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| Program: Sweet Briar Junior Year in France |
| Major: Musicology and English |
| Class: Music and WCAS 2010 |
| g-eng@northwestern.edu |
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September 17, 2007
Dear reader:
I write to you from my apartment in the Marais district of Paris, France. This entry marks my seventeenth day in France and my third in Paris, to where I have finally moved after having spent two weeks in Tours, a city southwest of Paris in the Loire Valley. For me, Tours was my introduction to the classic French way of life and the place where I could acclimate myself to the language. In fact, the French say that the Touraine region speaks the purest French out of the entire country.
At the Cathedral of Tours with NU student Gracie Klock
My living situation in Tours was ideal for such an introduction. I lived with a family of six. The father is the IT Director of the Touraine region hospitals. The mother is a high school French teacher in a nearby city named Blois. They have four sons age seventeen to twenty-four, all of whom are inclined to math and science. The oldest is a medical student, the second a future employee of EDF (Electricité de la France), the third a student of a highly competitive “prépas” program that will hopefully place him in an elite institution to become an engineer, and the fourth is likely to stay away from the humanities and follow one of his brothers.
Life in a French home is filled with cultural lessons, but above all the French family meal revealed the most to me about the French culture. For example, meals are always taken together and almost never rushed. The parents and children all come back from work or school to have lunch together. Usually, about two hours are set aside for this during the day. During my two weeks in Tours, only once was someone missing from the table for dinner. Dinners were relaxed and the time for the family to be together. Lunches and dinners, I found, were the daily rituals that kept the family close. In fact, the education and job system in France encourages this proximity by keeping family members in the same area in which they grew up.
Chateau of Chambord
Interior of the Chateau of Chambord Another fascinating thing I took away from family meals was how naturally “green” the French way of life is. We never wasted food. The first time my host mother brought out the main course, I thought there was barely enough food for three of us. But with a meal that usually had three or four courses, you only took what most Americans would call a modest portion. Bread is essential in every meal, and you use it to fill yourself up if you need just a little bit more to eat, but really also to clean off your plate and even your utensils. The French do not waste, only buy and cook just enough, and end every meal not stuffed, but pleasantly full. At the dinner table, we always used our designated cloth napkin, which was identified by your unique napkin ring. These napkins were washed only once every few weeks. This conservative use of resources extended well-beyond the dinner table. For example, the French homes I have visited are modestly lit. Laundry is most often line dried and not done often. And perhaps most green of all, most French cities are small enough and equipped with a good public transportation system that enables the French family to either drive very little or not at all.
In France, people enjoy life by taking their time and spending it with each other chatting at a café, sitting in their garden, or talking at the dinner table. As economically problematic as the thirty-five hour work week and four to six week vacations may be, after these two short weeks, I cannot imagine France or the French without them.
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October 18, 2007
Dear reader,
Before you set off for a year abroad in France, it’s not uncommon to have wild fantasies about your fabulous future life in Paris. I certainly did. I dreamt of late night walks along the Seine, afternoons I’d spend in the gardens reading, four-hour dinners of duck confit and endless bottles of red wine in a Latin Quarter brasserie. It’s certainly possible to live such a life here in Paris, but as a student, and more importantly a student on a budget, Paris begins to lose its movie-like charm, and since you can’t afford to go to a café for a nice three-course lunch to distract you from all the little things (which are in fact not little at all), you find yourself struggling to enjoy this country. Here are just two cultural differences that I’ve found difficult to overcome. There are more, but those are for another day.
Freya Damrell (from Simmons College) and I in front of Mont-St Michel The French are very proud of their culture, and I don’t blame them. It’s incredibly rich and beautifully preserved. But, I often hear that the French think Americans are too self-interested, and when I when I hear this I think to myself that one could say the same about France. Its museums are filled with French art, its orchestras play predominantly French music, some of its English classes, such as my own, are taught in French. This French-centered attitude goes far beyond its formal cultural institutions. At the dinner table and in conversation with other students, I find that the racial-sensitivity that we are raised to be acutely aware of and attuned to does not exist here to the same degree. In light of the events in the European Union, I find France’s attitude toward foreigners and the rest of the world surprising. In a conversation with my host, she said that she embraces diversity but insists that everyone guard their own culture. I found that this paradox seemed to be the attitude of most French people.
Detail of Mont Saint-Michel Abbey The public university system seems to have been abandoned decades ago and now its buildings are filled with administrators, faculty members, and students who appear to exist for existing’s sake. For me, enrolling into my courses was a nightmare. In France, there is no CAESAR, no centralized system for signing up for classes. Instead, class registration consisted of several pieces of paper taped to the wall and large crowds of students in the corridors waiting to speak to the department secretary. She records your name on the back of a piece of scratch A4 paper. If you’re as lucky as I was, you can witness the creation of a department’s inscription policy as the secretaries argue over what to do with your forms.
Trying to convince myself that those experiences shouldn’t get me down, I was determined to be more optimistic for my first week in school. In my musicology course at the L2 level (second-year post bac), I found myself in a lecture with 70 students, all of whom talked to their friends throughout the two-hour lecture. Thank goodness for the microphone, but the professor didn’t seem to care whether or not anyone was listening to him anyways. Dissatisfied, I decided to move to the L3 level, which I must admit is worlds
Contemporary jazz dance at the Louvre sculpture halls on "La Nuit Blanche" different than L2. At this level, most students from previous levels have dropped out leaving the highly-motivated and genuinely interested students. My classes are small, and the discussion is stimulating and rich. For me, it’s exciting to be in a class of other musicology students, which is a first for me since I am the only one in my year at Northwestern. But there remain many things that I am still learning to adjust to. For example, course reading is listed on a class bibliography. However, the majority of the books are out of print, and the bookstores where you would normally search for your books no longer carry them. Instead, you have to try to consult the books at a library, but even there the catalogs are almost impossible to navigate or are incomplete. Three of my four courses at the Sorbonne took place in rooms that were double-booked, so the professors had to spend 45 minutes of a 2 hour lecture that only takes place once a week sorting out the scheduling issues. The deficiencies (in my opinion) of the French university system are too numerous to write about in detail here, but suffice it to say, I miss the American system. I miss being in an environment that helps you succeed whether it is through easy access to research materials or to professors. To be completely honest, I am disappointed in myself for not having seen this coming, particularly in a year that I wanted to spend researching and developing a senior thesis. However, this is only the beginning, and I am spending these first weeks of school learning about how I can best take advantage of my situation.
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November 14, 2007
Dear reader,
Much has happened since I wrote last. My last entry did not speak very highly of my time here in France, but a week later, I spent a weekend in Vienna, a vacation that marked the beginning of a more lucid appreciation of my year abroad.
Vienna moves at a pace much slower than that of Paris. The city reconstructed itself in the neoclassical style after having been razed in the Second World War, and this restoration of the city reflects the city’s almost obsessive nostalgia for the Viennese golden age of the past. As a “Parisian” seeking respite from the mania of the Metro and the crisp attitude of the locals, Vienna was a bit like a weekend at the spa. The streets are quiet. The people are warm and welcoming. The food comes in familiar, American-sized portions. My warmest memory of Vienna comes from a heudigen or wine tavern, where my friends and I enjoyed a hearty meal of roast pork, potatoes, sauerkraut,  Now back in Paris, my attitude toward my time here has changed quite a bit. My overarching realization has been that I must accept that I will never have the type of education that I have back at Northwestern here in Paris. Classes are always somewhat haphazard here in France. In fact, students at several of the Paris University system have gone on strike (again), and some American students studying here have had their classes cancelled. My classes are not safe from these strikes, but I will hope for the best. Also, my five classes take up only 10.5 hours of class a week, so it is up to me to develop a regimen in order to stay productive and engaged with learning, even though that learning is almost entirely dictated by what I am interested in. I now spend Mondays, Tuesday afternoons, and Wednesday mornings at the national library doing research on what I hope will be my senior thesis. One of my greatest frustrations here in France was finding a research advisor; but finally, after two and a half months of letter-writing and most often cancelled appointments, a professor has graciously agreed to work with me. I feel much better now that I have a mentor to provide me direction in my research, a major driving force of my time here in Paris.
Pere Lachaise Cemetery, Paris
Not everything is perfect, though. This evening, a major transportation strike will begin its second round, a response to Sarkozy’s pension reforms. The papers are saying that the possibility of it lasting (in the mid-90s the strike lasted 6 weeks) is not unlikely. I only hope for good walking weather. But with the institutional strikes going on right now (students, transportation, stage technicians only to name a few), I am reminded of what I have been told about the French people. That is, they have always loved their culture but have always kept good distance from their government. In the French spirit, I will try to do the same. I will try to enjoy France, the plethora of museums to which I am just a neighbor, the opera library where I feel like the luckiest man alive to research (housed at the Palais Garnier, it used to be Napoleon’s private lounge), and the edgy opera productions, even if it does takes me fifty minutes to walk home.
Yours from Paris,
Garrett
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