Today was my last day at work. I won't say I'm sad to be done with teaching, especially since I'm lucky enough to be bowing out right at the time of year when kids see sunshine through the window and lose their minds at the thought of having to waste their time on stupid useless English. But overall, it's been a solid year, and my kids have been really sweet to me over the past few weeks as they've found out I was leaving. Among other things, I have received:
- Four classes' worth of sweet things written about/to me on blackboards
- One "card" (i.e. sheet of paper) full of adorable goodbye messages, including my favorite, "you will miss me" (written totally accidentally and non-ironically - the grammar of that phrase is the opposite in French, "vous me manquerez").
- One surprise party, including homemade cake from one of my girls! :)
- Three dinner invitations by teachers, at least two of which I will happily accept
- An unexpected 20€, since they are actually refunding my money that I never spent at the school cafeteria and forgot I had even given them
- Many many lovely sentiments from various members of the staff, especially at School 1. Okay, only at School 1; no one at School 2 actually realized I was leaving apart from the teachers I work with. But I'm okay with that.

So I've come to the end of this phase of things, and today I realized suddenly that I have no idea what to do with myself, now. "Suddenly" isn't entirely accurate; honestly, for about two months I've been thinking about very little other than what my Next Big Thing is going to be. But I forgot to think about what happens in the meantime, before I leave here, and what I want my days to look like.

As I type this I'm sitting out on my balcony, the one with the gorgeous 14th-floor view of the rooftops of the city and the full yellow moon. I have these moments here, looking out at this view or walking next to the river or noticing the way the warm afternoon light plays across the buildings on the presqu'île, where I can't imagine ever leaving this place. I've been struggling with that a lot lately, and for all the time and thought I put into it, I don't seem to be any closer to convincing myself what to do.

If you asked me to list everything I want in a city, Lyon has almost all of those things:
- It's really, really beautiful.
- Getting around couldn't be any easier - transit goes everywhere with decent regularity, and if I'm out after the metro I can take a free bike from anywhere in the city to anywhere else, or I can just walk. Relatedly, I can also get from this city to almost anywhere in western Europe with a minimum of hassle. At absolutely no point during this year have I thought "man, this would be way easier if I had a car."
- It's safer than basically anywhere else I've ever lived, at least in my experience (I don't have stats to back it up, but it feels true).
- There are innumerable small, non-chain shops in which to buy basically anything I need.
- There are not one but two rivers, which is something I've missed since leaving Boston.
- Financially, living here is really easy, especially since I'm eligible for a hefty housing subsidy and (of course) really cheap and available healthcare.
- It doesn't snow very much or rain all the time.
- Supermarkets here are kind of awful, but actual markets along the lines of farmers' markets in the US are everywhere, and almost every day, and cheap. Since I don't like buying packaged things and I do like buying real food and interacting with the people who sell it, that is pretty awesome.
- I get to speak French here, which I love. Although really, it could be any of my languages and I'd be just as happy.
- As a whole, people here are very friendly and polite, and patient with my limited French.
- And then there's an intangible - something. I feel easy here, like nowhere else I've ever lived. Even in the middle of winter, I never had a day where I walked out of my apartment and thought "damn, I hate it here." That sounds like a low bar to set, but it hasn't been true of anywhere else I've ever lived - that's not to say I've hated them consistently, just that they've all had their moments of that. Here, if I'm having a bad day, I can almost always make it at least a bit better just by going out into the city. I'll see something beautiful or interesting, or I'll have a short chat with my coffee guys, or I'll overhear a funny conversation and be proud of myself for understanding it. Something.

So Lyon has all of those things, which is great. But here is what Lyon doesn't have:
- Any opportunity for meaningful work. I could, without much hassle at all, come back here again in September and do the same job again. It would be even easier this year since I have all my lesson plans, there would be a minimum of grief, I would meet the new assistants and make friends, and it would probably be a pretty fun year. I'm not saying that's not appealing in some ways, but I'm kind of at a point in my life where I want to have a real job, one that's going somewhere and doesn't have an end date. One that involves me doing work that's actually useful to someone, rather than the glorified babysitting gig I have now. And ideally, one that pays more than the bare minimum necessary for survival, so I can have a bit of a safety net that isn't my parents (not that I don't appreciate all the help they've been giving me! Hi, Mom & Dad). And in France, with my current qualifications, I basically can't get that. I don't have a European BA, and frankly although it's much better than it was a year ago, my French isn't up to the task. My options here, as far as I can tell, are either a) English assistant or b) bartender in one of the numerous Anglophone bars around here. Neither is exactly what I'm hoping for.
- Quite frankly, very many friends. I met a lot of amazing people this year, who I consider good friends and hope to stay in touch with - but they're gone, they've moved back home. I didn't get to know a lot of French people this year, mostly because even after eight months, my language skills are not really to the point where I can consistently follow conversation among native speakers. Especially if that conversation is taking place somewhere remotely loud, like a restaurant or a bar. Don't get me wrong, I've met a lot of friendly French people and several of them have gone out of their way to include me in things, but at a certain point I get tired of constantly asking people to repeat themselves (or more likely, pretending to follow the conversation until someone asks me a question and I get caught out).
I know I would make friends here eventually; the bigger and more important point is that I really miss the friends I already have, back home. Of course, this is where it bites me that I've moved seven times in the last six years; it's not like it will ever be realistic again for me to want to have my good friends all in one place. And that's part of what goes into this too - I'm getting tired of moving, and I can't decide where to stop.

There are other things that play into this, of course. With my relatively limited language skills, there's a lot going on around me that I don't really get, and that I would very likely be troubled by if I did. I only have the barest sense of how politics work here, so issues that would really get to me back home just sort of aren't part of the picture when I think about France. I'm definitely not saying ignorance is bliss here, and it's getting less true as I understand more, but I can't help wondering how much is going on beneath the surface that would start to bother me if I stayed here for longer.

Last night I had a really interesting conversation with Michael and Imogen, two of my Australian friends, about race and how it's perceived and dealt with in the US vs Australia vs France. One of the conclusions that we came to is that issues of race seem to be a lot less dealt with here than they are back home. I'm not trying to say that in the US it's something that's been taken care of or that we deal with it effectively, but I think most people who live in the States have had to at least think about racial issues at some point in their lives. Most people (not all, but most) are reasonably good about avoiding blatant racism, even if they're not so great at questioning the stereotypes that they hold on a subconscious level. Here, despite the fact that there are some pretty serious racial/cultural/ethnic tensions going on between ethnic French people and the north African community, it just doesn't really seem to have taken hold that racial slurs are serious and potentially hurtful even if you think you're just kidding. The other night I was at a small get-together at which a French guy, the friend of a friend, said something that roughly translates to "man, it's really hot in here! I should buy myself a little Indian child to fan me with palm fronds." Our mutual friend, who is an Anglophone, reacted pretty much the same way I did: wide eyes, and what essentially boils down to ". . . did that just come out of your mouth??" The reaction from the French guy was basically "oh come on, English speakers are soooo PC, it's totally obvious I was just kidding, why are you making this into an issue." And honestly? I don't think he was lying; in his own head, I don't think he is racist. Unfortunately, that's not the same thing as actually not being racist, and it's a pretty widespread attitude here.

Another (though comparatively minor) example comes from my classroom - for several weeks I was showing all my classes photos of some of my friends, and they would describe what they saw in the photos, try to guess their hobbies and jobs, and ask me questions about their age and family and whatever else they could figure out how to say at whatever level of English they had. One of the people I showed photos of was a friend who was born in the US and is of half-white, half-Korean descent. When I asked the kids to describe this particular friend, in almost 100% of my classes someone would pipe up with "She is Chinese!" To which I would reply, nope, guess again. Eventually someone would go ahead and ask me "what is her nationality?" and I would say, well, she was born in the US, so she is American. One of her parents was also born in the US, and the other was born in Korea. And every single time, the response from the kids was basically "hey, that was a trick question! We already guessed right when we said she was Chinese, and now you're just nit-picking." I didn't really get into it with them, largely because of language barrier issues, but I did try to express the fact that this is an American person, just like everyone else who is born in America and everyone else who decides to become American. Nationality and ethnicity are so divorced for me, having grown up in a place where they are basically different by definition (you can't be "ethnically American"), that it still really jumps out at me how much that is not the case here. Half my kids, if I ask their nationality, will tell me they are from Algeria or Tunisia or Morocco. A few of them really were born in north Africa, but if you ask them specifically, most of them were born in France, and many of them have never been to "their country" at all. Which, in terms of who they consider themselves to be, matters exactly not at all.

I'm not trying to add fuel to any "they just won't integrate" arguments. It's not just that the kids self-identify that way; it's that a whole lot of ethnically-French people would 100% agree with what they're saying and would (at best) be confused if the kids tried to describe themselves as French. They have French passports, which from my American perspective kind of settles the question, but somehow what passport you carry and what nationality you are considered to be don't have to be the same thing. I should make the point that these are not radicalized kids; these are not the kids you heard about a few years ago rioting outside of Paris. I teach in good, fairly middle-class schools where kids get disciplined for "excessive rudeness to teacher" and "refusal to take out his workbook until 45 minutes after the start of class" (quoting here from discipline notices on the teacher's room bulletin board), and there are basically no fights or violence of any kind. This is an extremely mainstream view. France is a country that bans "all religious symbols" (meaning the hijab) from its public schools, then turns around and holds school-sponsored Christmas tree sales every December. This is a contradiction that got me funny looks every single time I pointed it out; if I got any response at all, it was "well Christmas trees aren't really Christian; it's just a tradition we have" [note: the French for "Christmas tree" doesn't actually contain the word "Christmas," so that sounds slightly less ridiculous on its face than in English, but not much]. Leaving entirely aside the fact that "no religious symbols" is enforced if a girl wants to cover her hair, but not if a student (or teacher, cough) decides to wear a crucifix necklace.

Anyway. That got long-winded and a bit off-track. What I'm saying is that in terms of almost anything rational, I should probably be making plans to move back home. I'm qualified for at least some of the kinds of jobs that I'm interested in, and I can get things done without a ton of effort trying to figure out what people are saying to me, and I miss my friends a lot. And even though I'm not really ready to say that our culture is better than French culture, I understand it better and have a better handle on what its pitfalls are. Every time I sit down and write this out and really pore over all the details of staying and going, I convince myself that I should start looking for a job and an apartment in DC. And then I turn off my computer and go really anywhere at all in this city, and I can't shake that thought of how can you ever leave this, how could you be thinking about walking away. So I don't know what to do, and I don't make plans, and I find myself at the end of my job with no real idea of what is supposed to happen next.

In any case, my lease runs out in a month and four days, so I suppose I'll have to know by then. In the meantime, it's summer, and summer is one of my favorite things.