just keep swimming just keep swimming just keep swimming swimming swimming...

I was hoofing it around the southern suburbs of Paris today looking for a stable residence and some guy stopped at a light was BLARING Men In Black by Will Smith. This may just be the highlight of my France experience to date.

Also, I might have a lead on a housing situation! I was down in Guyancourt (the town that high school I'm working at is in) and I talked to another Lycée there about renting a room for the next month at 25 euro a night. They were super nice and super flexible about it. This is not a super good deal, but it's a pretty ritzy set up and it's right by my school. The only problem is that it has no kitchen, so I'd be eating a lot of non-perishables for the next month. That starts next wednesday if I can't find anything else. So at least I have a short term plan of sorts.

Anyways, the real news is: while I was down there, I went to the University that is down in Guyancourt (which is the same town the High School I teach at is) and I went to this information desk and ended up talking to this dude for like 10 minutes where we basically just went around in circles talking about how shitty it is trying to find housing in the Paris area. He gave me a lot of websites I already had and it ended up with him being like well, Bon courage! But he also took down my e-mail address and said that if anyone came wandering up to him looking for a roommate, he would let me know about it. So, I walked around for most of the afternoon and made more dead end phone calls and when I got home about 4 hours later, I already had a message from him saying, Guess what? That a girl named Celia had come up to him not long after me and said she needed to find a roommate for her apartment. So I'm on the trail. I'll keep you updated on how that works out.

Tomorrow's my first day at the school, I get to sit on classes. I'm compiling a list of vocab that I think everyone english speaker should know and that conventional teachers are probably overlooking. So far it's short, if anyone has additions, please let me know.
1. Whack (as in: "They're expelling all of the Roma people from France, that's whack."
2. Bogus
3. Dope (ie, "Will Smith is dope.")

more to come, I've got to go to a language exchange dealie and eat some tacos.
later gators! <--- another possible phrase to teach?

Sans domicile fixe

           Since Sunday there have been lots of positives, but there is one big, nasty negative hovering over my head and it is housing. Trying to find an affordable place to live in or around Paris is absolutely terrible. For the record, Clare Longendyke is an angel. Since my arrival, she has let me have her room to myself, only coming in to grab stuff or practice piano. Being here at first is kind of like being a baby, I don’t know how to do anything. Clare graciously stepped into the role of mom until I could get my own food and phone and so forth. She has been above and beyond hospitable in every way she can be and I hope that karma pays her back in full.

            Anyways, I’m trying to get out of there before I exhaust her. I’ve cast out a million lines and none of them have come back with anything. I toured an apartment yesterday that claimed to be a legendary artist commune. It was really un-inspiring. They had built most of the rooms themselves and hadn’t done outlets in them so it was really dark. The space was for 10 people and they had one toilet. And I was almost willing to make all of those compromises, we were actually talking rent until they got into the house rules and said that they didn’t allow any visitors. I asked if that meant overnight guests and they said, no, anyone. No one is ever allowed to come in to the apartment ever, even during the day, even for a minute. That’s where they lost me. Just a little too weird. And not the good kind of weird.

            So, I’ve been calling and calling all over the place (slowly getting over my fear of phone conversations in French, which is a definite plus). I am learning that “open until 17h” in France means “open until we don’t want to be here anymore,” which could very well be 15h30.

I know that everything will work itself out eventually, I just wish it would hurry up and do it already.

            Outside of all of that chaos,  I’ve been able to make some progress establishing my French life. I set up a French cell phone and got my Paris metro pass. Both are awesome, but the metro pass might be the best part. I feel like I can go anywhere at anytime and it ain’t no thang.

           I went down to Guyancourt yesterday. It’s about an hour out of Paris and I had to take the same train the tourists take to get down to the Versailles Chateau. It was pretty fun. After a minute, I realized that the older couple across from me were Spanish. They were discussing where the Asian people across from us were from and decided on Japanese. It was quite the people watching experience.

            When I got to the school, the guard was really friendly and so was everyone in the office. Turns out that no one had ever told them that they were going to get an English language assistant. They knew about the Italian, Spanish and German ones, but no one had ever warned them of me. They had no paperwork or anything,  but they weren’t worried about it. The teacher that will be my mentor had already left for the day (it was 13h30…), but they introduced me to some of the other members of the English teaching staff and we talked about housing options. They said they think the rest of the assistants are living at a nearby high school, so with any luck I’ll be able to join them.             
           So, some things are looking hopeful. I knew this would all be challenging, but I’m hoping that I can get through most of the administrative/logistical challenges and start digging into the language and social challenges. Keep your fingers crossed for me! Or if you know of any place I can live in Paris, let me know…

I made it!

So, after a million reluctant goodbyes to friends and family, the time finally came to get on my plane to France. I chose an Icelandair flight because they were basically paying people to fly with them after all of the volcanic activity they had this summer. Such a goofy airline. Everything down to the pillows is an extreme demonstration of Icelandic culture. All of the flight attendants are perfectly blonde and blue-eyed, they blast Sigur Rós and the interior is covered with Icelandic translations of every phrase you could ever want to know. As I was boarding, I noticed that the airplane was named Hekla, after a volcano that experts are expecting to erupt imminently. Couldn't help but take that as a bad omen, but it might have actually been a good one? I managed to sleep like a rock the entire flight. I think I discovered the trick for beating jetlag: you have to sleep at really irregular hours for about a week and build up a big sleep deficit. By the time you board the plane you'll be so tired that you're asleep before take-off. Works like magic.

By the time we arrived at Charles de Gaulle I was well-rested and wide awake. All the same, arriving in a foreign country, in a very different time zone, after hours and hours of travel, is kind of like getting plastered and trying to thread a needle. There are numerous obstacles to navigate and even the most basic ones require intense focus. Getting baggage, getting cash, getting anywhere at all, can be a huge hassle. I wasn't too concerned about all of this because I had some good luck (or divine intervention), I recently reconnected with Clare Longendyke, a friend of mine from high school that has been living and studying in Paris for about 3 years. She offered to pick me up from the aiport and is letting me crash at her place until I sort out my housing situation. 

She's got a big, bouncy head of curly hair, so I expected to spot her right away. Not there. I waited for a while by the exit and then walked around getting a closer look at every curly-haired woman I could see. No Clare. Maybe this WAS all too good to be true after all? I had her cell phone number, but the phones wouldn't take my credit card and I didn't have euros. So, I had to find an ATM (which was a hassle) and get cash, but the phones didn't take bills so I had to get change. Blah blah blah hassle hassle hassle. Several hassles later, I was connected with Clare and she managed to tell me that they had closed the train route to the airport for the day and she had to take a bus detour that was going to make her about an hour  late. At that point I had already killed about 45 minutes trying to figure out the phone call, so I didn't have to wait long before she showed up and whisked me back to her place. 

I got to shower and change into real people clothes and we walked around for a long time and got caught up and ate some bread and cheese and drank a glass of red wine. So, I'm easing into the Paris thing. I've had a handful of awkward french interactions, but I know they're just the tip of the iceberg. My immersion has yet to begin. 

Today is Sunday, so France is closed and I can't really accomplish that much. I'm trying to prep myself for all of the hoops I'll be jumping through in the next couple days. The to-do list is getting long. I'm glad I figured out blogging. I will go check that off my list.