For the second time in my life, I find myself working in an environment envisioned by a mid-20th century architect to be an ideal academic sanctuary. NCAR had towers with grandiose windows nestled in the peaks of the Front Range of Colorado, with little crevices for thought and corridors and grand halls for conversation, while CERFACS is an inverted world, with pockets of tropical forests on the inside - a concept which makes little sense at the end of summer, but I’m assured is quite pleasant in November.
The last couple of weeks have been a whirlwind of an introduction to French working life. Our work colleagues at MeteoFrance and CERFACS have been welcoming and lovely, but we remain at a loss as to how to organize quite basic parts of our existence: how to pay our taxes or enroll ourselves in healthcare, for example - questions where even for French people it’s annoying and complicated, but for somebody arriving from outside the system with no history and only basic French, it seems practically impossible. As a result, we have about a 50% uncertainty on what our take home pay will be at the end of the year, and we’re trying our best to not to get ill - and after Sam broke both arms off my glasses, I’ve been holding the lenses to my face to see things in the distance like some sort of 18th century aristocrat.
Our induction was relaxed in many ways - the computing and security systems are designed to make working easy, unlike most of the US government facilities we’ve worked for which made it as difficult as possible, and constantly assumed you’re probably a terrorist if you’re not a US citizen. But one point was made clear in the French induction: you needed to take your holidays, and not doing so would effectively amount to a dereliction of duty - and possibly the collapse of the finances of the institution.. We somberly took note and started planning long weekends in the mountains.
My language skills fall way short of where I was hoping to be by this point, but we’re getting by, to some extent, in a social context (and totally failing professionally). One of our major confusions is the tu/vous dilemma. Our French podcast lessons imprinted the idea that the informal “tu” form is to be reserved for only very good friends - which seems to be an oversimplification. We’ve yet to hear anyone use the “vous” form at work, but it’s still unclear what the signal is for when it’s OK to use “tu”, and now it’s slightly too embarrassing to ask. Similarly, there are turns of phrase which are assumed to be universal, but can totally throw you off. For example: I nearly missed my first important meeting because a.m., incredibly annoyingly, is an abbreviation for the afternoon..
Much of my spare time has been spent iterating on the details of the bike commute to work, which we always knew would be the crux of living in a village on the opposite side of town. Although the commute doesn’t take much more time than it did in Boulder, the choice of route has a much more fundamental impact on your mood and safety. Whereas Boulder was all middle class, with reasonable bike and public transport routes but no real ambition to make it better - in Toulouse, different neighborhoods vary enormously in their poverty levels and their urban planning infrastructure (though the two aren’t always correlated). The city feels very much in a state of flux - bursting at the seams with huge growth and grand ideals to move past cars, but with a lot still to do. It’s exciting and frustrating at the same time.
Our life at home has become gradually more sane. The arrival of the entire contents of our huge Boulder house was slightly traumatic, some of it’s more rustic contents seemed slightly incongruous in our embarrassingly IKEA-esque French existence, but Rosie heroically managed to integrate everything into half the space, while simultaneously beginning work for a complex international melange of public institutions, and making industrial quantities of fig jam from the garden.
Sam, meanwhile, seems to have settled nicely with his “Assistante Maternelle”, Lati. He seems already to have adopted a more relaxed Gallic persona, completely unfazed by the language step change and has said his first word in French after a mere week (“Arrête!”, obviously). We’re looking forward to him immanently correcting our grammar.
Comments
Post a Comment