I’m bald, I’m bruised and I’m swollen; I look like a kiwi left behind in a lunchbox in the ruins of Chernobyl.
Continue readingStrasbourg | Moron
I look like a toad. I look like a sack of flour that’s been hung from a butcher’s hook and thumped until it burst. I look like an unkempt ballbag, recoiling in the sunlight for the first time after a long winter bundled up inside a pair of long johns.
Continue readingStrasbourg | Cochon
It’s been five and a half months in Strasbourg. This blows my mind. Half a year here, and still life feels like a waiting room; waiting for my French to improve, waiting for solid friendships to form, waiting for our money to stop fluctuating quite so madly.
Continue readingStrasbourg | A Good Man of Snow
Strasbourg is quilted with snow. We were supposed to go hiking in the mountains yesterday, and we got up early to dress ourselves in layer upon layer of old ski gear. When we got to the train station, however, we found our train cancelled due to some trees having collapsed onto the tracks.
Continue readingStrasbourg | You Must Learn Speaking French
I’m acquiring a lot of physical possessions in France, which is scaring me a bit. On my desk I have a sepia French globe (a gift from Jeanne), a harmonica (a gift from me to myself; extremely ill-advised), and a strange glass ornament containing sand and water and bubbles, the three of which drip over one another to form little orange pyramids whenever I shake the thing, which is every thirty seconds because I have the attention span of a hummingbird.
Continue readingStrasbourg | Paul Oomplah
France’s version of the Job Centre is called Pôle Emploi. It’s pronounced ‘poll ump-LAH’, or something like that. It seems to change every time a French person says it. It certainly changes every time I say it.
Continue readingStrasbourg | Cathédrale pt. 2
Coffee is my kryptonite, except it’s worse than kryptonite because at least Clark Kent doesn’t wake up every morning going ‘Oo a tell thee, a wouldn’t mind eating a nice shard of old krypto’. My relationship with coffee is a testament to the blasted duality of Dan: I love it, I love it so much, and yet it slays me. It ruins me. It gives me powerful, throat-punching acid reflux, and it kickstarts my anxiety with the rumbling force of a shifting tectonic plate. I know all of this, I experience it every single day, and yet… I just cannot say goodbye to my lovely, warm, bad-breath-making drink.
Continue readingStrasbourg | Cathédrale pt. 1
What’s the most elegant place you’ve ever had a panic attack?
Continue readingStrasbourg | The Big Move
Jeanne and I are now fully moved into our new apartment; from here on out we are happy residents of Bitch Street, Strasbourg.
Continue readingAvignon | Pompette
This weekend just gone, Jeanne and I took a train and went to visit some very good friends in the south of France. God I’m so proud of that sentence. Aren’t I classy these days?
Continue reading