A Weekend in Nancy

Hey guys--I know this post is long overdue, and everything I’m updating happened actually a few weeks ago. Late is better than never!

Periodically throughout a year abroad with AFS, there are obligatory weekends with the other AFSers in your chapter. Because Alsace only has three people, we joined up with the Lorraine chapter in Nancy for our weekend. During events like this, we have loads of activities to try to get us to express our emotions and talk about our cultures and all of that stuff, but mainly, it’s just to hang out with other exchange students. Yeah, we all have friends at school and people we connect with, but the only other people who get it are people who are going through the same thing.

There are only three people in Alsace (myself, Caroline from Denmark, and Lorena from Brazil), so we took the train from Strasbourg together to meet up with the Lorraine chapter. We had a bit of free time in Nancy, so we wandered around a little bit, bought some incredibly overpriced macaroons, and generally had a great time.

Caroline is such a cute human. 

For dessert on Saturday night, we all brought dishes from our home countries. I brought the traditional American pie and Abi (the other American) brought chocolate chip cookies.

It tasted like wholesome family values and freedom. 

Eating American food made me weirdly homesick. In general, when I get homesick, it isn't for America; I miss my best friends, doing theater, my boyfriend, my brother, or my parents. I miss my people, but not my country. Eating American food, though, made me really miss my country. I miss California--the fields, the hills, the ocean. France is beautiful, but France isn't home. 

 

Myself and Abi--we spent a lot of time talking about how we miss people who hug and big Sunday brunches. 

However, there are few things that sugar can't fix, and homesickness is not one of those things. Our chapter has people from Brazil, Argentina, Costa Rica, Turkey, Germany, Denmark, Norway, Bosnia, China, Italy, and the USA. There was definitely a lot of chocolate to go around. I thoroughly enjoyed myself.

We were staying in a really beautiful chateau-turned-youth-hostel. When the woman from AFS picked us up from the train station in Nancy and told us we were going to a chateau, I thought I had translated something wrong. We're staying in a castle? 

 Yep, we stayed in a mini-castle. Because France.

The grounds were gorgeous. We took advantage of the gorgeousness and Lorena's fancy new camera.

Pretending to be Julie Andrews in the Sound of Music. 

Shameless white girl photo shoot. 

Indie girl band album cover. 

The main room of the chateau being rented out for a birthday party, and they invited us outside to watch them shoot off the birthday fireworks.

After the fireworks, we all sang happy birthday. We sang it first in French, and then in the other ten languages represented. It took a while. Everyone was too pumped up from the sugar high and the fireworks to get any sleep, so we wandered through the woods, played foosball, and just messed around for a few more hours. 

Alessandro getting his t-shirt signed in different languages. 

After about four hours of sleep, we all got up again for the typical french breakfast--coffee and bread, with Nutella or butter. We went for a walk, did some more activities, and then all parted our separate ways. 

Denmark and Italy 

#alsacefilles

The selfie stick the most glorious invention of our time. 

  Yep, it was a pretty rad weekend. 

Why French Girls Aren't Afraid of Getting Fat

Today marks one month in Westhouse. It feels pretty surreal. I suppose it's because I’m not on vacation anymore. I’m just living here now, and in its own way, it’s nice.

If one thing is for sure, when you move to a foreign country, the learning curve is steep. Really really steep. And so I compiled a list:

Six Things I Learned After Spending a Month in France--

• Dessert is only ever meant to be eaten with a spoon (and eating it with a fork is sacrilege, but they’ll forgive you mostly because you have a funny American accent).
• On the whole, the French are not crazy about color. If you decide to wear your favorite bright yellow sweater to school, you will stick out like a sore American thumb and your friends will definitely offer to take you shopping. Probably for something grey or black.
• Wearing the same outfit for a few days in a row is totally socially acceptable (and probably more eco-friendly). Honestly, when you roll out of bed at 6 AM, who wants to put in effort to pick out something new?
• If you are Californian and you move to Alsace, a mild version of Seasonal Affective Disorder will likely take hold. Combined with some homesickness, that can make for a pretty bad day.
• Chocolate (particularly French chocolate) and exercise can pretty much fix any problem, whether it’s SAD or homesickness.
• Food is an experience, not just calories.

In relation to that last bullet point: French girls aren't afraid of getting fat. As vain and superficial as it sounds, gaining weight is probably one of my biggest fears. This worry isn’t that uncommon in the USA; according to the National Association of Anorexia and Associated Disorders, 42% of 1st-3rd grade girls wish they were thinner and 81% percent of 10 year-olds are afraid of being fat. It's a pretty standard fear in America. So naturally, it surprised me to see French women eating whatever they want. I haven’t heard a single women mention being on a diet or trying to lose weight, and strangely, it’s almost freeing. (Disclaimer: There is, of course, a pressure in France to be thin. I don't mean to devalidate the issue of eating disorders among French youth, however there is a mentality difference within the culture itself.)

Since my arrival in France, I’ve been eating a lot. And I mean, a lot. Pastries, chocolate, cream, butter, pretty much without thinking about it. I was pretty shocked when I stepped on the scale yesterday, and found out that I’ve lost weight. How did that happen? Maybe my brain just burns more calories speaking French. Okay, probably not. I don’t actually know how, but I can say that my lifestyle, as far as food is concerned, is a lot different here.

There’s this really excellent poem called “Shrinking Women” by Lily Myers (you can check it out here) in which she talks about the pressures of femininity. In one of my favorite quotes from it, she’s having a conversation with her brother:

“‘How could anyone have a relationship to food?’ he asks, laughing, as I eat the black bean soup I chose for its lack of carbs.”

And there lies the huge difference between my relationship with food in the US and my relationship with food here in France. In America, we view food as something that nourishes the body. We eat whenever we’re hungry; we talk about superfoods and antioxidants, about eating six smaller meals instead of three large ones, about obesity and eating disorders. Food is something that, particularly for women, is very controlled. We count our carbs and calories and percentages of trans fat. That isn’t an inherently bad thing--if anything, it’s proof that we care about what we put in our bodies. However, it can breed almost a stigma around food, an idea that if we don’t know at all times what we’re eating, that somehow this tower of cards will come crashing down.

In France, people almost never use the word “nourriture,” or “food.” They talk about meals, about experiences, about specific dishes. There isn’t a sense of shame about finishing your plate. Unlike in the States, snacking between meals is definitely frowned upon. You’re expected to eat well at each meal and not in between. It’s really difficult to grow vegetables in Alsace, so all traditional recipes are usually types of pasta or bread, potato dishes, and cream sauces to serve with red meat. People don’t seem to be preoccupied with their impending heart disease, though. They don’t eat for health; they eat for happiness.

When Someone Offers You a Tractor Ride, You Say Yes

I’m almost certain that Westhouse has had more rain in the past two weeks than California has had in the past year.

Of course, as the cliché goes, there can’t be rainbows without rain. And there we have it--the view out of my living room window last week.

Because lycées here don’t have the same extracurricular programs that we have in the US, I joined the church choir with my host mom as a sort of artistic outlet. On Saturday, we sang a special service for a couple’s Noces d'Or, the 50th wedding anniversary. It seems like everyone here got married when they were sixteen; couples who aren’t even that old have been married for fifty or sixty years. This was the first time I had ever been to church in French, and I understood nothing. Well, not nothing. I understood amen.

Afterwards, we went to visit my dad who was working at his brothers vineyard that day, hand picking wine grapes. They had just finished and were eating lunch when my host mom and I showed up, and offered to show me the processing plant for the wine grapes. I’d never seen two tons of wine grapes be mashed up at once, so I figured, why not? 

Two tons. I wasn't kidding.

My host uncle hopped into the tractor and patted the the window ledge beside him.

So, I took a fifteen minute excursion through the French countryside with the left half of me sticking a window of a tractor. There's a first time for everything here. I'm digging it.

Settling in to life in a foreign country is hard. It’s really freaking hard. Each day is better, though. My French keeps improving and things become more routine. As my host mom  likes to tell me all the time--il viendra. It’ll come. In the meantime, I’m having a totally rad experience.

And, on a completely unrelated note, here are some nice landscapes.

View out my bedroom window

Sun rising over the village while I walk to the bus stop in the morning.
Hashtag blessed.

Cathedral at Strasbourg

On Saturday night my host parents and I drove to Strasbourg (about 30 minutes away) to see the illumination of the cathedral on it’s 1000th anniversary. We went to dinner at a really lovely (and also very old, although not 1000 years) restaurant called Bistrot des Copains. My host parents are both born and raised Alsatians, which is a region with a very unique cuisine, and they chose traditional Alsatian dishes for me off the menu. It was seriously exceptional. I think tarte flambée may be my new favorite thing.

After dinner, we walked over to the cathedral. It was just barely raining--the type of rain that you’re happy to walk in. Enough to need an umbrella, but not so much that it’s unpleasant. Strasbourg is already a gorgeous city, but in the rain it’s extraordinary.

Now, when my host mom told me we were going to see the illumination of the cathedral, I thought she meant that there were just going to be a few lights shining on it here and there. I could not have been more wrong. The illumination used lights to color each and every detail of the cathedral. The level of detail was incredible; it must have taken hours upon hours of work.

Standing in front of it, watching the mist fall down on a crowd of umbrellas, and seeing the art of the façade truly recognized was awesome. And I don’t mean awesome like “yeah, it was cool.” While I use that word a lot, I don't think very few things are actually awesome in the literal sense. Awe inspiring. The vastness of the universe is awesome. The the Big Bang was awesome. Noah parting the Red Sea was awesome. That pizza you had for lunch the other day was probably pretty rad, but not in the same sense. But this cathedral? Yeah, it was awesome.

France, you are so gorgeous.

Oui are in France!

(punny title credit to my friend Teagan) 

Finally, I'm in France!

I wanted to wait a couple days after arriving at my host family before I posted anything, partly because I needed time to adjust and to form a real opinion. 

But, here we are. When I arrived in France a week ago, I spent 2 days in Paris for an orientation. This was an awesome opportunity to meet other AFSers, which is definitely what I enjoyed the most. They also roomed us by chapter, so my roomates were girls that were placed in the same region of France. The actual orientation, though, was pretty dull. Even though the information was helpful in theory (lots of discussion about different emotions that we'll experience, cultural differences, etc.), I don't think any of it actually prepared me for what I've gone through in the past few days. Although, to be fair, I doubt much really could have. 

The experience of speaking french 24/7 is beyond exhausting, and that's something that they don't mention in any orientation or handbook. At first I thought I was just super jet lagged, but now I've adjusted to the time change and I'm still tired. I feel like an little kid--I can't quite articulate my emotions or needs and so I just smile a lot until people feed me. In order to actually say something that expresses how I actually feel in a given moment, I have to plan it out in advance and really focus on how to string the words together. Usually by the time I've done that, the conversation has moved on and so I just don't speak at all. This process--constantly needing to choose each word individually and combine them in a grammatically correct sentence--takes two or three times more energy than to just speak English. By the end of the day, I'm just drained of any energy. I can't even carry a conversation over dinner. 

For the first few days I was in a perpetual state of sensory overload. I still do feel like I'm standing in the eye of the storm, but just slightly less. In the US, I could do my work just fine in a class where everyone was chatting. Now, I can only focus on one thing at a time. If there are voices speaking French in the background, it's 10x harder to complete an assignment. This has been the biggest challenge with school. Surprisingly, I pretty much understand most of what my teachers say. Completing the work is the issue. 

However, even though school tends to feel like a vrai catastrophe, overall I've had an incredible time. My host parents are incredibly wonderful and kind people. In just a few days, they set me up with a new French SIM card, school supplies, helped me figure out my schedule, and gotten my bus schedule sorted. My host mom is basically super woman. 

Anyway, I figure that my language skills can only get better from here. Each day is easier than the one before it, right? 

How to Get Free Snacks

Fun fact: if you cry enough waiting to board your plane, a kind flight attendant will indeed take pity on you and bring you water and pretzels. I can guarantee it.

Although, I can't say it's recommended.

Saying goodbye to my brother and parents was hard. Really hard. I brought a gazillion tissues and used them all. And now, here we go. Takeoff.

                     

Fêter/Pleurer

Last Saturday, I had a bunch of friends over to say one last goodbye. As far as going away parties go, it was actually pretty great (barely any crying until the very end!).

I really have had a hard time coming to terms with leaving, because lately I've been really happy with the way things are. If I have to have one last memory of the way things are right now, though, I'm glad it's musical theater charades, pizza and s'mores, and singing together like the bunch of choir nerds we are. It was really such an honest representation of what my I loved about the past year.

I was even able to hold it together until the very end when I actually had to start saying the actual goodbyes. I mean, I knew that the tears were going to come out eventually.

Going away parties are hard, but so is going away. I suppose that is the nature of things.

Here's to good friends and great adventures.

Group photo!

Yep, he's going to be hard to say goodbye to. 

          

They're pretty rad (feat. doge).

There are two types of people--photo bombers and everyone else.