There's a feeling that I don't think I'll ever stop getting when entering a new and previously unknown French city. It's that "I could so easily live here and be happy feeling."
Of course I got that same old feeling as soon as the bus' wheels started rolling over the old cobblestones near the Rennes Parliament to drop us off.
We walked up and down the streets, through the medieval town and the Saturday morning marché and I told myself that I could live and study here for a semester or a year without hesitation. It seemed to different from Paris, so different from Nantes. The French were more open and smiled, something I can't remember seeing on the streets of either city for quite some time.
When the tour guide turned us loose on the city, my friends and I decided to go back to the market and buy some of the strawberries that looked so wonderful and so fresh. We ended up finding a man who, in the interest of the closing market, decided to sell us 3 boats of strawberries for 2 euro. When I translated to everyone else what he had said, he immediately tried to switch to English, to which I responded in French. And so the conversation stayed in French and he gave us the strawberries in a plastic back and me a compliment that I speak French very well.
And so I may speak it well, but still that didn't change the fact that he sold us rather rotten strawberries. Of the 3 kilos that we purchased, only 5 strawberries were in a state somewhere close to be called edible.
So Rennes might be a place I could see myself living, but the ordeal in the market brought me back to realization that here was no mecca, no place without faults. There are people here like all the rest in the world and lessons for me left to learn.
Of course I got that same old feeling as soon as the bus' wheels started rolling over the old cobblestones near the Rennes Parliament to drop us off.
We walked up and down the streets, through the medieval town and the Saturday morning marché and I told myself that I could live and study here for a semester or a year without hesitation. It seemed to different from Paris, so different from Nantes. The French were more open and smiled, something I can't remember seeing on the streets of either city for quite some time.
When the tour guide turned us loose on the city, my friends and I decided to go back to the market and buy some of the strawberries that looked so wonderful and so fresh. We ended up finding a man who, in the interest of the closing market, decided to sell us 3 boats of strawberries for 2 euro. When I translated to everyone else what he had said, he immediately tried to switch to English, to which I responded in French. And so the conversation stayed in French and he gave us the strawberries in a plastic back and me a compliment that I speak French very well.
And so I may speak it well, but still that didn't change the fact that he sold us rather rotten strawberries. Of the 3 kilos that we purchased, only 5 strawberries were in a state somewhere close to be called edible.
So Rennes might be a place I could see myself living, but the ordeal in the market brought me back to realization that here was no mecca, no place without faults. There are people here like all the rest in the world and lessons for me left to learn.
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