The Life and Times of the Curious Cockroach

Date: January 30th, 2011

A few years ago, I had a particularly memorable piano lesson. It started out like any other: I came in after school,  having just wolfed down a tuna sandwich, and, with the same kind of delicacy, hammered out my Beethoven Sonata for my teacher. Here I don’t use the word “hammered” lightly. When I played the last chord and felt the piano steady itself beneath my fingers, I looked up proudly at my teacher. But she only shook her head.

“When you played that sonata, what did you imagine?” she asked.

I told her the truth: “nothing”.

“Me, I imagined a hippopotamus at its first tap-dancing lesson,” she said.

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Email to sibling
Location: boarding school dormitory, The Village

Dear Sibling,

I’m writing to you because I’ve just found a stable patch of internet in the school. It looks like it’ll rain a lot this weekend, so I’m not sure when I’ll have a good connection again. Heavy rain usually means internet melt-down in this place.

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Location: deepest darkest rural France
Number of friends: 0
Number of stop-lights seen: 0
Number of stop-lights village website boasted about: 1
Number of grams of cheese tasted: 0
Emotional state: unstable

Have just arrived in village. Am in the middle of nowhere. Cannot write anything more. Can only curl into ball. And weep.

Signing off,
The Curious Cockroach

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PS. Tried to make myself feel better with food. Almost always works. Bought what looked like pesto sandwich. Bit into sandwich. Sandwich tasted awful. Sandwich tasted like something salty and dead. Went back into store. Bravely went up to counter. Showed lady pesto sandwich. Lady laughed, and said “silly girl. This not pesto sandwich. This snail-paste sandwich. Snails harvested out of shells, pickled in own juices, mushed up into paste. Then spread on bread. Understand me?” Regrettably, yes, understood every word.

So am in the middle of nowhere. And have pickled slugs in stomach. Stomach gone on strike and refuses to digest anything.

Cannot write anything more. Can only curl into ball. And weep.

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PPS. Must clarify that usually enjoy snails. Am not one of those conservative pricks who pretend to eat only cute furry things like lamb or bunnies. Baked snails, still in shells, bathed in garlic butter and parsley, can be very tasty. But not when pickled “in own juices.” Not when mushed into oblivion. Not when spread on bread. And especially not when made to look like innocent pesto sandwich.

Am officially weeping.

Time: 5:31am
Temperature: -56°C
Ground speed: 643.74km/h
Location: 36,000ft above Greenland

1 of 9 hours:
The excitement begins! Going to live in a little village in France for eight months!  Can’t wait to finally see the village for myself, instead of just stalking through it on Google Earth!
First thing on the agenda will be to find that stop-light I’ve been reading about on The Village  website. Not that there’s anything special about the stop-light, except the fact that it is the only stop-light in the entire commune. How cute! Yeah, I’ll bet it’s a really cute stop light. Wearing a little beret or something French like that. Yippie!

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Location: French village
Reasons for being in French village: 1) am angsty 20-year-old, 2) am sick of living in parents’ leaky, smelly attic  3) am sick of discovering new fauna in attic every day, 4) am not particularly keen on raccoons and pigeons discovered in attic, 5) raccoons and pigeons in attic not particularly keen on me, either, 6) oh yes, and will be teaching English to French children

Right. So I’ll be living in rural France for the next eight months of my life. Believe me, it’s a bit of a shocker to me too.  A year ago, upon my return to Vancouver from my exchange abroad, if someone had told me I was going back to the Old Continent so soon, I would have stepped my foot down, furrowed my brow, and said:

“Now, hold on a minute there, sir. What’s the use of all this hopping around? How can I even begin to replenishing my sushi deficiency with so little time back in Vancouver? And to leave those mountains, rivers, and glistening skyscrapers again? Unthinkable! Just let me be. I insist this is a joke!”

Then came a particularly cold and rainy Vancouver evening.  I was sitting in my parents’ attic, staring at a blank Word document on my computer screen. Pages and pages of research on the 1898 Hague Peace Convention lay on the floor — limb, scuffed-up, and totally unwilling to transform themselves into an essay. It was going to be a long night.

A few hours later, I was about to stuff a hand-full of coffee beans into my mouth when my computer made an all-too-familiar noise. Yes! Mail! There was a tart little message from my university.  Apparently the French Ministry of National Education was recruiting English language assistants. Apparently they were still doing placements in Southern France. And what was more, was that at that exact moment, destiny turned its trick and sent a particularly offensive whiff of pigeon droppings my way.

Suddenly my mind became blank. All other considerations vanished, leaving one thought behind:  “wouldn’t it be nice to go away somewhere?”

So I did. I went away somewhere. Though that “somewhere” turned out to be in the middle of nowhere.

My cherished readers, welcome to a new chapter in The Life and Times of the Curious Cockroach. Hereon you’ll find reports on my life in deepest, darkest rural France. I write to you from a village that I’ll be referring to as “The Village”. Why not use the real name? Because if my neighbour finds out I am (or will be) blogging about her pet ferret to 21 countries, imagine the scandal that would ensue. And there’s only one pet ferret around so I can’t just say it’s someone else’s ferret.

Stay tuned.

The Curious Cockroach

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