FRENCH CONNECTION

New Year

2007-01-06T12:22:13+01:00

New year begins rather hectically. I must decide on the date of my departure within the following ten days but before leaving I should talk to the Research Director in order to see whether I will be able to continue my studies or not for the rest of the school year.

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SOCRATES BASSILY

2006-12-28T21:42:09+01:00

I forgot to introduce my best friend, a six-months old lovely dachshund whose name is... Socrates. He came into my life after a long period of considerating the pros and cons of having a dog at home. I used to have two dogs in the past (Rhudolph and Franco) hen I was still living in Buenos Aires, two lovely dachshunds, smooth haired ones too like Socrates and I must say both of them were incredibly smart and affectionate. The first one, Rhudolph shared my childhood memories and Franco, who's still alive, living with my parents today (he's 13 years old and still plays like a puppy!) shared my adolescence and youth... They were both standard dachsies (weighing between 9 and 12 kilos). Rhudolph was very intelligent and most of all extremely devoted to chase! Franco, inspite of being bigger in size, he is also incredibly smart but does not have exactly the profile of a "hunter" he's extremely affectionate and kind to other pets (be it a rabbit, a hamster or even a cat!).

I had been here for five years and I terribly missed having a dog by my side, but since I worked and often had to travel I knew for sure that having a 12 kg dachshund would not be sensible decision. So I started looking for a small dog, like a Chihuahua or a Pomeranian, even if I did not like the first and the second was too "hairy".

One day I saw an add in a newspaper. A breeder was selling two "Chiyorks" (a crossed made out of a Yorkshire and a Chihuahua) so Christophe and I went there and saw the puppies, they ressembled their father, a Yorkshire and the result of this mixture was not a good one, their mother did not seem to have a good character, neither did the father. We explained the breeder that we were looking for a small dog (not weighing more than 5 kg) so that he can travel with us when we go back to Argentina to visit our family. The breeder told us that he had two small teckels (they were not Kaninchen but their parents had been "crossed" with kaninchen teckels). And that's how we "met" our little Socrates. He immediately liked us, he was small, we saw his parents, which were small too, and above all, they were friendly, so we said, ok why not, let's take the risk....

Today, Socrates has reached his maximum weight (4,5 kilos) and we're looking for a lovely dachsie girlfirend for him... There's a serious "proposal" coming from a standard dachshund from Alsacia! But, since she's only six months, Socrates will have to wait a year to have a girlfriend. Our vet told us to wait a little too. I'd love to give one of his puppies to my mother.

Socrates is one of the best things that happened to me recently. Between funerals and health problems etc... Socrates brings joy to our lives, he's our angel... a real blessing.

And with this picture I wish you all had a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

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Dad...

2006-12-28T16:21:34+01:00

Today my dad has been operated on. I'm still waiting for the... good or bad news. I'm all stressed up, I wish I could do something...

This morning I got an email from Christophe's sister, she had written me an email yesterday for some information since she had to get a scanner done and she was afraid of getting claustrophobic or something... No comments. I just got the message today, together with another message saying that it was useless, that it was too late to give her an answer since she's leaving for hospital. She has nothing serious, just some sort of a conjunctivitis... Yeah well, you get a scanner done in France because of some conjunctivitis...

Anyway I'm quite fed up with his sister, his mother, his nephews, his whole entire "family"... I made myself clear this morning before he left. I don' want to see any of them anymore. Period.

As for me, I'm just trying to cope with my own problems, my future, my life, my career which seems to go through some sort of a parenthesis right now... Time has come to make some decisions...

Gotta go, see you later...

In the meantime, have a look at this picture taken of my lovely Socrates...

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La Suite...

2006-12-21T07:05:23+01:00

La Suite... in French means... "what follows" situations, things that followed after our wedding... in a word : everyday's life, routine, etc...

And many difficult situations followed those happy moments I shared with my family on that wedding day... that special and unique day...

Back to France, Christophe's secrets on some financial difficulties that I learned once I was back, secrets to "protect" me from... from what? from whom? Should some secrets be considered as lies? I know everything parted from a good natured feeling but his secret made me feel betrayed in some way... Same as he had been betrayed in his business by people he trusted, his colleagues... But well, the debt was paid and we were in a way relieved since from now on we could start planning our lives elsewhere, and finally get out of this godforsaken region..

Still other problems came, too many to be explained here in a few lines, but to name a few, my grandmother's unexpected decease last September, my father's illness worsening every day... my endless unbearable migraines were nothing compared to all this.

And life still goes on...

Sleepless nights, pain and sorrow and this feeling of injustice, why them? WHY?? Why cannot YOU Lord take with you evil people instead of my dearest ones...??

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The end of lonely days...

2006-12-20T05:48:10+01:00

Christophe...

It was December 2002, I was alone in Brittany, 11 km away from my family and friends... Nobody to celebrate Christmas with, there was a friend who invited me for New Year. It was very kind of him and I accepted the invitation but soon regretted it. His friends' idea of celebrating New Year's was getting drunk and talking nonsense. I heard all sorts of stupid questions about me, my country etc. etc..., stupidity depending on the degree of alcohol of each guy or girl. So before I knew I was in the middle of a bunch of drunkiards, not knowing exactly what I was doing there and I soon left the "party".

Back to Vannes I decided to write all the telephone numbers and addresses contained on my previous agenda and suddenly found the name of this guy... Christophe. I had never met him, he was one of the nice fellows who had kindly offer his help when I was trying to get organized to come here. I did not accept his help, but there was something I was really curious about. During the many hours we chatted, he spoke about his passion concerning the Chinese Culture and the fact that he had many Chinese friends (same as me). I was wondering if this was true or if it was only to flirt with me. That evening I decided to send him an SMS with the following message: "Ni hao, do you remember me?". The answer came soon. The next morning he calls me and... Of course he had not forgotten me. This was the beginning of a friend relationship.

The following months we spent hours on the phone, sometimes the whole evening... until one day, we decided to meet personally. And that day came, after so many hours of Internet chatting and spending so many evenings talking on the phone , Christophe decided to come to Vannes. It was an unusual day with a quite unusual weather... the weather was dry (for once!!!) and most of all there was snow falling!!!! It was perfect almost magical....

Since then we never separated, once my studies were over, I decided to move to Poitiers where he lived and we finally got engaged...

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And Life goes on... in Brittany....

2006-12-19T23:46:08+01:00

My first steps...

Little by little I got used to what I called "living in the middle of nowhere" and this kind of narrow-minded people (well, of course I did not get used to them, I just had to deal with them, there was no other choice for me).

Teachers were quite the same thing, they did not teach their students what real life was about (most of them did not know what it meant having a real job -not even what an internship was like-, taking responsibilities, having a boss, and everything connected to the experience of having a job, "building" your career..etc etc). They seemed to be disconnected from reality.
In a general way I must say that inspite of the fact of being a private university, the academic level was very poor...

Teachers showed the same "regionalistic" attitude as if Brittany was a "country" in itself, and not just a bloody region in the middle of good old France! Most of them treated me as "the foreigner" (not "the foreign student" but just "the foreigner") or else they just ignored me (still don't know which one was the best).

Then there were other things that made things even more difficult, having to walk for almost half an hour to the bus stop. Waiting for the bus for nearly 50 minutes and once on the bus having a 40 minutes trip each day. I had to wake up around 5 am to get to school everyday since leaving in Brittany and having no car can eventually become a real problem, if not... a nightmare. In addition to bad-timing transport, for those who ignore the following fact, weather conditions in Brittany are dreadfull such as rain almost every bloody day with a 90km wind and a real cold winter.

On top of all this, I got robbed during my first three weeks in Vannes by a breton "friend" who "kindly" offered to help me with some administrative tasks like dealing with the French Prefecture, opening a bank account and all of a sudden I realized that 1000 euros had mysteriously evaporated... same as my "friend"*. Welcome to Brittany, Alexandra...

NOTA BENE: Just a little tip to those "adventurers" wishing to go to Brittany to pursue some studies in the Morbihan area (I wonder if such people ever exist... I might have been the only mad one to have done such thing... ), be aware of someone by the name of "Braud" with a fake smile that might "invite" you to a plane trip on ULM or any other type of plane or "flying object" and then ask you to pay for it , or to pay for his car repair, his groceries, clothes or even his sockets! you will eventually refuse to pay for his personal expenses as I did but if you continue to frequent him you might eventually get robbed without even realizing until ... he's gone .

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Vannes....

2006-12-18T08:33:13+01:00

Where it all begun

This story starts when I was admitted to a French University in Southern Brittany to pursue my studies on the tourism field. I must say that getting all the administrative stuff as well as the lodging issue solved before my arrival in the land of Asterix was far from being an easy task... But I reckon I was pretty well organized and by means of contacting several students by means of Internet, people living in the "city" I was going to live in, common workers, etc. who gave me an idea of almost all the pros and cons I would be dealing with.

Among these people there were of course some idiots who did anything but helping you , I daresay they tried doing exactly the contrary, but of course there were also a couple of good-willing open-minded guys who were able to give you the right info and whom I'd like to thank (one for sending me a list of appartments free for rental, and the second one for helping me by calling some people so that I could rent an appartment). I never met these two people out of this "virtual world" but I'd like to thank Patrice and Leonard for giving me a hand when I felt helpless! So better late than never: Thanks a lot!

Concerning the University, inspite of the fact that it was a French Private institution, they could not care less about foreign students ! and thus I got no help from them, not even a list of appartments sent by mail... (this was not much to ask, was it? ) .

Dealing with adminsitrations in France could be quite an ordeal for a foreign student, and I had to be absent from school several times at the beginning in order to do so but well, I'm still here, I survived let's say !

Vannes is a small city in southern Brittany, approximately 40 000 inhabitants, all of them considering themselves not as French but as "Bretons" even if 99,9 % dont even speak a word of Breton's gaelic... Busses pass every 40 or 50 minutes depending on the day (sometimes I had to wait one and a half hour if I had missed the previous bus in order to go to school! School was in fact in another "city" (since it was village rather than a city) called Arradon) which meant a 40 or 50 minutes trip every day, every rainy windy day all through the school year, except for Summertime when the weather gets a bit "milder" but still cloudy, rainy and....depressing...

Life was tough for me in small Vannes, specially because I had lived all my life in a city of 15 million people where busses pass every five minutes as well as subways and trains, where people called themselves citizens and were not focused on their origin, since Buenos Aires is a real "melting pot" where everybody is from everywhere... Whether we were from either English, Spanish, Chinese, Italian, French, German, Russian or Slovenian origina, we were all Argentinians and a foreigner would soon feel himself at home...

As the Bretons in general, they seemed quite hostile to foreigners at the begining... as well as at the end. An example of this, inspite of the fact that I perfeclty managed in French, from the very moment they noticed my "foreing accent", their attitude suddenly changed (distant, cold, even rude sometimes...) . I consider it important to say that in Vannes, as well as in other small cities in Brittany in general, we hardly find foreigners, let alone foreign students... I must say sometimes I felt I was considered as some sort of an "E.T."

That "Godforsaken country"...

Let's talk about my "class mates" whose dearest aspiration in life was that of working in a tourism office within "their" region (and if possible not so far from "Moma and Papa").

My first day at school, I was introduced by the Dean as "the student coming from Argentina", he might have expected another reaction especially from Tourism students, but... no, nothing, not even the slightest remark or comment.

My "social life" was quite doomed I daresay... right from the very begining. Nobody to talk to, except one or two girls who seemed to be interested in getting to know something more about this "godforsaken country where I was supposed to come from".

There was a fella that asked me something like "oh I'd like to do my internship in Brazil, do you know where I should address to?" To the brazilian consulate, I come from ARGENTINA not from Brazil YOU ASSHOLE!!:> (of course, my response to this sort of idiocy was a much diplomatic one.

Then a second one asking "so you're from there...? (God knows where "there" was situated for him) "You're so WHITE for someone coming from there..." (yeah sure... would you like me to show you some pictures of me dancing the "rain dance" or something...? ) And yet another comment "oh yes, you dance salsa right? don't you miss your country's hot weather and spicy food?" (this was quite a frequent question) And then there was me, trying to explain that Argentina is a country who was built by immigrants comming from all parts of Europe (even France!) and that my grandparents came from northern Italy, Galicia (Spain) and even Ireland, just like the population in the States, in Canada, Australia or New Zealand! The guy looked at me puzzled. I think he prefered to believe in that image of "salsa", "indigenous peoples", hot weather and spicy food... inspite of all my explanations... Dear Lord... Patience is a virtue,I know...

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What to say....

2006-12-17T06:01:11+01:00

Introduction

Welcome everyone, if anyone ever reads this blog...

I should have started this blog a few years ago, when I moved from Buenos Aires to France. I was going through a difficult period in my life and I'd decided to make a big step then, only that I did not realize at the time that that "big step" was not a big but a HUGE one. A decision that would change my life, my destiny forever...

Five years have passed since that day and I still wonder if it worth it... Only time will tell...

Being away from your family and friends is not a solution to problems, just a way to escape from them. Sometimes I regret being away but sometimes it seems a blessing. Man's such a contradictional being...

I address this experience to all those who, like me, are away from "home" (depending on each one of us consider as "home") from their families and friends, to those who would like to share their experience being away in an open-minded way and to those I love... and most of all I dedicate this to my Grannie, this Celtic spirit who blesses me every day from wherever she might be right now (you'll always be in my heart same as I'll always be in yours...). I hope someday I'll become half the woman she was, an extraordinary human being... I hope one day I would have half the wisdom and the strength you had in your life... May your soul bless and guide my steps...

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