The Big Wrap Up Entry

I've been home for nine days, now. Actually, I should préciser: I've been in the US for nine days now. We touched down in the midst of that big northeast snowstorm that canceled a lot of my IES colleagues' flights. I shouldn't complain, but I will note the setbacks: we had to sit on the runway for almost another hour, waiting for an ice-free gate to open up; it took longer than usual for all the baggage to come around; there were NO cabs. We finally found a gypsy cab, though -- a gypsy SUV -- and made it home well after midnight. On the bright side, I was with my mom!

I filled the rest of my notebook on the train from Nantes to Paris and in the airport. I'm not above saying that I cried most of the way to Paris; writing was the only thing I could focus on. So, I can proudly say I accomplished yet another bucket list task (oh, and escargot, too! I found some chocolate ones at the airport). While I'm sure you'd find the tale of my six-hour wait in Charles de Gaulle absolutely scintillating, I'd prefer to fill this last entry with some selections from my final thoughts in France. (Although, notably, I shared my flight with about ten serious hipsters from the NYU Paris program. Not that I'm judging. If you'd like some judgmental commentary, see me in my office and I'd be happy to oblige. Then again, I'm about to provide excerpts from my moleskine, so who am I to judge?)

I feel as though I should try to synthesize my (sweeping) experience this semester and I don't know if I can. As you've seen from this rambling blog, I've got a lot of stories, too many, maybe -- or maybe not enough, maybe all I've got is a collection of descriptions and feelings. I've always had a penchant for vignettes. It's weird to be home now, weird but good. After a semester of being a tourist, I feel kind of like a tourist in my own city. I've reinvigorated my interest in this city; I want to explore it some more, try to find the nooks and crannies that I've overlooked for most of my natural life. I have a lot to think about, too. I hate it, but it's time to grow up, I guess. The semester in Nantes feels so much like a bubble of my youth that hasn't burst but that is slowly drifting out of my sight. I know it's not over forever because I've got far too many reasons to go back, but this part of it has come to its natural conclusion. The chapter has been written, if you will, and here's how it ended (or some selections, at any rate):

12/19/2009
TGV to Paris
AMERICAN AIRLINES to New York

the last thing Marie said to me before we parted à la gare:
"Reste comme tu es." [Trans: Stay as you are.]
this is so hard.

I'm sitting in the airport right now waiting for my gate to open & I feel like I owe it to myself to finish this "carnet" before I leave France. Plus writing will keep my mind off of those thoughts that make me cry & distract me from reading. It's funny how being in motion (even just the motion of moving a pen across a page) can have such a leveling effect on me.

I love being young. I guess you couldn't say I learned that here, but I felt it more strongly here that at other times in my life. I also feel like I grew up here, though. I've got that Peter Pan "but why can't it stay like this forever" itch. And I know it can't. All this mental pushing & pulling is really doing a number on me.

This last page is almost done & I'm starting to think about some of my regrets. I shouldn't do that. This was a take-one [or one-take, I guess] experience & there's just no way I was going to execute it perfectly...but you know, those people who became important to me and my life came pretty damn close to perfect.

I like not being perfect, though. It's given me somewhere to go from here.

Two Truths and a Lie: The Bucket List

Sunrise: 8:48
Vocab: classeur - binder

We'll start with a recap this time. (I've bolded the new stuff just for the sake of clarity...and variety.)

- Issue an Edict
- Go to a Discothèque (boite de nuit)
- Visit the Machines de l'Ile (comrades of the Elephant)
- Go swimming in the Place Royal fountain
- Go bus-hopping
- Soirée costard/robe de soirée dans un endroit incongrue (Trans: Classy dress for dinner at a relatively un-classy restaurant)
- Shop at the Christmas Market and take photos of the decorations
- Buy a striped shirt and a beret while laughing French-ly
- Ne pas respecter les bonnes manières à table (Trans: I think this one is clear...time to toss all my etiquette training to the wind)
- Take a photo of that violin guy
- Try absinthe
- Replicate Rimbaudian debauchery
- Learn a Georges Brassens song
- Get tea at La Cigale (a classy restaurant across from the Opera at Place Graslin)
- Placer le mot "levres" une vingtaine de fois au cours d'un repas (Trans: Say the word "lips" at least twenty times over the course of a meal)
- Try escargot
- Go on a mooning spree (definitely not my idea...)
- Free hugs in Place Royal!
- Fill the rest of my notebook {still in progress}

So, there you have it. Looking good, right? Well, I guess I have a little explaining to do. I have to admit, I had absolutely no ideas for a good edict, even though I was keen to turn out some witty historical parody. I started jotting in my notebook, but to no avail, so I'm going out on a limb on this one: there is a very special binder in my room, chock full of useful information about Nantes, passed down between host "daughters." Since Marie's first student, girls have been adding useful tidbits about life in Nantes, and yesterday, I finished writing my installment. I added four pages to the binder, and, well, seeing as the original Edict of Nantes was a fourfold document, I figure it's close enough. In other good news, my worthless scribblings in my notebook have gotten me that much closer to finishing it. For your reading pleasure:

Edict of Nantes 2.0
Let it be known that the penner of this document does not know exactly what an edict is for. However, with the knowledge that the original Edict of Nantes was a fourfold document, we will construct this 21st Century Edict in much the same fashion, holding this introductory digressive disclaimer as the first part.

Yeah...I know...

So, the next two items (boite and soirée costard) go together. Last night, Angèle and I had plans to go to Le Temps d'Amier, a gay discothèque in Nantes, so I donned my cutest dress and finally put to use the pepto-bismal pink purse I bought at the beginning of the semester (specifically for discothèquing). We met at Angèle's house and I brought a tupperware full of cookies I'd made earlier that day for Marie...thus began the soirée costard. Black-tie cookies and cocktails in Angèle's tiny student apartment. Some other friends came by to hang out and before we knew it, it was well after midnight, the guitars had come out, and all the buses had stopped running. We never made it to the discothèque, but this brings me to my next item: with all the singing and guitar playing going on, how could I not take advantage of the opportunity to learn and sing a Georges Brassens song?! Oh, and right, I crossed off discothèque because...well...I think this is kind of a "thought that counts" situation.

PLUS, today I did something extra...it wasn't on the list but it should have been. I went ice skating next to the cathedral with Angèle and then we headed over to La Cigale to warm up with some tea. Evidence:


A little patinoire action.




Yes! We're inside!

Trop Forte: A brief update

Booking it through centre-ville on this rainy Thursday, what did I hear but the ephemeral sound of my smiling violinist. Looks like I can check another thing (unexpectedly) off the list.

I'm afraid I was too shy to take the kind of photo I'd imagined...I didn't really want him to know I was photographing him.


He'd just finished playing "Inspector Gadget."


Can you see the smile? A little bit, maybe.

Epic Fail

Sunrise: 8:48
Vocab: la bêtise - the stupidity

Well, I'm afraid I have some bad news. I am terrible at bucket lists...but I think you'll understand. I've been out and about, of course, but I've been favoring time spent with friends over time spent questing. Yesterday I went to Saint Nazaire/Saint Brevin Les Pins* with Angèle to visit some of her family friends. I spent all day playing card games with the kids, ages 5 and 9. The little girl, Clara, told me that I was the first American she'd ever met, so we played on the same team for all of the games.

*A big thank you to P. Le Bozec for correcting mes bêtises.

Here's a recap of the list:

- Issue an Edict {in progress}
- Go to a Discothèque (boite de nuit) {tonight, most likely...do I get extra points if it's a gay boite?}
- Visit the Machines de l'Ile (comrades of the Elephant)
- Go swimming in the Place Royal fountain
- Go bus-hopping
- Soirée costard/robe de soirée dans un endroit incongrue (Trans: Classy dress for dinner at a relatively un-classy restaurant)
- Shop at the Christmas Market and take photos of the decorations
- Buy a striped shirt and a beret while laughing French-ly
- Ne pas respecter les bonnes manières à table (Trans: I think this one is clear...time to toss all my etiquette training to the wind)
- Take a photo of that violin guy
- Try absinthe
- Replicate Rimbaudian debauchery
- Learn a Georges Brassens song
- Get tea at La Cigale (a classy restaurant across from the Opera at Place Graslin)
- Placer le mot "levres" une vingtaine de fois au cours d'un repas (Trans: Say the word "lips" at least twenty times over the course of a meal)
- Try escargot
- Go on a mooning spree (definitely not my idea...)
- Free hugs in Place Royal!
- Fill the rest of my notebook {in progress}

I decided to group in bad table manners with Rimbaudian debauchery...hope that's cool! And here are some of the Christmas market photos I snapped.

De Bukkit List!

Sunrise: 8:44
Vocab: con - ass
(I'm getting into the "familiar" French these days, you know, I've reached that point in my relationship with the language.)


So, top of the list is, of course, to study for and take my Art History final this Tuesday, but let's forget that item. It seems only fair that a journey that began with a stack of lists should end with the List to End All Lists (comprising some of my own ideas, some of Angèle's ideas, and some of your ideas). Behold.

The Nantes Bucket List: A Mélange of Ideas, French and American (in no particular order except an arbitrary one)
- Issue an Edict
- Go to a Discothèque (boite de nuit)
- Visit the Machines de l'Ile (comrades of the Elephant)
- Go swimming in the Place Royal fountain
- Go bus-hopping
- Soirée costard/robe de soirée dans un endroit incongrue (Trans: Classy dress for dinner at a relatively un-classy restaurant)
- Shop at the Christmas Market and take photos of the decorations
- Buy a striped shirt and a beret while laughing French-ly
- Ne pas respecter les bonnes manières à table (Trans: I think this one is clear...time to toss all my etiquette training to the wind)
- Take a photo of that violin guy
- Try absinthe
- Replicate Rimbaudian debauchery
- Learn a Georges Brassens song
- Get tea at La Cigale (a classy restaurant across from the Opera at Place Graslin)
- Placer le mot "levres" une vingtaine de fois au cours d'un repas (Trans: Say the word "lips" at least twenty times over the course of a meal)
- Try escargot
- Go on a mooning spree (definitely not my idea...)
- Free hugs in Place Royal!
- Fill the rest of my notebook

Well, it's a hefty list, but I think I can do it (at least, most of it...). Expect more frequent posting from here on out...it'll be like a live stream of my progress!

Lost in Translation and Looking for a Map (a working title)

Sunrise: 8:39
Vocab:
merde - shit
s'emmerder - to be bored stiff

So, I was in a grim mood when I started writing this blog post on Thursday. Here are some highlights:

Well, we're three days into December and 16 days away from my flight home. It's hard to believe that this is the last full-month retrospective-style entry I will write. I just got home from a horrible oral final at the fac, so hopefully a little bit of solipsistic cyber catharsis will do me some good.

To be straightforward: translation is the theme of this post. Before I left home I had a lot of anxiety related to different issues of translation -- not just language barrier issues, but more intangible personal transformations, too.

Beyond my adventures around Nantes and France, I've omitted a lot of l'essentiel because I have no idea how to capture the ambiance of this place in words. Sometimes I can't resist slipping including the occasional French word in my English discourse because it expresses more completely what I really mean. Instincts -- almost impossible to teach.

But, I give up. My mood has taken a considerable turn for the better and here's what I want to write about: Christmas. Well, to be precise, I want to write about the Christmas market(s) in Nantes. As I may have mentioned, it's been Noël in Nantes since the beginning of November (since, you know, only about 100 of the people in this city celebrate T-giving) and the decorations have been going up all month. I haven't had the chance to snap any photos yet, but it's a must: Nantes hosts some of the most over-the-top, self-indulgent (apparently hyphenated) Christmas decorations I've ever seen...and that includes the enormous wreathes all over Ardmore. Large green garlands and stars made from branches hang suspended between the lampposts around Rond Point Rennes; no one can even see the Place Royal fountain anymore for the Christmas market spiraling around it; Passage Pommeray has turned into Narnia.

To be honest, I'm not a very "Christmas spirit" kind of person. Not exactly a Scrooge either, but I'm not often overflowing with joyous tidings and good will towards men...or who knows...maybe that's just the status quo for me. Either way, Christmas is no big until the 25th. Well, normally. In Nantes, it's hard not to smile when a portly aproned man beckons you over to his wooden booth and greeting you -- "bonjour, les filles!" -- ladles some vin chaud into a small plastic cup. Warmed by your Christmas wine, you start to admire the wares; you start to imagine how your family would look dressed all in those Breton knits; you don't even mind when the merchants try to speak to you in English. Taking a turn through Passage Pommeray, festooned as it is with white and silver, red and purple, your eyes expand to twice their normal size. Then, you exit the passage, and this is where I start speaking in the first person again (I'll keep the present tense, though, I like this sense of immediacy I've got going on).

There's a man there, who I see around often enough. He always wears a top hat and most of his teeth fell out long ago. Today, as most days, he's playing the violin, striking up an inspiring rendition of the Inspector Gadget theme song. Even in the concavity of his face, I can't miss his smile. I'm coming back down from my Christmas high a bit, though. For such a small city, Nantes has a lot of homeless on its streets. Like this man. I wonder where he'll go when it really starts to get cold. I wonder where he goes when it rains. I've wanted to write about him for so long now. He's one of those romanticized derelicts pulled straight out of my imagination -- maybe yours, too -- too ethereal to worry about for too long. He smiles too often for that. In spite of the rain, Christmas in Nantes is a storybook.

We've crested the two week hill, folks. I'm coming home in 12 days. Soon on this very blog: my end-of-semester Bucket List. (NB: Dare me to do something before I leave and I'll try to make it happen!)

Thanksgiving à la française

Sunrise: 8:30
Vocab: avoir le mal du pays - to be homesick

Well, and I will be honest. I've been hard pressed to work up the gumption to write this blog post. Officially three weeks away, my imminent return home has fostered a lot of reflection and not a little lethargy. The Mal du Pays struck pretty hard after Thanksgiving and I needed to spend a lot of Friday locked in my room going on facebook and pretending to be in America. Don't get me wrong, I had an amazing birthday and the food at Thanksgiving was delicious (both to be discussed!), but the distance between me and my friends and family just seemed that much greater when I realized how separate our experiences of this week had been; for me, Thanksgiving was more or less just another day with a fancy dinner at the end, and for them, my birthday was just a 24-hour window in which they had an excuse to write on my facebook wall. Well, maybe that's a bit much, but you see what I mean -- inverse experiences.

I'm eager to get home for Christmas, but my looming departure has also induced a certain amount of clinging; I still have so much left to see and do, it seems, and French friends who I may not see again for a long time once I leave. No question about it, I will return, but it won't be the same. This desire to see and do has not combined well with my approaching finals -- not a lot of work, but more work than I have been doing, to be honest. Mixing two such volatile ingredients in a vessel primed with homesickness has led to lethargy and a generally sedentary lifestyle these past few days. I'm overwhelmed. And thus the W descends again. This is a study abroad blog, after all, and I ought to document every aspect of this experience -- which includes the occasional period of emotional turmoil. During my solitary Friday, I watched L'auberge espagnole, a really fantastic French film with Audrey Tautou (in a role much smaller than and different from Amélie) that follows a young French university student on his year abroad in Spain with ERASMUS. He cries all the time.

But, on to happier things. My birthday was incredible; I was on such a high then that I guess my current crash was somewhat inevitable (again, tragedy?). Turning 21, for some unexplained reason, induced a day of delirious happiness. In between my two classes at the fac, as I was sitting in the open study space in the lobby Censive (the humanities building, basically), I could hardly control my impulse to laugh. Fortunately, that night I found an outlet for all of my suppressed mirth: Nantes Comedy Club. Naturally, it was Angèle's suggestion, and so after my inaugural G&T, we headed over to the show. Well, to make a long story short, it didn't take long for the MC to discover that I was an American student celebrating her 21st birthday, and naturally he started to tease me -- and I bantered back! I don't know what came over me, but I was actually funny, and that discovery was probably the best birthday gift I could have received. Other comedians that night seemed to pick up on my willingness to play with them and to speak in English and French, but the moral of the story is: I have a French sense of humor!

Two days later, it was Thursday, time for Thanksgiving à la française. IES had booked a restaurant out in the middle of nowhere -- on the outskirts of town, if you will -- because they had to find somewhere large enough to accommodate a group as formidable as ours: IES students, French host families, and visiting American parents. Marie couldn't make it because of another obligation, so I was really all alone in the midst of so many families and pseudo-families. Luckily, I found a place at the table with my friend Lauren and her host siblings: Comb, Elois, and Fauste (approximated spellings). Comb and Elois, the two older brothers, are 17 and 15 respectively, leaving their 13-year-old sister Fauste rather at a disadvantage when it comes to teasing. She holds her own though, and the three of them put on quite a show over dinner. I spent the most time speaking with Comb because he is absolutely obsessed with America; no sooner had I mentioned my New York upbringing when he began to grill me with Gossip Girl related questions ("is it really like that?").

I can't say I minded, though. French kids are funny. Most of the ones I've met have been incredibly poised and gracious, good conversationalists, and sharp dressers, but there are always little details here and there that give away how young they are -- the way they fidget when the conversation gets boring, or bite their nails, or laugh too loud. I was lucky to spend my Thanksgiving with such a lively group of siblings. But even these America-fixated, Abercrombie-American-Eagle-Hollister-wearing French adolescents had never experienced Thanksgiving before. I think the menu puzzled them a bit...it confused me, too, honestly, because all of the right ingredients were there, but it just didn't feel like home. The dishes were too polished. Here is what we ate...

The evening started with...how to describe it...I suppose it was something like bruschetta (only monster sized) with roasted peppers and vinaigrette dressing. (Sorry the photo quality is not wonderful; I blame the ambient lighting and my aversion to flash photography.):



After the appetizer came the true test, though -- the turkey. I have to say, I was impressed with my dinde à la française. The perfectly cooked meat was tender and juicy, dribbled over with a cranberry (wine?) sauce that artfully combined savory and sweet. Also on the plate were cooked chestnuts (a recurring theme here that I'm beginning to enjoy) and mushrooms...perhaps an attempt at stuffing. What I really missed though, was mashed potatoes. I guess purée de pommes de terre just doesn't fly in the land of wine and cheese, and each plate came with two measly, scrawny boiled potatos. Alas (oh, but note the red wine):



We rounded out our night of French portions with an insufficient amount of dessert; then again, when the primary confection is pumpkin flan, perhaps it's better to have only a sliver. I've never been a huge pumpkin pie fan, but this Thanksgiving, I finally came to appreciate the art of the pumpkin pie (although, as Garrison Keillor so accurately states, "The best pumpkin pie you eat isn't much different from the worst"). Our pumpkin flan wouldn't have been that bad if it hadn't been for one very out of place spice; we suspect it may have been curry, and I, personally, suspect that they based their pumpkin flan recipe on a recipe for pumpkin soup (a much more common dish in France):



Well and there you have it. In spite of my semi-sarcastic commentary, it really was a lovely meal -- if for no other reason than the company!

Addendum: And how could I forget to mention another amazing birthday present?! I was sitting next to Lauren's host dad at dinner, so naturally we chatted a little bit about my studies and experiences in Nantes. And, do you know what he told me? "You speak French very well. You have no accent." YES!