Tag Archives: year abroad

06/24/14

Barcelona dancing

774802_10153622850025038_1048782401_oBarcelona dances. Every city’s got a rhythm, every city’s got a beat, and Barcelona’s is a flamenco dancer: her hips swirl, her feet stamp, she tosses her head and flings back her arms with the kind of effortless grace and artistry people spend their lives searching for. You don’t have to be there long to taste it. The music moves in everything. You feel it as you’re pushed along the river of people on La Rambla, under the warm green light of the poplar trees – you know the kind of light that you think must be warming your soul, it feels so good? That’s the kind of light you get in Barcelona. Continue reading →

04/17/14

The walls of Budapest

Heroes' Square

Hősök tere: Heroes’ Square

Budapest isn’t one of those cities you fall in love with straight away, in the blink of an eye, without thought or doubt or hesitation. When you emerge dirty and travel-worn from the mire of Hungarian subway signs, you’re not immediately welcomed with open arms. You’re treated with the courtesy and kindness that is due a guest – but you haven’t come to a city willing to throw itself in your path, the people here will not vie for your attention. Instead, when you first step out of the depths of the train station, they seem to tuck their chins a little deeper into their coat collars: there are too many walls to hide behind. Continue reading →

04/8/14

White water rafting, and French carpe diem

This past weekend, thirty-five of us piled into a bus and drove for three hours deep into the French Alps for a weekend of white-water rafting and randonnée — hiking, the activity this part of the country is famous for.

If you go white-water rafting in this particular part of France, you will float along a river that winds its way through magnificent gorges and past the medieval ruins you can’t escape in Europe, but you won’t really be able to appreciate that because you will be getting pushed into the water every other minute by both the guides and your fellow rafters. Wearing the appropriate safety gear, you’ll live out your childhood dream of becoming a pirate. Yes, it was dangerous. But the air was warm and the waters of the Durance River were benign enough, and quite frankly the French don’t care. Continue reading →

01/16/14

Oh, take me back to the start

To all the people feeling overwhelmed by the number of options in exchanges that they have in Go Global, I’m so envious of you. (I’m supposed to be studying for my exam tomorrow but I’m not. Apparently you still have exams while on exchange??)

I’m so, so envious of you. I remember me at this time last year. I wanted more than anything in the world to go to Sciences Po Paris, and live on Boulevard St Michel, and sleep in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, and wander down the Seine every afternoon, and breathe in the same air that Hemingway and Picasso and Chanel and all the others did, once upon a sunny morning. I thought that’s what I’d wanted since I was twelve years old and I fell in the love with that city for the first time. But it’s been exactly four months, 21 days, and eight and a half hours since I arrived in Grenoble. And it’s been four months, 21 days and eight hours since I thought for a single second that going to Grenoble wasn’t absolutely the right decision. I love it here. I love it more than anything else. I never knew the meaning of the word serendipity until I got here. I don’t regret it for a moment, not for a heartbeat. I still don’t know why I chose this tiny little city as my second choice but I’m so inexpressibly glad that I did. What I’m saying is, it doesn’t matter where you go. Continue reading →

01/10/14

Walking a tenuous tightrope

It’s surprisingly easy to build up a life here on exchange when you know it can never be anything but temporary. Actually I try not to think of it as “exchange” at all; it only reminds me just how impermanent this year really is. It makes the whole affair so much more delicate, fragile: you have to throw yourself into it more, because you know there has a time limit on it. Otherwise it doesn’t seem real and you can’t do that for long, you cannot live in a dream, the two words cancel each other out, don’t they? You have to make it vivid because that’s your way of pinching yourself to keep this real. It is real.

For me – for all of us, here, I think – it’s a dream come true; sometimes it is hard to remind ourselves that is has come true. It feels like a dream, a pause on reality. Our lives here are so completely severed from home. We are so free from constraints. We can be anything. We can do anything. We can hide anything, we can show anything, no one’s known us longer than four months. Is it really any wonder that we become more ourselves here? It’s like we’re drunk, the whole year long. The freedom you feel when your head starts to spin with the wine runs deeper and stronger than ever before and transcends the alcohol and spills over into the raw rub of daytime light. The things we have here bear no connection to our past lives except for us. Continue reading →

01/9/14

On arriving in London

KensingtonHi Mum,

I got to the lady at the passport desk at Gatwick Airport and it suddenly occured to me that I could talk to her. What a weird feeling. Everything is delayed for me in France: not only do you have to focus and listen to what the other person is saying, but you have to translate that into your own language, come up with a reply, and then translate that back into French. And then somehow get it out of your mouth with some semblance of an accent. All while still paying attention to whatever it is they’re saying. Living in France is wonderful; living in French is hard. Continue reading →

12/13/13

If only in my dreams

It’s very rare to be in a moment and be able to look at it from the outside and say, I’m going to remember this for the rest of my life. Most of the time, the things we remember aren’t really what we expect: they are the little memories, the split seconds in time, that have somehow snagged on the thorns of our minds and stayed there, encapsulated forever. In the river that courses through our heads they’ve been caught by the odd rock jutting out and they’ve floated in the eddies off to the side. You never really know what’s going to stay, and what will drift on past. But then you look back and you think, yes, I remember that. Continue reading →

11/27/13

What is in a home?

In the kitchen I can hear my roommates laughing over something. Christmas music in the background. My clothes are strewn all over the bed and the clothes rack, a half-empty jar of Nutella and a spoon have taken up permanent residence on the mantlepiece; tickets, receipts, papers, passport, a jar of moisturizer, a spool of thread lie inches thick across the desk. A pile of yet-to-be-read books is perched precariously next to my bed. A cup with the abandoned dredges of hot chocolate in it sits at my elbow.

What I am trying to say by showing you these things is, I am entrenched here. Leaving the place that has been home for as long as you can remember really makes you think about these things: these are the particles that make up a life. These are the tell-tale signs of living – not travelling, not a nomad, just living and being in a place. That’s why I went on exchange for a year: I wanted to truly live in another city, I didn’t want to just visit. I have been in Grenoble for a while, and I’ll be here for a while yet. This is my home now. I have felt the heat of summer sun in my bones in this room and I will taste the tang of winter sunshine on my tongue here too. I’ve watched the mountains sink into golden glowing sunsets, I have seen them coated in the first November snows, I will watch them shake themselves loose again come springtime and dance, dance with a freshness that stretches from their rocky roots to the tips of their new budding leaves. I am learning another city’s heartbeat. I am swaying to another city’s rhythm. Continue reading →