Salut ! (Hi!) Welcome back to reading about my experience traveling to France. This is a continuation of my last post about my Bordeaux host family, covering my learning experience at the French language school in the city, Alliance Française (French Alliance).
As I lived in Eysines, a nearby suburb of Bordeaux, I had around a twenty-minute commute by tram to reach our language school each day, lengthened by my ten minutes to walk on either end. While this trip did mean I had to get up earlier to go to school, it was also a beautiful moment to enjoy in each of my days. Bordeaux, even toward the outskirts, is a city composed of picturesque storefronts and ornate stonework, which I would smile at the fascinating forms of as I headed into town. Sometimes I would be working on my homework for class while on the tram (since I would have gotten home late at night!). Other times, I might eat an orange to top off my waffle breakfast or sip my morning tea, but most of all, as I took the tram closer and closer to Bordeaux’s city center, I would observe its passengers.
There were adults and children, people traveling for education or work mainly, but all the passengers spoke in French and many dressed, to my eyes, in refined French fashions. Frock coats and scarves were common, and the ladies wore arrays of jewels at their wrists and necklines. The energy created by the passengers on the tram was calm and civilized, but frenetic too. I felt on those trips, as whenever I would take the tram or bus through the city’s streets, that the people saw the crowning beauty of their place of living. Though I’ve been glad since my return to be enjoying America too, there was something paramount to beauty in that city I was in. There was some feeling I could not escape and both mused and reveled in that Bordeaux was fantastic for all its secret holdings of the world’s splendor and history.
This sounds idealistic as well as elitist, and there's a way in which the feeling one got was both these things. I also think there was a genuine respect for the place we were in, though, and a kindness to every passerby for it. To give two words to the welcome I felt from Bordeaux’s residents, I could say soft, and splendid. And the very special feelings engendered by this welcome pervaded each of my interactions in the city, my tram trips certainly included.
One stop before the city center, at a statue between a supermarket and a (delectable) bakery, I would get off the tram and walk to Alliance Française. There, I’d greet my teacher and the small group of other students in my course. Though we started out with nine of us, by the end we were only six. This meant, as in Guadalajara, I got plenty of individual attention. Unlike in Guadalajara, however, the other students were not from Oberlin, but were fellow beginning French speakers from nations ranging from Columbia to Saudi Arabia. We had many interesting cultural exchanges and conversations about the differences between English (the language we all shared already), French, Spanish, Arabic, and more. My keen-witted and accommodating French teacher would begin our class with a word-guessing game, and then guide us through the next unit of French vocabulary and grammar. We moved quickly in that course but, once again like in Guadalajara, I felt energized and successful with each new development in our learning.
We would have a snack break partway through the classes on those long weekdays, but other than this would study until 1 pm, or 13:00, as the French would tell that time. At that point I, and all my fellow students, would be famished, and worn out from our explosive burst of learning. We would tumble from the academy onto the streets and then, often in clusters of friends, cascade to the many delicious spots where we would have lunch.
To be continued…
