Today after French class, the stars aligned for a perfectly nice day in Strasbourg. There are only seven of us in the intensive French course (up from five during our initial rentrée) but, incredibly, seven countries are represented: Slovakia, Poland, Ecuador, Germany, China, Brazil, and the U.S. It’s made for a true French-immersion experience; we only share the language we’ve signed up to learn for four hours a day, five days a week, so even conversations that take place outside of class are in French.
The language school we attend, Alliance Francaise Strasbourg, organized a mini-field trip for students after class today.
At 2PM, a longtime employee guided us over to the gorgeous Strasbourg Cathedral. Chatting with him on the walk over, I learned that he had lived in multiple countries around the world, the coolest of which I think are Turkey and Mexico. When I asked him how his career started out, he replied that he’d started his career as a philosophy teacher [in France] and an opportunity to teach abroad had come up, so he’d taken it.
The simplicity of his response was striking to me
I was sure there was more to the story than those two sentences, but by this point we’d arrived, and he left us at the foot of the 330 stairs to the top. I spent most of the walk up thinking about how odd it is that so many of the experiences that currently take me hundreds sometimes thousands, of words to process will eventually be consolidated into a couple of sentences that somehow summarize my past and explain my present.
A blustering, premature fall wind buffeted everyone at the top while a hot sun stretched our chapped lips dry across our faces. It is, as everyone assured me beforehand, well worth the effort to climb the stairs, and I do concur: Strasbourg is just big enough that the timbered houses and medieval architecture sprawl out below you, but small enough that you can see the Vosges mountains and the Black Forest in the distance.
After a swift descent down a spiraling stone staircase, three of us went in search of a nice café with a terrace to enjoy a coffee beneath the sunshine. We had to walk around for a bit; our itinerary was about as quintessentially French as it gets and most of the city had already claimed places. Finally, we succeeded in finding a table at the Café Montmartre, known for its rather horrible service but nice location near the canal. I enjoyed a café Chantilly, aka my new go-to period comfort drink: a coffee cup sprinkled with some coffee droplets and filled with real whipped cream that, according to Google, has 22 grams of fat per 100 grams.
When the sun dipped behind the buildings and cast us into shadow again, the three of us ambled after its weakening rays
We chatted about this and that, nothing of consequence but all in French, ducked into a store for some beers, and ended up on the grassy expanse in the middle of Place de la Republique—a place I’m very familiar with because it’s where I came to reapply for my student visa a few weeks ago.
I’m much older than my new friends from school—one still can’t legally enter a nightclub here and one just celebrated his ability to do so this week—but in the way that many things cease to matter when you meet people who are also out of their element, so too did this. Lying on the grass softened by the sun, we watched several groups of first-year college students congregate and take pictures with large, handmade flags. They appeared to be starting some sort of scavenger hunt and at one point my classmates and I fell silent watching them.
“It makes you want to be starting university, too,” I commented, remembering.
The other two nodded.
“Yeah,” replied the one who has no idea what she wants to study for undergrad, eyes trained on the group.
“Next year,” said the other one eagerly, who plans to enroll in an international relations program in France.
I nodded.
Shortly after, we gathered our things and parted ways for the evening with bisous and saluts. Then, I came home and drew, played guitar, and wrote all in the same evening, two of which are things I haven’t done in months.
There’s just something about a perfectly nice day in Strasbourg, I suppose.
