FIELD NOTE 1.30 - Last night of January, last night of something.

Tonight marks the end of January.
I've been in France for 16 days - that's 2 weeks and 2 days - and the memory of boarding United Airlines flight 4944 is still in my mind, as fresh and as potent as ever. And yet, even in remembering this, I don't feel like I'm the same person who stepped aboard that plane.
Well, that's not entirely true.
The face in the mirror is still my own, only now less 5 pounds. And the pain that I feel when I think of the people I've left behind is just as raw as when I left. But I feel different. Older, more aware.
A line keeps repeating inside my head from a short story collection I picked up seven years ago at Barnes & Noble in their bargain bin:

"We are what people make us, that's a fact I've learned is as true as the stars...We are still ourselves, just not who we intended to be."

And then I wonder. Who was it that I intended to be?
Three years ago the answer was easy: wealthy, famous, attractive. Now all that seems hollow to me.
But still the question remains.
And I have no answer for it. I don't want an answer, I don't want an intention.
Not yet, anyway.

FIELD NOTE 1.29 - Some views are priceless.

The view from my window at night is the thing I've come to love most about this dorm. It's come to be the sight I look forward to the most each day. I sometimes just sit in the dark with my iPod on and the lights turned off and just look out at Nantes and remind myself of who I am and where I come from - my daily meditation.

FIELD NOTE 1.28 - Blinds really do make all the difference.

I've been having some trouble sleeping here in this dorm room. It seems to me that I can't seem to make it through a single night without some small thing like a misplaced sheet or the noise of a passing tram waking me up. Another problem is that I don't seem to be able to sleep past 8h00 without waking up on my own.
But I think I may have found the remedy: closing the blinds completely.
Normally I leave about a foot of window exposed at night because I feel it is more comfortable than a completely covered window. But last night I covered it for some reason.
I still wasn't able to sleep completely through the night, but the darkness of the room was enough to convince me to go back to sleep. When I finally decided to wake up this morning it was 10h30.
Not too bad...

FIELD NOTE 1.27 - Heaven can be found in a fresh baguette.

I broke down.
But I just couldn't resist the smell of freshly baked bread coming from the little boulangerie right next to the pharmacy where I bought my pain pills. The fact that the baker was stacking the baguettes as they made their way out of the oven just sealed the deal.
I went back to my room and enjoyed my warm bread with mandarin marmalade and the requisite doctor-prescribed pill.

FIELD NOTE 1.26 - Pain makes broken French scary.

Last night I went to bed a bit earlier than normal because my stomach was hurting. Eventually the pain spread outward until it wrapped around my back and I couldn't move without feeling horrible pains shoot through my stomach.
After wavering between going downstairs to find someone to call a doctor and trying to outlast the pain until morning, pragmatism finally won out and I slowly got dressed and made my way down to the front desk.
Unfortunately the doctor wasn't available for an hour; fortunately I don't really recall that hour. When he finally arrived we began the task of trying to understand each other, he through the lens of medicine and me through the lens of blinding pain.
I recognized the word "stone" and, after piecing together what little medical knowledge remained of my pre-med days, tried to think of all the places stones could form in the body and where I was hurting.
Kidney.
I have kidney stones.
The doctor administered an anti-inflammatory shot to make my muscles relax and then he gave me a dose of morphine. There was pain, then I was floating.

FIELD NOTE 1.25 - Lightbulbs go out, then what?

I flipped the switch and there was a little spark. I flipped it again, same thing. The third time produced nothing.
After pulling the bulb out from its station over the mirror and hearing something rattle when it was shaken, I finally conceded the lightbulb a lost cause. So now tomorrow I have to hunt someone down to give me/change my lightbulb.
But before that, two showers in the dark.

FIELD NOTE 1.24 - Sleep is strange here.

I've been in France for nearly two weeks and I don't think I've even once managed to sleep a single night without waking up at least two times.

It's strange.

FIELD NOTE 1.23 - Revelations can happen in a grocery store.

I always love walking through grocery stores. I find them relaxing and could probably spend all day wandering back and forth examining the products and the produce. Tonight while searching adamantly for rice in E. Leclerc (which seems to be the French equivalent of Wal-Mart) I was struck by just how many rice choices there were. After the initial shock of that wore off I began to realize the vast price differences ranging from 0,68 euro all the way up to 6,45 euro per bag.
The old me wouldn't have thought twice about upgrading from the 0,68 euro bag, but being here and having to try to stretch 20 euros as far as it will go until my funds arrive. It also made me think about my consumer behavior in the United States where a few dollars or a few cents didn't really seem like that big of a deal. But here the price is magnified so those little sums add up more quickly.
So I placed that 0,68 euro bag of rice in my bag without a single regret. This is growth, perhaps.

FIELD NOTE 1.22 - Opening a French bank account isn't such a scary thing...

...especially when the man who works at the bank does his best to make sure I understand everything and even managed to mix the information with a fair amount of English and humor.

So now I officially have a French bank account and I am one step closer to being independent here, or whatever sort of permanence it is that I'm supposed to feel here.

FIELD NOTE 1.21 – Who would have thought buying milk would be an ordeal?

One of the plus sides to having stayed at the youth hostel during my first weekend in Nantes is that it taught me the location of what might be the cheapest grocery store in the city (I say that, of course, knowing less than 10% of the city). The store itself looks like a weird cross between your average hole-in-the-wall grocery store and Costco with its four aisles of oddly arranged goods. The best part, however, has to be the pricetags that hang over every product – some of these are negative. I am beginning to suspect this has something to do with a discount, but I’m still not quite sure and will have to investigate further.

This weekend the French equivalent of Fruit Loops, Fruit-Rings, ended up in my bag. This of course meant that I would have to brave the milk, something I have been avoiding since my first foray in a French grocery store.
The milk here seems to come in two varieties: room temperature bottle or room temperature carton (and the French carton resembles a Tazo chai tea mix carton more than our notion of a milk carton). After standing in front of the various cartons and bottles for more than three minutes trying to pick which kind I wanted, I finally decided to use American logic. In America skim milk tends to be the cheapest, so I hoped that rule translated into French and picked the cheapest carton.
The carton is now in my refrigerator until I feel brave enough to see whether or not I chose correctly.

FIELD NOTE 1.20 – Sometimes it’s nice just to do nothing.

Which is what I’ve been doing all afternoon. I’m getting away with it by telling myself that it’s because it’s Sunday and nothing’s really open that there’s no real point in venturing out into the cold.

I hope this will pass.
It feels strange to think I’ve been in this room all day when I look out at the view from my window. I see houses and businesses and even a misplaced construction crane. And then I remember that this is how I’ve always lived my life: on the other side of glass. I spend all my waking hours in classrooms, in offices, in my room.
I need to make a change.
But since I plan on spending the rest of the day not doing anything, change can wait until tomorrow.

FIELD NOTE 1.19 – I’m beginning to believe I can do this.

Just a little thought that came as I was putting on my peacoat and looking out my window.

FIELD NOTE 1.18 – Never get disheartened when five year olds speak better than you, they are the best teachers.

Today on the metro brought a vocabulary lesson from two brothers who decided to scream words at each other and, thanks to them, I now have a basic knowledge of the animals in the zoo and the weather. My favorite: l’ours (bear).
The only hard part about listening to the two boys speak was the realization that they not only probably had a wider vocabulary than myself but also that they were both speaking faster and more coherently than I have been able to speak in my entire French career.
But at the same time I also found it quite easy to follow their conversation and understand everything they were saying. So I guess that’s a little progress!

FIELD NOTE 1.17 – Procrastination is even worse in foreign countries.

It’s not that I don’t realize that I have to do my homework, it’s just that the teacher gave us Tuesday’s homework this week and somehow I seem to be able to get away with telling myself that looking up the perfect summer program in Paris is somehow more pressing.

FIELD NOTE 1.16 – Time, time, time.

I would say that I’ve been engrained with a healthy sense of punctuality; however, here time seems to pass differently.
To start with the clock and I don’t get along yet. I came to France without a watch because I thought (incorrectly, of course) that my world phone would set itself to the local time once it had tapped into the local network. So I have been forced to use my iPod Touch in lieu of a watch. And instead of constantly checking it to make sure that I am on time, I just seem to go with it, which also seems to be how everyone else around me is dealing with their schedules.
Take yesterday for instance: both my classes were in the Bâtiment CIL. I had no idea where that was. I ended up looking for fifteen minutes before I finally found it by following a little path under a trellis in front of the library. When I finally found the class five minutes later I was twenty minutes late but still ten minutes ahead of most of the other students.
Another thing I am still having trouble with is the time itself. France runs on a sort of military time so that after noon I am forced to subtract twelve from each hour to make sure I have the right time. It shouldn’t be too hard, right? Well, I must be an idiot.
I think I prefer to just ignore time altogether while I’m here. It seems easier and what the French do anyway.

FIELD NOTE 1.15 – You can hear but you can’t speak, this is the way of it.

I am growing used to my place in class. The professor talks and I can understand her, even going so far as to add in head motions and a smile, while in my head I begin to understand that everything I thought I knew, I didn’t. I just went through the motions.

FIELD NOTE 1.14 – Nothing can cheer you up like a freshly bake croissant. Or three.

Enough said.

FIELD NOTE 1.13 – Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

What have I gotten myself into? I understand practically everything that I’m being told but I seem to be incapable of forming a coherent sentence. It’s so bad that I even cringe when I speak and the entire time I’m speaking there runs a constant litany through my head screaming “Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.”
I can hear the mistakes as I make them. A past professor told me that this is a crucial step in learning the language. I sometimes worry though that I will be stuck in this step forever.

FIELD NOTE 1.12 – Surprises abound when you’re least expecting them.

C1. There are six levels in the IRFFLE program at the Université de Nantes and of those C2 is the highest. SO how is it exactly that I somehow managed to be placed into the 2nd highest?

My results were announced as I sat at a table with French student workers who were correcting dossiers of some sort and when my score was called a female student looked to the male student next to her and said, “pas mal.” I could translate that and I decided that perhaps I wasn’t giving myself enough credit.

FIELD NOTE 1.11 – Solde = Sale = Splurge

I couldn’t resist any longer; I needed a new coat. The black Gap wool peacoat I brought with me may be completely appropriate for a Virginia winter but it is most certainly not equipped to handle a winter in Nantes.
During the two-hour lunch break which also marked the period between the written and oral portions of my IRFFLE exam (which determines at which level I will be placed and thus which courses I will be allowed to take) I made my way down to Commerce on the metro with Melody and walked into Jules to take another look at the coat that had caught my eye the past Saturday. It was still there and with only one remaining in my size at 30% off I decided it was a sign that my purchase was meant to be.
I walked out of Jules with a new coat and when I walked back into the building to take my oral test I discovered slews of students with shopping bags. Turns out it is very common to shop during lunch breaks here.
I could get used to that idea…

FIELD NOTE 1.10 – When you have absolutely no idea what someone has just said, tell them how completely horrible your French is but how happy you are

This, I have learned, is key to making older French people automatically smile at you and is normally followed on their part by a hasty apology and an attempt to teach me something new.

FIELD NOTE 1.9 – Don’t judge a city when you’re HALT.

Hungry. Angry. Lonely. Tired.
That’s how I feel today. The reason I picked Nantes is because it feels strangely like a French Richmond, but those similarities are the same things that right now are making it nearly impossible for me to draw myself out of a little homesickness.
I suppose the call home hadn’t helped too much either because it brought with it the knowledge that I’m a three-hour train ride and a ten-hour plane ride from home for the next five months.
But this is only natural, I hope.

FIELD NOTE 1.8 – Don’t count on Sunday to do your shopping.

Commerce on Sunday is a vastly different picture than the same metro stop the day before. Where yesterday there had been practically more people than one is able to walk through now there are only a few. I guess that should have tipped me off that all the shops would be closed, but it hadn’t. Here I was on a Sunday and, thanks to the hostel’s being strictly closed for all between the hours of 10h00 and 15h30, without a place to go.
I wandered through Le Jardin des Plantes and the cemetery beyond it, the former teeming with screaming children and voracious pigeons and ducks while the former contained only a solemn crow and two finches.
Closed too were the grocery stores so Melody and I had to improvise: noodles cooked in water than refused to boil with a sauce. We made the most of it and everything was made more bearable by the comfort of knowing that tomorrow would bring with it a dorm room with a shower whose hot water would hopefully last more than three minutes.

FIELD NOTE 1.7 - Faces require moisturizer daily. Ignoring this fact for more than two days can be a bigger mess than breaking a doorknob.

The moisturizer is in my luggage and I just lacked the energy to take it out these two days at l’Auberge de jeunesse and now my skin is screaming at me.
In other news, I have broken the doorknob to one of the bathrooms on my floor. Apparently trying to open a locked door causes the knobs to instantaneously fall apart.
This wouldn’t have been such a bad deal had I been outside the bathroom when this happened rather than being stuck in a not-too-pleasant smelling room with a toilet and a questionable stain on the wall.
The day was saved when I decided to use the lock as leverage and pry the door open. Hastily reassembling the knob and then walking without a backwards glance I entered my room, still too lazy to rummage for my moisturizer.

FIELD NOTE 1.6 – Directions are best when followed. That said, when attempting to follow them make sure you have all the prerequisite materials befor

Tonight’s dinner was quiche Loraine that was supposed to have been cooked in a conventional oven but, due to the absence of one in the hostel’s kitchen, was cooked instead on a hot plate. It wasn’t the best, but it was interesting.
Before the quiche had fully cooked the night guard for the hostel came in to put his dinner in the refrigerator. He told engaged Melody and I in an awkward conversation for about five minutes during which time he told me pointedly not to drink his beer and I learned another important lesson: never say that you study gender and sexuality in college. Saying this led to a very off-putting stretch of conversation during which the man proceeded to talk about how when he was young he too explored sexuality. Not knowing what to say, Melody and I fell back on feigning complete ignorance. I for one would have preferred complete ignorance of what he said – sometime it is indeed bliss.

FIELD NOTE 1.5 – Solde = Sale = A Test in Restraint

Apparently in addition to freezing weather, January in France brings with it le mois des soldes where practically everything is on sale at incredible prices and, since this is France we’re talking about, all the stores actually carry clothes that fit!
Unfortunately for me I decided not long ago (15 days to be exact) that I was going to be more financially responsible. This meant having to give up buying the cute little scarf at H&M, having to say no to the warmest and slimmest looking coat at Jules, and waving goodbye to the blue sweater at Zara that would have made my eyes look so pretty by telling myself there would always be more scarves, if I wanted the coat it would still be there, and that my eyes really didn’t need to look that pretty.

FIELD NOTE 1.4 – It’s surprising just how often you run into old faces.

In October I was told by a woman at the ISEP central office that I was the only person that she had been able to place at the Université de Nantes for the spring semester.
So I was completely shocked to discover that I knew the face of the person sitting in the chair at the MEIF. Melody, a girl with whom I had shared FREN 301 at VCU the past spring, and who at this very moment was to be my savior in getting us to the hostel and then procuring a room.
Thank goodness for small blessings.

FIELD NOTE 1.3 – Eve if you have a housing contract that begins on a specific day, it is all still considered tentative in France.

I couldn’t be hearing him correctly; surely the time switch and lack of real sleep had caused me to begin hallucinating. I asked to hear the words again.
Nope, they were right. My dorm wasn’t ready, regardless of the fact that I had just run back and forth to Commerce and waited in line for 30 minutes to buy assurance just so that I could be sure to be able to move into the room that night. But now they were saying the room wasn’t even ready at all. This meant spending the entire weekend in a hostel, but this was quickly eclipsed by the question of how I was going to get myself to said hostel when I was about to pass out. The only thing the man said to me was, “C’est la vie” – as if this explained everything.
I was too tired to even come up with a witty reply. I just said, “Non, c’est la nuit.”

FIELD NOTE 1.2 – When in doubt, pretend to know what you’re doing.

When it was my turn to load into Coach 12 there were no spaces left on the luggage rack for my luggage. The man in front of me, who also found himself lacking a place for his luggage, looked at me and shrugged before leaving his own suitcase in front of the others in a way that could possibly pose a hazard during a curvy train ride. I decide to follow the “when in Rome” mantra and leave my own suitcase beside his and also take the shrug – it seemed the most important thing.
The three-hour ride to Nantes passed in a blur of sporadic napping that was occasionally interrupted by a comment from the woman sitting across from me. All in French, all replied to with what I can only hope was something reminiscent of correct grammar. I assume I accomplished that much since she kept talking.

FIELD NOTE 1.1 – Paris may be beautiful in winter, but it definitely requires the proper outerwear.

6h38. The plane has just landed and I’m sure France is beautiful. Or it would be at least were it not for the fog covering everything. From my window I can see the plane’s wing and the occasional halo of light from the runway.

A half hour later I find myself in the Gare SNCF waiting for the 10h30 TGV running from Paris to Nantes and asking myself for the hundredth time why I had decided not to take a ticket on the 8h30 train instead. The answer of course is simply that I didn’t want to risk losing my train to a delayed flight, but I didn’t realize that this would force me to spend more than three hours huddling for warmth in the marble-tiled tube that is the Gare SNCF. To make matters worse, the tube turns into a wind tunnel when the doors at either end open to allow passengers to enter or exit to their trains. On one side there are trains to Paris and on the other there are trains to all the other parts of France, all of which send chills down my spine.

A group of us have formed a group: four girls on their way to study in Angers and myself. We have piled our luggage around us and stand close together talking with our scarves over our mouths. I wonder if this is how the settlers felt after they had circled the wagons for night and prepared for the harsh cold of the desert night in the name of gold. I wonder this and then I wonder where that thought even came from.

I decide jetlag and remind myself to pick up a coat as soon as possible.