This is the official start of the travel blog I will be writing during my year (make that seven months) in France. I am staying in the town (really, village, but people get testy if you call it that) of Cosne-Cours-Sur-Loire. Like this Hawaiian fish, the name is more majestic than the reality.
However, majesty is not a quality that should be associated with the French, at least not since certain noteworthy heads of state lost theirs....but let's not bring the civil war--excusez-moi, Revolution--into it! Suffice it to say that there are many positive adjectives I can associate with my new locale, the most appropriate of which is mignon: cute (see above).
That is the view from the kitchen window of my little apartment. I am staying at the school where I teach, at an amazingly cut rate, with the only side effects being 1) that it is deathly quiet on weekends and 2) that I carry around the awareness that my life-work situation closely resembles a Victorian governesses' without the prospect of a Mr. Rochester in the future, or even a Rawdon Crawley. But c'est la vie!
It is actually quite amazing how much of what I have seen so far of France looks like France is supposed to look. I realize that sentence it quite redundant, but it's true that when you grow up hearing about a place in books, movies, tales, and myth, you pretty much expect that the reality is not actually going to be that way. True, I have yet to see anybody wearing a red beret, bicycling with a baguette in their wicker bicycle basket, or curling their mustaches, but the country houses are whitewashed with high-peaked roofs, the farmland is green and rolling, and people do both bicycle and buy baguettes (just not at the same time). I sometimes forget that, as a girl from California, I am used to a landscape that is much bigger and rougher, and an architecture that is much younger-looking than things tend to be in Europe.
...Speaking of California, just because things seem excessively French here, does not mean that I am not also having to navigate the unexpected episodes of globalization: This afternoon, over a petit cafe I was sharing with some of the teachers, the principle of the middle school, a man of years and dignity, asked me if, in American English, the word "girl" was spelled with an "i" or a "u." It seems he had been watching this video. (West Coast represent!!)
I think I have written as much English as I should allow myself for the day, but I will try to update this regularly (I hope not famous last words), with anecdotes of my experiences of small town life and touristic adventures.
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