« Voici ce que j'ai pensé : pour que l'événement le plus banal devienne une aventure, il faut et il suffit qu'on se mette à le raconter. C'est ce qui dupe les gens : un homme, c'est toujours un conteur d'histoires, il vit entouré de ses histoires et des histoires d'autrui, il voit tout ce qui lui arrive à travers elles ; et il cherche à vivre sa vie comme s'il la racontait. Mais il faut choisir:  vivre ou raconter. »

                                     JPS, La nausée

Life During the Last Six Weeks

It's been a while since I've written for this blog, but not for lack of material, adventures or time spent thinking of home. For three solid weeks a tremendous wave of rain and indignant wind has blown through all of France, forcing old metal pieces that held back shutters on castle walls for 200-years and tree branches that held up leaves for almost as many seasons to succumb to it's brash and petulant persuasion. With the exception of a few humid half-days of blue skies and sun, a welcomed, if brief, reprise of the wonderful early spring we had in Brittany in March, this relentless blowing brings us (as I write this, tomorrow) the second and final round of the 2012 French Presidential elections, and the last month of my 8 months spent in Europe. It's a troublesome wind, but it brings with it exciting things.

...

Since last I wrote I have spent four of the previous six weeks on the road. The two weeks in there not spent traveling were witness to my last two weeks of work at Lycée-College Brocéliande, split by a two-week spring break: during the second and third week of April, I passed my time divided between Stockholm, Sweden and Paris. Concidentally, one Everett "You're out of your element" Cislo's spring break within the German colegiate system fell exactly in line with my own and I was able to spend the first half of break with him and our dashingly Scandinavian host, Will "is a very straightforward guy" Jonsson in his swanky downtown Stockholm apartment. Unfortunately, just before I arrived, Will was taken ahold by what the French call la grippe and what I like to call that exotic, variable kick-in-the-teeth of an unconstant and mercurial mistress called, Influenza. Disdonc, thusly, therefore I was greeted at the Arlanda Airport not by my two strapping young friends but by Everett and a large, bearded Swedish man with Will's same Swedish head and was promptly swept away to the world's first IKEA to help Will's father acquire lots and lots of new furniture for his new apartment.

Welcome to Sweden, here's an IKEA.

After that first afternoon of good ol' fashioned heavy lifting to invigorate the ol' bones after a 3am awakening earlier that day, the rest of my week-long stay in Sweden's capitol was one of the most relaxed vacations I've ever had. During Will's brief stay in SickLand Everett and I explored Stockholm and started off a week of many museum visits, lots of cooking and many naps. Soon enough, our big blond Swede got good and healed and we were able to take on Stockholm as a trio. Waking up on my last day, we were to find all of Stockholm covered in a very wet and thick layer of snow, street sweepers equipped with tiny plows clearing intermittent sidewalks of 5 inches of slush so that the city was somewhat walkable.

I returned to Paris with no real plans for my second week of spring break except to meet up and hang out with Robbie and Alexis and the other American students who were residing in Paris for Evergreen's biennial France study abroad program. I stayed at a friend-of-a-friend's smoky and small apartment near Pigalle and spent most of that week doing a whole lot of nothing. I did, however, participate in some of the program's museum visits and outings, and hung out with the few students in that group that I knew already and met a few more. Among the visits I tagged along on was a concert of polyphonic choir and medieval music at Notre Dame de Paris, an intimate but breathtaking performance marked by reverberation and grandeur, and which left me somewhere between the quiet verge of tears, sublime ecstasy and a hearty, welcomed pain. It was something that took me by surprise in a way that I almost intellectually anticipated but for which I was not ready emotionally.

...

The French Ministry of Education divides the country into three or four zones so that all-of-France-with-kids doesn't go off on vacation at once. This year the académie de Rennes fell within Zone A, meaning, regardless of the fact that my contracted ended with the month of April, I was left with only one last week of work after the return to classes. My last week of work as an English language teaching assistant fell in line with the first week my father and Kathleen were to visit France, and so I caught a ride with them from Paris back to Guer. My last week in the classroom went by wonderfully. Half of my lessons were spent eating snacks the students had brought and saying goodbyes, with a little English game or two on the side, and the other half was spent with a strong lesson that ended in a sing-a-long with me on acoustic guitar, singing Katy Perry's "The One That Got Away" with a bunch of French 16 year-olds. That happened.

Near the end of the week, during one of the rare moments when the clouds broke and the sun peeked out its little head between spouts of pouty rain, a group of students gathered around a few acoustic guitars in one of the school's courtyards and I was invited to play. Since I was between classes, I obliged and played to a group of my 2nde students. After I had run through the few songs I knew by heart, I encouraged the students to play and a mini concert unfolded as more and more students gathered around. It was a great little spontaneous moment and would become one of my finest memories of the end of the school year.

Meanwhile, for my dad and Kathleen's stay in Guer I managed to set them up in a small château outside of town, owned by a family who is friends with a colleague of mine. While I worked during the week they went out on day trips to Mount Saint Michel and Josselin, and days that I had off we went to visit Quimper and the megaliths at nearby Monteneuf.

Back in Paris now, I leave at the end of this week for a month-long trip through Belgium and the Netherlands before I head back to the States at the end of May.  Although all of my things are packed away in suitcases and I'm currently living out of a backpack, it has not quite hit me how fast this has all happened.  It's a strange feeling, this one, and I don't yet know how to categorize it--it is analogous to the unease and unwanted anticipation that occurs the last few weeks of every summer at camp.

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As I wrote to a friend at the end of March, seven months spent in France is a long time, especially if we frame it within the academic calendar; the same that has seen my previous four years split between nine months spent in Olympia and the subsequent three spent in Northern Michigan. In reality, though, I will have not even seen three full seasons in France, let alone all four in Washington, Michigan or anywhere else in the last five years.  Yet seven months in Guer has been a formidable, grounding experience that has brought me both growth and fortitude, kindness and humility, offering time for reflection and much letter-writing--genuine is a word I want to use to describe this experience, avoiding at all costs the word authentic. During my time, I met real, genuine people, real teens, real teachers who were willing to let me be a part of their lives, some more than others, who drove me places, listened to my lessons, shook my hand, taught me how to follow a low kick jambe arrière with a single-leg takedown. There were real conversations with interested people and real families who let me sleep on their couches and talk to their kids and eat their food. As I get more and more deeply embedded in this language and culture, seven months feels like nothing. Seven months is a vessel, a yellow bird. Seven months is just long enough to present an accurate enough caricature of what a more permanent life here would be like. I wonder what will bring me back, and for how long.

P.S.
Thanks to all the friends and relatives who kept in touch via mail. It was a real highlight of my stay.

It's already March?

"You can be so lonely living your life where you never go outside of five miles from where you live. For me, traveling all of the time doesn't mean that you get to experience something new all the time. It means that you get to experience your same old self, with some different outer stuff around you."
--Matt Johnson, St. Vincent tour video #12

Gosh golly gee boy oh boy has March really snuck up on me! Let’s just say the first two months of 2012 have not been dull.

I realized the other day that one of the reasons my January and February flew by so quickly is that I was not in Guer for three of those eight weeks. After the big move to our new apartment during the first couple weeks back from the holidays, my two roommates and I, along with 7 other chaperones and one hundred screaming sixth graders, spent one week in mid-January in Ancelle, France, about 100km south of Grenoble, on the middle school’s annual class de neige—an exhausting but overall gratifying experience that allowed for (necessitated?) much yelling—arrêtez de courir!!!—and resulted in a hoarse voice and a cold, but also two child-free hours each day to ski the French Alps.

Ancelle

Less than one short month later was another break, this time what I’m calling mid-winter break, from mid- to late-February. The first of this two-week vacation was spent sightseeing in Paris and Brittany with my mother, the newly dubbed Harriet. In Paris, we visited the Catacombs, ate brunch at a vegetarian restaurant near the Bastille, took on both the Louvre and Musée d’Orsay, stalked around Montmarte and Sacre Coeur, watched the Eiffel Tour light up at night, witnessed a manifestation and, over nothing particularly hilarious, lost our proverbial shit on the Metro—in short, all the things we should have done. Taking our assets west, we rented a car in Rennes and spent the next few days exploring choice spots in Brittany, including the 4km of 5,000-year-old megalithic alignments at Carnac, as well as the always majestic Mount Saint Michel.

Breton Graffiti

Chapel at Mount Saint Michel

The second week of this vacation, of course, was the notorious Troutslayer German Roadtrip of 2012. Planned over two group Skype sessions consisting of nonsense and logistics about 72 hours before it was to happen, this now legendary voyage saw the convergence of four opposite but attracting forces: one Swedish pre-engineering student who chose bros before ones and zeros, taking a flight to Germany and skipping presentations and math classes like any respectable truant would (exhibit no. 1 when keeping it real goes right); one American photo-journalism major and accidental German business student originally from the land of horse racing and bourbon; one free-spirited traveling hoopmaster of Engineering, recently off a trip to the Middle East and southern Europe; and yours truly, Frenchified English language assistant living in the French rural west, amid farms, the pork industry, clouds and more clouds. The four of us united in Munich, where we rented a car and set off on a seven-day roadtrip from Munich to Nuremburg to Berlin to Dresden and then back to Munich. In order to keep this short and confidential, I’ll just say the trip involved lots of Bavaria’s favorite brewed beverage, lots and lots of pretzels (and a few of these glorious, glorious creations), lots of jokes, constant motion, the most informational three- turned six-hour walking tour of Berlin—covering 17^th century Germany all the way through the Cold War—to ever happen, and much more. I would elaborate, but it would probably just confuse matters. Didn’t you learn anything at the Deutsches Museum?

Nigel, the tour guide

And now here we are. The last two weeks have been pretty great overall. I am still really enjoying my MMA class, my classes have been going well (lessons on St. Patty’s Day and Irish heritage) and life is going by smoothly. Oh, and as my time here in Guer is dwindling, it looks like I might have been conscripted as a last-minute replacement chaperone for an 8^th grade trip to Wales later this month. Life’s not so dull after all.

On England

Months later, the things I remember the best from the short trip my brother and I made to England over the Christmas holidays are home cooked meals and English tea, the warmth of strangers' hearths and the chaos of the organ and the bells. The next thing that comes to mind is the phrase, “we have walked and tubed the shit out of London today.”

Boarding the small airplane that would take us from Rennes to Southampton, we took to the air like privileged time travelers, climbing up a small flight of stairs directly off the runway. Time travelers, because having left Rennes at 16h20 we would arrive in the land of tea and crumpets, dry humor and wet fog, at the very same time; and privileged, because we felt privileged to be traveling to a land where the people speak English!

After our arrival in England and reunion with my friend Cheryl, our generous, intelligent, beautiful and masterchef host for the holidays, the short drive from Southampton to Salisbury was spent catching up on the last couple months of our respective lives since one sad Sunday morning in September when Cheryl naively offered up, “Hey, you’re going to be in France all year, right? You can spend Christmas in England with me and my family!” On the part of my brother and I, this short trip was also spent cringing at the surely impending death of every left turn.

. . .

Midnight Christmas Eve mass at Salisbury Cathedral ended with an explosive and drawn-out organ solo that seemed to shake apart the quiet solace that had reigned over the entire ceremony. Rather than a frightening or unholy outburst after a pleasantly well-executed ritual, the organ’s chest-vibrating, dissonant blossoming was, for me, an exuberant and mercurial celebration of the comedy of life. A few days later, London’s Westminster Abbey would ring out in a similarly absurd Dionysian burst of laughter, filling tourists’ diaphragms and the early evening air with an overlapping and revelrous symphony of bells that would reign over the Thames for no less than eleven minutes. In the same way, two months later, the uncontrollable laughter of a mother and her son would fill an entire metro car with the stifled sounds of attempted discretion at the simple uttering of the name, Harriet.
(EDIT: "I realized that if my body broke, I would break into blossom")

. . .

« Où se trouve la beauté ? Dans les grandes choses qui, comme les autres, sont condamnées à mourir, ou bien dans les petites qui, sans prétendre à rien, savent incruster dans l’instant une gemme d’infini ? » // "Where is beauty found? In the big things which, like all others, are condemned to die, or rather in the little things which, without pretending a thing, can embed in one moment the gem of the infinite?"

December Holidays Part 3: belated belated belated

At 10:15am on Wednesday December 21^st my brother and I were climbing the 400-some steps that spiral to the top of the southern tower of Notre Dame de Paris. Having made our way through the rainy winter morning to the center of the city, we led ourselves up through the narrow and damp staircase, keeping an eye out for especially ancient graffiti. There, the old stone steps are the color of aged paperback volumes and, like stacks of forgotten phonebooks warped by the weight of time, gravity and moisture, they are each sagging or wilting or drooping at the center, gone limp from the weight and the wear of 800 years of tourism and devotion and shoes.

Tardy in our attempt to break convention and beat the (other) tourists to visit the inside of the cathedral, we made it just in time to get a good spot in line to climb the tower (once before when I lived and studied briefly in Paris, I was one of the few students in my program to actually follow the instructions of our professor on a certain day when we were to be at Notre Dame by eight in the morning. Among the hush and the dust of the pews I sat and wrote an assignment in French about sanctuary and thick stone walls and time-outside-of-time; the cathedral smelled vacant and idle). Through the fog of the morning we took in our first view of Paris as a whole entity, the Eiffel Tower’s upper third hidden in a low mist. By the time we made it to tour the Cathedral’s interior, it was busy sight to behold and the nativity set up had a strangely cheap feeling.

That day, we had lunch in the Latin district at a Sicilian restaurant with very good pizza (maybe the 2^nd best pizza I’ve had in France) and with a very unfortunate name (Pizza Roma—come on, bra. Way too easy.) From there we went the Pantheon, where France’s national heroes are buried, one of my favorite sites to visit in Paris. As I tried to explain it to Jay, if Notre Dame is the cathedral of catholic France, the Pantheon is the church of the French Republic. Although we have the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington monument to represent our nation’s mythic past, the reason why I love the Pantheon is because it is a monument to the idea of the Republic. France has any number of more illustrious or ancient monuments to represent its thousands of years of Gallic history, but it is this building—once a neoclassical church dedicated to Paris’ patron saint St. Geneviève—that houses the country’s memory of the idea that people could rule themselves.

Standing before La convention nationale, I once wrote:

In 2000 years human beings or aliens will find the autel républican in the ruins of the Panthéon in an abandoned Paris, and they will have forgotten the French language. A woman will uncover the Rosetta stone of what will become a resurgence in interest for old European languages and these beings of the future will read the block letters engraved on the autel, VIVRE LIBRE OU MOURIR. They will look into the decomposed and cracked and blank eyes of Marianne and they will see the unyielding gaze of a goddess holding a broadsword—a powerfully serious visage in the midst of ruins—and they will ask themselves in reverence who the people were who worshiped at this alter of stone, and freedom.

We spent that evening exploring the Christmas markets on Monmartre. Along with lonely tourists and the standard groups of loud drunk men wearing tracksuits, we drank whiskey and coke on the steps of Sacre Coeur, taking in the twinkling lights and the Eiffel Tower’s upper third obscured in a low mist. The next morning we would arrive in Rennes by carpool, and after two days exploration of one of my favorite small cities, take an hour flight back in time to England, United Kingdom.

p.s. fucking formatting.

December Holidays Part 2: A Short and Probably Heartwarming Reunion, a City at Night and Metro Mice

In trying to write this belated and multi-part Christmas epic, I’ve learned something about myself: for some unholy reason I do not have the brain capacity or energy to write during the workweek. Hello, weekend. Kind of.

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While I was working on sentence equivalence and high school-level geometry questions in a cubicle on the second floor of a Rue St. Honoré office building, mere blocks away from the Louvre and the river, in Paris’ 1^st arrondissement, my older brother Jay was arriving at Charles de Gaulle airport, and into a land of foreign words and names. Armed with but an iPhone and heroically intermediate German skills, he managed to successfully navigate the RER from the airport to the city proper and then the metro to our Paris hostel. What’s more, while waiting for me to finish my test, the little bugger got sick of watching American basketball in the hostel lobby (weirdest/classiest hostel I’ve ever stayed at) and decided to venture out and find the Eiffel Tower, red Canton Basketball duffel in tow. Despite it’s intrepid hide-and-seek skills, he managed to find the large metal tower (relic of the 1889 World’s Fair as much as the modern need for radio and television transmission), snap some photos and witness a French-Algerian military ceremony at les Invalides, quite possibly featuring Zinedine Zidane.

After I finished my test, I arrived at the hostel before Jay had made it back. I didn’t have to wait long, though, before he and his large red appendage walked through the door, and after a short and probably heartwarming reunion scene, the dogs of war were officially let slip upon Paris. But not before a well-earned nap.

After we both had some time to rest up, we made a plan for an informal jaunt around town and struck out into the night. Snaking our way underground, we emerged from the metro at Rue de Rivoli and made our way through the eastern entrance of the Louvre.

Having successfully admired the Pyramids and l’arc de triomphe de Carrousel and just how huge le palais du Louvre really is, we continued on along the river, hunger growing ever slightly as we swallowed up the city lights. We were aiming for my old district, nestled between the hip and gay and the Jewish districts, and for the apartment I briefly rented on Rue de Guillemites. Smaller than most modest living rooms, and bereft of hot water for half of our stay, for me and three classmates that apartment served as our point of access into the city’s Dark Romantic corners, when we lived and breathed and studied in Paris for an intensive month in the spring of 2010. On our way, Jay and I ran into a pleasant surprise at my old metro stop, where the city had installed an ice rink in front of sparkling white lights hanging from the Hôtel de Ville. Convinced I was just winging it, I was surprised at how easily I found my way through the narrow, cobbled streets which I hadn’t visited in nearly a year and a half. Soon enough, I was able to point through scaffolding to the windowsill—on which we spent many a spring afternoon perched—that I briefly called my own.

At this point I think I can very reasonably say that—after hours of walking and sightseeing, combined with the weight of jetlag pushing down on Jay’s shoulders and the fatigue of a four and a half hour standardized test weighing down mine—the City of Lights had burned such a wandering hunger through our eyes, down into our stomachs, and up and to the left to place a flaming hot grip so strong upon our collective Fleischmann soul that only the falafel most beloved by both Lenny Kravitz AND Celine Dion could quell the demon-child grumbling within our visceral parts. Dramatic much? I think not. After that completely sensible and not ridiculous sentence, let me just say that it’s not every day that you get to eat the most glorious falafel in the history of the world. Just sayin’.

After satisfying the basic human necessity to eat, we got a quick café at a nearby bar and walked ten minutes to l’île de la Cité and Notre Dame.

Trying to let sink in the idea that it’s almost Christmas regardless of the lack of cold and snow and family, we sat and admired the giant stone building, with it’s 20 meter Christmas tree and lit up façade, and decided to grab some drinks on the other side of the river. A few hours later, without an exact idea of when the metro stops in Paris on a Wednesday night, we tried to head back to the hostel and spent the next half hour waiting, and then running up and down the metro stairs in search of phantom trains--feinted by ventilation fans--our only companions the five mice who called that station their home, and an electronic sign telling us a train was coming, eventually. That night, we took a taxi home.

Tomorrow, we would be among the first to climb to the top of Notre Dame de Paris, we would visit of the graves of France’s most honored dead at the Panthéon and we’d watch the glimmering lights of the city through a gray and misty winter haze from the steps of the basilica of Sacre Coeur.

December Holidays Part 1: Today, Early Vacation, Fumes

These next couple posts have been a long time coming. It’s been difficult turning them out.

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As I sit in a very newly renovated apartment, with double paned windows and white washed walls that reiterate your every sung conviction back at you, distracted by the TV my roommate is laughing at and by music on YouTube, I’m noticing how much has happened in my life since the 14^th of December, one month ago today.

My last couple days have been unique in their tumultuous own way: hectic and dull, still and dynamic, stressful and then relieving. With unrestricted internet access for the first time in almost four months, with no GRE to study for and with the feeling of Winter finally settling in around me, my weekend, to start, has been overloaded with information, and uninspired. Finally settled into the new apartment, I woke up this morning with the idea to photograph horses, and the muscles on their necks, firmly planted in my head. I feel as if I’ve emerged from the sort of seclusion of a wooden cabin in the forest, which was coldly disguising itself in the dull masquerade of a fourth floor apartment atop a solid concrete design, white and dusty and white, to find myself in a setting of very similar aesthetics, but now with neighbors and a television connection, a shower with a door and a meter missing on one side. We'll get to how I got here later.

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The December holidays started two days early at Lycée-College Brocéliande when a fuel line broke somewhere within the heating system of our building, Building C where the male boarding students also live. Our apartment was flooded with gasoline fumes, and my brain was flooded with a chemically induced daze. Suddenly caught up in a very real and stressful fog, worsened by the fear of potential consequences for the then-fast-approaching GRE, I avoided my apartment for days and stayed at colleagues’ homes the following weekend, trying to get in last minute studying before my GRE on the following Tuesday. After a reassuring and comfortable couple of nights at the home of an amazingly accommodating friend and colleague named Joanne (the antics of 10-year old son and 5-year old daughter included in the experience for free), I set off for Paris on 19 December, a Monday.

My means of transportation from Guer to the big city was arranged through my favorite pragmatic website, covoiturage.fr: a carpool with Gilles F, a recently divorced, middle-aged man of somewhat conservative political beliefs, fitted with a graying buzz cut and glasses that frame fairly gentle eyes, who, by either profession or pastime (throughout the whole five hour car ride I was never quite certain which), is an avid historian and family history enthusiast. He was an extremely chatty man, who let me have my say but seemed perfectly content to share his own stories and, in the intervening silences, to pose me questions with an air of polite interest.

Arriving in Paris by mid-afternoon, Gilles dropped me off at l’Etoile, that crazy, crazy thing that encircles the Arc de triomphe and which some people might be inclined to call a roundabout but rather reminds me of pictures I’ve seen of city streets in southeast Asia, swarming with mopeds and motorcycles and humanity, and I sent a text message to my roommate that read something like, “j’suis à Paris. putain, les touristes.”

I stayed at a hostel in the 9th with a summer of love, rock and roll, Beatles kind of theme and, accompanied by a short novel named after the city of Rome, ate a dinner of gnocchi served by a quietly flirty waitress at a pizzeria down the street. The next morning I took the dreaded 4-hour exam that has occupied a medium-sized space in the back of my head since no later than September, and as I pushed open the glass doors of the testing center, said a big fucking "hello" to vacation.