10 Rue Edel
This is where I lived all year. It was usually more of a mess.
Just a few iPhone snapshots from my last week in Strasbourg. It was so hard to say goodbye to the city (and especially to my friends!) but part of me is also really excited to get to Boston and start my graduate program. For now, I’m staying with my parents in Stuttgart, but in four days, I’ll be on my way! I can’t wait!
Thoughts on my never-ending struggle with French
Learning a language, as it turns out, is nothing at all like riding a bike. It’s not easy. You can’t just pick up where you left off after taking a break. Most frustratingly, there’s no end point, ever. There’s no box to check when it’s suddenly over, and BAM, you’ve put in the required hours and acquired that skill and are now officially fluent. Instead… you just have to keep plugging away. Practice, practice, practice. You feel like a moron most of the time until you finally just let go of the fear of looking stupid and embrace it. Even then, you still have bad days.
A Day in the Life
Have you ever had a day when every single detail jumps out at you to remind you how different your life is now than it was before?
Saturday was surreal like that for me. I woke up for the first time at 5 a.m. to say goodbye to Laura, who was flying back to the U.S. with some of our other friends via Iceland. (A few hours after they arrived, the volcano erupted… we’re still waiting to hear whether the airport’s going to re-open in time for their flight Tuesday!) I was going to try to stay awake afterwards, but our apartment was so depressingly empty that even my footsteps echoed down the hallway. So I just went back to bed.
Team Tartine at L’Épicerie
It was Lily’s last day in Strasbourg today. It’s hard to believe the year’s drawing to a close, but everybody’s either leaving or getting ready to go these days — we’re all balancing our time between all the necessary moving-out errands (closing accounts, packing, cleaning, etc.) and spending as much time together as we can before we go our separate ways. I’m so jealous of everyone coming back next year, but I have to admit, I’m also really excited for my own plans — Boston! (More on that soon…)
For Lily’s last lunch, we all met up at L’Épicerie, a cute little restaurant in Centreville I actually hadn’t visited before. (After trying it, I wish I’d known about it all year!)
I had the tartine de chèvre aux amandes et au miel (tartine of goat’s cheese with almonds and honey) — delicious! It’s not a combination I ever would have considered before coming to France, but now it’s one of my favorites.
Everyone else trammed home afterwards, but I decided to take my time wandering through Centreville on foot. It was lunchtime, sunny and warm and crowded, and one of those days when I feel like I’ve been sucked into a movie about my life in France, complete with the café and street market backdrops, black-clad, smoke-trailing extras, and poignant accordion soundtrack.
A lot of the time life in France is just… life that happens to be in France. It’s living with roommates and going out with friends and figuring out bills and grocery shopping — just harder, because it’s all in a language and culture I’m still struggling to learn. But sometimes, I still have these moments when I can see my unspoiled romantic (cliché) fantasy image of la France. The more I learn from living here, the more I feel like that image should start to recede… but it’s hard to let go of entirely, especially in a city as beautiful as Strasbourg.
Palm Sunday on the Route des Vins in Alsace
Picture this: You’re having a picnic at a monastery on top of a mountain. It’s quite a spread, complete with bread, cheese, cake, and a bottle of wine, and from your spot in the shadow of the church, you can see miles of idyllic countryside.
Then you start to hear voices singing in French. How quaint! The voices get louder. Suddenly monks wearing long white robes and heavy-duty hiking backpacks start processing toward you carrying giant evergreen boughs.
At first you think there’s just a few of them. Two minutes later, you’re surrounded by hundreds of people. They’re all headed for the stone fountain you’d been sitting near moments before. They’re all carrying branches from the forest below. You’re scrambling to throw the cheese in a bag and move away. You’re hoping they didn’t see you passing around that bottle of wine. You’re wondering just what in God’s name is this, some kind of Christian flashmob?!
Nope, just Palm Sunday at Mont Sainte Odile.
On Sunday, my friends and I had decided to split the cost of two rental cars and spend the day driving the Route des Vins d’Alsace, a scenic tour of Alsatian vineyards and villages. The town of Obernai and the nearby monastery at Mont Sainte Odile were our first two stops along the way. Unfortunately, we’d neglected to check the date, so while the rest of the picnickers around us seemed to anticipate the procession of pilgrims, we were taken completely by surprise! After the initial awkwardness it was okay, though — most of the people just laughed at us, and they didn’t mind us watching the rest of the procession and the start of the outdoor mass afterwards (once we’d relocated to a less central location).
After lunch, we continued onward down the road, with stops in Barr, Ribeauvillé, Riquewihr, and Kaysersberg. Ribeauvillé was my favorite — it was almost like an Alsatian Disney World, complete with piped-in music up and down the main street, and bizarre Easter decorations hanging out of the windows. (In the Haut-Rhin, these window displays seem to heavily feature stuffed storks with naked human baby dolls dangling from their beaks. It’s a little creepy!)
Unfortunately, I have almost no photos of any of this thanks to a photo-downloading mishap this afternoon. Long story short: don’t ever ever ever wipe your CF card from iPhoto before you verify that your photos have actually been added to your library. Only eight photos from our last two stops in Riquewihr and Kaysersberg survived, but at least they offer a little window into the sights we saw around Alsace.
April in Strasbourg.
On the quai
With all the nice weather the last few weeks, we’ve been spending a lot of time on the quai. It’s a nice place to sit outside, enjoy the sunshine, and watch people walk and cycle by. Sometimes the ducks and swans even come hang out, looking for food. (It’s all fine as long as the ragondin stay away — they’re so incredibly disgusting that you kind of can’t look away. The other day, as we were discussing how gross they are, one crawled out of the water about twenty feet from us and started eating dog poop. Really.)
Thanksgiving
This year’s Thanksgiving was not the one I pictured, but that’s okay — it was even better. I think that for most people, Thanksgiving is as much about the comfort of tradition as it is about giving thanks, and I’m no exception. Growing up in Germany, good old-fashioned pilgrim food was a way to feel connected to my native culture. In college, when my family was far away, I at least made sure I was eating the same kind of turkey and mashed potatoes and pie my mother would have made for me. This year, I fully expected to spend the holidays indulging in tradition again. For the first time in awhile, I was going to be on the same continent on my parents and was planning to celebrate the holidays with them. But when a family emergency came up in the States two weeks beforehand, my parents had to fly back to help, and I was on my own again.
Joie de vivre
It was gorgeous outside today — sunny and warmer than its been in weeks — so I decided to go for a walk in the Orangerie to get some fresh air and take some pictures. The streets were deserted until I got to the park, and then I was amazed. I guess this is where everyone in Strasbourg disappears to on Sundays! Everywhere I looked, there were families of all ages — children playing together, couples holding hands or sharing a blanket while they read their own books, even a big multi-generational group (including an elderly nun) out for a stroll.
More than anything else about France, I love the slower pace of life here. I love taking long walks in the sunshine instead of going to the movies or the mall and running up my credit card bill. I love that the best “budget” foods for poor students are fresh vegetables, hand-made bread, and gourmet cheeses instead of over-processed, high-fat garbage. I love living on a street full of unique and beautiful old buildings for me to study as I stroll by, instead of a generic neighborhood I just want to hurry through on my way home. There’s still a huge part of me that misses the U.S. (and especially college) every day, but I’m trying to prendre le temps de vivre and enjoy this while it lasts.
