I have settled down in France with surprizingly little difficulty. Today, I spent four hours tracking down and transporting my freight shipment, but at least the computer within was in one piece and functional. I’ve noticed that the two things that make a home a home are my own computer and an internet connection. Always when I travel, I feel disconnected and alone until the first time I get to a net café. After that, I’m one with the world again.
The apartment I now live in is rented to students studying at le Fresnoy. There’s the detritus of successive generations of tenants, which is very nice for someone like me since I can try to make do on the cast-offs of other people. My flatmates are Benoit, a French guy and Sam, a Canadian girl. They seem like decent people, although Benoit looks like Groucho Marx.
Culture shock strikes from the most unexpected directions. The greatest one so far was the vile sponge used to wash dishes. I hope the locals won’t mind if I use a proper dishwashing brush instead. I just found out that the Cleaning Women are coming to play in Lille next Saturday. I suppose I should talk my new flatmates into attending the gig. Finnish culture at its finest.
Food is a bit of a problem. I have to learn all new habits and to cook again. For years I used to eat rye porridge every morning, but to date I have been unable to find ingredients for any sort of porridge. The results in the milk department have been more encouraging. I bought a bottle of milk at random, and it turned out to be of a high-fat variety, but otherwise perfectly drinkable. I seem to recall that the fat content varieties of milk have been standardized in the EU so I have hope that non-fat milk could be located.
The apartment is in the ass end of nowhere. It’s 200 meters to the school, which is nice. Half an hour by metro to the center of Lille, which is not so nice. At least the metro and the tram employ the Smurf-based model of making sure there are no freeloaders, so the reflexes I have developed in Finland for traveling without paying work perfectly here. The apartment is something like half a kilometer from the metro and tram stops.