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The version of WordPress used on the W&M blogs service is (understandably) limited, so since I wanted to do more with my blog visually, I am moving it to a regular wordpress address: currently here. All the former posts have been copied over, but I won’t be copying new postings on here.

See you over there!

In an effort to completely saturate every social media outlet, and as a result of my current transient employment status, I have decided to bring back this blog. I will be doing a lot of reading over the next few weeks in preparation for the Foreign Service Officer Test and as a means of keeping busy, so the scope of posts will probably widen from the original France-centric format.

Most of what I write will still most likely be viewed through the prisms of post-colonialism, constructivism, and anti-Orientalism that have been sculpted through my educational and professional experiences.

I want to preface by saying that I apologize for not writing in the past few months. I’ve had a lot going on here in France, and I sort of got pessimistic about the fact that few people read anything I write, but I decided that it was just as important for myself to have a space to write at length about issues which interest me, using my experiences in France as a sort of contextual backdrop. This post is in response to an op-ed in the New York Times by Thomas L. Friedman, who some may know as the author of The World is Flat and The Lexus and the Olive Tree. I usually love Friedman’s work, but this one struck a nerve somewhere deep inside me and merited a response. (Be warned that it is kind of long.)

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WARNING: This is a personal, wishy-washy post. Don’t expect to learn anything.

It was bound to happen, and not even the thousand Lyonnaise cathedrals I pass on my way to school could stop the momentum with which this certain malaise has taken over my psychological well-being. I feel like a namby-pamby for bringing it up, but I think it’s definitely a part of the experience of living abroad.

It’s not Novel A1N1 Influenza, though by the amount of coverage it’s getting in the press, I half expect to find my feet replaced with severely un-Kosher, un-Halal pigs’ trotters. (Did you know that France has both the largest Jewish and Muslim populations in all of Western Europe?)

It’s homesickness.

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I’m not coherent enough to write another deep post. So some uncharacteristic levity and brevity will be taken.

Ask an American what the Frenchiest French things fresh from France are, and she’ll probably list off some of the following:

• Wine, including Champagne;
• Cheese, including Brie;
• Pastries, including croissants;
• Snootiness, including disdain for those who don’t speak French.

These are all more or less true.

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Something that has stuck me since coming to France is the frankness and easiness with which people dispense racially-charged drivel. White French people from housewives to professors to men on the street seem to see no problem in labeling a whole immigrant population as cheap or sexually promiscuous or unhealthy or ruining the economy.

First, a quick primer in the racial composition of France.

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I got to Lyon just fine after a bit of scrambling. My first flight was delayed, so instead of going from Richmond to JFK to Lyon, I ended up going from Richmond to Atlanta to Madrid to Lyon. And my layover at Atlanta turned out to be only about 10 minutes long––running to the gate was my daily exercise.

My checked bag didn’t arrive with me, but I’m not too upset. It’s one less thing to have to carry around the city with me before moving in to my home-stay tomorrow. The airline even gave me a little toiletry bag with disgusting-tasting toothpaste and a T-shirt emblazoned with the SkyTeam logo. I think I’ll take a rain check on advertising which airline company lost my stuff.

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I started taking French classes in 7th grade at Toano Middle School (go Tigers!); the year was 2001.

Two weeks or so into the school year, one of the biggest events in modern history occurred: the September 11 suicide attacks in New York and Washington.

When our principal announced the situation over the loudspeaker during my English class, no one really understood the gravity of the attacks, but many of us immediately started crying. We couldn’t see photos or videos or hear official accounts of what had happened; we just knew that it was serious, and we felt vulnerable.

By the end of eighth grade, in what felt to a preteen me like a series of quickly made decisions, the US had attacked Afghanistan and invaded Iraq, places that I hadn’t really even heard of.

When France, under Jacques Chirac, objected to the invasion, the US backlashed in one of the weirdest ways possible, by renaming purportedly “French” foods on the cafeteria menus at Congress.

French fries became Freedom fries.

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Allez, viens! (Translation: Come on, let’s go!)

Weird middle school French textbooks were my very first real exposure to la langue française. In them, an ethnically diverse cast of French teenagers from the 1990′s discussed their favorite hobbies and ate super-phallic French hot dogs.

Now, at a ripe 20 years of age, I am ready to join the Luciens and Solanges and Thuys (the requisite Vietnamese girl to represent France’s ex-colonial empire––Africa is still too polemical) who I came to know so well in gathering a beginning grasp of French. I am ready to study beside them, ride public bicycles beside them, and (most excitingly) eat beside them.

Maybe, in between bites of poulet rôti and tarte tatin, I’ll even relax my American bourgeois dietary standards and try a phallic hot dog in France’s gastronomic capital.