Gallic Scrapbook

I've been thinking a lot about France lately. Not just this past year and teaching English and all, but the bicycle tour I did the spring before, and the summer in school in Lyon. And I realized that I never really told people all the stories, and especially all the things that aren't exactly stories but were so much more important at the time. I think that I sort of wanted to keep them private, keep those memories for myself, only allowing bits and pieces out to anyone else, but recently I am kind of scared that I will start to lose the things that mattered most to me while I was there. I also feel like I owe it to friends in the Eastern Standard time zone, since I didn't really stay and hang out at all in between Brittany and LA, and only gave short, predictable answers to the question "How was France?"

I feel like I have forgotten a lot, not in a permanent loss kind of way, but in a temporary, just-need-to-jog-it-loose kind of way. Hopefully this will help.


I remember springtime in Brittany, unfolding on schedule the second week in March, but still taking everyone by surprise and lifting our spirits in spite of ourselves. I remember the first few days of sunshine, when we didn't dare hope it would continue because we didn't want to jinx it, so Silvia couldn't help but spill out a running commentary of the unexpected beauty of every small glinting thing we crossed, basking in the same sunlight but all seeming fresh and new and different, like the deep glowing green of ducks' necks on a pond or glimmering jewelry in a shop window. I remember the warmth, at long last, that let us take off our jackets, only to remember that we had to cover ourselves (due to Catholicism) before entering the basilica in Quintin, which was just as well because the dark inside of the chapel didn't yet know that winter was over and was thus still cold enough that we could see our breath, an extra treat in the few daring rays of colorful light trickling down from the handful of stained-glass windows depicting Our Lord and Saviour or Whatever. I remember whistling as quietly as possible to hear the sound reflected and carried up throughout the Gothic arches in the ceiling, out of my control after passing through my lips, but still my responsibility in case any sour-faced church personnel appeared. Fortunately they did not, and I was able to experiment some with different acoustic decay times from different locations in the chapel, as well as different intervals and pitch registers, even using the reverberation to harmonize a little. Silvia definitely frowned at me in that particularly Italian way and I felt compelled to explain that she shouldn't bother, that whistling in churches was one of my favorite things, so no amount of frowning would make me stop.

I recall how a few weeks later, it turned out that our apprehension was either well-founded or coincidentally accurate; this brief respite didn't last forever. I awoke one morning shivering and saw through the window that the whole world (or Brittany, at least) was bathed in white. There was a fog so thick that I couldn't see three rows deep into the cemetery across the way, but it wasn't grey. The light permeating through the fog was strange, almost eerie; it was as if there were no clouds actually blocking the sun and it would have been a bright, cheery day, if only I had been elevated sixty feet in the air. As it was, it made everything quite beautiful, since there was plenty of light, but the limited range of visibility forced everyone to focus on the nearby, perceptible objects more closely, isolating them for analysis. This was my impression, anyway.

And along with the fog came the Dutch, two boxy European vans' worth of exchange students, all buzzing in that Germanic, loud, fashion-forward way, prone to some combination of bangly bracelets, blond layered hair and tiny, round eyeglasses. Recognizable from at least sixty yards. Their French was awful. Negligible, even, so everyone spoke in English. I am proud to mention that my French kids' English was at least as good as theirs, even though I had always had the impression that Dutch people are born speaking seven languages fluently, with English chief among them. I ended up traveling with the group as a chaperone, and this somehow felt more adult, even, than teaching. I remember that the bus ride was the first time I truly cursed the existence of portable music and loudspeakers (read: modern cell phones), and in particular their popularity with youths in every industrialized country in the world.

People of Earth: Hip-hop sounds terrible through tiny speakers. Make a note of it.

Damn, did I feel old.


Much more to come! Old bars, the chapel at the school, weird american hangups! Poorly designed parking garages! Immigration issues!