has "home" found a place to rest its weary head?

My parents are there waving from the observation
deck of little Tri-Cities Airport.

I recently returned to France after a longer than expected State-side visit that makes counting time more complicated than ever. I've officially been residing in France for over five years now, but I just spent nearly a year in the US. However, I kept my apartment in France while I was away, so I technically still resided there, I think. Um, how exactly do I answer that question of how long I've been living in France?

The complicated answers don't stop there.

Because, you see, I've also stepped over a weird threshold that I unconsciously never expected to cross: my home-life--that life where I return at the end of my voyages to my normal day-to-day rhythms--is actually in France now. Not the U.S.

Oh, I've heard about other Americans who feel that home-feeling once they return to the non-American place where they live. But because I get around so much and because I didn't move abroad expecting to stay so long and because my everyday life is far from settled-feeling and because I'm adaptable and find home both everywhere and nowhere and because I know I'm not yet fully at ease in French daily life and because my work life keeps me well-connected to the US, well, I just didn't anticipate becoming one of those Americans.

But two things happened that announced to me that I have indeed crossed over.

Transitioning from airplane to train, with plenty
of luggage in tow to make things exciting.

First, a close French friend spent some time in the US while I was there. I was excited for this friend to experience part of my US life, part of what has made me what I am. And excited that there would now be someone in France who knows me-in-the-US in a way that seemed like it would add a wholeness to my French life. Except that instead, during the visit, I slowly realized that US life isn't my real life anymore; it's not the place where my day-to-day life takes place; it's not even really the place where I feel most at home anymore and where I'm most me. Instead, it's the place of memories and history; it's the stage on which my past life took place. It's a place where I can no longer remember the shortest ways to get anywhere. It's the place where I don't have people's phone numbers already stored in my phone. It's the place where you learn who really cares that you're back in town for a visit. It took having someone from my French life dropped into my US life to make the big reveal (you might as well know that for some reason I'm imagining a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat as the visual metaphor of this big reveal ;-) ). My US life is still a good place; it's just no longer my today-life.

And then after that big white rabbit got pulled out of the sturdy black hat, I returned to my home-du-jour after months away and discovered that maybe [enter the magician with yet another rabbit to pull out of yet another hat]--despite having to rediscover where I keep things in my apartment--this place is more than my home-du-jour now. I only officially lived in this town for not-quite-a-year before leaving for nearly as long as I'd been living here. But I've returned to a life. A place where I know where to buy my groceries, where I don't have to check Google maps in order to get everywhere, a place where I have friends who welcomed me back, a place where people see me as part of their everyday lives rather than just that old friend who's dropped into town for a couple days but whom they forget to invite to things because they're not used to that friend being on the invitation list.

For those who've never experienced all of this (I was one of you until recently!), this rabbit-exiting-hat reveal is weird. It's one of those internal dissonance experiences that you want to give order to and understand but you can't really. So I think you're just supposed to accept it and move on with life. Right? Something like that anyway.

And maybe most surprising of all in this big reveal is discovering that of all the home-places my life is still tied to (hence, feeling at home both everywhere and nowhere), I kind of actually feel like I have a home-home again. But it took going away for a while and returning--returning to life and community that are real and that exist--to discover this home. It's often in the comparisons that we measure things, isn't it. How do we know we're taller than we were last year? Because our pants are too short now or because we can now look over the top of Aunt Mary's head or because the mark on the wall from last year's measurement now reaches our chin.

Back to the sometimes-rainy streets of Pau.

Accustomed as I am to that home-is-everywhere-and-nowhere feeling, it is massively unexpected to have these first stirrings of feelings of having a home in a physical place again. While I try to dive deeply into life wherever I am at the moment, I'm used to sensing that in some way I'm always just passing through, because a nomad lives in my soul. And the reality is that because I can do my work from anywhere, and because I only have to give a month's notice to move out of my furnished apartment, and because I'm here at the whim-in-the-form-of-visas-that-must-be-renewed of the French government, I really don't know how long I'll live here.

But there's still something new that I'm experiencing in this physical place that is becoming home-home more than anywhere else in the world right now.

And as with any early blossoms of feeling, I'll be testing this one out for a little while. However long it ultimately lasts, for now there's something unexpectedly satisfying and centering at giving a name to that surprising white rabbit--#ithinkihaveahomenow. (What self-respecting magic-show rabbit doesn't add a hashtag to her name these days?)

americans, please forgive me if i don't apologize for bumping into you

A sure sign you're no longer in France where

most people use long-life "shelf" milk that

isn't refrigerated until it's opened. I'm a

dedicated milk drinker, so I'm always raiding

a grocery store's small refrigerated shelves

holding 0.5 L, 1L, and occasionally 2L

"fresh milk" containers.

I rounded a corner at Walmart last night and nearly bumped into a couple coming from another direction. I intended to apologize. But it didn't happen.

I was foiled by that slow motion thing that's happening in reverse during this visit stateside. That slow motion thing where my mouth starts to say something (in this case "Pardon," as one would in France, but this time with English pronunciation instead of French - go figure), my brain stops it before it's said aloud, then those hills and valleys in my head try to figure out what I should be saying instead and why I'm having so much trouble, and then the split second appropriate for polite apologies of this sort was past as the girl in the couple murmured a "sorry," reminding me that this is what my slow-motion brain was trying to come up with.

I've been stateside for about a month and a half now, and it's been an interesting visit for discovering the way French life has infiltrated me after four-plus years there. Despite the fact that I still have slow-motion moments abroad when my American brain tries to figure out some oh-so-French situation, I have finally crossed that threshold I've heard about where that's also happening in reverse.

I officially belong nowhere now, it seems. Or everywhere.

So in honor of slow-motion moments the world over, here are a few other things that have tripped me up so far:

• I've apparently acclimated to the size of drinks outside the U.S. Many times now I've been subconsciously shocked over how huge "normal"-sized drinks are here. Twice I've been intentionally ordering a small drink and ended up being given one of the gigantic huge ones for free. This has made me chuckle. That other me--the pre-France one--would have felt like I'd won the lottery. The cheapskate current me is appreciative but really doesn't want to drink that much.
• I'm internally shocked here when servers at restaurants show up with the bill while we're still eating. It feels incredibly rude to me - like we're being asked to leave, rather than that they are just trying to provide good service and keep us from waiting. Apparently I've adjusted to the leisurely pace of most French dining (which works well for slow-eating me), where lingering long around a table is totally normal, where you almost never feel rushed out of a restaurant, and where you need to plan to start trying to get your bill about 20 minutes before you actually need to leave.
• I'm still adjusting to the fact that here it's not a mark of rudeness not to say goodbye to servers/salesclerks when you walk out of their establishment. It's okay to do it here, but it's not a cultural norm like it is in France.
• I had the hardest time the other day not using the 24-hour clock that has taken me forever to adjust to. So if I text you about meeting at 18h instead of 6 p.m., I hope you'll appreciate the little math exercise.
• I'm still kind of shocked inside when people speak nonchalantly of running to the store to pick up some sort of food product or other necessity on a Sunday. My insides want to gently remind them that stores aren't open on Sundays, especially not after 1 p.m. And then slow-motion-brain finally realizes I'm back visiting the land of Sunday-shopping-is-a-thing-here.
• On the up side - I was able to stay at a Starbucks the other night working on a proofreading project until 11:30 p.m.!!!! Such establishments in most of France are typically closed by 7 or 8 p.m.
• And a friend and I were able to enter a restaurant and order food within about 30 minutes of their posted closing time! Kitchens are often closed at French restaurants well before closing time, so this felt like a huge treat and the height of good customer service.

Et voilà! Reverse-slow-motion-brains-R-us.

the era of fixed things

If not for Air France's manhandling, my next suitcase purchase--whenever that day came--would have most likely been online or wherever I found the cheapest valise after hours and hours of research that would have included minimal opportunity to actually handle the bag I might buy. So while at first I was frustrated with another complicated-feeling thing to take care of in a place where I still don't know how everything works, I'm now a little grateful to Air France.

Because yesterday my unplanned suitcase purchase happened here at SPARBE, which turns out to be a family-owned business that's been operating in this same location for nearly 80 years. It was incredibly pleasing to walk in--at first just to see if they could repair my bag--and find that they knew exactly what needed to be done, knew exactly which forms the airline would ask for to prove the suitcase couldn't be repaired, knew exactly which form to submit to request reimbursement for the replacement carry-on, and were just all-around knowledgeable in helping find a bag that matched my damaged one as closely as possible in size (it was a larger-than-usual carryon that I wasn't eager to say good-bye to). It was really nice not to have to navigate another complication totally on my own.

This has turned into a sappy-sounding Yelp review of a mom and pop store from a bygone era, but because of them, a really frustrating experience turned into such an unexpectedly positive experience that, well, sappy-be-hanged, it was great enough to be worth recording for internet posterity. ;-)

A few of my broken things that are now fixed!

 The Fixing-Things Era

Perhaps because I've been here long now enough that belongings I owned before I came to France are getting old enough to be showing some wear, this summer began ushering me into a whole new era of life that involves fixing broken things. And it's turned into a lovely era for a few reasons:

1. It's nice to get to keep using belongings that I like a lot. No need to despair over discovering that something is damaged!
2. It's nice to avoid spending dollars or euros I don't have to replace things I hadn't prepared to replace.
3. It's nice to avoid shopping, which I really don't like. And to avoid having to figure out how to replace products I'm attached to but can't find exact replacements for here, only in the U.S.
4. It's given me a chance to get out into these lovely small shops and converse with people. When you're buying something, you don't necessarily have to talk much. But when you need something fixed, talking is much more necessary. No slinking into shops anonymously.

Becoming so nomadic has already changed my relationship with belongings--I try to mostly only own what I really need, not exactly the bare minimum, but close (as close as possible, given that I'm not a real minimalist...hence, my need for the very largest carry-on suitcase possible). I guess you could say that I keep pretty short accounts on my belongings these days, and I have to be pretty practical about things...if it's not useful, I don't keep it. This has even extended to the books in my life. You know it's serious when I ration how many of those I own at a time!

So in my long-ago, faraway American life, unless I or my parents could fix something fairly easily (and to be sure, I don't come from a family of cobblers, so shoes were not on the fix-it list), I assumed it had to be replaced. I never thought of going to a shoe shop to have my shoes fixed, for example. I didn't even really know where to go to have them fixed. Here, there are cordonniers in pretty much every town of reasonable size.

Thus, having things fixed is fairly easy to pull off...though I've taken to giving the cobblers and other fix-it people here magical powers in my mind, so then I'm disappointed to discover that not everything, said suitcase as an example, can be repaired.

I'm a New Woman

In short (I know, I know...after all those words...), this is just one of many only-sometimes-perceptible internal changes that has taken root inside me courtesy of changing cultures for a while. I suppose I knew those changes would come, except that when I came to France, I didn't know I'd stay so long, so I wasn't thinking about how four years and counting in this place might change my insides.

At any rate, I judge this change to be a good one.

america and france, when they just don't get each other

Interesting. Fascinating. Something to consider when next you're making foreign policy decisions. :-)

"Americans are definitely irked by the French habit of contesting the United States on every issue, but what really bugs the French is that the Americans seem to expect everyone to agree in every instance. We started to wonder if Raymonde Carroll's theory of couples' behavior didn't also apply to France and the United States on the international stage. Americans want nothing more than a perfect show of harmony among allies. The French think that if the relationship is strong enough, it should be able to withstand strong differences in public." 

--from Sixty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong by Jean-Benoît Nadeau and Julie Barlow

bathing sans american prudishness

It's a later-post from December 2015! In which I report from Tunis, Tunisia.

I can't show you pictures of what goes on in this building, but I can describe in words what is one of my new favorite cross cultural experiences. I have now bathed in a public bath house--women only, of course--and been scrubbed (exfoliated) by another woman whose job it is to spend the day in the steamy, tiled bathing rooms scrubbing all the naked bodies who pass through, well naked except for panties (kind of like some French beaches!).

The woman in the front room (where you pay before disrobing and walking into the bath section, leaving your towel behind) who runs the place explained that you need to come at least once a week for some good scrubbing, but if you can't make that, then once every 15 days is essential. She also explained that European women and even other Arab women besides those of North Africa just don't understand how important it is to take care of yourself this way. This scrubdown seems to be traditional mostly only in Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria. Owner-woman was a flight attendant in her younger days and still enjoys meeting people--running the bath house is much nicer, she says, than staying at home all day with just her 26-year-old son around for occasional company. 

Raise your hand if you, too, have been to a bathhouse! #thingsineverdreamediwoulddo

doctors: a crossing cultures episode

After pausing outside her office until her phone call ended, I let the receptionist know I had arrived for my appointment. She said she would tell the doctor I was there. I took a seat in the sunny waiting room down the wide hall where others who entered after me offered a "bonjour" to the room as they sat down. I had missed that step. Oops.

Doctors' offices here in the center of a French town are often located in the same buildings that house apartments. For example, there's a doctors' office on the ground floor of the building some friends of mine in Aix live in. This can be convenient when packages are delivered when they're not home, as they effectively have a concierge in doctor's clothes to accept their deliveries. As you can imagine, though, a doctor's office in an apartment building might be configured a little differently than the strip mall/medical office building variety I'm used to from back home.

When it was my turn before the doctor, it was he himself who poked his head into the waiting room and called my name. The same thing happened the one time I went to the dentist here. It was the dentist who came to collect me. As is the way with subtle cultural things you don't realize affect what you're expecting, I never realized before that it's perhaps an American norm rather than a worldwide norm that there's always an assistant of some sort of who does such banal tasks as getting patients situated in exam rooms.

In the States, I've perhaps never been inside a doctor's actual office--the place where he or she keeps their books and papers and photos of family. If I have, it's been a rare occurrence. Normally, I only ever see the small exam rooms, usually dressed in white and sterile-seeming décor, though with occasional slightly personal touches (my childhood doctor's exam rooms were graced with those famous images of bulldogs in upper class dinner attire smoking cigars around pool tables).

Here in France, though, I've twice now been ushered into large rooms with a messy desk and accompanying desk-accoutrements in one corner and an exam table and sink and other exam room things in another corner. The doctor does his exams in the same room in which he replies to email. Novel (to me) but not super novel I suppose. I must say, though, that it feels weird to climb upon an exam table in the middle of a large room (even if it's sort of in a corner). I end up feeling exposed. It's weird how weird it feels. Because on the face of it, it's not that crazy.

When it came time to pay yesterday, the doctor wasn't giving clear instructions, just kind of pausing as he sat behind his desk after he'd finished writing prescriptions. And I was internally confused about what was supposed to happen next. When I had time to sort it out later, I realized that again, this is how cross cultural moments work: something collides with what you're expecting, but it takes some seconds to understand that this is the reason it feels like you're moving through the moment in slow motion, trying to find firm footing where you know what you're supposed to do or say next.

I asked if I was supposed to pay him or the person out front. He was probably wondering why in the world I would be so confused about all this and why the person out front would have anything to do with this and why I kept asking if such-and-such was something he would do or her. To my American self, the doctor never occupies himself with such things and never has a credit card machine right there among all his desk-accoutrements. Again, processing payment is to be done by assistants after you leave the exam room and while the doctor rushes off to do the important work of doctoring the patient waiting in the next tiny, private, white exam room, with their chart waiting in the chart holder thing on the wall beside the door. But not in France. Here the doctor handles all that while seated at his desk in a large warmly decorated (in this case, anyway) room.

This is only my second doctor's visit in this country, and the last one was two years ago. There've been lots of other slow motion cross-cultural moments to wade through in the meantime. But maybe now that I've written about it, I'll remember the unspoken rules better the next time I climb onto an exam table in the middle of a large room, and next time I'll need a little less prompting on how to conduct myself. Maybe?

c'est la vie en france

Classic Mediterranean view on the Giens Peninsula.

I may have lived in France for a while now, but there's still a lot that doesn't feel normal yet. Including these moments: 

>>Vignette #1: July 2 ~~ French admin rightfully has a terrible reputation. But this week I've spent two days going in person into various offices and finally getting answers to some long-standing admin things I didn't know how to do. It's been so much better than trying to do it by phone (or trying to guess how to do things), and everyone in the offices has been super nice and helpful, and I didn't even get scolded for being six months late on turning in one particular piece of important paperwork. I feel like a huge administrative weight has been lifted! And I feel like I've taken some sort of giant leap forward in navigating some of the hardest parts of expat life. 

‪#‎itsgoodtoaskquestions‬‪ #‎forgetthestereotypeofsnobbyFrenchpeople‬

>>Vignette #2: July 4 ~~ In honor of my homeland, a July 4 Independence Day quiz: At 10:10 pm a girl walked into the neighborhood sushi restaurant thinking she could still get takeaway dinner after a long day of travel. According to its posted hours, the restaurant closes at 10:30 pm. Why did said girl leave empty-handed?

‪#‎youcantakethegirloutofamerica‬... ‪#‎butsometimesshestillthinkslikeanamerican‬...

‪#‎whereyoucanorderuntilthestoreisclosed‬

(France, I love you, but seriously, could you have mercy on me and not shut down your kitchen 30 minutes before you close, and not shrug your shoulders as though this is the most normal thing in the world? ;-) Sorry, France, but there are some moments where America outshines you. But no hard feelings, it's a friendly competition! ;-) )

>>Vignette #3: July 7 ~~ France, the land where it's not weird when a stranger kisses you (on the cheeks, évidemment) after the home team has just won a big match!

all the best travel stories include a bathroom scene

Can you believe it? Another toilet photo?
This one's at my university. Lovely, huh?

It was July 2000, and I was enjoying my third trip outside the U.S. This time, I was visiting my dear college friend Julie who was living in Londrina, Brazil.

As has continued to be my modus operandi in my travels since then, I had gone to Brazil to see Julie, not to check off a long list of tourist attractions. Thankfully, though, she organized for us what is still one of my favorite travel memories.

One afternoon we hopped aboard a bus for a lengthy-ish trek to Iguaçu Falls/Iguazu Falls. Being the bad traveler I am who doesn't research places before I go to them, I had never heard of this rumbling paradise before. (Here are some intel and photos.) But I was excited about the trip: taking a local bus with real local people outside the city with stops in small towns as we made our way to the grand attraction would be almost as great as the waterfall itself, in my opinion.

As I recall, the bus ride delivered on its promise of adventure, including some crowdedness and an unplanned stop at a bus depot because someone threw up. We either changed buses or waited for ours to be cleaned; I can no longer recall the specifics.

What I remember most about that ride, though, is climbing off the bus at a small town bus station and eagerly following the other women to the bathroom. So far all my Brazilian bathroom experiences had been pretty much like the ones in the U.S., so I had no expectation of anything different.

But as I stepped into the stall, I paused in surprise and confusion. Was this possible? Were my eyes deceiving me? And what was I supposed to do next?

In that little Brazilian bus station I encountered my first seat-less toilet. It had never occurred to me that toilets might not automatically come with seats. Or that it could be an intentional choice not to include a seat with a public toilet. I had never thought of toilet seats as luxuries.

I've traveled a lot more since then and used a lot of different types of "toilets." I've even mastered the squatty potty variety enough that on a couple occasions -- given the options and depending on what I was wearing -- I've chosen the squatty over the regular toilet (and then called my girl scout leader to request my squatty potty badge). I've probably encountered other seat-less toilets, but they don't stand out in my memories.

But then I arrived in France, a reasonably hygienic country with most of the amenities my American self is used to. Yet after nearly 1.5 years here, I'm still not fully acclimated to the bathroom culture of this place. Sometimes it's pretty much the same as in the U.S., but other times it's wildly different.

For starters, it's rare to find a toilet seat in the bathrooms in the university building that holds my classrooms, and in addition to that, most of bathrooms aren't designated as male or female. They're a free-for-all. There are individual stalls, so really, there's still full privacy, but it still feels strange to walk through the doorway from the hallway into the bathroom on the heals of a man, because in public bathrooms in the U.S. that only happens by accident, in the stories you tell your friends for a laugh (after you've recovered enough from the embarrassment).

In other places, here, things are even more shocking (to my privacy-loving, body-parts-covering American self). At a nearby brasserie, when the need for relief strikes, you follow circular stairs down to a small basement bathroom. First the sink greets you at the bottom of the stairs. Then to the right are a couple small stalls with doors. But beside those and without a door? A urinal. C'est la vie ici.

It's also reasonably common to find men relieving themselves against some building or other (or sometimes a dumpster suffices for them) right here in the center of town, especially at night after a few hours at a bar. Sometimes they seek out shadowed corners, sometimes not. I suppose it's one way of feeling a little like you're camping even when you can't escape the urban life to hie thee for the woods?

Bathroom culture is a fascinating piece of culture exploration, one that any traveler will unavoidably encounter. It doesn't get much more quotidian than reliving oneself somewhere, somehow. And it strikes into all these core assumptions and sensibilities that are part of us without our ever choosing them. They're part of us simply because of where we come from and how we've grown up. And it's not until encountering an alternative that we ever realize our way of doing bathrooms isn't the only proper one. And that maybe the other options are perfectly and completely acceptable, even if they just feel awkward and weird and uncomfortable because they're not what we're used to.

And as uncomfortable as these moments are, one of my favorite things about soaking into a new culture is discovering the many ways of thinking and being that are subconsciously part of me. Once I discover there are other options, I get to make a choice: continue doing things the way I've always done them or make a change. Whatever the result, the beauty is that it's now an intentional choice, not an at-the-mercy-of-not-knowing-anything-else one.

For the record, I still choose toilet seats whenever possible.

culture shock. or not

True confession: This is my French toilet. It is not
 in a gas station. Alas, I had no American ones
on hand for illustration. Who takes
pictures of toilets?

It was a gas station bathroom. One not remarkable in any way except that it was relievingly clean, as "les toilettes" at the big trucker-targeting interstate-highway gas station complexes tend to be--cleaner, at least, than the kind around back that must be entered with keys attached to three-foot-long boards marked "Women" in black magic marker. I was making my first little solo road trip in months, maybe a year, even, and enjoying the chance to be alone in a car on the open road during a summer trip back to the U.S.

The bathroom was small-ish as such bathrooms go, with only about three stalls. I exited to the sink ahead of the other woman who had entered the bathroom. But she had reached the hand-washing stage of things beside me by the time I was waving my hands under the magic sensor to acquire a paper towel. What emerged surprised me: only about three inches of stingy dispensing. As I waved a second time, so I could dry my other hand, she was receiving her first ration.

And then suddenly I realized I could comment aloud about the slightly comical allotment. So I did. She smiled and agreed that these were the smallest paper towels in the world (or maybe it was something slightly less hyperbolic but just as friendly).

And it was in that little highway bathroom somewhere in Tennessee that I realized how the past year, and especially the six months since my two-week run State-side for Christmas, had retrained me: I've stopped talking to strangers.

My brain still doesn't work fast enough in French to succeed well in those spontaneous life moments in which two unknown-to-each-other people exchange their humanity for a few seconds. And outside of France--say, in the realm of international flights--I now wonder how you can ever know which language to try first when speaking to someone you don't know. Really, you can't tell by looking at most people what language they speak. And with one and 1/4 languages now at my disposal, I'm paralyzed by the possibility of choice.

This thing that in my former life had always been a certainty--speak in English and they will understand--is no longer certain. As though I've eaten from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, my new knowledge has left me tongue-tied. The world is no longer simple and innocent.

I hadn't realized how silent I've become until I was confronted by it in that truck-stop loo. It was strange and sobering and exciting all at once to discover how my new cultural milieu has changed me. I tend to dance between cultures quite easily, feeling at home in lots of places in this world. This is mostly a gift, though sometimes being a chameleon leaves you wondering who you really are.

So when others talk about culture shock, I can barely relate. I enter new places excited to discover how they are different and how they are similar to all the other places I know. I enter eager to understand how people transact life there, eager to interact with them on their terms. Perhaps it's that lens of wonder that keeps me from being too rattled by all that's new and different. I don't expect it to be the same. I want it to be different. I want the world's cultures to keep their endearing and sometimes-maddening quirks.

But this is the longest I've lived outside the States, so I have wondered if this culture shock thing would rear its ugly head in time to celebrate my one-year anniversary of life abroad. I expect I'll discover other effects, but for now I've just stopped talking to strangers. I suppose that's not so bad as the list of potential shocking maladies goes. And I have hope that this skill isn't lost forever. So watch out, strangers of the world, my French is improving. One day I'll learn how to say, "That's the shortest paper towel I've ever seen!"