09/05/22
I’ve already missed my goal and forgot to write last week. But it’s Monday, so I’m not too far off from my weekly schedule! I’ll pick up from here. A lot has been going on—maybe I’ll even write twice this week.
I just moved into the dormitory that I will be staying in for the extent of my semester abroad. My dorm is not actually part of any university, it is on a campus that is entirely a community of its own. It is a bit difficult to explain, but essentially students from around the world who come to Paris to study at any of its many universities, often for a masters degree or higher, choose to live here at this community, which has something like 40 dormitories spread across a mile-long campus. And so, as you can imagine, it is a meeting place of many different cultures and people.
There is a French film called L’Auberge Espagnole, which means “the Spanish hostel”, and it is about a group of Erasmus students, each from a different country with a different native language, who live together in a small house in Spain. Throughout the movie you follow the shenanigans and camaraderie that ensue from the culture clash as they adapt to living together in close quarters. It is a film that makes you laugh and also warms your heart. And right now, I feel like I’m in that movie—I feel like I'm living in an auberge espagnole. Actually, the term auberge espagnole is an idiom in French, which means a place where visitors eat what they bring, with the idea that everyone is independent (this I got from Wikipedia). That’s a perfect description of where I am now.
My building has 6 floors, each floor with about 40 rooms and one communal kitchen. The kitchen is the center of all camaraderie and interaction. Most of the people here are young adults and cook many of their own meals, even though there is a cafeteria on campus. So at meal time the kitchen becomes filled with strangers and new faces of different backgrounds and native languages, but as they cook their meals and sit down to eat, the conversation and the introductions begin.
People typically introduce themselves with a “bonjour” or “bonsoir”, or sometimes a “hello”, and from there the usual questions are “where are you from?” and the responses will be spread all over the globe, from South America, across Europe, all the way to East Asia; then, “what are you studying?” which can range from cosmology, to law, to theater; and finally “at what university?” of which the responses are spread all over Paris.
The universal language on campus is English, but in my dorm in particular many people are French or Dutch-speaking natives. Yesterday I spent half the day speaking only in French! I was even able to make jokes and share some laughs totally en francais, and that was really exciting to me. I have never been more aware of the value of studying a second language, and I am more grateful than ever for my French education.
I have seen the vastness of space, and I have visited many planets with landscapes that Earthlings have only heard of in fairytales and dreams. But I can say that this place I’m in now, this auberge, is quite possibly the most surreal environment I’ve ever had the pleasure of living in.
Stargirl se rejouit...
