- How long have you lived in France?
- 6 years
- Wow, your French is amazing?
- Yes, I lived here when I was sixteen. I went to high school for a year. I lived with a French family and I placed second in French that year at school… even though I’m Australian#
If I had a euro for every time I’ve answered that question in the 2190 days, give or take a month, that I’ve lived in Paris, I’d be richer than Spain. Actually, I am already richer than Spain; I just don’t own as much sunshine…or a tan…or Javier Bardem.
I lived in France when I was a sixteen because I was an Exchange Student.
I was an exchange student back in the days before Internet, before Dubya Bush but when women had bushes, before online dating and Big Brother. I left sunny Sydney and her drought wrought plains for the fields of gold (-en corn) in South West France to spend a year with the Belloncles.
The Belloncles taught me to eat radishes with salted butter, they showed me how to pick girolles, delicious buttery mushrooms, in the damp forests of the Pyrenees and Papa taught me a skill I might have been better off without, oenology, the art of consuming wine. A mother, a father, an older brother and a younger sister*, I was re-birthed as a Béarnaise Belloncle for a whole year. In 1992, without text messages, email or Facebook, (Disneyland Paris was still EuroDisney!) I couldn’t communicate with a single soul down south other than by writing letters. I wrote every week, with a pen and paper, not a keyboard, sharing the stories of my storied life with my other family, and they would reply. It would take two weeks for them to receive a letter; I wrote on tissue thin paper to minimise the cost of postage.
Today, I speak to them almost every day…on video…via text…posting on Facebook or just ringing them on my Smartphone. All of which, like legalising gay marriage, were impossible in 1992.
Being an exchange student implies that someone switched places with me, that an adolescent French girl went to live in Sydney in my stead. Well my suburban Sydney family went one (four) better than that.
I came to France thanks to the financial precariousness of my parents and hefty selection process of the global organisation AFS. AFS organise cultural exchange programmes across the world for high school students. Learning a new language, the language I speak everyday in 2013, is only a very small part of what I gained from twelve months à l’étranger.
The year I left, we welcomed a boy from Aarau, known in our house as Jesus Christ Superstar from Switzerland. We blessed him with a holy name in part because Motherbear deemed him perfect, in part because he was much better behaved than us, her biological children, but mainly because his kind and open nature saved us… even if for only for twelve months. So Jesus Christ, the real one, the singing one or the Swiss one, became the superstar of our suburban Zeitgeist.
JCSfS was a year older than us and liked to eat bread. Knowing only our suburban Sydney existence, bread was something that you toasted at breakfast and pasted with Vegemite, it was not a condiment laid on the table at dinner like salt or pepper. JCSfS taught us that Europeans ate bread without butter; he also taught us to eat a meal around a table in the evening as a family and not spread among the Jason recliners as the individuals we were. JCSfS, in keeping with his nickname returned home to the Alps and an icy North Star in time for Christmas.
In the years since, he, and his parents, have welcomed many of my family to their frozen front door. I went to visit them when I was living in France and learned how (not) to ski. Most recently, he joined us in Paris last month during The Smartarse’s visit. The two surrogate brothers hadn’t seen each other for 15 years but they talked non-stop for two days as though no time had passed at all.
Back to 1993, after JCSfS had gone home, sometime in the early Australian winter, I returned from France just as my cousin, The Panther, was herself heading North for a year in the snow of Zurich. Exchange-student-ism is contagious in our family.
That winter I returned to the only home I had ever known to discover that Motherbear had purchased a new washing machine I didn’t know how to operate and learned I was sharing a bedroom with a Thai girl. The former made me cry more than the latter.
Nada from Bangkok lived with us for a year. Her legacy was teaching us how to cook fuck and prick – don’t be juvenile, that is chilli and lettuce in her language! She now lives with her two children and her husband back in Bangkok.
The following year, after Nada had gone home for Christmas and the Art-sist-ologer had packed her bags, bags that would be stolen before she even arrived, for Sweden, Simon came to live with us.
Simon spoke French, but he wasn’t French. He was from Quebec. I couldn’t bear the notion that there was someone living in my house that spoke better French than I...and he had much better hair. He brought a culture of heavy metal music that was much appreciated by the Smartarse and an avid love for the Simpsons that was much appreciated by us all. Today, he lives in Quebec City and works at a radio station. He is living the dream…a dream that makes me just a little bit more jealous. He got the hair, the language and the job!
The Art-sist-ologer landed just after the beautiful blue-eyed blonde-haloed American from Green Bay, Wisconsin…BaaahhhB. Bob played guitar, he knew the words to almost every Beatles song: my father had another son. Today, he is still an incredibly talented musician who has made music his life and lives in New York. Further confounding the toing and froing of foreigners connected only by a year abroad with AFS, Bob and his family welcomed my French sister at their home in Wisconsin some years after his stay in Sydney.
The same year that we lived with Bob, the Panther’s younger sister, Giggles, was somewhere in Germany, her family had a boy from the Czech republic in their spare room in St Clair but even so, the geographically gluttonous coming and going of youths from near and far would come to an end that year.
Beyond those that came or went within my own family, there are those that we met along the way. The exchange community lends itself to fleeting relationships, some longer lasting than others, some more physically intimate than others, all rendered longer lasting after so very many years by modern technology and social media.
A beautiful Norwegian who photo-bombed my disposable Kodak camera with a picture of his genitalia hidden inside a tube sock à la Red Hot Chilli Peppers who lives today in Trondheim with his own family. During a short stay one winter Bernt’s family showed the Art-sist-ologer and I how they smoke salmon, in their own home and also how to slide down an Olympic ski jump on your bum, your cheeks shielded only with a plastic supermarket shopping bag.
The Academic, an American who lived in France the same year as I, who now lives a dozen metro stops from me in Paris. She who taught me the future-conditional and who today, teaches students far more willing than I at the New York University of Paris when she isn’t caring for her two children.
There are the Nobels, The Art-sist-ologer’s Swedish family who have welcomed me for two Christmases as one of their own. A family so doted with sons, they are happy to ring in a daughter. Albeit a very loud one who does not speak Swedish but does bring wine and foie gras along with her endless stream of words…not at all prize-winning.
Being an exchange student is not something that happens to you just once, for twelve months. It is an experience that stays with you for life. The family and friends that I have earned, despite the humiliation of repeating a year at my own posh private school when I returned in 1993, has afforded me the strength of character to withstand all that this life has flung upon me since.
I know I’m not starving, I’m not destitute and I’m in comparably good health. But I did watch as my father breathed his last, I watched as everyone I knew coupled and procreated. I wander and wonder, with a modicum of fear, but with a healthy dose of curiosity and a desire to learn and understand what it is like to be from somewhere else.
Going so far away at such a young age, being cut off from everything I knew, and didn’t know, has doted me with a love for others that I don’t even have for myself. I only wish I knew that Italian boy who fronted up to my school assembly in 1991.
- Mum, I want to go and live in France
- Why?
- Because an Italian exchange student spoke at school today and I want to do what he did.
- Ok, let me call the bank…
Thank you Motherbear
#I’ll admit that I do love to talk myself up…at any given opportunity…hence the blog
*and a middle brother my age who was in the US that same year
great man :D
Posted by: bedroom furniture | 07/28/2013 at 08:03 PM