Depuis que je sais que je vais déménager bientôt, je trie mes tonnes de papiers et je jette pratiquement tout. Parfois c’est difficile et triste de jeter comme ça toute une partie de sa vie, mais j’ai l’habitude. Hier, j’ai failli jeter une collection de papiers que j’ai écrits durant ma première année aux Etats Unis pour une classe de « personal history writing. » Finalement, j’ai gardé quelques textes marrants… et j’en copie un ici au cas où je perdrais ces papiers (dont je n’ai plus de copies électroniques). Je copierai les autres de temps en temps. Désolée, c’est en anglais et c’est long, et ce n’est ps nécessairement des textes faits pour des blogs, mais c’est de l’anglais très facile et ce sont des bons souvenirs pour moi. Je garde même les fautes d’origine 
I really wanted to go, but my parents said it would kill me. And they were almost right! However, I was sure I could make it. It would be the first time I went somewhere with the other students in my class. I was sick of staying at home every time they were doing something fun. The year before, they had gone to Italy and to the mountains. I had stayed at home! This time, I felt that I could go with them. I was 17 and old enough to be a little more independent. I also wanted to take some risks because it would make my life a little more interesting.
So, I told my parents to trust me, and I took the bus on this very early morning of February 1990, with twenty other students and our English teacher. This bus would take us all to London, some twelve hours later. Since we all were poor students, we couldn’t afford the train, so we had to rent the bus. The « Tunnel sous la Manche » didn’t exist at that time, so the bus would drive to Le Havre where we would go on a boat, and then the bus would drive us to Canterbury, our final destination.
Of course, the bus driver didn’t want to take the French highways because there are « péages » to pay, so he took every little road he could find, until he had lost us in the deep and unwelcoming north of France! Fortunately, we were just on time to catch our boat, and, on this dark evening, the bus entered the entrails of the boat, while we tried to find a place to sit on the deck. It was the first time I would cross « La Manche. »
Just as we were leaving the port, the wind began to blow, and the security instructions began to be given: « If the boat sinks, don’t worry, » « it’s the first very strong wind in three years but don’t worry, we are prepared for it » and so on, just so that we would feel better! We were on the deck, trying to stay together, to see the stars through the heavy clouds, and to laugh rather than to scream.
I don’t know how, but we finally made it to England, arriving late at night in Canterbury. A lot of people were waiting for us. Every one of us had to go with a family with which we would stay for three weeks. I remember seeing a student from my class, Christian, leaving with somebody in a beautiful Porsche and wondering why it was he instead of I. My very good friend Catherine also left very quickly with a lady who seemed very nice. Then, a little man with a beard called my name and I left with him. He had a very British accent and I was too tired to understand him.
The house in which I was going to stay was a nightmare. It was close to school, which was good for me, but my room was on the second floor, and the stairs had no banister and very high steps, and the bathroom was on the first floor. I don’t remember how many nights I fell of those steps, trying to go to the bathroom without waking up the whole family.
This family, by the way, was very strange. The father was a German teacher, and he always talked to me in German, which upset and confused me a lot. The mother was never at home, and when she was, she cooked extremely bad dinners. The son was never happy, and the daughter was terribly ugly and almost simple-minded. Their bathtub was broken, so I had to take showers at the neighbors’, where another student was staying. There was no TV, but fortunately, there was a piano. Across the yard was the school, and behind the school was a farm with thousands of pigs, which smelled really bad!
On the first day of class, we had a big surprise: leather jackets, nose earrings, earrings for the guys, and chewing gum in class were not allowed. Smoking was also totally forbidden, and all these rules would create numerous problems between the schoolteachers and the students of my class. Our first class every morning would be art history, then we would have math or gymnastics or chorale, and in the afternoon, we could choose between silk painting and metalworking. I chose silk painting, and my two very best friends, Catherine and Michele chose the other class, which made me mad. I was very jealous of Catherine at that time, because she spent a lot more time with Michele than me, and I felt that she was stealing my friend. That first day of school, I also learned that Michele was staying with a very old woman in a very old and dirty place, and that Catherine was staying with a very nice family in a typically British cottage. Michele and I once spent a day with Catherine’s family, and the mother prepared a delicious meal for us, took us to visit a beautiful castle near the sea, and bought us « fish and chips. »
Two or three times a week, our English teacher would take us to London. That was the most terrible and also the best part of this trip to England. We would take the train together, very early in the morning, and arrive an hour later at the Victoria Train Station in London. In London, we would have to run the entire day in order to visit as many museums as possible and to see as many places as possible. In-between museums, we were usually free to spend an hour as we wanted wherever we wanted. But we had to be on time for the next museum or sometimes for a theater play. Our teacher was a very tall man, always stressed, and he would make us run from one underground to the next as fast as possible, then run to the museum, run to the London Bridge, run to the House of Parliament, run to the next museum, run to the underground, run to the train station…
The underground was a nightmare. We were such a big group that we couldn’t always stay together in the same car. So we didn’t know where to change trains or when to leave the train. We would always be scared to lose someone or that one of us might miss our train back home. For me, the always-broken-automatic-stairs would always be where I had to go and I was always the last one to enter the train–when I didn’t miss it! I was sometimes so tired I wished I had listened to my parents and stayed home. But at other times I was very happy not to have listened to them: I was having a lot of fun!
It was just the beginning of spring, and London and Canterbury were beautiful. We saw a lot of teacher plays and comedies, and I became very good at buying my tickets at the same time as Michele so my seats would be next to hers. I spent a lot of money buying CDs and books, and going to « interdit aux moins de 18 ans » movies.
In class, I had a very hard time understanding what the teachers were saying, so I copied different papers from everyone’s notebooks, except for my last paper. We had to write about our feelings towards art history, and I wrote a marvelous text explaining that I loved art history (which was not the case at all!). I lied so well that it saved me from the F I deserved for having copied all the other papers. In my silk paining class, I made a very ugly thing that doesn’t have a name. And in math, I spent a lot of time decorating my notebooks with my own artwork!
At my host-family’s home, I usually invited Michele to stay with me, and we would cook special Swiss dishes (not always good) and play four hands music on the piano for hours. Our favorite was the Hungarian Dances from Brahms, which we would play over and over and so often that my family was soon sick of it! Michele and I would also go to my place and stay there instead of going to school, when the weather was too bad, and play Brahms, only Brahms… The weather during those three weeks was very bad, so bad that usually, during the night, trees would fall on roads. That sometimes scared me, especially when I was feeling homesick or when I couldn’t sleep.
We all had so much fun that I sometimes wished those three weeks never ended. But they did. And again, we too the terrible bus that had no bathroom in it and got lost, the horrible boat that wanted to drown us, and the never-ending little roads of France. I was exhausted but I had survived, and I was ready for my next trip–to the United States!
PS. Parce que je suis trop triste et déçue qu’Olivier arrête son blog, je vous propose d’aller faire sauter ses commentaires en lui disant que de perdre un blog de cette qualité c’est pas du tout juste et trop cruel et une trop grosse perte pour la bloggosphère et qu’il a intérêt à s’en ouvrir un nouveau ou à continuer le sien sinon ça va chauffer! (et attention, Granbled c’est pas loin de Montréal!).
PPS. Un dernier petit geste pour la Sosso? Merci!
Ceux qui devinent tout le jour où la devinette est publiée recevront mes premières cartes postales de Granbled! 
