A Sip to Get Me Going

Damn. I huddle before this Macbook sipping beer and eating lentil soup a slightly older me. I am confronted with the reality that I cannot possibly catch this last year in a blog post. Portugal came, went, returned, and left again. Dancing in Madrid, fleeing Sweden, and tearful subterranean goodbyes in Budapest have all taken their place in the dreamy ether of 'remember when?'s. I've come home and feel in equal measure lost and found as I gear up for the next concurrent adventures of pursuing love in South America and beginning nursing school. The world feels big and broad.

Kids, Go To College. I Did And Look At Me!

^note my scholastic painter's jumpsuit.

The Intumblable Snow-Woman

So going up the chair lift on Dent d’Oche (mountain) my thoughts were as follows:

“Wow, I’m really here, in the real Alps really on a ski lift with REAL skis on! Sweet Jesus I’m awesome. I skied a couple times when I was 10, how hard can it be? And besides! If I’ve forgotten a bunch of stuff I’ve ice skated, I’ve water skied, just….put ‘em together!”

My chair approached the top and, in full view of a million pods of 5-7 year old ski schools, I rode down the gentle slope on my butt with a big “AAAAAAHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

Trudging and slipping around for a couple minutes, trying to formulate how to ask for pointers in French, I gloriously heard a man’s voice clear the panic in my brain.

“Where’re you going?” he said to his little puffy pink jacket clad daughter.

“Oh thank God!”

They both looked at me.

“Uh….sorry…..um……I heard you speaking English and I was wondering if you could tell me how to….um…..turn?”

“How to turn?”

“Yeah.”

“…”

“…”

“Why’re you here? Go back to the US and stop getting these nutty ideas that get you stuck on the stop of The Matterhorn when you can’t ski! Harumph!”

In reality he was very nice and gave me some “use the force” type suggestions, I just continued to feel foolish.

One snowboarder who helped me up reassured me with the ol’ “It’s like riding a bicycle!” Yes. A bicycle made of solid ice and 2 sticks. 4 if you count the ice picks of death that swung uselessly from my wrists. 36 if you count the ski school I bowled over.

However on the up and up, by the second run I had sort of figured it out sort of and it finally turned fun. Like super fun. Did I fall? No way! Was I scared I would? Hell yes! Did I snow-plow the entire way down like a goofy piece of pizza with a human on it? You bet your sweet ass I did.

Booyah.

La Petite Hyène

So I’m not here 5 days before I find myself in front of a classroom full of 6-8 year old French children crawling around on the floor pretending I’m a hyena. Blame the -11ºC weather outside, but damn did I have fun.  When the crap did kids get so cool?! All my memories from that goofy little epoche was Hooked On Phonics (Being fresh off the truck from Madagascar and unable to read English) and colored tissue paper “stained glass windows”. We told stories, they asked me questions about Hollywood and the Statue of Liberty, I read them Robin Hood, and they went NUTS when I took out my video camera and caught all of their hilarious (be it alarmingly death-filled) Robin Hood-based skits on film. Seriously, cranky as some people I’ve met here are, the kids are freakin’ stellar. I’ll try and do video.

Strike that, I’ll do a video.

So in otherwise, when I’m not hanging out with little kids (I hate how creepy that sounds) My mornings are spend hanging from scaffolding from 8a.m. to lunchtime, after which I, being the gung-ho painfully American direction-challenged 20 year old young lady I am, have the people I live with drop me in the woods where I then proceed to Bear Grills myself back home while listening to my favorite guilty pleasure podcasts (namely Crash Course In Awesome) for the rest of the afternoon.

Tally ho!

It’s winter so all the bugs my imaginary “surviving” is supposed to drive me to eat are all dead! Though if I make it through this crazy year without eating one bug I might be a little underwhelmed.

You watch, that bug will be malaria.

Back to the scaffolding:

So being an unpaid and unskilled laborer means all I can do is try my best. I will paint unevenly for a while. My girl arms, in all their feminist might, will get tired quickly. All things that every so often the less-kind-than-I’m-used-to dude I work with and for has trouble understanding. Of course I imagine that it’s hair-pullingly frustrating to deal with someone who needs as many pointers as I do, but a part of me feels that it is sort of what he signed up for by accepting HelpXers (that’s what we call ourselves. Cute huh?). There are, every so often, when I feel on the brink of taking him aside and saying “Listen here Omlette Du Fromage, I’m trying my best here. LAY OFF!” I crack a smile, turn up my iPod, and carry on.
The tension however, I’ve noted, in only the last two days has changed the way we approach one another. Headphones in, I work with the focus for a surgeon. Now instead of snatching the roller, he tells me what to do and leaves me the hell alone. I don’t know what I was looking for, but I found something waaaaaay different, and in it’s own gruff and frozen way, very cool. As a person not used to being treat like something not special (I’m very aware that I have lived a super lucky existence) I am learning a lot about how I react to that. As my friend Lydia said sunnily one day, “Every day’s a school day!”

We also eat dessert at every meal, a tradition I will keep forever.

Eu Falo Português

So you figure out quickly, when you’re trying to learn a third language to impress your shweetheart, that you’ve grown cocky since gaining your sputtering fluency in your second language. You’re all “Mmm! Wiggity-WHAT?! Look at me! You see that future-anterior conjugation? Aw YEAH you did!” Then suddenly you're right back in 7^th grade French 1. Only it’s Portuguese online. 

And you’re in the Alps. 

And it’s cold. 

It’s like being told at Thanksgiving when you’re 20 that you have to sit back at the kid’s table, in that we talk in simple present-tense about colors and leave the parents to it. Subjunctive and big-kid chairs are for jokers anyhows.

Still it is a little goofy when I phone up my Latin lover to tell him “I am the Naomi. I eat pasta every day. May I have the check?”

Sizzling. 

Some things however go farther than language when you're dating someone from a different country. Little things you know? Like how I am convinced that EVERYTHING in Brazil wants to KILL you. Upon telling this theory to Paulo he looked at me startled and assured me that of course that wasn't the case. "And besides" he promised,"I would only take you to the safe places, like my farm! There's nothing dangerous on my farm." 

We smiled at each other.

"Except for the spiders," he added,"..........and the scorpions.....and the snakes."

"Wait a sec, didn't you say there are jaguars at your farm?"

"And jaguars."

One time we were walking through downtown Poitiers when it started raining.

"Oh look!" I said brilliantly, using all my finely honed investigative abilities, "it started raining!" 

He looked around like a baby that just tasted a lemon (youtube it) and asked, "You call this raining? But it's just up and down..."

At the end of the day, muttering to myself in front of a computer screen is absolutely worth doing for someone I'm a big fan of. I don't have half as good a reason for learning French (Am I right?!)! And speaking of the two I thought I'd share this drawing Paulo made in my notebook over dinner. Medium? Red pen and red wine. Vive la France!

 

Would You Believe Me if I Said "HOLY CRAP I AM SORRY THIS TOOK SO LONG!"

So I finally sat myself down between trying to learn a song off Youtube and clicking “refresh” on Facebook and said “GURL WRITE YOUR DAMN BLOG ALREADY!”

“But…but….”

“NO BUTS. OPEN UP WORD THIS INSTANT YOUNG LADY! MARCH!”

“Ugh. Fiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiine!”

Actually I have been meaning to update this thing for a long time and I am sorry for the hollow promise of the last post, maybe I can make it up to you with the news that EVERYTHING HAS CHANGED!

In short, about 2 weeks before what was a badass trip with my dear friend Clara through Budapest, Berlin, and the entire country of Jordan, I formally quit my study abroad program and effectively went rogue on the whole “pleasant year in France” agenda.

Why?

One day, in the strain to keep myself from punching my own head through the classroom wall during Niveau 4B Grammaire, an idea was either hatched or busted open. My French had been improving a lot, but I suddenly realized it was entirely thanks to my host family, french friends, and work I had done that was entirely unrelated to university. The recent planning of Clara and I’s trip (another blog post altogether) had only fed the travel bug I’ve had all my life and so I said to myself, “Why don’t I ….just….keep traveling?”

So I left. I did some forum surfing and got myself a profile on a site called HelpX.com (short for Help Exchange) on which you can essentially pick where you want to go and live/eat there for free on farms or in hotels or in people’s houses in exchange for some good old fashion company and manual labor. It’s actually super great, and exists all over the world! Booyah right?

So now from my first stop, a bee farm in the French Alps on Evian lake (spitting distance from Switzerland), where a pregnant cat keeps trying to eat my hair, I want to thank everyone again for your love and patience with my whimsy. I’m here in the Alps for a month and I think this blog may very well keep me as up to date with my affairs as you.

OH! I also FINALLY read The Great Gatsby on the way to Évian-Les-Bains (Which apparently some past helper on this farm read “Évian Lesbians”...teehee). How I managed to receive a high school diploma without have to read a damn thing astounds and scares the crap out of me.