Finding my feet

 Hi guys!

I have not died in France! I am well, in fact. It has been a crazy week of running back and forth to McDonalds every day just to log into Facebook (to stay in touch with the world!!) and check my emails because alas, there is still no internet in my flat. 

I currently live in McDonalds.

I hope I am not becoming entirely dependant on internet, but the truth is, I am. There is very little else to distract me in this small little town of Mennecy, and so I have been making do with reading, decorating my flat, doing laundry, lesson planning, ballet dancing in my living room and watching back to back episodes of Gilmore Girls. I have to say, things are looking up much more than they were even a week ago. Now that my place looks like a home, I have a washing machine, a fridge, a bed and even a sofa to curl up on when it gets cold, I feel much happier and snug in my apartment. Which, incidentally, is enormous!

I still can't believe I got this sofa free online. recupe.net if anyone is interested!

And beneath is the state of my dining room table after the first two weeks of paperwork and French bureaucracy....

The 'lobby..'

Room 1 (cleaning products)

Hallway

My bedroom! 

Hallway two

Bathroom

Me in my kitchen (tea after a day of work!)

Yes, I am open to receiving visitors (and that is my way of saying, please come and visit me for a weekend in Paris!). I have already had the first, my friend Sara from sixth form, which was an amazing weekend of non-stop fun.

After this weekend that has just passed, I was absolutely exhausted, but in a positive way. On Sunday, something happened which was really amazing. I felt so amazed by the whole experience that I decided to not only blog about it but to write it in novel-style rather than bloggy style because I miss creative writing from school but also because I thought it was worthy of being told properly. I am going to call this particular episode of my experiences so far in Paris “Finding my Feet”. Because although the past 2-3 weeks have been stressful, tiring, challenging, unpredictable and at times, emotional, I feel that finally, after this weekend with my friend from high school I started to see things in a different light. After that weekend, I felt that:

• I have been so blessed and lucky by ending up here
• There is lots of potential for me in a city like Paris
• I am going to make lots of unforgettable memories and friends here, I just know it

Finding my feet

It is 11AM. The sky is clear, streaked with strips of wispy clouds and when the wind picks up it is strong and bitterly cold. I stand across the street, in a park opposite the coach station, looking down onto a giant motorway where cars pass underneath.

In a few moments, after I have taken a deep breath, inhaling the scent of autumn leaves and pollution, I glance once more across the motorway, across the coach station. In the distance, the Eiffel Tower is peeking over the tops of cream coloured buildings and the narrow, paved streets of Paris.

I take the opportunity, as I stand on the motorway bridge looking out over this impressive cityscape, to inhale a deep breath and commit this moment to memory. I have to count my lucky stars. I do not remember a time when anyone has ever associated the name Paris with anything but beautiful or elegant or impressive. And as I look out, I realise with a smile that I have somehow fallen on my feet, like a cat does when it jumps out of a tree. I think for a moment of where I had wanted to be in the beginning. I wanted to be in Martinique, I was so sure of it. A French island in the middle of the Caribbean, with beautiful beaches, hot sun and impressive mountains and volcanoes.

That was a place far away, where I'd wanted to have a great adventure, explore islands and jungles and caves, sit out on the beach day or night, sleeping under the sun or the stars. I never wanted to wear a pair of gloves or a winter coat. If someone had even suggested that I go to Paris for my year out as a teaching assistant, I would have laughed in their face and told them to dream on and find a different girl. No way was I going to Paris when it was only a train ride from London and in one of the coldest regions of France. I knew that all my friends understood how much I wanted the Caribbean adventure and they were all crossing their fingers for me.

But then I had ended up with a job in France after all. Paris, of all the places I had ruled out. But now I was here. And it wasn't so bad. In fact, it was mysteriously beautiful to me. Experiencing Paris is something that can never get old; it is timeless, full of history but at the same time modern, mixed and culturally different. Even after two weeks, I was beginning to see that.

I was sure in that moment, looking out on the city, that I was going to find my feet.

I make my way across the street and descend into the nearest Metro station, walk through the maze of tunnels and walk onto an underground train which whisks me away at top speed. At my stop, Chatelet-les-Halles, the lady announces in a proud voice, I get off and make my way to the train platform which will lead me home, thirty-seven kilometres away.

As I do all of this, I am completely lost in thought. Have you ever had a moment in life when you feel that your body is functioning (breathing, walking and seeing) but your mind is somewhere utterly elsewhere? I hardly realise that I am sitting on the train until I am out of the station, gazing out at the grey skyline of Paris's suburbs.

I reach into my bag and pull out my trusty journal which I like to take with me on long trips like this by myself. I take my pen and open it to a blank page...but as I stare out of the window once more, watching the world rush past me, I cannot think of the words to write.

Even though I have fallen on my feet, I think to myself, living alone in a foreign country is nonetheless a challenging feat. Did I know what I was doing? Not really. There were times when I felt lonely. When I didn't know exactly how the next day or the next week was going to turn out. There were times when I felt frightened, scared of the loneliness that might befall me.

What on earth did you do when you were lonely, with no family in a city that you barely had any friends in? What could stop loneliness when it hit, would it simply stop itself after time?

But a small voice in the back of my head reminded me, confidently: You have done this before. And you can make a life for yourself wherever you go. I considered the voice like it was my conscience speaking. Yes conscience, I told it. You have a point.

Out of the window I gazed once more, reflecting on my independence. Was it a good thing? Yes I suppose it was. But being completely independent could be tiring also.

Sometimes, you just need someone to do the work for you. When you're rushing around, opening a bank account, buying a mobile phone, shopping for food, carrying bags under the rain, sitting at the bus stop waiting to get home, reading a map to get on a Metro, going to the Post Office to send letters and running around a workplace trying to find the correct room for the correct time of day...it all becomes too much.

Sometimes you just need people to find you and be your friend, instead of you trying to find them.

It is not long before I hear something which brings me out of deep, distracted reverie. It is a beautiful sound, a pair of angelic voices, coming from somewhere down the train.

I soon seek them out. It a trio of teenage girls, one who is moving her lips so carefully you'd think she was a ventriloquist – a pro at what she is doing. Her voice harmonizes with the voice of the girl sitting next to her. The third teenager sits in front of them, filming them. They appear to be African, with their long dark hair and strong vocal chords, but I can't tell for sure.

At first I cannot hear what they are saying, beneath the noise of the train. Their voices compliment each other: one girl harmonizing with the other without need for any background music. I listen carefully, trying to make out what they are saying. Soon enough I make out one word:

Seigneur.

Have I heard it correctly? But then I make out another word:

Jésus-Christ.

Instantly, I smile to myself. They are singing a hymn. Seigneur means Saviour in French. It could quite possibly be a choir of angels after all.

Describing the sound of these voices would not quite encompass the feeling I had then, sitting on the train listening to these singers. The graffittied walls and dirty buildings of the Parisien suburbs shoot past in the background. Somewhere in the cloudless, wintry sky the sun was shining through the window on me, onto my lap where my diary rested open, blank-paged and speechless.

I decided sometime then that I was going to go over to them. There are only a few times in life when moments like this happen. There are times when I should have followed out on decisions such as these: many a person I have wished to speak to and I have let the chance slide by.

This time I won't.

I shove my diary into my bag and walk down the aisle towards the singers. They notice me approaching but they say nothing. I sit down opposite them and they continue singing.

There was a man fast asleep in the chair in front of me, completely oblivious to everything going on in the world. I crane my neck around to look at the rest of the coach and realise that nobody else is listening to the girls. Everyone is wrapped in their own world, their own bubble – just another Sunday morning on the long train ride to wherever home is.

Sitting opposite them, I can hear the words to the song they are singing. There is only one line, which is repeated again and again:

Je n'ai que toi, Seigneur... je n'ai que toi...

One of the girls uses her knees and feet as percussion. The drum, the harmonizing and the high notes float over the entire carriage of the train and I wonder to myself: why isn't anyone else listening?

The words in French do not translate in the exact same way into English, but a sufficient translation would be: I have only you, Lord, there is only you...

Or something to that extent.

I steal a glance at one of the singers. Out of the corner of her eye she has noticed me looking at her, but she says nothing still. As they bring their song to an end and I find myself clapping shyly and they all look at me hiding grins.

“Merci,” they say in unison and before I can even think about it, I say exactly what is on my mind:

“Vous chantez tres bien. J'ai jamais entendu ca sur le train!”

You all sing superbly, and I've never heard anything like it on the train.

The conversation is short as the train is slowing down as it pulls into a station where the girls are evidently getting off. Before I can stop myself I ask:

“Are you on your way to church?”

They nod and I blurt, in spite of myself:

“Can I come?”

Of course, no one ever really heard of anyone being refused entry to a place like church. But all the same, I feel a bit strange inviting myself.

But of course, they reply, and a few moments later, I find myself getting off onto the platform with them. We keep up a conversation, I find out their names: Eldad, Nelly and Rachel. Rachel! But that's my name too, I say and they respond enthusiastically. I find out that they are Congolese and that their church is currently in an apartment a few streets away. They lost access to the building they had, they tell me. Two hundred members scattered around the outskirts of Paris have been forced to set up mini-churches in apartments where they can until they can get access back to the main building.

I don't understand the ins and outs of the legal situation but I decide it doesn't matter. Even if it's informal, it is an interesting opportunity. Stumbling across a group of Congolese Parisienne teenagers on their way to church in the suburbs doesn't happen every Sunday. And in fact, I explain to them, I had missed church that very morning. A situation which I couldn't avoid – I had to drop my friend off at the coach station so that she could make her way back to London safely. She had been visiting me for the weekend and she doesn't speak any French, nor does she know Paris at all. I had resigned myself to the fact that I would just have to try again the next week, against all odds.

But then there I was, on my way to church now. It seemed as if they had found me, I hadn't even had to look further than a few metres down the train.

We cross an enormous bridge which takes us over rows of train tracks, leading into all the major Parisien stations. The sky is clear, very blue, contrasting with the black landscape of apartment buildings, grubby walls and telephone poles.

Soon enough, we are at an apartment building. We go inside and up three flights of stairs. Eldad knocks on a door and turns around to me:

“Par contre, on est vraiment en rétard,” she whispers, making a face. We are late. The 'service' started at 10:30AM apparently. It is now 12.

A small boy peeks his head around the door, staring up at us curiously. The girls ruffle his hair and he lets us pass, looking very intently at me in particular.

I walk into a large living room which seems to be holding about twenty people sitting around, mostly women, some children and other teenagers. Two men are sitting near a table, one of whom has a bible in his lap and is reading it with an expression of rapt concentration on his face. The other man is standing up, holding a bible in his left hand, gesticulating wildly with the other and almost shouting out the words from it. Everyone in the room glances briefly at me as I come in and Eldad leads me to a spare chair right next to the gesticulating man who appears to be the preacher. Everyone is African, or Caribbean. Quite frankly, I've never felt like more of a foreigner in my entire life.

But I decide that it doesn't matter. Everyone is looking at me curiously, but with expressions that suggest friendliness. Perhaps this doesn't happen very often, I tell myself. How would it, unless you knew exactly which apartments in this part of Paris held services?

The preacher is in Luke chapter 19 and so I decide to do what I can to blend in and take out my bible. I just so happened to be carrying my French bible with me that morning; before I knew I was going to miss church. He is speaking about something, but it is not the words which are on the page. He is saying what he is saying very passionately and very loudly and every now and then some of the women nod their heads and all affirm in unison “Amen”. Occasionally it is “Hallelujah”.

The sermon lasts another ten minutes, since we are very much latecomers, and then the three girls I met on the train, Nelly, Eldad and Rachel, stand up. Without prompting, they begin to sing, without background music, the same song they were singing on the train.

Je n'ai que toi Seigneur, je n'ai que toi...

The others in the room stand up and start to sing. I do not know the words so I close my eyes and listen. The voices of the three girls can be heard above the others and I keep thinking to myself how beautiful they sound. How I wish I could sing like that. But I am quite happy just to listen.

In the end, I meet everyone at the end of the service. I find out that this is some sort of extended family – everyone is Congolese. The group of teenage girls flock around me – around ten in total – fascinated and asking me lots of questions. Where are you from in England? What are you doing in France? How do you speak French so well? They are all smiling widely, friendly in the most extreme.

It is a better reception than I could have imagined – how are you supposed to know, before you walk into a place, someone's apartment at that, what everyone is going to think of you? But the other man, not the preacher, silences everyone and Eldad explains the story of how her and the two other girls were singing on the train and I came over to listen. She explains how I had missed church and asked about theirs. The man, whose name is Ange, like the word for angel in French, smiles broadly at me. He has very kind eyes.

“Well it is a miracle,” he says, and the ladies agree with “Amen!” 

I smile to myself. If there is one thing I admire greatly, it is the passion and enthusiasm expressed by African Christians. At home in England, I had been going to a church for six months which was predominantly African. In the time that I spent there, I began to see a different way of church, a different way of faith. The members of that church were not afraid to express their faith in every possible way. Some ladies danced wildly as if they were in a Whitney Houston video, sometimes the preachers screamed loudly as they were preaching and acted as if it were perfectly normal. Sometimes there were periods of time, half an hour or two, where there would be no service, simply music and the congregation sat at the front, lying down on the ground, deeply reflective. Even if it wasn't what every church was like, it was the kind of passion that inspired me to explore deeper into what it all meant.

Which was why I was very interested in coming back, I told them when the girls asked me eagerly if I wanted to join them for the service next week. Same apartment, they said. Since I had found nothing so far in the way of church and since I was already fascinated by the similar way in which they expressed their faith to the church I had back home, I agreed.

And you know what? It isn't every day that something like that happens on the train – sometimes there is a reason for these things.

Sometimes, I told myself an hour later when I was getting on the train to go back to my small village, you don't have to do any of the work. Sometimes, even when you're at your most independent and you feel that something as complex as making friends, finding your bearings and becoming part of a new culture is an impossible feat, something happens that makes you realise that you're not meant to do all the hard work by yourself. It is perfectly normal, once in a while, to land on your feet the way a cat falls out of tree and find yourself looking out onto a beautiful horizon, counting your blessings.