by Brian Alcamo

With Back-to-School season upon us, I’ve found myself reflecting on what it was like to go back to a high school for the first time since graduating college. This high school wasn’t my alma mater, and it wasn’t even in my home country. The school didn’t have lockers, it didn’t have cheerleaders, and it didn’t have mystery meat hamburgers. A little under a year ago, I made the courageous and foolish decision to move to France right before a new wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. I was given the opportunity through a program called TAPIF (Teaching Assistant Program In France) which I had applied to during my senior year of college back in December 2019, before COVID-19 was making national headlines. At the time, many of my friends were looking for or had already found their first post-college jobs, but I had my sights set on a different kind of experience: I wanted to live in France. 

More specifically, I was looking for a redo. A year prior, I had spent a semester in Paris. The experience was less than stellar. Bouts of anxiety and difficulty in navigating an unexpected culture shock translated into me angstily denying myself a proper study abroad experience. I refrained from exploring the country in which I was privileged enough to have an extended stay, and I missed out on so many adventures because I was so caught up in the anguish of being far away from home for the first time. Despite my lackluster time in Paris, I left France with the creeping feeling of unfinished business. TAPIF, I had thought, was the second chance I needed. I would finally have the experience I’d dreamed of having, filled with travel, meaningful surface-level one-off exchanges with strangers (you know the kind), and ample opportunities to practice my French while opening up my worldview. I proudly sent out my application and awaited the results while finishing my final semester of college... until a certain virus knocked the world as we knew it right out of existence.

After a move home, a rushed goodbye to my friends, and a quick foray into the challenges of distance learning (all combined with your typical senioritis), I practically forgot about my application to go to France. “No way would they let us head over there during a global pandemic,” I repeatedly told myself and others. I wanted this to be true, since I wasn’t ready to leave the community I had just re-entered. COVID had turned out to be a strange opportunity to reconnect with my family and my hometown, and I was deep in the fog of familiarity. I spent April, May, and early June wondering if the program would be cancelled before receiving my acceptance letter. Then, against all odds, my opportunity to escape pandemic mundanity arrived in my email inbox with an unseasonably joyous “Felicitations !” 

I had been accepted to teach at the secondary school level with the Academie de Lille, located in the extreme north of France, abutting Belgium and, by water, the United Kingdom. The schools I’d potentially be working at were in the best location possible, right outside of the city center. In the months leading up to my given start date, I toiled and tumulted over whether or not to leave the US. “Will it be worth it to go during a pandemic? I’ll miss my family and friends and not even be able to enjoy my time there. What if things lockdown?” My mind swam with what-ifs and worst-cases. Eventually, I began to receive emails from teachers I’d be working with. This communication, filled with humanity and kindness that hadn’t yet been part of the bureaucratic application process, was what kept my interest levels high enough to continue considering while all of the other data around me suggested I stay put.

My life from June to early September was also characterized by the anxiety of not knowing whether TAPIF would even pan out. I had dug my hands even further into my familial ties, relishing in outdoor reunions with childhood friends and my extended bloodline. By September, all of the rumors about a post-summer uptick in coronavirus cases were proving to be true, and I hadn’t yet received the green light to go ahead with the visa process. I felt like I was on call for an international move. I was stressed beyond compare, but a teeny tiny part of me loved to anguish over feeling like a diplomat waiting to be beckoned to a foreign land. At the same time, another teeny tiny part of me was desperate for the program to be cancelled out-right, so that I wouldn’t have to make my first big post-college decision for myself. I craved adventure, spontaneity, and detachment, but I was scared to be lonely, even more so because of pandemic restrictions. I watched the case numbers go up with a twisted sense of silent glee, hoping that the program would be cancelled and my fate would be taken out of my hands, and was nervous when France continued to insist that its schools were remaining open with in-person instruction.

Despite the rising coronavirus tides and a late-start to the immigration process, TAPIF eventually issued the go-ahead for my visa along with a stipulation stating that I had ample leeway to make it to l'Hexagone. I was allowed to arrive as late as December 31st, 2020, if my visa processing took that long.  My wishy-washy decision making process kept me and my loved ones on edge right up until the date I left. No one, including myself, thought I would follow through with it, but there I was, presenting my passport to the AirFrance employee working at check-in. When I got onto the plane, I realized just how lucky I was. The entire back section of Coach on a flight from New York’s JFK to Paris’s Charles de Gaule was completely empty, as if I had the entire airplane to myself. I was alone for the first time since rushedly moving home from college, but I felt a sense of freedom I hadn't felt since graduating high school.

Arriving in Lille–sweaty as can be with two suitcases and horrific breath after wearing an N95 mask for upwards of twelve hours on a plane and then a train–I was quickly elated by the feeling that I had made the right decision. I had taken a risk during a time when taking risks felt all the heavier. I had given myself an opportunity for post-college closure after a cancelled graduation ceremony that made life feel like a foggy false-start. I was able to launch myself when many launchpads were closed until further notice.

The fact that schools were physically open was the reason why I could go to France in the first place. It was also the only way I was able to stay sane during my time in Lille, with almost no other outlets to meet and engage with public life available to me during my stay. School was where I made friends. School was where I could talk, laugh, and be reminded that people existed outside of my computer screen. It kept me tethered to the real world when a combination of increased internet usage and culture shock threatened to completely detach me from reality.

My job as an English teaching assistant meant that I was to work in tandem with teachers’ lessons. I worked at both a lycée (high school) and a collège (middle school). Regardless of grade level, the goal at both schools was simple: get the students to speak English. 

At the high school, the job typically consisted of me pulling out half a class at a time to give a presentation, have a discussion about American current events, play games, or supplement what a teacher was doing during the main lesson. Sometimes, I would do speaking exercises with the high schoolers to help them prepare for the Examen baccalauréat, which students take throughout their premiere and terminale years.

During my hours at the middle school, the teachers and I worked together in the same classroom, typically playing games designed to get the students to speak. While the high school was running on a hybrid model, the middle school’s classes were at full capacity and had more or less an unchanged rhythm to the school day. They still had recess–which was of top priority for both teachers and students alike.

In my freetime, I was often alone, but I was rarely lonely. I lived at the high school where I worked, which had dorms available for all of the assistants. The close quarters and confinement policies ensured that we had plenty of time for roommate bonding activities. After the lockdown announcement that came one week after my late arrival, one of my new friends made us lasagna as a way to build morale. We would usually have drinks on Thursday nights, communing in our tiny windowless kitchen to discuss the week’s events and our cultural differences. Sometimes we would cook together, each of us preparing each other food or snacks from our country of origin. For Thanksgiving, I made them a pecan pie made out of almonds and walnuts because pecans were so hard to find in France.

The restrictions in France were tough at times, but I appreciated the fact that there were even restrictions to begin with. I spent my free time writing, walking around, and going to whatever kinds of establishments were open at the time. The types of places that were allowed to be open changed every few weeks, and at times my most exciting excursion would be getting a haircut. Other times, we were able to go to non-essential stores, and I would spend a large portion of my days taking long, winding walks into the Vieux Lille to go window shopping. Since my teacher friends couldn’t just pop by the assistant dorms, we would try to get together for drinks and Sunday lunches when we could, sneaking around and loosely interpreting the rules du jour. 

There were periods when life was more free. While I couldn’t spend the every-other-month two-week vacations galavanting through Europe like I dreamed of doing, I could still move around a little bit. I went to Lyon with two friends during the winter break and had the opportunity to go to Paris a handful of times as well. Life maintained some semblance of spontaneity and joie de vivre. Once, my American friend (who had been serendipitously put in the same city as I was) and I got beers to-go and sat down on an empty sidewalk overlooking the Tour Montparnasse. 

The people of the north seemed to take COVID-19 rules more seriously.  On my weekend trips to Paris, it was easier to find people sneaking out for a clandestine drink in the park. Further south in Lyon, people proudly and openly toted their after-work drinks to the park right after curfew. Up in Lille, the city shut down right at 6 p.m. (or 7, or 8:30, or 9, depending on what week it was).

Despite being in the north of France, which gets a bad rap for having horrible weather, the winter wasn’t as bad as people said it would be. Sometimes it snowed, but mostly the temperature remained above freezing. I did have to take Vitamin D, because it was only sunny every few days (this wasn’t as depressing as it sounds).

Sometimes I wonder what my time would have been like if I had come to France during a "normal" year. I'd like to think it would have been filled with parties, bars, traveling, and other kinds of ephemeral activities that people love to spend money on. Instead, it was filled with long, aimless walks through the same picturesque streets day after day. Lille confiné was not the amusement park I'd been hoping for. Instead of being my playground, Lille was my labyrinth. Week after week, I'd fester and ponder and reflect during my long, ambling walks up Rue Armand Carrel, toward Saint Sauveur, and finally make my way towards Place d'Opera. The city served as a backdrop to the many milestones of growth I accomplished as each new COVID-19 safety measure made my already quiet life there even quieter.

So what's the upside of living in a foreign country during a pandemic? The same as its downside: the quiet. Although painful at times, silence and social retreat can do wonders for someone looking to unwind from a period of heightened extroversion. I did not grow up a Francophile, but every time I go to France, I love it more. The longer I stayed, the more I felt like I was becoming myself. Seeing new places, trying new foods, and doing fun activities is all good and fun, but I believe one of the bigger benefits of traveling is being far enough away from home to let all the noise and expectations and internalized judgements fall away until a person is left with only themselves. So that each step in an undiscovered city is also a step inward. 

But eventually we must return home, as I had to do three weeks early when France finally decided to close its schools for a month to avoid the worst of a once-again surging case count. After the announcement to close schools was made, I quickly said goodbye to my friends. I cried in my bedroom with each goodbye, tearful at the thought of not seeing the people who had made my stay worthwhile as I spent the next week packing up. While I was glad I got to experience the feeling of being a detached traveler, I found myself preparing to miss my friends much more so than my solitary walks. I had sought the life of a vagabond, but I had been handed a community.

While my time in the country wasn’t what it could have been if I went during a different year, it was still educational in its own right, and I know I was extremely lucky. Not only because I got to go to France when almost no non-EU citizen was allowed into the country, but also because my post-college plans went largely unscathed by the brunt of the pandemic. And perhaps I’m even luckier, because now I have another perfect excuse to go back for another “redo.” 

Thanks for Reading!

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