au revoir

It's hard to write a final farewell blog without knowing if I'll be coming back in the fall (though the prospects of getting renewed as a lycée assistant are not as promising as I'd hoped). It's also hard to write a blog after two hours of sleep and several more of laying on the unforgivingly cold and stony floor of CDG, but I know if I don't get this started now I'll never get around to it later. 

(sidebar: Aside from the appalling lack of a tempurpedic mattress, the overnight CDG experience was much nicer than I'd been prepared for. Terminal 2A, while not affording any long benches without armrests or privacy, was clean at least and they dimmed the lights at night with no annoying announcements running. Altogether a much more pleasant experience than when I spent the night in the Lyon airport in December.)

Before I left Sainté yesterday, my friend Orrin and I were discussing how year abroad experiences affect people, and he asked me if I thought I'd changed much. For some of our friends there were more obvious transformations, but I couldn't think of any ways that I had perceptibly changed. Even after reflecting upon it further, I don't think living in France has drastically changed me in any way (folks back home will have to set me straight if I'm wrong on that ;). 

I know I’ve become a more adventurous cook, and I’ve come to appreciate how easy it is to get fresh ingredients at the marché. I’ve always been a huge fan of bread and cheese, though, so being in France has just facilitated my access to the good stuff.

Being here has certainly given me a new perspective on how the US is seen from abroad, at least from the viewpoints of my French, Canadian, and British friends. Especially having grown up and spent more or less my whole life in the South, you don’t realize exactly how…I’m trying to find the right word here… pervasive? the idea of the bible belt is, and just how religious the US really is.  It’s kind of funny that historically Catholic France is now known as a secular-socialist bastion, whereas the US has gravitated towards religion after being founded by many notable agnostics and atheists.

Buuuut this is a travel/living abroad-themed blog, not a political one, so I’ll leave any further discussions to be had in person (preferably over some wine and cheese. Or burgers. Or both).

I'm going to miss France a lot. I already started feeling nostalgic for Sainté (and even for Feurs, to a certain extent) before I even left, and even now I'm not sure I've really processed that my year as an assistant is over. For all that it can be a bureaucratic nightmare sometimes (and for whatever reason, the internet in France seemed to have had a personal vendetta against me), it’s got a lot going for it and I anticipate some reverse culture shock when I get home.

But I know I can be happy no matter where I am, whether in the land of air conditioning, customer service, and McDonald’s or that of trains, wine, and pervasive cigarette clouds, or anywhere else for that matter. It just remains to be seen what lies ahead.