Op-Ed
Hugging The Brie
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Raisin d'etre
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Eight weeks ago, I came back to my parents’ home in suburban Chicago after having spent thirteen months working and studying in France. I lived in both Marseille and Paris and traveled to 45 other cities in 14 countries. I had the time of my life and, admittedly, consumed far too many bottles of wine.
As the return to America loomed, the prospect of returning home became increasingly dreadful. My wine consumption rose to exceed food and water consumption combined.
Yet the gentle numbing effect of fermented grapes did nothing to alleviate the reverse culture shock I experienced upon arriving in America. Even spending the return flight from Paris seated in a sea of evangelical missionaries didn’t prepare me for the pain of reintegration. In retrospect, I should have taken them up on the Jesus offer.
I left for France convinced that I would have this overwhelmingly abundant cultural experience, that I would eat the most delicious food in the world and spend my time gallivanting around the museums and historical sites of Europe, and that I would just, you know, come home. And that’s what I did.
But it never dawned on me how drastic it would be to come back.
Returning to the United States has been a bit like waking up from a one-year coma.
I feel a bit like I did when my family moved from Montréal to Tennessee a decade ago. I knew people were still speaking English, but I had no idea what they were saying.
I haven’t seen the 4th season of LOST, I just discovered that Lindsay Lohan is now a lesbian, and someone had to tell me that Derek and Meredith are back together. Against all odds, those velour tracksuit horrors are still considered fashionable.
Even watching the news almost had me swimming back across the Atlantic. As a complete news junkie, I was subscribed to every important American podcast while in France. But listening to compressed blurbs and reading about America through the lens of Le Monde and Libération made the U.S. seem disconcertingly Orwellian. Nothing I watched or read upon returning home erased that impression. The first Larry King special I watched was about aliens (and not the immigrant kind). Last week, I watched CNN devote exclusive coverage to staking out of the homes of Obama’s potential VPs while bombs went off in Iraq.
But the cherry on the proverbial sundae was finding out the hard way that the drinking age in America is still 21. While eating dinner at P.F. Chang’s with my mother, I tried to ease the reverse culture shock pain with a glass of California Cabernet, got carded, and was denied a glass of wine 3 weeks short of my 21st birthday.
Since I wasn’t going to be able to drink the pain away until August, I decided I needed to get my act together
I had to go on American cultural reintegration overdrive.
In high school, when I was still young and full of naïve conviction, I never watched television. I thought it killed brain cells (says the girl with the wine problem). I thought it was evil. But I knew from my freshman fall, when I discovered that television was at the center of many social rituals, that I would have to go on a massive TV binge to get back into the groove.
It also suddenly seemed vitally important to my cultural reintegration therapy that I memorize every celebrity gossip magazine known to man. Before I left for France, I couldn’t tell the Olsen twins apart. Now I know everything there is to know about the Jolie-Pitt brood. Somehow, it makes me feel more American.
When I wasn’t reading In Touch or watching Weeds, I practiced my English and took great pleasure in driving walkable distances.
In this wallowing state of cultural reintegration, I spent time looking for the light at the end of the tunnel. I almost died from the anticipation of returning to Wegmans.
Going to France, the world’s culinary paradise, I never thought that I would miss food. I ate all the croissants, baguettes, and raw milk Camemberts I had vividly dreamed before departure. But, embarrassingly, I missed things like hot sauce, peanut butter, and Betty Crocker chocolate frosting. I missed eating pre-sliced bread out of plastic bags. Most of all, I missed grocery shopping in America.
Grocery shopping in France is an exercise in patience and, incidentally, physical strength. Parisian women, their grossly inflated Euros in hand, practically tackle every soul in the produce section in their quest for cassoulet ingredients.
Wegmans has always been like Disneyland to me. So, after having lived in Paris, walking into Wegmans on Sunday afternoon was like riding the world’s best rollercoaster.
But last night, I also found myself practically hugging their French cheese case in deep longing. And even though I know that the Président brie sold at Wegmans is manufactured in America, it still feels like a little slice of Paris. A little slice of home.
They should warn you about that before they send you abroad.
Andréa Girardin is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences. She can be reached at agirardin@cornellsun.com. Raisin d’être will appear alternate Fridays this semester.