La Roche-sur-Yon

La Roche-sur-Yon

Sunday, October 5, 2014

La vie en pays yonnais

It's been almost two weeks since I arrived chez moi in the Vendée region.  After five days living the marvelous Parisian life, the slow, small-town pace of la Roche-sur-Yon was a bit of a shock to the system.

The Pays de la Loire region of France is divided into five sections; la Roche-sur-Yon is in one called the Vendée.  The town is, as I was told beforehand by several people, tranquille; calm and fairly quiet.  From my apartment au lycée (at the high school), it's about a ten-minute walk to the city centre.  On the way, you take a modern and unique red pedestrian bridge (the fifth and sixth pictures on the left) that links the outer area of the city to the center; the bridge is also the background image of this blog.  After passing la gare, you'll continue to the Place de la Vendée, the smaller of two main city squares, and Rue Clemenceau, the shopping street (last photo to the left).  La Roche has a good variety of stores, especially clothing and jewelry shops, as well as several banks and, randomly, opticians.  You can find at least a dozen opticians au centre-ville alone; the concentration of opticians here is like that of coffee shops in Seattle.  I was happy to also discover many boulangeries (bakeries) and patisseries (pastry shops) that are even open on Sundays - nearly everything else in town is closed, but people need their fresh baguettes.  My favorite boulangerie is called L'Imperial (second-to-last photo, with the green awning); they have a special baguette-like bread that is heaven on earth.  The first time I bought one, it was still warm from the oven and I decided to taste just a bit on my way home.  By the time I reached my apartment, it was half gone.

If you look at an aerial map of la Roche-sur-Yon, the outer perimeter of le centre-ville is shaped like a hexigon with the most important square in the middle: la Place Napoléon, or Place Nap for short.  Place Nap (top photo) used to be a parking lot, but is now a gorgeous park with plants, lights that sparkle at night, a nice café, music that is piped in through speakers at certain times of day, a snazzy statue of Napoleon riding a horse, and ponds with real fish and mechanical animals.  In the second photo, you can see a couple of the mechanical animals that are actually in the pools; in the afternoons, you can use control panels in the park to manipulate the animals and make them move in various ways, kind of like puppets.  They represent the menagerie of exotic animals that Napoleon brought back from Egypt in the late 18th century.

People here adore the slow, simple life; as quiet as the town is, there are cafés and brasseries everywhere and by mid-afternoon every day, almost every outdoor seat is full.  To be fair, the weather has been perfect for lounging outside; very foggy and a little chilly in the early mornings, but around seventy degrees and sunny every afternoon.

One of my other favorite parts of la Roche-sur-Yon is their covered Marché les Halles near Place Nap (third photo).  It's a decent-sized market with a variety of fruit, vegetables, cheese, meat, fish, bread, pastries, jam...and it's very highly rated in France.  I go almost every day for fresh produce - it's open every morning except Sunday - and have made friends with several vendors who love chatting and teaching people about their food.

The Vendée region is known for its extensive hiking and biking trails; the terrain is fairly flat.  One of the English teachers au lycée is going to loan me un vélo (a bike) for the year and most of the other assistants are trying to get them too so we can explore further on the weekends.

La Roche-sur-Yon is the perfect-sized town for meeting other assistants...and meeting French people!  If I taught in a bigger city like Nantes, there would be around one hundred assistants also working there; in some small towns, there are only one or two assistants.  In la Roche, we have a group of about fifteen or twenty (I haven't met all yet) from all over the world:  Spain, Germany, Venezuela, China, England, Russia, Canada, and there are just two of us from the U.S.

Henry (Canada), me, Laura (Spain), Elyse (U.S.)
Me and Laura, ma coloc
Henry, Kate (England), me, Elyse, Jack, and Christopher (both England)
There's always someone to meet up with for coffee, a meal, a walk, or a day trip to another city.  We all have slightly different living situations, so we share kitchens, laundry facilities, and household utensils.  I live with two colocs (roommates): Laura from Spain (Seville) and Julian from Germany (Bochum, not even ten minutes from Essen).  They both work at Lycée Branly part time and at different middle schools in la Roche for the rest.  Living with them is so fascinating; although Julian can speak English and Spanish and Laura can speak a little English, we all speak French at home.  It's great practice, but I think I'm picking up some Espan-français and Allefrançais: Spanish and German phrases that probably don't translate into French (or at least don't mean the same thing to native French speakers)...but we use them anyway.  As we continue to settle in, I'm excited for them to teach me some Spanish and German!  At the moment, we have the best-sized living space of anyone and the most-furnished kitchen and an old TV with several stations so we can practice listening to French; it's a lively place with friends coming and going frequently.

On the other hand, the logistical end of moving here has been a bit of un cauchemar (a nightmare).  As soon as I have a working cell phone, I'll write the abridged version of the bank account/phone plan saga, an incredible and mind-boggling tale that well illustrates the quirks of the not-so-logical logistical French way of life.  In the meantime, I have a few more stories to share soon about day trips in the Pays de la Loire!

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