The Long-Haul
I'm going back to France tomorrow. Once in a while, I slip and say that I'm going 'home' which implies good things I guess, but immediately, it always sounds wrong to me. My mushy little single bed (into which I stopped sinking only after I unpacked and shoved my too-big suitcases underneath, creating accidental support in my search for storage space) in my lonely little tower room will never quite be any genuine kind of 'home' to me. I'll be glad once I'm there (I can't really justify hiding out here for any longer), but the prospect of nearly ten more hours of travel time does not excite me, especially since I always find leaving Edinburgh impossibly hard. Is it even physically possible for a week to pass this quickly? Didn't I just arrive last night?
Tonight should be good (pub quiz in the gay bar!), and I shall fill in the events of the week (not that there were many events to speak of) once I recover from the combined effects of early morning travel and whatever state I drink myself into ce soir. (Oh, hungover plane journeys, will I never learn from you?) I think that beginning tomorrow, I shall be in France for the long haul. Since I arrived in September, I have never spent an entire calendar month there, but unforeseeable events aside, I don't think I'll have much cause to leave France in the next three. I'm ready for that though; these next three months will be the crisis point - a kind of do or die style approach to my French education - in regard to my French language skills; most of what I don't learn in the coming months, I probably never will. I no longer expect to attain absolute fluency, but I'm ready to immerse myself both literally and figuratively in the Franceness, and do the best I can; there will be no more coming up to breathe; next time I taste Anglo air, I will no longer be an ERASMUS. That's a bit of a daunting prospect, so I'm glad that I was allowed the indulgence of this week.
Tonight should be good (pub quiz in the gay bar!), and I shall fill in the events of the week (not that there were many events to speak of) once I recover from the combined effects of early morning travel and whatever state I drink myself into ce soir. (Oh, hungover plane journeys, will I never learn from you?) I think that beginning tomorrow, I shall be in France for the long haul. Since I arrived in September, I have never spent an entire calendar month there, but unforeseeable events aside, I don't think I'll have much cause to leave France in the next three. I'm ready for that though; these next three months will be the crisis point - a kind of do or die style approach to my French education - in regard to my French language skills; most of what I don't learn in the coming months, I probably never will. I no longer expect to attain absolute fluency, but I'm ready to immerse myself both literally and figuratively in the Franceness, and do the best I can; there will be no more coming up to breathe; next time I taste Anglo air, I will no longer be an ERASMUS. That's a bit of a daunting prospect, so I'm glad that I was allowed the indulgence of this week.