Far and Away

Featured image: A winter wonderland—in March—in Strasbourg, a beautiful fairytale city on France’s border with Germany. Ah, French. The language of poets, the mots justes of Flaubert and Camus, evocative of ballet, theatre, cuisine, art—and, it often feels, the construction of a madman. Though grammar, syntax and conjugation are by this point full-on hobbies of mine (I take Ancient Greek back at Vassar, if that’s any indication), French’s contradictory rules and endless exceptions are a world unto themselves. Getting a…

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Featured image: Beautiful gray Paris days—here, in the jardin des Tuileries—have been slowly showing signs of the spring to come. The notion of being abroad comes with a lot of expectations. What essentially describes a physical distance morphs into this romantic notion of difference, of monumental personal change, of an irreversible growth and expansion in understanding. Frankly, that’s a lot of pressure. I’m often reminded that I’m not that much farther away from Vassar here in Paris than I am…

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Featured image: Integrating seamlessly into French society by posing for tourist pictures. You’d be hard-pressed to find a French class in the U.S. that doesn’t mention terroir, the French culinary principle that says that food and wine from different places absorb unique qualities of the land, the terre, in which their ingredients grow. This concept seemed particularly relevant to the study abroad experience, a grand experiment in déracinage, uprooting—in leaving one land, gaining another and trying to make a fruitful…

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