Living in limbo—and liking it

Papers rustle. Someone sneezes.

I check my watch with a kind of tired reflex. I’ve been checking it and rechecking it so often that I’ve caught myself glancing at it within the same minute several times already. This time, though, as I’m checking my watch, something changes. It’s been a fully forty-five minutes since the three hour lecture was meant to begin, and it seems that everyone was waiting for this—an appropriate time spent waiting for the professor to arrive, clear his throat into the microphone at the amphitheatre’s podium, and launch himself into his lecture on sixteenth and seventeenth century French literature—but it’s clear now that the waiting is over; no one’s coming.

People straighten their backs and shrug on their coats, scarves, and gloves, chattering in a flurry of rapid French that I understand in snatches as I put away my notebook purchased that morning at Gibert Joseph. Its pages, striped in a series of tiny lines and grids, seem to swallow up my writing as soon as I put it down into the kind of chaos of the blue, red, and white of the page. I hadn’t written much—no notes for class yet to speak of—but as I waited, I’d jotted down some reminders to myself, a kind of mini-to do list that slanted wildly in this and that direction across the page. (Since then, I’ve seen that many French students use a ruler while taking notes, underlining the line in the sea of them that they plan to use as the principal one. Given the difficulties I’ve had with my own notes, I understand why.)

At this point, I don’t have the wisdom—hah!—another full week and a half of classes will give me, and, still somewhat stunned by the non-arrival of the professor for my very first class away from Georgetown, I follow the crowd out onto the steps surrounding the building. Students alternately light up cigarettes and lambast the professor, who is, according to what I overhear from several circles of friends, nul. Not yet confident enough to join in, I veer around the plumes of smoke and start my way back to the metro.

This is…different, I think to myself, remembering the warning I’d gotten from an orientation staff member that things, undoubtedly, would be different in the French system, but that the best approach was simply to look at the differences between the American and French system as just that, differences, and not in terms of “better” or “worse.”

At the time, I’d shrugged off her advice, but in the week that’s followed that first class—a week of getting endlessly lost in the labyrinthine hallways and more than fifteen separate staircases of the Sorbonne (if you’ve been reading my other posts, getting lost seems to be a bit of a common theme), of showing up to a TD, (travaux dirigés) a rough equivalent of an American discussion section minus the discussion, and finding out that the class has been canceled altogether, and, in what I thought would be a repeat performance of the absent professor, waiting thirty five minutes in a crowded, overheated classroom for a professor to arrive (this time, unlike the first, she did arrive, full of apologies)—I’ve experienced quite a few “differences” in the respective university systems, and, surprisingly enough, I’ve learned to live with them and the uncertainty that comes along with never quite knowing what to expect.

A friend of mine here mentioned that she feels a bit as if she’s living in limbo, and I agree with her—my time in Paris has been a bit of a jumble of balancing seeing the city, adjusting to cultural and linguistic differences, starting classes and balancing all of these obligations with my life that hasn’t stopped in the United States. Still, for all of the inconveniences and my constant feeling that I’m about five years old in the patient, tolerant presence of the grown-ups, I’ve gotten the chance to see and hear and experience so many great and beautiful things during my time here in Paris. Even the forty-five minutes spent waiting for my professor who never arrived wasn’t a waste of time; I ended up striking up a friendly conversation with the girl sitting next to me, an ERASMUS student from Germany who turned out to be taking another class with me later in the week.

I know I’ll only have to wait and see if the rest of my semester promises the same kind of daily “surprises,” but at least I know now that I can live with them—and enjoy their hidden perks. In the case of that first canceled class, it was an unexpected free afternoon spent browsing aimlessly around the Louvre, drinking an espresso in the museum café, and walking back to my host family’s apartment just before dark, not at all an unpleasant alternative to a three hour lecture.