Today I have been in France for one week. It's hard to believe as I sit here in the kitchen, eating pasta and watching the grey drizzle fall against the window, that I came rolling into town only 7 days ago. At this time last week I was sitting on a train heading out of Paris and wondering if it was entirely out of the question to ask that they stop the train and take me home, please? Now, even as the things around me continue to be fresh and new, with exciting and unexpected adventures constantly presenting themselves, a sense of normalcy is beginning already to penetrate my cultural barriers. I find myself getting impatient with those poor fools who don't seem capable of working the ticket machine at the Metro (les imbéciles!), or automatically adopting a dead-eyed stare as I walk along the sidewalks of this gorgeous city with the rest of its zombie-faced inhabitants.
The funny thing is that these are truly fantastic and fun, warm and welcoming people. It just seems that they've adapted this technique for maintaining their privacy, even in public, by staying so deeply inside themselves and their own internal world that no one can get in, nothing can detain or de-rail them. I always seem to spend my first few days back in Europe using every bit of will power I can muster just to keep at bay the enormous joy that floods my soul as my eyes feast on the beauty around me. Finally it just bubbles up and over into my sparkling eyes and grinning face, which immediately seek out the gaze of those elegant strangers around me as if to ask, "Awesome, right? Is just walking down this street the single greatest thing that ever happened to anyone else around here? Anybody? Anybody?" Hahaha. It's an urge that takes some effort to quell inside of me.
It already feels like I've established the little circle of people who will be my base of friendship during my time here-- the fun french girl who speaks english with a british accent and seems to manage the perfect balance between going out to 4 hour dinners and still following her incredibly rigorous Maîtrise studies. The British guy who loves music, plays guitar, puts serious thought and concern into his efforts at teaching english to indifferent french uni students, and marvels at the daily mutations of his short blond hair as he tries to convince it to become dreadlocks. The Irish girl who, the first time we met, ordered a glass of red wine, lit a cigarrette, looked into my eyes and said, "I'm just back from holiday in Madrid and I don't think I love Miguel anymore." These people fascinate and excite me and I'm so glad to know them. They are also quite intimidating with their linguistic abilities and European ways, but I just love it and want nothing more than to be around them and to let a little bit of them rub off on me.
The French uni is absolutely astonishing to me-- I can see no rhyme or reason to any of it. Maybe it will all start to make sense to me at some point, but I seriously and sincerely doubt it. We teach english classes, REQUIRED english courses, with absolutely no guidlines, no protocol, no required content, and no supervision. It is entirely at our discretion as to what we cover and how we conduct our classes. Also, you cannot mandate attendance within the French university system, so more than half the students of most classes will never actually make an appearance in class. Fascinating. Of course the lack of structure leaves us teachers entirely to our own devices, meaning we have a level of creative control this is kind of exciting and liberating, in a sense, but I can already see how this could quickly degenerate into a meaningless activity, and how the inspiration and motivation to teach will be hard to find under circumstances like these. But as I said before, this is only week one of my little foray into the french uni system-- I'm sure there will be plenty of time to complain later.
