Vive les Vacances!

 

Vacation is very important in France (an attitude I wish my workaholic American friends would adopt).  So naturally, three weeks after I started my job, it was time for a 10-day vacation.  It may be true that the French don’t celebrate Halloween, but they get 10-days off school (or work) instead!  Fair trade?  Possibly… 

So what should I do during my ten days off?  A responsible teacher might have stayed in town and worked on lesson plans, but I’m not all that responsible so I had to come up with a different plan.

Then I realized- I have three lovely friends who are living in England at this very moment.  It’s time I paid them a visit!  I started off my vacation in Lyon, France, a city not far from Besançon.  Then moved on to Brighton, a beach city in the south of England, then to London, and finally to Oxford. 

Lyon

My friend Altaire, who studies anthropology at the University of Sussex and lives in Brighton, met me in Lyon the weekend before my English holiday.  We saw Yelle in concert – a French electro-pop group with a lively female singer.  

The concert was Saturday night, so we spent the day exploring Lyon.  We walked along the Rhone river, through the Parc de la Tête d’Or (Park of the Golden Head), and finally found ourselves outside Lyon’s famous contemporary art museum. 

 

Now, some of my friends might know that I’m somewhat of an “art freak.”  I thoroughly enjoy looking at blank canvasses called “untitled” and trying to contemplate what they might mean.  So I was pretty thrilled to spend the afternoon doing just that.  Together, Altaire and I contemplated the arbitrary nature of gender roles, our preconceptions about the uses of everyday objects, and the inequalities and assumptions inherent in Western culture.  Pretty heavy stuff for our first morning in Lyon.   

The major theme of all these exhibits seemed to be that life is senseless and that we have no reason to hope for any kind of meaning.  Or as my old friend Thomas Hobbes once said, “The life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Yikes.  I have to disagree with Mr. Hobbes.  I may be naïve, but I simply can’t stand to believe it.

We left the museum feeling a bit solemn, but figured it was nothing a beer and a walk in the Lyon sunlight couldn’t fix.  But as we were walking I noticed a large, white Church at the top of a very, VERY steep hill (or was it a mountain?) and said, “let’s go there!”  Next the weird art, old European churches are another fetish of mine. 

So we walked, and walked, and walked, stopped to catch our breath, walked some more, crawled, climbed.  You get the picture.  Finally we made it to the Church. Notre-Dame de Fourvière.

 

The inside of Notre-Dame is meant to make everyone who enters it feel the opposite of the way I felt on leaving the contemporary art museum: that life has a purpose; that people have the capacity to love one another; and that we should be in constant awe of life's beauty.

The ceilings of the church were ornate mosaics and moldings, not unlike the churches in Florence, but the ceilings of  Notre-Dame de Fourvière were decorated with geometrical shapes, rather than biblical figures. 

 

As we were leaving, mass was beginning, so we stayed for the opening hymn.  French singing was still echoing in the foyer as we left. 

As we were walking down the hill, Altaire and I talked about how we had seen two completely different outlooks on life that day.  I’m not sure if it’s really possible to choose the truth, but if it is, I’m definitely going with the second one!

Brighton

We got to England late Sunday night and went straight to a 24-hour convenience store.  Wow.  I had forgotten those existed.  I couldn’t believe I was hearing English all around me, albeit in a funny accent. 

The majority of my day in Brighton was spent, eating scones, drinking tea, taking stupid pictures with Altaire’s camera, and striking up conversations with shopkeepers in my beloved native language.

They call Brighton the “San Francisco of England” because of its large gay population, it’s quirky art scene, and it’s large quantity of vegan and vegetarian restaurants. 

Perhaps the oddest part of Brighton was the Royal Pavilion, an old government building modeled after the Taj Mahal.  Unfortunately for whichever Duke built it, the pavilion ended up looking more like a Disneyworld attraction than an official government building.   

In all, I really liked Brighton.  It’s basically a beach city with a flair for culture and all the quirks of the Brits :)

London

It probably goes without saying that London is an amazing city.  I arrived on Wednesday morning and met my friend Freddi at Picadilly Circus.  She lives in Soho, so we wove through the crowds on the main streets back to her secluded alleyway apartment.  

We went first to get coffee at Freddi’s new favorite haunt, The Society Club.  I’m not sure where this name came from, but The Society Club is anything but an exclusive social club.  It’s an all-inclusive bookstore, coffee shop, art gallery, event space, and general hang-out.  I couldn’t tell who was working from who was actually purchasing coffee. Everyone just sat around chatting about books, about art, in French (I felt at home!), or just telling jokes.  Occasionally someone would get up and make coffee for someone else but it was never a big deal.  In the short time I was there I met, a girl who’s mom wrote a book about living in a random French town, an actor/dog-walker, the seventy-five-year-old woman who owns the place, and a aspiring photographer who showed us his work. I couldn’t help falling in love with The Society Club, so if any of you ever find yourselves in London, do me a favor and GO THERE

Freddi had class so I went on a “Free tour of London” to see the obligatory sights – Wellington arch, Hyde Park, Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abbey, and Big Ben.  This tour actually is free – but the guide will ask you for tips at the end.   

During the tour, I hit it off with two German girls who were also visiting London this week, so I joined them for lunch afterward.  We decided to be as British as we possibly could, so we went to a nearby pub and ordered beer and  “Fish and Chips with Mushy Peas.”  

This dish is actually as unappetizing as it sounds.  Fortunately, my lunch was cut short when I realized I was late to meet my cousin’s English beau for tea in Chelsea.  Au revoir fish and chips! 

Alastair is a clean-cut British chap who met my cousin Margaret when he spent a year studying abroad in America.  He visited UVA a few times while he was in the states, so he and I had a grand old time reminiscing about events such as Foxfeilds and Beach Week over our cups of English tea. He taught me about the different types of accents in England, explaining that you can tell by someone’s accent, not only where they are from, but also their level of education and their financial situation.  This made me grateful for my own very American accent, basking in relative anonymity.

A day later, I hopped on a train for Oxford.  

Oxford

When I arrived at the train station my friend Laura bounced up and gave me a huge hug.  She was glowing and clearly in her element in this intellectual paradise.  We walked all over Oxford, visiting the two famous Magdalen and Christ Church “colleges.”  

When I say college, I mean a sort communal living, dining, and learning situation that takes place in a large castle-like structure.  The closest comparison I can find is “houses” in Harry Potter – you know like, Gryffindor and Slytherin.   In fact, the entire time I was at Oxford I felt like I was wandering around Hogwarts (I swear the staircases changed at some point!) Some parts of Harry Potter were actually filmed at Oxford, and the “Great Hall” from the movie was allegedly inspired by the dining hall at Christ Church college.  

Laura invited me to a diner at her college.  We ate at four long tables, and had to stand as professors entered the room and took their place at “high table.”  It was all very exciting!! 

My second day at Oxford, I attended a talk by a professor from Harvard about the future of journalism education, a topic that interests me since I am an aspiring journalist myself.  Most of the time I tried to hide behind a pillar, because I was afraid something about me might be screaming “I DON’T GO TO OXFORD!”  But luckily no one found me out…

The talk was given in front of a panel of journalists from all over the world.  Harvard-man was arguing that journalism education is only good if students are also educated in the discipline they plan to report on.  He said we should all require our journalists to learn political theory if they plan to report on politics, religious studies theory if they plan to report on religion…etc.  I was nodding along comfortably agreeing with everything he said, until the journalist from Yemen raised his hand and said, “but sir, in my country we don’t have journalism school.” 

Before leaving Oxford I made sure to rummage through the bookstore.  I wore my glasses and bought two highly intellectual books about Africa, one of which I read on the train ride home.  

Now I am back in France, and it is starting to feel like a very familiar place indeed.