Beaune 1

Soon after our arrival in Dijon we heard that the beautiful Côte d’Or that we could gaze at from our unit at the fac had wineries enough for an army. The country trains from Dijon go through the heart of this wine country to Nuits St. Georges and Beaune. Being lovers of fine Australian wine (and not so fine Australian wine that is still fine because it’s Australian), we were excited about visiting one of the best known wine regions of France to see what all the fuss was about. In Australia we get French wine but it’s normally not very nice (unless you pay outrageous prices for the good stuff).

One hot Sunday, just two weeks into our stay, we took the train to Beaune. First on our list of things to visit was the Hôtel Dieu or Hospices de Beaune (our priority was to go to one of the many wine merchants for a wine tasting but it was before midday and we have to have some principles about drinking, don’t we?).

The Hôtel Dieu was built in the 15th century as a hospital for the poor who were suffering from sickness and famine after the Hundred Years War. We paid our €5 each and took our pamphlets in French and English, explaining the many rooms and halls of the hospital. It was actually used as a hospital until the 1970s. Now it has been opened up for the public to visit. It really is a beautiful example of medieval architecture. The most impressive part of the place is the courtyard where you can stare in wonder at the glazed coloured roof tiles, which were apparently the first in the area to be arranged in the famous geometric patterns that have come to be recognised as typically Burgundian.

After having lunch (smartly eating before going drinking, I mean, wine tasting), we proceeded to the Marché aux Vins and for €9 got to taste 4 white wines and 14 red wines. We thought at first that this was a bit hefty. But then we were told that we could proceed unaccompanied and try as much of the wine as we wanted, as long as we were finished within about an hour. Not a bad deal in my opinion.

The first half of the tasting is below ground in the cellars and as you walk from one wine to the next you pass barrels of ageing wine. There’s also a display of really old wines (behind locked bars of course) with their name and year tagged on them. The oldest we saw was from 1915. It was definitely impressive, wish we could have tried those wines in our visit! Above the cellar was the more expensive and presumably better selection of wines (prices all higher than €20 a bottle), but in our opinion some of the cheaper bottles were nicer. I have a feeling though that we had our Australian wine hats on and not our French ones.

I know for a fact now that Australian and French wines can’t be compared. Having developed my taste for wine in Australia, I tend to enjoy a full-bodied tannin-filled wine. No light fruity wines for me thank you very much. That’s why every time I tried French wine in the past I really didn’t like it. Tasted a bit metallic.

But I discovered through lack of Australian wine while living in France (there’s so much of the French stuff that they don’t need to sell wine from anywhere else) that when you don’t compare the two, French wine can actually be thoroughly enjoyed. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I like French wine better than Australian wine. I don’t. But I can appreciate it now that I’ve been able to live with it for a year and it’s not as bad as I originally thought. I just don my French wine hat and Bob’s your uncle (or Bernard is in my case).

Anyway, we walked away from the Marché Aux Vins in Beaune with a few bottles of nice wine that promptly got put under the lounge to be transported later in the year back to Australia for long-term storage.

Summer #1

Did you know that Dijon is the French city the furthest from any sea in France? When people found out we came from Sydney, we were often asked how we would cope living in Dijon given the above information. We were told that to get to any large body of water, you have to travel 500km to the south to Marseille, 630km to Nantes in the west, 500km to Le Havre in the northwest and don’t even bother about looking to the east. And that’s all travelling by the motorways. If you are in any way poorer than rich, you can add a whole lot of extra time by going by the slower Routes Nationales! For a couple of Aussies who had grown up in the fresh sea air of Sydney, the prospect of not being near the ocean, and most importantly, a beach, kind of scared us (well me anyway). So imagine how we felt when we arrived in Dijon to be told the news that there was no water near us.

Then the summer hit. It seemed that there were varying opinions on how hot it actually got near us but some thermometers actually said 38°C. (It did get up to 45°C but we’d escaped to London by that stage.) It was an indescribable heat, oppressive and lethargic. A heat that made you sweat more even if you were just rolling over in bed to get out of your wet sweat patch. A heat that came inside and smothered you as soon as you opened the windows with the intention of cooling the place down. The only time the heat subsided was at 5am in the morning just as the sun, the source of the heat itself, was about to rise for another day of torture. The only place with air conditioning to escape the heat and humidity was in the Galleries Lafayette department store and that was packed! There wasn’t even a body of water we could go and cool off in. Except of course if you counted the Lac Kir and the Cap Vert water centre. But the first from a distance looked filthy and not safe to swim in (even though we did see some people around its banks later in the summer), and the second you had to fork out €8.50 to get in and then there’s some French regulation that nobody’s allowed to wear board shorts, not even boys. Mmm. A real bargain. Paying to swim and not even having the choice of what to swim in? Doesn’t compute in an Australian’s brain. Needless to say we didn’t bother with either. In the end we had to settle for the River Thames in London! But we didn’t swim in it of course…errrgh!

Dream Apparte

As part of my effort to get myself not bored, I took to looking in the classifieds for prospective apartments. One day I circled an ad for a two-bedroom apartment in the centre of town, but not really understanding the codes used for the number of bedrooms, facilities etc in real estate classifieds, I kind of forgot about it. One weekend we happened to walk past a real estate agent and went in to ask about the process for renting an apartment. We were told we had several alternatives. One would be to go directly through the owner in a private agreement. Another would be to go through an agent who organised everything and then added their fee to the monthly rent. The third option was to register with these guys for a fee and they would give us a list of places for rent that fit our requirements. They would then give us the details of places we were interested in and leave us to organise any meetings or viewings with the owner. It seemed that we would be paying this agent to be a source of information rather than a help in finding our dream apartment. We didn’t like the idea of paying someone to do what we could do ourselves for free so in the end we sat on our tails and stalled the apartment-finding process while we considered what to do.

A few days later Michael saw my circled advertisement and we tried to find it the next time we were walking in town. It was in a street called Rue Musette, which to our delight was the exact same street that had enchanted us on our first night in Dijon! We thought we should have a look before making a decision so we called the owner from where we thought the apartment was (there was no building number on the ad) and five minutes later we were being shown around. It was perfect! It had been redone only a year before so the paint was fresh and modern, and the bathroom was clean and, my favourite bathroom colour, blue! We were in love. It even had wooden floors - or so Michael thought – he only realised that it was lino about 3 weeks after moving in!

But we had a problem. The location and the price, although on the higher end of our budget, were right. But we’d said we’d have a look at another place that someone from uni had suggested, because they were moving out soon. We had our hearts set on Rue Musette and we didn’t want to miss out on it. But we also didn’t want to say yes in case the other place was better. I felt like we were little kids standing in front of the lolly counter at the corner shop, undecided about which lolly to choose for our lolly bag!

We were in a real bind and all we knew was that we had to act fast. So we organised a viewing of the other place and hoped that Rue Musette didn’t get snapped up in the meantime. You can guess what’s coming, can’t you? Yes, thank the lucky stars! The other place was a dump, I mean, totally unsuitable. Up several winding old staircases into the attic area of the building, it had a half size bedroom that wouldn’t fit a double bed in it and a second bedroom that had just enough room for the built-in bunks in it. The living area and kitchen were the only things going for it, although to get from there to the bedrooms you had to go back out into the stairwell and around the corner. I can’t even remember if there was a toilet or not! No, we’d found our dream home and no matter how great this attic apartment could have been, it would not change our minds. We called the owner of Rue Musette the next day and arranged to sign the contracts as soon as possible.

The following weekend we met with our future landlord, Mr Berthaud, at a café in the centre of town, right under Dijon’s very own Arc de Triomphe, actually called the Porte Guillaume. Here, we drank coffee and tried to decipher the terms and conditions of the contract. Luckily Mr Berthaud was friendly and helpful otherwise we could have been signing our lives away without knowing it!

Contracts signed, we started to feel a bit edgy, that we might have been too hasty in signing. We’d been told by some friends that it was hard to find good apartments in Dijon, that they had looked at up to 20 places before finally finding something acceptable. We were worried that we’d found something acceptable first time round and what if it was a mistake? So we asked Mr Berthaud if we could look again at the apartment just to be sure. Of course we knew all along that we’d been lucky when we found Rue Musette. It looked just the same as when we saw it the first time. And because we were new to the country/city/area, Mr Berthaud offered to take us on a tour of central Dijon! I bet there aren’t too many people out there who can say that their landlord took them on a tour of their town!

Pondering #1: To kiss or not to kiss

Most Australians shake hands to say hello or nice to meet you. We don’t usually kiss unless it’s girls and we already know each other (or we’re a couple). Guys NEVER kiss each other (not including couples). It's just not done (not manly enough I suspect). 

My family always kisses hello and goodbye with other French people. Men and women kiss each other and women and women kiss each other. Men sometimes kiss each other if they haven’t seen one another for a long time or if they are congratulating someone on something pretty important. And I’m not talking about French kissing. Normal greetings kissing, pecks on the cheeks. I thought that when we got to France I’d have the kissing thing sorted for sure. Surely sorted it was not.

In most of Burgundy, it’s polite to kiss even if someone is meeting you for the first time. When saying hello and goodbye it is polite to give 2 kisses. Older generations of men kiss each other hello and goodbye. But not everyone living in Dijon is originally from Burgundy and it seems that the number of kisses that you greet someone with depends on which region of France you come from. This is fine when two people come from the same region. There is no confusion. The confusion comes when two people meet and are not from the same area of France.

Take my family, for example, which is from the centre of France near the Loire Valley. We kiss 4 times. Our friend was from Brittany and he kissed 3 times. How do you know how many kisses to give? Do you just keep kissing until someone pulls away (you’d have to know them pretty well)?

I always thought that the kissing thing in France was an older generation thing, that the younger generations wouldn’t really be into physical contact so much. But I was wrong! At Michael’s lab, where students were in their early twenties, kissing is the norm, but only in social situations. If you’re both at work, kissing is not performed. If you are outside of work you kiss and if someone not from your work comes to your work you kiss. Spinning your head? Well consider this: before you even get to the kissing part, you have to work out which side you’re supposed to start on! Now you can see where the Eskimo kiss (picture nose rubbing) comes from – not from the North Pole but from France!

I have to say that it took many trials and many errors to get used to the number of kisses, which side to start and when it was appropriate to kiss at all. It was easier for me because I’m a girl. Once it’s been established that kissing is to occur, I just kiss everyone. For Michael it was harder to adapt. He had to gauge whether it was appropriate to kiss someone he’d only just met. He had many embarrassing moments of hesitation (possible offence to the girl for not wanting to kiss her) and just going for it when she hesitated (maybe he wasn’t supposed to). My advice in these situations is you have to just follow the experts’ lead. If they keep kissing past the 2 Dijon kisses, just go with the flow. After all, even the French get confused between themselves and they just laugh about it.

It's a lonely life a la fac

While it was nice to have temporary accommodation organised, the unit turned out to be the unit from hell! I had never lived on campus during my uni days in Australia and boy am I glad if that’s what it’s like! Our new ‘home’ had 2 big rooms and a separate bathroom and kitchen. They were the only positive things about it. By way of furniture, it had 2 of everything: two single beds with two hard foam mattresses, two bookshelves, two bedside tables, two desks and two chairs, all stain proof and very simple. It had a little table about the size you get in a squishy restaurant – very romantic for 2 but impossible for any more than that. The floors were lino-covered and were extremely slippery and squeaky with or without shoes (again stain proof!).

We soon got sick of that horrible sterile place and decided we needed to make it a bit more homely. So we hired a truck and went around to troc places that sold second hand goods. In French the word troc means trade or barter. The idea with these shops is that people take their second-hand goods along and the shop gets a commission if they’re sold. It means that items can be sold for less, although it doesn’t necessarily mean that they are guaranteed to work. Luckily they have a 24hr returns policy so we were able to return the washing machine that didn’t work. But unluckily it’s only a 24hr returns policy and we didn’t work out that the dryer wasn’t working properly until a few days later and then had to live with a piece of useless furniture for the rest of our stay.

Living on campus (or à la fac as they say in French) did have its advantages (no, really). The Côte d'Or was about 30km away - the big wineries all situated in a line along the side of a hilly stretch of countryside. Our block of units was a concrete monstrosity but from our top floor windows we could actually see the Côte d’Or (but not touch it. Shame!). And it was fairly quiet (except for the Mirage fighter jets doing flybys throughout the day) but this could have been because all the students had left for the summer. I guess that’s all the advantages it had. Not many really. It had more negative points. Especially when the heat started in mid-June and the unit became a furnace day and night. 

Life for me at the fac was strange and dreamlike and very lonely. As with a lot of universities around the world, the University of Burgundy was situated on the outskirts of town and I soon tired of being so far away from anything interesting. Even the purchase of a stereo and TV from one of the local trocs (thankfully fully functional) so I could watch crappy daytime French shows and dance to really repetitive French music didn’t help. My days became a routine of seeing Michael off to work every day and settling down to boredom. Oh, I did things to combat it, like going in to have lunch with Michael and his new colleagues, but it somehow felt like I was intruding, especially when they all talked about work. I also went shopping or used Michael’s computer in his office to email friends and family but even this became awkward when one day his crazy (psychotic) roommate who was doing her PhD came in and accused me of cracking her computer password and stealing her files! Why?? (She went on to finish and obtain her doctorate, even though many thought her work didn’t deserve it, and continued to haunt everyone in the department by sending them abusive emails, including the department head! She really knew how to entertain people, even if she thought she was being serious!)

No matter what I did, I always returned to the unit feeling more lonely than before. This was not the way I thought my first month living in Dijon would turn out. We had to do something about finding a more permanent apartment in a more interesting part of town. 

Arrivals

We finally arrived in Dijon on a Monday evening and were met at the train station by Michael’s supervisor, Ronald. He’d been waiting for us to let him know when we were arriving and had been a bit confused when Michael told him we didn’t know! As he drove us to our hotel where we’d be spending our first night in Dijon, we used what little energy we had left to tell him in French all about our ordeal getting there and he finally nodded in understanding, although I don’t think he really did.

As I watched the buildings whizzing by, I found myself taking in as much as I could, as though we were just passing through. It was the strangest feeling, seeing a town for the first time and realising that we weren’t just going to stay for a few days. It dawned on me that we were finally there, that we had actually packed up our lives in Australia and moved to the other side of the world. And this blur of strangeness flying past us was our new hometown.

Ronald left us at the Hôtel Jacquemart in the middle of town and that night we explored a little with the help of a bad map. It was kind of an explore-by-feel. We walked down cobblestone streets and gazed at the stone buildings with wooden frames on the outsides. We came across a pretty square with a fountain in the middle and French signs in all the windows of the surrounding shops and cafes, making it strikingly obvious that we weren’t in good old suburban Sydney anymore. At one point, we wandered up a beautiful cobblestone street filled with little speciality shops. It was one of the most pretty places I’d ever seen and so beautifully silent in its desertedness. I remember saying to ourselves that this was the kind of place we wanted to live in.

The next day Ronald came and picked us up. We were refreshed and ready to start our new lives. First thing to do was open a bank account so we could get accommodation. Ronald had organised a student apartment on campus, and after helping us with the bank account and dropping off our luggage at the new apartment, he took us to the local Carrefour shopping centre.

Now, when I think of a shopping centre in Australia, I think of a couple of big department stores and lots of little independent shops all in the one centre. In France, they have what they call the hypermarché. This is a massive supermarket that sells everything from food and clothes to electrical goods and gardening tools. It’s amazing and absolutely great to get lost in! So this is where Ronald took us on our first day in Dijon to buy our food and essential household items. We were set! 

Introducing

I’d always wanted to live overseas for a while. I studied Japanese and French at university, which of course led to a wealth of career choices, namely none! So I was all for going to Japan for a year of teaching English after my uni days were over because I’d heard it paid really well (and I wanted to use my Japanese skills of course…). My husband, Michael, also wanted to do something similar but when I was ready, he was in the throes of his PhD and couldn’t afford to take time off to live overseas before his thesis was done. So we agreed to consider a year in Japan after he’d finished and I went out to find a job.

The job I got wasn’t exactly the flight attendant job I’d secretly dreamed of but it was in the airline industry and I got to pretend that the few people I came across with whom I could show off my language skills proved that my university degree was worth the time and money involved. For five and a half years we travelled around during our holidays, seeing places that took our fancy (and that were cheap to get to using my airline benefits!). Finally, as he came to the end of his PhD, Michael’s sights were set more on the career aspect of an overseas jaunt and decided that Japan provided little opportunity for him. He kept his eye out for postdoctoral positions (or postdocs), one to three year research contracts in universities for people who have completed their PhD thesis and want to continue in academia. One day he saw a postdoc position in France advertised on a web mailing list and decided to get some experience applying for jobs. He prepared and sent off his application and didn’t think much about it after that, until he got a reply saying that the University of Burgundy in Dijon would be happy to welcome him on board as their newest postdoc. It came as a bit of a shock because it happened so fast and he didn’t even have an interview!

After the initial shock that comes with the news that you’re going to up and leave your native country, along with all your family and friends, we decided that it was the perfect place to go and live. Both of us had studied French before so we were at least familiar with the language. It was also a good place because it had special links to my family. Well, actually, my family had special links to it. You see, my father is French and has been living in Australia since he was 21. Ok, so it’s a pretty strong link! But the link for me wasn’t a strong French link.

My mother came from New Zealand when she was in her early twenties and met my father in Sydney. I knew my sisters and I grew up in a slightly different way from other Australian families. But it wasn’t that different. We spoke English at home but heard French spoken when my parents had French friends over. Meal times were heavily influenced by the French cooking that my mother had adapted over the years but for big holidays we went to visit the family like anyone else, only the family was in France and New Zealand.

All up, my childhood was like any normal Australian childhood only I never really considered myself 100% Australian. I liked the idea that I was part French and so when I found out that we were definitely going to France, I wasn’t too phased about living in a country where they don’t even speak English. I knew about French culture from all those dinners spent with my parents’ friends and we both at least spoke a little of the language. So it couldn’t be that hard to live there, could it?

Sleeping through First Class?

We were looking for the next available flight to anywhere on the east coast of America, since the next flight to Paris wasn’t until the next day and it was also overbooked. We found a helpful check-in agent (a rare thing in airports, except of course when I was on duty!) and she advised us to get the red-eye to Newark, where there was an empty flight to London leaving the next evening. My back up plan had been to go to Chicago, which had one flight to Paris, also overbooked. London wasn’t really in the right direction but we were tired and decided to leave our plight up to the experts. We made camp in one of the sparse airport lounges for about 10 hours until the flight to Newark was open for boarding late that evening. We found ourselves playing a game of ‘you look after the bags while I have a snooze for a couple of hours’. The idea was that the bag minder wasn’t allowed to fall asleep and leave the bags free to be stolen. It was a hard game after a 14-hour flight.

All went well for our flight to Newark (we were on our way again!) and when we arrived we tried to find lockers to store all our bags for the 12 hours before our next standby flight to London. No joy! Since September 11, American security has increased somewhat (!) and they now don’t allow left luggage in airports. So we chose our other option, which was to get a cheap hotel room, using the benefits of being an airline employee, i.e. big discount, and leave our luggage there. The added bonus of a hotel was that we could have a shower and breakfast as well. Opting (stupidly) against having a rest to catch up on some sleep, we decided to go in to Manhattan on the train.

We’d been to New York before but not since the September 11 attacks. I’d been working for United Airlines the day we found out the horrible news in Australia and we all at least knew somebody who knew the flight attendants that died on UA flights 175 and 93. So I really wanted to see Ground Zero. I had a feeling that being there would somehow bring relief and an end to the feeling I got every time I thought back to that horrible time. When we got there, I was touched by the messages from the thousands who, like me, had come to see the place where so many people had perished through no fault of their own. But I wasn’t prepared for the enormity of the destruction and the overwhelming sense of helplessness that enveloped me. No sooner had we arrived that I felt I had to get out of there.

That evening we not only got on the flight to London, but we got First Class! We managed to take a photo of ourselves enjoying the luxuries of the Boeing 777 First Class cabin as soon as we boarded (pre-flight cocktail in hand), even if we fell asleep straight after the camera was switched off! It was fitting that my last ever flight on standby with United was in First Class because 6 years before, my first ever standby flight with United had been in First Class. What a nice ending to a fun, but sometimes tumultuous and always stressful (have you seen the TV series Airport? All true!), career in the airline industry. And what a nice beginning to a new life in a new country.

But wait! That flight only got us as far as London. We still had to somehow get to Dijon with our 158kg of luggage (hey, our whole lives were packed in those suitcases!)! So we hunted around for the United desk and got advice from a ticketing agent. He suggested that we try to standby for a British Midlands flight to Paris as there were lots of them and we were sure to get on quite easily. I think my definition of quite easily is a bit different to his because it wasn’t that easy. We missed two flights before we got accepted on the second last flight of the day. A very close call in my opinion. Being stranded in London is not a cheap option! But it was definitely a relief to land in Paris because I knew we were home free, wherever home was now.

So there you go. Getting to France was a saga in itself. It should have been easy except that we travelled on standby, with all our possessions packed into four 32kg checked bags and two 15kg hand bags. And instead of flying directly from Sydney to San Francisco and then on to Paris, we ended up spending 76 hours travelling to our final destination, via San Francisco, Newark, London and Paris, with a couple of 12 hour layovers in there for good measure. And I still can’t believe we slept right through the First Class flight!