Bonjour from Toulouse!

Ah, oui, the first update from France. So much pressure (thanks Ray) to make it good. The introduction, after all, is where you decide if the rest of the story is worth reading or not. I may unknowingly be losing half my audience at this very moment! Oh, who am I kidding. You guys are either going to read this, or face the fact that you have 300 pages of reading for / work tomorrow. Easiest crowd ever.

My route from NYC to Toulouse was rather indirect, with a layover in Detroit before a nonstop flight to Paris. I got there just before noon on the 5^th, and after taking forever to find an ATM at the airport, took a train to Gare de Lyon where I met a friend from high school who’s on rotary exchange in Bourges. We spent a few hours in Paris with his friends, stopping by the Louve and Sacre Coeur before I got my first meal in France: (French) onion soup, sitting outside at a café. (The waiter also wore a beret and horizontal stripes, played the accordion, and was named Jean-Pierre… alright, kidding about the accordion). We took a train from Paris to Bourges, where his host dad picked us up and drove us home. His host parents were incredibly hospitable, cooking dinner for us at 10 at night and giving me my own room to sleep in. The next morning, the dad drove me to a train station 25 minutes further away just so that I wouldn’t have an hour long layover there. So my French experience was off to a great start.

The train got into Paris at 10 to 5 on Saturday, just in time for me to meet my host family. They’re really great people, and I feel pretty lucky since the family is probably the most important part of the LSA experience. My parents, Miki and Hervé, are a retired couple, and they live in a house pretty close to downtown (Centre Ville) Toulouse. Miki is always worried about whether I’ve eaten enough and if I’ve liked what she cooks, which is great because French cuisine is, well, you know, different. Turns out though I’ve happened to like just about everything she’s mentioned, and she’s convinced I’m lying to her. Having wine at every meal is a great backup though, because it can drown out the taste of just about anything, so I have no fear of trying new things. It makes me kind of sleepy though.

Hervé is a really cool guy. At first I thought he wouldn’t take much of an interest in me, but it turns out we have a lot in common (at least when it comes to what to watch on TV), so it’s been fun so far. He used to jump horses and he’s interested in most sports, so between those and game shows, that’s pretty much what we watch. We also showed each other card tricks the other day, and he was pissed cause he thought he’d figured mine out but in the end he hadn’t. The Dakar Rally is going on now, and so there’s coverage of that every night. I guess it’s interesting… And the French are really into American Basketball. I swear I know more about how the Nuggets are doing now than I ever have in my life before.

Mami, Miki’s mom lives upstairs, but is here for lunch and dinner every day. She’s 87 and of course smokes (everyone does), but is in excellent health. She’s just like a grandma – she corrects my French when I mess up, and than passes me chocolate under the table. Since my only grandparent (mother) that I knew passed away when I was 9, it’s really cool for me to have someone like Mami around.

Miki and Hervé’s granddaughters, Jeanne and Ninon, who are 2 ½ and 7, have also been around a lot, along with their dad, Laurent. Both of the girls are fascinated by me because I’m American. It’s really funny. And for me, coming from such a small family, it’s awesome to have 4 generations coming in and out of the house.

Life in Toulouse has been pretty good so far. The kids on the trip (there are 15 of us) have gotten to know each other pretty quickly and we’ve been having a lot of fun together. Last Friday we went out together for the first time, and it was a sick night. The bars here are pretty much what you’d expect – like hip American bars except you know you’re somewhere else because everyone is dressed a little differently and there’s euro-pop/prog rock blasting from the DJ booth in one of the corners. So we barhopped for awhile before deciding to stick around and dance at one for a little bit while some of the girls tried to get free drinks from the locals. I don’t know how successful they were, but the pictures say we were having a good time. We were on our way to another bar when we ran into 3 guys from Australia, who if I remember right had just finished a rugby tourney and were bouncing around Europe for a week or two. Apparently in Australia “to get loose” means to get wasted, so they were here in Toulouse “to get loose.” They must think that’s the funniest thing ever cause I’m pretty sure I heard them tell that story at least 5 times. But they were cool enough guys, and after no one made a decision on where to go for about 10 minutes, Jeff and I led the group to a bar (Café Classico) we know that’s pretty close to where we live. We’d gone there one day searching for Wifi, and the one bartender who was there was a really nice guy. When I went back later, the internet wasn’t working but I met two of the other guys who work there, Marc and Steven, and they’re also cool. Classico has a DJ starting at 11, and when we got there everybody decided that we’d made the right call. So we stayed and danced until they closed at 2, and between us and the Australians spent probably close to $150 on alcohol. Which is great, because now I don’t feel bad about using the Wifi for free, and I’m on a first name basis with almost everyone who works there. It’s nice to have a place where you can go and feel comfortable just hanging out and order the occasional beer and drink not to excess but in a safe and social environment (the American legal drinking age should be 19… anyone? …Anyone?)

Anyway, after Classico we weren’t sure where to go next, until I met (I really don’t know how) 2 Scots in the street – I think I just heard them and said “Hey! You speak English! – who’ve been living here for 6 years, teaching English “in their own manner.” (There was also some weird girl from Florida, but I mention her only because she was with some other random Irish guy named Colin, and I just wanted to say I met an Irish guy named Colin.) Anyway, I figured these Scottish fellows would know the best place to go at 2 in the morning, and they said “Aye” and led us to a discothèque called Shanghai. I talked to them along the way, which was a long walk cause all the wasted Dartmouth people stopped every block because they forgot where we were going. Anyway, I learned that in Scottish, “taking the piss” means to fuck around with somebody (like “I’m pulling your leg,” only more serious.) I mean, just in case you ever wanted to know that. Their names were, surprise, Harry and Dan, and Dan was flying back to Scotland the next day (as in like 6 hours) because he’s in a band there (he plays the bagpipes, mandolin, guitar, and flute), and they were touring or recording or something… I don’t know. Anyway, it was cool to talk to them.

So we got to Shanghai, led by the Scots and bringing along the Australians, the Scots got us in cause they knew the bouncers, or one of them knew one of them, or something, and I had my first European discothèque experience. Found out the next day, looking through the Toulouse tourist guide, that it was also my first gay discothèque experience as well. Apparently, on the 3^rd floor there are these rooms where guys just go to have sex, and periodically they flash hardcore porn on the projection screen on the first floor (where we were). But all of this was lost on us, and I think there were more girls than guys where we were anyway, and it was an awesome time.

The next day, a few of us were supposed to go to Carcassonne, a fortified city about an hour from here, but my mom got a call about an hour before I was supposed to meet Jeff to go and his mom said he was sick “because he’d eaten gluten and has a gluten allergy.” Which of course was fucking hilarious, because I knew Jeff was experiencing the hangover of his life. His mom also knew, but was nice enough to make up that excuse to tell the other moms when she called saying the trip was cancelled. No matter – Jeff slept it off (for 17 hours), and we went out the next day. Pics on facebook. Not a lot to say.

Of course, we also learn here too a bit. The 15 of us take classes together at the Université Toulouse Mirail, which is just about a 25 minute walk/metro ride/walk from where I live, which is one of the shorter commutes. We’re taking art history, architecture history (the two combine for one grade), French lit., (taught by a guy who looks exactly like a French lit prof), French History (which is really more like history/social geography/sociology), and those combing for a grade, and… what am I forgetting… oh, French. Out professors are great, and basically I love all the classes except art history, because I don’t understand Impressionism even in English, and the prof kind of bounces from one point to the next and no one has any idea what he’s saying. The history prof has very strong… French… beliefs. He’s entertaining and knowledgeable, but also really ethno-centric. For instance, he calls France the “end of Europe” (Spain and Portugal don’t count), says English is derived from French (it’s Germanic), talked about LaFayette’s role in our Revolution more than was necessary, and compared France’s war with Algeria to the war in Iraq. I mean, sure our current war is a total disaster, but I really can’t say that it’s the same as slaughtering a million revolting colonists (and yet somehow still losing). It’s just interesting ‘learning’ things from the French perspective. For another class, we read about how France has 6 “coasts,” (The Channel, the Atlantic, Spain, the Mediterranean, Italy/Switzerland/Germany, and the Low Countries). The book said that France was fortunate that 5 of these coasts are natural barriers, be they water or mountains, and this has historically helped protect France from invasion on those coasts. The only artificial boundary is that with Belgium, and it’s there, the book tells has, that France has been especially vulnerable (I guess we’ll forget the Allied Invasion in the north and the Roman invasion in the south and the Muslim invasion from… where’d they come from again?) Anyway, knowing this – that France is vulnerable to attack really only in one concentrated area – you’d think the country would not have been invaded more times than (usually my hyperbole would be France… umm…. Hanover High by Chi Gam’s?) But seriously, France’s first hero was a guy who lost the war with Caesar. But I mean, whatever. I guess Napoleon did kick some ass, even though he declared himself Emperor… after the French had a revolution to install a republic.

There’s a lot more I could write about, given that there have been so many ‘firsts’ in the last week and half, but I’ll stop here and end with an early observation. Globalization is made very obvious when you travel abroad. My Bourges friend’s host dad drove a Ford, and everywhere you look you see foreign cars. Nissan is popular, as is Suzuki. I was watching a show before that featured a Honda Accord and a Chrysler Sebring. I saw a sticker on the back of car before that said "J'aime ma Toyota" (I love my Toyota). The music here is mostly American, and you hear it a lot in commercials or as background music during some television shows. It's funny. I’ll be like "ah, the theme from American Beauty," and I look at the TV and it's a commercial for dog food or something. It's also interesting to realize that so many of the goods advertised in America are not really American at all. It was strange at first to see a Volkswagon commerical in French, but really, France is a lot closer to Germany than we are. It’s just interesting, I think, that we (or at least I) think of a lot of things as inherently American, when they’re not at all. And as much as I talked before about France’s historic military incompetence (sometimes I wonder what would happen if I stuck an American flag in the ground somewhere and said I was annexing the surrounding area for the United States. Maybe if I spoke German?), they do a lot of things right. It was so nice to go to the morning market my first day here and see everyone out buying fresh food for the day, and even though this is the 5^th largest city in France, my host mom met no fewer than 7 people that she knew in the short time we were there. Businesses are closed on Sunday, which is something I wish we’d see more of in the US. Most of the stores are small and locally owned. Banks don’t charge you for using their ATM’s. And eating dinner together as a family every night (not lunch for me during the week since I’m at the university) is something I look forward to every day.

I hope all is well back home/ in: Barcelona/the Marshall Islands/Rome/wherever else you are, and that those of you in Hanover are weathering (zing) this latest storm alright. Sadly, I can hardly imagine what the Green looks like covered in real, actual snow. Maybe even a decent sculpture this year? Keep me posted. And write back and let me know what you all are up to!

A bientôt,

John