A First

My first impression of France was that it had a serious case of seventies architecture. When I got picked up from the airport on Monday and we got on our way, I finally just stopped looking out the window—at sound walls and awful buildings—and started reading my book. Things got much better, though, once we got out of the city (and its congestion). Even though sparkling water isn’t a thing here, and even though I don’t have an internet connection in my room, I’m starting to like France.

I wasn’t really sure where we were going after I got picked up from the airport—I didn’t know if, or where, Alliance Française had found me a host family. It turns out they did, though—a family in Rouen. Noriko sleeps in the bedroom down from mine. She is here learning French with the Alliance Française so she can go to a baking school in Rouen. She is from Japan, where, she explained to me, you eat rice, not bread. But bread has charmed her, and she is here to follow her dream.

And I am here to follow my own, I guess—speaking French. We have both been displaced, then, because home can do a lot of things, but it can’t teach Noriko how to bake world-class bread, and it can’t teach me how to speak French.

Tuesday I got driven to Duclair (a town of 4,000 about a half hour from Rouen) and introduced to the people at the office of the MJC, where I will be doing my internship. And then for the next two days I hung out with a group of Ukrainian kids who are here to perform in Duclair’s theater festival. After a day and a half of hanging around and waiting for stuff, I realized where I was:

and I savored the irony of how I came to France for an internship because I didn’t want to go anywhere near a tour bus while I was in Europe.

During the last few days, I have also wandered around Rouen. There is plenty to see, and so far I’ve been to l’Église Sainte Jeanne d’Arc and the surrounding square full of half-timbered houses and chic shops and the Cathedral de Rouen, and a museum dedicated to works in iron that is housed in an old church. The old and the new all end up together here—because I guess, no matter what, everything has to end up in the present. Please enjoy this fine example of palimpsest:

According to Christine Rolland, the half-timber with x's date in the fifteenth century. Beyond, are buildings from the eighteenth or ninteenth century, and in the background, you can see the ninteenth-century steeple of the tenth-century Cathedral of Rouen. To the left, the church of Saint Joan of Arc, which was completed in 1979, and in the foreground, chairs and tables that are used every day and stored in the ruins of...a really old church.

Every morning I wake up and I think, so, I’m in France. That’s cool. There is lots of French here. And lots of really old stuff to see. And I guess it’s all part of it—even hanging out on the Ukrainian’s tour bus.