La Bastille

I'm ashamed to admit that in the past few days I haven't done much besides go food shopping and sleep, but today was the day I finally got my butt on the tram and went into the city.

The people I live with told me Grenoble itself isn't the most interesting city. True, architecturally it's not as striking as other European cities, but I like it. It makes it less pretentious, less...imposing. What really makes the area special, though, are the surrounding mountains. Grenoble itself is flat, so you see them constantly. 

The main attraction here is the climb up to the Bastille, an old fortress built in the 16th century. I hadn't planning on climbing up it today, but I didn't really know where I was going and then I got distracted and somehow I ended up going up a hill that led to the hike. 

It. Was. Fantastic. The view was absolutely beautiful the whole way up. I couldn't stop gaping. What's amazing is how close it is to the city. Like...it's IN the city. I mean we have great hikes near Seattle, but you have to drive an hour out before you reach them. Anyways, less words, more photos:

:D No shame, sushi avant croissants 

Some Robert Frost stuff right here

Surprise Family

Eight years ago I angrily signed up for a French class because the US education system required me to take a foreign language and I wanted to avoid the awkwardness of learning Spanish (with a name like Ola...) I hated it, I felt like I was wasting my time, it seemed even more useless than math. Who would have thought that I was slowly preparing myself for a job abroad? And even more surprising: who knew it would lead me to family? Apparently I have a secret cousin who lives near Grenoble. Surprise!

My grandma was at a family birthday a few months ago, and she told someone that I'm going to Grenoble, they started talking and in the end I had a name and a phone number of someone I was apparently related to.

Despite both my mom and my grandma explaining it several times, I still don't quite get how we're related. Our grandparents were siblings, I think? It's one of those weird cousin once-removed situations that I don't fully understand. Something like that. In any case I called her and we talked and she was really nice (and surprisingly didn't seem freaked out by the strange girl randomly calling her saying "hey there, you don't know me but we're related and I can't wait to see you in a month!")

She invited me over this past weekend to meet her and stay with her and her family. Her husband and her kids (7 and 11) only speak French, so it was more French than Polish...significantly more French, actually. To be honest, after only a few days here a lot of words come faster in French than in Polish, so I didn't mind. I find that I can switch between Polish and English easily, but switching from Polish to French and vice-versa is more challenging, I either speak one or the other or my brain malfunctions. The connections in there get clogged or something. I don't know, leave me alone, I'm not a neuroscientist .

The weekend was great. I watched her daughter's basketball game, I ate dinner with her family, I played with her two kids all day, I went to Coup d'Icare. I saw a part of the country I would have never seen otherwise.

Crazy little monkey

My Place

For those who are curious to see how I live...
I rent a room with a family in Echirolles, which is just south of Grenoble. Besides the family there's one other girl, a Chinese student, who lives in the other room. Altogether there are five of us sharing a bathroom and kitchen, and before I got here I was worried that it was going to be cramped, but somehow it works, no problem. Like I said in a previous post, the room is fine, everyone else in the house is really nice (fais comme chez toi!), no complaints from me.

How to get to France

Step 1: Get sick
Step 2: Pack
Step 3: Don’t fall asleep until 4:00 am because your body hates you
Step 4: Wake up, drink coffee. Realize that you’re too tired and sick for it to actually work. Remain exhausted.
Step 5: Reward yourself for your troubles by indulging in self-pity, but also appreciate the fact that you don’t have the energy needed to be as nervous as you should be right before traveling across the globe for a year. Enjoy this exhausted indifference.
Step 6: Sit in plane for 10 hours. Engage in conversation with people around you. Wasn’t that fun?
Step 7: Land in Germany. Get a nose bleed. Realize that German is scary. Why do they all sound so angry at me?
Step 8: Eat a pretzel
Step 9: Decide never to fly Condor airlines again; they don’t even give you peanuts. And only one movie choice? What is this, 1997?
Step 10: Get on plane number two, land in Lyon, figure out a way to lug 100 pounds of suitcases and a purse and a backpack and a laptop to your shuttle. Stay awake. Get on shuttle. Stay awake. Get off shuttle. Stay awake. Meet landlord/roommate, say hi (how many times does one bisou in Grenoble?), try to remember how to speak this language. Inevitably butcher said language. Stay awake.
Step 11: Sleep

But in all seriousness, I'm finally here! After a year of planning and buying and paperwork and questions, I'm here. The trip went as smoothly as it could have gone. Planes were on time, flights went by quickly, my roommate/landlord came to pick me up no problem, the room is great, the family I live with it great, the other girl renting is great. The area is also really beautiful. I was so exhausted on my bus ride from Lyon to Grenoble (see steps 1 and 3) I thought I was going to die, but I couldn't close my eyes, it was too gorgeous. Anywhere you turn you're surrounded by mountains. It's like living in a huge, beautiful bowl, that's the best way I can think to describe it. None of the pictures did it any justice, but I gave it a shot:

view from my room

Where I'll be

For those of you who are curious, I'm going to be working at two different elementary schools just south of Grenoble, in Echirolles and Pont-de-Claix. 

T-2 Days

Eventually the To Do list gets checked off (mostly) and the bags are packed (mostly) and you're left with an empty room and your thoughts. With two days to go before I leave that's where I'm at now, and it's terrifying.

The language I feel like I've forgotten, the job I'm hardly qualified for, living/teaching in a city whose name makes people wince and give me looks of pity, dealing with French bureaucracy, getting into the rhythm of living in a new place, convincing new people to befriend me. All of it. Oh, and I'm sick. (Sorry to whoever sits next to me on the airplane).

Let the packing begin. So. Much. Packing. 

I shan't be homeless (I think)

"So what are you doing after you graduate?"

"I'm going to France for a year to teach English through a program called TAPIF"

"Oh yeah? That's awesome. So do they, like, give you an apartment or something?"

...you're asking me if a program run by the French government would ever make anything easy? Hah, good one. Next you'll ask me if it's possible to go vegan over there (hint: it's not). 

One of, if not the most, stressful things for a TAPIF-er is the inevitable task of finding housing. Read any old TAPIF blog and you see it again and again: the horror of looking for housing in France where landlords seldom answer emails and most places require you to have a bank account (which requires an address, which requires a bank account, which requires an address... you get it). Besides a few tips in our intro packets, we're basically left on our own to make sure we aren't homeless for the next 8 months. 

For me the search started a while ago. I considered being brave and waiting until I got there to find a place. You can actually see the place before you commit, and French renters are way more responsive to calls and direct visits. But then I remembered how I deal with stress (if you don't know me...I don't deal with it very well). Having to live out of a suitcase on the creaky bed of a hostel for a week while desperately trying to simultaneously open a bank account, visit my schools, get a new phone plan, and look for housing really didn't sound like the best route to go for someone prone to anxiety. 

And so the search began. I remember I spent eight hours one day making profiles on every housing website I could find: seloger.com, leboncoin.fr, appartager.com, colocation.fr, lecartedescolocs.fr, recherche-colocation.com...etc., etc. 

I scoured the listings, I wrote messages to people and heard back from almost no one. I looked into staying in student dorms (a possibility in France even if you are not a student, cheap but crappy), I asked people who had lived in Grenoble, then I messaged their friends, and their friends' friends, I messaged people in the Grenoble TAPIF Facebook group. I did everything. I got so sick of it at one point that I had to rip myself away from my computer for a day to keep from going crazy. 

Then I had some luck. Another fellow assistant who had spent the whole summer in Grenoble with a host family gave me the contact information of a woman who was also looking to host a foreigner. I emailed her, sent her my picture, and heard back almost immediately. The place seemed really nice, in the center of Grenoble. The only problem was that it was pretty expensive, and my commute to work would have been long.  

At the same time another woman reached out to me on one of the housing websites. According to her profile she was also looking for une étrangère to rent a room in her apartment. She lived 5 minutes away from one of my schools in Echirolles, and the rent was really low. Almost too low. I was skeptical. Echirolles isn't the nicest of place. It's one thing to work in a ghetto, and another thing to live there. After a nervous Skype meeting with her (During which I absolutely butchered the French language), I decided she seemed  nice, but I would prefer to live in the city. I was basically ready to send the other woman an email asking her where to send the deposit. 

But then she emailed me: "I'm sorry, but the room has been rented. Bonne journée." I almost crapped myself. And then I sat stunned for a while. I had spent the last few weeks carefully writing overly-polite, grammatically-correct emails, to this woman and she hadn't even told me that I had competition. 

And so, I thought, I guess I'll look for something else, if all else fails I can always take the other place. Literally 10 minutes later the other woman messaged me on Skype, letting me know she had other people interested in the apartment and needed an answer in 24 hours. I swear, it was like they were working together to give me a heart-attack. They almost succeeded: hands-down that was the most stressful day of the entire summer. At the time it seemed like an impossible decision: commit to living 8 months in what seemed to be an overcrowded apartment I had never seen in the ghetto with a lady I had never actually met, or let go of the only housing option I had and deal with the stress of looking again (or possibly not having a place until I got there) in hopes of finding a better place in the city. 

In the end, I ended up spending the rest of the day in a detached, stressed-out haze while mulling over the decision, and then spending three hours constructing an email, basically begging her to let me commit to two months, pay a little more, and decide 100% if I wanted to stay there until May after I came. And she agreed. I don't think she was too happy about it, though, and at one point I thought she was going to change her mind and give it to someone else, which thankfully she didn't.

So I have housing. Seeing the comments of the other stressed-out assistants desperately paying insane amounts for agencies to find them a place to live (or opting for waiting until they get there), I'm glad I did it. It's such a weight off my shoulders knowing that at least I'll have a bed to call my own once I land, instead of lugging my suitcases around a hostel.