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?"