“Goodbye’s too good a word, babe So I’ll just say fare thee well…” -Bob Dylan, Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright Friday afternoon in Rouen. In fact, my last. Come Monday I’ll be just another first-year law student weasel, trying to settle in to my new apartment in Chicago and complaining about things like “Torts” and […]
“Goodbye’s too good a word, babe
So I’ll just say fare thee well…”-Bob Dylan, Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright
Friday afternoon in Rouen. In fact, my last. Come Monday I’ll be just another first-year law student weasel, trying to settle in to my new apartment in Chicago and complaining about things like “Torts” and “Contracts.” Yikes.
France has been my home for nearly half a year. While most- in fact, all- of the HBWT story has been whimsical and humorous and I’ve treated my time here as such, I can’t help but feel saddened knowing that my six-month romance with the country is drawing rapidly to a close. After Monday, it’ll be a series of one-offs, 48-hour trysts the likes of which cannot possibly maintain a long-distance relationship.
I will miss France, almost as much as I will miss the great friends I have made here. I will miss the bread, to be sure, the wine, the pastries, and the kebabs. Most of all, I’ll miss the generous, welcoming people in Bois-Guillaume who made me feel at home while some 6,000 miles from it. Never let anyone tell you that the French are rude or aloof or anti-American; as with any group, there are those among them, but for the most part they are a wonderful people with a better-than-average handle on the way life ought to be lived.
That said, something happened yesterday that made it clear to me that it was time to go. Ironically, during my month in Savigny, I never got around to hopping on the RER C line for the 45-minute ride to visit Versailles, the monument to French 17th and 18th century opulence. Instead, after picking up the newly refurbished Woodmobile from the garage on Tuesday, I drove the 117 kilometers along Autoroute A13 to make the pilgrimage, to knock off my last “must-see” in France. Just as an aside, it is truly everything it’s cracked up to be. The perfectly maintained gardens, the elaborately painted ceilings, and the gilt hallways are truly breathtaking. I guess I’m just sort of surprised that the French people put up with such garish flaunting of wealth while most of them lacked sufficient bread to survive. If ever there was such a disparity of wealth in the U.S., I’m sure heads would roll.*
On the return trip, I found myself eschewing the usual SkyRock or Europe 4 French radio stations for something called “Le Jukebox,” because they were playing a modern country marathon. Now, aside from the odd funky bluegrass track or Johnny Cash single, I hate country music, especially modern country. Along with the Marilyn Mansons and Nine Inch Nails’ of the world, it’s maybe the only genre of music I can’t relate to in any way, shape or form. But I found myself tapping along with it for over an hour… because it was in English.
There are a few French words that I’ve come to consider overwhelmingly superior to their English translation. (“Feu d’artifice,” for example, is far more elegant and descriptive than “fireworks.”) The one that applies here is “mal du pays,” which literally replaces “homesick” with “pain of the country.” Simply put, I miss America. For all its crappy bread and weak coffee, I miss it terribly. I want to be able to watch the Red Sox at night. I want a night out talking with friends to resemble leisure hours instead of my 125th consecutive Conversational French oral final exam. I want my grunts and gestures and body language while ordering a meal to actually convey something to the person receiving them, and I want to do so without feeling like I might have to apologize for being a foreigner. I want to take a taxicab without worrying that the driver is taking advantage of me on account of my accent. I want to drink American beers, eat hamburgers, and watch movies without subtitles. I want to be able to casually read the paper, watch the news, or strike up a conversation without getting stressed out about proper verb conjugation.
With all apologies to France, I want to go home.
Living abroad is an exercise in context, which is to say, everything is out of it. Almost every social norm to which you’ve become accustomed during your life is out the window, and suddenly you’re thrust into a world where the only clear thing is that you are very much an outsider, the “other.” It was hard enough for me, and I arrived speaking functional (if heavily accented) French and leave more or less fluent (if still heavily accented.) I can only imagine what it must be like for Matt, or for the two Americans playing for Rouen, who speak nary a word of French. Even speaking a little French as I did, I can identify with the inclination to retreat within your own world, erect an invisible barrier between “you” and “them,” an isolated zone of normalcy where you roll neither your “r’s” nor your own cigarettes, you don’t sit down to shower, and you don’t eat cheese for desert.
The only way to really enjoy yourself, I think, is to throw yourself headlong into the culture, to do as the Romans do and savor the foreign-ness of the experience. I did my best, and while I never did manage to get the hang of the sit-down shower, I feel like I’ve come to appreciate the many things the French culture has to offer, like potent cheese, calvados, and the occasional outburst of historical revisionism. In fact, when it comes to experiencing France, I think I did it the best way possible. Between the euro/dollar exchange rate, the cost of hotels in Paris, the difficulty of hiring a car to really see the country, and the big-city resentment of tourists in general, the typical trip to France seems to me far too harried and abrupt to be worth your while. Far better, in my opinion, to come for six months or a year, find a job that will pay you in Euros, and take advantage of the leisurely pace of life. Living there will make you a little bit less of an outsider, you’ll make French friends who will show you things that aren’t in the tour books, and you’ll learn to appreciate their unique perspective on the world, on America, and on Lance Armstrong. That’s the way to do it. It’s ironic, given my upcoming schedule of punctuated round-trips, but six months here has taught me that France is a great place to live… but I wouldn’t want to visit there.
So goodbye, France. When we meet again, I’ll no longer be a resident of La Patrie, but just another Yank tourist on his way to and from Charles De Gaulle. I guess I’ll rely again on a more apropos French translation, avoiding the all-too final “goodbye” for your equivalent, “To the re-seeing.”
Au Revoir.
* I couldn’t realistically be expected to make it six months in France without at least one terrible French Revolution joke.