day #258 - done

 

So, if the title and the photo doesn't help you - yeah, I'm done. The last month has been very, very hectic, squeezing in a trip to Montpellier (which is really cool, has lots of student dive bars and lots of excellent weather, and is generally the cooliest) and Paris (which is classic and gave us lots of lovely warm Spring weather to boot) while trying - and failing - to revise for my Finals and pack up all my crap in anticipation of heading home.

I am now procrastinating from packing, which I like even less than I like revising. France has given me one final slap in the face by plonking a bank holiday down on the day before I leave, which means that if I don't have everything I need now, I won't be able to get it until I head back to the UK. Thanks, France.

I should probably write some kind of What I've Learned thing, or, What Really Happens On Your Year Abroad, but I am lazy and one thing I Have Learned is that I'm not even that good at years abroad anyway. Generally, the whole year has made me feel like I'm going crazy - the pendulum is always swinging, and there are constant shifts reminding you that no, you haven't quite got it all sorted, and no, you'll probably not manage to get the hang of it in the short 9-12 months you'll spend in a foreign country. I wish I could say, "But I learned to deal with the stress and come to terms with the fact it was all out of my control," but I have not, and the whole experience has, at times, been incredibly frustrating, scary, and generally made me feel like a huge ball of existentialist melancholy, rather than a human being who was just born in a different place. But I kind of got used to it, started anticipating having the rug pulled from under my feet, and then when it does, the world kind of makes sense, in a weird way.

I have dealt with rude administration staff who simply shrug and say, "Ce n'est pas possible," when you ask for help, weird flatmates, incompetent administration staff who lose your vital paperwork and then blame you, teachers who kick you out of classes for being international, teachers who wish they could kick you out (and spend the whole year ignoring you and shooting you doubtful glances), exams I knew I was going to fail, lectures I didn't understand, French classmates regarding me as some kind of leper because I had a funny accent, loneliness (yes, I said it), trying to deal with home university paperwork from a distance, etc, etc, etc. You can understand why me walking out of the university campus on the day of my final exam in one piece feels like enough of a triumph. I don't care if I passed my exams. I literally don't care. Because this whole year has felt like one massive obstacle, and even if I mess up the landing, I didn't, you know, die, or starve, or wander into oncoming traffic.

And I'm still sad that I'm leaving. There's a sense that there are a million and one things left to do on my list, and they were all plans made with new-found friends who I am leaving behind. It's definitely the things outside of the university which are central to your year abroad, and yeah, your classes fall by the wayside, because they have to, or else you would go utterly insane. I will miss this weird town. It is weird. So weird. But I will miss it. 

I scoffed when people told me, "You'll think all your old friends are so boring when you go back," because that's dumb - but I kind of get it now. Because I've just spent this huge chunk of time stumbling around in this weird French dream-haze, encountering obstacles at every turn, and they got to sit comfortably at home with their friends and their families and watch British TV and drink their tea with milk in and eat proper oven chips. You sort of teach yourself to stop wanting that, because you have to. You switch off, because homesickness isn't really an option. You can't have it, and after a while, you accept that you can't have it, and you don't want it anymore. It's hard to put into words, really, but going back will be odd. It will be odd to be so comfortable again and I think reverse culture shock is probably definitely a thing.

Don't get me wrong, I am so excited about going home. But it will be weird. It will take a few days to adjust. I've been home twice in 9 months, for 2 weeks in total. I found a £1 coin on the floor the other day and it took a while to register what it was. You know how it is.

I will miss the opportunity for visiting friends in far-flung places, and I will miss the opportunity to practice my French with natives without leaving my front door, and I definitely miss the patisseries and the €4 wine. I will miss the weather, which is at least 4° warmer than Edinburgh at any given moment. I will miss trying to pretend that I am from Normandy, and the lovely feeling when someone asks, "Wait, you're French though, aren't you?". I will miss my rouennais friends, who are all very weird, and very lovely, and very generous. I will miss cheap public transport, being so close to Paris, trying out new bars and coffee houses just because, French stereotypes, the excellent cheese, the Sunday markets, and my weird new little city. I will miss 'being an Erasmus'. I will miss the fact that the world kind of feels like my oyster.
I will not miss google.fr. That is something I will not miss. Also, French Netflix. It's not great. And thank God I'm out of that awful university. But hey ho. I didn't do too badly, after all.

I was walking near the train station, and I was stopped by a guy who asked for directions in French with a foreign accent. It turns out he was American, and staying in Rouen for a week to decide if he wanted to spend his year abroad here. Kind of a weird full circle.

I have to go pack now. I'm moving out of my house tomorrow and so far all my belongings are strewn across my floor and I have posters to pull down and empty wine bottles-turned-candleholders to throw out and laundry to do. I imagine this may be the last post I do on this blog. How weird !
Hope this wasn't too wanky for a final post.

Josie
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day #217 - hey there, mr blue!

Alternative title: Here Comes The Sun or Help It's Sunny And There's Not Much Longer To Go
 
After a fairly abysmal March (save for the wonderful week I had in my last blog post, where I was bragging about the warm weather - is it possible I got myself bad karma for being too smug?), the sunshine is finally back in my life again, and I couldn't be happier.

jardin des plantes, the first sunny day

It sure has been a long, cold, lonely winter. I feel like the winter in France has felt considerably longer than it ever did in England or Scotland, and I think most of that is due to France's café culture - a lot of little cafés and brasseries in France are not made to be sat in, and rely far more on the warmer weather, when they can get plenty of punters to sit out on the pavement outside with a glass of white wine and a cigarette. It's also really, really difficult to drag yourself out of bed to go to classes which are led in awkward, complicated French, the teachers are becoming increasingly strict as exam season approaches, and it's still dark outside.

Of course, now it's still difficult to drag myself to class, but at least that's because it's much easier to skip class altogether, and, say, go and eat sushi in one of the public gardens in Rouen, or run away to the beach on Cabourg for a day and sunbathe and eat great salmon tagliatelle in the sunshine (which are both things that - if any university personnel are reading - I definitely did not do. Nope. Not at all)

You can't blame me for not wanting to stick around in hot, sweaty classrooms though. The countdown has officially begun - as I am writing this, there are exactly fourty days until the end of the May exam season. That's less than six weeks. For a girl who was bragging about being here for six months just a few weeks ago, I'm actually feeling a little overwhelmed.

my new year's resolution was to learn how to cartwheel... still working on it

My family visited last weekend for the bi-annual Easter trip we make to a town near Amiens, where we have some friends. I headed over there with them and we had a cracking trip; we visited Saint-Quentin (lovingly named Saint-Qu by the locals... have a go at saying it out loud in a French accent, you'll hear something a little more edgy), Meaux (famous for yummy brie) and some other good places. It was nice to see them and they came and took a ton of my stuff away in the hope that it will make the move easier in five and a half weeks' time. (Five and a half weeks. What the dean.)

I'm also now at the stage where I'm trying to squeeze everything in before I get on my ferry home. Because French universities are terrible and hate international students, I have absolutely no idea when my exams are, so I'm not sure how long I actually have left here in Rouen. I am therefore excitedly booking trips willy-nilly - Montpellier, check, another jaunt to Paris, check, go-karting, why not, that weird old charity shop sale that happens every month where it's a kilo for a fiver and you always meant to go...

Fourty days... isn't that just weird? It really rushed up towards me. Obviously, there's plenty left to do - I'm in a play, and there's exams to revise for, and all my trips to get in - but in fourty days, I will be able to turn around and say, "I did it." It was really, really hard, but I made myself a little family here, and I figured the crappy stuff out, and... yeah. It's a lovely feeling.
And hey, even if the weather doesn't keep up - that's good enough for me.

Josie
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