And so she did: wandering up and down, and trying turn after turn, but always coming back to the house, do what she would. Indeed, once, when she turned a corner rather more quickly than usual, she ran against it before she could stop herself." - Through the Looking Glass, "The Garden of Live Flowers", Lewis Carroll.
Alice's anxious anticipation of and frustration towards the elusive garden on top of the hill very justly parallels my experiences in trying to navigate my neighborhood park. Her amazement and angst at her inability to reach her intended destination faithfully mirrors my own reaction to consistently futile effort I put forth in trying to assert my cartesian sense of direction on the wooded environs. Although I have encountered no outlandish creatures (save for the Frenchmen in running tights), the fear of losing time and peace of mind is ever present on the smaller, ever-so-slightly-turning trails. It is clear that the architects of the grid system of streets in Chicago and New York did not have a hand in designing the gravel-covered routes of the bois de Vincennes. Or maybe they did and the bois represents their drunken liberation from the oppressive (although reassuringly logical) system of perfectly perpendicular intersections. However, as surely as other oppressed peoples have cried out at the injustices surrounding them, I say to the confoundingly homogenous mass of trees, bushes, winding paths: "I shall overcome!"
My last "Through the Looking Glass" experience in the woods occurred just before my departure on the 10h54 TGV to Lyon. Fortunately, marathon and tennis training has supplied me with the endurance to overcome the potential fatigue of an unexpectedly prolonged run. Having left a little time cushion for precisely this type of delay, I made it home and onto the speedy train with plently of time to spare and little time to waste.
The entirety of the weekend was superb. I arrived at Lyon Perrache and was met at the entry to the train station by one of my gracious hosts. For lunch, we decided to head back to their apartment perched on a hill over looking the city. On this particular weekend, it was better to observe the center city from afar rather than find oneself mixed up in the aftershocks of the week's earlier protests and violence. Although the destruction in Lyon was linked to the nation-wide protests against certain reforms in France's retirement system, the most egregious destruction seemed to be enacted by certain young people who simply took the unrest as a pretext for unleashing angst and a repressed desire to reek havoc. The news reports claimed that many of the young people involved in the crowd (not necessarily that actual destruction) were female high school students, and there were very few in the group who actually had any kind of history of this sort of behavior. Apparently the possibility of acting out with impunity was too great a temptation to be overcome.
The afternoon was to bring more excitement and action from the CRS (basically, the French riot police) and Police helicopters. While my host and I were meeting up with some other friends from Charlottesville, we observed, from the children's playground, the overhead surveillance and the street-level parade of 10 CRS vans pass, fortunately on the opposite side of the Saône river.
Time spent in Lyon on this trip was not be long. In the early evening, when the better half of my duo of hosts returned home from work, we loaded up the car and headed to Praz-sur-Arly, a ski area in Haute-Savoie, not far from Mont-Blanc. From the backseat, as I have done in the past, I marveled at Lyon's lights and beautiful landscape as we left the city and began our journey towards the mountains. In the daylight, the outline of the alps actually appears rather quickly after passing the city limits. In my child-like fascination with mountains and snow, I anxiously awaited the gradual appearance of the peaks appear before my eyes. Alas, given the hour, it would have to wait until morning. The following photographs represent the view from my bedroom window, and subsequently the ajoining balcony, at the Meyer's apartment in Praz:
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| If you look closely on top of the mountain, there are ski lifts in the snow patches. |
We arrived on Friday evening and slept in a bit on Saturday morning before our "hike". I must qualify the word "hike" by saying that it was really just a car ride to Megève (a well-know and super glitzy French ski resort) plus a 20 minute walk up the mountain to enjoy the fall air and ham sandwiches alongside the local alpine bovine. In our defense, one of my hosts' friends from Grenoble made the climb with an 8-month old strapped to his front. Hence the brevity of our trekking.
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| Megève |
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| A view into the valley of Megève as we began our hike |
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| Our wonderfully gracious hosts, Alix and Marlène |
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| Off we go |
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| Hmm...where are we? |
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| A garden with a view |
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| View from our sandwich stop |
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| Emilie, mother of the petite Lison |
Post-hike, we returned to the apartment for some relaxation and sauna time before beginning preparations for the main dish of the weekend: Fondue! Although we were a little short on good weather for the weekend (it rained all day Sunday with snow starting at altitudes a little higher than the base of Praz), we suffered no shortage of good company and good food. Given the relatively sparse quantity of activity, one might even be tempted to say that we over-indulged. However, given that for most of France, this past weekend announced the beginning of the Toussaint (All Saints) holiday, we just made sure to get vacation off to a good start. (That being said, your dear correspondent's university apparently didn't get the memo about the holiday. Although, I suppose that after only one week of teaching, perhaps complaining about being overworked is probably in slightly bad taste. Nonetheless, we do have off on November 1, All Saints' Day.)
Lessons in language proficiency: Playing "Taboo" in French
Once we soaked as much bread as we could with cheese, and filled our bellies with as much as they could withstand, we moved on to what the French call "jeux de société." An example of one of these large group style games is Taboo, a challenge that involves two teams, a deck of cards and a board on which to advance each team's token. On the header of each of the cards is a word with five words below it which may not be used in trying to help the other members of the team guess the word. While I certainly experiences tests everyday of my proficiency in French, this was a reassuring one. Although I did manage to help my team out a little on the guessing end, I was much better at the role of describing the word. Only a once was there a word that I just didn't know. Its English equivalent is "tire tracks". A new word added to my vocabulary: les ornières.
Speaking about one's level of language proficiency to others who have no knowledge of the language in question is actually quite easy to exaggerate. Since I have studied French for about 15 years (now officially longer than the amount of time that I haven't studied French), those who want to judge my fluency by some sort of "tangible" measure, often ask whether or not I dream in my second language. I have never been able to answer this question satisfactorily, neither for myself nor for another interlocutor. In fact, the response to the question may be unimportant since we could never prove to anyone concretely, including ourselves, that about which we have dreamed. While we may remember particularly vividly certain images, it is really about consciousness. When I think that I may have dreamed in French, I'm not quite sure because in a dream, it is about what I have understood. Even in waking moments, there are times when it takes me awhile to realize that I'm talking to myself in French until I come to a thought about which I'm not 100 percent sure of how to express in French. Only then do I become aware of the distinction between the two languages, for each has settled in my brain at a very fluid level of comprehension as well as production, though of course at varying degrees.
At the end of a wonderful weekend, I made my way back to Paris on the TGV with two little girls who were trying everything in their power to make sure that no one in the car would be able to get the sleep that would normally be expected to accompany a two-hour train ride that began at 10:42 on Sunday evening. In spite of their struggle to use "inside voices" and the parents' unwillingness to do what was necessary to achieve that goal, I must have managed to doze off for before I knew it, the familiar TGV chimes were sounding our imminent arrival into Paris Gare de Lyon. Looking at my watch and thinking hopefully that the metro might not yet be closed, I sped as quickly as I could through the sleepy travelers on the platform and tried to dodge others who clearly were of the same mind as me. By an amazing feat of timing, I managed to arrive at the tracks of the métro, Direction Château de Vincennes just a few short minutes before the last train came through the station, saving myself at least 6-7 euros in cab fare. A dramatic, cinematic end to a delightful weekend.
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