Blogs from Nord-Pas de Calais, France, Europe - page 32

Let me just clear something up for all of you who think that you can become fluent in a language from hardcore studying in school. You may get damn good at the language itself, but you cannot become well-versed in culture, which you need to call yourself anywhere close to fluent in a language. What brought this one? “Si vous voulez bien patienter quelques instants…” Literally: “If you’d be willing to wait a moment…” That, however, is not an accurate translation. I waited two hours and fifteen minutes, not a moment, to see the director of La Résidence Bethany, a sort of dormlike residency for les jeunes travailleurs de Lille (young working people in Lille), with zero apologies. And that’s normal. Waiting “just a moment” in France can mean a moment, but it can easily mean ... read more

It’s 11AM. I’m sitting here at the gare (train station) because they have seating that doesn’t require me to buy anything, and I realized that I forgot to tell you my absolute favorite thing about train stations. Not all gares have them, but some do, including the Paris Gare du Nord (North Station), which happens to be the Paris gare that goes to Lille. The signs!!! Every train station has a huge billboard-sized sign high up in the middle of the gare that posts the scheduled departure times, destinations, numbers, and voies (gates/ways). The ones I love are not the brand new, digital screens with bright orange LED numbers and letters, nor are they the old, funky digital screens with blocky, green, dot matrix-looking text. The signs I love are based on the old-fashioned ones that ... read more

I’ll write about it tomorrow - it’s still too new for me to even have an impression. But taking the train and arriving here alone really solidified that I really am starting completely over. And it’s sad and it’s exciting and it’s scary and it’s wonderful and it’s exhausting and it’s energizing. I was reminded of L’Auberge espagnole (The Spanish Apartment), another one of my favorite movies. (The movie, briefly, is about Xavier, who decides to spend a year abroad in Spain studying Economics. During this time, he lives in an apartment with about six other people, all of different nationalities.) When Xavier first arrives in Spain, he remarks how strange and foreign all the names and things and people seemed, and how they would, a year later, become as routine and unremarkable to him as ... read more

Hello everyone, Well we are back in London hoping to see the Queen this time. Her Royal Standard was flying as we dropped by but she didn't have her teapot on so we were refused entry for tea... may be next time. At least the Canadian Embassy let us in to send this message for free. Oh to be a Canadian! We have had quite a busy few days since we left the south of France. We headed north to Paris on Monday and stopped in Lyon to break up the long train trip. Lyon is a very nice city that sits between the Rhone and the Saoune and has a nice pedestrian walking area through the old town. We had a nice dinner in Bellecour and had seafood salad (yes, Katy ate the whole thing)... ... read more

Another weekend rolls around and another chance for us to leave behind London and head off on another little adventure. Our stop this time - Lille in northern France. Just a short Eurostar trip across the English Channel into France, not too far from the Belgium border. We headed off after work on Friday and made the 1hr 40min trip from Waterloo to Lille. I think Ange and I still both agree that train travel is our prefered method - just so relaxed, ample room, and a quieter passenger group compared to air travel - or maybe we've just been lucky so far. We arrived into Lille at about 10pm and began to fret at the thought of managing the language barriers that we knew would arise. We frantically attempted to memorise what we thought would ... read more