Blink And You Miss It

You really can’t beat a Year Abroad. With the opportunity to live somewhere completely new, the chance to expand your circle of friends beyond the borders of your home country, and maybe even the possibility to reinvent yourself, there is no experience quite like it. But beneath all of that excitement there is one thing that we don’t really talk about - living abroad can be hard! The challenges are many, both intellectual and emotional, but the most poignant of all is that niggling feeling of homesickness. I had an incredible year in France, but no matter how great a time you’re having, you’re always going to miss home. Especially…

The Prices

I mean, at the end of the day I’m a student, right? So the price of alcohol is always going to have a massive impact on how much I like a city. Now the wine was, of course, nice and cheap; it was generally about €2-€3 for a bottle of wine in the supermarket (even if I did end up having to splash out a bit more for a screw-top bottle because the cheaper ones required a corkscrew that none of my friends ever seemed to have – you’d have thought they’d have learned by the end of the year, but apparently not!). Now don’t get me wrong, I’m sure the French would scoff at me and recommend it be left on the supermarket shelves, but it was better than the £5 bottle of Echo Falls on offer back home.

The rest of the alcohol, however, wasn’t quite as good value.

If I go to the pub at home, we usually hit up a Wetherspoons where a single vodka-coke would set you back around £2.99, and £5.70 would buy you an entire cocktail pitcher. In France, however, the prices climbed a little higher; in our favourite student area you were looking at a pretty steep €6.50 just for a single measure. I used to have a bad tendency to buy people drinks but that was killed off pretty swiftly when I ordered a round of 6 Jägerbombs in my first week in Toulouse and it cost me €30. Needless to say it left me with a rather angry bank account and an undeniable longing for a good ol’ Spoons.

Normal Tuna Tins

Pretty specific, I know. You see, I eat quite a lot of tuna in the warmer months of the year and it was (obviously) quite a bit warmer in France, so their tuna tins were honestly a bit problem to me. I know you’re probably thinking “how can the tuna tins be any different?”, so let me explain. Basically, tuna tins in France are like soup tins, or baked beans tins in the UK, complete with a ring-pull on top so you don’t need a tin opener. I mean, I’m sure this design is supposed to make my life easier but NO. After 20 years of ingeniously using the cut lid of the tin to drain the liquid out of the tuna, I had no idea how on earth I was supposed to get the tuna to stay in the tin whilst pouring out the liquid. You can scream ‘first-world problems’ at me all you like, but honestly this was a real issue, okay?

And this is just one of the many foody differences I encountered in my time in Toulouse; I had no idea that a supermarket could feel so, well, foreign to me. Honestly, the difference in brands on offer truly impeded a flawless transition into life abroad. Everyone has their favourite food products or brands, and it takes a while of trying out new things to decide what your favourite foreign-alternative is. I personally didn’t like the lack of spring onions in the vegetable section, or the fact that cheaper chocolate bars always seemed to be sold in bulk (seriously, Leclerc, if you make me buy 5 bars at once, I will eat 5 bars at once).

The Language

This is a pretty obvious one, really. Yes, one of the main points of moving to France was to be in an environment where I had to speak a lot of French, so I probably shouldn’t complain, but you honestly have NO IDEA how much of a challenge it is until you’re actually there. Surprisingly, it wasn’t even my lectures that were the issue, because I had mentally prepared myself to speak French for 6 hours a day whilst at uni. No, the challenge was the unexpected chitchat – that woman in the clothes shop asking if she could be of any assistance, strangers asking if I had the time of knew where they could find ‘Avenue Didier Daurat’.

I had a French mobile number whilst I was out there, and you couldn’t imagine how much I tensed up whenever my phone rang. It was almost always a wrong number, but I don’t even like phone calls in English so French ones were pretty stressful. I mean, I guess thinking on your feet in situations like that is the difference between a language-learner and someone considered bilingual, but you better believe that every conversation made me miss my home country and a familiar ‘hello’.

University

As a British student, I was used to huge universities that always had something going on – clubbing nights, sports events etc, each contributing to a huge network of fellow students. Let me tell you, studying at a Grande Ecole was not the same at all, not least because it was about a tenth of the size of my university back in the UK. It just didn’t have that same university feel. The facilities weren’t as great (can you imagine if the libraries closed for lunch in the UK?), and the lack of integration with the French students meant that it felt as though there were only 30 or so other students that I could actually make friends with. Don’t get me wrong, I did make friends with those 30 or so students, and we formed a lovely international friendship group that I will hopefully stay in touch with for many years to come, but that wasn’t really the university’s doing. In fact, we were so close because we used to come together to complain about how annoying the University Administration was, or how the French students were being somewhat unfair. I know this is probably a bit of a biased opinion because British universities are internationally recognised as brilliant establishments and its hard to compete with that, but that didn’t stop me missing my home uni.

That said, now that I’m back home, I’ve found myself missing quite a fair bit from my year abroad, too. Such as…

The Weather

Oh, what a surprise, the girl that has lived in two of the rainiest parts of the UK for the past two decades enjoyed having a bit of sun in the South of France! I know, I’m predictable, but it was such a lovely addition to an already brilliant city. I was lucky enough to be on the 7thfloor of my student accommodation building, complete with a lovely balcony. Granted, the view was nothing special because I lived further out of the city in the more industrial area, but we bought a paddling pool at the start of the year to be able to make the most of the Toulousian sunshine. Granted, it’s actually nice weather in the UK at the moment because it’s summer but come September, I can guarantee I’ll miss cycling into the city on the Canal Du Midi wearing only shorts and a tshirt (even if the French were all wrapped up in their winter coats, giving me funny looks from beneath their scarves…).

The Supermarket

This isn’t indecision, this is merely exemplifying my very real love-hate relationship with French supermarkets! Honestly though, most of the time it was just a love-love relationship because the quality of goods offered in French supermarkets is something we can barely imagine back in the UK. Not only are they all about twice the size of normal UK supermarkets, but they also have a cheese counter, a seafood counter and often a meat counter. My local supermarket in Toulouse even had a counter dedicated entirely to sushi.

And the food wasn’t the only reason to go to the supermarket; the majority of the big supermarkets were within a commercial shopping centre with a whole range of clothes, shoes and beauty retail outlets. Why would I bother going into the busy city centre when my favourite clothes shop, Pimkie, is only round the corner?

Mind you, this was pretty dangerous too because it meant I spent a fortune at the supermarket. There was one time I went to the shops just to get some milk for my cereal the following morning and then I ended up buying a dress. Oops.

The Pretty Buildings

Living abroad is known for giving you a different perspective on everything and I didn’t quite believe it until I lived there. In fact, having spent a lot of time in the country whilst I was growing up, I didn’t think I would find life in France too out of the ordinary. But one thing where it was incredibly obvious that I had changed was the way I saw the city. France is obviously usually a holiday destination to most British people, so when I first moved out there, that’s how I saw it too. I though the pink-coloured buildings were gorgeous, and the inside of the Capitole Building (the main administrative centre of Toulouse) was one of my favourite places in the city. Obviously, in time that wonder usually wears off, but I found it hard to see it as just this city that I lived in. And every time I had someone to visit, I saw it through the eyes of a tourist once again. So my amazement at the beauty of the city never really subsided, and now I’m back in a bog-standard British town, I’m missing the pink-tinted architecture of the Occitainie region.

Travelling

This was by far the best bit of my Erasmus year. In 8 months living in France, I visited 9 different departments of France (10 if you count the one I lived in), went to Germany twice, and flew back to Britain 4 times. Some of those trips were to visit family and friends that I’ve known for years, some of them were holidays away with the people I’d met in France. But every single one of them was great fun, regardless of cost and how tired I was afterwards. In fact, in January and February, I had a particularly tough semester at university and we were in university 8:30-4 for 5 days a week. Trying to make the most of my time abroad, though, I still managed to visit three different departments of France in the space of about 5 weeks. Yes, I was pretty much constantly exhausted for 2 months, but I have no regrets. There’s an Erasmus mentality whereby it suddenly becomes incredibly important to see as much of the world as possible, and that’s something that I will carry with me for the rest of my life.

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