When I grow up

Going back to school again is exciting - I used to say that if I could do anything for a living, I would be a professional study abroad student - but has already got me thinking about the next step, since I’ve heard rumors that you’re not supposed to be a full time student forever and everyone keeps asking me why I am here and how I plan to use this experience in my career. So far being here makes me want to:

a) teach ESL in a similar intensive program at an American university or more generally work in international/language education,
b) use my French somewhere else afterwards, such as teaching English in France, joining the Peace Corps or another program for teaching in Francophone Africa, or lead American high school study trips in Guadeloupe or France,
c) continue studying languages and cultures, maybe a month or two of intensive German or Italian or Russian here or there, a summer at Middlebury in Portuguese, or perhaps a PhD in Portuguese and Brazilian Studies,

and perhaps most of all

d) stay here doing exactly what I’m doing.

Go to class, people. Just a thought.

The one interesting part of the 2.5 hour orientation for new students in “Lettres” (approximately liberal arts) that I attended on Welcome Day two weeks ago (97% of which did not apply to me but I got a bag full of brochures, a free t-shirt, and a plastic cup of wine so it was not a total waste, plus – let’s be honest – what else did I have to do?) was the dean’s response to a student asking what to do if she had to take two classes that happened to be at the same time.

Register for them both, and go to one class one week, the other the other week.

“Generally, attendance is not required. If your professors try to tell you it is, tell them to come talk to the dean.”

The same applies to a lesser degree in my program, French as a foreign language, since in theory language classes are meant to be attended. It is nice to know it won’t be too much of a problem to miss a couple days for my brother’s wedding next week.

I’m also continually surprised at how infrequently people attend capoeira classes. If there is one thing I’m good at in capoeira, it’s showing up. Granted, the upper cords have their own classes to teach, and the intermediate/advanced classes in practice run 2.5-3 hours so maybe one or two of those a week is enough for some people. But it seems like very few people of any level come more than two times a week (I can tell, because I'm always there). Seriously, your teacher is a MESTRE. Go to class. SO ungrateful, these Europeans.

I leave you with an unrelated picture of Ouchy and Lake Geneva.

The Swiss Apartment OR a Mexican, a Serbian and a Malagasy walk into a flat…

As far as housing, the only thing I can complain about so far is the size of my refrigerator, and since I’ve already done that in a previous post, we’ll get on with it.

I got on the wait list for the student apartments last August or September, mostly out of boredom and curiosity on a slow day in Brazil. At the time I was only just starting to toy with the idea of coming here, and it was a maybe-someday thing, surely not before 2011 or 12.

Only problem was, you had to go back to the site and renew every month to keep your place in line, and I couldn’t for the life of me remember what name I could have possibly registered under, until I realized that “nom” means last name, and is quite often placed before the “prenom” which means, literally, "pre-name," and should logically therefore go before the "name," but nobody asked me. I eventually figured it out and got back in line, but I was afraid it was too little too late.

The student housing website announced in June that they were completely full until the end of 2010, and after a few panicked weeks of emailing people advertising expensive and inconvenient rooms and getting no responses other than the rooms were no longer available, I was about to give up on the idea of coming at all. And then, in late July, as if by magic, I got an email from the student housing foundation asking if I wanted a room in a five bedroom, furnished apartment, a block from the lake, a twenty-minute walk to the center of town, with a kitchen and two bathrooms, internet and utilities included and with the cheapest rent I had seen in Lausanne.

Yes. Yes, I did.

I was lucky to get an apartment at all. I was lucky that it’s much nicer and, refrigerator excepted, bigger than I had expected. Although the lease specifically says dishes aer not included, past tenants have left the place well-stocked. We even have a lettuce spinner. What college student needs a lettuce spinner?! We also have two couches so I’m excepting visitors.

And I got lucky with my roommates. For one thing, it’s 2:3 girls:guys, which means I only have to share my bathroom with one other person, and it’s actually two separate rooms (toilet+sink and shower+sink), which is quite convenient. For another, we speak French since three of the four are native speakers (a guy from Paris of Tunisian origin, a girl from just across the boarder from Geneva in France, and a guy from a small town in French-speaking Switzerland), and the fourth (from Italy) speaks French almost as well as he speaks English. Oh, and they’re all pretty cool people too.

It seems that most Swiss studying in Switzerland tend to live at home and commute to the nearest university, so the student housing is almost exclusively international students and often a very diverse mix of nationalities. A more typical situation is that of a Mexican guy I met the other day (through a Spaniard that I had met earlier that day doing laundry), who shares an apartment with students from Iran, Serbia and Madagascar. While I love meeting people from all corners of the world, the downside is that the common language is almost always English, since chances are their English is better than their French and they might not even speak or need to learn French at all, especially the students in the sciency programs. This way I still get to meet people from all over in other apartments in my building (doing laundry, for example), but still spend most of my day speaking French.

And did I mention I’m a block away from the lake? :)

Lemania

The day before I left Illinois, a lovely late August day, I was coming home from visiting friends in Chicago and it was a little dangerous driving down Lake Shore Drive with Lake Michigan being so distractingly gorgeous. All I can say it’s probably for the best that I’m not driving here in Lausanne – I don’t know if I would be able to handle three dimensional street plans and pedestrians who think they own the place even if Lac Léman weren’t there to distract me.

And Lac Léman is there to distract me. Always beautiful, but always in a slightly different way. It has many moods, depending on the time of day and the weather, and I’ve only gotten to see a few of them so far. I sometimes have the urge to stop strangers who aren’t paying attention to it and ask them, “Have you SEEN the lake today?!” But I haven’t. Yet.

The listening comprehension section of today’s French placement exam was an interview with a literature professor at the University of Lausanne who specializes in “the history of travel and of landscapes” (oh, academia), in particular the region around the Lac Léman. So it turns out that at least one person managed to make appreciating the lake a full-time job!

According to the professor, it took the British, who had a long tradition of spending time studying and traveling on the continent, until the 18th century to notice that Switzerland was kinda pretty. They would pass through on their way to Italy with their curtains shut, sleeping, until Jean-Jacques Rousseau set his La Nouvelle Héloïse in a utopia on the shores of Lac Léman and it became “probably the most widely read novel of the century.” Then people started to open their curtains when they went by. Good job, guys.

Monday of federal fasting and personal feasting

I would have probably appreciated today being a federal holiday a little more if it weren’t my 371st day “off” in a row. Not that anyone’s counting. I did still appreciate not having more to do than hang out by the lake, especially with the ridiculously gorgeous weather we are having lately. I’m pretty sure I could make appreciating Lac Léman my full-time job if I could find anyone hiring with that job description, and I might go ahead and keep up the trend of posting a picture of it with every blog entry. It’s literally a block away from my apartment, so I can and do go down to sit by the lake at the slightest whim to read or take pictures or just look at it. I can already tell it’s going to be one of the things I’ll miss the most (if/)when I leave.

Anyway, today is called “Monday of Federal Fasting” (le lundi du jeûne fédéral) and no one I’ve asked could explain what it means other than the day off. I had overestimated my ability to squeeze meals out of what’s left on my refrigerator shelf, and it was close to being a Monday of fasting of another kind, but luckily one grocery store was open, as was the hamburger stand by the lake. I'd been good about cooking cheap things at home, so I splurged on a $6 hamburger (which makes it one of the cheapest prepared food you can find around here). It was pretty tasty, but I couldn't help thinking of the kind of hamburger $6 would buy you at MegaLanches, the best hamburger joint in the town I lived in in Brazil (I think that would have been the one with 3 beef patties, 3 servings of ham, 3 eggs, 3 slices of cheese, potato crisps, lettuce, tomato, and catupiri). Grocery store prices here (meat and imports excepted) are reasonable and comparable to the US, but eating out is not in my budget. One thing I feel this place is sorely missing is cheap street food - burek, acaraje, empanadas, that sort of thing.

Miscellaneous observations 1

Crossing the street here is not like crossing the street where I come from. Except at (green) traffic lights, the cars will stop for you. Only, they expect you to expect them to stop, which means you’re supposed to start walking well BEFORE they stop. Actually, “stop” is not the right word here at all. They wave you on long before they put their foot on the breaks. Sometimes you make it across the street before they would have hit you anyway, and if not, they do slow down a little. If you hesitate to cross, waiting for them to either pass or slow down for you (as we do in my country), they will stop and wait for you, but then, look at all of everyone’s time you’ve just wasted.

It’s actually a fairly efficient way to do things – pedestrians don’t have to wait at all and drivers only wait a few seconds – but like many cultural assumptions, it only works if everyone is on the same page. I still find it unnerving to step out into full-speed oncoming traffic, even as the driver is waving me on, even though I know he will slow down (at the last moment and if absolutely necessary), and I fear for the Swiss pedestrians who go elsewhere and except things to work like they do here.

Most girls (children) seem to wear only bikini bottoms for swimming.

Lac Léman is pretty. So, so pretty. More on that later.

We have a small refrigerator. It is small to begin with, but try dividing it by five. And not five people sharing, either. I think we have five 2-liter packages of milk in there right now, for example. Europeans go to the grocery store more often and get less stuff each time. While I knew that on one level, it’s still kind of difficult to get used to. On the one hand, you probably waste less, but at any given time you have fewer options and fewer ingredients to cook with. The rest of the apartment is much bigger and nicer than I expected, more on that later too.

“Oh, yeah? I have a friend there. He teaches capoeira, too.”

– Mestre Railson, on learning that I’m going to Lausanne

Ya don’t say…

I’m going to study a language that I think is pretty great for a price that I think is pretty great at a university that I think is pretty great in a city that I think is pretty great and train capoeira with a group that I think is pretty great, and also affiliated with mine, and also within striking distance of many other great branches of my group. Yes, there is at least one coincidence in there somewhere. It is not, however, that my mestre happens to have a friend who happens to teach capoeira here.

I remember trying to explain to a friend, way back in 2005, why I was considering taking up capoeira and why I thought it might be a good fit for me, in spite of the way it seems to cater to most of my weaknesses. The gist of the argument was that it seemed like a pretty good way to meet interesting local people when I am living in other countries, which was something I was having trouble doing in Chile. At the time, I had only a vague notion of capoeira, and no way of knowing how true that assessment would turn out to be. But classes seemed a bit pricy, and sure, it’s neat to watch, but you don’t really think I can do it myself, do you? It was another three years before I discovered I could.

Basically, I plan to divide my time between quality language classes and hanging out with receptive native speakers who share a common interest with me (and also staring at the lake). If those aren’t ideal conditions for language learning, I don’t know what are. The only thing that could possibly make for better learnings would be a Swiss boyfriend. Still working on that one.

So even if I didn’t care at all about improving as a capoeirista, I would still want to keep it up here for linguistic and social purposes. Thing is, I do care about improving, a lot, actually, and I’m pretty sure I picked a great place to do just that (more on that later).

I had the foresight to write out directions from my apartment to the academy in case I didn’t have internet access when I first arrived in Lausanne. As it turned out, I had just enough time to unpack a little, shower (I was extra gross because besides the whole transatlantic traveling thing, I hadn’t had the energy to shower in Paris after a double capoeira class), and walk to the academy.

It took about 20 rather difficult minutes (hello, Alps) to get to a place with the same address of the academy, and another 10 to find the academy itself. If I had not seen this video more times than I care to admit, I might not have ever found it. Note, for example, that the blue car at 00:15 is in front of a place which has the same address as the academy, and that the entrance is on a completely different street, up some stairs, down some stairs and around the corner. Getting to my apartment from the train station by taxi was similarly tricky, and the taxi driver was not happy with me that the street numbers went directly from 7 to B21 when we were looking for 9. Whatever reputation the Swiss have for being efficient and organized they did not get from their street addresses.

My main impression after the first day: I have SO much to learn. Of French, but that was a given, and of capoeira – well, that was a given too.

After capoeira, I went to go meet the lake and that was my first day in the land of the Swiss. Pas mal du tout.

“Why would you go to the French part of SWITZERLAND? Why don’t you go to the French part of FRANCE?” – Cortez

After giving more than a little thought to the matter, I chose Paris as the destination and Brazilian Independence Day as the date of my one-way transatlantic flight, with a ticket for a train to Lausanne approximately 26 hours after landing in Charles de Gaulle in my carry-on. It was hard for everyone to believe that I would want to spend eight days in Maryland/DC and only one in Paris, but it worked out well and I’m glad I knew myself well enough to know that I wouldn’t feel up to playing the tourist alone, jetlagged, in transit and hauling my life around everywhere. I enjoyed my short stay and definitely plan to be back a time or two while I’m here, but I was just as glad to get to Lausanne.

The first part of my Parisian day was dedicated to travelly nonsense, of the kind I’m getting much better at but still don’t necessarily enjoy, followed by wandering around looking for a good place to eat my grocery store sandwich at, which I found in the Botanical Gardens. [Edit: I found a good place in the Botanical Garden; I did not find my sandwich there, though that would have been cool.] It was rainy and my foot hurt and I was tired, so I did less wandering than I had planned, and mainly focused on staying awake and dry, both of which were easier said than done. Figuring staying up to around 8pm would be plenty late enough, I made my way to the capoeira academy (where my first teacher’s teacher teaches) in time for the 5:30 class, which, it turned out, didn’t start until the following week. I hung around with CM Maxuel and stole some internets for a while, and ended up staying for both the 7 and the 8:30 classes. Classes were great but exhausting, as if I weren't already exhausted. After almost more hours of capoeira than sleep for the day, I got back to the hostel around 11pm, and went to bed until going back to the train station the next morning and that was my day in the French part of France.

Since then, one of the most common questions I get in Switzerland is why I didn’t go to France instead. Why does everyone ask why? It's not like I went to Bosnia or something! Nothing against France (okay, maybe some things against France…), but part of the reason I liked the idea of coming here was that it is (ever so slightly) off the well-beaten path of Americans studying in Paris (and yes, I realize there is more to France than just Paris, but that's where most of the good capoeira is, so that's where I would have gone). One of the main reasons is that I like the French program at the University of Lausanne (and its price) better than any I've found elsewhere, even after casually toying with the idea of spending a semester studying French somewhere for the past four years or so. Switzerland is a quirky country that I like more the more I learn about it. I think I prefer medium sized cities with (the right kind of) stuff going on to big cities, and Lausanne seems to have (almost) everything I need. For one thing, it has Lake Geneva (called Lac Léman here by us rivals of the Genevans), which you might begin to notice I've developed a soft spot for. You can forgive a lot about a city if it has a lake like that.

CH-CH-CH-Changes

Ten months after I had planned, and in a completely different direction, I finally left again on August 30th, with one hundred thoughtfully (and not-so-thoughtfully) selected pounds of my belongings and a series of one-way tickets. Whether this is a good idea remains to be seen, but I’m willing to give it a shot. Deciding that I wanted to come here was one of the easiest decisions that I have ever made (language classes, being a full-time student at a foreign university, exploring another culture and continent, capoeira, Lake Geneva, sailing, chocolate, traveling? Yes, please.), but I’m still not entirely sure how “maybe someday” became “now” or how I managed to convince myself or anyone else that it was at all a reasonable thing to do.

Careerwise (because I'm supposed to care about these things), I (think I) would like to work in language education and/or international education, and there are probably better things I could be doing to prepare me for that, but I’d still rather be the one learning languages and studying abroad than the teacher or the one dealing with other people’s student visa and vaccination requirements. Between the cheap tuition, subsidized student housing, permission (more or less) to work and high hourly rates for English tutors, I might not even go completely broke, and a year was about as much as I could take of job rejections and surgeries and being unemployed in the suburbs without capoeira or any social life to speak of, so here I am, and this is me starting a blog to chronicle my new life in Switzerland, which is, of course, abbreviated “CH.”

The name comes from my new capoeira name, which was given to me by CM João de Deus over breakfast the day after the batizado during my eight-day layover in Maryland/DC earlier this month.

The conversation went kind of like this:
Me: I actually don’t live in DC, I’m just visiting for the week.
Luana: Are you training somewhere else, then?
Me: Well… yes and no. I started capoeira when I was living here, trained here for a year and a half, and then I moved to Brazil and was training with another group for three months, but broke my foot and until last week I was living with my parents near Chicago, and not training because of my foot and because the closest school was an hour away. I just started playing again this week, here, and day after tomorrow I’m moving to Lausanne and will train with the group there.
[It later came up that I had spent a year in Chile, and that I haven’t spent more than two years in the same place in the seven since high school.]
João de Deus: Do you have a capoeira name yet?
Me: Not really.
João de Deus: Romeira.

It literally means “pilgrim” (I assume it comes from “Rome”?) but the connotation, I'm told, is closer to “wanderer.” I have not done as much wandering as I would have liked, and compared to most capoeiristas, I’ve barely wandered at all, but I’m working on it, I'm working on it.

“Volta do mundo” roughly translated means either a trip around the world or the turn of the earth. In capoeira, it refers to walking a few times around the roda, which capoeirsitas do when they need a breather or to calm down before resuming the game.

For once, I decided to go with a name that wasn’t specific to a particular trip or location, so perhaps this will be a general blog and not necessarily a Swiss one. And even when I am in Switzerland, there will probably be more capoeira-related stuff than normal people care to read about. Deal with it. :)