The End

We'd like to end the blog with a few reflections on our nine and a half months spent living in France.

One of the many delicious tarts we tried from our local bakery.

Cheese.

Lisa: Our year in France was an excellent one.  I was able to improve my French and see lots of the country, which has proved a great help for teaching this year already.  In addition, I found a job teaching French literature and Latin at a university in Minnesota, and was able to finish my dissertation and graduate this summer!  It was quite the whirlwind of a year--marriage, moving to France, traveling to twelve countries in under twelve months, moving back to the US, finishing a dissertation, graduating, and moving to a new state for a new job!  All in all, I'd call that successful!  

Where we worked.

It wasn't all cheese and pastry, though I'm still running those off!  The hours were long, and many of the students didn't want us there and didn't want to be there themselves.  Going from teaching students who chose our classes in the US to students who had to take these classes in France was quite a difference.  I taught two classes at a time at OSU, then six plus individual instruction, and now back to just three in Minnesota.  The best part about teaching all those classes at once was the fact that we were able to finish the hours of our twelve-month contract in about six.  

We really appreciated learning about a new culture, especially how civilized the people were and how people were much healthier in the time they spent at work and how they ate.  The fact that consumerism was also less ubiquitous was a nice change.  The travel was superb--I really miss discovering someplace new and amazing every other weekend.  We hope to get back to Europe soon!  We made great friends, especially in Estelle, Andrew, Margaret, Perrine, Thomas, Constance, and those who were friends with Aaron he met in classes.  We miss them a lot!

Typical Breton weather, though it did provide for
gorgeous greenery.

Aaron: There were certainly some depressing things about our time. The job could be pretty awful at times, especially the long hours in the fall semester. Plus, I'd much rather be teaching Greek and Latin, not English, so that, too, made it difficult to get used to. The Breton weather was pretty terrible: lots of rain and overcast almost every day. And in winter, when we only had about nine hours of daylight, it felt even more oppressive.

Friends.

But we got to meet some great people through our job and make some new friends, especially our colleagues Andrew and Margaret and my former student Sylvain and his friends. The other thing that made the whole experience bearable was the amount of traveling we did. I love traveling and seeing new places and monuments (or, really, old monuments that are new to me!) and we certainly did a lot of that. Before this year, I never expected to see 2/3 of the regions of France and seven new countries and make two more visits to Italy, let alone doing all of that in nine and a half months! I think the last two and a half months where we were traveling almost constantly helped erase a lot of bad memories related to the job and so I'm inclined to think much more positively about the whole experience. So I think the travel was my favorite part of life in France and I'm certainly going to miss that.

The other positive aspect I would like to share is that I think this year has strengthened Lisa's and my relationship. By starting our marriage abroad, without a lot of demands on our time beyond our job, we were able to spend a lot of time together, more than many newlyweds I imagine. And by both moving somewhere new, with few possessions, far from both our families, working essentially the same job, everything was very equal. It wasn't as if one of us was making significantly more money than the other or as if one of us had moved in to the other person's apartment, meaning it was still sort of one person's space. Instead, we were really able to start our marriage from scratch. Along the way, we learned how to solve problems together and how to spend time together. I think by laying this kind of foundation now, our marriage will be stronger in the long run.

Finally, now we're back in the States, it's hard to believe this year even happened. It all seems like a dream because it's all so distant from our everyday lives in the US. On the other hand, they're great memories and I'm so glad I was able to live in Europe for a second time, to see how people in another country live and to see so many of the historical sites I've read about and I teach about it. It was a good experience in many ways.

We'd like to close this final entry with two lists we made on the flight back to the US last month. First are things we won't miss about our life in France, followed by a list of things we will miss.

Even boats in a lock don't know how to wait in line!

Won't miss:
smelly students
unmotivated students
annoying French teenagers
enormous glasses/eye-wear/teenagers' ugly Rayban glasses
Breton weather
line-pushing/cutting
inability to buy Cheerios
pay toilets
no drinking fountains
bureaucratic paperwork
businesses closing for lunch
unfriendly store clerks
giving the bise and shaking everyone's hand every time you greet a friend (this is more about the fact that our students did this every time they came into class late)
taking up multiple seats on the train with a microscopic purse when you only need one
small bags of chips and crackers
the scarcity of American chain restaurants

But they will wait patiently in line for good bread.

Will miss:
Saturday market
la famille Fleury-Soubeyrand
cheese
bread and pastries
efficient, extensive public transportation system
ease of travel
friends
people talking quietly in public
having your own private bubble of communication
not seeing fat people
Andrew
Perrine
being able to see the Fleurys more than once a year
good chocolate
cidre
rondin de brebis cheese
not having people think we're weird for living the way we do


Thank you, everyone, for reading this blog. We hope you've enjoyed keeping up with our year of European adventures. Till the next time we move to Europe and blog about it - au revoir!

The Saturday market.

Andrew with an Easter pastry from our bakery.  (Note that
at Easter, we still had out Christmas "tree" up).

The Voyage Home

Our last view of Rennes: the train station.

We took a direct train from Rennes to Charles de Gaulle Airport and we're very glad we did. After our horrible experience trying to drag three huge suitcases up and down stairs in the Paris Metro on our way to Rennes in August, we were not going to repeat that. Our train got in around 5:30 and we checked into the Ibis hotel at the airport. We spent some time re-packing suitcases, trying to balance out the weight so that we wouldn't have to pay an overweight baggage fee. Around 7, we took the Paris commuter train into central Paris for dinner. We thought it would be depressing to eat our last meal in France at a crummy airport restaurant and that we should go into Paris one more time before we left.

Lisa's risotto at L'Ardoise Gourmand.

Since we didn't want to spend a lot of time traveling in the city, we decided to find a place near the Gare du Nord train station (the biggest, oldest, and busiest train station in Paris, by the way), the first stop the train made in central Paris. I looked up some places on-line before we left the hotel and once we got to the station, we wandered up a big street but didn't see anything too appetizing. So we turned down a side street and came upon L'Ardoise Gourmand, a restaurant I had seen on-line as being pretty good. It seemed reasonably priced so we decided to check it out. It was a pretty small place and very crowded and we got one of the last non-reserved tables. The service was a bit slow because one of the waiters didn't show up for work that night so there was only one waiter for the whole place. Beyond that, though, it was fantastic, easily one of the two or three best restaurants we've been to in France. It was full of local regulars who clearly knew the owner, Francois. He walked around the room talking to almost everyone since he knew them all. The food was fantastic. I had pesto bruschetta with a mixed salad with delicious dressing (a rarity in France - they don't know how to make interesting salad dressings for some reason) and for my main course I had a very tender cut of beef with an amazing wine/vinegar/shallot sauce and pureed potatoes. Lisa had a green bean salad and a tasty mushroom risotto. Lisa said she felt very classy eating there, despite being tired from so little sleep the last few days. It was definitely a restaurant we'd go back to next time we're in Paris - and next time, we'll make reservations!

Speaking of which, we saw a Chinese tourist couple in the restaurant who figured out how to defeat the waiter's excuse of "no reservations? we're full, sorry!" When told that there were no tables, the couple said (in English, of course), "We'll wait for a table." The waiter said, "But there are no tables." The woman said, "No, you don't understand. We want to eat here. We'll wait till there's a table available." The waiter had no idea what to do because in France, you don't wait for a table; if the restaurant's full and you don't have reservations, you leave and find a different restaurant. So he quickly found an empty table for them! Similarly, a man came in shortly after they did, was told there were no tables, so he made a reservation on the spot for a table in half an hour or so. He came back half an hour later only to find that the table he'd reserved had been given to someone else. So he calmly explained to the waiter, "I reserved that table and I would like to have it please." He waited patiently in the doorway for about ten minutes with his wife and daughter until the waiter moved the people at "his" table to another one. It was all a very interesting lesson in French restaurant etiquette, although I felt bad for the waiter since he was clearly overwhelmed that night.

Gare du Nord at night.

We left the restaurant around 11 and getting back to the airport proved to be an adventure. When we got  back to the Gare du Nord, we discovered there were no more trains out to the airport, which meant we might have had to take a very expensive cab back. But we saw a rather lost-looking young Chinese woman with a suitcase on the platform. Lisa approached and asked if she was going to the airport. She said she was and said that, as far as she understood, we could take a train close to the airport then take a shuttle bus the rest of the way. She didn't sound entirely sure, so we found a security guard and asked if that was true and he said yes. So, with the Chinese woman, we took a train to Aulnay-sous-Bois then found a bus to the airport. Unfortunately, the express bus was completely full by the time we got out of the station, so we had to take the "slow" bus that made all the intermediate stops. (Apparently, this is all necessary because of night-time track work on the line to the airport.) We didn't get back to the hotel till around 1 am, much later than we anticipated. We had a nice chat with the Chinese woman, though; she was leaving the next day for Russia where she was going to study. She was also so amazed that we were Americans returning to the US. I think we were the first Americans she'd ever met!

We essentially took a nap in the hotel, since we had to be up a bit after 5 in order to get to the check-in desk for an 8 am flight. Miraculously, we didn't have to pay extra for our bags, even though we had an additional checked bag and more weight than we should have had under Iceland Air's policy - but hey, we're not complaining! We flew through Reykjavik, meaning our first flight was about three hours long and our flight on to Boston was about five hours. We had an hour in the Reykjavik airport which we spent tasting Icelandic doughnuts and yogurt in the food court area. We saw two young tall Icelandic women with long blond hair each buying a big bottle of beer there, too. It was only 9:30 am, but, as I said to Lisa, these people are the descendents of Vikings, so of course they're going to start drinking first thing in the morning!

Iceland.

We also began to acclimate ourselves to being around Americans there, too, as the flight to Boston was almost all Americans. In the Reykjavik airport, there are no gate announcements of any kind - you just go to your gate, they eventually open the door, and you get on the plane. This caused a great deal of confusion for an older American couple behind us in line: "What's going on?" "The door's open. Are they boarding?" "I don't know; I didn't hear any announcement." "Well, people are going through. Should we go?" "I'm not sure. What rows are they boarding?" "I don't know, there was no announcement. Are we supposed to go?" And on and on. It was annoying and funny all at the same time. Also on the plane, there was a young British man sitting in the row behind us and we're pretty sure he didn't stop talking the entire flight, except when he was eating. He talked to the man next to him (whom we never heard speak) about everything under the sun: his job, flying, British monetary policy, the Icelandic language compared to other languages, living in a foreign country. It was amazing that he wasn't hoarse by the end of the flight!

Icelandic volcanoes.

From what we could see from the plane and through the airport windows, Iceland is a beautiful country. It's very flat, except for the many volcanoes, without a lot of trees or plants. Many of the volcanoes seemed to rise directly out of the ocean. We both think it would be a fun country to visit and hike around in for a week. Plus, since it's only about half-way to mainland Europe, flights are less expensive and Iceland Air has direct flights from Minneapolis-St. Paul to Reykjavik, which might come in handy for us next year!

Icelandic coastline.

Once in Boston, we went through customs, which really didn't take that long. Again, it was like an overload of Americans. We just weren't used to interacting with so many native English-speakers and so many overly-friendly people! On the customs form, we had to fill in all the countries we've visited since we last left the US. We actually ran out of room and had to write below the line to get them all in (for the record: Iceland, Ireland [airports only for both of those], France, the UK, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Greece, Switzerland).

After customs, we indulged in some good trashy American food by eating a burrito and a burrito salad in the food court. Immediately, we were struck by how much saltier our food was than anything we'd had in France. Then it was off to our flight from Boston to Pittsburgh, where Lisa's mom was waiting to pick us up and take us back to their house, thus ending our wonderful nine-and-a-half-month European adventure.

Matt, Margaret, and Moving Out

Merlin's Tomb.

The Fountain of Youth.

On Sunday, we spent the afternoon with our colleague Margaret. She drove us west from Rennes to the Forest of Paimpont, It's one of the small parts remaining of the once-huge forests that covered most of northern Europe. Part of it is a protected nature reserve, but a lot of it is still owned by private individuals. More interestingly, Paimpont has been frequently identified by medieval and early modern authors as the magical forest of Broceliande, with ties to King Arthur and especially Merlin. There's a small Stone Age rock formation in the forest nicknamed "Merlin's Tomb" which we saw. There's also a little spring called the Fountain of Youth not far away that again is mentioned in various King Arthur legends.

Matt and Aaron enjoying the forest.

It was cool to walk around the forest a little bit; it was one of the few times this year when we've experienced (mostly-) pristine nature. It's hard to do in Europe because it's been densely settled for so much longer than North America and there are just fewer natural places left to enjoy than in the US. I'm sorry, too, that we waited so long in the year to finally go to Merlin's Forest and that we didn't spend more time there hiking around, but to be fair, it's very difficult to get there without a car (Sarah managed to do it when she came to visit, but she only was able to spend an hour or so there). Margaret also took us to a concert in the chapel of Rennes' hospital that afternoon. It was an acapella group, one of whose members she was friends with. They did a few older, Renaissance pieces but most of what they sang were modern 20th and 21st century works, some of which were quite fun. It was an enjoyable concert.

Dinner with three pieces of furniture.

Monday, Lisa and I were busy with last-minute errands and packing so Matt was on his own. We explained to him how to get to Dinard and Saint-Malo because he said he wanted to go to the beach. He got there and back OK and we hope he had a good time without us. While he was gone, Lisa and I went to campus to turn in our keys and say good-bye to whoever was there, especially our direct supervisor, Perrine. She was wonderful to work with/for and we'll certainly miss her. That night, once Matt returned, we all went to O'Connell's Pub for one last "English Club" night. Mainly, it was just our French friends who were there so it was a fun send-off to say good-bye to all of them.

Final lunch at the apartment.

Tuesday was the big day. Margaret came first thing in the morning to collect a coffee table we gave her as well as several boxes of things which we'd sold to the OSU person who's coming next year and which Margaret kindly agreed to store till his arrival in August. Next, we went to the laundromat to give a table and chair that we couldn't sell, along with our air mattress and some extra bedding, to the laundress. She had told us on Saturday that she could definitely find someone who would be able to use it (whereas almost anyone else we asked about it said we should just throw it away). She said she hates wasting things like that and would find a good home for it. It was sad to say good-bye to her because she's one of the nicest, friendliest people we met all year and always wanted to chat with us whenever we came in to do laundry. When we left, she even said that if we ever come back Cesson, she would be happy to let us stay in her house! After that, we dropped off a couple more boxes at the post office then I took Matt into central Rennes to catch his train to Paris while Lisa stayed at the apartment for the final walk-through with the property manager. It all went smoothly and by the time I returned to the apartment, the manager had finished.

Depositing the key.

Lisa and I went to the bakery to buy a last baguette and tart and say good-bye to the women who work there. We then had a make-shift (and kind of pathetic!) lunch sitting on the ground on the little patio behind our apartment. After lunch, we locked the apartment, put the key in our mailbox, then got our three huge suitcases and two carry-on bags on the bus to head downtown to the train station and begin our long journey home to the US.

Almost all of our possessions in France, 

ready for the trip home.

Matt's Visit and Packing Up

Meeting Matt at the train station.

We returned to Rennes from our travel-ganza late on a Friday afternoon and my brother Matt was waiting at the train station to meet us. He was in the midst of a month-long European adventure across Spain, France, Germany, Portugal, and the Netherlands. His bus go to Rennes early that Friday morning so he had about seven hours on his own to explore Rennes and we hope he did. He said that he tried to take a nap in one of the city's parks because he didn't get much sleep on his night bus from Spain to Rennes.

Part of the map-covered bedroom.

Lisa and I both felt bad that we couldn't provide Matt with the same kind of hospitality we've given other guests because, after returning to Rennes, we had three days before we had to vacate our apartment and return to the US. That meant that we had a lot of packing and last-minute errands to do. It also meant that every day Matt was there, someone came by to pick up pieces of furniture they'd bought from us. So every day, we changed what piece of furniture we sat on or ate off of! It was a little sad to pack up everything we own, especially all the maps we'd hung up in the bedroom and the postcards we'd put in the toilet room. In every city we visited this year, we got a map from the tourist office and, when we returned home, hung them on the bedroom walls as decoration and as a reminder of all the amazing trips we took. Similarly, in the toilet room, we hung up a postcard from nearly every city we visited. Returning to bare white walls was a bit depressing!

On the other hand, it was exciting to know that we were just a few days away from returning home to the US and our friends and family. It was stressful few days, though, of canceling our utilities, cleaning, and trips to the post office to mail boxes of books, maps, and brochures home because it was cheaper than paying the overweight baggage fee on the plane. Also, once we started boxing and mailing things, it was surprising how much we had accumulated in France - admittedly, not much by American standards, but quite a lot in proportion to how much we brought with us. Mainly it was maps and books we had purchased, but then again, this blog is called "Running and Reading in Rennes" so you shouldn't be surprised we bought a lot of books.

Our cheese-mongers.

Our apple-seller.

Amidst all the packing and selling and moving, we were able to do a few things with Matt in our area. On Saturday, we took him to the market where we were able to buy some last good fresh French produce and cheese and say good-bye to the many vendors we had become familiar with over the course of the year. They were as sad to see us go as we were to say good-bye to them! We were very happy the cheese-mongers agreed to pose for a picture for us.  We also went into central Rennes that afternoon to go to a record store. Since had Matt hadn't brought any good-sized sturdy luggage, though, he didn't want to try to take records home with him so he bought a few cassette tapes instead. Also downtown, we saw part of what passed for Rennes' Gay Pride Parade and Matt listened to and recorded a good gospel choir singing to advertise their church.

Gay Pride Parade, French-style.

Some Notes on French Trains

Train station in Carcassonne.

Note: this is a bonus entry for my dad because he loves trains.

Power cars for a TGV train.

TGV station in Avignon.

All trains in France are managed by the national rail company, SNCF. There are basically three types of passenger trains. First are the electric long-distance high-speed TGVs. They usually run at between 180 and 200 miles per hour, although in some parts of France, these trains use tracks that haven't been upgraded to handle those kinds of speeds. For instance, the last part of the journey between Paris and Rennes is on conventional tracks and so the train has to slow down to about 100 or 120 miles per hour. However, the French government is currently upgrading those tracks (and many others throughout France) so that by 2014, the roughly 200-mile long trip from central Paris to Rennes will take one hour and twenty-four minutes. The TGV network is quite extensive, but almost all of it runs through Paris. It's very difficult to take a TGV train cross-country without either passing through or changing stations in Paris. Many of our journety this year were on TGVs. In general, the TGV trains are the fanciest cars with first- and second-class options and a bar car. Some of them even provide WiFi service.

Train station in Bordeaux. A TER train is on the left;
an Intercites train on the right.

Second, there are the Intercites trains. These trains serve medium- and long-distance routes not served by the TGVs. They use older, pre-TGV cars (mostly from the 80s) and while comfortable, they're generally not as nice as the TGVs - there's no bar car, for instance, just a guy who comes down the aisle with a snack cart with things for you to purchase. They also aren't high-speed (although they still can go pretty fast - over 100 miles an hour). We only took two of this kind of train, both at the very end of our time in France: from Nantes to Toulouse (about a six hour ride) and from Paris to Bayeux (about an hour and a half ride).

Inside of a TER train.

Finally, there are the regional TER trains. These are smaller, less fancy trains that don't require a reservation (unlike the first two kinds) and mainly serve the small towns of one region (although some run from region to another). They're more like US commuter trains, although probably a bit nicer - no assigned seats, no snack car of any kind, and (in our experience) used by a lot of high-school and college kids to get from home to school. Because they stop in many towns, they can't go as fast as the other types of trains and journeys can be a bit long. We also took many of these trains on our various trips this year and Lisa took TER trains almost every week when she went to Vitre to tutor/babysit the Romanian girls.

Another TER train, in Normandy.

TER train.

Exterior of a TER train.

Gare Saint-Lazare, Paris.

Main hall of the Gare de l'Est, Paris.

Normandy in the Spring

Chez la famille Fleury.

From Strasbourg, it was off to Normandy to visit Brice and Michele, Lisa's host parents, one more time before we left France. We took a train back west to Paris, took the Metro across town to change stations, and then took another train to Bayeux. We arrived on June 6, the 68th anniversary of the arrival of thousands of other Americans in Normandy under very different (and much more important) circumstances.

"The Ireland of France."

We spent a couple days at Brice and Michele's house and it was nice to relax, catch up, eat some good homemade meals (a welcome change after all the eating-out we'd done over the past week!), and enjoy some time in the country. On our second day there, Michele drove us to La Hague, a little peninsula past Cherbourg at the tip of the Cotentin Penninsula on the English Channel.

She said it was like a French version of Ireland, and she wasn't wrong (at least based on the pictures I've seen of Ireland - I've never been!). It was a lot of beautiful rocky coastline covered in greenery. Unfortunately, it was a cold, windy, rainy morning which it made walking around a bit unpleasant. We started at the house of the 19th-century painter Jean-Francois Millet, who painted a lot of rural scenes of this area of Normandy. We didn't actually go into the house (just the gift store and the restroom!) but we saw a couple places he painted nearby, including a little village lane and some dramatic rocks along the coast.

Jean-Francois Millet painted this scene, near his house.

Norman-Gothic church.

We also drove to another little village and saw a little 13th-century Norman-Gothic church and then an old estate farm that's been turned into a community center. We had lunch at a surprising Asian restaurant. When we walked in, it looked like a typical small-town French tabac/bar, with the rows of cigarettes for sale behind the counter where you sit and drink your coffee. But there was a side room with the Asian restaurant that served very good food. It wasn't quite what I expected when we entered!

Michele in Jacques Prevert's studio.

Lisa under a gunnera plant in Jacques Prevert's garden.

After lunch, we went to the house of Jacques Prevert, who moved here from Paris in the last few years of his life in the 1960s and 70s. He was a 20th-century poet and screenwriter and many of his poems were set to music. I had not heard of him prior to our visit so it was interesting to learn about his life and his art. His house was hosting an exhibit of some of his collages, too, many of which were quite strange. They were made from magazine clippings, photographs, old advertisements, and old postcards. As a young man, he was friends with Surrealists and Pablo Picasso, so perhaps its no wonder his collages are odd! His house also has a lovely garden and by the time we left, the rain had cleared off and it was sunny (but still cool and windy), making it easier to enjoy the garden. Lisa was particularly enamored of some giant umbrella-like plants called gunnera. She says she wants to live under one and, as you can see from the picture, she probably could.

Look at the size of that gunnera!

Coastline near Vauville.

Michele also took us to Vauville for more sea views as well as a botanical garden there. It has plants from all over the world (including more gunnera) and is really pretty impressive, although being right next to the ocean, it was very windy. We also met a friendly dog there and, in a field next to the parking lot, saw a colt and its mother. The colt was very young since it was walking awkwardly and clearly hadn't quite gotten the hang of it yet! From there, we went back home, had dinner, and played Bananagrams (both in French and English). We stayed up till about 11 then drove into Caen to pick Brice up, who was at some sort of conference that evening.

The friendly dog and the scared colt.

Botanical garden near Vauville.

Pizza!

The next day, we puttered around the house and had home-made pizza. We shared the recipe we use for pizza dough which we learned from my mom. Then it was back to the train station to head back to Rennes. It was a fun couple of days in Normandy and it was a nice, relaxing, and happy way to end our final trip in France. Thanks, Brice and Michele, for another wonderful time!

Michèle and her favorite cat.