Today was absolutely amazing. It started about 23 hours ago as I left the airport in Detroit with a window-seat view of Independence Day fireworks lighting up the sky below me. As I wondered at the little dime-sized color bursts, the man who’d be sitting next to me for the next 8 hours began to ask if I spoke English. His name was Basham and he was going back to Lebanon for a three-week visit after 27 years of being in the States. We spoke a little of languages [I presented my limited knowledge of Arabic to his great amusement]; we joked about airline food and the time change; he gave me his non-hilal meat chicken appetizer at dinner, I gave him my makes-me-sick-so-I-don’t-eat-them blueberry muffin at breakfast. Basically we were bffs. And at seeing my tattoo, he decided to explain to me the difference between Islam and Christianity. Needless to say, it was an interesting flight.
As we flew down closer to the airport ready to land, there she was, the Eiffel Tower, in all of her foggy glory. I wish I could’ve taken a picture of it [I may or may not have attempted...] and then: the airport. Oh man, Charles de Gaulle. If you ever want to feel small, this is the place to go. The plane landed and they wheeled stairs up to it, so we went outside to get on a shuttle to go to the actual terminal, it felt very movie-like to me. It’s a gorgeous airport, and at special request- yes, there are fresh flowers in the Paris airport, and the whole place smells like perfume.
Customs laughed at me. Not quite the welcome I expected, but hey, whatever floats their boat. They were having a good ol’ time making fun of the tourists that “didn’t know French”… except I know French. Their jokes weren’t that funny. I made my way to the luggage belt, somehow, and they didn’t lose my luggage [yay!]. After that I began to drag around my 2-month supply, and thus begun my workout that lasted for about the next 8 hours. I got to the train station, sweating bullets [at least it felt like it] and managed to get a ticket for the train 2 hours away, not too bad, so I started to walk around… with my 80+ lbs of baggage. I decided to go into a little shop to see if I had enough euro on me to eat anything and they had these adorable little raspberry tarts. The second I walked in, one of the male employees dashed behind the counter to my aid and raised his eyebrows with a smile when I opened my mouth and French came out. Une tartelette aux framboises et un espresso simple, s’il vous plait. He only charged me for the tart, whispering the coffee was on the house as he returned my change. It was absolutely delicious.
I finally got on the train and witnessed a lot of... interesting people. There was a handful of British teenagers that didn’t seem to actually have tickets or seats, they got off at the first exit, which was too bad; I enjoyed their accents. I made it to my first stop and dragged my luggage off of the train and began walking to the monitor to see where my next train would be coming in. I met a girl standing there named Stephanie, from Britain, ironically enough also on her way to Angers, but not for the same school. She was relieved to find someone who spoke English, as I’ve found with every non-French person I’ve spoken to here thus far [minus one, we’ll get to him later]. I’m not shy about asking if someone knows where something is, I know full well I’m a clueless tourist, and I’d rather look like a tourist than miss my train. But I always ask in my most formal polite stranger French, and non-French people nearly immediately respond with “parlez-vous anglais??” and a relieved sigh when I answer in English. What I’ve really enjoyed, are the people who don’t ask me that. Who just assume that my French is peachy keen and start rattling off information to me in French. It makes me feel like I’ve fooled them, even though I’m sure it couldn’t be more clear to them that I’m a foreigner if I had AMERICAN stamped across my forehead. I’ve found that the French are very eager to help with heavy bags, male or female, which was lovely, because I was struggling to say the least.
I made it on and off my second train without too much trouble, and I was in Angers! [Another yay!] I made my way over to the entrance and found a group of people huddled around a CIDEF sign speaking English, so I headed that way. They handed me a map of Angers and a map of the campus with a short itinerary for tomorrow’s events and sent me on my way. I walked the two blocks to my dorm, still dragging that dang luggage, but it was hard to worry about that while looking at Angers. It is beautiful here, made-for-me perfect. It’s a city, with old beautiful buildings, lots of shops close together, little hatch-backs driving around everywhere. A total dream come true. I made it to my dorm and found that I was put in the all-girls dorm, run by Spanish nuns. Yes, Spanish nuns. They’re truly lovely women, super old and super sweet. I was shown to my room [she even carried one of my bags] and then rushed outside as she hurriedly walked me down the street to show me how to get to the université. It was about another 2 blocks walk, and I made it just in time to grab a little dinner and introduce myself. To my great disappointment, it would seem that my French is a little.. over-developed for the students that are here this month. There are a lot of people that I’ve yet to meet, and I heard certain tables speaking beautiful French, however the table I sat with barely knows any at all. I made small talk, because I didn’t want to be rude, but if I wanted to speak English with girls from Missouri, I’d go to Missouri, not France. I headed out and ended up catching up to a group of people I’d seen in the café. We started in French, until they [again with relieved sighs] learned that I speak English. The three of them are from Florida [Casey, Colleen, and Meghan] and we talked about majors and all that good stuff. They were all staying in one of the other dorms and invited me to come back in a few hours to hang out with them and their floor, they were planning to go out to get to know each other.
9h30ish, I was back at their dorm and was introduced to the rest of the people staying there with them. Three guys from Ireland with awesome accents, a German dude, an Italian that doesn’t speak very much English, and a guy that goes to school with my dinner-mates from Missouri. They all have very interesting names, however, once again, they were all speaking English [aside from poor Italian Ricardo who was kind of lost in the shuffle trying to pick up pieces of things he understood]… and they were drinking. Not really interested in that kind of going out, I planned on just heading back to my dorm whenever they were going to leave, but then Daniel (Irish) asked me about my French and when I started to speak it, I saw Elias’ (German) and Ricardo’s heads pop up. The three of us started having our own little conversation in French and decided that as lovely as our new friends were, they were too loud. So we went for a walk to talk about languages and cultures and ourselves and just explore the city. It was absolutely beautiful. Ricardo started teaching us a little Italian and we tried to teach him a little English and better his French. It was much better than going to the pub with the others, at least in my opinion, and since it was getting late/dark, they walked me home like nice gentlemen. I have yet to unpack and I have a full day tomorrow, but over-all I’d say good first day, you know, minus it being 2 in the morning here and I can't sleep...
I promise, tomorrow my camera will be glued to my hand, and you will reap all of the glorious benefits. There is no way that I'm missing another sunset like the one we had tonight, breathtaking. Au revoir.
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