[If you happen to have the good fortune of being one of the people portrayed in the following accounts, please don’t take offence at anything written here. Just mention it to me, and I’ll in most cases happily amend it. For example, I’ve decided to avoid using names, just in case any of you happen to be on the run from the law, but I would completely understand if you wanted to get your name out there (or link it to your YouTube channel, or something). Not that I think terribly many are reading this now, but in the future, who knows? You might one day be famous – again, not that that would result from me or anything I write; just saying, I have complete confidence in you.
Disclaimer no. 2: I make no claims as to the veracity of the French interspersed throughout this writing, nor, for that matter, the English. Corrections would however be appreciated.]
We made it. I can’t take long writing this because I don’t have a power converter to be able to plug it in, and actually I won’t be able to upload this because I don’t have wifi access yet, but I thought I should quickly jot down some notes to capture the feeling of right now.
I’m sitting in what I assume will be my room for this year, in Cité Universitaire de L’Arsenal B. Something like that. It’s a neat room – small, but amazingly economic in its use of space. I’ll probably take pictures or make a video before too long, but basically you enter and have the toilet/sink/shower on your left in a room not much more than a metre square. You squeeze past the wardrobe and have about three metres by three metres with the desk in front of you facing the window and some shelves to either side. No bed. I walked in, my first thought was, neat-o (because I think thoughts like that); my second thought was, hang on, surely we’re missing something crucial here. At first I thought it was the white thing against the wall to my left, which, provided it folded down like an ironing board and then unfolded into twice its width, would offer something almost bed-size. No. It was only the radiator. Then I looked up. Ohh. There it is. Above the desk. Except…there’s only about a foot between the bed and the ceiling.
[Here’s a video tour of my new room, if the thousand words haven’t been enough.]
Obviously now it all makes sense – you pull the bed down about a metre on its track to sleep in it, then push it back up in the morning. It’s great. Of course it will be even greater once I have sheets and a pillow, but that will not be before tonight. But I figured that would be the case.
In fact I figured on doing without a lot of things this first night, like shower gel, shampoo, a large towel, and electricity (well, the ability to plug my devices in, at least). I was packed to the max already.
In hindsight there were probably things I brought that I could’ve done without – well, plenty, if you’re truly ruthless. I didn’t want to be quite that ruthless; after all, my clothing is no use to me if it’s not with me, and I definitely want to go snowboarding this year. But I’m the type of person that, told I can check-in a suitcase of 22 kg, will bring a 22.2 kg, with a 12 kg carry-on that’s only supposed to be 10. I made it through, but as I was thinking on the way, you can’t put a price on peace of mind – better to leave some leeway, even if it costs a bit more (that’s my sensible side speaking, not the side I tend to listen to). So I’m trying to move away from the push-it-to-the-very-edge, take-as-much-as-you-possibly-can mentality. Still a long way to go.
At least this time I didn’t do most of my packing through the night before I left. Since I moved from my massive mansion (that I shared with six other guys during the year but had to myself for a month at the beginning of the summer) to my pastor’s house at the beginning of July, all my England belongings were already packed and, having attempted to pack shrewdly, a lot of it I could put straight into storage and not bother with for the rest of the summer. I also had to move about a week before leaving Bradford, this time from a bigger bedroom in the house to the smaller bedroom, the smallest bedroom I have ever seen. The accommodation I’m in now, here in Toulouse, is a presidential suite compared to that room. That room was twice the size of the bed, tops. Not that I’ve ever seen a presidential suite (that is a thing, though, right?).
But that bedroom (and nothing-else-room) was completely fine for my final few days, and helpful to force me to do most of my packing in advance of my departure date. There was still a lot in the run-up, especially as I was desperately trying to fit in too much, but it wasn’t as bad as other times have been.
I apologise if you were expecting a quick run-down of my journey to Toulouse. That’s not how I tend to write. But you can skip over the reminiscings and philosophical abstractions if you must.
It was an interesting run-up; even though, like I said, I did a lot in advance, I still left a lot until the final day or two, almost as if I didn’t want to think about it, or wanted to pretend that I still had loads of time to waste (because that’s what a lot of my summer has been, unfortunately). When I was studying French or corresponding about my arrival, I would get excited – yes, excited, even – about the coming year. Other times, especially that last day, I didn’t want to leave, mostly because I didn’t want the accompanying stress and necessary planning. But I always feel that: when I have no plans of leaving, I can only think about being elsewhere, and when the time comes to leave, I want to be lazy and stay, and it’s only recently that I’ve really started to try to fight those feelings, because they’re completely unhelpful.
But leave I did. Sunday was suddenly upon me and I was scurrying around in the two hours before church, skimming off the top of my baggage, throwing some things away, weighing, worrying, wondering.
I had to take my suitcase and backpack (yes, ladies and gentlemen, that is all I brought for my new life in France; well, one year – 32.2 kg. Which I think is quite good, despite my earlier confessions) to church because I was leaving straight from there. I wasn’t too keen on that because it would mean a lot of good-byes right as I’m trying to leave, which I’ve had bad experiences with, but it turned out alright. It was actually great that I was there that last time because I got to see some people coming back for this year that I hadn’t seen in a while. The good-byes didn’t take too long, and I was soon trundling off from the Midland Hotel to Bradford Interchange.
There I encountered my first problem (ah, the ever-elusive perfect run was not to be had this time!). The ticket machine was broken (yes, THE ticket machine; ridiculous isn’t it), and it was the only place I could print out my prepaid tickets. The woman at the counter wouldn’t do it. The man trying to fix the machine told me I’d have to buy it at my first transfer station, Huddersfield. I was dubious about this – what would I tell the ticket collector on the first train, what if I could only print my tickets at the station I’d indicated online…but I continued onto the platform.
Thankfully, thankfully, I returned about ten minutes later, just to check; found the machine in totally proper working order, printed out my tickets, and boarded my train. Unlike in Japan, you and your well-being are not the primary concern of most British employees. You gotta fight for love, like Gabriella.
The rest of the train journey was uneventful. The trains came into the platforms I expected them to, and I made both my connections with time to spare. I suppose one thing of note was that between Huddersfield and Manchester I could overhear a large group of northern ladies, probably late twenties or early thirties, talking very loudly. I got a catch-up on their lives, which seemed to generally consist of clubbing and getting drunk, reminiscing about past times of clubbing and getting drunk, and discussing whether or not the others peed in the shower. I believe the general consensus was that it was acceptable. No comment. Actually, yes comment; that was essentially my last English experience before leaving the country – but I’ll leave it to you to decide whether that was a fairly representative experience to remind me what I’d be missing, or a wacky one-off to send me away with confidence (another comment might be that in my place now I’m not faced with that decision as the toilet juts into the shower space).
Pulled into the airport, took my heavy suitcase on several escalators I wasn’t supposed to, found the queue for Jet2 check-in. That was where I met up with one of the two girls from Bradford Peace Studies doing the same exchange to Toulouse, with whom I fortuitously had the same flight. Though my suitcase was slightly overweight, as I said, the guy let it through, and even my carry-on wasn’t even inspected, though it was packed full of dubious materials like paper clips, drum sticks, and hair wax. I wonder if budget airlines are more lax? Although I think everyone went through the same place, not just the budget people.
Not much to tell about the flight; it was the usual parade of hawkers from start to finish, trying to get us to pay even more small fees for drinks, snacks, charity scratchcards, and duty-free items, that budget flights always are. No thank you. No screaming babies this time, though, thankfully. One thing that was very strange was that even though it was only about a two-hour flight, we landed half an hour early! How does that work? How could you possibly be that wrong in your prediction or make up that much time? A pilot could probably tell me. I certainly wasn’t complaining, though, as it meant even more daylight in which to find our accommodation, and we were successful in that. With the bus drivers I settled for key words rather than trying to formulate full sentences; felt like a bit of a cop-out but, on the other hand, I can probably count on (that) one hand the number of full French sentences I can formulate. We made it to Compans Caffarelli which I was pronouncing very wrongly, and even found our accommodation without too much trouble.
That was where some fun began. There was a girl at reception, and after some stutter-starts on our part, she asked us if we spoke Spanish. Well, I thought, if she speaks Spanish, she must speak English, especially seeing as she asked us the question in English. Nah. Not even a bit. She ended up calling a woman and we passed the phone back and forth several times. Classic foreign language country experience. Thankfully the woman on the other end (I still have no idea who she was) spoke brilliant English and took us through everything. Our names were on some list, and though I didn’t have the contract sheet I was supposed to (e-mail fail?), my travel buddy did, and we got our keys.
But before I can bring you to where we started, the description of the room as I found it, we first had to lug our luggage up the stairs to the fourth floor, which in my language is the fifth floor. No lift. This would prove to be a pattern with the French buildings, at least the ones on campus. Not only do the French seem to eschew lifts, they rejoice in stairs, putting a down case and an up case where a walkway straight across would suffice. But quirks are what make the foreign foreign, I suppose – that and the incomprehensibility of the language.
That’s half the reason I’m doing this, though. Not only do I want to learn French, I want to live – well, be forced to survive – in a country where I don’t speak the official language, something I’ve never done before despite having lived in quite a few different locations. It will be character-building, and empathy-building. To all those new missionaries, summer workers, and other foreigners who came across my path in Japan, I feel your pain. I didn’t when I was with you; mostly I enjoyed your pain, but now I feel it.
For the first time in all my travelling and studying abroad I feel like a real international student. Oh boy.
Inspiration's Waiting Room 