Feb 28, 2020
Life in Paris February 2020, Part I (instagram: noraaradi)
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Life in Paris February 2020, Part I (instagram: noraaradi)
A super chill week in my life in Paris, France spent with cute cafe hunting, visiting the Korean Cultural Center and spending some time in nature between my ...
new video on my channel xx
Here are my favorite things I love about living in Paris, France! I hope you will enjoy it and let me know in the comments if you've been to Paris before wha...
new video on my channel xx
why you should stop drinking milk
why you should stop drinking milk
why you should stop drinking milk
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The nights are drawing in and I'm sad to say goodbye to those beautiful summer sunsets, but Autumn has set in and there's that mysterious wintery darkness hanging over the town. Beyond this urban jungle of grey buildings and flashing kebab shop signs, there's an autumnal magic in the twinkling lights on the hills beyond. Walking home from lectures in the twilight and listening to Intro and Brisé is my new favourite thing to do here. I've nearly reached the halfway point of my stay in Dijon, and it's the Toussaints holiday in the middle of the term. It's been seven weeks since I arrived, and finally I'm starting to feel more at home in France. My friend came to stay with me this week, and I proudly showed her round Dijon as though it really was my town. Before I came to France I imagined speaking nothing but French all day, every day. Looking back it probably wasn't a realistic view of studying in France, after all, thanks to English being the language that dominates popular culture across the world, many people my age over here do speak English. English is, (fortunately or unfortunately) a very widely spoken language and immersing oneself in a different language is always going to prove more difficult for English native speakers. A few weeks ago I was feeling frustrated by the fact that in spite of my best efforts to speak French, many people insisted on speaking to me in English if I showed even the slightest hesitation in replying to them. This problem might occur more often for year abroad students who go to universities, which tend to have a strong international presence anyway. However over the last few weeks I've tried to turn this frustration in to some positive motivation to speak more French, and it's definitely worked! I've started meeting up with some French girls from my translation class to do the work together each week. They teach me a mixture of formal French for the translation and then they explain slang words that they use to help me understand them more easily. I went to party this week and met some other French-speaking Erasmus students and I've even been trying to speak French to my English friends. These all seem like small changes, but doing them on a regular basis is really boosting my confidence. Now I automatically switch in to French mode when I'm out and about, rather than worrying too much about how I'm going to phrase things. In the supermarket yesterday I got confused at the self-service machine and wasted no time in asking the assistant for help. She explained everything to me in French and knew I could understand. Another thing that's helped is to take the pressure off myself to be perfect all the time. We all make silly mistakes and I'm still communicating successfully with everyone I meet, even if the conversation gets off to a bumpy start! I've also stopped comparing my French to that of everyone else's and assuming I would have learnt more in a different setting. University is a great way to meet young people and having the opportunity to study abroad is something that I'll never get again. At the end of the day I am a foreigner in France, but that doesn't mean I can't fit in a bit too! Why not be dijonnaise and anglaise?
I can honestly say I’ve never had so many problems during a finals period trying to get some peace and quiet to focus, do my work, and get decent sleep at a reasonable hour than I’ve had here in central but definitely rural Taiwan.
At night, despite lights automatically going out at midnight, it’s hard to get any real sleep. And yes, the lights get shut off at 12 on the dot. Starting around 11PM, though, you get drunken partiers fighting in the yard beside my dorm (I’m on the top floor, and I’ve heard some really stupid shit go down), crazed cheering at all hours (I assume for school events of some sort in the undergrad division, but not sure why they’d go until 1 or 2AM), and of course birds that are peculiarly loud at night instead of day.
You’d think eventually there’d be quiet long enough to get some sleep. Nope. At 4AM the neighborhood dogs go nuts. Roosters start crowing - multiple ones, and then in between barking that fades in the distance (I assume someone rounds up the strays and takes them away), motorcycles rev up to get people to work.
So just sleep in, you might say. Hah. With the dawn comes the pigeon coos at frightening mutant volumes - I’m not kidding, when you can hear a pigeon cooing from across the hall past several doors and over your aircon, those things are abnormal.
And of course, you have classes and things to do during the day, so you can’t sleep in during the quietest part of the day - 10AM through 3PM is the quietest in the dorms, with noisy punctuations of people coming back from and going to class at either end of the lunch hour.
It’s not much better in the school buildings, where I try to arrive early on weekends so I can take advantage of the quiet as everyone sleeps in and slumps about. However, this...has not always worked. Some students see the weekend daylight hours of quiettime as their time to muck about.
As I write, we’re going into hour 6 of a group of students playing music loudly downstairs in the photography studio. They’re recording a music video. And playing their instruments. And singing. I know every spot in the tune where the drummer loses his timing because the lead singer pauses too long. The drumming reverberates through my feet and chair. The caterwauling hook in the chorus A leading to chorus B is consistently offtune with a lot of not-pretty scooping that always goes flat.
Gotta love finals month here. Half of my due dates were suddenly bumped up by a week or even two despite what the syllabi I have for those classes say, so I’m stressed enough trying to find the time to get everything done when I’d planned for more time. (Pro-tip - the Taiwanese love to change things last minute; it’s interesting comparing their lax sense of time and nil deadline urgency with American ‘time is money’ pacing.)
The border, the bank, and the potential boyfriend...
I stress, NOT a potential boyfriend. All shall be revealed.
On Monday I had to go to the foreign office to pick up my NIE. I could not remember for the life of me where it was, so I was wandering and wondering and eventually plucked up the courage to ask someone where the hell this place was.
Imagine these dialogues in Spanish:
"Excuse me Miss, could you tell me where the foreign office is"
"No, I'm from Andalucia. There is one there if you would like to know where that is."
Thank, but, no thanks.
"Excuse Sir, but could you tell me where the foreign office is?"
"Yes, of course!! If you go back from whence you came then turn left you'll come to a cafe. Ask in the cafe and they will be able to help you."
Not quite what I was hoping for...
Then, suddenly, after an hour and a half of wandering around I remembered! So off I went.
The man there asked me if I was Scottish. I extended my passport and said "Yes, yes I am." He asked me what part of Ireland that's in. All my forms were filled in incorrectly. He then tried to blame me but I said, very firmly, "No sir, I know I am not from Ireland. I have never been under that impression. In fact, in all my documentation you have wanted to see, bank letters, passport, NIN, drivers license, housing contracts, all of them have said that I am from Scotland, UK." He sniffed and said, come back tomorrow.
So I did. And he stamped my shiny new green card. Before handing it back he said that I was very pretty, and that he would like to show his son a picture of me, and maybe we could go on a date. I politely declined. Anyone from the parentage that is able to confuse Ireland with the British Isles should probably know when to stop.
I've noticed a lot of people absolutely STARING at me in the streets. People slow down their cars and crane their next, they are one step away from shielding their children's eyes. So when I was approached in the bank by a man who "Just wanted to know [my] name and Just wanted to kiss [my] hand," I didn't think much of it. He thought I was French because of my accent when I speak Spanish. Tip - always try and put on a little accent when speaking foreign languages, you sound like much less of an idiot.
And finally. The border.
Yesterday I went for a coffee with the French teacher. He wanted to practise his eengleesh so I said I'd be happy to have a conversation class to help him. Nothing formal though. On the way back he took me around his local haunts and eventually went into his flat and I walked home. Or at least that's what I thought I was going to do. All of a sudden I had no idea where I was. I had a vague direction in my head and went with it, then when I came to a dead end I panicked and went where ever had a bit of light.
I found hundreds of kids playing in a play park, so I asked one of the mothers if she knew where Avenida de Lisboa is. She ignored my question and asked where I was from. I said Scotland, UK. I thought I was going to have to perform CPR with the amount she laughed. After showing the lost Scottish girl too ALL her friends she pointed me in the right direction. Instead, I assaulted a taxi man, who was very nice and funny and he took me to Parque Ceuta, where I was going to meet Ana.
He told me that I was at the border when he picked me up. I had been texting Ana to let her know I would be late because I was lost, so when I told her I was actually at the border the whole time we both were inconsolable with laughter in the supermarket.
Poor little me!