The Life and Times of the Curious Cockroach

(A quick post I wrote at home before firing it off from internet cafe. No longer have internet, will be traveling to villages around Nice for the next little while. Stay tuned.)

Location: The Village,  Southern France
Date: May 2nd, 2010

I think it’s time I introduce you to The Village. It’s my eighth month here as a language assistant. I applied to work in the Toulouse school district, and in the work placement gamble, the French Ministry of Education sent me here. It certainly isn’t Toulouse, and it isn’t anywhere close to Toulouse, but I’ve grown to love it. So after getting intimate with The Village – through its deep winter hibernation to its spring awakening — it’s time for the official introduction.

The first thing I must tell you is that The Village is not actually a village. It’s considered as a city by French standards. And by French standards, any middle-of-nowhere hummel with no stoplights or running buses becomes a city when it acquires its three-thousand-and-first inhabitant.

The Village was born out of the medieval times, and probably hasn’t expanded much since then. It  has all that’s needed to make it a wholesome, overall cute place to be. There’s a town hall, a post office, a church, a tea shop, a market square, a few bakeries, an ancient nunnery-turned-school, and a lovely river that’s harnessed into two or three canals as it runs through The Village.

Night Life

If you walk along the canals on any given evening, you’ll see the same pair of old ducks, cleaning themselves on the same rock. They are not the chattiest of types – no amount of human quacking will solicit a quack back. Still, if you’re a restless soul looking for night life, this is probably the closest you’ll get.

There are a few bars, but I generally avoid them. I’d bump into my students there, and I don’t think I’m supposed to drink with them – what with the school principal living a few blocks away!

Morning Life

This is when The Village becomes a veritable bee hive. Buses and shuttles roll in from all directions and head to the school. They drop off all those who are aged between 10-18, who live in the surrounding hamlets.

There’s also the Wednesday morning market, where you can find all sorts of smelly and delicious goods from local farms. These vendors often go from village to village, like nomads, hopping from this market to that.

Afternoon Life

At the stroke of 12, a general sleepiness descends on The Village. This is the afternoon siesta, when everything closes and people go home to have lunch with their families. Store shutters are slammed shut and curtains are drawn for the next two hours or so. Sometimes I sit on a bench and watch this closing ceremony with wonder. How the economy functions around here is still a mystery to me.

At 2:30 we can continue our tour through The Village, and head to the tea shop.  This is one of the popular hang-out spots. I’m convinced the owner, Madame Toussaint, thinks that tea can be a solution to anything. I’ve seen people walk into the tea shop as they would into a pharmacy: they name their problem – bad sleep, bad digestion, bad divorce – and Madame Toussaint names the tea. She brings out a cast-iron tea pot, then some flimsy cup from one of the shelves, and finally a set of tiny hour-glasses. She tells you which one to watch, and as soon as the red, grey, or yellow sand runs out, you can start drinking the tea. I can assure you that your troubles will melt away with each sip.

Between 5:30 and 7:30, all the shops close for the night, and sleepiness descends on The Village once more.

Everyday Life

So you might be wondering how a young university student would fare in such a lost and faraway place. Language assistants are assigned here every year – some of them love it and some hate it. Some leave after the first few weeks, unnerved by all the levels of silence this place can have. Or they get seduced by some dazzling city and don’t want to come back.

I think that, to survive here, you have to be social and anti-social at the same time. You have to be comfortable with solitude. With eerie abandoned hamlets. With empty stretches of land.  But you also have to make the extra effort to meet people, because a succulent home-made dinner is just as part of the experience as anything.

In the Lot region, there’s actually loads to do and see, but you have to find it first. And when you do find it, you are all the happier. Even in The Village itself, you can still do crazy modern things like go to the cinema or get your body parts X-rayed –both of which I’ve done, and it was loads of fun.

It’s all a question of adaptability, folks.

See you again soon,
The Curious Cockroach