People are bigger here than in Lille, where I’ve spent half of the last year. Perhaps due in part to the Red Bull and creatine protein powder I spotted in the first row of a northern suburbs supermarket yesterday.

But Australians seem to possess not just a more imposing physical presence; we occupy a greater energetic space too.  I was taken aback by the confidence with which the mining engineer based in Jakarta who sat next to me on my flight from Singapore asked about my past.  Surprised (pleasantly, I think) by the young girl who looked directly in my eyes and told me she liked my scarf.

In Lille I ate delicate cakes and rode upright, gently, on a Dutch-bike.   At Trigg Beach this evening I wanted to run hard and jump.   The wild landscape does something to you.

The two countries are so subtly and yet so vastly different.  And a switch takes some getting used to.  It’s not a simple matter of trading in a treadly for a 4WD and croissants for carrot cake.  It’s not just catching up with old friends or finding a job where your adventures abroad have some validity.

It is a complete re-negotiation of the physical and energetic relationship with the country I grew up in.   It’s a re-orientation of my senses into a different pace of life.  A different rhythm d’etre.

Where I was last week.

And now I'm here.

It’s not surprising I feel a bit strange.  It’s not better or worse, it’s simply different.  And it’s going to take time to adjust.

Questions?

Buying a ticket back to Perth took me by surprise, especially when I realised I was thinking of sticking around there for a while.  I might not, of course, but it just goes to show that what you think you’ll want isn’t always what you end up choosing.

I remember pondering long and hard about whether to leave Perth in the first place.  Talking with the Fairydust Executive we remarked that life was pretty good.  Why leave?

But leave we did, and stuff happened.

I love my life in Lille.  On Wednesdays and Saturdays I walk down the stairs from my one-bed studio that overlooks several terraced gardens, turn left and arrive at French farmer’s markets.   ”Bonjour, l’australienne”, calls out le monsieur with the best endives and rocket.  At these markets I learnt what butter really is, and why you must eat a Ch’ti gauffre only after you’ve watched it made fresh in front of your eyes.

At a moment’s notice, les amis will arrive by bike to cook and eat together, Rita with a broccoli, Paolo with a Bordeaux, and Rita’s Paolo with a merveilleux from Wazemmes Market.  Virginie cooks red lentil soup and lets me test yoga teaching on her.  Cécile offers lessons in asian cuisine as part of a skillswap.  Mary knows where and when to go dancing (not before midnight) and Nathalie always knows the yoga timetable.  With June summer weather as far back as March we’ve been blessed with picnics in the park and badminton under natural light until well after 9pm. And it’s all a teensy bike ride away.

Candyland by CocoRosie seems to capture this fascinating feeling of loving where I am and being excited about where I’ll be next.  There’s a little sadness but it’s not the sadness of losing something…rather a gentle reminder to give this next transition in the never-ending transition of life a little bit of notice.

I hope you see the little bit of this story that happened because I know you.  If you’re reading it then there is something about having known you that makes my story just as it is.

I’m wondering if some recent experiences with The Commonwealth Bank are an indication of what’s to come when I re-connect with home a little later this year.

NUMERO UNO

Nice boy in the Brisbane office of the Commonwealth Bank: So where in England are you?

Me: Sheffield.

Nice boy: Oh, I’ve been to Sheffield.  I was there last year, visiting family.

It’s a great city.

You must check out the shopping centre.

Meadowhall. Sheffield's Shopping Centre.

NUMERO TWO

Nice girl in the Melbourne office of the Commonwealth Bank: And where are you calling from today?

Me: France.

Nice girl: Pardon?

Me: France.

[Pause.]

Nice girl: OHHHHHHHH!  France!  [Pronouncing the ‘a’ as one might in the word ‘apple’]

Or Fr-ah-nce as you say it.  [She adds helpfully]  You say tomato, I say tom-ay-to.

[The conversation closed with the nice girl helping me with my banking and then very kindly apologising for having made fun of my accent.]

The pizza man in a van visits on Wednesday and Friday evenings and on Sunday afternoon you can hear a girl from New Zealand sing an assortment of the types of ballads English tourists in Tenerife might enjoy on their yearly holiday to the sun.  She has a beautiful voice and wears a big bow in her hair and one around her waist, and even when her audience are attending to their beers and not her music, she will look at each of them as if she has eyes for no one else.

If you are in town for Thursday’s market, you should visit The French Cafe, which is opposite The English Bar, for a coffee.  The cafe also offers Lipton tea if expresso isn’t your drink.  It will be impossible to tell that the waitress there is not French – her accent is perfect Parisian and she flirts with the locals as if she grew up here.

Charroux is a pitstop for Dutch cyclists heading for the Camino de Santiago, which has made the township more used to bikes, but you will still attract a bit of attention if you take your little velo out for un petit tour.  Take your city treadly just a few hundred metres from the quaint village centre and you will find yourself suddenly and unmistakenly in the outer suburbs of this 1200-person town.  The gardens are nicely kept and there is a good primary school next to the town hall, as well as a college with 153 students, including 12 English and two Dutch.

Luigi is 70 and deaf, so he shouts at his wife.  They have their country house in Chatain, a slightly smaller village nine kilometres to the south.  Apart from that they spend all year in Charroux, unlike the English community and the Parisians, who are here just for the summer.

In summer the fruit trees are laden with plums and peaches, and a short walk will reward you with blackberries and pears.  You’ll buy your bread – baguette ou Charloise – each morning, fresh from the oven, and enjoy it with confiture, homemade if you or your neighbours made jam from the previous year’s bounty. Lunch and dinner will be taken in the garden, generally accompanied by wine and followed by cheese.  The afternoon may be spent writing or gardening and you might choose to take a stroll after your evening meal.

Come September it will be hard to leave but autumn is on its way and there are things to do.

More photos of inner city and suburban Charroux, postcode 86250, here.

The man with no name at Page Hall Convenience Store: "Are you looking for someone for your future? Write to me."

A few days before leaving Sheffield, where I survived a real English winter and stayed a lot longer than I’d ever imagined, I took my camera to capture the parts of the city of steel that I’d explored over the past six months.  My Canon 500D turned out to be a bit of a novelty on Page Hall Road, where Indian Asian grocery stores, Halaal chippies and Saree fabric stores replace Starbucks, H&M and Sainsbury’s.  Men in Arabic taquiyah caps came out of their shops to ask if I was a journalist and offer their friend’s hands in marriage.

“Are you taking photos?” the man in the convenience store asked.  ”How much?”

He doesn’t have email so I’ll post him the photo.  I don’t know his name but he did give me his address and ask me to write to let him know if I would consider him for my future.  I think he was impressed that I had saved enough money, without help, to travel to France.

Other conversations I owe to my digital SLR?

From one of the five partners of Page Hall’s mobile phone store (possibly the only mobile phone store in England also offering ‘designer clothing’): “You’re Australian?  It’s difficult to find good designer clothes in Australia.  Look at our range – we could go into business.  By the way, are you married?”

And proof that everything you could ever want or need can be found in Sheffield: “Is London more cosmopolitan than Sheffield, do you think?  And have you met my friend?  He’s very good-looking.” (Another shop-owner.)

In Sheffield I learnt to make chapatis (I left it too late to learn from my Grandma), to tread the tightrope and perform on trapeze.  I learnt that the Koran forbids eyebrow waxing, but a bikini wax is OK.  I found my inner Yorkshire and introduced ‘pet’ and ‘love’ into my vocabulary and started standing in line for the bus.  Not a bad mix for a wee city in The North.

More photos of My Sheffield on Flickr.

]]> http://stuffthathappens.wordpress.com/2010/07/30/three-marriage-proposals-and-a-business-offer-my-sheffield/feed/ 0 rachaelwest Proposal http://stuffthathappens.wordpress.com/2010/05/22/white-girl-learns-a-bit-about-the-world/ http://stuffthathappens.wordpress.com/2010/05/22/white-girl-learns-a-bit-about-the-world/#comments Sat, 22 May 2010 09:37:23 +0000 rachaelwest http://stuffthathappens.wordpress.com/?p=92 Continue reading →]]> Yesterday I waved farewell to my housemate and the three trapeze artists-extraordinaire he was driving to Bristol airport (they were flying to a gig in Tenerife which, while not particularly relevant to the story, is very interesting and very exciting nevertheless).   Sheffield is suffering a heatwave – four days over 19 degrees – so I was wearing shorts for the first time in quite a while (‘Oh look, you have legs,’ said Micky).  I ran to the street in the style of an American mom sending her children off to university in the big city, but quickly retreated.

Our area in Sheffield is incredibly diverse.  From my window right now I can see a woman in a black hijab (headscarf) and jilbaab (a long cloak to cover the underclothes) talking to another in a bright blue and sparkly shalwar kameez.  The chippie at the end of the street is halaal.  When I asked the gentleman in one of the local Indian food store (called ‘Asian’ in the UK) what I could cook with pomegranate seeds he told me, “If I’m honest, I’ve never cooked a day in my life.  I mean I can make a cup of tea if I need to, of course.”

Lots of muslims, lots of modest attire: I didn’t think my wee Aussie summer shorts would go down too well.  So, out of respect for my neighbourhood, I went back inside.  What would you feel self-conscious wearing in your street?  Are PJs OK to get you to the letterbox?  To the shop?   Are bare legs in April appropriate?  Bare shoulders after 40?

The wee story that inspired this post took place in a deli/convenience store/off-licence-without-the-booze a few months back where I very nearly showed myself up as a religious ignoramus.

I was standing in line to pay. There was a man at the counter but he seemed to be ignoring us.  I waited.  I got frustrated. He seemed to be looking for something under the counter, but then he stood up again.   Still with his back to us.   The only thing that stopped me from saying, ‘Excuse me’, was the fact that I was second in line.

I am so very grateful for that man in front of me to have been there because, after a couple of minutes, the man behind the counter knelt down and rolled up his prayer rug.

Characters:

Me, playing myself (though confused about whether I am perhaps playing my mother) and sitting at the front of the bus, as usual.

Boy at the back of the bus.  (Note that location of seat implies potentially troublesome youth, or back seat bogans as we say in Australia.  Or at least did say in 1992.)

Friend. (Character with no lines and inconsequential to the story, except that he is sitting next to Boy).

The script:

Loud obscenities coming from back of the bus, in the form of a rap song littered with every f, c and four-letter word you can imagine and a heap you haven’t learnt yet.  Rachael (playing herself) turns around and notices that the singer looks about seven.  She questions a society that allows such youths access to such music and wonders if he knows what the words even mean.  She contemplates suggesting to the boy, in a gentle and down-with-the-kids kind of way, that it sounds pretty f$@*ing terrible to hear words like that on the bus.

Rachael immediately wonders if she has turned into her mother and holds her tongue.

The bus arrives at its stop and both the boy and Rachael (again playing herself) move to alight.  They nearly bump into each other at the door.

“After you,” says the boy.

“I’m going to have to marry you Rachael.  You’re too much fun to let you leave the country.”  (My lovely housemate.)

“Don’t you have a nice boyfriend you can marry?” (Business advisor upon realising that I am here on a temporary visa and so can’t stick around long enough for him to count me as an ‘output’ on his funded training programme.)

“You’re quite lovely.  Though I am drunk and may regret having said that.” (Man.  And if you are a man who has ever said something of the sort to a young lady, then please regard said reference with affection.)

Circus trainer, Rick, when explaining the rules for a warm-up juggling game:  ”If you c@#k up, you’re out.”

Gonzalo:  ”Sorry, if you what?” [Gonzalo is South American and has a great command of English - not to mention Spanish, Portuguese and Italian - but obviously isn't au fait with all our colloquialisms!]

Rick: “If you c@#k up.  It means if you make a mistake.”

Gonzalo: “Oh.”  [Looking vaguely confused.  Fits of laughter from the rest of us]

Rick: “What would you say then?”

Gonzalo: “I would say if you f@#k up.”