THE SUMMER months in Dublin can be a pretty depressing place. Everything is different. All the boggers have gone home for the holidays to cut peat on the family farm, the stressed-out suits who are usually seen rushing around college green have been replaced by angry-looking and purposeless emo kids, and even the skinny-jeaned arts student (who most of us wouldn’t usually admit to missing) has made way for a swarm of Japanese and Spanish tourists. There are no twisted Tuesdays in Citibar or Wankered Wednesdays in somebody’s dingy apartment to take the edge off working the nine to five in your local Tesco either.
THE SUMMER months in Dublin can be a pretty depressing place. Everything is different. All the boggers have gone home for the holidays to cut peat on the family farm, the stressed-out suits who are usually seen rushing around college green have been replaced by angry-looking and purposeless emo kids, and even the skinny-jeaned arts student (who most of us wouldn’t usually admit to missing) has made way for a swarm of Japanese and Spanish tourists. There are no twisted Tuesdays in Citibar or Wankered Wednesdays in somebody’s dingy apartment to take the edge off working the nine to five in your local Tesco either.
So although I was looking towards my departure on Erasmus to the Mainland with a mixture of fear (what would the girlfriend say?) and cautious curiosity (what would the girlfriend say?) it could only be a good thing to leave Dublin behind me for foreign parts. Couldn’t it? Touching down in Lyon airport I could have been forgiven for thinking not. The disappointingly tearless goodbyes (she took it well) had taken place in a chilly and very autumnal Dublin airport, and I was sure that the south-eastern corner of France where Grenoble is located would have more to offer. However, the tropical thunderstorm that greeted me was so intense that sitting in an airport cafe, every time the automatic exit doors twenty metres from me opened I was sprayed with rain. Dublin one, Grenoble nil. Who would have thought that anywhere could be wetter than Ireland, the cloud congregation capital of the world?
I decided to give it a chance anyway. So after a night spent in a Grenoblois (the adjective of the noun Grenoble don’t ya know) youth hostel, the first day was to be spent hunting for accommodation. A mixture of laziness, complacency and naïvety meant that my mate and I hadn’t sorted out an apartment before arriving- boy, would this turn out to be a mistake.
France has a reputation for being bureaucratic, and evidently it’s well deserved. Although there were more estate agents in the town than there are sheep in Wicklow, regulations meant that to lease an apartment collateral is needed in the form of a guarantor, in case you decide to run off to Mexico without paying your rent. Oh, and the guarantor has to be French. With a salary three times greater than the monthly rent. Suffice to say this was only the tip of the bureaucratic iceberg, so we returned to our hostel for another night to work out plan B.
For my mate this consisted of a teary phone call to the apparently well-connected mammy back home, who could pull a few strings to bypass much of the red tape. For me, things were looking bleak until I stumbled upon a dodgy Spanish landlord with a distaste for form filling and a preference for cash – success!
So after settling into my impressively cheap and well-facilitated suburban gaf, thoughts turned towards college, my ability to speak en français, and when we were going to have a night out.
The first was starting a lot sooner than expected, the second posed less of a problem than feared, and the third posed more of a problem than anticipated. University seemed to just involve more forms and endless regulations (no wonder the students over here went on strike back in 1968), though the prospect of a four-day weekend – my timetable entails only twelve hours per week with no classes Friday or Monday – cheered me up immensely. The other Erasmus students (over 200 come to Grenoble every year) seemed fairly friendly also, and virtually all had a conversational level of English – problem number two solved!
As for nights out, clubs didn’t exactly seem to exist over here, and despite the fact that apparently one in every seven of Grenoble’s 400,000 residents is a student, the consumption of unhealthy amounts of Dutch Gold followed by wheelie bin robbery and other drunken shenanigans didn’t appear to be commonplace.
Café bars seemed to be almost as numerous as the ubiquitous estate agents however, and although they close at about half one (we give out about the new opening hours in Ireland?) they can be lively enough spots.
So I’m now a week into my Erasmus Adventure (corny eh?) and I have to say it’s relatively ok so far. C’est la vie en France for the moment!
