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.
No comments:
Post a Comment