Apologies in advance. No travel which means this will be more a Blah, Blah, Blah post and just checking in.
The spring dragged on with more winter type weather. Cold, overcast, windy and rainy. The news in the states showed records broken in the amount of snow, rain and low temperatures across the nation. Still, we are seeing vines greening and fields of daffodils here on our walks which reminds us that even if the spring seems subdued, summer is surely not far away.
As we mentioned in previous blogs – if we’re not traveling, there isn’t much we can share that is different from your own daily routines. Like the pandemic period, if there isn’t anything to share regarding traveling on a travel blog, we keep the day to day minutiae to ourselves and those close.
The dearth of our travel adventures are to due to turning our focus on the language here. Every block of classes which we’ve taken, are comprised of 6 to 8 other students who are rarely from the same country. So far our classmates have hailed from Thailand, Japan, Brazil, Russia, Lebanon, Israel, Denmark, Croatia, US and the UK. Our French language classes began again at the beginning of March and this session ran for 8 weeks. The beginning classes are classified as A1 and are split in two sessions – one 6 and one 8 weeks in length. We have completed those and in March started A2 sessions. A2 is split into three sessions; red, orange and green. We have just finished A2 red and were seriously considering retaking that level before going further. The last section of A1, I felt I really needed to retake it and against the advice of the school, I did. I sorely needed to and when we started A2, I no longer felt lost in class discussion.
However, not being great at learning a new language, by the time I finished this A2 red class, I really felt lost again and wanted to retake it. Our teacher and tutor told me that she was sure I was ready for the next section and because G (who is much better than I) would probably have been bored to retake it, we are signed up to start A2 orange on May 2nd. I can always take THAT again, if need be – or leap off of our balcony and put an end to it all.
All of this to say for the last two months. So, no blog. And, we continue to frequent our cafĆ©s and bars here in Lille where we meet up with friends and the barkeeps. One in particular – LāIllustration – where we hadnāt been in a while, is tended by Richard, the bartender and great jazz music aficionado, whose wife is an artist and her work graces the walls. Itās always good to see him and chitchat.
Our one excursion in the last two months was a tour of the Maison natale Charles de Gaulle (house where CDG was born), here in Lille. It is a typical bourgeois house from the end of the 19th century. He never actually lived there (his parents lived in Paris) but he was born there in 1890 and his maternal grandparents inhabited the house their entire adulthood. Until he was 22, he stayed very regularly in Lille: for five months at the age of 6 when he was educated at the Notre-Dame de la Sagesse school in Lille, for family reunions and holidays. He also took advantage of the proximity of Antoing (in Belgium) where he studied in 1907-1908 to return regularly to Lille to see his grandmother.
The house left the family after the World War II so few of objects and furniture presented belonged to the family. The collections are mainly made up of similar historical objects acquired after scientific research and expertise. Open to the public for almost 40 years, the museum welcomes more than 20,000 visitors a year. In 2019, the Maison natale Charles de Gaulle needed a major renovation. It closed its doors on November 4, 2019, and in addition to structural work and repair of the facades, the living areas and the decorations of era were restored.
We went there as part of a tour provided by our French school, Alliance FranƧaise de Lille. The tour included students from the different levels, beginning to advanced, and was conducted all in French by our teacher, Vanessa, and we asked our questions and commented in French. It was a very enjoyable way to spend a rainy, Friday afternoon.
A bit of a note here – a friend commented that my life was basically home maintenance and French classes. There is no doubt that the scope of what I discussed was reduced tremendously when not traveling. The daily life of most individuals is comprised of the same basic components. In a single day you spend most of your time in predictable categories; sleeping, working, shopping, cooking, eating, cleaning. Unless of course you’ve more money than me and have a cook, housekeeper and maybe a chauffeur.
Most of our lives are such. Whomever you may think is leading a more exciting or more meaningful life, I can assure you that their days are filled with the mechanics of life that we all have. So if my life is rote – is it more exciting to friends in the states because I can say that ‘my life is such…in France‘ ? Silly but actually to some, yes – they think location makes a difference. My laundry doesn’t think so and neither does the toilet I scrub.
But the picture of who we are is painted by a thousand strokes of the brush. What we choose to wear, how we structure our day, how we arrange our living quarters – from routines, to decor, to meal preparation. Our passions may mark our individuality more than anything else about us, it doesn’t completely define us because everything you do is touched by who you are as an individual.
Our passion is traveling, not necessarily to see the monuments or museums but to connect with the people who live in the various places we visit. We go to experience their surroundings and all of the pieces that frame their lives. How they interact in their community, how they dress, what they love to eat, how they spend their free time, says the most about who they are. Absolutely the rest of the picture is rounded out by the history, the structure of the city, the monuments, politics and the art but it all stems from their humanity. That is our common ground and what we seek to find.
So when reviewing one’s daily emails, texts, letters, it would be easy to weigh missives about routines as less than passions, I argue that they are of equal value as only all of it will truly give one a complete portrait. In our communications a good percentage of what we all do is as I’ve stated – predictable. The letters of those famous (or not) held in historic museums are filled with the minutes of life. If you talk to the same person by phone or text or email every day, you will cover the same topics repeatedly. We talk of the banal, daily workings but in small slips and spaces, we include the many other facets which interest us – music, family relationships, books, poetry, films. It is through all of those pieces that we are actually talking about our lives. When I continue an ongoing communication with someone, I am as interested in their passions as I am the health struggles, the garden, the new recipe, the club meeting, a new piece of clothing. All of those things are the flavor of whom I’ve come to know.
Moving on and finishing up, how we spend our time currently is trying to learn a foreign language, a foreign culture and a foreign bureaucratic system. In between the inordinate amount of time that I spend on French classes, we choose to travel to places in the world that we have never seen or only seen in books and movies. Whether we are traveling, studying or spitting out, “Je voudrais un livre sur les itinĆ©raires cyclables” at our local store, our lives are completely wrapped around experiencing our world. If I talked to you daily, you would also hear that we wash dishes and clean the bathroom. It’s all that and the spaces in between which gives you a complete portrait. Know your communications have value, even in the unexpected places.
A BientƓt !!
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