Halfway

On June 8^th, in four months and one week, I will meet my parents and my brother at the Nantes train station – the same one I've passed through every time I travel elsewhere in Europe. One week later, we'll pack up my things and head over to Germany to visit some very good family friends of ours. A week later, we'll head down south again, to the Alps, possibly Venice, possibly the Mediterranean, and who knows what else. On June 27^th, my parents will fly home in a normal fashion, while I am required to pass through Paris, Reykjavik, and Boston on Icelandair before proceeding on to San Francisco due to travel agent shenanigans. From there on out, my plans are fuzzy, but my host sister is coming to visit me for half of July and all of August, and I'd really like to take a roadtrip across the States to college.

The halfway point was January 22^nd. I feel like I should have passed the halfway point a long time ago, like I should be almost done. It might well end up feeling like that – I rather hope these next four months and one week pass much more quickly than the first half did. After all, I have never lived a longer week than the first week I was here, and never a longer month than the first month. It took until November for time to speed back up to its normal steady tumble.

A lot of the other exchange students I met have gone home. In a way, I envy them, because I know that I was happier at home and that I've already learned most of what I have to learn in France. My language acquisition is plateauing even though it never really stops. I've seen the differences and similarities between the French and Americans, and I prefer Americans. I've learned what it's like to be a foreigner, and although that's valuable information, I prefer being a native. But at the same time, I can't really imagine going home right now. Going back to my high school after living abroad would be weird, like aging backwards. Fortunately I'm a senior this year (well, technically I'm in my second year of being a junior, and I'll skip being a senior) and won't have to go back to my high school – even though, for the most part, I liked it at Homestead. Anyway, it wouldn't feel very complete, to go home and take back up the threads of my life like I hadn't just dropped them and ran. And 4 months left is practically nothing, especially with a week in England, a week of skiing, and 3 other weeks of vacation to look forward to.

And with all those exchange students who left after semester 1, there's a whole new crop for semester 2. I'll never meet them in person, but I read their blogs. I was discussing with Sarah, my American friend, how we can't believe the exchange students who write all about “I love my new school! It's so exciting and interesting and I have so many new friends who are awesome lalala! And my host family is adorable and I have kittens and I never want to go home France is so much better than the US wooo!” And all the people who told us before we left “You're never going to want to come home! You'll have a blast.” No one ever talks about how hard it is. Which is one of the reasons I write honestly about my experiences, for future exchange students. Maybe Sarah and I are the anomalies. Maybe everyone else really does have 100% fun and happiness and never wants to go home. But I'm here to tell you that at least for me, some days are really great and others really suck and there'll be moments of homesickness and maybe if you're me even more moments of just plain not liking how things work in France. And at this halfway point, I'm not unhappy, and there are a lot of good things in this experience: my host family, whom I adore, Ultimate Frisbee, and the travelling I get to do from time to time. But I have to admit: I think a lot about the day when I'll get to go meet my family at the train station. When I go running, I think about the day when I'll take my dad with me to show him my favorite 7 kilometer circuit. (Not that I'd ever admit it to him. Hi Dad! I miss you. ;) ) I look forward to coming home, waking up in my own bed, hanging out in Serra Park with my friends, and especially making my own food for breakfast and lunch. (I used to make curry at least once a week, but in France spicy food doesn't exist.) Study abroad is a good thing to do. I recommend it. But it's good to be halfway. Halfway means I survived 5 months already; I can survive the last 4 as well.

I thought of a blog idea that will hopefully be entertaining: Send me stereotypes about the French or about France, and I will bunk or debunk them!

Here are your French stereotypes of the day:

1) French people smell.

Status: FALSE

They shower just as often as we do, and are shocked and disgusted to learn that most Americans don't wear perfume. Perfume is an essential element of the French grooming regimen.

2) French women don't shave their legs.

Status: FALSE

Not only do they shave, but from a very young age, and often in high school they wax their entire bodies and pluck their eyebrows and other horribly painful-sounding procedures. Beauty is important in France, and we all know that “beauty is pain.”

Méribel, take 1.

Over vacation (after my week of oysters), I went skiing in Méribel with my host siblings and their grandparents and some friends. I am finally writing about it now because I'm supposed to write a blog post by Friday. Therefore you can expect a little less introspection than usual, as I am working under a deadline. (Hey, when you do sports 3-4 times a week, you don't have a lot of free time for blogging.)

Méribel is beautiful. It's in the French Alps, which dwarf the Sierra Nevadas and makes them look shabby and brown in comparison. The grandparents own an apartment near the ski slopes, which was cozy and small and convenient. Here's a picture of all of us – (left to right) me, my host sister, her boyfriend, grandma, host brother, and 3 of my host brother's friends. Grandpa isn't in the picture because he took it.

The other fun thing about Méribel, besides having an amazing quality of snow, was that it was chock-full of Russians and Brits. Apparently Méribel has earned a reputation as a rich and international ski resort, and now you're just as likely to hear English on the streets as French.

Méribel!

My host sibs continue to make fun of me because, starved of English for 4 months, I was desperate to make friends with some Brits, and always tried to get on ski lifts with them. My super unsubtle opening line was “Are you guys from ENGLAND??”

My host brother did one even worse – once we were in the ski lift with some guys who started speaking in German. My brother takes German at school, so for the benefit of the rest of us, he stage whispered “It's Germans!” which was hilarious because, if the Germans didn't speak French, the only thing to tip them off about what we were saying would be the obviously loud whisper.

Fortunately, my host sister brought her boyfriend – let's call him Pierre since I still operate under the principle of not sharing people's names – who didn't know how to ski, because I'm not a very good skiier and my host siblings are both intimidatingly talented. (I have skiied since I was quite young, but switched to snowboarding when I was 13, snowboarded for 3 years, and then spent two years away from the snow because I was in NYC and the Caribbean and other fun places. So anyway, I haven't skiied for 5 years and I'm a little rusty.) We ended up spending the first day at the free bunny hill slope (it wasn't really a bunny hill, more of a normal green run) and the morning of the second day walking to a really pretty lake and the afternoon at the bunny hill and the late afternoon sledding and having snowball fights. (The sledding and snowball fights was my personal favorite part, even though the skiing was pretty boss too.)

The last 2 days we bought our ski passes and skiied the heck out of Méribel. At first I was a little hesitant and didn't do so well -- I blame it on my collection of 3 wrist fracturing incidents I collected while snowboarding, which has made me more cautious. I was a little bit disgusted that Pierre, fearless athletic kid that he is, did as well or better than I did even with no previous skiing experience. We didn't stick to the easy slopes, either -- we did Saulire, which is the highest peak in the Méribel Valley, and descended on mostly reds. Red is a European code that would be a mild black diamond in the US.

I bought this super awesome Canadian balaclava from the Christmas market in Nantes. I swear, I was bordering on heat stroke. You'll never ever be cold with one of these babies.

At first I struggled with Saulire, because the first wall is all full of moguls. The rest of that day I went around a different blue trail that avoided the first wall of Saulire, and rejoined everyone else after. Pierre is fearless -- he falls all the time, but still enjoys himself and refuses to take an easier path. At the end of the day I was completely drained, and since there'd been lots of sun and then a sudden drop in temperature as the sun started to sink behind the mountains, everything was iced-over, which made my last descent back to the cabin not very pleasant. But then the last day the snow was unbelievably perfect, I had sort of re-found my rhythm, and we had a blast. We did all reds at Tougnete, which is officially my favorite mountain ever. When it's marked red purely for the steepness of the slope, but the conditions are perfect -- great snow, no moguls, no ice, not too much powder, not too many people on the slopes -- I just have a blast, going a million miles an hour down the run. Pierre does better in bad conditions because he isn't afraid, but I beat him down the mountain by a good chunk of time in ideal conditions because then I trust myself with speed and know how to do little snake-track slaloms instead of big wide turns. Those are my favorites. In the afternoon we did the Olympic face, which was our first real black run (at least where the whole thing was black, and not just a little black arm of a red slope). It was surprisingly not too difficult, but by then we'd gotten well into our rhythm. In the late afternoon we returned to Saulire. The goal: speed runs, to get as many reps as possible before the lifts close at 4:30. Saulire, which I had struggled with just the day before and is really really long, we demolished in 4 minutes, twice (after one warm-up round of 7 minutes or so). It was insane. And awesome. So that is the story of my ski adventures. I highly recommend Méribel, or the Alps in general, to anyone who is into skiing and/or beautiful places. I could live there.

In other news, not much has been going on. I have been undergoing a philosophical crisis on the nature of fashion (continued from my rant on feminism), trying to decide if conforming to the norm is good or bad (the hipster in me vs. the blend-in-with-the-natives anthropologist in me + the insecure teenager in me). French people are extremely judgemental about superficial things, and will pretty much shun everyone who doesn't dress amazingly (calling them weirdos and freaks behind their backs and being faultlessly polite but distant to their faces). By “dress amazingly” I mean I have seen this shunning and name-calling happen for people who dress normally, or even a little better than the American average: jeans, boots, wool coat, and scarf. (Maybe it was the nerdy glasses that tipped the scale over to unacceptable? Or does just plain not being beautiful render you a social leper?) I have never experienced this before this year, and there is no more successful way to make everyone feel insecure and disgusted with humanity. (At least, for me personally.) Thus, issues. And I need to figure out whether to look more French, which I had been working on up until now, or give up and just be me, with the ragged flannel shirts I stole from my dad, no jewelry, jeans, and my good old black Converse. The question is, is fashion a social obligation, a set of rules that must be met and a source of anxiety (as I see it), or is it a way to give yourself more confidence by looking in the mirror and feeling good about yourself, feeling well put-together, as Julia sees it? I suppose it depends on if you're into that sort of thing or not, if you even like fashion in the first place. But if we shun unfashionable people, then it's pretty much an obligation to “like fashion,” in which case... well, it's an obligation. Let's just say “I can't wait to get back to America, land of sweatpants” and leave it at that.

Otherwise, school continues to go well. We had parent-teacher conferences last Friday, which went well, as all my teachers gushed to my host mom about how well I do in school. (It sickens me! Oh, how it sickens me to be doing about 15% of the work I did last year, and getting such results. My brain is BORED and UNSTIMULATED even though we spend 9 hours a day at school. I'm going to have to turn artistic or something.) At least my math teacher was rather nonchalant about it, telling me he had nothing to say and to go away, cause clearly my level of knowledge is more than adequate for the contents of the course. (What a great guy.) And I have to say my favorite meeting was with my history teacher, because we spent half the time talking about the Cold War, like the history nerds we are.

Oh, non-sequitor – I hear the train! That means the cold is coming, because the wind is coming from the east, otherwise I wouldn't hear the train. Maybe it'll snow! We've been hoping to inch a few degrees colder for weeks now, because when there's snow we don't have to go to school.

I also switched English classes (again) recently, which is pretty cool. I like switching classes. My new teacher speaks incredibly good English for a Frenchie, and in voice and mannerisms reminds me very much of my 8^th grade physics teacher.

While I'm suffering slowly through the boredom that is high school and waiting with bated breath for my February trip to England and ski trip #2, I'm busy planning next summer. It is going to be super exciting! My family is coming to meet my host family in June and then we'll do *something cool* in Europe (haven't figured out what yet) before going to meet up with our dear friends Cheryl and Eric who currently live in Germany. Then we'll come home (!) and in mid-July, my host sister will come join us! We'll show her all the attractions of SanFran and the Valley and then take a roadtrip across the country to visit my aunt's cabin in Wisconsin, as we do every summer, and also bring my stuff to college. Words cannot express how excited I am for all this. The year abroad was nice and all, but can't we hurry up and finish the last 5 months and get to the exciting stuff now?

Chill French-Canadian song of the day: Loup Blanc by Mes Aïeux

For REALS for Reals Going to France

Woah.

Apparently my interviewer was being pessimistic when she said I wouldn't know my host family, school, or city until summer. I got all that information TODAY along with my official acceptance letter. Basically my reaction was lots of excitement, followed by disbelief (this is just a really elaborate hoax they're playing on me, right?) followed by a few minutes of nervousness followed by more excitement.

I'm going to live in a very small town (population 1750) about 45 minutes SW of Nantes, according to google maps. Close to the beach, close enough to a big city, but in a nice rural area, the land lot four times as big as ours (that's what you get for living in Silicon Valley, of course), with a swimming pool, my own room, and cats, birds, and poultry. It sounds perfect – right down to the lack of dogs, which I was concerned about since someone told me dogs are much more common in France. No snow, unfortunately – France west coast weather is remarkably like US west coast weather. Given that it's a rural-ish area, the school is 11 km away, but there's a bus.

The family: a mom, dad, 16 year old girl, and 19 year old guy. Perfect. I'm guessing it'll take me awhile to be able to speak with the teenagers, as they will most likely use slang and speak more quickly, but it'll be nice to have people my age, especially if I go to the same high school as the girl, which I think is the case. They're very active, love sports like skiing, hiking, and biking, love to travel, socialize often, and seem like very kind and interesting people. I loved the introductory letter they wrote to me – they said all the right things. I hope with all my heart that they will like me and I will like them and we will all get along splendidly.

I've already packed up my things over and over in my head. What will I bring? What will I say to them when I first meet them? How will I survive with a more difficult high school system in my second language? How will I make friends, not being able to rely on my dry wit showing through the language barrier? My French is so rusty. I need to practice – I'll make it a goal to listen to French youtube videos every day to improve my comprehension, which is the most difficult part of languages for me (even in English I have trouble understanding what people say). My head is bursting with a thousand different irrelevant questions, or rather, concerns I shouldn't bother thinking about yet. I'm a bundle of excitement and nervousness. How will I last through 59 more days of school, focus on AP tests, finals, SAT IIs, etc., when I have an adventure this massive in front of me? I have second-semester senioritis to the worst degree, and I'm a junior.

I'll leave in late August, and be gone for 10 months.

I've been planning this since this past August, so why is it only now that I'm realizing what I'm going to do, and just how crazy it is to pack my bags and go live with a family I've never met, in a language I've never spoken growing up, to live for a year in a country and culture utterly foreign to me?

This is ridiculous. I'm so excited. More on this later, that isn't just me babbling incoherently.

FRANCE

After a very long day of history bowl and getting lost in cars, I finally had my interview with CIEE. And guess what they said? I'M GOING TO FRANCE NEXT YEAR! Woohoo! They don't know where I'm going to be yet or who my host family will be -- in fact, I probably won't know that until July. But they are for sure going to find me a place.

I am so. ridiculously. excited.

Where to?

Someone told me I should make a list, with pictures, of all the places I want to go. There is actual content about my progress at the very bottom of this post, if you want to avoid the irrelevant stuff (or the relevant stuff cause you don't really care about me, but like pretty pictures :) ).

Venice, Italy

Actually anywhere and everywhere in Italy would be nice. Home of the greatest musicians, one of the most beautiful languages in the world, and delicious food. Italian is also on my list of languages to learn.

Really this is redundant, because going to France is like putting “all of Europe” on my list. (People travel more there, since places are closer, or so I'm hoping.) I hope to be able to see Germany, Spain, Italy, England, and Ireland because they're all wonderful places and so close, how could you not go visit them? But I'm aware that's a lot of travel for only a year abroad, and not likely at all. My most realistic wish is that I'll be able to go visit my good friend Cheryl in Heidelberg, Germany.

Cameroon and/or Senegal

One of the most special people I've met (sort of a father/uncle/mentor figure to me, though I don't get to hang out with him much) comes from Cameroon. Knowing one person should not really be enough to feel the flavor of a society, but nonetheless he showed me and told me of the wonderful sense of humor, hospitality, and ingenuity native to Cameroon, or at least just enough that I really want to go there and see for myself. Cameroon and Senegal are both French-speaking countries in Africa where plenty of my camp friends and counselors have gone, so I guess it's natural for me to want to follow.

Switzerland

Just look at the flipping picture. Who wouldn't want to go there? Apparently it's beautiful. To someone who loves the outdoors as much as I do, irresistible. Also they speak French (except when they speak German or Italian or Romansh...), have amazing government and health care and stuff, and are just pretty amazing like most European countries.

Iceland

Why the frig not? When I think of Iceland, I think of three things. #1: That picture ^

#2: This girl and her awesome music: 

(EDIT: My dear friend Solange told me how confusing this is to anyone who has not experienced the wonders of Bjork. To be clear, Bjork is a musician from Iceland, and I highly suggest you go to youtube and listen to some of her music.)
#3: Because I'm a linguistics nerd, how the language is almost unadulterated proto-Germanic because of the island's isolation. Yes, yes, I know, I'm a nerd. So anyway. Iceland here I come.

Israel

Because I love history. I would say my history, but it's not, really. I love when people insist that Judaism is not a race, but only a religion. I'm sure I will rant about this plenty later, but it is a culture, a race, and a religion. People sometimes insist than when “Jewish” is used racially, you must replace it with “Israeli.” There are several things wrong with that: first, the Jews aren't originally from Israel. Well, yes, originally, before the Diaspora. That was a long time ago. The state of Israel was created in 1948 – after WWII. “Israeli” is only as accurate a term as “American” is for me, but actually less so (my Jewish great-grandfather came to the US before WWI, before Israel's creation). Second, as I mentioned, Jews are a race as well-- you can be a German Jew, a Russian Jew, a Polish Jew (generally collectively named the Ashkenazim) or a Spanish Jew (Sephardic). My great-grandfather came from the Ukraine, but he came because he was Jewish and had to escape the Russian army. My great-grandmother came with her family just before WWI in fear of political turmoil and anti-Semitism. If you tell me I am not Jewish because I am not Israeli, or tell me that I should label myself Israeli instead of Jewish because my religious label is atheist, I will give you the disappointed "oh, how ignorant" look. (The real reason I am not technically Jewish is that 1) my mother is not Jewish, and Jewish tradition is that you take on your mother's religion, and 2) I didn't have a bat mitzvah, which would have effectively negated the first point. Ethnically and culturally, without regard to the synagogue, I consider myself Jewish.)
Anyway, enough of that, it's not terribly relevant. What I meant to say is that I love history and Israel is full of Jewish history, which I can relate to and have a personal interest in even if none of my relatives (besides a couple aunts, going to university there) have lived there.

Similarly, for reasons of family history:

The Netherlands:

The Czech Republic:
(Prague): 
(and the rest of it): 

And England oh and also Ireland! For much, much more than just family history.

Ireland, first of all, is beautiful. What better reason?
It also makes me think of tin whistles and haunting beautiful music, crazy folk tales, and Sir Galway.

Note: all these probably wildly inaccurate stereotypes I'm using as reasons to want to go places are just that – silly little reasons. Please don't be offended by anything I say, and if it's horribly incorrect, correct me. I'm just an ignorant American who wants to go see the world so I can become less ignorant.

Speaking of good music... it's always been on my bucket list to learn bagpipes. Alors:
The Scottish highlands: 

That's more than enough for now. Right now I just have to work on getting to FRANCE, stop number one.
Onward to the content!

The good news: The office finally agreed to let me go! It took five months for them to say yes and sign a piece of paper. 5 months. For my short proposal with only a word and a signature needed in return. What confused me was this: every person I talked to (and I talked to many, since the first people I talked to were quite unhelpful) was reluctant to say yes, because there aren't any actual rules about exchange programs in this very American school district where no one would consider such a strange notion. So, if there are no rules... why would you say no? It's so easy just to say yes, sign my forms, and approve my credits as valid for Homestead. Why not? Regardless, I finally won them over, and learned a lot about the value of persistence and ignoring social norms (not leaving them alone when they tell you to stop bothering them, etc.). I asked two of my favorite teachers to write me letters of rec, and I'm done with most of my application. Will send it in sometime next week.

Bad news: I still have to get accepted. Which I'm not really concerned about; I'm sure they want my money. Other bad news: It's kinda sad. I'll miss my friends. Since when've I had friends? Good timing, Ikwe... get better, closer friends right before you're about to leave and never live near them again unless you coincidentally go to the same university or eventually settle back down in Sunnyvale (bah, yeah right).

I thought it was interesting that the hardest thing so far, harder than telling my best friends, my flute section, or pestering the office staff, was telling my esteemed band director. Band has been my entire life. And now I'm leaving? Right before senior year. Right before I would be section leader – in fact, the only student leader with a year of experience (this year I'm assistant section leader and the other three leaders are seniors). Right before being first chair in wind ensemble – in fact, the only returning member of wind ensemble, as I'm the only junior this year. Will band fall apart without me? Almost scarier, will it function as normal, completely unaffected because let's face it Ikwe, you just aren't that important? Will I be able to find friends without marching band? Mr. Burn, who I hold in high regard but is extremely socially awkward, looked disappointed but accepted it in the same quiet, supine way he does everything.

One more good thing: I don't really know why I did it. I purposely didn't tell my director where I was going, explaining only that I was signing up “to go abroad,” to see if he would ask. Partially because some people think he doesn't care about his students, only about band, and the response to a question like that (irrelevant to band) provides some small proof one way or another. Partially because I didn't want to make it seem like a big deal, like, oh, look at me, I'm so special and have better plans than band – I actually talked more about band than France, thanking him for the amazing experience and telling him who should be section leader next year. :P In any case, he did ask, and somehow it made the overall rather depressing encounter a little better. “I'm going to France,” I said. “But I'll miss band so much.”

A Year of Planning

 At this moment, no one knows of the existence of this blog. In fact, only my family and two close friends know about my plans that are the reason for its existence. But, if all goes according to plan, by this time next year my friends or anyone who is interested in seeing the world through another's eyes will be reading what I'm writing right now, on August 19, 2011.

Well that was an unruly sentence.

So the actual purpose of this blog, as you may have deduced from the title up there ^ “Wanderlust,” is to document my travels to many different places, since I have always had a worse case of wanderlust than anyone else I've met, and plan to satisfy it as much as possible. This will start, esperant, with an exchange student trip to spend my senior year in France.

As I mentioned, I'm writing this before I have even told my friends, and actually before I know it is possible. I haven't talked to my guidance counselor yet, though I've done RIDICULOUS amounts of research and contacted the obliging people at CIEE to let them know I'm interested. So who knows? Maybe it won't work out. But I'm determined not to spend another two years at my nice but boring high school near Sunnyvale, California, where I've lived for the past 16-and-a-half years. Somehow I'll find a way out. There's a lovely phrase in French “trouver un moyenne,” which is approximately “to find a way/a means” to do something, a phrase which I repeat to myself often.

And the “many other places,” you might ask? Indeed. After this, who knows? Not I. But I'll go to college somewhere interesting, and I'll try to do a year abroad there too, perhaps venturing to Cameroon or another Francophone African country. I find it likely that I'll work for an international charity organization at some point, to travel the world doing good things for the Peace Corps, or AmeriCorps, or Les Medicins Sans Frontiers, or whatever. I also find it likely that when I'm figuring out what to do with my life (a process I assume happens at some point between starting college and leaving it) I'll choose something that allows me to travel, like journalism, international politics, or even a normal but highly relocatable job such as nursing. (Yeah, you can tell this is really set in stone, huh.)

Until then, and after then: May we lead interesting lives! I will post observations about living abroad, perhaps some photos, or whatever other mind-vomit really needs to be here (more for me than for you guys, but I hope you few readers will enjoy it).

Oh, a few other things: 1) All my California friends know me as Jenna. I'm the same person, with two names. :) 2) If you were wondering about my, uh... creative URL (there are SO many blogs, it's impossible to get a sensical name), I would love to explain it to you! Envie de voyager is approximately how you'd say “wanderlust” in French, and I've inserted my name in the middle of it-- “Env-ikwe” de voyager. My name seems to have a history of creative mangling, after all – my dear camp friends might recall L'Iktionaire, Ikwe-itis, the Ik-squeak, or Lea's Icky-wee-wee. <3 Good times.

I'm actually posting this first blurb way after I wrote it. Unfortunately, I have little progress to report, a month later. My school guidance counselor is a useless lump of flesh, no matter how kind and understanding I try to be about it. I have everything totally planned out-- but for the past month, all I've needed as a next step is to talk with my counselor, and every one of the half-dozen times I've gone to see her, she's been fairly rude, too busy to see me, unwilling to tell me what else I can do or when she'll be less busy, and altogether thoroughly unpleasant to deal with. The introverted, non-confrontational side of me just wants to slink into a corner and forget about it, but with such a goal in my head (and internal murmurings of “trouver un moyenne,” and “never give up”), I keep going back for still more unpleasant conversations. Wish me luck, oh so-far-non-existent readers!

Amities, Ikwe