Woohoo ! I am officially en vacances ! It’s the first time in my life I’ve gotten to properly celebrate that fact and decompress- usually I go straight from frantic essay writing to frantic packing before rushing to the airport and barely catching the connecting flight home. Not this year. Now is my chance to indulge in the pleasures of sleeping in till 1pm, downloading Christmas music, and spending immoral amounts of time on personal grooming. Considering that I barely survived the last two weeks of school- I feel entitled.
The last two weeks of school…I think the gaping hole in my blog speaks for itself.
I’d prefer to forget the whole thing entirely, but I’ll recount a few memories that may haunt me forever.
- self-medicating with a large pack of « super-acide » gummy worms to the point of being teary-eyed and sure that I had not only given myself a cavity, but also burnt off every single one of taste buds for good.
- Stepping crusty-eyed out of my residence at 3pm one day with the resolve to motivate myself to start the five page paper I needed to write in a single night with an overpriced starbucks, before bumping into two girls I knew. The conversation went something like this :
Me : How are you ?
Them : Oh good, how are you ?
Me : Ughhh. Okay. I’m just going to get some coffee and start working on this paper. I have so much work…
Them : Awww.
Me : Meh.
Them : I haven’t had that much, actually—
-- no, me neither.
Me : …
Them : I’m sure it’ll be different next semester
-- OH yeah, definitely, it will all even out in the end.
Me :…Yeah, well. You know.
Them : So, where do you want to go shopping ?
--- Oh, mmm, I’d really like to get a bagel first.
--- Oh yeah !
--- And then maybe go to that vintage shop by Hotel de Ville
--- Oh okay ! Well what shall we do first—the vintage shop, or the bagel ?
Me : Bagels….
- Making the 35 minute trek to campus (no metro pass for me this month) for my 8 :30 am class after having been awake all night writing about power dynamics in « Le Mariage de Figaro » moody emo music wailing through my headphones and realizing that in my paper, I had forgotten to include the all-important problematique.
- Getting strange, slightly disgusted looks from the girl sitting next to me in 18th century littérature when I continued to fall asleep, then jolt awake.
- Deciding that, instead of taking serious notes for the last lecture of « European Cultural Movements » I was going to entertain my friend Ben with drawings of Jean-Paul Sartre swimming among various sea creatures. This resulted in the two of us falling into a helpless and poorly-concealed fit of giggles that lasted 10 minutes and left us teary eyes and barely able to breathe. It was cathartic.
- Saying « fuck all » to library policy and sneaking a baguette sandwich in as I rushed to finish my essay on Baroque art- leaving a mass of bread crumbs behind me. There library- that’s what you get for being crappy and not having any comfortable couches to sleep on or cubicles to surreptitiously eat in !
- Looking in the mirror when I got home after not having slept for over 40 hours and detecting a brand new greenish tint to my face.
- Chatting online to a friend as I was pulling an all-nighter
Her : How are you ?
Me : you know that scene in the simpsons, where apu has a flashback to working in the quickie mart for three days straight ? that’s how i am.
- Crying. A lot.
A more organized and generally better person would have organized her time so as to avoid all of this pain and melodrama. Alas, I’m only human. Excruciatingly human.
It wasn’t all bad, though. To start, I turned 21 (rather anticlimactic in France, but birthdays are always nice). And my friends Chloe and Jenn came to visit me from Montpelier. They brought me some amazing gifts (treasures from the 1 euro store- a Jafar key ring and chocolate eggs with plastic animals inside) and we had fun seeing what we could of the Fete de Lumieres (more on this hype later). It was nice to have guests, as it sometimes gets a little lonely and dull in my apartment. For my birthday, I had a joint party with my friend Zoe who’s turning 21 soon. Our attempts at Mexican cuisine were a little dogdy, but I think most people were just happy to be getting free food. And naturally, I stayed sober. So sober that I told a French lad who spoke perfect English with a British accent and would not let on how he’d learned to speak so well, that I too was French and had learned English from working at Disneyland over the summer. Fortunately, he found this funny.
I have found in life that bragging of any sort tends to bite you in the ass later on, and this theory was well demonstrated with the recent Fete de Lumieres. The Fete de Lumieres is the main festival in Lyon- in which the entire city is decorated with various light displays. Quite awhile back, I realized that it was going to fall on my birthday, and so whenever anyone mentioned it, I annoyingly chirped, in english or french, « Oh, you know- that’s the time of my birthday ! » After years of birthdays spent slaving away studying for a final exam or writing a paper, I was overjoyed to see that I would, quite obviously, be celebrating my 21st in style.
Now for the reality of the Fete de Lumieres : clenching my teeth as I tried, tried to move through the thousands of seemingly aimless amblers that filled the streets of Lyon, clutching my purse so as to protect myself from the rumored pickpocketers, far far far from being able to appreciate anything going on around me and apologizing to my two friends who had come up expecting something resembling good ol’ Christmas festivities for the disappointing nature of what Lyon considers its pride and joy.
The pinnacle of this enchanting experience was Place de Terraux—wherein we found thousands of people crammed around a rotating globe of sorts, glowing all different sorts of colors. I thought surely I must have been missing something. We trudged home freezing, tired, and disillusioned.
According to one of their travel guides, the Lyonnaise have a complex about their city paling in comparison to Paris. At times like this, I can see why.
I think there are some really neat displays to be found at the Fete de Lumieres- it’s just a matter of knowing where to go and when to go there. I really believe this. All the same, I firmly maintain that the very point of a festival is defeated when you have to PLAN how you will see it, then waddle your way through a slew of grumpy pedestrians to get where you want to go. Thumbs down, Fete de Lumieres. Thumbs down.
As the semester comes to an end, I can’t help but reflect on my life here- the surreality of having already completed a semester, of being half-way done academically. I can’t say whether or not Lyon has lived up to my expectations, because I hardly knew what the expect coming here. I recall having a few comically unrealistic visions of dining in fancy restaurants with dashing French men whilst discussing- in prefect French- the philosophical underpinnings of Camus novels (okay, maybe that’s a hyperbolic amalgamation of my various expectations, but you get the point). I guess being twenty years old didn’t do much to put me above this sort of fairy-tale thinking. How quickly one learns !
Maybe some people get this sort of fairy-tale experience. I certainly don’t know any of them, nor do I want to. They can go on leading their pristine lives and leave the rest of us to giggle at the wrong times and blunder our merry way along.
