Once I get settled into a city, it can be hard to leave–even for a visit. I attribute it to Torontonian syndrome. This means 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 going up to the suburbs. Somehow this complex has dogged me during my stints living in the Netherlands and Taiwan. I’m always torn between discovering the rest of the country or getting to know your city better. 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, was a good enough reason for me.
When I decided to do this program, for the longest time, I was convinced I was going to go to Nantes. I had met a few Nantais during my travels and was charmed by their friendliness and impossibly cute French accents in English. My logic was that if they sounded like that in English, if I learned French in Nantes, maybe I would sound like them. In the end, I ranked the Strasbourg academy as my number one choice, instead of Nantes. Since then there has always been a little pang of longing for what could have been if I had chosen to live in the Bretagne region instead of the Alsace. (I know Nantes is technically no longer a part of Bretagne, but I’m talking historically/culturally.)
Even though the festival was in Rennes, 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.) The Alsatians tell me their region isn’t 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 eat crepes and wash it down with cider. Oh cider, I thought, how very English. In the Alsace, you will never hear the words choucroute or bretzel without the words “regional specialty” attached to them. I know these things as sauerkraut and pretzels (or bretzen, since I learned the German word first.) It’s funny how at least these regional specialties are just things that, from a foreigner’s perspective, 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. The ones in Rennes looked more rickety and purposely historic, while Alsatian ones are painted pleasant pastel colours and look like they come out of fairy tales. While I thought living in one of these houses in 2009 is quaint (Sélestat has its share), it’s nothing compared to the stone houses and medieval villages in Bretagne. I took a little excursion to Dinan 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 it had a reputation as a student city but was surprised by the extent of it. I had inklings that Strasbourg felt was a bit stuffy, but going to Rennes confirmed it. Rennes is an anomaly (like the university towns Kingston or London in Ontario) in France because of the disproportionate number of students. The youth is visibly and immediately apparent in the students littering the streets. Even the clothing stores were more interesting to me than the ones in Strasboug. The city also has a surplus of is police presence. Around downtown, especially at night, I saw on average seven carloads of police wearing special protective gear while patrolling. My friend told me these were normal patrols there to control drunken students when they spill out onto the street after last call. Since this was during Les Trans (which brings in its share of drunken tourists) it was only natural that they beef up the force.
The festival itself had a fantastic atmosphere. It was held at Parc Expo, a collection of airport hangars just outside the city. Each had its own line-up and one hangar was a dedicated bar, lounge and water bar. The tarmac was consistently full of people smoking or getting some fresh air after dancing–though these might be the same thing for the French.
I came to Les Trans was to see Fever Ray. This tour was billed as the group’s first and only tour and Rennes was the second-to-last show. Since 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 known 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 America for the music video for Flat Beat. I was most excited to see the French reception for their homeboy. 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 the Justice remix of “Blood On Our Hands” by Death From Above 1979. 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 most memorable part of the set was a sample of a robot voice gleefully declaring 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. To paraphrase Morrissey, if ten-tonne truck crashes into us, to die in Rennes, well..it might be a better way to go than in Strasbourg.
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.
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 (x amount of 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 don’t have many answers. 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.
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.
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.
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A little about me A Canadian flies into a country called the Netherlands to study journalism.
There she develops a taste for a drink called "living abroad."
A bartender asks if she wants a shot of Taiwan and France.
"Sure," she says, reaching for the glass. "Just two things. How do you say 'Cheers' in Mandarin and French?"
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