Virtually Home

People drink a lot of tea here, but there is also an 11 a.m. break time called "tea", when people stop for a few minutes, make a cuppa, and maybe chat. In the department, people bring cake to share at tea time to celebrate having their papers accepted or their grants funded. I think it's a good social tradition. It's also a lot of cake, distributed stochastically. One day we had three cakes! But many days there are no cakes. Of late, the "autoboiler" on the wall, which dispenses boiling water from the wall on demand, has been on the fritz. The extent to which this has bothered me is troubling -- I clearly have begun both to drink more tea and also to depend on this novel (to me) technology.

Sometimes a moment in my life gets stuck in an album, like a mosquito in amber. From then on, hearing that piece of music reminds me strongly of being in another place at another time. Just after I moved to Bordeaux, Monsters of Folk released their eponymous record and I walked around the streets listening to it on my iPod repeatedly, relentlessly. Our washing machine was broken from the moment we moved in, and the repair process took an agonizingly long time. The sound of that album is the dryer spinning in the laundromat down the road from my house. It's the automated voice announcing stops on the tram on the way to the Université Bordeaux III for my linguistics classes. It's the long walk home from the guitar store where I bought the Cort electric-acoustic guitar I played that year (and which I recently gave away to a friend, to downsize my belongings before moving to Australia). This musical fossilization doesn't always happen and I can't always tell in real tim...

I've been meaning to get this blog up and running again, but wasn't sure what direction it should go. And frankly, I'm still not sure. It's definitely no longer a chronicle of my time abroad, since I'm back in Oklahoma, where things are much the same as they were when I left them. Everything is different and the same. I've been missing my friends in Bordeaux like crazy, which is not alleviated by the photos posted by another OU student currently living in my apartment on Rue du Loup. I miss life in France in a lot of ways, and I feel like I'm living abroad sort of vicariously by meeting a lot of exchange students. I'm participating in a program that matches students studying abroad with students interested in cultural exchange. My student is Japanese, and we've so far had a lot of fun together. I envy the newness of everything she's getting to do, and the linguistic strides she's making. I teach her as much slang as I can work into the conv...