Wednesday, September 23, 2015

An Abundance of Free Time

Before we moved to France, whenever we told someone that we would be moving to Paris for Rory's work, I was inevitably asked the question, “So what are you going to do there?” I would usually smile sheepishly and say, “I have no idea!” and then elaborate on what I might do with all my free time (since I can't legally work until I have my residence permit, which may be several months). Anyone who knows me probably knows that free time was a foreign concept to me. Rory had to persuade me not to teach cello lessons on the weekends or after 7 pm, and any time that wasn't spent teaching was usually spent on Baha'i activities like serving on the Local Spiritual Assembly and participating in neighborhood community building. It's not that I didn't want free time, it's just that there were too many good causes to support.


To be honest, having nothing but free time in a new city and country is a somewhat terrifying prospect. To not have the consistency of getting out of the apartment every day, and to not have specific projects for which I am held accountable, means that there are some days when I stand on our balcony and gaze out at the bustling street below, and then decide to spend the rest of the day at home. As I wrote three and a half weeks ago when Rory first started his job,


“Being unfamiliar with my surroundings, the timid, small town girl in me would have been completely content to stay at the apartment doing laundry and watching episodes of “Jane the Virgin” until Rory returned. Paris is an amazing city, don't get me wrong, but the throngs of people all saying things I can't understand, the irrepressible fear that someone will steal my purse...these things make it scary to tackle the city on my own.”


On that day three and a half weeks ago, I'm proud to say that I was writing those thoughts not in our apartment but in a gluten-free cafe called My Free Kitchen. I steeled my resolve and trekked to this cute cafe where I deliberately ate very slowly, not just to make the delicious blueberry almond cake last longer, but also to give my nerves a chance to calm down. It was a relatively easy walk, only 30 minutes and almost a straight shot from our place, but I was nervous nonetheless. No one messed with me, no one even talked to me, it was all fine, but I couldn't shake the nervousness.
GF blueberry cake from My Free Kitchen on my first solo outing
Fortunately, that successful first solo outing gave me the courage to explore other new places in the city by myself. I have visited several of the surprisingly numerous gluten-free cafes, I've gone to the bank and the post office and the town hall to conduct important business (speaking in French, I might add!), I even went for an early morning run to see new parts of my neighborhood.
Hôtel de Ville, Paris' City Hall
A large part of the rest of my time has been spent working on learning French, cooking and baking in our tiny kitchen, reading and writing (Harry Potter in French is a fun way to learn new words), meeting friends-of-friends, and finding groups to join on Meetup. This week I went to a meeting of the Trailing Spouses group at a coffee shop next to the river Seine and found a bunch of lovely American, British, and Australian women to chat with. Just before that, I registered for a French conversation group at the Cercle International de l'ARC (I had an interview in French! It was terrifying!).

Harry Potter at the Wizard School
Hogwarts is called Collège Poudlard. *Giggle*

















All this is to say that I am finding fun and productive ways to use my free time. Without the extreme demands on my time and energy, I am finding that I can be more creative and more open to new experiences. I am standing at a crossroads, with paths branching off in all different directions, and I get to choose which paths to follow. It's an exciting prospect.

Wednesday, September 16, 2015

One month!

Today is a month since we moved to France. We haven't actually spent the whole month in France - we've been to Belgium, and taken a couple of trips to Scotland (and England, technically) - but today is a month since we moved.

So, what has happened in that time? Here's a run-down:

Work

I've started work. Being a postdoc is hard - harder than being a graduate student - and adjusting to a new environment with new colleagues is difficult but rewarding. Foremost among these differences, apart from, y'know, being in France, is that I am now in a cognitive science department, while I got my PhD in a linguistics department. So I've gone from being at the cognitive end of studying language, to being at the linguistic end of studying cognition.

Previously I had colleagues who wondered about why "John ate", "John ate the steak", and "John devoured the steak" are all fine English sentences, but "John devoured" is not acceptable. Now I have colleagues who wonder about how the mammalian auditory system represents acoustic information, or human metacognition under attentional load, that sort of thing. Well, we do more than just wondering, but I'll spare you the discussion of experimental research methodologies in cognitive science.

Apartment

Our apartment is set up and we're living just fine. We might do a little furniture rearranging or adjusting while we settle in, and we could probably do with some particular kitchen items to help us cook specific recipes, but the basics are all there. It's rapidly becoming a home.

 

Necessities of modern life

Bank accounts, library accounts, ATM cards, phone numbers, we have all of these. We've figured out the transport system and can navigate easily. Talia doesn't yet have her carte de sejour (residence permit), but that's a long process. We also don't yet have our cartes vitales (a card which entitles you to healthcare), so I'll probably need to chase up someone in HR at my work. French bureaucracy is somewhat labyrinthine so I'm not entirely looking forward to it.

 

Friends

Friends! Friends are good. We've met up with a few people we knew before we moved, not to mention seeing people on our trips to Belgium and Scotland. We went to a Bahá'í feast the other week and met some local Bahá'ís, which was really great. We have more friends-of-friends on the horizon who we will be meeting soon, too. I've always found making friends hard, especially when moving to a new place, but the effort has always paid off.

Language

Our language skills have improved a lot since we arrived. Well, Talia's have at least. She's been making her way through all sorts of complicated interactions in French just fine. I've been a little slower, partly because my work is more or less in English, and because I've not been trying as hard. I'd better catch up!

Tuesday, September 8, 2015

Mrs. Turnbull's Neighborhood (not quite as good as Mister Rogers'...)

We have been living in Paris for three weeks now! Although with the trip to Belgium, last weekend in Scotland for Grandma Turnbull's 90th birthday, and next weekend's return trip to Scotland for a wedding, it doesn't exactly feel like we're firmly situated in Paris yet. Nonetheless, it's high time we shared with you about our appartement and our neighborhood so you can see where we live.


A little history
The view from our bedroom
In July, after extensive and disappointing online searches for apartments in Paris, we were contacted by Rory's supervisor at École Normale Supérieure (ENS) where he is now employed as a post-doctoral researcher. She mentioned that a friend of hers would be moving to China for ten months and was looking to sublet her apartment. And she could speak English. Hallelujah! We wouldn't have to deal with landlords we didn't understand and complicated rental laws and documents, and a mad scramble to find an apartment once we arrived. This was such a relief, since the prospect of finding a place to live was very daunting and stressful.


Our spiral staircase. Only 6 floors to go...
We saw photos of the 36 m² one-bedroom apartment and thought that it looked nicely decorated, well-maintained, and extremely colorful, if rather small. The walls were painted very bright colors—nearly every wall a different hue. The propriétaire assured us that the small kitchen appliance which looked an awful lot like a microwave/toaster oven was indeed a real oven (having an oven was a condition of any place we looked at, given my need to bake). The owner was also willing to give us a deal on rent, so it would only cost 1,100 euros a month! This was over our budget and at the time seemed ludicrously expensive. Keep in mind that in Columbus we had a three bedroom, two story house with an attic, a basement, and front and back yards for less than $1000. Oh, and did I mention this apartment is on the 5th floor (6th floor in American terms)? No elevator, of course.


Still, the assurance of having a decent place to live and a friendly landlord we could communicate easily with seemed worth the expense...


Back to the present
Lime green walls? Really?
Happily, it has been worth it! We are adjusting to living in smaller quarters and our legs are getting stronger from all the stairs. The apartment is certainly sufficient and I have even baked muffins in the “oven”. Our neighborhood is great! Transportation is easy: our building is right next to a metro (subway) station, and there is a Vélib' station across the street (Vélib' is a city-wide bike-share program with thousands of bicycles available to use for cheap). And we are within a short walk of almost everything we could possibly need: cafes, restaurants, grocery stores (even several health food stores), department stores, post offices, Office Depot, African and Asian markets, banks, libraries, parks, and so much more.


On a side note, there's a cool website at www.walkscore.com where you can find a measurement of how walkable your neighborhood is. Basically, how easy it is to live there without a car. Our house in Columbus had a walk score of 81/100, which is very good. My parents' house in Oregon has a dismal score of 1. Guess what our score is now? That's right, it's 99.

It says "Le Foll [Stéphane Le Foll, the French Minister of Agriculture] should come work on the farm to see if the difference in salaries is justified."
One interesting feature of our neighborhood is that we live very close to the Place de la Nation (“widely known for having the most active guillotines during the French Revolution”). Apparently, this place (plaza or “square”--though it's a circle) is where a lot of protests happen. I found this out last week when I awoke to the sound of a thousand tractors honking their horns and people shouting on a loudspeaker. French farmers had driven their tractors all the way to Paris to protest low agricultural prices, since many farmers are now nearly bankrupt. The noise and the tractors parading down the street lasted for about seven hours. I guess that's the price to pay for my new-found liberté, égalité, fraternité!

The view from our dining room/kitchen/living room