Talbert Pipes Life in France Adventures Visitors Emily, myself, and our friends Nancy and Dan The Visitors January 2004 marked our second January in France, and it started out considerably better than the previous new year. Our second Christmas holiday season in this strange land was indescribably more enjoyable than that first dismal December of 2002, where Emily and I sat indoors in our living room filled with boxes on Christmas Eve, just staring at the walls and feeling the most profound loneliness and homesickness. January of 2004 was marked by another strange occurance, though - we had our first visit from some of our old friends in the states. We had been visited by a few Americans over the course of 2003 but no one that we knew very well, and this was the first time we had someone from our "old lives" visiting us in our new life. The strangeness of this cannot be overstated. It was BIZARRE. For our first two years here, everything seemed like a bit of a dream (or nightmare, depending) and there was always a faint sense that one day we were going to wake up, and we'd be back in North Carolina. It's a bit hard to describe to anyone who hasn't lived it, but there is definitely a state of being wherein one just isn't sure if life is really happening as perceived - sometimes events twist and take us to such strange and alien places that we're left wondering who put acid in the cola bottle. Thus it was, when we got the call that old friends Nancy and Dan had plane tickets reserved and were flying over to spend a week here. This was really a jolt for a number of reasons. One, somehow we had gotten so immersed in just surviving that the people from our old lives seemed like ghosts. When you're working every waking hour and it is a struggle just to talk to the postman, it tends to keep the mind firmly in the "now". Also, the fact that we could not afford a satellite dish or any form of cable meant that we'd had no English-language television for nearly two years, nor any English radio. It resulted in us being cut off from events to a large degree, where life was one long tunnel of sleep/workshop/unpack/remodel/sleep. We were, and still are, totally unaccustomed to hearing casual speech that we could understand, not to mention the hundred invisible cultural cues that mark each person as a member of a particular mode of behavior. The other problem was the house itself - when we purchased it, it was in a terrible state of disrepair. It was wired and plumbed (and thus much better than the typical French "needs work" wreck sloughed off on the unsuspecting English) but the interior was a disaster of mold and peeling paint and poor workmanship. It looked very much as if someone had gotten a good start on the place, gradually faded into a sort of half-hearted slapdash "splash some primer here and there" approach, and finally had given up altogether to go down to the pub. We had hoped that we could spend our first months here doing all the remodeling and have the place finished and livable, but unfortunately the morass of chaos that occurred when we arrived took all of that time and left us in desparate need to start production immediately, with no time for home improvement. As I write this in April of 2004, we're still nowhere near finished - we've painted some of the upstairs and have a working office, but there is still much to do... including the guest room (totally unfinished and currently a repository of moving crates, paint cans, brushes, and any other thing that still needs a home). Having company was galvanizing because we had to get the place better fixed-up, and fast. Over the course of a few weeks, I refinished the spiral staircase from living room to attic, repainted the downstairs area, and generally transformed the place from "abandoned warehouse" to "going to be a cozy home one of these days". All of this, however, pales in comparison to the total weirdness of seeing two old friends arrive at the St. Nazaire train station. It was, no joke, much like seeing ghosts - it wouldn't have been any more surreal to have seen the ghost of my dead grandfather hop off the train with backpack and sneakers. In hindsight, over the course of that whole week, our perception finally upshifted from a sort of first-gear crawl to a smoother, cruising form of realization that A) all the stuff from North Carolina was still there and it wasn't some distant dream, and B) we really were living here now and it wasn't some extended psychedelic trip. To understand the amazing sense of comfortable familiarity of one's "own kind", it is essential to spend a long period of time cut off in an alien culture. Only after years adrift in a sea of strange manners and incomprehensible expectations can one really appreciate the sheer joy in being able to tell a casual joke and have your company not only understand it immediately, but also firmly grasp the whole cultural genre that the humor is grounded in. (We had foreshadowing of this in October of 2003, when our English friends Trish and Steve visited us. At some point I made a small joke to Emily in my best Hank Hill imitation, and Steve immediately caught it and said, "King of the Hill". After I collected my eyeballs with Emily's garden trowel, I realized it had been a long time since I had talked to anyone with shared cultural references...) So, we had a week of North Carolina jokes and news, current events, and we totally lost our fragile and hard-fought "neutral English". This is what English speakers in foreign climes must use, and it takes concentration... one must avoid contractions, speak slowly and clearly, avoid accents, and above all avoid slang. Even when talking to French locals who have a good understanding of English (and there are many), one still has to say, "Hello, how are you and your family today?" instead of, "Hey, how y'all doin?" or "Howzitgoin?" We discovered this fact when we took our friends to Emily's English language class (she teaches advanced English now, for our village). We had to spend the evening slapping ourselves because we kept falling back into "gonna" and so forth. For some mad reason, Nancy and Dan chose to visit Brittany in January, an experience that can be replicated by getting into your shower with all your clothes on, for much less cost. It rained the whole time they were here but that was fine, as it was good just to have familiar people around. Also, thankfully, Nancy and Dan are like us in the sense that they are undaunted by such trivial setbacks, and are quite capable of having a damned good time even if it IS 20 degrees outside and pouring. The picture above is from a coastal birdwatching walk - they birdwatch, I walk. All things considered, it was an excellent visit that had much more of an impact than one would imagine. As I write this tonight, I'm typing in our newly-refinished library room where we have finally been able to unpack all the books we brought with us (the simple joy of being able to browse for a book on a shelf can't be explained unless you've spent 2 years wondering which box you need to dig through in the attic). Since this is obviously not a dream, we may as well learn to live here...