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angloinangouleme · 7 years ago

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An Introduction

Hello all, and welcome to the beginning of my blog! If you’re looking for some info about me or what I’m doing, you can head on over to my about page where I’ve written out a brief explanation of who I am and what I’m doing this year. In short, I’m an English language assistant in a few public schools in the southwest of France, centered around the town of Angoulême. This blog is meant to capture my experiences over the coming school year.

If you are wondering what sort of content you might expect to see on this blog, look no further! For the moment, my plan is to update with a text post (like this one, for example) about once a week. The post could be about what has been happening to me in the past week, what has been on my mind, fun things I’ve been doing with students, or anything else that I feel encapsulates my experience here. The post below is a little longer than I’d like these posts to be, but I thought it appropriate to write more considering how quickly things have happened in the past few days.

Between text posts, I intend to post a photo every day. The photo may not always have been taken on the same day, but I’ll try my best to upload something current. If I feel some explanation is necessary I might write something brief about what the photo depicts, but those posts will be much shorter than the text posts.

Finally, before I get into my first real update: if you ever have any questions or comments about what I’m doing, or maybe a suggestion about something you’d like to see me write about or take a photo of, feel free to drop me a line via the mailbox, linked here or conveniently located to the left side of the page.

Muscat grapes in the supermarket and escargots for dinner - French enough for you?

Tuesday, 9/26/17

Well, I’m finally here - I arrived in Paris on Saturday morning, stayed there through Sunday, then left on the train to get to Angoulême on Monday afternoon. I’ve spent all of about one day here so far, and it seems like a pretty cozy town! For this week, my mom has been generous enough to come with me and help my lug my suitcases around France - she’s a very selfless person. I will definitely miss that help when I embark on other journeys during school breaks - although I really hope to avoid ever carrying so much luggage again.

In any case, let’s back up a few days to our arrival in Paris. The airport was, as it almost always seems to be, a test of patience; we waited in the customs line for well over an hour before finally getting through. Fortunately, we had had the foresight to book a taxi in advance to take us to our hotel in the Latin quarter, an undertaking far preferable to bringing six large suitcases through the RER (Paris commuter train). Once we arrived at the hotel around 10:00, neither of us wanted anything more than simply to give in to our bodies begging us to sleep but unfortunately we had resolved to stay awake the whole day to avoid the worst of jet lag and unfortunatlier still, we wouldn’t be able to check in for another four hours. So, having left our heavy burden in hotel storage, we set out to walk the streets of Paris. We ended up mostly exploring the 3rd arrondissement, heading up to the place des Vosges to buy some tea at Damman Frères (highly recommended!), eating lunch at a café on the rue de Rivoli and walking past sites such as the Musée Carnavalet (a museum about the history of Paris) and the tour Saint-Jacques. Eventually, we found dinner and slept heavily all through the night.

A cute - and somewhat kitschy - café in the 5th arrondissement

Sunday was somewhat calmer than Saturday. Beginning the day with a mass at Notre Dame, we had had grand plans to follow that up with visits to both the medieval Musée de Cluny to see the famous series of tapestries known as La Dame à la licorne, or “The Lady and the Unicorn” as well as to the Mémorial de la Shoah, or Holocaust memorial, which contains many extraordinarily meaningful and excruciatingly heartbreaking exhibits. After seeing several placards on the right bank on Sunday in parts of the old Jewish quarter memorializing individuals who were arrested in those very buildings - schools, offices, and homes alike - and deported, “by French police officers complicit in the Nazi occupation,” as some of these signs remarked, we felt it would be important to visit a place dedicated to all those whose lives were unjustly extinguished by a government rife with hatred and xenophobia and lacking in self-reflection and empathy. The exhibits in Cluny took much longer than we had thought, however, and we were not able to make it to the Mémorial de la Shoah before it closed for the day. That evening, we found dinner on the rue Mouffetard, a street filled with little restaurants that provides an escape from the constant crowds, noise, and tourist traps of the Quartier latin.

7th-century Visigothic decorative crowns at the Musée Cluny

On Monday we elected to visit a church before departing, and so we walked over to the Église Saint-Gervais-Saint-Protais. This church is known for two things: firstly, a tragedy on Good Friday in 1918 in which a German artillery shell fell onto and collapsed the roof during a service, killing 88 civilians; and secondly, a family of musicians known by the name Couperin, including the composer François Couperin; the Couperins were organists at Saint-Gervais for more than two centuries and significant portions of the organ date from that period. After that quick stop, we boarded the TGV (Train à grande vitesse, or “High-Speed Train” - a very inventive name) in the direction of Bordeaux and almost exactly two hours later arrived in Angoulême. The rest of Monday was spent getting set up in the apartment we had rented out for the week and poking our heads around the main downtown drag. Angoulême is a relatively small town that overlooks the idyllic landscape around it from atop a hill.

Looking down from the top of the hill

Today began with a breakfast of tea, baguette and jam, and a pain au chocolat (what might be called a “chocolate croissant” back in the US; this, however, is an abomination of language for the French). I’ll take this over a bowl of cereal any day. After breakfast, I did more exploring of Angoulême on foot and later joined up with another assistant who will also be working at the Lycée Guez de Balzac (quick note: lycée in France is roughly comparable to high school in the US). The two of us talked for hours about our concerns with starting on Monday, what we are excited to do, and everything else that has been on our minds leading up to the beginning of our posts. While we chatted, we shared with each other what we knew of Angoulême and walked up and down the town – quite literally, considering the topography of the place (I’ve been reconsidering my idea to buy a bicycle). In the end, we said au revoir and parted ways for the evening. I’m very excited to meet more of the assistants in the area, not to mention the teachers and students I’ll be working with!

A nighttime view looking out over the valley

One of the main takeaways from my first few days in France is the realization of how much more I’ve been walking - it’s something I always find when I travel abroad, but the knowledge that it will happen never seems to make my feet hurt any less. Stay tuned for my next text update, which I hope to write next week after I’ve begun in both of my schools, as well as for the daily photo updates I’ll be posting!

#angouleme #tapif #aia text

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