Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Apathetic

My contract is over on June 30 - you know, 12 days from now. I may or may not get kicked out of the lycée when it closes on July 11. I want to travel before I go home. D and I want to celebrate our birthdays together (13 and 15 of July respectively).

Have I made any travel plans? No. Do I have a ticket home? No. Have I asked the lycée if I can stay past the 11? No.

What's with this total lack of action? Does this mean that I don't actually want to leave France? I have to leave, I can't just stay here. Even if I get renewed, I have to go home to get a new visa!

Somehow I've carved out a life for myself here. The longer I stay, the harder it will be to finally leave. I don't think I want to stay in France forever. I can't imagine raising my kids here, I can't imagine not living in America with my friends and family. I have a life at home, I have plans at home.

But it feels right to be here right now.

At what point will my life be in France? At what point will it feel more normal to be here? At what point will I change my plans to stay here? How long does that take? Will that happen if I stay another year?

My mother will kill me if that ever happens.

So I need to make a plan for leaving for the summer. Step One: tomorrow afternoon, ask the lycée when I'm getting kicked out. Step Two: Figure out travel and departure and where to stay over bday in the case where I am kicked out.

6 comments:

J said...

I decided to stay in France only after a few months, but that was mostly because of David. I still don't know if I want to stay here forever, but we will be here for at least 2 more years because of our jobs. Living in one place is never really forever for me though - I like a change of scenery often!

I feel really settled though. We have our apartment, our cars, our cat... it will be hard (and a lot of work) to move, but I still do want to go to Canada or Australia or New Zealand... ::sigh::

shannon said...

That was pretty much my feeling a month ago. I didn't want to leave. I didn't talk to anyone about leaving. Seriously... didn't talk to the housing people until the day before about my official move out. If I didn't have a plane ticket home already, I probably would still be there. It just kind of felt like I was leaving home. You know? Yeah, I wanted to go see my mom, my family, and my dogs. But that was all. I didn't have some strong desire to be back in America. If my mom could have came to visit me for a week (and brought the dogs), I would have been more than content to just stay.

*hugs*

Monique Geisler said...

However, you'll be very very shocked at how easy it will be to come back to the U.S.

A year isn't too long away if you need to come back home, and you're already seasoned for it after your long "vacation" back home not too long ago.

All I have to say is, good luck with whatever you decide! If you get kicked out, you could always travel Europe until you're sickeningly broke and need to look for a job :)

That was fun... (and super worth it)

BlondeInFrance said...

My suggestions:
Try living illegally this summer, it might not be too late to find au pair work, go travel all over and make money by giving streetside English lessons (Hello sir, would you like me to conjugate "to be" for you for 5 euros?), unofficial tour guide, circus performer.

But once you pick from all these lovely choices, buy a ticket home!! I'm worried what the prices will be, you want to buy soon so you have enough to come back in the fall if you have to! No fun to get the job and then not have a way to get there!

au soleil levant said...

Thanks for all the tips guys. For this summer, I know I'll be home definitely in August, and I'm moving towards making more concrete plans. I just have to make sure I get that job so I can come back in the fall! And apparently a huge gas surcharge is getting added to plane tickets, so I need to buy like now!

Monique Geisler said...

Yeah in order to make up for gas, they're taking on $15-$45 per suitcase you check depending on the carrier. It's so lame.