L'auberge espagnole: Part Deux

L’auberge espagnole (The Spanish Hostel) is a film I watched my senior year of high school for a French class project. It’s about Xavier, a French college student who spends a year studying abroad in Spain with the Erasmus program. After a horrendously difficult apartment search (which many of my fellow teaching assistants are now suffering through, sorry!), Xavier ends up living in a flat with 6 other Erasmus students from all over Europe. The movie follows the roommates’ adventures living in a foreign country, learning a new language, and trying to understand each other and their cultures.

In high school, I remember thinking I would love to live in an international apartment like Xavier. Now, I actually am. In the apartment provided by my school, I am living with the school’s German and Arabic teaching assistants. The German assistant, Ramona, is from Austria and the Arabic assistant, Aya, comes from Palestine. The last time I posted, I only had one roommate, Ramona. Wednesday night, when Ramona and I returned from a day of being tourists and exploring Lyon, we opened the door to find “surprise!” (again), we had a new roommate, Aya, who had been alone in our apartment all day wondering if she actually had other roommates! Plus, we will eventually be getting one more roommate, although right now it’s all up in the air as to whether our fourth and final roommate will be from Spain, the UK, or another Palestinian. We just have to wait and see. I imagine we’ll probably come home again one night to find the fourth room occupied.

Most of my past week has been spent getting to know my new roommates. Although we unfortunately don’t have a common room or living room in our apartment, we’ve become completely comfortable hanging out in each others’ rooms. Just like in the film, we try to speak mostly French (emphasis on try), but we really end up speaking a mixture of French and English (which they both speak fluently, better than their French actually, putting me to shame as a speaker of only two languages) with frequent games of charades thrown in to help us understand each other. Sometimes we even use pictures. Regardless of the language barriers, we’ve been having a great time, or at least I have!

We come from three different, basically polar opposite backgrounds, but we all bond over shared experiences getting started here in Lyon. I really appreciate having two people who come with me to the bank or the grocery store. On their first days here, I got to play tour guide a bit since I had been living here for a few days already. But now we help each other find the nearest laundromat or understand our cell phone plans. We complain together about complicated French bureaucracy and laugh together when we enter and exit the metro three times before finding where we want to go.

The three of us have also come to Lyon with different friends, some from home and some we’ve just met through our programs, but we always take each other along to get togethers with friends around town. So our little international circle of friends in Lyon just keeps getting bigger! On Friday night last week, there was a massive get together of all the teaching assistants in Lyon, from every language. In all, I think there was about 50-60 people there! I had a great time meeting people from literally all over the world, (England, Russia, Germany, Canada, New Zealand and more!) , as we spent the night mingling on the terrace of a café located in the shadow of the beautiful Cathedral St. Jean.

Cathedral St. Jean

Besides other meet-ups with friends I met on Friday night, I’ve also been making French friends. A friend, Spencer, who I met in the US through Liz and Korey (my best friend from Pittsburgh and her husband) actually is dating a Lyon resident, Harmony. Harmony and I met up for a typical French afternoon at a café on Friday, spending hours chatting in the sunlight. Then Saturday she brought me along to an afternoon BBQ with her university friends. It was great fun seeing what a French BBQ is like. They call it a BBQ because they grill hotdogs on a mini charcoal grill, put them on ripped off pieces of baguette, and eat them with spicy mustard spread. I must say, they were better than most American hot dogs in my book. I also had another great day getting to know some native Lyonnais.

All together, my week was spent meeting new friends at cafés and restaurants, running errands around town, and not working. I did accomplish some important steps in getting settled here. I got a cell phone, filled out paperwork, did major grocery shopping, and reopened my French bank account (which I found out had 121 Euros in it I didn’t know about!). What I have not been doing is working. I am basically on a paid vacation right now. Even though I was supposed to have started on Thursday, the teacher in charge of my schedule at my school hasn’t made it yet. He told me not to worry about working or observing any classes until I get my schedule. When that will be? TBD. Until that happens, I love getting acquainted with international friends and the city of Lyon.

A view of Lyon from a top its highest hill