Je Suis Charlie...Partout

Some random snapshots of various "Je Suis Charlie" signs around the area. They're absolutely everywhere....

In the library

I passed by a few magazine stores the other day and ALL of them had signs like this: no more Charlie Hebdo, referring to the most recent issue published right after the attack

With one of my private students I read My Weekly, a weekly English newspaper for French tweens, this whole issue was about Charlie Hebdo and reactions in the Anglophone world

You can hardly see them, but walking around the mall there were six militaires with machine guns, they're in the train station as well, according to the conversation I heard between a kid and his dad on the tram

Coverage of the Paris march

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.

Galette des Rois - King's Cake

Last Sunday the people I live with invited me to have a slice of Galette des Rois - king's cake - with them to celebrate le Jour des Rois, or L'Epiphanie, which commemorates the coming of the Three Wise Men.

The cake itself is made differently according to region, but here it's a puff pastry filled with almond paste and it's dangerously good. No matter what the specific recipe is, the important part is the fève, which is a little ceramic trinket in the cake, whoever gets the slice with the fève is the king or queen for the day and is supposed to wear a crown.

The next day I had a private lesson, and the family gave me more cake. A few weeks ago after our English lesson the girl told me her and her mom decided they were going to bake one typical French dessert every week and asked if I would be interested in taking home a little bit each time. Do I want you to give me cake? Why do you even have to ask? So they've been fattening me up, and last week's weapon on choice was Galette des Rois.

And then the next day when I babysat, guess what they offered me?

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...

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. 

Toussaints #7: Getting Back Home

Our trip back from Rome to Grenoble was without a doubt the pinnacle of our insanity. I suppose that it was only appropriate that our most terrifying day fell on Halloween. Even before the trip I had something of a panic attack just looking at our return trip, I didn't think we would make all our connections from one place to another (there were a lot). At best I knew we'd come out of our "vacation" somewhere between exhausted and dead.

We woke up at 3:30 am to catch a shuttle to the airport, had some coffee, and flew to Milan. Chelsea had had some problems printing out her train ticket that we needed to get back to Grenoble, so we took a metro to the Milan SNCF office to get that, then we took another metro to the middle of nowhere to catch an 8.5 hour bus from Milan to Lyon. By that time we were very, very tired, after not only that early morning but also two weeks of little sleep and lots of travel. I had a little notebook where I made quick notes of where we had been and what we had done, and I wrote "we are the kind of exhausted that makes you wonder if maybe you accidentally inhaled too much of that pot you just walked by. What the hell were we thinking?"

We had a few hours to kill so we went in search of something to get for lunch and dinner for later, but we couldn't find anything. We wandered for a good half hour before we saw a sign that said "centro," assuming it mean the center of town we walked there which took another half hour-ish. I found a little corner store and got way too many apples because I was too tired to count, and then we finally found a little kebab/pizza place.

You have to imagine us, two girls with three big bags, five if you count the huge ones under our eyes, on the verge of collapsing right there, struggling to order food from a man who spoke no English. Chelsea ordered pizza. I pointed at what looked to be a calzone and got him to tell me what was in it, realized I didn't care, weakly pointed to it and said I would take one. Then remembering dinner I pathetically looked up at him "falafel?" "Ah, si," and pointed to another plate. Okay, I'll take that too. He looked at me, confused "so this one, and not that one?"
"No no, this one AND that one." More confused looks. He could clearly see we were half dead.

I swear at this point he must have thought we were some poor foreign hobos, I could literally feel the pity he was emitting. We stood awkwardly for a while, until he told us to put our bags down and sit. He tried to make a few jokes but we were too tired to do anything more than weakly smile. In the end when we were paying he totally undercharged us, "it's okay, it's okay." Once we left the place we just started laughing at how incredibly pathetic we must have looked to the nice old man. We still had some time so we walked to a park where I became a fully-fledged hobo and took a nap on a bench. Yup, dignity has a funny way of dying at moments like that. The last thing I wrote in my notebook: "Lord please just get our idiot selves back home safe."

We got up and started walking back, expecting it to take us an hour, but after walking five minutes we were back at the station. Our poor brains were very confused and we spend a few minutes just staring at each other and turning our heads "but how... what?" So we magically had another hour to kill which we used to drink more coffee.

We finally got on the bus, struggled through 8.5 hours of sleepless sitting, and were dropped off in Lyon. In case you didn't already think we were idiots, let me try to convince you. When we were buying tickets we figured we could get off in Lyon and hop right onto the train, so the half hour between when we were dropped off and when the train left seemed perfect. We failed to realize that there are two train stations in Lyon, and we were being dropped off in the wrong one. We realized this about a week before we left, so we planned on calling a taxi and praying and crossing fingers and toes and everything else that we got there on time. Thank God we did, because it was literally the last train from Lyon to Grenoble, otherwise we would have had to sleep in the station or something. That would have taken me to a whole new level of hobo, and I'm not sure I'm ready for that yet.

We got to Grenoble, the lovely family I live with came to pick us up because the trams stopped running, and I got home around 1:00 am. It was so, so, so nice having my bed back, being in a place with good wifi. And it was really nice to come home and have someone to give you a hug and be happy you made it back alive.

So the trip back was nuts. We got back about a week ago, and looking back, yes, I think it would have been smart to cut the number of places we saw in half. But sleeplessness aside, it was a privilege and a blessing to be able to see so many places and meet so many amazing people. :)