Le denouement

I feel I may have left off on a sour note at my last post. For those of you who couldn't decipher my poetic abstraction, perhaps you heard on the news about the volcano in Iceland that erupted some days ago and whose cloud of ash cancelled nearly all Western European flights for most the week. To be honest, it didn't affect my travel plans all that much. It prevented me from going to Dublin and gave me three extra days in London. Can't complain too much about that. Especially when you consider all the people who were really inconvenienced by the flight cancellations -- Britons stranded around the world trying to return to their families and their jobs, for instance. For me, it was just another part of the adventure.

Come to think of it, disrupted travel plans played a major part in my two-week break. My initial train from Montpellier to Paris was cancelled because of a rail strike; one night in London I waited for a bus until 3 am before giving up and going to a different stop; and when I returned to Montpellier yesterday the tramway was down because of a strike. I got back to Montpellier by taking a bus from London to Paris and then the TGV from Paris. Instead of going through the chunnel -- which I was pretty excited about -- the bus took a ferry. It was a surreal experience. My bus left London at 10:30 Wednesday night, and I woke up around midnight to the angry yelling of our bus driver telling us to get off. There were dozens of coach buses and cars in this long chamber, and we took a passenger lift to the lounge area. I was with this French student named Thibault who I met on the bus and who, remarkably, is a good friend of Marine, a French girl doing a year abroad at Whitworth! I followed him in a half-daze to floor 5 of the ferry, which, but for the people sleeping awkwardly in chairs and on the ground, may as well have been a shopping mall. For some reason I've never considered how large a ferry must be. Quite large, I discovered. There were cafes and shops, huge seating areas and carpeted walkways. We went up another floor and found a quiet place to sleep for the hour and a half before reboarding our bus. We arrived at Gare de Lyon in Paris around 8:00 am, and as we looked at the metro map to figure out our route, my friend Rachel came walking up. What the hell? She's from Montpellier and was on break, too, but what are the chances we'd see each other in the Paris metro? What's even weirder is that I saw her in London, too, in the British Museum. Too bizarre!

After that journey down the rabbit hole, it's very nice to be back in Montpellier. It's warm and humid here, even when cloudy, and you can feel summer creeping on. Next week I have three major assignments due -- my last assignments of the semester, in fact -- which will be hard to finish with my playing in a Frisbee tournament this weekend. It also didn't much help that I made dirt cake with my friends Sarah and Eddy this afternoon. It sure was tasty, though, and fun!

It astounds me that I have only a few more weeks left in France. Two weeks of class, a few days of finals, then my dad will visit me for a couple weeks, and I'll leave soon after that. Just before break I spent my last time with the Tapperts (my pastor and his family) at the CFU (my church). They leave this weekend for the states, as they do every summer, to visit their base of support and ask for continued support for their mission in France. It was a sad and significant goodbye. By and large they have represented the most important aspect of my time abroad, that is, the development of my trust in the Lord. They were very nearly the first people I met in Montpellier, literally the first morning I was here. They took me into their church and their home like a son, and I have benefited greatly from the fellowship that's taken place in their home.

Well before break the idea of "denouement" came to mind. We use the word in English when discussing literature to mean the resolution of a plot, the events that follow the climax. In French it derives from the verb "denouer," which means "to undo," literally to undo a knot ("knot" = "noeud"). With my last time at the CFU with the Tapperts, with my vacation having finished, with only a few weeks of class ahead of me, I feel very clearly in the denouement of my chapter in France. It seems that I experience a somewhat significant denouement in my life every few months in recent years. Last year I started getting sad about leaving for France sometime in August! On the other hand, I'm already really excited about next semester starting and being an RA again. Transitions come at me so fast, they tend to blend together, these beginnings and endings, the process of making and untying all this yarn, all these knots. I go back and forth between Colorado and Whitworth, and now between the US and Montpellier and other places in Europe, and no matter how present-minded I am in each place, threads are constantly being done and undone. I am becoming more and more convince of two absolute truths. Human life is inherently transient, and all that remains and remains constant is God. What I wrote in my second post on this blog -- which I didn't understand as well as I do now, and which I still can't completely understand -- still holds true: God, the one Constant, is with us, ever with us. Two weeks of travel only served to convince me further of this. In allowing me to meet with good friends in Paris, in blessing my travels, in giving me a gracious host in Chester, in keeping me safe in London, in intersecting my path with those of Rachel and Thibault, in granting me a thankful heart, I know the Lord is in my life, solid and active and good.

I took several hundred pictures in Paris, Chester, and London, but since I'm still borrowing a computer, I unfortunately can't put them up here. Not too long from now, though, I'll be back in the US and can post them or, better yet, print them off and show them to you myself! With much love and gratitude, your Montpellier man.

My vacation plans are like a volcano...

My vacation plans are like a volcano
that unexpectedly blew up,
sending massive mushrooming
clouds over the UK,
grounding all the planes
until who knows when.
Oh wait --
a volcano actually did blow up,
and the planes are actually grounded.




(composed in an internet cafe in London)

In London

So I'm still in an Anglophone country -- the same one as before, in fact -- but it's starting to feel a bit more normal. The southern accent is, of course, quite a bit easier to understand than the midlands or northern accents. One interesting discovery is that I'm still functioning on a sort of bilingual level. Naturally (well, not always so naturally -- I do have to remind myself that strangers here speak English), I speak English to people, but I still think a good deal in French, or sometimes in a fluid combination of French and English. That's encouraging. It makes me think that perhaps I'll still be able to speak French when I return to Montpellier next Friday. A few months after being in the states, though, that could be a different story...

London is enormous. It's much larger than Paris. I realized last weekend that you can walk most of central and historical Paris in a single day. Not so with London. I arrived yesterday in the afternoon and started my tourist excursion at kind of an odd time -- around 4:30, not long before many museums close and well before the night life begins. So I saw a lot of things from the outside: the Royal Observatory, the Queen's House, the Eye, Big Ben, the Tower and Tower Bridge, Parliament Square, Westminster Abbey, and lots and lots and lots of buses. Today I plan on actually entering a building or two, probably the British Museum, the National Gallery, and perhaps Pollock's Toy Museum and/or the Charles Dickens Museum.

I can tell already it's a great city, but a city can only be so great if you don't know anyone there. After spending a wonderful time in Paris and Chester with lots of friends, London can't compare. I'm hoping to meet up with Shawna McNally and Katie Goodell tomorrow, and perhaps my friend Parham on Sunday, and I think that will brigthen up my time in this incredible city. Today is already bright, though; it's sunny and clear, an unusual blessing in England. It's been great weather my whole trip, in fact. Paris was beautiful, and Sarah said that Chester was clearer and warmer when I was visiting than it has been all semester. Sarah and I went to the Lake District on Wednesday, which was not only beautiful but markedly peaceful. "The fairest place on earth," Wordsworth called it. Well I may not be in the fairest place on earth right now, but there are a lot of great things to see, so I best be going. Peace and blessings!

-Your chap in London

Cheers from Chester

I am in an Anglophone country. Whoa.

Yesterday I flew from Paris to Liverpool and then took a train to Chester to meet my friend Sarah Glady. Right now I'm in the kitchen of her student apartment (whose bathroom is bigger than my dorm room, I'm pretty sure) while she's in class. Sarah is about the best host I could ask for. She gave me a walking tour of the city yesterday, and we were stopping every ten steps so she could explain the historical significance of this or that tower or church or field. Considering the fact that before yesterday I knew maybe three things about Chester, it seems like it holds quite a bit of historical significance, from Roman times all the way through World War II. It's a beautiful little town, too, with an interesting combination of Roman, Medieval, Elizabethan, and Victorian architecture.

It really is something to be somewhere where everyone speaks English and almost no one speaks French. An airport employeee wanted to tell me something yesterday and I replied, "Oui?" Just as silly, I found myself saying "pardon" (French "pardon," that is) as Sarah and I passed people on our walk around town. What makes my confusion especially confusing is that I don't know the English that English people use. I'd sound silly saying "pardon" in French, but I think I'd sound just as silly saying "excuse me," as we Americans tend to say, instead of "sorry," as the British tend to say. With language as well as little cultural details, I find myself here in Chester in a bizarre state of familiarity and displacement. Strangely, or perhaps not so strangely, in many ways I'd feel much more at home in France right now than I feel in England.

To back-track a bit, I should add that the rest of my time in Paris was fantastic. This third time in Paris was my best ever, largely because I didn't have much of an agenda and because I knew a bunch of people who were there at least for the weekend. I ended up seeing Ashley Warner, a friend from high school; Aleksandra and Aneta, my Polish friends from Montpellier who I traveled to Barcelona with; Maoyu, my friend from church in Montpellier; and Katrina Wheeler and the Whitworth study group traveling through France this whole semester. I went up the towers of Notre Dame, visited much of the Louvre (my second time there), attended a birthday party in a rented-out bar, drank wine with masses of people on a bridge next to Pont Neuf, saw several cathedrals I hadn't previously visited, and spent lots of time in great convsersation with my friends. Oh yeah, and the Korean food at my hostel was incredible.

In every way my trip is off to a great start. God has blessed me immensely every day, from being able to see friends to catching buses or trains at the very last minute to simply being kept safe. However excited I am to travel through Europe, I am just as thankful to be able to do so.

-Your man in Chester

Worst Blogger Ever

The votes are in -- I am the worst blogger ever. To be fair, my computer is broken at the moment. Still.

It took me getting to Paris to put up another post. Right now I am in a hostel on the south end of the city. I guess it's a hostel, since I found it on hostelworld.com, but it's really more like a house. This Korean woman runs it, and she makes breakfast and dinner for whoever wants it -- for free -- every day. I will probably eat more Korean food this weekend in Paris than I have in my whole life.

My school has two weeks of break (the one week-break in February wasn't nearly enough vacation, they decided), so from Paris I'm going to Chester, England to see my friend Sarah from Whitworth; then to London, where I'll probably meet up with Shawna and Katie from Whitworth; and then to Dublin. And I'm actually seeing another Whitworth person today -- Katrina Wheeler, who's TA-ing for the school's French study program. Whitworth connections abound! I need to go shower and get going to meet Katrina, but I wanted to finally get up a post. I remember one of my first posts on this blog was written from a different hostel in Paris. I feel so much more comfortable here this time. It helps that I don't have 80 pounds of luggage to haul around. It also helps that I have more confidence in my language abilities, as well as my ability to navigate unfamiliar situations. Well I'm off, but I'll try to post somewhat regularly during break, according to internet availability, of course.

-Your man in France

written from a computer lab...

Hey there, everyone. The sole point of this message is to relay the information that my computer has effectively died. Specifically, it's the hard drive that's jacked up. Whatever the problem is exactly, my computer is entirely unoperable. I don't know if I'm going to buy a new hard drive or buy a new computer, or maybe just go without a computer until sometime after I get back to the states. Having gone even a couple days now without a computer has shown me how terribly dependent I am (or was, more like) on my computer. To that end, thank God it broke!

The downside is that I'll have less access to this blog and to all my friends and family in the states (or abroad). Skype will be especially difficult; I can maybe borrow a friend's computer from time to time, but I don't want to abuse my friends' generosity.

I'll keep you updated on the situation, but for now I'll just have to learn how to type on these funky French keyboards. I'm getting better already, but it certainly slows me down. So try to understand if I put a "q" instead of an "a," or a comma instead of an "m," or a "ç" instead of a "9." (Those are just a few differences between the keyboards.)

And by the way, other than that, things are going great. I finished and turned in that text explication that I talked about in my last post, and I feel pretty good but not great about it. Next week I have a real doozie (doozy? doozee? Is what I'm trying to say even a word?), a 12-pager on the poet's journey inward as represented in Philippe Jaccottet's A la lumière d'hiver. Good stuff. It's refreshing to finally do some work :)

A bientôt, mes amis!

Text Explication Explication

[started writing this post at] 12:22 am, Saturday night. Here's what I did today:

-woke up --10:30
-worked on a text explication -- 11:00-2:00
-made and ate lunch with my friend Anthony -- 2:30-5:00
-worked on my text explication -- pretty much until I started writing this post

As you can see, it really is a crazy night life here!

But let me give a few reasons why I'm not a total lamo:

1) This is the first Saturday night since I've been in France that I've worked on homework.

2) It was rainy today, not very attractive weather for going out and about. Plus, a strike on the tram has made the times rather irregular. Yesterday there was no tram at all, in fact, resulting in more people on foot, on bike, and in their cars than I've ever seen in Montpellier.

3) This text explication is due on Tuesday. I started writing at 11:00 today (see bullet item 2).

4) Apparently I have to write this thing in French. Go figure. It requires a lot of time because first of all, I have to look words up, and secondly, when I look words up I start getting curious about other words and expressions and start looking things up that have nothing to do with my paper.

Despite those four very good reasons I'm not a lamo, there still remains the fact that I worked on this paper for over ten hours today, and still haven't finished. This reminds me a little bit of the time I wrote a paper for my metaphysics class about how time might not exist. I pretty much locked myself in my room in the Duvall basement, just reading, thinking, writing. Naturally, treating the nonexistence of time and all, I lost track of time as I worked, and even started to forget about meals. And since I have the habit of running my hand through my hair when I'm reading or thinking deeply -- which poofs up my fro wall-socket style -- I emerged from my lair looking and feeling much like a mad scientist.

Today wasn't quite so drastic. The subject matter, after all, is a fairy tale by Charles Perrault.

Sadly I hadn't known the name Perrault before I started taking this class. He wrote versions of many famous fairy tales -- Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty, Blue Beard, and others. And if any of you ever have a question concerning the 30 or so lines of "Le Petit Poucet" beginning at "La nuit vint" and ending at "si vous voulez bien l'en prier," I am the man to ask. Text explications don't really exist in the US. In fact, I don't think they really exist anywhere besides France. It's a literary analysis paper, but one that has to follow a passage (of no more than 30 lines) in a linear manner and focus with extreme precision on its composition. Sometimes I feel ridiculous taking notes in my literature classes, because a professor can spend a one-and-a-half hour lecture on a two-page passage. Of course, there's probably no better way to learn the intricacies of the French language than to do such a close reading, whether for native or non-native speakers.

I hope I didn't convey up there that I was complaining about writing the explication. I've really enjoyed doing it so far. Believe it or not, this essay will be the very first assignment I will have turned in this semester. There's been other homework (admittedly not very much), but we never have to turn it in. (It's the strangest thing, too: the professor will ask who has done the homework, and sometimes less than half the class raises their hands. The students don't try to fool anybody; they just sit there unassumingly, listening to their headphones or talking to their neighbors. And the teachers don't seem to care all that much, either. It's mind-boggling! And, sadly, rather contagious. It's hard not to assume that je m'en fous attitude when over half the class isn't doing the work.) So go ahead and congratulate me: after two months of classes, I'm finally turning in my first assignment!

I actually have several assignment due in the next few weeks. I need to complete or at least get a start on a commentary paper on a work by Rilke, an essay on the poetry of mourning of Philippe Jaccottet, a document analysis for my Geography of France class, and an oral presentation on a topic of my choice related to Spinoza's Ethic.

Well, I just wanted to put up a post on here before going to bed, and I also wanted to write in a language where expressions come easily to me. Recently I've decided to step up my language acquisition a bit: I'm journaling only in French, reading only in French (except for those emails and letters my friends and family keep sending me. Agh! Enough's enough already!), and trying to think and pray only in French. So this blog is a bit of a haven.

Before I couche myself, as some of my Anglophone friends are fond of saying, I should say that I found out last night that I was rehired as an RA for next year. I will be in East Hall, the newest (and easternmost) dorm on campus, having opened just last year. It'll be somewhat of a shift going from French dorms, which have no RA and where people often have wine or beer or vodka or anything else they please with their dinner, to Whitworth dorms. But don't get me wrong -- I am so excited to be RAing it up next year. (And if you're an incoming freshman to Whitworth and you're going to be living on my hall next year: No, I don't drink wine or beer or vodka or anything else that I please, and I never will. Good.)

Well if you've learned anything in reading my post, I hope it's a basic concept of a French text explication. And if I've learned anything, it's that I probably shouldn't write blog posts after midnight, especially if I've been in my room for over ten hours. Wow. I think this post is proof that I'm closer to mad-scientist status than I thought. I'm off to bed now -- church in the morning and early afternoon, and then back to my friend Charles.