I had a revelation when I realized I would be writing this entry in hip café with free wi-fi. I’m enjoying a big chai latte looking out at the bustling street of brunch-goers and shoppers. There are some bubbles floating by the cafe entrance and, across the street, a poncho-wearing mouse who’s handing out flyers is talking to a headscarf-wearing canvasser for Oxfam. Collectively, I think they’re trying to tell me something. It’s something along the lines of, “Readers, we are not in France anymore.” I’m pleased to announce that for the HMS Vicky is now based out of Montréal, Québec, Canada.

This week I started my internship at enRoute online, the website for enRoute, Air Canada’s in-flight travel magazine. I’m mostly working on the blog right now but I’m sure the full extent of my responsibilities will reveal themselves in the next six months.

First let’s do a little recap and wrap-up. When I left you, I had just arrived in Strasbourg after escaping Barcelona via Lyon. I had two weeks left in Strasbourg to finish up work, see a little more of the Alsace and say goodbye to my friends. I flew home at the beginning of May and had one week in Toronto to eat all my favourite foods and say hello/goodbye to my friends. My parents and I took a brief trip to Ottawa to attend the tulip festival. My former roommate came along for the ride and helped me fulfill my lifelong dream of going to Zaphod Beeblebrox and having a pan-galactic gargleblaster. My parents and I continued up the 401 where they dropped me off in Montréal. And voila!

I’m still trying to unravel my overall thoughts about France and my time there. Regarding my big dilemma at the beginning about whether to live in Strasbourg or Séléstat, I’m glad that I chose the former. I’m not an expert on the countryside, but in the Alsace it’s beautiful. It’s tiny villages of houses painted in Easter colours dotted around and nestled in between the Vosges mountains. When you drive down le Route du Vin, you drive by each village with only thing a field of vineyards separating you. I feel a tinge of sadness I didn’t have more interaction with the countryside but no regret. At heart, I know I am a city girl but I honestly can’t say what will happen if I have the option to choose the next time.

I enjoyed teaching more than I thought I would but I still wouldn’t want to do it for a living. Would I do it again? Maybe. If it was the right place, the right students and the right time. My students, for the most part, were nice and funny people. They reminded me of myself and my friends at that age but, at the same time, still made great anthropological subjects. Being able to make them do ridiculous things was great. When I think of the time I made each student say “happy new year” in Cantonese or read tongue twisters filled with “th” sounds, I laugh. But then I remember the time a teacher asked me to teach a class on the history of immigration to her Terminal class and I’m relieved it’s over. Life in the teacher’s lounge wasn’t so different from high school. There are still cliques and there are still popular kids. I’ll miss the cafeteria and a certain class of secondes but that’s about it. I will never have such a sweet job again. The kind where you work 12 hours a week and get two weeks of holidays every month and half. Those days are over and people who have never been part of the French education system will never understand it.

I haven’t done at all a good job documenting my working, travel and living experience during this trip for a variety of reasons. Part of it was that I was having an awful time at the beginning. I try to stay away from blogging when I feel like this for fear that it will turn this site into LiveJournal or that it will come off like I’m whining about my life. In hindsight this betrayed the purpose of this blog. While I generally try to keep this blog light, I write to honestly share my experience in other cultures and life abroad. And as lucky as I am to be able to live around the world, there are difficulties and lonely moments that come along with it.

France was difficult because I had the option to integrate for the first time. I had a job and the chance to build relationships with real French people. This was the one country I’ve lived in where I actually spoke the language before I got there. While it was a great opportunity to improve my French (which it did) it came with a good amount of guilt and failure. Speaking a lot of English in our foreigner bubble and not being able to make French friends (at least not ones I spoke in French with) always left lingering feelings of guilt. I felt angry at myself for retreating into the comfort of speaking English and taking advantage of coming to France to improve my English. I didn’t want to be one of those people that hung around at Irish pubs, spoke English with my American friends all the time and wondered at the end of seven months why my French hadn’t improved. In the end, I made French friends who I communicated with only in French but my closest group of friends were other anglophone assistants. Meeting both groups is actually what turned my experience in France around for me.

Presently I face the challenge of improving my French but also trying to understand the Québecois accent. I already feel more intimidated speaking French here than France since the majority of francophones seem to speak English so well. A common anglophone complaint is when locals hear your accent they will automatically switch over to English–something that never happened to me in France. I’m still undecided whether it’s a snub at your language skills or a courtesy to make you more comfortable. Or both. I’ve also realized how big language plays in your personality and identity. As much as I need to practice my French, I can’t exist without at least an equal dose of English. Living in France has shown, or forced me to learn in some cases, that I can deal with everyday things in French but socializing is another story. The task I’m charged for the next six months is trying to find myself and develop my personality in French. It’s a tall order but I’m trying to answer the question of whether it’s question of time or possibility to be yourself completely in another language. Bon courage à moi.

posted by vicky at 7:17 pm under France, Learning French, Montréal, Sélestat
1 Comment

It kind of felt like it was the Armageddon. We were huddled in the windowless kitchen of the hostel–like a bright, unusually cheerful bunker. Everyone sat around drinking, discussing their plans for the future, trading exit plans and information. We were all glued to the hostel’s four computers and our cell phones. In between our frantic clicking and texting, we ranted out loud to each other about the sheer incredulousness of it all. Except there was no fire ball–everyone’s flight got cancelled because of an Icelandic volcano, that’s all.

For the two-week Easter holiday I decided to head to Spain, a glaring omission in my European travels. I started in Granada and continued to Madrid. On Wednesday April 17, I arrived in Barcelona–my final stop before home. In vacation mode, I had no access to a television and was intermittently reading the news. At first it seemed like a few people had told me their flights were cancelled because of some volcano thing but still the full impact of consequences never fully registered with me. I was impervious to that thought I could be affected by it. By Friday I had thought to check my flight from Girona to Karlsruhe-Baden on Sunday morning. Ryanair assured me that while all flights to northern France and northern Germany were cancelled, mine would be okay. I went about my tourist existence without giving it a second thought. Then Saturday rolled around and I could no longer be so high and mighty. All flights to France and Germany had been cancelled until Tuesday. In an instant I was in the same predicament as everyone else and scrambling to find out how to get out and where to stay until I did (if I even could.)

As the sheer size of the chaos dawned on me, so did the plethora of options to get back and their unique difficulties. I was able to rebook my flight for Wednesday but waiting for it meant paying to put myself up in Barcelona until then and risking the possibility the flight could be cancelled again. (Which it was.) But was there any room left in my hostel or any other hostel in Barcelona or had spaces been gobbled up already by travelers whose flights were cancelled before mine? How could I get home short of spending hundreds of euros or spending an entire day on a bus?

Some of these questions answered themselves. The website for the Spanish train system, was fully booked and useless as it ever was. The Eurolines bus system didn’t have any buses leaving Barcelona for anywhere near Strasbourg until the end of the week. Those who had made the trek to the airport, train and bus stations, told me they were flooded with people. I didn’t need another reason to deter me from getting a ticket in person, but not speaking Spanish at least added to my case. I felt like as long as I got across the border, things would be okay. Still, flying was out of the question, work was starting up again on Monday, I had less than 100 euros in my bank account and I had no idea how to get back.

Over the course of my vacation, I had been a little shy to announce myself as a fellow resident to the hoardes of other French tourists but suddenly the French became my countrymen. I heard wafts of French drift up from the lobby while I sat in front of the hostel computer trying to find a solution. I sprang up, figuring that French people must need or know how to get back. I then committed one of my most hated traveler faux-pas: asking someone’s nationality as a conversation starter. But this wasn’t a way to break the ice, this was desperate. That was how I found out the SNCF, the French train system, was still on strike. Two weeks when I left France, they went on strike. I figured it was another one of those random one-day strikes that happen frequently and didn’t even bother to see what regions or routes were participating. After two weeks I had completely forgotten about it.

In a word, I was overwhelmed. The only thing I felt like it was clear I should do was to call my parents and ask them what to do. It was then I realized a few things. The first was that I only had six euros of credit left on my phone and it would be best used to try to find a way back to Strasbourg. A call home was a luxury I couldn’t afford. The second, and more chilling of the two, was that my parents couldn’t help me. Yes, they could give me the money to get out and tide myself over until I could get out. In that sense, I was never in a dire situation but I realized at this moment they couldn’t help me figure out what to do any more than I could. What could my parents tell me about the best way to bus or train back? In fact, I could get myself back faster and cheaper than if they bankrolled all my expenses. I knew better than my parents did and this was weird. So I sent them an email instead.

After spending hours searching for a solution and finding none, I resigned myself to having a drink with my fellow travelers. At the time of going to bed I had found a flight for Wednesday, a place to stay for free for at least one night, a few leads on other ways to get out and other potential free places to stay but no plan. Right before I headed to bed someone asked me what I was going to do tomorrow. I thought for a second and answered, honestly, “I think I’m going to sleep in.”

One of the leads came to fruition the next morning through Covoiturage, a French rideshare website. In broken French, over the hostel clamour, I found a drive from Barcelona to Lyon for 45€ that evening. My drivers were kind enough to offer me a place to sleep at their apartment since we wouldn’t arrive at Lyon until after midnight. This is how I found myself in a tiny two-door car with two French people, an elderly Spanish woman and a Quebecois for six hours. By this time train service had resumed to normal and it was just a hop, skip and five hour train ride from Lyon to Strasbourg.

Maybe I’ve been incredibly fortunate that up until now all my travels have gone according to plan. But now I’m not so sure if that has been a completely good thing. While everyone in the hostel were frantic and complaining, it was a strange bonding experience. As an individual, it was a moment of self-discovery. When things slip out of your control, you find out what you’re made of. Do you break down? Do you sulk and Google for the entire night if you can’t find a solution? Do you resume routine as fast as you possibly can? After close to three years of living abroad and traveling, this experience brought out things out of me I didn’t know I had. Somewhere along the way I picked up how to solve problems and speak French. I can take care of myself and it only took a volcano in Iceland to erupt for me to realize that.

posted by vicky at 6:29 pm under Europe, Spain
No Comments

Wintzenheim – 24/02/2010 

posted by vicky at 12:22 am under Europe, France
1 Comment

Today I finally understood why Albert Camus could write about such length about “the absurd.” He’s French. Of course this revelation came after a dalliance with the Office of Immigration and Integration. The way things work in this country is so preposterous sometimes, it could only be described as absurd. Sometimes the people, offices and bureaucracy make no sense whatsoever. On days when when these things converge and conspire against you, you can’t even feel upset, just numb. And you honestly just can’t be angry at the absurd.

Here is a list of things that irritate me about France:

-A general lack of communication between people/organizations. This is the worst and most evident when you deal with any government-run organization. New laws get passed and the people whose jobs are to deal with the general public have not received or read the memo. Of course, there are always people who are up-to-date and know what their doing but even they will tell you that getting things done or approved is a matter of luck. Different French people give you different answers to the same question. In fact the same person will give you different answers the same question. The official word that is posted on government websites takes ages to trickle down and come into effect in real life. The best people to turn to with your questions are other foreigners. Somehow they are always-up-to-date on new laws and procedures and have experiences to share about how they convinced French people that they weren’t just making these things up.

-The inability to say “I don’t know.” Instead of admitting they don’t know the answer to your question about how to do something or who to see, French people like to send you off to someone else. Sometimes this is done under the guise of telling you this is the person you who can help you. Other times, when it is honest, they send you to the person they think will know the answer. Inevitably, this person will not know the answer, do the same and pass you along. It’s the French version of pinball.

-Everything is more complicated than it needs to be.No one does this better than the French. If I need to deal with bureaucracy, I need to leave the house with every single piece of paper I have to prove my identity and whatever else they feel they need to know about me. Every single piece of paper requires a stamp or another piece of paper from someone else. Why not make it easy for everyone and making ridiculous and irrelevant demands? I complain about red tape in Canada but lately, I’ve found myself saying, “This would never happen in Canada.” It’s a little sad when you grow to appreciate your home only by living through a lower standard elsewhere.

-Opening hours of offices/stores/organizations. If you want to get something done you either need to get up at 8.00 or do it after lunch. The entire country shuts down at 12.00 and does not start up again until at least 13.30. (Sometimes it takes until 15.00 to get going again.) Everyone is on their lunch break except for restaurants, bakeries and some of the bigger stores. Even some supermarkets close for lunch. This collective shut down makes it impossible to run errands during your lunch break. Things re-open for a few hours and only to close between the hours of 16.30-20.30, depending what it is. Most things are closed by 18.00. Naturally, nothing except restaurants and cafes are open on Sunday. And how many times have I showed up at the library on Monday to try and return some things only to realize it’s closed?

-The lack of English speaking people. Yes, I know I came to France to speak French. But when I’m talking to the director of Office of Immigration, it’s not a language exchange okay? I’d prefer things to be clear than to practice my speaking. How do people who don’t speak English get hired for jobs that revolve around dealing with foreign people? It’s a running joke among my roommate (who is on exchange from Spain) and her friends that the international relations officer for their department doesn’t speak English. It’s kind of funny, except not.

-Grèves. Far be for me to tell people they can’t strike but the way the French go on strike makes no sense to me. Workers for the trains, schools, libraries go on strike for a day and then resume normal service. How does this help you get your demands? Yes, I am inconvenienced but too briefly to get really angry about it. The exception happened this week when the cafeteria workers went on strike and German food day was canceled as a result. A few days before the strike, the principal made a cheery announcement about it over the PA and told everyone to bring sandwiches.

In the interest of fairness, here is a list of things I like about France and wish existed in Canada.

-Opening hours of offices/stores/organizations. The fact that the whole country shuts down for lunch is a double-edged sword. It really bothered me at first and does remain an inconvenience sometimes. But there is something incredibly egalitarian about such strictly enforced dining hours. Sure you can’t do anything during your lunch hour, but neither can anyone else. Everyone is required to take a nice, long, unrushed break. I also feel like the principle applies for the month of August when the whole country goes on vacation. The French are on to something with this almost universal vacation time. It’s only an inconvenience if you’re not on holiday with them (i.e. if you’re visiting France from abroad on your own holiday and nothing is open.)

-Overwhelming number of student discounts. If you’re under 26, you’re golden. You can buy a train discount card that gets you up to 50% off. In Strasbourg, as a student or young worker you can get a culture discount card that gets you into the movies, theatre orchestra, opera, museums and concerts for free or super cheap. Unemployed people get discounts too.

-The holidays. The French school system has tons of holidays, many for no apparent reason (at least to me.) So far I’ve had week and a half  off for the Toussaint holiday (October), two weeks for Christmas, two coming up in February (informally known as the French ski vacation) and two more for Pacques (Easter) in April. I will have been on (paid) vacation for two out of the seven months of my work contract.

-The CAF. This is a program that refunds the rent of low-income people. One of the really interesting things is there is no sense of stigma like there is with applying for welfare in North America. They calculate how much money to give back to you based on whether you live with roommates, if your apartment is furnished, how much money you make etc. All students are on it and actually know all the little tricks to get more money back (like pretending you are in a common-law marriage with one of your roommates, regardless of gender.) Actually this entry is tentative in the “like” category and is pending the day when I actually see this money make it into my account. (If ever.)

-Telecommunications. With basically any provider you can get television, internet and a landline for 30 euros. The kicker is you can call landlines in certain countries for free! Canada, United States, Taiwan, Hong Kong, China and all of the EU, aka all the countries where I could ever possibly need to call, I can call landlines for free. Recently, I found out that I can call cell phones for free in North America too, since there’s no distinction in the phone codes between cell phones and landlines. When it comes to cell phones, you’re also allowed to cancel your contract at no cost if you can prove you’re moving to a place where your company can’t provide service. This is unbelievable when you come from a country where a town 20 minutes away with the same area code is considered long distance. Don’t even get me started on owning a cell phone in Canada.

Whenever things aren’t going my way, I tend to blame France, the easy scapegoat. I try to be as fair and realistic about these experiences as possible but there is no denying that the French have their own special way of doing things. If you want the good, you have to accept the bad–merde and all.

posted by vicky at 8:06 pm under Europe, France
2 Comments

Once I get settled into a city, it can be hard to get me to leave it. I attribute it to Torontonian syndrome. This means always paying lip service when friends suggest you visit them in Ottawa or Kitchener, but secretly loathing the idea of taking a Greyhound out there. Those who live downtown are even worse and balk at the idea of getting out to the 905. Somehow this complex has dogged me during my stints living in the Netherlands and Taiwan. But this weekend, for the first time since arriving in France, I traveled outside of the Alsace region. I took two high-speed trains across France all the way to Rennes. Of course it would take a music festival to get me out west and the Transmusicales Festival, or Les Trans as the French call it, was a good enough reason for me.When I decided to do this program, I was convinced I was going to go to Nantes for the longest time. I had met a few Nantais during my travels and was charmed by their friendliness and impossibly cute French accents while speaking English. I thought if they spoke like that in English, if I learned French in Nantes, maybe I would sound like them. However it was not to be and ended up ranking the Strasbourg academy as my number one choice. Since then there has always been a little pang of longing for what could have been if I had chosen to live in the Brittany region instead of the Alsace. Even though the festival was in Rennes and not Nantes, I figured this was my chance to see Celtic-influenced French culture (as opposed to the brand of German influenced French culture over here.)I never cease to be amused by the pride the French have for their home region (or their disdain for Paris.) In the Alsace, people tell me it’s not French at all and the Bretons were only too eager to tell me the same thing. One of my students told me how in “Little Brittany,” they ate crepes and washed it down with cider. Oh cider, I thought, how very English. Here, you will never hear the words choucroute or brezel without the words “regional specialty” following. I know these things as saukerkraut and pretzel (or at least bretzen, since I learned the German word first.) I love how these regional specialties are just things that, for me, come from other countries.

I was surprised to see quite a few half-timbered style houses in Rennes since I thought they were characteristically Alsatian. However the ones in Rennes looked more rickety and purposely historic while Alsace ones are painted pleasant pastel colours and overall have cleaner-looking wood. While I thought living in one of these houses in 2009 was quaint (Sélestat has its share), it’s nothing compared to the typical Breton digs. With the celtic culture comes stone houses and medieval villages that people continue to live in. I took a little excursion to Dinan on my last day in Brittany and it blew my mind that medieval castle is only minutes away from the downtown. I know it’s all perfectly normal to the French but the North American suburbanite in me is still amazed at the idea of growing up with among this kind of scenery.The vibe from Rennes itself was the opposite of old age. I knew its reputation as a student city but was surprised by the extent of it. I had inklings that Strasbourg felt a bit like an old person’s city but going to Rennes confirmed it. Rennes is an anomaly (like the university towns Kingston or London in Ontario) in France because of the disporportionate number of students it has compared to residents. It immediately felt much younger to me as soon as I looked around. There were university students everywhere and the clothing stores were noticeably more interesting to me than the ones in Strasboug. Another thing Rennes has a surplus of is police presence. Around downtown, especially at night, it wasn’t uncommon to see seven carloads of police wearing special protective gear while patrolling. I was told this is normal in Rennes in order to control drunken students when they spill out onto the street after last call. Since it was Trans (which brings in its share of drunken tourists) it was only natural that they beef up the force.

The festival itself was a fantastic atmosphere. It was held at Parc Expo, a collection of airport hangars just outside the city. Each hangar had its own line-up and one hangar was one hangar was a dedciated bar, lounge and water bar. There was a consistent crowd of people who spilled on the tarmac to get fresh air after dancing or to smoke (but those might be the same thing for the French.) The reason that I came to Trans was to see Fever Ray. This tour was the first and only tour for the group and Rennes was the second-to-last show. While I’ve never seen The Knife (and probably never will since they refuse to tour again) seeing Fever Ray was the next best thing. I was so close to the stage I could smell the incense, but not close enough to get a good look at Karin Dreijer, the singer of both bands. The Knife are famous for their stage fright and standoffish ways and seeing Fever Ray confirmed this. Dreijer was positioned half way back on the stage, clad in full on black-and-white face makeup and a witch-like robe. The antique lamps surrounding her and her equally spookily-dressed bandmates flashed while smoke swirled around stage. It was dark, slightly unnerving and great.I only planned on going to the festival for one day but I unexpectedly came into a ticket the night after, the techno night. Commanding most, if not all the of the hype, was Mr Oizo–best known in North American as that fuzzy yellow bear puppet, a.k.a Flat Eric. I was most excited to see the French reception for their homeboy. By the end, I felt we had both come to the same conclusion. The first half-hour was great but it really petered out by the end. Significant numbers of the crowd were leaving and those who stayed was just because it was, well, Oizo. I was pleased that he played “Blood on our Hands” by Death From Above 1979. (It was the Justice remix, for the record. It’s a fine remix but is it mandatory that everything is Frenched up?) At times it felt like he was falling back on the popularity of other bands to keep the crowd interested. How else do you explain playing two Daft Punk songs in one set. The highlight of the set, hands down,  was the sample he made with a robot voice. It gleefully (as much as a robot can be) declared to the crowd that: “Nous avons le grippe A” (We have the H1N1 flu) and “Nous allons tous mourir à Rennes” (We are all going to die in Rennes.) A cheap trick for sure, but it worked. But hey, to paraphrase Morrisey, if ten-tonne truck crashes into us, to die in Rennes, well..it might be a better way to go than in Strasbourg.

posted by vicky at 11:08 pm under Europe, France, Music
No Comments

Two weeks I ago I taught my class before the one-and-a-half week Toussaint holiday. This terminale (the final year of high school) class was the first class I ever taught. It consists of mostly boys who told me about the virtues of pimp rap during our first session together. They were opinionated, funny and pretty good at English so for the next two weeks I looked forward to the vacation and teaching them again. To reward them for being the most animated class, I took printed out the lyrics to “Gangsterz,” a song by English rapper Wiley, blasted it several times and had them play fill-in-the-blanks. This activity meant I got to explain what it meant to “squash the beef” or when “the shells start spraying.” It was an amusing way to end the day, the first two weeks and to send me off on my holiday to London.

My last stop on my backpacking tour last summer was two weeks in London and I absolutely fell in love. After a month and a half traveling nonstop, it was a relief and luxury to have such a long time to spend in one place (especially since I had one friend kind enough to let me stay with her for the entire trip.) This time coming from Strasbourg to London, I felt a culture shock that I never anticipated.

While I’m frequently clueless in France because of a language barrier or the French way of doing things, London makes sense to me but is so big it becomes a mess of logic. The quintessential London experience for me is going through a series of false starts before I finally head down the right road I meant to follow. Londoners are pretty useless when it comes to giving directions. The city is so big even people who have lived there their entire lives plead clueless when asked how to go somewhere. The sheer number of people constantly milling around made me feel claustrophobic. I remember feeling the same way last year but somehow this trip, the feeling was much more intense. Somehow it felt like I had come from the countryside and was being overwhelmed by the city. I had obstained from buying winter clothes in France because I knew I was going to London. When I worked in flagship stores in downtown Toronto, we got people driving from small towns in Ontario and even from Ottawa to do shopping. I had always looked at those customers with amusement and a little pity; travelling so far to Toronto, all just for a shopping trip. And now, here I was, one of those people.

Both times in London I’ve been pumped full of stories by the people who live here about the dangers of the city. Last time it was my friend’s roommate who was off-work during my visit because he was recovering from having his jaw bashed in a pipe in a random act of violence. What happened to him was scary but seeing how much he enjoyed telling the story and watching him smoke weed to cure the pain lessened the impact of his story a little. This time most of my trip with my friend Mark’s apartment in Walthamstow, a borough in northeast London. There I faced foxes running through the streets and in our backyard at night. Bulletholes in windows in windows of stores were pointed out to me during our hurried walks through the streets. I earned the respect and awe of Mark and his roommate when I returned home at 2 a.m. after taking the night bus alone.

Maybe the most bewildering part of my trip was the culture of poverty that exists in London when you look past tourist hotspots of Zone 1. Houses aren’t billed for their gas consumption but instead you top-up your gas credit like a mobile phone. This is why during the first morning of my stay in Walthamstow I had an icy shower and couldn’t turn on the stove to cook. As spoiled and naive as it sounds, the concept of not having credit automatically extended to me is strange. When people here forget or have no money, they just have to do without. Something so basic and essential, like gas, for me, was just always, by some mysterious force, just there.

I regret now not taking any pictures of Walthamstow. It’s the kind of place no one would take a picture of for aesthetic purposes, which is why I forgot. (Apparently, it’s also not unheard of to get jumped for your expensive technology there.) The only reason anyone would is to document what normal London is outside of the glamourous bits. It’s unremarkable, dirty and even ugly. I’ve been told by teachers that my neighbourhood in is dodgy but Strasbourg wouldn’t know dodgy if it got bit in the face by it.

What people will give up and put up with to live in London is both sad and admirable. Surprisingly, living in Strasbourg is slightly cheaper than Toronto. While I don’t earn much or live in luxury, I can live comfortably. People in London pay twice as much as I do for half (or less) of what I have here. After leaving, I could feel already how more culturally alive I felt there. I found myself in an old factory on a Wednesday at what may or may not have been “a dubstep rave.” On a lazy Sunday I sat in on an afternoon of children’s activities at the Victoria & Albert museum. I made my own bejewelled Indian headpiece and followed barefoot women  in saris in a parade around Hellenic sculptures. When I flipped through a copy of Time Out and saw both Morrissey and Brett Anderson (of Suede) were playing on the same night, I really felt like I was at the centre of the universe. I didn’t go to either, but I could have and that felt amazing.

posted by vicky at 8:36 pm under England, Europe, France, Teaching English
1 Comment

Since I arrived I’ve been avoiding the question about what I think about France. Each time I answer, ” I’ve only been here for (such and such time.) It’s too early to tell. Ask me later.” Then one week grew into two, two grew into three and now I’ve been here a full month and I still have no idea. My hesitance isn’t out of politeness, so I don’t have to utter secret grievances. One month has gone by in France and I have no idea where it went.

I’ve spent the last month not having much of a life while I tried to get my life set up. Going to Ikea, making appointments at the bank, buying a bicycle: these were the building blocks I decided were absolutely crucial for the life I was trying to construct. Indeed, I am grateful for my dish rack and being able to bike the library. Now comes the hard part: making friends (foreign and local), learning the language and mustering up the courage to teach a room full of teenagers English 12 times a week.

For the first time in months I’m waking up at 7 a.m. regularly and I’m back to the commuter life. This time, instead of waking up early to catch the bus and subway from Markham to Toronto, I take the train from Strasbourg to Sélestat.The 20 minute train ride is a little deceiving since it’s about 10 minute walk each way to the station (from my apartment to the Strasbourg station and from the Sélestat station to the school), plus buffer time to catch the train. Although I can’t deny that staring out the window at the Alsatian countryside is a little more enjoyable than taking the TTC at rush hour.

I feel completely wiped after a few hours teaching at school, even though I only teach for a few hours a day. I work with nine teachers this semester (which runs until mid-January), teaching 12 classes. About half of the classes are oral examination classes where students read an article or look at a picture and then make a 10-minute presentation about it to me. Usually I’m lucky if they last three minutes. To get them to the 10-minute mark usually takes a lot of prompting on my part. I have ask countless questions about the same boring articles about the economy or the workplace. This is all in an attempt to get more than one sentence at a time out of them so I can fill out an evaluation form.

In the other half of the classses, I actually teach. Teachers send me one-half of their students (usually from 10 to 15 pupils) to my classroom. The following week, I teach the other half of the class the same lesson. This means I see the kids twice a month and really have no idea about their names. I’m not sure what’s worse: being given boring course material (oral exams) or having to come up with my own for these classes. The class I dread the most is the one where the teacher asked me to teach about journalism (since it’s my “area of expertise.”) Being asked to condense four years of university into lessons for French teenagers made me I feel like I was in over my head and slightly insulted at the same time.

Coming up with my own lesson plans is probably one of the worst homework assignments I’ve ever had. Finding things with educational value, a cultural exchange aspect and engaging for myself and the students is difficult but possible. Even if I am lucky enough to have a 17-year-old who does want to speak, usually, inevitably you will hit a language wall. Every day I will meet this expression–the one where the initial excitement to having something to say turns frustration and then to embarrassment while they struggle to find the words. I can only look on and try to coax it out of them by wearing my most encouraging and patient face and offering a selection of my words as to what I think they’re saying. Sitting on this side of the teacher’s desk, being looked at in this way, makes me feel like a fraud. Every time I come see this look, I think to myself in English, I know exactly how you feel.

posted by vicky at 10:14 pm under Europe, France, Learning French, Sélestat, Teaching English
3 Comments

Every time I come home from abroad it feels like no time has passed. My parents are always there waiting for me at arrivals. After a brief, glad but unemotional reunion, we head towards the parking lot. Before we can make it to the car, some kind of bickering will break out between the three of us. I will sit in the front seat of the car, my Dad in the driver’s and my Mom in the back. The radio will be tuned to 680 News, an all-news AM radio station my Dad keeps on to avoid Toronto’s traffic jams. I stare out the window at the highway and stare at the open space as we drive from back home. Once we are home and my bags are laying in a pile inside the house, I sit around and wonder what to do. There’s this unwritten rule that you don’t make any plans on the day you return from a trip. You feel like you should be really tired or decompressing. So I pace our house in the suburbs, like most days when I’m living there, and try to pass time.

It’s only in the following days and weeks do I get a sense of how long I’ve been gone. In time I find stores I’m accustomed to visiting are gone, whole buildings stand fully-formed and new appliances are found around the house. When I catch up with friends and on gossip I realize how far their lives have moved too. After the initial reunions, it’s even more of a game to try and figure out what to do with my time.

The wait is over and I’m flying out tonight to Paris. From there, I’ll take a train out to Strasbourg where I’ll stay for a few days figuring out where I’m going to live. The long and short of my living situation is I’m not any closer to making a decision than when I found out I would be teaching in Sélestat. I went from definitely commuting, to maybe I should live in a small town, to relief/cold feet when the teacher at my school told me I could live in an apartment on campus of another high school, to scouring French housing websites several times a day to find myself some roommates, or colocs. Here I am the day I am about to leave perhaps even more muddled in my opinion than when I began.

Now that I’m on my third big trip away from home, I think it’s safe to say that I’ve established a routine. I can’t go without feeling intense anxiety right before leaving. It’s exactly how I feel when I’m at an amusement park and faced with roller coasters. I run my mouth and try to cajole my friends who don’t want to ride it to change their minds. As the line dwindles down and we’re the next group to be let on, I think “Oh shit, why did I sign myself up for this?” Despite all the good times I’ve had in another country (and on roller coasters) before, I can’t help but quiver a little bit.

posted by vicky at 9:02 pm under Pre-departure, Toronto
No Comments

I’m writing from the Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport (again.) One year ago (almost to this day) I was standing at the Schiphol airport in Amsterdam at the boarding gate. My first signs of dread only appeared when I saw my fellow passengers toting Aritzia carry-on bags and heard the sounds of native English swirling around me. I remember texting my friends with the remaining money on my SIM card, telling them that I was staring at the vessel that would transport me back to my impending fate. After five months on exchange in the Netherlands and two months backpacking Europe, I was ready to go home and face my final year of university. I wasn’t particularly looking forward to it but I wasn’t dreading it, it was just what was going to happen.

I’m leaving Taiwan in two hours and I don’t feel the same way at all. When I left Utrecht at the end of June to go backpacking all the other exchange students were just starting to leave. In August when I went back at the end of the summer to pick up my luggage, it felt like a completely different city. I didn’t mind going back to Canada because Utrecht as I knew it had disappeared.

For the first time I have a few good local friends (natives and permanent expats.) After today, life will go on without me in Taipei. This Tuesday will be the first in about two months where I will not go to Underworld, the bar across the street from my apartment, after the 10:30 p.m. garbage pick-up. On Monday, there will be no class to attend and my classmates won’t sidetrack our teacher from the lesson plan with our bad Mandarin. And once again, I’m finished school.

My final day in Taiwan consisted of packing and a series of three goodbye meals. Seeing my apartment bare made me sad and petrified to leave a place for the first time. It’s strange to think that tomorrow I won’t be woken up by the creeping morning heat or the sound of man driving a cart calling for recycling. When I open the door to leave the house next time, I won’t step in the fray of the Shida night market.

When I think back on my time in the Netherlands, I think of it as a really beautiful time in my life. I miss my friends, the lifestyle and the situation we were in together but it’s not something I could go back to. Going back to Canada feels like I’m headed somewhere cold–literally and figuratively. The random conversations and acts of kindness will be no more and we will all continue to mind our own business and pretend not to notice each other. I never expected that I would have a life in Taipei, much less have one to leave behind, but there it is.

posted by vicky at 3:48 pm under Asia, Taiwan
1 Comment

I’m standing in a retirement home somewhere in northern, rural Taiwan next to a Taiwanese grandma. I met her while hitchhiking at a cemetery and now she’s showing me her family members, clad in full-dynasty wear, in a 150-year-old photograph. A lot of the time here in Taiwan, I wonder if my day can get any stranger or more random. And the answer is always: yes it can. There is actually a very logical explanation for all of this.

It all started two months ago during my trip to Green Island. While my friends and I were at the hot spring, a group of old women were singing a song in Mandarin. I instantly recognized it but knew neither the song or artist. Too shy and my Mandarin too shameful at the time to ask them what they were singing, I wrote it off as a pleasant memory and mystery. Fast-forward to last month when I went to karaoke (or KTV as it’s called here) with my friend Channing, her classmates and a few locals. After a few “gang bei”s, a request/challenge/demand to finish the contents of your cup frequently issued by the Taiwanese, I finally mustered enough courage to hum the tune to a local to find out the name of the song and add it to the playlist.

The song was “The Moon represents my heart” (月亮代表我的心) by Teresa Teng (鄧麗君.) Teng is a legendary Taiwanese pop star and who was popular even in non-Chinese speaking Asia. When she died at 42 from an asthma attack that shocked not only Taiwan but the continent. This song is the kind of song I felt like I have always known and could sing along to despite the fact I couldn’t speak Mandarin until recently. Once I could put a name to the music, the Wikipedia search that followed revealed that her grave was in Chi Pao San, a mountain cemetery, in Jin Shan, a town in Taipei county.  The article said her grave had a large in-ground keyboard that fans could play by stepping on the keys and I decided I had to go.

So Channing and I set out one hot Taiwanese Saturday afternoon to find Teng’s grave. We took the MRT to Danshui, the final stop on the subway’s red line and boarded a bus for Jin Shan. It took us two-and-a-half hours in total to get to Jin Shan, about an hour longer than I was expecting. When we started asking around for directions to Chi Pao San, we were met with of shock and horror. “It’s too far away to walk,” said the woman whose restaurant we ate at. “No buses go up there. You should take a taxi.” Still she pointed us in the direction. We felt anxious and took a stroll through Jin Shan’s night market before deciding what to do. For no good reason I was compelled to buy a bag of lobster chips.

After walking to the edge of the town, we checked with a security guard who reacted the same way and told us it would take another 40 minutes. Despite the discouragement, we pressed onward through the Taiwanese countryside with the sun blaring down at us. The next woman we met told us it would take an hour and a half. The convenience store owner, who sold us a bottle of water further down the road, told us if we would get heat stroke from going. After starting up the mountain we met a man who told us we were on the right track, but it was going to be another hour and a half.

Two hours after leaving the restaurant, we made it to Chi Pao San. Teng’s grave is at the front of the massive mountainside cemetery. As we approached her grave we could hear her music playing. Appropriately enough, the first song we heard was her rendition of “I’m gonna live forever” from Fame.  We were steps away from Teng’s grave a security guard rode up on a scooter and asked if we had walked all the way up. When we confirmed we had walked from Jin Shan, he responded with “pei fu, pei fu” (佩服)–an expression of respect and admiration. We asked if he had any good suggestions on how to get down the mountain that didn’t involve walking. He told us there was an hourly shuttle bus but only for locals. But, he said, if you ask them maybe they’ll let you on.

And so there it was. The in-floor keyboard, a golden statue of Teng, her grave and a small collection of flowers. We had hiked two hours and had reached the promised land. While my mother’s attempt to instill Chinese attitudes and traditions on me has been less than successful, here is the proof it wasn’t completely wasted. You can’t show up to someone’s grave empty handed. You have to bring an offering, usually food. So it only felt right to leave her my lobster chips.

Channing and I were tired from the hike and sat down to wait for the 5 p.m. shuttle down to Jin Shan. Half an hour passed by and there was no sign of it. Darkness was approaching and Jin Shan was still two-and-a-half hours away from Taipei. We made the collective decision to solicit fellow visitors for rides down the mountain. Our first attempt was shot down. We tried to explain our situation to a man who was cleaning off his car while his wife sat inside. He said something in Japanese, which I think amounted to “I don’t speak Mandarin.” On our second try we hit gold. We met Lois, a 30-year-old piano and violin teacher, and her grandma, who only spoke Taiwanese. Lois offered to take us down the hill to Jin Shan but, if we wanted, she was going to go to Taipei after dinner and we were free to join her for the meal and the ride back home. We looked at each other, shrugged and were only too happy to accept.

The ride down the mountain took only about 10 minutes and in another 20 we arrived at Bai Sha Wan, a popular beach nearby. We all sat down for dinner at a restaurant that directly overlooked the Pacific Ocean. Grandma was pretty agitated during the meal because, she said, it was getting dark and she was worried about Lois driving back to Taipei. Channing and I tried to pay for dinner knowing the usual Asian money-shoving match would ensue. We lost and ended up going Dutch. After dinner we drove Grandma back to her retirement home that is run by a convent. Six years ago she decided to move because she was tired of cooking and cleaning and here she could go to church every day. She showed us her five copies of the Bible, each in different languages, that she was learning to read. Grandma hated being in pictures and protested each time Lois suggested it. Still, she always obliged and sometimes even pulled out the peace sign. Lois drove us all the way back to the Shida neighbourhood despite that she lives in Xiandian, on the outskirts of Taipei city.

It’s a little sad when the kindness of strangers is so foreign that it’s actually funny. These encounters always become epic-traveling stories that bring out disbelief in other people. In a way I’ve come to expect this kind of random generosity in Taiwan but I always still feel grateful. Maybe this is just how things work in the friendliest country I have ever been to and this is just another day in the life of a Taiwanese. Or maybe Channing and I are a hilarious story for Grandma to tell to her friends at the home. (It was ridiculous watching Lois introduce us to her friend and at the home. while we stood there like the vagabonds we were.) One thing is for sure, I should just ask more often.

posted by vicky at 6:12 pm under Asia, Music, Taiwan
3 Comments