I have been very lazy about updating this blog lately. It is my last weekend in Angers and it is raining so this is as good a time as any to write about the past month.
The weekend after my parents visited Angers I thought I might try to meet them in the south, but I had too much homework to do so I stayed in Angers. I was supposed to film members of our group at the market on that Saturday morning, but it rained and no one went.
The week after that was our Ascension holiday. Classes were cancelled for that Thursday and I left Angers on Tuesday morning with Marco. We went to Luxembourg to stay with his parents. He had been telling me all semester about how much I would like Luxembourg and I was not disappointed. We arrived in the late afternoon and after dinner we joined several of his friends and went to Maastricht, Holland. I’ll let you, reader, assume what it was we went to Holland for. The next day we slept late and Marlisa joined us in Luxembourg. Marco showed us around Luxembourg City for a while and then his friends called and invited us to go camping. We drove to the north, Luxembourg is not a very big country and to get the northern part of it only took about an hour. There are a lot of Portuguese people in Luxembourg and one of their traditions is to camp in the hills in the north on Ascension. They make some kind of pilgrimage there. Marco is Italian, but he has a lot of Portuguese friends. None of them were really there for the purpose of making a pilgrimage though. Camping with them was very similar to camping in Texas in that they grilled a lot of meat ever couple hours. We probably ate four meals of just sausage and bread in the 14 hours we were at the campsite. We didn’t leave the camp site until about 7 pm the next day and I pretty much immediately went to sleep once we got back to Marco’s house because I did not sleep very comfortably in the tent. The next day we woke up and got a train to Brussels. Everything was closed because of the holiday but we walked around for a while and saw the Grand Place. Brussels is a really pretty city and I need to go back for longer one day.
Last weekend I met Melissa and her friend Pete in Paris. We stayed in Montmartre and I got to play tour guide because neither of them had been to Paris before. Since we were not there for very long we did a lot of site seeing in a very short amount of time. Melissa came to Angers two days after I got back and we got to spend more time together. It was fun and I am really glad I got to hang out with Melissa. We spent a lot of our time talking about Austin, our friends and restaurants that we miss. We decided that in the fall we are going to have a Prom party at our house, and it is going to be the best party ever.
St. Ed’s took our group out for a big going away dinner at a really nice restaurant in the old city. Benoit made a toast in French and it was a good end to our time here, although most of us are still in town until next weekend.
On 5 June Emily and I leave Angers for Berlin, Prague, Florence and Rome. On the 18th we will take an overnight train to Angers, via Milan and Paris. We will spend 2 hours in Angers on the 19th just to pick up our bags and then return to Paris where we fly home from the next day. I am conflicted about returning home but once again I am too lazy to write about here. I know it will be good to get home and that I will surely miss France.
I've never been as excited about seeing my parents as I was last weekend. After film class on Thursday I met them at their hotel. I called my dad after class and told him I was on my way but still on the other side of town. He asked if I could catch the bus or take a Taxi. I laughed because he didn't realize how small this city is. We had a good dinner, during which I discovered the best part about their visit.
Dad: "blah, blah... when we were getting gas..."
Me: "Wait, gas? did you rent a car?"
Dad: "Yeah we decided it made more sense..."
Me: "LET ME DRIVE IT"
I had been dreaming about two things for a while: mexican food and driving. I still haven't had very great mexican food, but I did get to spend the weekend speeding around the Loire valley in a diesel Mercedes. I am not excited about going back to Austin and driving everywhere, but speeding through the French Paysage, through the canola fields, passed orchards and ancient Chateaux, was fantastic.
We spent the weekend in Chinon, a small city on the Vienne river known for its great wine. For two days we woke up late, ate breakfast in the hotel and then lazily toured several chateaux and jardins and then drank wine and relaxed. I especially enjoyed the jardins of the Chateau Villandry (seen above). That picture is only a little bit of the garden, which is huge. The only gardens I have seen that were better were at Versailles.
I hadn't really expected to have so much fun with my parents. Maybe I was just really stoked about driving, but that weekend was one of the nicest times I've had with them in years.
Most Sundays in France, whether I’d read or worked or procrastinated all day, I’d go out after dinner looking for a café. Any place where I could sit outside and enjoy a beer in some where that wasn’t my little room where I spent all day would have done fine. I’d know it was closed every Sunday but I’d still walk past Café L’Atelier because it was close to the apartment and the most familiar. Then I'd walk in to the city center to see if there was anywhere to sit at the Hotel Bar du Centre. When I first arrived in Angers no one ever went to this café. But when it got warm and they’d put chairs and tables outside it became the most crowded of all the cafés in town. It seemed like it filled the instant it opened in the morning and didn’t empty until 2 a.m. the following morning.
Once I’d realize that Hotel Bar du Centre was too crowded and that even if I could find a table it was too crowded for a boy to sit at alone I’d settle for whatever smaller café was open. I’d pay more for pint of good beer than I would have paid for dinner had I eaten anything but an omelet or just bread and olive oil. Sitting outside I’d open the book that I brought to make it look like I was there for any other reason than that I was simply lonely and wanted to be around people even though I knew no one would talk to me.
When you’re lonely in France, or any place that isn't home, you spend all the daylight hours alone cleaning, reading or killing time in whatever way you can. Then at night you decide to go out because you think maybe you’ll meet people even though you’ve been in town for three months and have tried the same way and haven’t met anyone. You sit yourself down at a little café or in a bar and watch girls who should be in love with you talk with guys who should be your friends or maybe people you don’t want to know just talking the language you don’t understand. And you order a beer because it will give you the most time in the café before you feel obligated to leave or order something else. A café, even a café grand, is cheaper than a pint but will only last you five minutes before it is cold and impalpable. So you get a pint of beer and sit.
Then you sink into a chair, surrounded by strangers, and pretend like you’re okay with being there alone for thirty minutes. And then you begin to long for something familiar like your mother’s cooking or a slow dance with an old sweetheart.
Most Sundays there would be a soccer match on T.V. and patrons yelling simultaneously cheers or curses depending on how the team they favored was fairing. I’d sit outside and at breaks in the game the sidewalk would fill with people smoking and then empty again as they went back inside to watch the remainder.
Tons of stuff happened over the past two weeks. So here is a summary:
Paris: Arrived 9 April. Train workers were on strike so we took a bus. St. Edwards got us a nice hotel for the first two nights and then I stayed in a hotel with some friends for three more nights. Saw everything: Notre Dame, Shakespeare & Co., Pere Lachaise Cemetery, Sacre Coure, Eiffel tower, got in to the Louvre and Musee D’Orsay for free just by showing my student visa. Rode the metro like 30 times. Saw Gertrude Stein’s old house, cafes were Hemingway wrote, a café were Malcolm Cowley punched the owner. Spent tons of money but it was great. I love Paris.
Dublin: Met Rachel at the airport, found our hotel near the city center, toured the Guinness factory and got free pints in the rooftop bar. Our whole trip basically revolved around Guinness and James Joyce. I got to see 7 Eccles Street and the James Joyce museum. Spent a lot of time laying on St. Stephen’s Green, this was nice after wearing myself out in Paris.
All of that volcano mess ruined my plans after this. Our flight to London was canceled so we caught a ferry to Holyhead, Wales. We slept on the floor of the train station. It was terrible. We caught a train to London.
My time in London was cut in half because of how long it took me to get there. I saw Piccadilly Circus for a few seconds.
After I abruptly left London with out saying goodbye to anyone I caught the Eurostar to Lille. I decided I didn’t want to go back to Angers just then. I tried to get a train to Brussels but they were all full so I just spent the night in Lille at a shitty hotel and went back to Angers the next(yesterday) morning. Because of another train strike I had to go to Tours—the land of fucked up train plans—and spend an hour there.
It is nice to be back in Angers. Today I rode my bike out into the suburbs. There is an old Slate quarry in Trelaze that is pretty cool. I ate lunch on the bank of the Loire and then got lost on my home and came back into Angers from the North even though I left from the South. I’m going to be in such god shape.
Also I gave myself a hair cut and removed my beard:
Here is a travel essay that I wrote for creative writing class with pictures:
I’d been in France for almost two months, but I was still confused by the idea of going west to get to the Atlantic coast. We boarded the bus that would take us from Angers to Normandy early in the morning, and like most other days, to appease my almost insatiable paranoia, I had to climb back up three flights of stairs to make sure that I had in fact locked the door to my apartment. I think that was the form my homesickness was being manifested into, the need to know my only possessions and I were secure in a place that still felt somewhat unfamiliar.
My apartment in Angers reminded me of a hotel room. The empty, white walls; the space-saving furniture; the micro-kitchenette, despite having been my residence for almost two months, it all seemed cold, sterile and foreign. For lack of room in my suitcase or money to spend I had neither brought decorations from home or purchased anything in Angers that would make my room seem like anything less than a temporary habitat for my stay in Europe. The only ‘decoration’ in the room was a single 4x5 photograph of my brother and I dressed as British soldiers that was taken the summer before in a costume shop in Austin. I didn’t even own a single picture frame. I was excited about spending a night away from this room that, save the want of iron bars and abundance of metal silverware, had the aesthetic quality of a minimum security prison cell.
Angers is different from Austin, not in a bad way—its just different. The people are different. Just like in Austin, the young people flock to the bars and cafés at night, drink, flirt and make noise on their ways home. But there is something profoundly different that I had a lot of trouble placing. Teenagers in Angers don’t use their 24-hour laundromats as free music venues. No one is out chugging beer while riding bikes in groups of 50. People in Angers live, work and socialize in the same basic way, but maybe it was the age of the city or lack of live music in every bar that made everything feel routine and complacent to me. Part of me wanted to be like the young French men who sit in cafés in evenings, drinking espresso surrounded by friends. In Austin every coffee shop is full of people typing on laptops with their headphones on and it isn’t the most inviting environment. I wanted to feel like a part of French culture, but I always wound up sitting alone outside of cafés, unapproached and afraid of approaching. I like Angers, and I like Austin, and I was ready to get out of Angers for a while.
Mont Saint Michel is one place that, at least to me, seems like it should not be a community. Nature, God or whichever force made the tiny mountain, placed it in the middle of what during low tide is a lovely, barren peninsula with a grey beach and low hanging clouds, all of which give the place a dream-like quality. During high tide, however, Mont Saint Michel stands in what the French call La Manche— the English Channel. This inhospitable, yet strangely attracting place was obviously idyllic for the Benedictine monks, not minding the solitary and isolated life, to establish a monastery in the 11th century. I would think the monks would still be there had it not been for the French revolution.
The modern village of Mont Saint Michel appears to be mostly based around capitalizing on the vast amount of tourists who pass through every year. The base of the mountain is filled with souvenir shops, restaurants and pay toilets. Miniature Eiffel towers and novelty knives with pictures of French kings are just a prevalent as prayer cards and depictions of saints. Above the commercial street is the neighborhood, complete with its own adjacent graveyard—high enough to keep the tide from uncovering caskets.
After 300 or so steps one finally makes it to the abbey at Mont Saint Michel. With it’s combination of Romanesque and gothic architecture you can imagine the abbey on a stormy night as the setting of a Victorian vampire story. The view of the channel from the terrace in the rear of the abbey awed me. In the distance you could see the remains of the island from which masons obtained all of the stone used in the construction of the abbey. If you allow your eye to follow the lines in the brick all the way up the side of the abbey your eyes will find the tall spire, atop which sits a statue of Saint Michel the archangel. Saint Michel hangs in the air, the highest point on the island, as if he is singlehandedly supporting the entire mountain, preventing it from washing away in the high tides.
My group took a tour. Our guide was a Frenchman who had lived in Liverpool for a lot his life and had a bit of British accent. He liked The Kinks more than The Beatles. It had never occurred to me before but I decided that what British rock and roll band someone prefers over The Beatles might actually be a very important character trait. I tried to figure out what my liking The Zombies more than The Beatles said about me.
Our guide seemed to have worked at the abbey for a long time and he liked to joke about the fact that he could very well be making up everything he told us. Very little of the written histories of the abbey exist anymore. During the French revolution the abbey was converted into a prison and the contents of the library were sent to Saint-Malo, where they would later be destroyed in WWII.
Part of me wished I could have the abbey to myself for a few hours. I wanted to ask all the other tourists to leave me one room in which to spend the afternoon in silence and solitude like the monks who had built the place. I wanted to find the old the Mont Saint Michel and understand the ascetic, spartan lifestyle that the monks had led. But the abbey, after all these years, remains a major destination for travelers, both pilgrims and tourist.
Saint-Malo pretends to be an old city, but the first Saint-Malo was destroyed in the Second World War. The new Saint-Malo, modeled after the original Saint-Malo, is a beautiful beach city surrounded on all sides by a large wall. You can circle the entirety of it in a 30-minute walk atop the wall, with the endlessly blue Atlantic on you right and the marvelous, bustling city on your left. Though a large tourist destination, inner Saint-Malo is like a coastal Angers or any other small French city. The strange twisting streets are filled with cafés, patisseries, restaurants, libraries and art galleries. After walking the wall I found an antique shop that I wanted to investigate, but like all French businesses the employees were out on a two-hour lunch break.
Our hotel was outside the wall, in a newer part of town a short walk from the city gate but on the beach. Even as evening set in to Saint-Malo I could see children, unaffected but the cool ocean wind, playing in the sand and locals walking their dogs. This part of Saint-Malo some what reminded me of an American East coast city like Charleston, South Carolina or Savannah, Georgia. The city had a kind of lazy, coastal feel to it—given we were only there over a weekend.
Walking down the beach in the morning, with the wind blowing my hair, I searched for the quick sand I had been told about. I had only seen quick sand in movies and wanted to experience the potentially deadly absorption into the Earth. After almost thirty minutes I found a spot in the sand that started to suck my feet in after I stood on it for a few seconds. Resisting is supposed to cause it to suck you in faster, I’ve heard, so I wiggled my feet and I think if I had tried hard enough I could have gotten in further than just a few inches of my shoes. It certainly was not ‘quick’ by any means, but I had found quick sand. With my now muddy shoes I boarded the bus to return to Angers.
As the bus drove back into the city on Sunday evening Angers was still alive. The city buses still circled the town on the their usual routes, the few shops and patisseries that operated on Sundays were open, and the whole city seemed to have gone on about its life all weekend unaware of the missing busload of American students with whom I had travelled. John Berger once wrote: “Home is the return to where distance did not yet count.” I knew that Austin, or at least my friends and family in Austin, knew of my distance, noticed my absence from the city, but it didn’t seem Angers would. Could you call you call a place home when 95% of the people you know there also leave with you? Back in my apartment, beginning my writing, I wondered if I could really call this place home if it didn’t notice my absence when I left and if I would have to miss Angers the same way I missed Austin.
