By: Hamish Clinton and Jozsef Varga
Imagine heavily armed French border patrol officers chasing you off a train, demanding that you show them your papers . . . Well, we don’t have to! Because that was us only a handful of days ago, on exchange.
We were coming back from a short trip to Italy on one of many trains running between the Italian border town of Ventimiglia and the French border town of Menton. Unfortunately, we hadn’t realized that despite Europe’s open borders, you still need to keep your passport on you. In our ignorance, we thought the best plan of action was to play even more ignorant, assuming the Quebecois and Anglo-Canadian identities of “French-Canadian Passenger #1” and “Jonathon.” After we recited what felt like a painfully long and stupid excuse, the police, accustomed to silly North American tourists, let us go with a warning.
All that aside, the south of France is truly lovely, filled with the scents of lavender, sage, and the aromatic Mediterranean Sea. After the eight-hour plane ride from Ottawa it took to get there, it was all the more beautiful.
We’re part of a program at SFU called the French Cohort Program, and the third year features a mandatory exchange to a French-speaking region of the world: France, Belgium, Switzerland, even Quebec if you want. We went with the first option, and we are now happily attending a school called Sciences Po at its Menton campus.
Menton is a rather small town to the east of Nice, all the way at the bottom of France. There seem to be about twelve people living here, and once tourist season fully dies down, perhaps it’ll drop to three or four . . . Who knows? We’ve heard the town brings in a nice big Ferris wheel during the winter months to encourage a few travel-happy fools to come and give the population some diversity.
It’s a pretty little town with a pretty little school on a pretty little hill looking over a pretty big sea. We like it here. When we first arrived, naturally we completely ignored the chance to get to know our future classmates and went exploring instead — an excellent idea on all accounts.
We started by taking the train west to Nice. This train hugs the coastline for the entire trip, offering stunning views of the rocky beaches, the yachts making the trek from one coastal resort town to another, and the skyscrapers and glitzy wealth of Monaco. When you aren’t treated to a view of something beautiful, it’s because you’re in one of the many tunnels constructed beneath seaside neighbourhoods filled with multimillion-dollar villas and palaces.
Spoiler alert: Nice is nice. Incredibly nice. We saw many a quaint café, sat on a gorgeous beach, and climbed a mountain. (The mountain was really just a hill with a waterfall, a historic fort, and an even nicer view of the city and ocean, but in 30-plus-degree heat, it certainly felt like a mountain.) We only stayed on the summit for a short while, because the sun started to sink, bathing the city with a peaceful glow.
It was late when we made our way back, but we could still make out the many church bell towers scattered throughout the cluster of homes in the “old city,” bathed in the orange lights lining the streets. This was home now.
Heading back to our place means leaving the train station and starting a three-minute trek towards a waterfront casino. If it weren’t for the building across from us, we would be able to see the bright white, well-illuminated casino from where we live . . . well, if it weren’t for the building across from us and the fact that we live in the basement.
Our small underground apartment is in a housing complex off of Avenue de Verdun. This avenue features many cafés and restaurants, along with a large park in the middle of the boulevard. Townspeople frequent the park with their many, many little dogs, and it boasts an impressive number of lemon and orange trees.
Menton has so many lemon trees, in fact, that the lemon is the town’s main export and most important symbol. We’ve never seen so many shops dedicated simply to lemons and their by-products! The town even hosts a lemon festival every February, with large displays made entirely of lemons, and the idea of such a festival is equal parts strange and exciting.
Menton has some cultural influence from ancient Rome, but unlike some other towns in southern France, it doesn’t have a large coliseum or an aqueduct to prove it. Rather, there is a road.
La rue Longue (literally “The Long Road”) runs through the old town and connects its bustling main square to Sciences Po. However, this long road was once even longer, as it belonged to the network of roads that joined Rome to the rest of the sprawling Roman Empire. Long after the empire fell, that Long Road remained, and the Italians eventually founded Menton on it. Now, a century or two after the town became part of France, the two of us use this road every day to go to school.
On that note, Menton has so much Italian influence. You’re just as likely to hear Italian on the street as French. In fact, Menton is so close to Italy that you can walk from our school to the Italian border in under 10 minutes. Because Italy tends to have cheaper prices than France does, many people cross the border to do their shopping (much like Canadians crossing the border into Bellingham or Sumas to shop and load up on gas). Of course, this means that good Italian food is readily available, and the pizzas we’ve been eating have spoiled us.
Now that we’ve been here for about a month, we’re starting to better understand the southern French lifestyle that we may need to adopt if we want to fit in. This means some seaside lounging, afternoon naps, and general relaxation vibes. All this might sound quite nice, but it isn’t always fun and games. This “carefree” lifestyle can be frustrating to the point of early balding, especially when it is introduced to what seems to be comically intense French bureaucracy.
Despite having gone to the bank our very first day here in France, we still don’t have bank cards, and it’s nearly a month into our exchange. We received our French SIM cards only days ago, and we still do not have Wi-Fi, cable, or a home phone. It can also be frustrating when businesses close between 11:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. for lunch, or between 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. for an afternoon break or siesta.
Thankfully, we’re slowly adapting, both in our general day-to-day lives and our day-to-day schooling. At school, we are taking a class taught by premier French international relations professor Bertrand Badie, another class with a focus on political philosophy, and finally a class on international law.
Hopefully, taking all these classes on international society while living internationally will help us focus, and maybe even better appreciate what we are being taught . . . because so far, the hardest assignment we’ve been given in the classroom is to avoid staring out the floor-to-ceiling windows. It’s hard not to look at the bright blue sea glimmering in the sunshine only a few hundred meters away, at its peaceful bathers and tall sailboats floating alongside the warm Mediterranean breeze.
