“À quoi ça sert d’écrire sur les murs?”

[Paris] “Smile, Laugh, Breathe”

It’s hard to believe that two months have passed since I left France and stepped foot on Canadian soil again. I’ve already spent 6-7 weeks in Montréal as a full time summer au pair, and will resume my position with the family at the end of August for the next school year. As excited as I was to start on yet another new venture, I had a hard time settling in, and accepting the fact that I had to leave behind the country that represented the culmination of all my previous hopes and dreams – of living abroad, speaking a foreign language, and immersing in an exciting, inspiring culture. In fact, I think I hated Montréal for the first two weeks that I was here, it was as big, dirty, noisy, and lacking in charm as I had feared. After time spent in the French countryside, the weather in Montréal seemed dreadful, the humidity was awful and stifling, the pollution was detestable. Even now, I can’t help often comparing everything to “how it is in France.” But it’s not fair to compare, I know I arrived in France with stars in my eyes, France has always been a glowing pinnacle on the towers of my castle in the clouds. So I try to look at Montréal through rose-tinted (sun)glasses and try to be content with being Canadian again.

Recently, I met up again with some friends who had been on exchange in France at the same time, and we couldn’t help but chat over drinks about the things we missed about France – the pâtisseries, the trains, the food, the wine (and wine prices!!), the charm of historical buildings, or the accessibility of travel to other countries…and I started looking through the huge collection of photos taken in France/Italy that I still refuse to delete off my iPhone (hence why I have no memory space for photos in Montréal…). I came across several images of graffiti, street art, window displays or vandalism that had delighted me at the point of their discovery, whether it had been with the brazenness or with the wisdom of their messages, and thought that I would make a post of them, as a way of remembering yet another aspect of France qui me manque.

[Cahors] One of the first photos I took in my first days in Cahors. Shoes thrown over a wire is a common sight back home, and this image made me smile as I realized that some things don’t change just because you cross an ocean and leave one country for another.

[Rue des Soubirous, Cahors] “In your mouth, idiot.” Down the street from where I lived in Cahors, an abandoned medieval structure was boarded up and scrawled upon by some lycéens. The French vocab reminded me at the time of how I was well and truly living in a foreign place.

[Cahors] This one made me realize the extent of English that my potential students would have! (And of their typical teenage mindsets.)

a week of WWOOFing: a city mouse in a country house

If someone had told me a week ago that I would be waking up at 8 every morning in eager anticipation of hoe-ing, planting, blisters, back pain, overexposure to sun and weeding, I would’ve told them to be quiet, because the next episode rerun of my Criminal Minds marathon was starting. But here we are, and here I am, in Lieu-dit-Brouillac, near Sarrazac, France, still in the Midi-Pyrénées. Brouillac is a small “place” nestled amongst sprawling hillside fields and woods, with five houses. The nearest village, as I discovered on a long, meandering walk on my second day, is L’Hôpital St. Jean, whose single church bell echoes over the hills across all neighbouring “lieux” and whose École Primaire has exactly 24 students, one of them being the younger daughter of my WWOOFing host.

The house my host and her family live in is a former sheep stable built of stone, with an even bigger stone barn next to it. A wooden gate hung with a cowbell and the herbal scent of the rosemary bush in the front garden greets the newcomer. Their bedrooms are up a narrow flight of wooden stairs in the main building and have square skylight windows. The guest bedroom where I sleep is in the new extension to the house, with double glass doors that overlook verdure and a stable that is home to two female donkeys, Lilou and Oasis. Every morning I wake up before my alarm clock from the sun’s intense rays shining into my room, and every night I go to sleep listening to the steady chirp of crickets that serves as nature’s soundtrack to planting vegetables all day long. They have three cats (one of whom startled the merde out of me just now by appearing out of the darkness outside, pressing its paws suddenly against the window), several black hens and two black roosters who crow nearly non-stop before nightfall and lead the hens like a clucking gang around the house, in the garden, or in the gravel driveway.

I am WWOOFing for the first time for a woman named Virginie Podevin, and her vegetable “farm” is called “Les Jardins de Virginie.”

last days in Cahors…

♥ One my favourite stalls in the bi-weekly marché, the spice seller! I love how the herbs and spices are individually displayed in rolled down cloth sacks with handwritten cardboard signs…

♥ What’s in season right now? les fraises et les asperges…miam miam!

♥ An infamous and grotesquely fascinating statue of a naked woman (?) near the marché next to the St. Étienne Cathedral…

♥ Une dernière  soirée with some of my élèves…photo taken before too many drinks were had ;) “C’était le feu!” 

♥ A photo on a sign outside le parc Tassart that I noticed was taken by  my friend, one of the English teachers! I was walking by when I happened to see her name under the photograph!   

♥ One last glance down my neighbourhood…my front door was just to the right. Fun fact, the owner of the pizzeria a few steps down told me “je t’aime” the first week I was in Cahors. I didn’t go back for months, haha. 

♥ One last precarious tiptoe on my windowsill for a peek of the Tour des Pendus over the red-tiled roof of the Ensemble Scolaire Saint-Étienne next door, whose students would wake me in the mornings with their chatter and laughter…

♥ Speaking of lycées, one last photo of the Lycée Clément-Marot where I worked as an English assistant.

♥ One last look at the Statue of Gambetta at les Allées Fénelon in the late evening sunlight…The statue was directly across from La Mie Câline, so…

♥ …One last éclair café from La Mie Câline, my favourite! 

♥ One last gaze upon the belltower of Gambetta collège the same evening…same one featured in my friend’s photo above!

♥ Un dernier spectacle…an orchestral and choral concert given by lycéen(ne)s of the Lot department at L’Espace Valentré in Cahors . Many of my students were performing that night, some of them even had solos! Very entertaining and impressive musical displays, and they even played “Le Choeur des esclaves” (Chorus of the Hebrew slaves) from the Verdi opera Nabucco, which I grew up listening to, so it brought me to tears, as it reminded me of my dad.  

♥ One last farewell message…

♥ Mais, c’est pas la fin! I’ll be back one day, Ciao for now! ♥

 

Room Without A View

Out of all my experiences in France so far, the one that I have regrettably appreciated the least has been my living situation. I currently rent a large bedroom that I found early on through Airbnb, and I’ve lived with a woman and her 18-year-old son for the last seven months. Sure, I felt very lucky to not have had to go through the whole business of moving around a lot into temporary apartments, or the stressful search for an affordable place. But, the months of isolation and feeling unwelcome have marred my overall enjoyable experience of living abroad as a foreign teaching assistant.

I don’t like to talk about it, because I want to have rosy-tinted montages in my head of my time in France, and the only reason I feel compelled to write about it at this moment, at 1 in the morning, is because I was in the middle of Skyping my boyfriend at midnight and maybe I was disturbing them, or something, but for whatever reason, without warning, they seem to have cut me off from the internet network completely. Maybe I’m just being paranoid because of my unenthusiastic opinions about them, but I am pretty sure the wireless network is still working, because I can locate its strong signal on my phone and on my computer, but I am unable to join with either device, using the password given to me at the beginning – which has worked recently for other Airbnb guests.

Let me be honest – I was trying to lower my voice! I usually keep pretty quiet! She has only had to tell me once in 7 months that I was laughing too loudly, and I was immediately quiet after that. If I was being too loud this time, no one said a thing. There was no warning whatsoever. If I had been conscious of a problem, I would have acted immediately. So, I don’t know what exactly it could have been, but I find it quite unfair, and I am quite angry now. I think I have a right to be angry, since I am still paying for this room + utilities, and I have always paid the full month, even though I’ve really only lived here 5 out of the first 7 months, and even though I am leaving a week early this 8^th month. Sadly, my feelings towards this imminent event are of anticipated relief and a certain sense of I can’t wait to get out of here. I mean, my suitcases are 80% packed. I could leave tomorrow if I had to.

Perhaps I should have left after the first 3 months, before the blinds were drawn back in my mind, and I was able to get a different view of the situation. But then again, I did not have a full grasp of the situation until it was well into January/February. Essentially, I feel like an unwanted guest who continues to overstay my welcome. Yes, my hostess is nice and well intentioned. But that’s all I ever seem to be able to say about her when people ask me how I like living here. For someone who used to host many homestay students and still hosts Airbnb guests year-round, she should be used to having guests – but maybe that’s all she really prefers – temporary guests who stay for a brief period of time, so she doesn’t have to continue a prolonged interaction with them, or to spend time with them. I had a lovely, now blighted dream about coming to France, meeting a family, becoming close with them, learning to cook from a Frenchwoman in her home, sharing meals and laughs together. The part about coming to France came true, but alas, not all dreams can come true, I suppose.