It’s been a month since the end of my erasmus experience in Lyon. I dont really know why I waited so long before writing something about it. I think It was hard to take a moment and think about what I really lived during 9 months away from my family, my friends and my italian comfort zone.
I remember the first day I came to Lyon. It was the 4th september 2017 and I was kind of exciting about my dream coming true. I’ve never been a dreaming girl, acutually I had just one or two dreams in my head and one of them was “spending a year abroad to study”. You can image my state of mind in that moment. I could touch the sky with my happiness. I finally arrived in my flat where I should have shared my 9 months experience with 5 stranger flatmates. I was unpacking all my stuff with my parents when I went to the kitchen and I met my first flatmates: Guillaume. We introduced ourselves and I remember I had a very good impression of him. Still dont know him but already like him.
After lunch my parents officially left me and the feeling I had in that moment, was very strange. It was the first time realizing that I wouldn’t see mom and dad until the christmas holidays. I hugged them and when their car left, I felt like I’ve been punched in the gut. I felt for the first time that I was alone and that I should have built my life from the beginning because that was the start of a new life. That weird feeling went away when I went back to my room and I looked out my window and saw the lyon’s landscape. That became my french therapy. When I was sad, when I was pissed of, when I wanted to come back to Italy, when I was nervous, I had just to look out the window and look at the beauty of the place I had the fortune to live in. That sight could calm me down in a way that I cant really tell.
I remember my first challenges with french bureaucracy and I remember how is the feeling of feeling a foreigner in a country. Being a foreigner is not easy at all because locals attempt to take adventage of you 9 times on 10. The language problem is another issue because even if I wasnt that bad in french, I had problems to understand what I was supposed to do, what I wasnt allowed to do etc. The beginning wasnt easy and after 2 weeks I burst into tears and called my mother saying “I want to come home”.
I remember the nights spent at home with my flatmates playing cards, board games while drinking a beer, listening french rap music and knowing each other. I love to say that my flatmates were special guys. Quentin was the classy french stoner who could cook crepes really well. At the beginninh he was cool, then weed probably shot his brain out.
Cecile was out of normality, hippy we could say. She loved weeends in the woods for some rave party and making our home a zoo. Actually it was very fun to have a chat with her.
Fantomas is the room number 6. She was invisible in the house. She was anti-social and we knew she was alive when we used to see a shadow going to the toilet. oh la la, we have a ghost in the house!!
Najette was my favourite person in that house. She was the eldest one but she was the happiest one. I like to say that she has the sun in herself. You can feel it when you talk with her. She was my room neighbour and she was also my psychologist. She understood me, she digged in the deep and she made me face some things of me that i’ve never faced before. She tought me so much about life and she shared her story with me. She’s a role model, shes very brave, shes a self-made woman. I really hope to look like her one day.
Guillaume was like my little bro. I miss him knocking at my door just to tell me how was his day. We get closer step by step and I really appreciated it. He didnt have a perfect life but he’s very good boy who deserves the best. We’ve been flatmates for 9 months and as I rembered before, he was the first person I met and with whom I laughed so bad, I had the police trouble experience and the mediators experience.
stay tuned...













