

I welcomed 2015 by drinking what tasted like sugared rubbing-alcohol with my grandma, and exchanging życzenia (basically what you wish the other person in the new year) which I don't think is a thing in the U.S. (it should be). It wasn't the most exciting of new years celebrations, but at that moment I wouldn't have wanted to be anywhere else.

Then the next day I made the long trek back home where nothing interesting happened except for the conversation I had with a Congolese man on the tram. Although I was so dead by that point it might have been a hallucination. It started at 4:00 am and I was able to flop onto my bed a bit before midnight.

We even got a little snow

Christmas in Bydgoszcz

Went to go see my cousin's band (B.O.K.) in concert. Maybe standing in front of speakers in a crowded room isn't the best way to deal with a virus, but I'm really glad I went

Yum, drugs

What?? It's hard enough to read this shiz in English

Happy New Year :) I promised I wouldn't share this post-shower photo, but I love it too much

Wigilia part 1

I swear all this kid does it eat

Wigilia Part 2

Warsaw Uprising Museum, some of the armbands of the underground movement members

Soviet "liberators," Warsaw Uprising Museum

Palace of Culture. Thanks Stalin

Our Christmas Tree. I've never decorated one of the kitchen table before, very efficient

This made up 80% of my diet

And the journey back home begins...

Christmas in Echirolles (is a confusing time)

Anyone who has ever taken any interest in French current events is well aware of it's changing demographic, but it's one thing to read about it and another to see it firsthand. The country is historically catholic, but because of the huge waves of North African immigration and the decline of catholic influence, you're more likely to see people going to the mosque than going to mass. This is especially apparent in Echirolles, where a large majority of people aren't what the French call francais de souche (literally souche means stump, and it refers to a person who is "pure" French, or whose French roots go back generations).

Case-in-point: teaching a Christmas lesson. This is the last week before the winter break so I decided to have a low-key Christmas-themed coloring activity day with my 2nd/3rd grade students (I'm just as ready for break as these kids are, and I had no desire to try to talk over a class of 20 screaming kids for 40 minutes). I started off the lesson by asking the class who celebrates Christmas, expecting maybe half the class to raise there hands. Three kids raised their hands.

"Okay, who doesn't celebrate Christmas?" Almost every hand shot up. Instead, most of them celebrate l'Aïd (explanation here). From what Wikipedia tells me, it's a celebration of Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his own son before God intervened.

(Side note: I asked the students what traditions they have, and I got a lot of the same responses I got when I asked about Christmas traditions in some of my other classes (family, food, snowmen, etc.). Then one girl bluntly said they kill a sheep. I was a little shocked., Thinking maybe I understood her wrong, I moved on to the next kid, but then I turned to her again, too curious to resist: "like...a live sheep?" A few of the kids made the knife -across-the-throat gesture and the teacher looked at me and gave a slight shake of the head. I'm not quite sure if he meant "don't get into this" or "she's bs-ing you.")

At the same time it's interesting to see the interaction between this and laicité, the French version of separation between church and state which has become something of a national obsession. For example ever since 2004 students are forbidden from wearing any sort of religious symbols, be it a cross on a necklace, a headscarf, a yamaka, etc. So often here you'll see students or, in my case teachers, take off their headscarf before entering the school, and then putting it right back on as they leave for lunch.

I'm not making any judgments, just making observations,  just want to make that clear, these subjects are always a little touchy.

Walk

Pictures of the trails behind Echirolles that go up to Haute Jarrie and beyond. I know, I know, I've already posted a bunch of photos from this place, but it's amazing and deserves more. 

The time I ran to a castle

I've said this before, but I swear, every time I go out and explore this area a little I fall more and more in love with it. It's not everywhere that a simple run can lead you to a chateau. 

Behind my apartment there is a big hill which takes you out of the city and into the countryside. If you go a little further you get to a little nature reserve (which has become my favorite spot) where you can sit on the dock over the small lake and watch the birds (Skribbles flies here! Only my mom and Kerry will get that though...). I had never gone past there before, but today curiosity got the better of me and I kept going...and going and going. I ended up in a little town, and I kept seeing signs for Chateau de Bon Repos, so I followed those and a little farther up, there it was, a 15th century chateau, just chillin' a few hundred meters from some peoples' houses, overlooking the mountains, with some donkeys right next to it just to add some extra charm. I just stood there smiling at it like an idiot (and pet the donkey, of course).

Not a bad find, for a morning run...

On the way back I ran on a gorgeous trail I had never been on before. More donkeys. And horses. And cows. I stopped and stared at a cow for a while, it stared back at me... I don't think it  liked me much, so I left. 

Remember a week or two ago when I published a post about finding miles and miles of trails behind that park five minutes away from my place? Well somehow I ended up there again, and from there I went back home.

I was gone for hours, and when I got back I was muddy and starving. It was amazing.

And to think I almost decided to live in the city, I would have never discovered this if I did. It's one of those places you would never find on TripAdvisor. That's what I love about Grenoble (and Echirolles), the longer I live here the more hidden gems I find. 

Hidden Trails

This morning was unintentionally awesome. I decided to go on one of my increasingly rare "runs" (i.e. glorified walks) to a park I had passed by about a week before. Turns out there's a trail that runs behind it and keeps  going and going out into the countryside where it forks out into several other trails. No roads, barely any houses,  horses and donkeys, no people. Back home I would have to drive an hour for trails like this, here, it's a ten-minute walk away. How have I lived here for two months without finding this??

On my way back I was running behind this middle-aged man, and as I was passing him he said something to me. I took out my earbud, "what was that?"

I thought he asked me if we could run together until the end of the trail, which seemed a little strange, but I said why not, we were almost there anyways. Then he sped up, so I sped up to keep up with him, then he sped up again, so I sped up, etc., until we were full-on sprinting. Looking back on it I think he was asking me to race. (And I realize how creepy this sounds, but trust me, it was fine).

"Ah, ca fait du bien"

Turns out he had been a serious runner in his youth and he ran those trails all the time, usually at a leisurely pace but every once in a while he liked to push it. He explained more or less how the trails are laid out, gave me the name of some local running club, and then we parted ways. Thanks, kind stranger.

I really wish I had brought my camera, it was really gorgeous.

I've been feeling sort of crummy this last week, and this was just what I needed, a hit of endorphins and a forest.

First hike in the Alps!

I finally went on a hike the other day with a few other assistants! It was great, but about halfway up it started to drizzle. As we made our way up and through the snow and then started to come back down, it slowly progressed into a full on downpour. Eventually we decided to get off the trail and veer onto a rode where we hitched a ride with a nice old man who let all five of us squeeze into his little car, and drove our freezing butts into town. So it was a little cold and wet, but it was great :) Next time I won't ignore the weather report though.

You can't see it, but once we got to the top it was covered in snow

I was a little bummed we missed the great view, there was so much fog we couldn't see anything! 

Made it to the top!