I’ve now been a full-time student for nearly three months. I’ve sat in on every class, every exam and gone to the usual places for breaks (ie. Monaco, Cannes, Paris, Versailles) and i’ve even enjoyed it at moments. At the same time, the maths remain a puzzle unsolved and the specific workings of pipes and channels remain as elusive as if I was a molecule trapped within them just trying to find a way out. Luckily, my classmates say they also haven’t found the door yet. What about this door I wonder. Will it lead to enlightenment or disillusion? Will it lead to a natural place of beauty or just some ugly man-made infrastructure? How many doors are there before you finally do make your way out and is the fun really in the end or in the means to getting there? Hmm…so many puzzles and the leaders say we all need a strategy and I wonder if I have one. My inept fluency in English seems to be my only leverage and now there’s just 5 more weeks of class before reaching the summit of my French education. Then England will get its peculiar grip on me and they say that is when the challenge begins.
Yesterday was a great day leaving behind the books and the dormitory to frollick in the forest in a quiet hilly place outside Cannes. The six of us walked to several summits with Amine showing me the edible berries and plants along the way and stopped to have our lunch of baguettes and cheese on a covered reservoir. It was a nice sunny day and we finished it with a classical gypsy concert in Nice. I hadn’t had a little weekend retreat like this to relax my mind from the daily grind in a long time. The open spaces and crisp clean forest air that accompanied us on the winding pathway up that included climbing with our bodily strength up boulders, was a welcoming relief to the cramped stale little cell of my dorm room. It reminded me that the wily ways of nature are always waiting for each of us when we tire of our self-constructed order.
repreve in the city I hopped back on the plane, this time on a $330 flight with Air Berlin. Sprechen Sie Deutsch? I didn’t realize that speaking the language of the airline was a pre-requisite. But I learned more German on that six-hour flight to Dusseldorf than I probably ever will. Even though I again and again said that I didn’t understand, the flight attendant continued serving me soley in her mother tongue, I guess that three-quarters on my mom’s side is to blame. Anyway, I didn’t say Auf wiedersehen for the last time until the end of the second flight and I had arrived in Nice, my destination. A Chinese girl came and picked me up along with an Indian boy. When we emerged to the blistering beach sun blaring down on our already tired and sweaty bodies, he stated repeatedly that he could not handle staying in this place. Even in Indian standards, I guess it’s hot here.
