I’m back home, my adventures in Namur are over. I have to admit I’m kind of glad to be done, which is not to say that I’m not also happy I went. I would even suggest it to anyone who wants to work on their French and live in Europe with virtually no living expenses. (If I were capable of resisting sales at the Body Shop and weren’t such a picky eater I could have literally not spent any money for the entire six weeks.) But a lot of things were starting to get  old like hostel beds, hostel food, internet that works only when it feels like it and only in one noisy room with one rarely available outlet…Namur is not exactly a sprawling metropolis, which has its advantages. It’s clean and friendly in a way that larger cities just can’t be. But after one afternoon of wandering around I saw everything I wanted to see. After one night at a bar I felt like I met just about twenty-something Namurois.

I know some people like that but I prefer Paris, which is where I am right now. Okay, technically Montrouge, but still not beyond the reaches of the Paris metro. As much as I hate to say this, my job right now is stay at home girlfriend. I’m trying to find a job babysitting or teaching English or showing tourists around, but seeing as I’m visaless and only staying for a month I’m probably only going to work a few hours a week at most. So I’ll keep living off my graduation gifts and—I’ll be honest here—mooching off Ader. I’ll fill my days with writing and trying to get my legs as tan as my arms are and I hope catching up with the handful of friends from junior year who still live in Paris.

And I’m going to start cooking dinner. I never cooked before for both ideological and practical reasons. Having dinner on the table when the man gets home from work just seemed too much like something the Christian Right would approve of. Plus I never really had to learn what with a mom who’s such a good cook and a brother who’s an actual chef. I do need to feel like I’m contributing to making our little household run smoothly though; not doing so seems more lazy than feminist in these circumstances. And I don’t really cook as much as I dump ingredients in a salad bowl, crock pot, or on really ambitious days a frying pan and wait hopefully for it to turn into something yummy.

I’m not going to be on the Real Housewives of Île-de-France anytime soon. But I have to admit I really love this lifestyle, and in a sustainable way. So the plan now is to write a best seller so I can live like this forever with my own money. Just kidding, there still is no real plan.            

I got back from Calais last night. So now I know, Calais is not the best place to visit if you want to work on your tan. Beach + summer does not necessarily equal nice sunny weather, as Scandinavia should have taught me. However, Calais is the best place I know of for shopping. Last week was the beginning of the bi-annual country-wide sales. I have only ever experienced the soldes in Paris, where they’re the French equivalent of Black Friday. You can buy a new outfit with a handful of coins but you have to fight your way through crowds of sweaty people and then spend sometimes over an hour in line. But in Calais it’s very civilized. I finally found non-leather sandals. They were so cheap that I bought two pairs. Everything in the store was half off and yet, there was space for me to try the sandals on and walk around, and then there was no line and when we went to pay for them. I felt like there had just been a plague and we were making the best of it.

Actually, Calais isn’t completely civilized. I had always heard that the French police were racist, especially in the northern fringes of the country. Is it racist to call French police racist? Maybe, but I believe it. Like anyone who has ever taken a French cinema class I’ve seen Welcome (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoRqzMGBU4U). I know about the refugees from Iraq who walked all the way to Calais and are stuck there until they can find a way to cross the channel and start new live in England. I know that the city has been inhospitable to these refugees to say the least.

My train arrived before Ader’s and I was sitting in the station waiting for him. I saw a guy go up to the window and ask for a ticket in English. I couldn’t really hear the exchange but for whatever reason the lady behind the counter didn’t sell him the ticket. Looking defeated the guy came and sat next to me. No less than five minutes later the police came, a whole troop of them with guns and those stick they beat rioters with hanging from their belts. This is in response to one guy who probably weighs less than I do quietly sitting in a bench in a train station minding his own business. The police asked him for his papers. He pulled something out of his pocket and handed it to one of the officers who examined it and passed it to another officer. They all took a look at this poor guy’s papers. What seemed like was happening was that the police were realizing that despite appearances this guy was in France legally and now they looked a bit foolish. There was whispering among the police and then one of them grabs the guy roughly by the arms and says in French that they’re going to search him. Like this was some kind of airport.

If I had any balls I would have given the police a piece of my mind. Really though, what would that have accomplished? Excusez-nous, Mademoiselle. Vous avez raison, on le laisse tranquille? Unlikely. Plus I really wasn’t up for another discussion about why my carte de séjour was expired. Still, I stared as the police patted him down in the middle of the train station hoping I could shame them into stopping if they realized I was paying attention and was going to blog about this later. It didn’t work. And I was the only one even looking! No one else seemed to think that there was anything unjust or even unusual about what was going on.

I should say that I know there are French people who are as appalled as I am by this kind of discrimination even if they are, in certain regions, a minority. Discrimination seems a more accurate term for it than racism. Because I really do think it’s true that you can be any color and accepted by French society...as long as you assimilate. If the guy at the train station had shaved his beard, changed into a suit, and spoken French the police wouldn’t have been there. While I do think that a certain amount of adapting to their new country is a reasonable expectation of immigrants, I don’t think that you should have to completely abandon your original cultural identity to avoid police harassment. Okay, I’m digressing.

We really did manage to have a lovely weekend otherwise. I leave Namur on Wednesday to spend July in Paris. I am going to really and seriously work on my novels. I am going to look for a job but only so hard, and I’m going to try my best not to worry about what comes next.

I just got back from Paris. Except that my train from Brussels was late it went as well as expected and maybe even a little better. When everyone in the group has the same enthusiasm and mobility things just run smoother. We walked around Père Lachaise, I showed everyone my old school. We ate crêpes from the place I used to go so often that the guy eventually stopped asking what I wanted when he saw me and just said, “Crêpe végétarienne, pas de poivrons?” It was a different guy working there this time. I got my dad two posters from the natural history museum. My cousin got my uncle a Nascar poster. I hope they don’t get mixed up, although it would be amusing to see my uncle’s reaction to receiving a poster advertising an exhibit about evolution, in French no less.

We went to Versailles and spent two hours waiting to get inside even after we had tickets. Now, I understand that the more people they let in the more money they make, and keeping up a castle and garden of that size can’t be cheap. Even so, I think that only so many people should be allowed in at a time. If you want to be guaranteed a ticket you should have to reserve in advance. Shoving in as many people as possible makes the experience less enjoyable for everyone. Imagine a mosh pit with old people and no music.

The last day we went to Giverny to visit Monet’s house. I illegally took a picture inside and got away with it. In the gardens you literally feel like you’re walking through a painting if you can imagine that all the other tourists taking pictures aren’t there. We went to an Indian restaurant for our last meal together. It was my aunt’s suggestion, although secretly mine too. I thought I was the only one who liked Indian food. Ader has been weary of new foods I introduce him to ever since I took him to a Japanese restaurant and neglected to explain that the wasabi is not to be popped in your mouth all at once. But even he liked it.

On Thursday Ader met me at St Lazare during his lunch break to say goodbye and I had to see myself off to Gare du Nord. He didn’t feel like he could take an extended lunch break since our next vacation is less than a week away.

Now I’m back in Namur, the only volunteer/intern left. It’s kind of lonely but also kind of nice because I have the room to myself. There’s only one outlet that works and I don’t have to step over anyone’s head to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. And I’ve got two books and the fourth season of 30 Rock to occupy myself with, now that I only have six days left.              

NB: This is a few days old. I’m just getting a chance to post now.

I’m going to Paris today! As soon as I’m done with work. “Working” right now consists of waiting for the people who are eating breakfast now to finish so that I can wash their dishes. My aunt and my cousins are in Paris, so the pretext is that I’m going to visit them. And it will be nice to see them. As children we didn’t get along terribly well, my cousins and I. They’re nice churchgoing Midwestern girls and I’m everything that’s wrong with America. But now we’re older and they’ve started to think for themselves, so we’re doing better.

But the other reasons I’m going to Paris: let my mosquito bites heal, sleep on a comfortable bed, and mix up my diet a little (I haven’t been eating anything besides bread, cheese, tomatoes, cucumbers and the occasional frites with curry ketchup since I came to Namur). Plus once I cross the border into France I can put money on my phone and it will once again function as more than an alarm clock. The internet is still my main means of communication, it being free and all. Still it’s nice to know that I could use my cell phone even if I’m generally too cheap to. And in Paris I can use my library card and get some fresh reading materials. There is literally not a single English bookstore or even section of English books in any bookstore in Namur. Or non-leather white sandals, but that’s another story. I also need to buy a father’s day present. Oh, and I need to see Ader. Not only because I miss him like crazy already but because he’s a good shopping buddy and I need a new watch.

I come back to Namur Thursday night. Then the following Wednesday morning I head to Calais to meet Ader. After extensive searching we found a city that wasn’t too far for either of us with a hotel that wasn’t too expensive. That was the only criteria. For previous trips I tried to pick scenic cities with lots of things to do. But the reality is that we’re going to spend our long weekend like this: stay in bed until hunger overcomes sloth, eat, walk around because we ate too much, repeat. Any city that allows us to do this will suffice. A beach is nice too. After Calais I come back and work three days and then go to Paris and I get to stay for a whole month. So yeah, life is good.

I’ve been working in this hostel long enough to have lost track of how long exactly it’s been since I arrived. I also forget what day it is sometimes, oftentimes. I think I like it here, but then maybe I’m not as comfortable as I think because I find myself doing things like not taking the five cents change that’s owed to me out of the cash register when I buy myself a drink from the bar, because I can feel the secretary watching me and I’m afraid that she’ll accuse me of stealing. I like the people I work with and I think they like me too. They buy me beers and answer all my stupid questions with a smile. (On dit un montre? –Une montre, ma petite.) But every once in a while something will happen, like Hélène will invite everyone except me to have a cigarette on her balcony. Maybe-probably-it’s just because I’m the only one who doesn’t smoke that I’m not invited. But then I can’t help but think that they’ve all been plotting: What activity can we do that we don’t have to invite the American to?

I once poured a Jupiler into an Appleboq glass and my boss Brigitte had to (I’m pretty sure literally) hold herself back from strangling me. When I was helping the chef Alex in the kitchen he asked, in French obviously, to get the cilantro out of the freezer. Except I forget the French word for cilantro so I said, “You want me to get what out of the freezers?” He did not try and hide his irritation. But this is the same Brigitte who tells me my outfit is pretty and the same Alex who makes meatless pasta sauce especially for me. So I just need to stop being so sensitive, I guess. The Belgians are like the French and unlike the Americans in that they don’t feel obligated to hide negative emotions and put on a happy face when they don’t feel like it. Whereas Americans who show any signs of displeasure are not only saying, “I’m pissed off” but also “I hope you know it and feel bad about it because I blame you.” The French/Belgian way is probably healthier.

I’ve made a new friend, she shares the room with me and her name is Myriam. We get along swimmingly. She’s from Rennes, so she’s French yet friendly and unrefined. She doesn’t try to speak English with me, she doesn’t get frustrated when I don’t understand her argot. She forces me to go out when she knows I’ll have fun and she walks home with me when I’m tired. There’s only one problem: she’s nineteen years old. She’s even younger than my brother. We weren’t even in high school at the same time. Until now it’s been my unofficial rule that I only hang out with people older than me or no more than months younger than me. It used to be because I didn’t get along with people younger than me. They had immaturity and naiveté oozing from their pores. Even when younger people didn’t irritate me they had nothing in common with me. Now I guess that’s changed and I feel like a real adult. I can drive, I can vote, I could smoke if I wanted to, and when I ask my parents to send me my birth control pills no one blinks. For all these reason I feel grown up, but now that I’m apparently at the age where age doesn’t matter I feel truly old.      

I feel much, much better now that I a) wrote my personal statement for law school, and b) chose where I’m going to work this year. In case you’re interested this is my generic personal statement. I’m obviously going to tweak it a little for each school.

            A particularly opinionated high school study hall teacher I once had saw me doing my French homework and said, “You’re taking French? What a waste of time!” I didn’t have a good response ready. First of all because I never expected someone who educated young people for a living to speak so disparagingly of my own attempt to learn something, and secondly because admittedly my only reason for taking up French at sixteen was that my mother had promised to take me to a family friend’s wedding in Brittany the following summer if I served as her translator. It wasn’t until later that I realized how many good reasons there were to learn a foreign language and chose French as my major. Then I had to answer the criticism of even my friends and family, who would well-meaningly ask “Why French? I thought you wanted to be a lawyer.” And just this past year, my undergraduate institution, located only a few hours’ drive from the Quebec border, announced that French was “not essential” to the university and would therefore be among the first programs to be cut in response to the budget crisis.

                American college students who study any language are constantly reminded that the world is larger than their corner of it. Language classes beyond basic grammar necessarily become classes about other things than the language itself. The requirements for completing a French major at my undergraduate university were too demanding to leave time for many courses outside of the French department, but that doesn’t mean that I didn’t get a well rounded education. My courses were a sampling of just about every one of the humanities and social sciences: linguistics, history, literature, sociology and women’s studies. We didn’t sit around conjugating verbs, but rather we talked (and read and wrote extensively) about why there was such a bloody civil war in the Congo, why Swiss women couldn’t vote until the 1970s, and why there is still so much disparity between socio-economic classes in Europe as well as most other countries in the world.  

                It may be true that in the area of New Jersey that I grew up in, the most spoken language after English is Spanish, a fact that my study hall teacher used to support his assertion. What my critics don’t seem to realize is we’re allowed to learn more than one foreign language. Knowing French has made it easier for me to understand other “more useful” romance languages. And the number of Haitian immigrants, French and Belgian exchange students, and French Canadian tourists is already enough to justify learning French even for someone who never travels.             

However, I did choose to use my French to travel to Montreal, Marseille, Brussels, Marrakesh…and I studied abroad in Paris, financed by teaching English to French high school students in Versailles, and working in a hostel in Namur. My junior year at La Sorbonne Nouvelle was by far the most difficult year of my education. Besides the language difference I had to figure out the French university system. Without on-line registration, syllabi, or office hours, I had to teach myself the French way to write a research paper and give an oral presentation (both considerably different from the American way I had learned). I quickly realized that foreign students who chose to enroll in regular classes with French students--rather than French as a second language classes with other foreigners--were not evaluated any differently. I also quickly came to appreciate how easy my university in New York had been.

                What struck me most during my junior year abroad was my experience working at Lycée La Bruyère. How well my students could communicate in English was impressive, but it was their knowledge of American culture that amazed me. When introducing myself on the first day I said I went to school in Albany. “Oh, the state capital?” one girl asked. Later, when comparing American and French political systems, my students brought up the names Hillary Clinton and John McCain almost immediately. Try asking any American high school French class to name a capital of a French province that isn’t Paris, or who the current president of France is, let alone who ran against him and lost.

                However, I think that while studying international law at name of school, I will be surrounded by people who have the same international perspective as me, and I can finally stop defending my choice of undergraduate major.  

And to answer your next question, these are the schools I’m applying to, in alphabetic order: University at Buffalo, Case Western Reserve, University of Florida, Indiana University, University of Maine, University of Miami, Michigan State, Penn State, Rutgers Newark, Syracuse, University of Toledo, and Wayne State. These are all the schools in my LSAT and GPA range that offer a concentration in international law, minus the religious schools and the schools in red states. Ader is looking for graduate assistantships in the same cities. I’ll go wherever we can both go.

There were four serious candidates for au pair families. One in Berlin, one in Liege, and two in Munich. The family in Berlin I actually met in person. What I liked about them: they live in Berlin (duh), I would only have to look after one ten month old baby who is very cute, and they’re vegetarians. What I didn’t like: language. The idea here is for me to speak German better. The family is from India and they speak English to the baby and Hindi with each other. I feel like only assholes complain about people speaking a language they don’t understand among each other. Still, I couldn’t help but feel a little left out. Also, they wanted me to live with them, in a room that shares one wall with the parents’ room, one wall with the baby’s room. The apartment isn’t small by Berlin standards, but it’s small enough that I would start to feel claustrophobic, living and working in the same place.

The family in Liege I only skyped with. Since they’re so close we had planned to meet in person but (spoiler alert) I chose another family before we arranged that. The mother is Swiss German, the father is from the Dutch part of Belgium. They were willing to pay me well and give me three day weekends, plus pay for my language classes. But they wanted me to start in July, which would leave me with no real break and some visa issues, plus they were very strict about only speaking English with the kids.

The first family in Munich had five year old twin girls. They had two previous au pairs, both from Australia. When alone with the girls I would have to speak English, but when the parents came home we could speak German. The reason I didn’t pick them was because they were deciding between potential au pairs just as I was deciding between potential families, and I didn’t want to sit around and wait to be rejected, especially since there was another family in Munich.

An agency had set us up. They saw my profile and chose me, even with my limited German skills and weird eating habits. The mother is a doctor, the father is a lawyer. They have three kids, 14, 7 and 5 years old. Obviously I get all the standards, the language class, 260 Euros spending money a month, four weeks of vacation two of which are paid. They don’t need me to speak German all the time with the kids, just to help with their English homework. As soon as I sent the email accepting the job they sent me back a picture of the October fest costume they saved for me from the last au pair. And they’re the only ones to keep emailing me in German, no matter how ungrammatical my responses are.

But the best part about going with the family the agency chose for me is that just in case I made the wrong decision the agency will help me change families. I don’t think I made a mistake here, I really think I’ll get along with this family. But when I think about the handful of people in the world with whom I really don’t get along, I didn’t know it when I first met them. What it is that really appeals to me is that for just one more year I maintain the ability to change my mind.