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I'm being a negligent blogger, but I've decided to give it another (belated) shot before I'm back in NZ again. I'm now in a totally different world, hot and red full of dust and children and noise (although with a similar disrespect for anglo-saxon timelines).
But I'm going to backtrack. Five months is a hard amount of time to spend in a country. It went so fast, but felt like so long. You have your rituals, your little family of friends, your become fluent in Franglais and get used to drinking wine like water and then suddenly it's all gone and wine is expensive again.
The last few months I didn't do a lot of travelling and tried to soak up France, as much as is possible in stubbornly Anglophone-averse French will allow. So we ate a lot of cheese, drank a lot of red wine and explored the city. By November this was made more difficult by the weather when it decided to snow. While the Canadians laughed at how little it was the rest of us, especially the Australians, shivered and slipped and skidded through the ankle deep snow, made a lot worse by the fact that none of it was properly swept up so the bottom layers would freeze into a fatally invisible ice. I would have love to filmed myself walking home through all this. The first night I fell over about five times, spectacularly and on one bit where the footpath was tilted I had to hold onto the fence and drag myself along as the rest of my body made a slippery bid for the road at the bottom of the path. Not a good idea with buses hurtling past.
All of my memories of this time in France involve a lot of wine. I recently bought a diary for 2011 and along with all the useful information normally found at the front of a diary such as international dialing codes the French diaries have the essential table of best wines by region and year. One of the best wines most certainly is not Beaujolais this year or ever, but for some reason it has become a ritual in France to get very excited on the first Thursday at 12.01am in November because this is when the previous year's bottle of Beaujolais is allowed to be uncorked (all bottles in France still use corks making a bottle opener a crucial item in you purse on an evening out). So naturally a huge group of exchange students took a bus to the town only one hour away from Lyon on a Wednesday evening where we hung out in the town filling in time until midnight trying to escape the rain and make friends with the locals. Finally at midnight there was a strange parade, Brazilian dancers, fireworks and a countdown and we all got a first taste of Beaujolais Nouveau which was just as bad as last year's but at least it was free.
We got back to Lyon at 3am and I slept the rest of the day with my heater on high before having to write two essays and two oral presentations before the following week. That was not a fun weekend but after my last presentation on the following Wednesday we celebrated by descending en masse (see my French there) to the English screening of Harry Potter. I can handle movies in French, I may not understand them, but I can handle them, but I really didn't feel like watching 'Arry, Ron and 'Ermione going to Sng?
After that week of assignments I avoided doing any work as much as possible which was a bit of a problem with exams coming up. Luckily some of the exams were not very challenging, read: a bit of a joke. My favourite was my French 'exam'. While seven of the other classes practiced for their three hour tests, often accompanied by twenty minute oral presentations, we sat 'un petit test' consisting of 20 multiple choice questions and then celebrated our hard work by eating and drinking between the twenty-five of us 13 bottles of wine (I counted when we cleaned up). My awesomely cool French teacher who I still miss, shocked at how freely we spoke French after a few glasses of wine commented she should have allowed us to drink at every class.
Afterwards the weirdness continued as we went to a nearby bar with a group of lecturers, none of which were actually mine. They then invited the few of us that remained to a nearby restaurant, which was all a bit weird. The exchange student coordinator a woman old enough to be my mother is clearly my age at heart, Chantal, invited me, my friend Lucy and a Texan guy called Brian to her house for dinner. None of us were sure whether she was actually serious until an email turned up two days later setting a time and a date.
In the mean time I sat four more exams, attempted to spend as much time as possible with all the friends I was about to leave, and spent three freezing but beautiful night wandering through the city for Fete des lumieres. This is a three day festival that I had never heard of but, apparently, is very well known given that the amount of visitors each year exceeds the population of my entire country. But it was three of the coolest nights of my life. It was asthough I had stepped out of the already pretty Lyon centre and into a fairytale. You wander though the crowds of people buzzing with excitement and suddenly stumble across giant lampshades, a levitating moon, vines growing out of the walls or, my favourite, a dancing theatre, all created with lights. The last night of fete de lumieres I walked through the city for nearly 12 hours, up from Bellecour, through the traboules, secret passages used during the French resistance, to Croix Rousse for dinner, then back down into the city, up to the Basilica, filled with people and candals where there is a spectacular view of the city, down again to Bellecour and up in the huge ferris wheel for another spectacular view this time right from the centre of the city. Then we met up with friends who showed us this artsy Indie but not pretentious bar in the Croix Rousse that played 60s music and that I really wished I had not waited until my last week to find.Then me and Beck finished it all of by catching the last metro, having to change lines three times and run like crazy for each one of them.
So by the time our dinner party rolled around the next week I was exhausted but despite the fact it involved me getting up sleep deprived and a little hungover at 6.30am for my French law exam at 8am the next morning, it was worth it. Chantal cooked us amazing food and plied us with cigarettes and wine and we talked about anything and everything in French all evening with her and her partner.
But the next day was not fun. Apart from the exam, which went surprisingly well seeing as my French law teacher's English grammar was not her strong point meaning many of her question were incomprehensible ("Jean borrowed 100euros to Jacques…"). But then I had two days to say a lot of goodbyes, get a few hours sleep, pack up my apartment, face the inspection by my platinum blonde arch enemy Nathalie ("dit-moi jeune fille") and get to Paris. The last, just, turned out to be the hardest. It was snowing all over France and in French style, everything was delayed. My train was on time but no one else's was so the train station was chaos. Complete chaos. Getting my pack, suitcase and laptop through a tightly packed crowd about 10 metres wide trying to get up one escalator less than one metre wide was not easy. Neither was getting off the train at the other end in Paris and figuring out the Parisian metro which at 14 lines (plus the RER lines) was a little more confusing than the 4 I was used to in Lyon.
The next three days I spent in Paris, city of lights, my favourite city in the world. I love Paris and I love it even more since living in France. This is because of how it compares to the rest of France. The people are friendlier and their automatic response to my questions in French (which no matter how strong my accent must be or how imperfect I am, cannot be that wrong) is not "quoi?" Everyone is not stick thin, the still all look sophiscated but a small amount of individuality is permissible in their fashion, things are open on Sundays and, most importantly, public toilets are beginning to catch on. What's more these public toilets are free and self-cleaning. This can be a downside however when it is -7 degrees outside and three people each need to wait five minutes for the bathroom to clean itself. The electronic door, like the rest of the country, had to close at the speed of about 1 inch per second. So we each had to stand awkwardly stand there looking out on the street waiting for it to close and give some much needed privacy. It was a weird feeling, sort of like being beamed up by an alien spaceship on the snowy streets of Paris but no where near as weird as I'm sure it would have felt to get stuck in the bathroom while it was selfcleaning (something easy to do, Ruben nearly did) which a friend of ours apparently did. "What was it like?" "Very wet".
It is strange being a tourist in a country you've been living in. Everything is familiar, the brands, the language, with the added exception that you can watch all the other tourists just off the plane struggle with the French which you now smugly feel you can handle (until you get another blank face when you ask a simple question). But Paris is bigger and fuller and more beautiful than the rest of France. It really does have everything except decent systems for dealing with snow. We learnt this on my second night and Jen and Ruben's first as we tried to warm up our frozen feet enough to convince them to go back out of our hostel to look for dinner. We finally did but the problem was food was up from us on the same hill as Montmatre which anyone who has decided to walk to Sacre Couer knows is a hill to rival Baldwin Street. Covered in ice, this posed some problems. We had to link arms and grab on to door handles, cars, anything firmly planted on the ground and climb up it. Getting down was even more fun.
I walked around so much in those three days that I felt like I had been there about a week. I went to all the old sights I'd seen when I was younger to see them with new eyes, I wandered through districts of Paris just to follow in the footsteps of Picasso, Hemmingway, Edith Piaf and even Marion Cotillard (I'm officially a stalker, I had read in an interview what part of Paris she lives in). But I think the weirdest walking we did was through the catacombs. We lined up, walked down underground beneath the metro, beneath the plumbing to old mines where it was surprisingly warm and with a path made up by bones stacked up against the walls on either side. Since my cave experience I am not at my most comfortable in dark enclosed spaces especially surrounded by 10 million skeletons. This was not helped by Ruben hiding in a dark corner and jumping out at me. Apparently there is a 60 Euro fine that has to be regularly handed out to people who sneak in at night when it's closed. Why you have to have a fine to deter people from doing that I don't know.
But hands down my favourite experience in Paris has to be my first night there. I was exhausted but my Italian friend Alessandra had asked her friend who lives in Paris to show me around so she offered to show me round at 10pm that night. It was snowing hard and as we walked through the traditional tourist meccas of Place de la concorde jardin de tulieries and the Louvre completely deserted, quiet and still except for the snow raining down on us. It was like a dream world and a far cry from the noisy crowded camera toting tourist filled area I walked through the next day.
After three nights in Paris I had to say goodbye to Jen and Ruben and to France and haul all my bags back through the complicated metro, through the complicated train station into the complicated airport which was chaos, 70% of flights had been cancelled. But luckily my flight was going and barely even delayed. Although getting to Doha was a different story. Because of all the delays in Europe Doha airport was full of people and to be in transit in Europe you have to re-go through security (they quite sensibly don't trust security at the French end). My flight was boarding as I arrived two hours late in Doha so I had to push through an entire hall through of people squashed together all of whom kept telling me their flights were leaving in the next hour too. Yes but mine's leaving now I had to keep yelling. But I made it to Nairobi only three hours late right before David and Charity were going to give up waiting for me. But this blog is definitely long enough so the past two weeks will have to wait for another day.
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