Well, this has been an interesting second week. I’m going to take the liberty to be whiny about the past few days, and then I’m dropping it and moving on. Still, I want to share the complete experience of studying abroad, so I feel like I need to share the lows of culture shock as well. I didn't ever feel this last semester, but I've finally identified this inescapable tiredness, slight resentment, and the mood swings I've been having as culture shock. So, warning: this isn’t such an uppity post. I blame the culture shock, but I know that will pass. (It does get happy at the end, so feel to skip to the last few paragraphs.) Sorry, and here goes.
So Monday, Carly woke me up to tell me we didn’t have power. I went to the front lobby/entrance to flip the breaker, but it didn’t do anything. Oh well, no worries. I left a message for our landlord in broken French, since the machine caught me off guard, but I hoped I got my point across well enough. In my syntax class, I started to become slightly overwhelmed over the pace, but I eventually got back on track at the end and felt okay with the class. I really wanted to stay after and talk with some of the students, since my goal of the week was to be more outgoing. I’ve been super jealous of the French friends some of the other girls have met at school and at bars, and I wanted to make these friends too.
Unfortunately, I had to run upstairs to my next class, since it starts at the same time the other class ends. I had hoped to inhale some of my pizza between classes and even use the restroom, but as soon as I sat down, the professor closed the door and began his lecture. The prof talked for thirty second before abruptly stopping a conversation in the back of the room and told them not to talk while he was talking. He stared daggers at them that made me uncomfortable, even though he wasn’t looking at me. Maybe a minute later, a girl walked into class late. She was given a similar look, and the prof asked her rather brusquely what she was doing walking into class late, and she half-smiled back, unable to tell if he were joking or not.
He wasn’t. He proceeded to stand up and shut the door behind her, straight up yelling about how it’s just not that hard to get to class on time! Leave your house on time! It’s rude and disrespectful to be late! It’s just not that hard to be on time! And things of that ilk. I exchanged looks with Chelsea, because we were pretty afraid at this point. The prof got back into his lecture for about half a sentence before all hell broke loose and he began absolutely SCREAMING at some people in the back of the lecture room for talking. If I thought I’d been afraid either time before, it was nothing compared to how absolutely terrified I was during this four minute tirade. Oh. My. God. I’ve never been yelled at by my parents like that, let alone a teacher. I can only imagine a drill sergeant screaming at someone the way this professor was going. By the end of the shouting, I was slumped down in my seat, all but shaking.
At about two, an hour into lecture, there was a knock at the door, and two girls steped in asking if they were in the right place for the novel course. I braced myself for the rant this time, but the prof simply replied yes they were in the right room, but class begins at one now, since the schedule was changed, and go ahead take a seat. Then he went back to lecturing. I spent half the lecture trying to understand what made him so absolutely furious, and the other half trying to understand the lecture over the book I’d struggled with (turns out it’s quite funny, when you understand all the words and the social commentary…I think I’ll have to go back over that one).
Chelsea and I went to the shops to pick up the rest of our reading materials, and I talked to Carly about the electricity that still wasn’t working. I called the power company on the walk back, and I fumbled through the automated machine before talking to a live person who must have thought I was the biggest idiot in the world; between the background noise from the street and the fact that it’s so much more difficult to understand French over the phone, I had to ask the person to repeat themselves several times before they transferred me to someone that spoke English. From there, I was given an emergency number that I gave to Carly. When the emergence number told us to flip the breaker and then hung up, we called the landlord back and she sent her husband to help us.
I arrived home from shopping the same time he arrived, and he started by flipping the breaker again, asked if we’d blown a fuse plugging something in, then poked around the fuse box in our apartment before calling the power company himself. On the phone, I heard him talking to what seemed like multiple people, because he kept repeating the part about how we were “a few foreign girls who didn’t understand.” I understood that part, thank you very much. From his side of the conversation, I was able to figure out that we needed to set up our own account, even though we were told when we moved in that we would pay the landlord for the entire stay’s electricity.
After he got off the phone, he told us we would need to set up an account with the electric company, and I asked him if that was something we were supposed to have done when we moved in, but in a passive aggressive way that let him know I’d understood him on the phone. He said that yes, we should have, and sorry that we may have either misunderstood or if his wife hadn’t mentioned it. Yeah, that’s right, be sheepish about talking about me in front of my face. Since he had to leave, he left the number for the power company for us to call and set up everything, and that all we needed was our bank account information. I asked if I’d speak to a machine or real person, and he assured me it would be a real person, and wished us good luck before leaving.
He was wrong. The number he gave us was the same as the one I’d called first and spent ten minutes on hold for. Having learned the first time, I just stayed quiet until the voice told me it didn’t understand me and put me through to a real person. I was even worse at speaking French this time around, and they asked almost immediately, and in not such a friendly way, if I wanted someone who spoke English. I responded, “YES.” Then the French woman speaking English to me was rude. A few times, I slipped and answered “oui” out of habit, and she told me to just speak English. I had my bank account number ready for her, but first she needed the number off the breaker, and then the numbers/reading off the box, and then not only my account number but the bank information including some code that I couldn’t even figure out how to find, even though she was speaking English. But the bank business she said could be sorted later, after they set the power back up on Wednesday morning. Mind you, this was on Monday night. To have someone come out on Tuesday, if I called them back on Tuesday morning at exactly 8am when they opened to see if maybe they could fit us in at the end of the day would have cost one hundred Euros. We decided Wednesday morning was fine. I hung up, dropped my phone on the table, and curled up in a ball on the floor, half giggling because I knew I was being ridiculous but not really.
I explained to Carly and Roz, who had stopped by, what happened in the phone call. Roz wished us luck and was really great and sympathetic, and Carly and I went out for dinner, since it had been dark for hours already, and there was no way we could find food in our pantries with the two candles we had, let alone cook anything. We chose the big greasy burger shop around the corner with fries like Penn Station. It was delicious and exactly what I needed. We spent the rest of the night in darkness trying to think of good games to play in the dark, other than flashlight tag, since we didn’t have a flashlight. Roz came back over, since she so graciously offered to charge our devices to last through the next day, and then we went to bed.
Tuesday, I woke up late and grabbed a sandwich on my way to class at the anthropology building, where I felt absolutely and completely lost in class. Still discouraged from the fiasco with the power company and the landlord’s insistence that we foreign girls didn’t understand, I felt like I was losing my resolve to understand and lost focus during class. Instead, I organized my planner and came up with a to-do list for the day, and ended up flipping my planner open to last August, where I’d kept track of all the activities and things I was doing in Australia. An overwhelmingly strong urge to drop everything and spend my entire savings on a ticket to Australia hit me right then. I miss Australia (Happy Australia Day, by the way), I-House, and every last person I met last semester with all my heart, and I still can't believe what a good time I had. I started comparing my first few weeks here to my first few weeks in Australia, and the downward emotional spiral I’ve been riding just increased in pace, I grew even more homesick for Australia, and I got more mad at myself for feeling so down.
That night, I was able to meet up with Dale, one of the guys I met in Australia. He offered to let me charge my things at his hotel, so I went back with him and met his girlfriend, Lex. They’ve been traveling for the past two months and told me all about their amazing experiences through the US, Iceland, and Europe, and I started to feel excited about traveling, taking as mental notes as possible. It was so nice to hear the familiar Australian accent (I didn’t realize how much I’ve missed it and the slang, or how awfully inaccurate the one I hear in my head is!) and a familiar face from last semester. Then he told me how lucky I am to be in such a beautiful place with so many opportunities to travel and experience the culture.
I was still feeling sad and mopey this morning when I got on Facebook and saw my sister's status about missing me, and I can't begin to tell her how much I miss her back. Words wouldn't do it justice, and part of me can't believe that I would think about spending time in another country when she's still growing up in Cincinnati. This brought on an overwhelmingly strong urge to go buy a plane ticket home to the states and never leave my sister's, parents', or friends' sides ever, ever again. But that whole scenario is even less realistic than catching a plane to Australia for a few weeks.
It wasn’t until after I'd really woken up this morning (after buzzing in the electricity man, going back to sleep, sleeping through my alarm, and then actually waking up), that I realized how right he is. I’ve had friends from the states and Australia tell me how lucky I am to have this opportunity to spend two semesters abroad, and I know they’re right. These past few days, I’ve definitely let the culture shock and homesickness get the better of me, but that is stopping right now.
As I’ve been writing this post, I’ve realized that I’m just glossing over the good things that have happened the past few days: I got to see a friend that lives halfway around the world that I might not get to see for some time; I talked to Kaitlin, a girl from the program in my anthro class, about swimming and hiking Monte St. Victoire sometime soon, and I plan to look into soccer, too; I’ve kept in contact with friends and family from home, despite my lack of a consistent internet connection, and that’s just going to get even easier when internet gets installed this weekend; I’m still working on my trip to Italy for spring break, and I’ve been getting good travel advice from Italian Ross in Australia, and now I have Dale’s input too; I’m talking to friends and family from home about visiting me here; and, maybe the biggest thing, I’m living in southern France for a few months with so much culture and so many experiences and opportunities right at my fingertips.
Just now, I booked a place on the program’s bus to Monaco for a day trip this Saturday, and there was one spot left to go see Swan Lake tomorrow night, so we’ll see if I scored that ticket too. I should be receiving information about an exchange family where I help kids with their English/English homework for an hour or so, then have dinner with the family (come at me ratatouille and bouillabaisse!). I’ve gotten in contact with my family here, so hopefully I’ll get to Paris and Toulouse soon. I’m looking into a train to Paris to visit Ole and Leelou, who I met at I-House, for a few days, then I’ll have the chance to host Ole here for a weekend in February.
All really, really good things. So. Now that I’ve sat inside for a day to catch up on email and soak up more than enough electricity for the two days that I missed, it’s out with this awful attitude I’ve been sporting, and upward and onward. Time flew by in Australia, and I’d be crazy to think it’s going to slow down any here, and I really don’t want to be kicking myself in a few months for squandering weeks that I could have spent exploring this wonderful country that I’m lucky enough to call home for the time being. I’ll remind myself of Charlotte’s words from I-House’s first Soapbox of the session, almost six months ago: Life isn’t that hard. It’s really not, and it’s time for me to stop acting like it is. Cheers, and I hope you’re all doing well - I promise I’m going to be doing better (starting now!), and that there will be pictures once we get internet this coming weekend!
Here and there,
Kiley
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