Bon Voyage

[Today’s entry is slightly shorter than the others, mainly because I didn’t write enough down on the actual day and now, three weeks later, I don’t remember squat, but also partially because I did less on this day. Took it easy after all the effort; relaxed in the afternoon, did some reading. In a way, what I’m doing in these first few weeks in France – reading and writing – is what I should’ve been doing all summer. Ah well, as one high school English teacher used to say, ‘Better late than dead’. The quotes that stick in our heads, eh? But my activity today, or lack thereof, should explain the format; most of this is thoughts I had at various points throughout the day.]

You know, it is a fight to go out – to go out again today, trying to get this paperwork done, encountering numerous obstacles. I have to will myself into doing it some more and not just staying in this room. Again, I’m sure there are countless exchange students, new missionaries, and others the world over who’ve been experiencing those feelings for decades. I can now relate to them firsthand, a skill that will certainly not remain unused throughout the rest of my life.

I went this morning to try again for my student card. Yes, I know they told me Friday, but that seems like a very long time from now, and if the disorganisation thus far is any indication, not everything they say is written in stone. Sure enough, this time the guy, though he laughed slightly when he saw me, told me jeudi, quatorze-heure. Thursday at 2 p.m. That’s tomorrow. Boom. Persistence.

Speaking of persistence, I also went to the international office to see if the woman had sent our papers back to Bradford that would release our funding. She hadn’t and asked me to come back tomorrow. I highly doubt she will have done it by tomorrow, but I’ll keep coming back. I’ll be the very essence of graciousness each time, but I’ll keep coming back. That’s my plan.

[Whatever you think of that plan, I didn’t actually go back until more than two weeks later.]

Right before I went into the office I ran into a group of French-speaking ERASMUS students and the French girl helping them asked if I needed to go down and do the payment for my student card along with them. She asked in French! And she didn’t recognise me as one of the English speakers, so she asked it at full speed! And I understood! I didn’t know how to respond in French, so I said, ‘Yesterday’ in English, but I understood the question! I will get this.

Went shopping after that; had to withdraw some more money from overseas, hopefully this’ll be the last time.

*     *     *

I was just thinking about when we arrived at Toulouse-Blagnac airport. We swept out of there so quickly – waiting for our suitcases at baggage claim was by far the most time-consuming. The immigration officers or whatever they’re called asked us no questions, they simply (for me) turned to the French visa in my passport and stamped it. Coming to the UK the first time I had to produce my CAS letter, possibly other documents, and they asked me questions. I thought that the laidback-ness of our arrival in France boded well for the registration process and all other formalities awaiting us. It did not, it was a severe anomaly.

[This is the other complaint I referred to earlier that you are meant to take with a grain of salt. It’s not so bad, and like I said then, they gave us mini-fridges! Means I don’t even have to go to the kitchen and risk running into a French person when I wanna munch. That was a joke. I am practicing my French by speaking to French people, yes I am.]

But I’m not just tired of all these formalities, I’m tired of complaining about them, so for both my sake and yours I hope they pass quickly so I can go on to telling all of you about my lectures, my interactions with French cultures, my hilarious language goofs (for that I need to be far more daring – I promised myself I would be), and the people I meet. I’m sure they will; the first few days always seem the longest and hardest. But telling myself that doesn’t help as much as I want it to.

*     *     *

I guess one thing that makes it hard is feeling like a burden, what with not being able to speak even a minimal level of French. If anyone told me I was a burden on the system, I would angrily retort that the system is a burden on me, and that would be true. But I still feel like a burden, coming into their country and expecting them to, at least somewhat, condescend to my level. I need to at least repay them for that kindness.

What also came to me today is that the reason I’m so frustrated with the language barrier is not just that I can’t communicate, but that I can’t express myself. Language has so much to do with how I convey my identity and persona to others that, excluding that, I feel so little. They don’t know me. I don’t fully exist. Now, part of that is valid, and useful to know about myself, but it’s not alright that I am so focused on me and my conveyance of myself. I should be about actions, not words and impressions.

*     *     *

In the distance I see a plane rising into the sky (my window faces the airport, though I can’t see it). Do I wish I were on it?

[Perhaps I should interject that the reason this question comes quickly to my mind whenever I see a plane in the sky is that several years ago, after having been asked at numerous points through my life what I considered home to be, I came up with the following definition: home is where you can look up at a plane in the sky and not wish you were on it. So now I, unbidden, perform that test quite often.]

No. I’ll stick this out a little longer (by a little longer, I of course mean the entire year). I just need to find something to sustain me here, like City Vaults Sunday night jazz in Bradford.

Another reason I don’t wish I were on that plane is that landing in Toulouse on Sunday was the second time in my life I have felt a searing pain in my head during a plane’s descent, and when I say searing, I mean searing. As in it feels like something behind my left eye is growing and trying to escape. My eyeball starts watering and seems about to pop out, every nerve around it is on fire, little pinpricks on my forehead feel like needles stabbing from the inside out, and generally I get the impression my left brain lobe wants to get as far away from my right as possible. It’s awful.

I don’t like to complain about pain, I mean, I am male. I wasn’t even going to write about this originally, but as I’ve been flying all my life and this has only started happening in the past few years, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little worried. The first time was on a flight from Japan to the US last summer. Same sensation. I looked it up a few days after arriving, and at least I’m not the only one who’s experienced it (one of the joys of the internet). Apparently it’s caused by fluid filling some chamber in the head at high altitude, and then expanding as the atmospheric pressure builds. I’ve had some trouble off and on with nosebleeds in my life, and those are always from the left nostril, so some of my piping back there must be wonky. But since I didn’t feel it on my flight back to the UK, I thought (hoped) it was a one-off. Seems it wasn’t. I’ll have to do some more research, especially on potential remedies.

Because it’s not just about being able to comfortably use the fastest form of transportation currently available to mankind. It’s not just that I enjoy flying and want to continue to enjoy it. Flying, for me, is much more than those things; it is far more sentimental.

No, I don’t have childhood ambitions to be a bird or Superman that I’m secretly clinging to (though some of you might take issue with the latter claim). But I have been flying longer than I can remember. I’ve lived in a lot of different places, and airplanes have taken me between almost all of those places. You could say that the cabin of a jumbo jet has been a relatively constant physical location (with irony as my elixir) throughout my life, something I cannot say for any house in which I’ve lived. So air travel is a glue that holds all my life experiences together. After long periods without it, I miss flying like I imagine other people miss their hometown. As for the place I sometimes call my hometown, Yokohama, well, yes, I love it there, but I love it because it’s cool. I probably have stronger feelings for Tokyo and my high school, but Yokohama is cooler so I call it my hometown. I’m not sure that’s completely legit.

Going back to the previous point, I suppose that the reason my definition of home is so useful for me is that it’s not merely asking if I wish I were in a different place, it is asking if the place I am in right now beats being on a plane, a wondrous long-haul plane flight, with all the home-ness I attach to that experience. To be told that I cannot, or probably shouldn’t, experience that anymore would be, in my mind, akin to someone who finds out that they, for whatever reason, cannot return to their home, though I don’t wish to trivialise those actually in such situations. I realise that my mentality, or perhaps sentimentality, rather, is born very much of first world privileges.

There’s more I could say about this, such as that one thing I like about being on a plane (long-haul, of course) is that for the duration of that journey, everyone is from the same place and they are going to the same place. There is none of this pesky, ‘Where are you from?’ business. And likely some of what I have said could be said in a better way. But I will do that at a later date, in a far more polished form. For now, these are some of the thoughts flitting through my head as I watch that jet (Airbus-made, perhaps?) climb away from Toulouse-Blagnac. If you’re a fellow TCK I would love to hear your thoughts on what I’ve said, or even if you’re not a TCK, I suppose.

That’s Wednesday.

Arrivée à Toulouse

[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.