I came across this article today about living simply. It’s called “The 100 Thing Challenge” and it was developed by this guy named Dave . (teehee)

Here’s the idea: He decided that for a full year, he was going to live with only 100 “personal things”. There were a few loopholes, for example he didn’t give away the house his family lives in or his wife’s dining room table – because they aren’t his personally. Also certain things, like underwear and socks, he counted in groups… so 30 pairs of underwear count as 1 thing. This was also presumably to live harmoniously with the rest of his family who may or may not have appreciated him hand washing and drying his unmentionables every night for reuse the next day. Last but not least, his entire library of roughly 300 books counted as one thing… because they were “work related”.

This really got me thinking, because I just spent an entire week taking my little sister “back-to-school shopping” and helping her buy nice things for her dorm room. In order to fully join in the spirit of celebration, of course, I bought quite a few choice items for myself. Not to mention since having my own apartment (it’s been over a year now.. wow) has officially turned into a home-decorating-on-a-budget obsessed craigslist, curbside, and IKEA shopper. I actually take pride in how many things I have – because I’m in my early 20′s and want to be a “grown up”. Which everyone knows means owning pots and pans, a set of knives, “real” furniture (that which does not in any way resemble “dorm furniture”), framed pictures, a really big bed, lots and lots of smart-looking books, kitchen appliances, and espresso cups. Oh, and a dog. All of which I have…

My first reaction to this challenge was thinking how unfair it was that my kitchen table, couch, bed, etc count as “personal”, because they’re mine and I can’t blame them on a wife, kid, etc. My second reaction was to wonder if my books are “work related” too. (The answer – yes. Student AND Lit major. Take that!)

Then I started wondering if I was just playing my part of the inevitable cycle. Step one: acquire like mad. Step two: purge baby, purge. I mean, didn’t Dave here have to get all his stuff before he could make the decision to get rid of it?

Perhaps the take-away message for me is not self-denial but self-awareness. Am I living like this because it is a joyful expression of who I am, or because I want to think it’s who I am? Something I have to think about, I guess.

But I think the even the bigger question is this: what is this cycle we fall prey to saying about our refusal to ever be happy with our current state? Instead of having too much or too little… can we ever have just enough?

Thought I would post some musings I put up today on my “work blog” for the First Church of Christ, Scientist, where I am interning this summer…

We seem to be faced in this day and age with a paradox. On the one hand, it looks like we are living in an era of unparalleled materiality. Our houses are larger than ever, we have more cars, and our bigger paychecks are put towards the eternal rat race of keeping up with the tech-savvy Jones’. We are obsessed with our weight, image, and facebook profile picture. We “can’t live without” our computers, phones, i pods, or cars, and going without television would be considered a hardship. Just try to go a week without technology and see if you don’t feel totally and completely lost.

But that’s the thing. Unlike cars, houses, or new shoes (which, lets face it – no matter what Grandma and Grandpa say were important to earlier generations, too) our obsession with technology isn’t really material at all. It’s mental.

Let’s ask ourselves – why is technology changing so fast? Yes, scientific advancements have always tended to grow exponentially rather than in linear form. And yes, constantly updated technology drives our market economy. But there’s something more than that. I believe it has something to with the fact that today’s technology is all about the exchange of ideas.

Sure, our computers are important to us, but if you think about it, it’s because they give us access to our most prized possessions – the things we don’t own. I personally would give up my laptop, just not my facebook, skype, email, or google. Or you tube. Our phones are important because they connect us to others, and now to the infinite space of ideas and information on the web. The phone itself is nice, but whats a smart phone without all those applications that you don’t own?

When you think about it, the internet has mentalized a lot of the things that we used to think we had to own. Do I mind that I don’t own music when I can find it in an instant on you tube and pandora? Not reeally. Most college students I know don’t even have a TV anymore because they can watch everything online. Why even buy a newspaper when you could read it online? And why print something and keep the hard document in your possession when Google Docs has got it all taken care of?

I know my argument isn’t perfect, but I think we as a culture are becoming less material in a lot of ways. It’s as though we are getting more and more comfortable with the idea of… an idea.

Feel free to check out my other work (read: church) related blog posts here

I’m back in the lovely United States of America. The transition back was hard… to say the least. Although my blogging faded as my time went on in France, (blogging in English is just so counter-productive to French language immersion!) let it suffice to say that my enthusiasm for being there never waned. Nor did I leave easily; at the end of the semester I felt as though I was being dragged back to the States kicking and screaming. I tried desperately to find a job that would allow me to stay for the summer… but as it turned out the job scene for a foreigner with limited language abilities is limited – without throwing in soaring unemployment rates.

The fact that, in the midst of all the beauty and intrigue that was France, I had enough sense to accept a paid internship in Boston, is now something that I count as one of my top most level-headed moments. Because of this decision I am not sitting next to a fountain sipping a café, but I am earning a steady paycheck and gaining relevant work experience. I guess life’s all about balance.

No longer do I have 2 hour lunch breaks; I have 37 minute lunch breaks. I work 10 hour days – 10-6 – something which allows me to horrify French people and have three day weekends every weekend. I can talk effortlessly with strangers, I don’t have an accent, and I am a master at the local language. My eating habits have drastically changed as well. Once again cooking for myself, my intake of expensive cheese has, well… halted. As has my consumption of white bread. Magically, I seem to be losing weight. I dream of one day fitting into the pants I wore before I went abroad… and actually find myself motivated to work out! That surely never happened in France.

So, I guess it’s not all bad. I miss being surrounded by appreciation for leisure and pleasure, but on the other hand, my incredible weight gain while I was there (I like to call it a “period of growth”) hints that I may have inadvertently overdosed on both of those things. Now that I’m home, I think the biggest thing that I have learned is that I am, in fact, American. Which means that I’m not French. No matter how hard I try to be.

Is that going to stop me from making my own vinaigrette, buying an espresso machine and setting the table with wine glasses and a wine bottle full of chilled water each night? Heck no.

After being enchanted by the sea I went to the mountains! I had known since I signed up for the program that it contained a “village research project”.. but I had no idea what that meant. Allow me to explain. We were driven to Ceret, another beautiful, famous town in the south south soouutthhh of France, (my phone thought I was in Spain the whole time) and deposited into new homestay families. There were no classes to take, no “things” to do at all actually. We were just supposed to “pick an aspect of Catalan culture” to “research” for the 10 days that we were there, and at the end of the 10 days we were to hand in a 7 page paper and give a 15 minute presentation at the city hall. C’est simple!

Apparently all the other students were placed in homestay families in town, but I of course was given the one family who lived far, far, away, up in the mountains, without internet. For some this might have been a negative thing, but I loved every minute of it. My “family” was a retired couple named Gaby and Michou, (ok Gabriel and Michelle) and there is only one way to describe them… interesting.

Pourqoui si interessant? Well…

For one, they are both artists. Gaby is a painter of the “imaginative” genre. He gets a lot of inspiration from Chagall, Picasso, and other such master imagine-ators. And he paints on everything, not just canvasses. He does palates (you know like the wooden slatted things), chairs, tables.. basically anything you can paint on. And Michou makes lamps, chandeliers, jewelry, tile-work, ceramics, etc. Their house is crazy.

They also happen to be farmers. Organic farmers to be exact. They grow most of their own food and also make their own organic goat cheese. So I got to work on a farm – which was a nice break from city life. I gardened, milked goats, and helped with the: sheep, goats, pig, chickens, turkeys, mama and baby donkey (born on April Fool’s day while I was there) dogs, cats, monkey, turtles, birds and.. squirrel of course. Of course.

Life was pretty good. We woke at 8, fed the animals, and then worked in the garden until lunch. After lunch Michou and Gavy would work in their studios and I usually went for a hike by myself in the mountains. Then we fed animals again and had dinner. Then we watched the news. Then we went to bed and did it all over again.

So I learned how to make cheese. And bread. And cook… a lot.

About halfway through we got a new addition to our family – a super nice Canadian girl named Fanny who came as a WOOFer. In case you’re wondering, that stands for World Organization of Organic Farmers, and it’s a really great way to travel the world for free… you get to stay on organic farms for free, in exchange for work. After that things changed a bit for me, as there wasn’t as much for me to do, but I still managed to find plenty of work…

Oh dear, too much to say. Somehow I blinked and then I was in the third and final stage of my time here.. and finished with my French classes. Not sure how that happened! This is something that makes me quite sad, as I still have so much to learn…

At the end of May I “graduated” from my French program and all the SIT students and I left for two weeks to go to the French Pyrenees for a village study. But we stopped first at Colliure, an amazingly beautiful town on the Mediterranean, where we had the good fortune to spend 3 days eating French food, going to wine tastings, and staying in a little hotel right on the beach. Love. My. Life.

Let me tell you why Colliure is amazing. It is called the “city of painters” and it’s easy to see why it would be… its gorgeous. Picasso, Matisse, and Chagall painted there, and the list goes on and on… And today, there are painters literally everywhere you turn. It was wonderful!

It was also my first glimpse of the Mediterranean! For some reason, I feel like this is a major landmark in my life. The color palette makes me want to change my life.

A very wise friend told me that even though I have so much to say that it takes me three hours to write a post, I can write lots of little quick posts… what a revelation… So with that I am going to skip over tons of things I have to say (don’t worry I will say them at some point) and recount a simple triumph that I had today.

I was at the dinner table with my family tonight, as usual. The two boys were zinging jokes, insults, and various comments back and forth at each other as usual, and I was listening, as usual. Now, let me back up and say that when I first came, I could not understand a word of the dinner table conversation. These days I actually take part in the conversation, so it is plain that I have made progress. However, tonight, there were a particularly high number of things being said at the same time, so I guess my host family figured that I had gotten lost… but just then Celine muttered something funny under her breath and I laughed – because it was funny.

Tyrone (the oldest) stopped talking and was like – “Whoa! She understood that!” And we all just kind of pondered for a second, because they had been talking really fast and they didn’t realize that I was still following. Finally Tyrone said “I guess she can understand everything now.” And everyone was like, “yeah, I guess so…” And I could tell they were all thinking that they had to watch it a little from now on!

Yay.

Going with the dinner theme... here's the Sunday market

I’ve been here a month! Holy cow. I think the reason its been so long since I’ve made a blog post is that I really don’t feel like I’m “traveling” anymore… it just feels like this is my life. Today I took my big exam in French, as the course is taught on a month-to-month basis, and it was the last real day. It was very sad – I had so say goodbye to some great people who I may never see again… tear. Next month there will be new students and they are splitting us up because “certain people” (aka NOT ME) are going to be moving a up a level and “certain” others will not. Alas… change…

It’s so funny how quickly we humans adapt. I am totally used to my little french life now – every day I wake up at 7 and take a shower with the hand held shower thingy.. I don’t even mind it anymore; I hook the shower head on my shoulder when I wash my hair and the warm water sprays right on my back. I walk to class at 8:15 am, past the school where all the little french parents are dropping their little french children off by foot, car, or bike. Then I walk by the boulangerie (best in Toulouse) where I eat lunch most days, and smile in the window at the woman who now knows me by name. Class starts at 8:30, but half the class usually doesn’t roll in until 8:40… which I think is a reflection of how well all us international students have adapted to the french lifestyle. At 10:30ish we take a “repose” and the class all goes together to get coffee and converse mostly in French, but of course also English, Spanish, Chinese, and Japanese. Then its back to class until 12:30ish, when I usually head to the boulangerie with various American or otherwise nationally designated friends. We usually take up the whole back room (not very hard – remember everything here is tiny) to ourselves, and in true French style we always take our time. The owner refers to us as “les jeunes” and is the friendliest, nicest woman in Toulouse. The place is cute as a button and you can get a sandwich (literally made out of entire baguette) for 3.30 euros, or a mini quiche or pizza for just over 2… Needless to say best prices in Toulouse as well. Then its either back to class at 2 or off to my volunteer job, which also starts at 2.

Thats how it is here – everything is leisurely, and why hurry? Everyone takes 2 hours for lunch, and there is no excuse not to because all the shops, offices, etc are closed from 12-2pm, so there is nothing else to do. Sometimes I come home for lunch instead, and when I do I usually get to talk to Celine or one of the boys who is having lunch as well.

My volunteer job is going great as well – although I think it probably deserves its own post. I go a couple of times a week, and all the people who work there are incredibly nice. There is a middle-aged guy who works there as an intern also because he wants get a job in the social service field, and luckily he is super-patient with my french. I talk with him the most, but also a great deal with the regulars who I am starting to get to know… They refer to me as the “petite américaine avec les boucles anglaise”.. the little american with the english curls.

I am usually finished with work or class by 4:30 or 5pm, at which point I tend to wander. This is how I have come to feel even more deeply in love with Toulouse. I love walking through the streets by myself, it really makes me feel like I am a part of it. I watch and listen to everything with such an intensity that I feel like I live in high-definition – literally I have never taken so much in in my life. I think I actually walk around with my eyes physically open wider, and my ears too – it’s as if I am a particularly greedy sponge that can’t soak in enough. I always make it a point to always walk home a different way, which sometimes takes me as much as an hour or so… quite a feat in a city as small as Toulouse… And I can understand conversations now (at least much more of them) too, which makes me feel like that much more of an insider..

Winter is really over here now and I am watching the transformation into spring – my favorite time of year. Yesterday I went to the park and I think every Toulousian family with small children was there. It was fun to watch all the kids playing, but at the same time I kept thinking what it must be like to live with all that pent up energy all winter!! I have purchased a french copy of Harry Potter (just about perfect for my reading level!) which is sometimes useful to pretend to read if I want to sit on a bench for a while and people watch, although most of the time its not necessary. Its funny to observe the differences in the mothering styles here too.. the moms here are much more severe than mothers in the US tend to be. I have yet to see a french mother fawn over a crying child, even if he is literally spurting blood.

What else to say? I feel like my writing style is reflexive of my wandering state of mind at the moment!! I’m getting used to the perpetually fuzzy-headed feeling that comes as a result of constantly concentrating so hard… Tomorrow I am leaving for a weekend trip with the whole group to a small village 3 hours north of Toulouse, and I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, it will be nice to be “reunited” with all my American friends, but on the other hand I am not looking forward to pulling out out of my French immersion. It’s hard not to speak English when you’re with a group of all Americans! And although last weekend I went the whole weekend without speaking English, I feel like this little jaunt might undo whatever progress I made… Let’s hope not!!

I think my friends and “family” are getting used to my bad french now because they understand me a lot more even though I feel like I haven’t improved too drastically. I’m at the point now that I care more about the content of what I want to say than if I am really saying it correctly, so its a constant hassle to keep checking myself and asking people if I am saying things right. I literally feel like a 3 year old.. there’s so much I want to say that sometimes I say whatever just so I can get everything out! But the nice thing is that it doesn’t stop me anymore – I no longer long to speak English and at this point I would rather just speak bad French. Maybe that’s because I have friends now who speak worse English than I speak French… something that, while it shouldn’t be surprising given that I am IN France, nevertheless always makes me feel really accomplished.

I have to share a little anecdote. This Monday was the birthday of one of my “camarades de class” and so I went out with all of my classmates to an English bar to celebrate the affair. It was a truly wonderful time – everyone was so warm and welcoming, and I spoke lots and lots of French. I even achieved one of the things on my “France to-do list”… have a heated debate in French. And I think I won, too! Granted, I had the upper-hand, being the sober one of the conversation…

All the same, I returned “chez-moi” at nearly one in the morning. This would not have been a problem if it had not been for one little cultural detail… Here in France, many of the light-switches look door-bells and the door-bells like light-switches.

I don’t know if I have mentioned this before, but the French are not turned off by darkness like we are in America. I have sat through regular classes here in what would in the US be considered a “dark room.” There is no compulsion to “leave a light on” at night, or even during the day. Furthermore, many of the lights are on timers to ensure that they are not creating light unnecessarily. That being said, it should come as no surprise that when I got home the inside of the apartment building was completely and totally pitch black. As I live on the 4th floor, and as there could have been who-knows-what lurking in the 3 flights of stairs between here and there, I was determined to find a light switch.

This is why they should not make light switches and doorbells look/feel the same. Not only did I ring the 1st floor apartment’s doorbell, but I was so desperate that I continued to ring doorbells, knowing that there HAD to be a light switch around here somewhere! After I made the baby on the first floor start to cry, however, I felt so horrible that I crawled… literally… up the stairs, in total frightened darkness.

When I finally did make it to the apartment I was of course met with more darkness, because I suppose the “don’t leave lights on” rule even applies when you know someone will be arriving home after others have gone to bed. Unable to find a light switch other than the main hall one which turned on an entire strip of lights and would flood all of my host family’s bedrooms with lights, I continued to crawl/feel my way to my room.

Needless to say the next morning I experimented with our own door bell and light switch to ascertain which was which. I am proud to say that I can now identify both.

So, there you have it. And now, I shall leave you with more pictures of Medieval buildings!

This past weekend it was Celine’s aunt’s 76th birthday. As I have established myself as a curly-haired, talkative extension of her own body, it was only natural that she offered to bring me along. And, as I knew this aunt to be a particularly interesting woman who lived in the middle of nowhere in the French countryside, it was only natural that I jumped at the chance. So, Saturday night after Celine finished work, we booked it to the car to make the 2 hour drive to her aunt’s house for dinner… an affair that would commence at around 10 pm.

Now, allow me to describe this woman and the house in which she lives. From what I can understand, she led quite an exciting life, living in exotic locations and traveling often. She married an American… and a pilot I believe, unless I am getting him confused with Celine’s brother, who is also a pilot. He has since passed away, and she now lives alone in their large, isolated house with three dogs for company. Straight out of some old French folktale, this home is a grand stone edifice accessible only by a windy, dirt, single track road that seemed to carry us back in time rather than than forwards in space. The large, drafty rooms were heated by the single fireplace in the living room and a small wood stove in the kitchen, and while magnificent and fascinating to behold, are were as devoid of light as they were heat. Every wall was made of stacked stone – even those between rooms – comparable to the kind which I had only before found in the foundations of very old houses and barns. Furthermore everything inside the house was fittingly ancient, with the exception of a few modern appliances and amenities such as a shower and toilet. (Side note: hers was actually the first “regular,” fixed-head shower I have seen since I have been here, and the thought of standing beneath a warm stream of water excited me almost to the point of shivers… despite the fact that I never got to use it.) To top off the movie-like feeling of antiquity, all of the furniture was covered with sheets… though I think this was because the dogs ruled this place and made themselves at home on every surface. They actually got up on the benches at the dinner table – thereby bringing begging to a whole new level. I may have grown up on a farm, and be accustomed to a level of country living that surpasses most, but even I was in culture shock.

Of course the entirety of the weekend was conducted in french. This was a great experience for me, although I was completely lost most of the time. Celine’s niece was there visiting as well, and although a very nice girl she spoke so incredibly fast that I spent most of the time she was talking watching her lips move and thinking about the interesting way that french people purse their lips while they converse. At the end of dinner, I was given the “choice” of two rooms in which to sleep – I could either sleep downstairs, in a dank room that smelled like a celler, or upstairs, in a part of the house that, after opening a door that was literally 300 years old, I discovered to be brightly lit, clean, and… almost regular looking. Knowing that Celine was going to take whichever room I didn’t choose, I of course chose to sleep downstairs. I was just getting ready to climb into bed when there was a knock at my door, and a voice cheerily informing me that I might be woken at around 5am to the din of the dogs barking as they were let out, but not to worry.

Now how’s that for an intercultural experience?

I must say though, all of this was more than made up for by the following day, when Celine drove me around to visit several of the nearby villages. What could possibly have made these villages so special? Well, they were built in the Middle Ages. Like the 14th century. And we aren’t just talking one church here… we are talking a whole village full of medieval houses that are still standing to this day… and have people living in them. This was fascinating to me. Apparently the south of France was relatively undamaged by “the war” and so still has a lot of undamaged historical sites such as these…

Wow… as I am an American, this was pretty impressive.

Anyway, here are some pictures… Enjoy!

So, I have officially finished my first week of classes at L’Institut Catholique.  And I am proud to say that I have already made progress… I moved up a level!  But you can hold your applause, because I should have been in this class all along – I just did so badly on the placement test that they thought I would be too French-impaired to handle it.  After 3 days of re-learning passe compose, l’imparfait, and plus-que-parfait, however, I realized that I did not come all this way to feel… comfortable.  I thought that my french classes were going to be intense, not boring!  So I took my French-impaired self to the office and explained in painfully bad francais that I was simply too good for the class that I was in, and I would like to me moved up a level, thank-you-very-much.  The woman gave me a look that said “QUOI?  EST-CE QUE VOUS ETEZ UN FOU?”  but she agreed to let me “try.”

In fact, my french abilities were so highly doubted that she visited me halfway through the class today to make sure that I wasn’t “perdu”  (en anglais: lost).  Thankfully the professor told her that I was doing splendidly, which made me smile so big that I really did look like a “fou.”  Her doubt was merited, however, because everyone else in this class has been living in Toulouse for at least 4 months, and speak french… really well.  And really fast.  I’m loving it.

I literally sat on the edge of my seat through the 3 hours of class today.  It made be feel so on the ball that I was the first one to finish the exercise on translating 1st person dialog into 3rd person.  Take THAT office lady!  Everyone in this class also knows each other.  This actually turns out to be a good thing, because they seem to want to welcome me into their little friend group.  Unlike my previous class, where all the students were so terrified to speak French that they would barely say hello, the people in this class are downright chatty.  One Spanish fellow spent the whole coffee break trying to tell me that since I live in New Hampshire, I must be a libertarian…  By the end of the class, I had even been invited to a birthday party!  (Although it took me a while before I was sure that he was actually inviting me and one other American, and not just informing me that he would soon be 26 and was therefore having a party with all the other students in the class…)

To top it all off, this weekend my host “mother” is taking me with her to the country to visit her father.  So it looks like I will be getting plenty of practical french experience!  Yes indeed, this is why I came…