Sorry to those of you who don’t speak French.

Maybe I should start posting here again.

Je suis un américain qui ai fait une année d’échange à une des grandes facs à Paris. J’avoue que le système nord-américain a certains avantages, surtout (comme vous l’avez indiqué) qu’il y a plus de souplesse qu’en France pour la spécialisation des étudiants.

En effet, le problème dans le système américain se trouve plutôt au lycée, voire en collège. Les professeurs commencent à parler de l’université quand on a à peine 12 ans ; ensuite, tout au long du lycée, ils nous disent que si nous arrivons pas à nous faire accepter par une université, souvent une université prestigieuse, nos vies seront de grands échecs.

Les universités considèrent des critères à la fois quantitatifs (les tests “SAT” et “ACT”, les notes de cours, etc) et qualitatifs (tous nos jobs depuis le collège, les équipes sportives dont on a fait partie, les autres activités qu’on a fait, comme les pièces musicales, les clubs, etc). Les élèves ressentent donc une forte pression de réussir absolument partout.

Enfin, puisque les standards d’acceptation aux grandes universités américaines deviennent toujours de plus en plus élevés, les étudiants décident en général de ne pas mettre tous leurs oeufs dans le même panier : ils font souvent jusqu’a 10 demandes d’acceptation, chacun ayant ses propres exigences : en général il s’agit de plusieurs compositions jusuqu’à 5 pages chacun, qui devraient montrer nos caractères, nos aspirations, nos rêves …

Chaque demande coûte au moins 40 $, certaines jusqu’à 100. ( Vous ne le trouvez pas ironique qu’on paie souvent 100 $ pour le privilège de payer peut-être des centaines de milliers de dollars plus tard ? Bien sûr, c’est bien possible d’obtenir une très bonne formation pas chère, mais là il faut rester dans une université géré par l’état de sa résidence, ce qui manque souvent de prestige. Et comme mon choix d’université va déterminer toute ma vie … )

Moi, de ma part, j’étais paresseux : j’ai fait total 5 demandes d’acceptation, dont 3 dossiers ont été acceptés. J’ai une amie qui en a fait 16. Elle me dit souvent qu’elle est très contente à sa petite université au sein du Massachusetts.

You might have heard about the French elections. I mean, if you know how to read you might have. It seemed to be all over the Internet news, anyway, so I might be making a leap of faith, but I’m going to assume you’ve heard something about it. If you haven’t, I invite you to step onto Earth. Spring has hit the Northern hemisphere and it’s just lovely there.

I have a few French friends at this point, and they are almost all Socialist party supporters. So between that and the fact that Nicholas Sarkozy has been presenting himself as a racist nutjob since the beginning of the campaign, I have become something of an impromptu Socialist Party supporter here.

The other consideration is that even though I’ve been following the news here in France, French politics are incredibly character-based and it’s virtually impossible to know all 400,000 of them. As far as I’m concerned, they could make French Politician trading cards in the Pokemon style. Segolene would have an attack called “Make a campaign faux pas” and Sarkozy would have attacks called “Turkey is in Asia Minor” and “Inspire car fires”.

But I digress. When one friend sent me a text message inviting me to come watch the election results in front of the Socialist Party headquarters with her, I jumped at the chance. Sarah, like me, is a refugee from the glaciers class. But instead of suffering silently through it like I did, she altogether gave up on the Paris 1 geography department by dropping her double major. Since she made that fateful decision in the middle of last semester, I’ve seen a lot less of her. At 6:40 in the evening I, with the rest of the balloon-toting, banner-carrying Segolene Royal supporters, stepped out of the 12 train at metro Solferino.

Sarah and I had made no fixed rendez-vous point, and upon stepping out of the metro, I found myself in a beautiful little plaza on Boulevard St-Germain facing a closed off street. Both were quickly filling with Socialist partisans, who spilled out into the boulevard and seemed to be making the traffic more and more difficult. I made a circuit of all the different metro exits to make sure Sarah wasn’t at any of them before stepping across the street toward the Parti Socialist (PS) headquarters.

The cops had cordoned off the street in front of the headquarters for a length of two city blocks. The PS had set up a projection screen at the back of this section of street, but an hour and a half before the results were to be unveiled, it wasn’t showing anything in particular. TV crews for various channels had set up cameras around the periphery, some on tripods and some on cranes, and one small one hanging off a pole that dangled over the crowd. The mass became more and more dense toward the front, but fortunately, Sarah has very particular hair, and I was able to spot her halfway in. I followed her for five minutes, trying to punch out a text message on my phone to tell her to stop moving. At some point, however, she turned around and we caught eye contact. I pushed through the throng of red shirts and caught up with her.

We did the bise. “It was meant to be,” she said. “I was beginning to get worried. I was about to call.”

She introduced me to her friend, Margot, who had just recently returned from her own Erasmus exchange in England, before pointing me to turn around to grab a flag with Segolene Royal’s face on it from a man who was giving them out. And with flags in hand, we all pushed forward into the crush. It only thickened from where we were. We passed men with “Stop Sarko” badges and women with banners sporting the names of various organisations tied to the Socialist Party: the Movement for Young Socialists, for example. At about two thirds of the way to the front, Sarah and Margot were satisfied and we stopped moving.

At 7:00 the TV was switched to France 2: think France’s answer to the BBC. The presenters started speaking in patriotic terms about how historic this election was and how it would decide the course of the country; that’s such a common thing to say during election season that I think it’s practically a truism, but in these circumstances there was probably some truth to it. After two or three minutes of what the French call “blabla,” France 2 cut to a computer-generated introductory sequence for the show. It depicted three comet-like streams of blue, white, and red smoke surging past the La Defense business district, around the Arc de Triomphe, and into the Elysees Palace: the President’s mansion. The crowd roared; Sarah and Margot with them. I laughed.

“What?” Sarah prodded.

“How is it that I’m standing here with a Segolene Royal flag in front of the PS headquarters in Paris?” I said. “It’s pretty bizarre.”

She smiled. “Fun, isn’t it?” she said.

And for the next hour we watched as the talking heads on France 2 went at it. For the record, the male anchor had eyes that were disconcertingly close to each other. Each time he or his female counterpart mentioned the Socialist Party or Segolene Royal, or showed footage of our mob, everyone erupted in cheer and waved banners and flags. When Sarkozy was mentioned, there were boos and shrieks of anger. For a while it was good fun. There was a certain level of solidarity in the group. I saw and heard more than a few phone numbers change hands. Cheers erupted spontaneously.

Then, at 7:59, the Mr. Close-Eyes reported that the results were in and would be announced shortly. An onscreen timer ticked downwards and the crowd screamed. Five, four…

“We’re estimating this at 53% for Sarkozy,” said the anchor.

I looked at Sarah. The normally sharp and dispassionate girl’s face had gone completely red, and she was biting her nails. Margot was squinting at the screen, completely lost. Sobs were heard in every direction. A good half of the banners and flags fell out of vision. Streams of people turned around and started for the metro station. They were replaced by TV crews and journalists, who descened vulture-like into the crowd and seemed to poach the people in the worst emotional states. From our vantage point, I counted at least twenty television cameras. I thought about what I’d say if they somehow found me; something about how foreigners were also invested this country, and not all Americans supported Sarkozy.

Some fifteen minutes later, Segolene appeared onscreen to give a concession speech. The crowd cheered at her sight; it would be the evening’s last real cheer. She delivered her entire speech smiling like an idiot: the contrast between her face and those of her supporters was palpable and ridiculous. I don’t even remember what she said; something about the fight continuing in the National Assembly, and how the Left would never concede defeat. Sarah swallowed hard, snagged a cigarette from a passerby, lit it, and took a long drag. She passed it to me. I followed suit. And I don’t even smoke. But being one person in the presence of ten thousand grieving faces does something to you…

But when Nicholas Sarkozy, Darth Vader himself, appeared on the TV another twenty minutes later, the woe disappeared and was replaced with raw anger. The entire crowd booed; many flicked their middle fingers toward the screen. I have virtually no idea what he said because virtually every word was drowned out in heckling. At one point he mentioned the United States, probably with the line that the two countries were friends but that friends could have disagreements. “Hey, the United States!” Sarah called at me, reaching around my back and giving me half a hug. I groaned and let my head drop.

At the end of Sarkozy’s speech, we started back toward the metro. The crowd had dissipated some, and the back half of the cordoned off area was empty. We crossed a few camera crews in process of “interviewing” passers-by who were generally more interested in yelling than being in actual interviews. Sarah walked into a number of frames, yelled “long live the spirit of 1968!” (which sounds a lot more pithy in French), and left. The Metro station was absolutely filled with people, and cops lined the walls. One was about to nab a man who had managed to sneak his way halfway through a turnstile but was stuck; Sarah put her ticket through there, thus setting him free.

We had heard about a Movement of Young Socialists rally that was to be held at the Place de la Bastille, so we set off to meet some of Sarah’s friends there. We got off the 12 at Concorde to catch a 1 train; on an upwards escalator, a mass of 20-something teenagers shouted “Sarko ! Facho ! Le peuple aura ta peau !” – “Sarko, fascist, the people will have your hide” – as a TV camera rolled.

The Paris metro is set up in groupings of four seats: two pairs of two that face each other. We found a bank of seats with three free, one being consumed by a man in his mid thirties in a grey fleece. The three of us started talking, and Grey-Fleece ultimately joined in, asking questions about the rally after seeing that two of us held Segolene Royal flags. He asked if I was English and was surprised to hear that I was American; apparently Americans have universally bad accents, and most of us seem not to talk very intelligently in the “Hey, that station is named after a dead president!” 1 train.

When we got out of the train, Sarah’s friends were waiting for us. I was introduced to the group as Sam, “American-Canadian-French.” It’s by far the first time I’ve ever been identified as having three nationalities. And I’ve never been introduced as having anything to do with France. That moment stayed in my head for a long time.

The group, now at seven or eight people, walked at a brisk pace toward the Place de la Bastille. The last block was sectioned off. We walked past riot police with clear plastic shields, with large blue armored vans at their backs. We arrived around 8:45; the Young Socialists were nowhere to be seen, but a band of anarchists had climbed the statue in the middle of the Place: the slogan “Sarko, fils de macro” (Sarkozy, son of a pimp) was clearly legible in white paint. By the time the Socialists arrived half an hour later, the anarchists’ ranks had swelled and they were waving flares. A bonfire was lit in the plaza. A man entering the plaza revved his motorcycle. A few people threw beer bottles.

We stayed for an hour or so. Nothing happened while I was there, really, but after we watched a large mass of people surge toward us, we decided this was not going to end well and that it was high time to go. I, for one, didn’t feel like getting arrested; I didn’t have my papers on me, and that alone would have qualified me for some kind of penalty. We retreated past the riot police, through the Marais, where large bands of Orthodox Jews were swirling about, happily discussing Sarkozy’s election. Sarah and Margot went home, and I, in no mood to go home and eat pasta, dropped in on my friends up in the third arrondissement.

When I left their apartment three hours later, the riot police were facing Bastille, backing toward the Place de la Republique. I read in the newspaper the next morning that the demonstration had escalated into a riot and that the police had used tear gas. A car had apparently been set ablaze in the area. The day after, I saw the same incident reported in the New York Times, but fortunately I wasn’t there to witness it. There were some 100 arrests.

There is nothing like a big, emotional day of politics to make a foreigner feel that he has a place in a country in which he’s only a temporary resident. And not to get personal and weepy, because some of you have historically only read this blog because I make a lot of snippy comments, but the emotion and passion that ran over in the streets did a huge number on me. When I arrived in September, I knew nobody and got flustered ordering food in bakeries. And yet, this past Sunday, I ran around town to political rallies with friends who spoke French natively and with whom I was able to communicate without much trouble. This progression has never really dawned on me, because I have been very critical of my ability to speak this language.

So this was an interesting political day, and one that has made me think a lot about this country and my own position in it. Maybe it’s stupid that I’m getting worked up over someone else’s election day. I don’t care.

First the artists move in; with them come improvements to the buildings and trendier night spots. Then, lured by a newfound sense of respectability, comes the bourgeoisie, and finally the neighbourhood is protected with a historic preservation statute. This is what’s called “stage gentrification,” and you can learn about it in any 100-level urban geography class.

In fact, the idea of gentrification is no longer the exclusive preserve of urban geographers and economists, like it was in the mid 1980s when David Ley published some of the first portraits of gentrifiers and Neil Smith described its economic principles. Today, gentrification is in the greater public eye; it’s in newspapers that describe today’s up-and-coming neighbourhoods, and in magazines that wonder about the segregation and inequalities it causes. So gentrification is old news. It’s boring. Played out.

Or it would be, anywhere west of here. I’m now in Krakow, one of Poland’s largest and most famous cities, and one of its most important economic engines. Today, Krakow is also a tourist hub with a storied Old City like many European cities. It’s a massive centre of learning as well, with practically too many universities to count. Just outside Krakow’s southen city walls, between the thirteenth-century royal palace known as the Wawel and the Vistula River that flows north to Warsaw and the Baltic Sea, is a neighbourhood called Kazimierz. Until 1939, Kazimierz (pronounced “KA-zee-meersh”) was Krakow’s Jewish neighbourhood. Today, it’s become one of the city’s trendy neighbourhoods and tourist landmarks.

Krakow’s storied culture is centred around what is today the Jagiellonian University. That university was created in the fourteenth century by King Casimir the Great, and it was installed on land expropriated from the city’s Jewish community. The newly homeless Jews responded by moving their businesses, their institutions, and themselves to the south of town. They built their own city, Kazimierz, with a charter and city hall. As Krakow and Kazimierz grew in lockstep, the latter was annexed to the former. By 1939, when the Nazis marched into Poland, Kazimierz (and Podgórze south of the Vistula river) were important Jewish population centres.

The swift mechanics of Nazi extermination are by now well known. But in the context of Krakow, let me spell them out anyway: first herded into a ghetto in Podgórze, some were then sent to the Płaszów forced labour camp two miles to the south. A few were summarily shot in a small, set-off square that today is hemmed in by rusty metal gates and whose walls are still pocked with bullet holes. Most went directly to Auschwitz. Either way, by the time of the Red Army’s 1945 entry into Poland, Kazimierz stood essentially empty.

The half-century of Communist rule did little to change this state of affairs. Krakow was seen by the Communists as an insubordinate city, an intellectual and bourgeois place to be subdued. Instead of filling in existing parts of the city, the leadership decided to construct the city of Nowa Huta, a model socialist enclave and workers’ paradise, outside Krakow proper. Nowa Huta, which translates to “New Foundry,” was to be the site of the industrial jobs that the Communists valued and sought to create. The privation of these jobs from Krakow proper was considered a punishment. And for half a century, Kazimierz sat in fallow, decaying, frozen in an easier time.

It’s been sixteen years since communism. Poland has embraced capitalism headlong in the intervening time, and in 2004 the country joined the European Union. Just to the west of the Schengen customs union, Poland loosened its borders and allowed the tourists to trickle in. Unlike Warsaw, which had been destroyed during World War II by the Nazis and was rebuilt along the Soviet model, Krakow was comparatively unharmed by the years of Nazism and Soviet communism: its market square and old roads were still intact. The old storefronts were repainted and land values started to climb. But Kazimierz, outside the old city fortifications, was slower to develop. It was a less obvious place to revamp, and its buildings in worse condition.

I must admit that I am no expert on either Krakow or Poland. But it would seem to me that in the context of a picturesque city in an ascendant country, there must have been two processes operating in parallel. The first, and less interesting, is the process of stage gentrification that I described earlier, which can be clearly detected in parts of the neighbourhood today, where buildings are repainted and the nightclubs and bars smack of the influence of too-cool teenagers.

The second trend is a concerted effort by the Krakow tourism bureau.

BUT BEFORE I move on, I need to first note that I, myself, am Jewish. My ancestors arrived in North America in the latter part of the nineteenth century, fleeing persecution and poor conditions in various parts of Eastern Europe. Like the tales of immigrants that have become part of America’s cliché bedtime-story lore, my ancestors worked tirelessly, to the point that today, my family and I are happily situated in the American middle-class mainstream.

My family’s story is hardly unique. Today’s North America is home to millions of Jews, most of whom are more or less like me: relatively happy and comfortable in the Canadian or American middle classes. We’ve never thought to spend that much time in Europe, but today’s age of low-cost airlines, Eurail passes, the Schengen Zone, and college exchanges, has suddenly rendered the sexy Old World attainable. Programs like March of the Living have found great success by sending Jewish teenagers to the lands of their European antecedents.

Krakow has taken note of this trend, and has seen the success of other former-Soviet Bloc cities like Budapest, Tallinn, and Prague in drawing tourists. So the city has put its tourism bureau to work: Kazimierz is now noted on all the Old City maps and official tourist materiel. The Jewish neighbourhood is now also demarcated on the city’s new, sleek directional signs. So are at least four synagogues, one of which is now a museum of Jewish history. The Plac Bohaterów Getta, from where the ghetto’s Jews were herded onto trains, is demarcated on an officially signed walking tour.

Then there’s the Ulica Szeroka. The street has been doted with at least four separate restaurants offering purportedly authentic Eastern European Jewish cuisine. A (non-Jewish) Polish friend and I entered one restaurant, finding the walls covered in period ladies’ dresses and signboards offering the services of tradesmen with Jewish-sounding names. The tables were converted carpenters’ workbenches or sewing machine tables, each adorned with one Sabbath candle lit on an heirloom candlestick – Jewish law would have required two. The menu cited endorsements from an American rabbi, who liked the ambiance, and a Catholic priest, who found the food particularly authentic. It also offered a dozen main dishes, not a single one even slightly resembling a dish that I remember my grandmother making.

This, I reflected, must be how Chinese immigrants feel upon entering red, dragon-filled “Chinese” restaurants in North America. Who was Gerneral Tao, they must ask themselves, and why does he have a kind of chicken?

But authenticity is moot. In today’s North America, where Jews enjoy an unprecedented level of popular acceptance and, yes, assimilation, most of us probably can’t identify a difference between history and pastiche. And anyway, half of Kazimierz is now filled with bars and nightclubs and barely resembles the neighbourhood of my great grandparents’ generation. Who cares, then, if Kazimierz can never be returned to anything like its former state if this new one is two thirds as meaningful and twice as much fun?

PERHAPS I’VE OVERSPOKEN. Much of Kazimierz is as yet unclaimed by both the gentrifiers and the historic preservationists. Bustling bars and Jewish bookstores with signboards in Yiddish stand starkly next to crumbling façades and rubble-covered lots. It’s clear that the neighbourhood is on the rise, but no one can predict how far it will go or how quickly success, whatever that means, will arrive.

And the fact is that whatever happens to Kazimierz is a sideshow. Sure, the city of Krakow would love to have a trendy nightlife quarter to raise its tax revenue and the number of incoming tourists, but Krakow has bigger fish to fry. Krakow is safe in the knowledge that it will continue to spring back from Communism’s years of neglect because of one factor that I’ve hardly even alluded to at all: Auschwitz. The death camp’s effect on the Jewish psyche is hard to overstate, and Krakow is its proverbial gateway.

So it’s not random that Krakow, more than most Eastern European cities, has chosen to emphasize its Jewish corners. Consider the example of Warsaw, for example: an equally important Jewish centre until World War II, Warsaw was largely destroyed by the Nazis following a 1944 uprising. Today, its slaughtered Jewish population is only commemorated by a series of awkward and recent plaques in strategic locations among the peeling Soviet towers. And even though Krakow’s re-cobbled plazas and touched-up houses are these days scarcely more ‘authentic’ than any of Warsaw’s asphalt and high-rise reconstruction, it certainly seems like they might be. In other words, the Krakow tourism board has a vested interest in maintaining the ‘historic Jewish’ nature of this neighbourhood, because it is an important means of appealing to a certain demographic.

But then, gentrifiers have shown time and time again that they, too, appreciate the attractive architecture, authenticity and “sense of place” that the right historic quarter can bring. Given enough time, they can remake entire sections of cities. The question is whether the pattern of a historic neighbourhood remodeled through gentrification will match the historic neighbourhood that Krakow wants to recreate. If anything, Kazimierz should remind us of just how many mercenary ways we can put history to use.

Kazimierz is a place caught between gentrification and tourist development: torn between a free market and the government’s plans, between individuals and the greater community, between what it is becoming without interference and what it “should be.” It’s a neighbourhood undecided. The question is really whose quarter it will become.

On that day, I decided that a career in math was not for me. I was saddened, but not altogether surprised, when the grade came back: 41%. So it’s in that spirit that I announce today that it’s official: I will not be following a career in glaciers. I will not be a glaciertologist, or whatever. As of today, there is a new Lowest Grade Ever. A new feather in my cap of mediocrity, if you will.

But before I tell you what I actually received, let me explain the French grading system a little bit. In theory, marks range from 0 to 20, a 0 indicating that you failed to sign your name correctly and a 20 meaning that you just might be the Messiah. Realistically, however, professors tend to assign only grades taken from the middle six or seven numbers. That means that for super-good work, you might receive a 14. What’s more is that the notion of “passing” and “failing” doesn’t seem to exist in France the same way as it does in North America: in principle, I’m supposed to receive a minimum of a 10 to be able to transfer credits home. Realistically, however, French students I’ve met have often felt quite content with their 9’s or 8’s.

So you who are accustomed to already-difficult McGill grades: imagine working your tail off for four months on a subject, poring over books and academic papers and writing the best dissertation the world has ever known. And feeling happy when you receive a 65%: at McGill, a low B-. In France, that’s a 13, which is considered perfectly respectable.

Luckily for me, foreign exchange students receive more lenient grading: I call that the Foreigner Pity Grade Supplement. That means that occasionally, I’m in the position of having received the highest grade in the class, even if I’m not sure if the ideas I put forth in my composition (or whatever) merit it. This happened, for example, in a course about territorial development: I wrote a bang-up book review, studied reasonably hard (for an exchange student), and received a 13.5. When I shared this with a reasonably close French friend, her mouth went agape. Since then, for social reasons, I’ve been saying I received an 11.

Imagine that: being embarrassed to have received a 67%!

But it’s my mark in Glaciers that embarrasses me most, and it’s embarrassing in the opposite direction. Even by French standards, this is dismal. Hold yourself down: I received a 3. That’s a 15%.

The problem is that this makes no mathematical sense. The final grade was calculated as the average of the conference grade and the final exam grade. Let’s make like this is math class: I received a 7.2 in the conference, so what grade must I have received on the exam to have received a 3 in the course?

Give up? The answer is -1.5.

So something is fishy. The French students who I told about this told me laughed and told me it wasn’t possible to receive a negative grade. Today I went to the department secretary for further confirmation: she agreed, a -1.5 was probably not plausible, but that she, of course, was not the one to talk to about this grade.

So I’m at a crossroads. I can either pursue this matter with the professor in order to get my grade raised by probably some one or two points, which would still put me in the realm of failing. Or I can let this slide and content myself with the knowledge that as a Canadian Urban Systems major, I’ll probably never have to take a class about glaciers again.

In Canada I’d content myself with the knowledge that this was probably just some quick little mistake; the wrong bubble filled in on the Scantron sheet. But having gone through an entire semester with this conference professor, I feel like it could just as well be malicious. She’s the one, after all, who mocked me at the first class for being foreign. (”Is that how you take notes in Canada?” she said in front of an entire class.)

There are two latent desires which are currently duking it out in my head. On the one hand, I would be perfectly happy to never deal with her again; I wish her well, I hope her rock chemistry research makes her very happy, but that I have no part in it. But on the other hand, I’m angry enough that I do, in a way, want to stick it to her. My French may be imperfect, but that doesn’t mean I’m stupid.

Yet here I am waiting for the bus. The roads here are too small to be anything but one-way, and the road in front of my destination, the hostel where I’m staying, goes the wrong way. I’m not entirely sure where I’ll end up.

In North America, we’re accustomed to newness. It’s ingrained in us. Whether we like it or not, most of our continent lives in the suburbs; many of those same places weren’t there when their inhabitants were children. And our cities – even the older ones – are shrines to modernism and postmodernism: statues without recognizable forms, or skyscrapers that we could judiciously refer to as “concrete slab chic.”

So to the North American eye, Bruges is old. Really old. And quaint too! The roofs are gabled, the streets are paved in cobblestones, and the locals are speaking a language that the North American has never heard in her life. Forget Disney’s Magic Kingdom, she thinks as she drifts toward the town centre with wide eyes, I’ve got this real cathedral right here. There’s a Christmas market still out, and just look at these adorable little restaurants!

Bruges’s centre is the Grote Markt, or Grand Place in French, and grand it is. Surrounded on two sides by three-story buildings full of shops and restaurants, on the third by the city hall with its tall surveillance tower, and on the fourth by a Gothic-style cathedral, the Markt is an important hub and reference point for the city. Merchants inside the Christmas market’s stalls sell bratwurst sandwiches, holiday season compact discs, and savoyard tartiflette: a dish involving potatos drenched in cheese and covered with bacon and onions.

Moving radially outward from the plaza, our visitor witnesses the commerce slowly transform from restaurants and souvenir shops to groceries and laundromats. She sees the stately central buildings give way to gabled attached houses and even the rare abandoned brown lot. The sidewalks empty out and the roadbeds turn from cobbles to asphalt.

And then, finally, one last wind in the road and one final canal. And then, a traffic light. An arterial road. Our traveler is in the ‘burbs.

I came to Bruges because I was told I absolutely had to. I was staying at a hostel for a few days in Brussels and my taste of Belgium would be there and Antwerp. But person after person told me to go to Bruges. “Oh, but it’s so pretty!,” they said. The caveat was also the same: full of tourists. But it’s worth it. Even my tour book used practically the same words.

Travelling alone, or almost alone, is fun but tiring. Each hostel has a new group of travellers, none of whom you’ve ever met before or will probably ever see again. They come in certain forms: world-weary backpackers for whom the current city is never quite as good as the last; tired drivers halfway to their destination; confused teenagers lost without a beer in hand. The people you meet start to blur together.

Then there’s the physical fatigue. You’ve stayed up late with your single-serving friends, but then need to wake up early to catch the hostel’s free breakfast (inevitably toast with jam, and two to four cups of watery coffee). You find your friends from last night – who are inevitably more hung over than you, and care mostly to talk about life back in the Chicago suburbs or English Midlands (remember, people of the same language inevitably flock together). You might indulge in a few nice meals if you’re in a culinary town, but most of what you’ve been eating for the time of your travels has been fast food or streetside kebab, so your lack of nutrition isn’t helping your body’s natural balance much either. But hey – you’re on vacation! Who needs nutrition or sleep?

If you’re moving on to another city that day, you find somewhere in the hostel to stash your suitcase so that you can sightsee before catching your train. Or you return to the dorm and try to hide everything you own under the bunk bed. Then out you go: back into the foreign city that’s become your short-term home.

Foreign cities have lots of museums, so if you’re inclined towards culture, those are always a possibility. In Europe, they also often have historic old downtowns, so photo opportunities are a dime a dozen. Odds are one in two that there’s a historic wharf, a museum of city history, or an important cathedral. After your full day of culture and sightseeing, as the art museums are turning out their lights, you return to the hostel to find something to do for the evening.

I am walking down a dark cobblestone street in Bruges with two other men. One, Richard, is from the North of France; the other, Paul, is from Wallonia: Belgium’s Southern, French-speaking half. Richard and Paul are on the way from the area around Calais to Brussels to catch a plane. They had decided to stay in Bruges for a night to catch a drink.

After having left Richard’s car on the Bruges outskirts to avoid the stringent centre-city parking regulations, we start in toward the Grote Markt. There is no one else on the street: the tourists are asleep in their hotels, and the locals are watching TV in their homes. The air is damp and cold. Street lamps pierce the night’s deep grey.

At a twist in the road, Richard stops us. “You see that tower over in front of us?” he asks, gesturing at a large, pointed spire on the other side of a few blocks of residential buildings.

Paul and I nod.

“That’s the city hall, of course,” he says as we start walking again, more slowly than before. “In old times, they used to keep someone up there at all times. There was always a risk of an invasion, and they wanted to be forewarned. The land around here is almost completely flat, so it was easy to see.”

Turning a few more corners, we arrive at the front of the city hall, at the Grote Markt. It’s mostly abandoned. A few cars drive cautiously through. A man running a fry kiosk listens to a radio talk show in Flemish.

I buy a medium fry, slathered in Andalusian Sauce – the Belgians cover their fries in mayonnaise-based dips and provide a tiny two-pronged fork to help you escape the grease. I turn back to the French speakers, who are puzzling over the Tourism Office map.

We walk around the Grote Markt toward a bar: what appears to be the only place still open. A bouncer opens the door for us and we enter.

The bar is submerged in a blue tint, as if in a submarine, and packed with teenagers: Bruges’ high school students. A lone disco ball hangs from the ceiling, rotating back and forth and projecting little white U’s on the surfaces underneath. There’s a stage to the right with two men on it: one plays a keyboard, as the other sings in Flemish and keeps the adolescent crowd under control.

Richard, Paul, and I slink to the back of the chamber. We’re probably the only ones in the bar speaking French instead of Flemish: much like in Canada, language issues are supreme in Belgium, and it wouldn’t be good to be heard by too many people. We find a table at chest height to stand around. Paul snags a beer list from the next table and announces that this round’s on him. A waiter comes and we order.

It’s only a couple days after Christmas, and in tourist towns, holidays die hard. The singer on stage is singing a Flemish Christmas song: there are synthesized bells coming out of the keyboard, and the crowd is swaying back and forth drunkenly.

Richard sidles up to another table and says something to its occupants. When he returns, he has a thick pamphlet with him. He pages through it and shrugs.

“It’s a song list,” he says. “But I have no idea what they’re singing now. In fact, I don’t know how to do much in Flemish. I can order drinks and that’s pretty much it.”

“How much more do you need?” Paul asks, laughing.

The two men on stage start performing John Lennon’s “A Very Merry Christmas.” The entire bar erupts for the chorus.

On a web site like urbanphoto, a site so devoted to recently enshined ideas like an ‘urban experience’ of mixed land use and walkability, it’s easy to laud Bruges for its good urban design. True, it’s compact and walkable; it’s got great focal points like plazas and canal arms that make it easy to navigate. To a limited degree, Western cities could try to glean a lesson or two from Bruges. But let’s not forget that Bruges is not a product of our time. It hasn’t been up-to-date since it was one of Europe’s main ports. That was in the 1400s.

Europe deals with this tension between the new and old-fashioned frequently. In a sense, World War II settled the question for them: there would be space for new architecture where buildings had been destroyed. Americans, too, chose novelty, by building tracts upon tracts of suburban houses outside of the existing inner city. Canada has always teetered on the edge.

But this is all in the world of what is. Bruges, however, is a tourist city: a place devoted to what was and what might have been. From the point of view of the urban planner, if Bruges has made its visitors think more about the spaces in which they live, it has probably fulfilled its purpose.

Finals here are more or less the same process, but with a big shot of novocaine. The knowledge that all of this is pass fail lubricates the whole process. I’ve now taken six out of my seven (!) exams here, and even done a fair bit of studying for them all (with my 60-80% comprehension level notes). And somehow, until today, I’ve felt very distant about the whole process. Like in some kind of strange out-of-body experience. Not understanding everything the professors are saying helps.

Frankly I’m kind of worried about exams. It’s hard enough to take them in English, but I really am relying on my being a non-francophone foreigner to ride through these. It isn’t even just an issue of comprehension: a lot of what goes on in class relates to structures of how various layers of government work, things that these students have been familiar with since they started university and that I’ve just been dropped into.

I have one class where I basically had to do a project tracing the building of a development project out in the suburbs. I did the best I could, given that my partner had decided to quit school two weeks before the due date, all the while taking the notes with her. Most of the effort I put into the project wasn’t on the project itself, but rather getting to the point where I know what sorts of structures I’d be looking for in the first place. Then I did the project the best I could.

So I guess the question is whether me writing “Etudiant CREPUQ (non-francophone)” on top of all my tests will make the professors realize how far behind these people I actually am, or will only cause the professors to forgive my grammar mistakes. I’m at this weird point where my French is good enough that professors expect things out of me, but bad enough that I’m not completely able to provide it. True, the comfort is way way up compared to October, but that had to be expected. I’ve been here for two months and can’t spend all of it in my room.

Speaking of comfort. The other solution to the notes problem is befriending people who I could ask for notes. And here’s the thing: I’m coming to realize that people at “la fac” – that’s to say, university – are really, really nice. And I’ve found out that since about 80% of them did the university-disrupting “prepa” program to try to get into the elite French private schools, all of them have felt somewhat awkward as well here, themselves not really knowing anyone. The only difference in my situation is the language, and that’s becoming less of an issue.

The last evening before Christmas break (which, in France, is less a break than a massive pre-Finals study period) I managed to go out and get a beer with some of the other geography students. They were clearly by then friends, and it was heartening not only to be able to understand them but to be able to riposte! It’s not perfect, since I still have trouble with vocabulary and with forming the sarcastic tone of voice, but this is progress. It’s only January. I’m here till the end of June. Life is looking up.

The ERASMUS people, by the way, are excellent as well. Low-key bunch, mostly Italians and Spanish, with a few others, like yours truly (token American), who I actually can joke around with. We’ve managed to score a mega-cheap car rental to drive to Amsterdam for a few days in early February, which will be excellent. I’ve been impressed with how little it costs to move around Europe, even if things once you’re at where you’re trying to go are really expensive.

Vacation. Belgium and London were both excellent. I’m about halfway though an article on Bruges for Urbanphoto, which I’ll post here as well. I’ve started to put up photos on a flickr archive, so feel free to check that out. Antwerp was fabulous too. I do plan on explaining those places more, but frankly, finals have intervened.

So this has been what’s been going on in my life in the three weeks since I’ve last posted. I’m going to Stockholm tomorrow night for a few days, and maybe either Oslo or Copenhagen. I don’t want to go away for too long. I don’t like hostelling that much, and Paris has become comfortable. I need a few days where I can just get up late and do nothing.

—–

I can’t keep writing in the newspaper-feature-article style I’ve been trying to write most of the posts in. It takes too much work, which means I can’t post as much, which means the blog doesn’t fulfill what I wanted it to: to tell my family and friends what I’ve been up to without having to repeat myself a hundred thousand times. From here on out, you have to deal with normal stream-of-consciousness.

One complaint that almost all of the Erasmus kids have is that they meet too many people. I know, I know – boo hoo, cry me a river – but trust me, it becomes a problem when you show up at a party that someone you happened to meet a month ago has also come to. He remembers your name, and you don’t remember his. This happens at least once a week – sure, not always at parties, but it’s a permanent annoyance in the Erasmus experience.

What’s worse is that there’s no tactful way to admit that you don’t remember a name. There’s always the classic “introduce someone else to them so they have to say their name” routine, but since everyone else has done this already, they know what you’re trying to pull off and if you’re going to make it work, you have to be really suave. And you can just forget about it if the guy you saw two weeks ago is the only person there who you’ve seen before at all.

I believe that ultimately, the only acceptable solution will be some kind of heads-up-display like fighter jet pilots use. Looking at the party through your pair of electronic glasses, you’ll see above each person’s head their name (Jane), country of origin (Finland), field of study (ethnobiology), relationship status (Facebook: “It’s Complicated”), and highlights of your previous conversations. When you plug the glasses in to charge at night, everything is sent to your computer, and you can search through for highlights. Who, for example, was it that compared Americans to large children?

The last two or so weeks before break were packed with Christmas parties. All Christmas parties are pretty much the same: mulled wine, mistletoe, Secret Santa games in any of ten languages. By this time of year, the internationals have become homesick, and they recount misty-eyed descriptions of their late-December family traditions to each other. Somewhere in the background, a fireplace is quietly crackling.

Generally I’m the only Jew around. It’s usually not a big deal. While I don’t flaunt the fact, if I’m asked about – say – my Christmas traditions, I’m not shy to say that I’m not actually Christian.

Are you going back home to the States for the holiday?

No, I’m going to be travelling around a little bit.

Aren’t you going to be sad to be missing Christmas with your family?

Well, what can I say? I’m Jewish, so Christmas isn’t a huge deal for me, and when will I get to travel around like this again?

A few people have even started to engage me a bit. One girl asked me if I celebrated the new year on January 1 like she did. I answered that yes, it was true, we had our own Jewish New Year, but that we also lived in the Christian world. Of course I celebrated New Year’s Eve!

The second-to-last Christmas party I went to was held at an apartment in my neighbourhood. I live in a pretty swanky area, and the guy who held the party, Douglas, was a guy who I’d heard about a number of times but hadn’t actually met: like me, he was a Montreal resident living overseas. Unlike me, Douglas was a Francophone, but his accent in English was much better than mine in French. He lived in an incredible apartment, and I can only guess that he was renting a room from the probably-elderly people who actually owned the place.

Douglas’s party had a much more classy ambience than most of the student-run events I’ve been to. Low-key lounge music played in the background over the crackling of a fire in the fireplace and the quiet background chatter of other guests. I had unintentionally dressed for the occasion, with a nice sweater and polo shirt on, but a few of my less clairvoyant friends wore jeans or, worse, soccer jerseys. They almost immediately felt out of place.

My first social misstep took place as soon as I walked through the door. Douglas’s roommate answered the door – but not knowing if it she were host or guest, I had no idea what actually to say. I stammered and semi-introduced myself, finally feeling relieved as one of my friends noticed my entry and greeted me. My presence was therefore valid. Following the roommate’s direction, I placed the bottle of white wine I had brought on the kitchen counter.

For me, the party started slowly. There wasn’t much mixing among groups of people so I, staying true to the atmosphere, stuck with my friends. They were less than enthused about the party and had decided to mix a pot of their favourite drink: calimocho, a combination of one part cheap red wine to one part coke, which apparently comes from Spain – though I’m not sure something so obvious can really be credited to any one country.

I’ve had more than my fill of calimocho lately, so I found an opened decent-looking bottle of red wine and filled half a plastic cup. For some reason, it’s easier to talk to people while holding a cup. My theory is that having your hand occupied means that you can’t lock your arms, and therefore appear to be more open to conversation. A friend adds that at awkward pauses, you can take a sip while you quickly figure out what to say next.

Later on, as I stood talking to a girl from my French class, Peter – a tall Italian student who I know reasonably well at this point – grabbed me by the shoulder. There was someone he wanted me to meet, he said.

Peter led me to a girl who was sitting on a large, stuffed chair that looked like the lost middle third of an old couch. Her name was Evelyn, she had a narrow face surrounded by strikingly black hair that pulled itself into large coils, and she would be studying management in Vancouver next year. At first, she seemed roughly as pleasant as any French person I’ve met randomly at a party: that’s to say, somewhat cool but civil. Gradually, over the course of five or ten minutes of conversation, she started to soften up. And then:

“So you live in Montreal, but is that where you’re from?”

“Actually, I’m from the States,” I responded.

“Oh,” she answered.

So the slightly self-deprecating “actually” didn’t make the pill go down any softer like it usually does. I took a sip of wine while I tried to figure out what to say to a person who was very visibly unhappy about my place of origin.

“Oh?” I said. “Why ‘oh’? Have you been to the States before?”

“I spent three weeks of a summer at a program at NYU,” she said. “It was interesting.”

“Interesting?” I prodded.

“Yeah, it’s an interesting place,” she said.

I said nothing. She seemed on the verge of adding something else about New York. Then, her back straightened.

“I’m going to get a drink,” she said sharply. “I’ll be right back.”

Anyone who has been to a fair number of parties knows that that’s code for “this conversation is over.” So as Evelyn disappeared into the kitchen, I sauntered back to my friends. They were in the middle of a conversation about being intellectual in Paris – how cliché it was, and yet how they felt that if they didn’t spend time in cafés discussing the finer points of life, they were not living up to the Paris experience. I slowly slipped into the discussion.

So did Evelyn.

“This one here-” she said, pointing to me “- is probably an intellectual.”

My friends shot wry glances at me.

“North Americans don’t usually consider themselves intellectuals,” I shot back. “Any of the other people in this group can quote more Plato than I can.”

To make a long story short, since this post is already far too long, this conversation finally taught me what I needed to know about the clashes in personality between Americans and French. They consider us superficial and don’t understand how we can invite people into our houses that we barely know; I explained to her that we consider warmth and welcomingness as very appealing characteristics and that dinner parties, to us, were ways to get to know people and not to show them that they had made it. I explained to her that the French often came off as cold, snide, snobbish, and uncaring. She told me that I had too much class to be American, and she would have pegged me from my good pronunciation and non-loudness as being English. And last of all, to my laughter, she explained that the dominant stereotype of Americans was that we were all overgrown, blimp-sized children.

I have only one thing left to say. If I had had my pair of glasses, I wouldn’t have had to recount this entire story to know where that quotation came from.

—–

Going off to Brussels tomorrow morning. Bruges, Antwerp, or Luxembourg may follow. I’ll take pictures and try to post. Merry Christmas to those of you who celebrate it. As you know, I don’t.

And so it was that on a particular Sunday, my corner bakery did not, actually, have croissants. Or pain au chocolat or much of anything else, except for apple turnovers. And I was not in the mood for apple turnovers. Being out of cereal and bread, if I was going to eat anything that morning, I was going to have to find it first. I would be meeting a friend at the Centre Pompidou, way downtown, at 2. Mission: breakfast.

Generally speaking, not being able to buy croissants at this bakery is not a huge loss. I don’t like the lady who runs the corner bakery, and she doesn’t seem to like me; maybe she hates English speakers, or maybe she’s experiencing job burnout, or hey, maybe her marriage is lacking. If another bakery were present, I’d almost certainly patronize them instead.

But this was Sunday morning, and finding places to buy baked goods on Sunday morning in Paris – the capital of a country which has a mandatory 35-hour work week and which nearly entirely vacates to the beaches for an entire month every year – is no simple feat. In my head, I listed the four or five bakeries near my apartment. One, the self-proclaimed “Golden Baguette Winner, 2004,” would be too expensive to buy a simple breakfast from. Two more would certainly be closed. That left two: one which I didn’t remember the location of well, and one whose hours I couldn’t remember.

So I set off for Place Victor Hugo, home of the bakery whose hours I couldn’t remember. I walked to the curb and then, seeing that the bus wasn’t coming, started the five or ten minutes on foot. The air was humid and cold. Paris may not be as frigid as Montreal, but in terms of raw units of early Winter drabness, it still gives its younger cousin a run for its money.

I negotiated the roundabout to look for the bakery. True to the day’s luck, it was closed. And here, I reasoned that I might as well just wait for lunch. I turned around and walked to the bus stop. I perched myself on the bench under the overhang and waited.

And waited.

It seems that I had picked the wrong day to try Place Victor Hugo for croissants. As I was bundling up to leave my apartment for breakfast, the Parade of Horses was working its way through Paris from somewhere south-east of me: probably the Trocadero or the Eiffel Tower. And therefore we arrive at the famous physics problem: if a man leaves his apartment for a croissant and walks southeast at a speed of 5 kilometres per hour while a parade of horses walks toward him at a speed of not-fast-enough, will the man have enough patience to wait for the bus which is stalled behind the entire parade of horses?

A complicated question indeed. And it turns out that in this case, that particular man was surprised enough to see a mob of men on horses dressed as French Revolution soldiers that yes, he waited through it. In fact, the experience was more than a little surreal. It was a pastiche of the last six centuries of history: the procession of revolutionaries was followed by mobs of jousters and Davy Crocketts. Every so often, two horses would be followed by a carriage, invariably full of bored children and waving men in tuxedos. A few people awkwardly strode past on donkeys.

The last squadron of American frontiersmen glided past the now-packed bus stop after about twenty-five minutes. It was followed by a number of police on mopeds – and then, appropriately, a rather ineffective street sweeper. Then, a long queue of cars. Then, my bus.

Enough. I threw up my hands and started walking home. And about here, I think it’s about right to paraphrase a Mitch Hedberg joke: if you want to rewind a parade, just walk forward faster than it’s moving. And as I walked toward home, it at first didn’t strike me that the parade no longer seemed to be moving forward – that the parade was rewinding before my eyes.

Then, as I crossed the street, I saw it. The parade was trying to turn a corner. And I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the St. Patrick’s Day parades in Montreal or New York, but there’s a reason they don’t turn off of St-Catherine Street or Fifth Avenue. They get stuck.

The police on the mopeds at the back of the parade fanned out across the intersection to try to keep the oncoming cars under control. Traffic started to stall all the way back to the Arc de Triomphe. The sound of car horns pierced the ear from every direction. The horses were visibly perturbed. And I handily beat the bus home.

But none of this is particularly important. What was important was this past Tuesday: the date I would be absolutely, positively receiving my carte de séjour, i.e. my non-temporary French visa that would cover the rest of my stay. It turns out that this is a pan-European Union thing; my friend in the Netherlands has one, and my friend who will be going to Italy has to get one upon his arrival. I can’t recap the entire saga thus far because it would take way too long (and plus, I’ve already written it here), but let’s just say that I’ve been strung along with the carte de séjour process for my entire stay here thus far.

My medical visit was scheduled for 3:30, but as I’ve learned from my last few runs-in with various bureaucracies, you are never the only one to receive a given date and time. So I arrived at 3 to beat the 3:30 rush. I presented my convocation to a woman at a desk, who told me to take a seat in the waiting area to wait my turn. To my left, an asian guy, clearly a college student, spoke in English to an Arab-looking student. He had apparently been called back in the middle of January, after his scheduled December return to China to see his family. This would not pose a problem, except that his original visa into the Schengen Zone was single-entrance . . .

After fifteen minutes in the waiting room, I was called in to a second room – a chaotic rectangular chamber with two rows of back-to-back chairs, surrounded on all sides by smaller check-up rooms. Like a game of bureaucratic Whack-a-Mole, middle-aged men and women in white lab jackets popped in and out of the doors calling the names of carte de séjour applicants. After twenty minutes, my name was called by a short, grey-haired black doctor. He shook my hand and instructed me to hang my coat and bag on a hook on the wall. He took my height and weight.

“Stand at the line,” he said as I stepped off the scale, pointing to a scabby-looking piece of duct tape on the floor. He walked to an eye chart across the room and instructed me to read letters from it.

Then, pulling a laminated card from his lab coat’s chest pocket, he walked toward me. He pointed to a place on the card.

“Opportunité,” I said.

He pointed to another place.

“Bonheur,” I said. Happiness. Was this some kind of subliminal message game? Indoctrination by health test?

Regardless, I passed the eye/literacy test and was sent into the next hall, a stubby enclosure with three small doors coming off it. The attendant instructed me to wait there. Sounds good – by now I’m pretty good at waiting.

One of the doors clicked open and the arab-looking guy from the first waiting room walked out.

“Please enter and lock the door behind you,” said the attendant. “And take off all the clothing above your waist. They’re going to take an X-ray.”

Awesome. I entered the small chamber and locked the door as I had been told. Another door, opposite the first one, had a sign in about ten languages instructing the applicant to take off all the clothing above his or her waist. I placed the papers I had been given – my file – in the pocket on that second door.

After a few claustrophobic, half-naked minutes, another man in a white coat opened the second door.

“Please follow me,” he said quickly.

He led me to an X-ray machine – a flat, white metallic surface about one metre by one metre, and instructed me to give it a big hug. Which I did, but not without wondering how many sick, hairy dudes had already done the same thing today and whether this plate was regularly disinfected. Fortunately, I have not been sick since the X-ray was taken.

The process was over in a minute, and I was sent back to the other room to dress myself. I left the dressing room clothed and was sent back to the second waiting room.

I sat for another fifteen minutes before I was called in by a friendly-looking 40-ish female doctor. She advised me to sit down on a plastic chair, facing her, and hung my X-ray on a fluorescent-backlit box.

“Well, Monsieur Imberman, your X-ray is looking pretty good,” she said with the gravity of a doctor announcing that her patient had three days to live. “And,” she went on, “it looks like you didn’t have much lunch today!”

“Not so!” I said. “I actually ate pretty well. Beef bourguignon. It was pretty cheap too, from a school cafeteria.”

She laughed. “So I take it you’re a student then, I take it? What do you study?”

“Geography,” I said. “In Canada, it’s more about urban planning, but here I’m a geography student.”

She asked me what the difference was, and I replied with my stock answer about how glaciers and mountains bored me. After about five minutes of this sort of banter – seems the doctors are also supposed to assess whether applicants are decent human beings as well? – she sent me back to the waiting room. Again. It’s like Whack-a-Mole for applicants too. We’re both the whackers and the moles.

Only this time, I was armed with the large, life-sized X-ray of my chest. Otherwise she was going to throw it out, and hey, maybe someone will ask for my chest X-ray.

Unsurprisingly, I received a clean bill of health, as attested on two separate sheets of paper: one for me and one for the police prefecture. And I was sent down the hall to actually receive my carte de séjour.

My fingers tingled with excitement. I waited for ten minutes in line. Was this the moment I’d been waiting for? Would the gods of bureaucracy smile on me today? Would the skies open up and bestow upon me the ticket to a real life in Paris?

Pfft. No! Of course not!

“We’re sorry, Monsieur Imberman, but your card just hasn’t come in yet.”

Oh.

So the next magical date is December 22. Brilliant.

It never ends.

I have this vision of going back to Canada in another ten months and having them call me up the day school starts back up there. “Monsieur Imberman!” they’d say. “Your card is ready! You only need to come in and have these four vaccinations.”

But at this point I’m pretty resigned and philosophical about all of this. Waiting is just part of the French experience, I keep telling myself. And at least I’m pretty much settled now. I’ve got a fridge, a French press (for my coffee) and hot plate, and the other day I stocked the fridge. Life goes on.

And best of all: now I have a giant X-ray of my chest that I have no idea what to do with. It doesn’t fit on any of my shelves, so right now it’s resting against the wall behind a cabinet. I’m thinking of hanging it up and making a little shrine with votive candles and incense. Or something.