Perdue en Provence

Apologies in advance for how sickeningly smug this article is. As I stepped off my sleazy-jet flight and onto French soil I took in a deep breath and said to myself: this is it. A year in France. Toute seule. Stay calm – just think of the cheese. A month in, I can say with certainty that I had nothing to be afraid of and hyperventilating on my plane over to Aix-en-Provence was a wasted effort and hardly a glamorous entrance.

This trip has been seamless since the first day, my French colocataire , Charlotte, who drives a small red Peugot, of course - how French - was waiting for me in the arrivals lounge with a smile that stretched from ear to ear and a never ending supply of ice breakers and anecdotes for the short journey to our apartment. Ok, I admit it, I didn’t get everything she was saying (understanding French whilst appearing totally blasé is quite a feat) but I nodded and smiled in the right places and that’s the basis of a long and prosperous friendship, no?  

Thirty minutes later, Charlotte flings open the door of our apartment in Aix. “Welcome to France!” She grins, reaching for a bottle of Bergerac’s finest vin rouge out of the cupboard. I let out a sigh of relief. To my delight I see that my room is even better than it looked on appartager.fr and certainly a step up from my student house in Liverpool last year, in which the living conditions were barely at a legal standard. My room has plenty of space for activities and my window (clad with shutters!) leads out onto the roof terrace, prime location for sitting with a copy of French Elle, sipping on an espresso and other similarly pretentious things.

Our landlady, Mme Gaufrès (Mrs Waffles in English) is there to meet us with an inventory the length of my leg which I have to pretend I understand, sign and return in one hand and a petit camembert in the other. Kidding, my mind just drifted to cheese related thoughts mid-sentence, really not socially acceptable. I spend the rest of the afternoon taking generic snaps of fountains in Aix – of which there are a lot – and then share a dinner in town with Charlotte during which we discover our mutual love of food and charming French waiters.

And so student life in Aix-en-Provence begins. The bad news is French paperwork is endless and soul destroying, toilets are unisex and the building is falling apart. (There are literally debris nets on every wall of the faculté to stop unsuspecting students being flattened by falling chunks of cement.) The good news is that Erasmus students have very little contact hours, receive a pretty generous grant and most of us just have to pass the year without worrying about it contributing to our final grade. One of my teachers is a tiny yet impressively muscly (she definitely does lift bro) femme du sud. She is typically Aixois: she oozes elegance and has leathery golden skin from years of sun exposure beautifully contrasted by a white linen ensemble, the unspoken dress code of Aix. One of my classmates succinctly described her as a MILF. I refuse to elaborate.

Erasmus students, myself included, are comparable to sheep, following the infamous “Organisator” to and from clubs with names like the Wohoo – true, Aix isn’t renowned for its buzzing nightlife but Marseille, host to music festival Marsatac, is just down the road. The “Organisator” prowls the Erasmus page on Facebook and as intimidating and robotic as he may sound, I had the good fortune of learning that he really has a heart of gold: on our first meeting he declared his undying love for me “you make my heartbeat fast ma belle let me take you to breakfast!”

The big question: will this year improve my French language? It’s safe to say it can’t get much worse: since being here I have realised, a little too late, that no one has said sacre bleu since the early 20th century and that “je joue au foot avec mes copains” is both untrue and unsophisticated.

So far, it’s like a holiday and I feel like I am about to embark on one of the best adventures of my life: C’est la vie has never rang so true… I have a roof terrace, St Tropez is a short ride away on the TGV and I can buy a wheel of brie the size of my face for less than 2euro at the local fromagerie. If everything continues to go perfectly, I will acquire an amour francais, a blue Vespa to take me to the fromagerie and back quicker than you can say Jacques' your uncle, utter fluency in French and bo-bo (Bourgeois bohème) status.  However, there’s a little voice in the back of my head saying that in reality, I will probably finish this year with a mediocre level of franglais and a larger jean size courtesy of fromage indulgence. Either way, as Edith Piaf would have said: Je ne regrette rien.

http://www.appartager.com/

http://www.marsatac.com/

Clutch Control

I don't know whether Paul has ever listened to "The Driving Instructor", the hilarious radio sketch by the American comedian Bob Newhart, but he ought to. Particularly the bit where the instructor throws himself from the car as Mrs Webb travels down her driveway at 75mph - in reverse. Paul is my driving instructor and once a week he puts his life in my hands.

Learning to drive in Liverpool is …different. The good news is it’s inexpensive, the roads are wide, and it’s yet another excuse to delay handing in that overdue essay. Procrastination at its best. The bad news is that the only available slots seem to be at 9am – I’m expecting Ashton to jump out of a bush at any moment and shout “You’ve been Punk’d!” Honestly. 9am?! – and my fellow drivers on Smithdown Road are unforgiving to put it mildly.

My first driving lesson in Liverpool was less like mid-town suburban America and more like a scene from Grand Theft Auto.

In Toxteth, the sun don’t shine and the birds don’t tweet. In other words, rising early is a challenge. As if scheduling my lessons at the crack of dawn was not punishment enough, Paul insists on sending reminder texts before each lesson at an hour which should be made illegal.

Rival road users on Smithdown, and I use the phrase deliberately, will happily add insult to injury and should under no circumstances be confronted before breakfast. They refuse to recognise the learner sign on my bonnet and show no pity when I stall, which is often. It is not unknown for Paul's car to remain immobile through several traffic light changes much to the frustration of the men in white vans getting uncomfortably close to my rear. No pun intended.

Bus drivers and taxi drivers are, no exaggeration, engaged in guerrilla warfare with each other. I am prone to road rage, yes, but never have I seen deeper hatred than when the eyes of delta cabbies meet those of a bus conductor.

Nor do I need these external distractions from the main task of learning to drive. I am quite capable of those myself. Tootling along Edge Lane one bright morning, I spotted some friends on the pavement and got so excited at the prospect of them seeing me drive that I took both hands off the wheel to wave ecstatically. Alas, they were oblivious to my hand manoeuvres – unlike Paul who almost went into cardiac arrest in his efforts to try and stop the car from knocking down an innocent pedestrian. He’s a real gem.

Sometimes I wonder why he puts up with me. Paul is a stand-up guy with infinite patience, enthusiasm and an unusual taste in music for someone comfortably old enough to be my Dad. On our first encounter, he rapped and rhymed his way through the lesson: “Step down on the clutch, now feel the engine bite-ite-ite.....accelerate!” Jesus.

On our second outing, he turned to me whilst I was cruising along Mossley Hill Drive and said: “Ellie, guess what my favourite genre of music is?” After a tedious 2 or 3 minutes of sifting through every genre that I could imagine a 64 year old Top Gear fanatic listening to, Paul couldn’t hold it in anymore: “House music!” he declared, whipping out Ministry of Sound’s “Deep House” compilation and cranking it up to full volume in case I didn’t believe him. To Paul’s dismay, I ejected the CD and explained to him that I really felt I could concentrate better on clutch control without the beloved beats of Miguel Campbell blaring through the car. Little did he know, I didn’t want to let Chamillionaire down.

Despite my reluctance, I do relish the thrills of motoring - especially when I get to race over the Runcorn bridge at 70mph screaming with delight, only for Paul to note dryly that it’s  “just an A road” and to “get some perspective”. Spoil sport.

I am still a long way from trusting myself behind the wheel alone but who cares if it means I can spend another 20 or so hours listening to Paul's house music and his endless backlog of anecdotes about past clients and his, how can I put it, imaginative ways of making sure they always pay up. I have made sure to pay for my lessons in advance. After all, my body is a temple as you have probably gleaned from my previous articles.

As Bob Newhart observed, Paul belongs to a special group of (mostly) men, who go out to work each morning facing death in a hundred different ways and never quite knowing whether they will return in the evening. I want him to know he is safe with me. But I must confess, the dual controls in his little Honda are a big comfort to the both of us.

Why I don't have a gym membership... anymore

Some months ago, in a quest to rid my body of fresher’s fat, I joined the university gym. That was an expensive mistake. This is what I learned from the experience. Not only did I have to prepare myself psychologically for exercise days in advance, but when I finally mustered the strength to think about leaving the safe confines of my cold hard surface which calls itself a student bed, the trek through Toxteth and the bus ride bursting with lunatic crack-heads loomed, making me sink back underneath the sheets.

This vicious yet inevitable conflict between my vain desire to get slim and my natural instinct to remain horizontal occurred repeatedly until the stack of Chickster’s receipts was higher than my collection of academic books and could no longer be ignored. I realise: it’s time. My first (and last) encounter at the gym proved traumatic to say the least.

I arrive, optimistic, with a spring in my step and ready to take on the intimidating exercise machines when a gym bunny strides up to me, “woah, not so fast…you need to complete your induction  before we let you use the equipment”, I frown, exasperated already, what on earth have I gotten myself into? He proceeds to measure my weight, hips, jeez he may as well have written my cup size down on that clipboard of his, and finally my height. “You’re bang on 6 fuh!” I recoil in horror – 6’ 4”?! Christ. That surely counts as a height disorder. I scale the language barrier that is his heavy scouse and figure out he was saying bang on 6ft. Phew… After this ordeal, he decides, to my amazement, that I am fit enough to join the gym officially.

So I step on the treadmill with trepidation, only to fall off within seconds. I am totally incapable of using it without hanging on for dear life, even with the incline setting turned to zero and the speed barely above walking pace. Why did no one tell me it was so hard?! My gym bunny hops over “You are no longer allowed to use this machine,” he informs me, “you are a danger to yourself and your surroundings”. He may as well have a hung a “dunce” sign around my neck and sent me to face the wall in the corner of the room. I laugh, “you can’t be serious…” but trail off as I look over at the poor Asian student whom I’d flattened – collateral damage – and grin apologetically.

Still, I refuse to let this dishearten me, I’d spent a good 15 minutes on the grime vehicle that is the 86A to get there after all… so I moved on to the so-called “inner-outer thigh machine. For those unfamiliar with sporting lingo this is a piece of equipment which requires you to open and close your legs against weights for an extended period of time with the desired effect of toning the upper-leg region. See fig.1. Turns out I don’t have much luck on this either, and instead of putting it to good use end up looking like a sexually frustrated psychopath opening and closing my legs whilst gawking at the gym ladz pumping iron and screwing their faces up into frankly hilarious expressions until their gunz are at bursting point. Yum?

Ever since that tragic day at the university gym the closest I have come to entering the turnstile gate of hell again  is to light a cigarette in the shelter of its doorway, only to be met with judgmental and pitying stares from the hussies on speed, oops I mean cheerleaders, within. Alternative: exercise outdoors! It’s free, exhilarating and Sefton Park provides some stunning scenery. How I wish it was that simple… I do run outdoors, correction, I sprint: away from the gangsters who sit on the wall at the end of my road hollering degrading remarks about the tight fit of my streamline jogging attire. A friend of a friend once saw me running and apparently compared the sight to that of a buffalo – ahem, I prefer gazelle. Exercise is overrated, expensive and all in vain as my post-exercise overeating serves to prove. If you are not convinced then be my guest and sign up to Liverpool university gym at this link. http://www.liv.ac.uk/sports/facilities/sports-and-fitness-centre/.

But don’t say I didn’t warn you…

The Jagwa Experience

Waxing? Oh I dabble. By that I mean I have summoned the courage from some dark space deep within me to walk through the doors of Jagwa, spread my legs and endure the pain about once a year for three years. Jagwa is my salon of choice – purely because it is £6 cheaper than the tranquil and glamorous service at Uniquely You and that’s a lot of money to a student. £6 makes the difference in terms of not having to skip lunch for three days to save money for Friday’s nightclub entry fee.

I will always remember the first Jagwa experience I ever had. Tracey, the Madame of the parlour, led me down into her dungeon and, noticing I was a little shy to get undressed, practically slurred in her brummy accent: “I’ve seen more vaginas than you’ve had hot dinners love.” I went from shy to terrified in one breath. The worst aspect of the dungeon is that every wall is painted blood red, so that when you’re on your back, trying to distract yourself from the agony of the wax, all you can see is the red ceiling closing in on you and gory thoughts begin to trickle through your mind. I must encourage ol’ Trace to redecorate.

My most recent Jagwa experience was quite the experience. As one of Tracey’s girls led me down the stairs, her Terrier – the latest addition to the Jagwa crew – followed us down. Naturally I thought this must be breaking some kind of hygiene regulation so I said to the girl “Is he allowed downstairs with us?” To which she replied “Yeah come on Kingsley there’s a good boy”. Kingsley?! And it gets worse.  After undressing in preparation for the dreaded procedure, I notice that one of my shoes is missing. Kingsley. So after completing the humiliating task of undressing in front of Kate – Tracey’s girl – which makes me feel about 7 years old, I then had to do a semi-naked chase after the amazingly agile Kingsley around the room and then a tug of war. Kingsley is strong for his size. I finally get my mangled shoe, panting and red-cheeked and Kate grins at me: “Oh yeah, you’ve got to put your stuff on a high surface out of his reach.” Cheers for the heads up, Kate. She then proceeds to speak to Kingsley in a baby voice and tickle him while he licks her face. Is this real life?

A lot of people I know feel uncomfortable with forced small-talk at the hairdressers; the waxing salon is not exactly the ideal social setting, either. Me and Kate exchange very few words during the excruciating 20 minutes we spend together in the cell. She initiated conversation once, Kate’s a mumbler so I replied with “Pardon?” only to discover that she was actually addressing Kingsley, not me.  What happened next was emotionally scarring to say the least, “If you could just stretch out your stomach for us there love…” Excuse me?! I had never been asked to do this before and I eventually came to the awful realisation that Kate needed me to make my skin taught (skin that would have been extremely taught if I hadn’t contracted a food baby following from an intense relationship with Dominos during my first year of university.)

“There!” Yes, I exhaled, it’s finally over. I look down, thinking I really should have invested in a Hollywood, all a Brazilian gets you is an unfinished wax and £5 richer.  I scurry out of Jagwa, don’t look back and catch the  bus home feeling relieved that I didn’t cycle – as mum had suggested after her comment referring to my bloated face – I’ll feel fortunate if I can ever walk properly again let alone mount a bike.