Tiny Cities Made of Awesome

This post risks flailing about in unanchored nostalgia, if I'm not careful. I was in Rouen last weekend and, oh dear, was it ever wonderful. Elements that made it so:

1. Pauline. She and I became friends in those first few terrifying weeks of my student exchange in 2000. I was supposed to have been assigned to my exchange partner's class, but some bureaucratic slip landed me instead in a class of complete strangers. I felt like someone had shoved me into a gladiator arena full of snarling tigers and said, "Go!". I tried to explain this mistake to the school administration, and as I stood near a window that looked over the drizzly school courtyard and waited for my turn in the office, I thought I would get comfort from looking at a photo of my jerkfaced boyfriend at the time (which of course only made me feel worse). That mental snapshot of me is filed into the Most Pathetic Moments drawer of my brain, and will never go away. BUT THEN: Pauline. I hope I didn't cling too desperately to her in those early days. If I did, I know she's graceful enough not to say so now. We kept in touch over the years and even though she and her boyfriend live in Stockholm now, some flash of divinity brought her to Rouen on the very weekend that I proposed to visit. Her family's incredible sense of humour, camaraderie, and damn good cooking felt amazing. I loved it. We ate, we laughed, I talked French, they pretended it was good. If I was a character in a video game with little status bars monitoring my emotional health, then the "family" bar, which was shrinking into the red last week, got replenished in Rouen.

2. Seeing the clock again. Oh, the number of pain-au-chocolats I ate under there with the Norwegian exchange students. Oh, the number of times I stood there with Mark waiting for the rain to slow. The number of postcards I bought from the stand that you can see. The number of people I thought of when I walked below it. The way it looks to me now.


4. The weather. There were sunglasses! And t-shirts! And angry protestors! You can see them in this picture, with their bright green flags.

And this is taken from the top of Pauline's street. The colour of the trees reminded me of the way Ontario must look right now...


3. BIKES FOR RENT. This has to be the greatest tranportational invention of all time. All over the city there are "stations" where you punch a bunch of numbers into an ATM-type machine, and a bike is automatically released from its lock and ready for you to use. IT IS INCREDIBLE. Here are the bikes:

Why don't all cities do this??? The best part: a bike for 24hrs costs ONE EURO. Which is a buck fifty. And if you're like us and you switch to a new bike at every station, IT'S FREE.

Us on our bikes:


4. Seeing my old school. The street that runs alongside it is crazy-narrow so it's hard to get a clear shot, but in this picture you can at least see the walls of the school along the left-hand side. Yes, walls! Just like the gates at Faidherbe! I think some disgruntled foreman's assistant switched the school blueprints with the prison blueprints back in the mystical times when these places were built. Srsly.

And this is The Door To Knowledge. I love how this door is still fighting to look old and distinguished, despite the graffiti and garbage can and forbidding sticker. Go, door!

5. Seeing all those old buildings that look like they're made out of sticks of wood. They are everywhere in Rouen!

6. Carrot Tree!
7. This car. They were everywhere when I used to live in France, but since then they've become kind of vintage. But finally I saw one! In Rouen!!

8. This random marathon that we discovered on our bikes. It gave me a happy little surge of home, thinking of my insane family and how much they like to compete in those things...


Rouen, in a nutshell.

I think I might have figured out how to post a video here. Maybe. With some glitches. Here (I hope) is a video taken from my bike as I wobbled behind Pauline, towards the Church of Joan of Arc; where she was burned at the stake. I wish I could have taken a video on the Carrot Tree street, because it was incredibly beautiful and more typical of Rouen than the one you'll see here, but it was also super narrow and biking while videotaping there probably would have resulted in me landing camera-first in the tiny little stream we were following. BTW, I can't stand to watch this video because of the part where I talk. It sounds awful and I didn't know the word for "stake" in French. But whatever. What's a blog for, but self-humiliation?



Got a little video-happy and decided to post that second one, of Alejandra and I doing a bad job of trying to stay cool in the face of a camera. This was only a day or two after I arrived in Lille, so I was too stunned to speak very well. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Aside: the only unfortunate thing about Rouen is that I left my white shirt there, the one I'm wearing in that video under the purple sweater. Now my teacherly ensemble of sweater-and-white-collar is impossible!