“Being an immigrant is hard,” said a family friend to me a few days ago. She has just moved to Europe for her retirement and is quickly realizing, as I am, that we are not in Kansas anymore. Everything is just different enough to realize that this isn’t quite home — yet — as much as we want it to be.

I arrived in Grenoble nearly two weeks ago and my spacious bachelor pad is just beginning to feel like it’s mine. Having gone from living with three roommates to now living on my own, the evidence is stark that living in France is basically like turning my Ottawa lifestyle upside-down.

While my friends back home are anxiously starting up their final years of university, thinking about careers or graduate school, and are probably all meeting up with one another again after spending the summer scattered across Canada, I am sitting here in a foreign country — and that is pretty much all I’m doing.

I am desperately trying to meet new friends, but the fact that school still doesn’t start for about two more weeks makes the process a bit harder. I seem to have arrived a month too early, so now I am caught in some limbo state between vacation and regular life. Every day is like a holiday — I explore the city as a tourist — yet I am trying to make this place a home, so I also have to set up a bank account, buy cleaning products and generally try to get established here.

Without any set routine or need to be somewhere I have a lot of time to ponder my emotions — my anxiousness of having arrived in a new place, my excitement for the escapades around Europe to come, and my homesickness — a longing to be laughing at a bar with my friends, eating dinner with my family, or just hugging my boyfriend.

We were told at our orientation that it helps to have a set routine to get over “culture shock;” I need it more just to get over the homesickness.

Those who know me would say that I am a go-go-go person — this past year I worked at the Charlatan, had a full course load, and balanced all that with various extra-curriculars and my social life to boot. So having nothing to do every day except wander the beautiful cobblestone streets of Grenoble, trying to orient myself to these new surroundings, is quite different from the life I’m used to back home.

Some of the differences between life in Ottawa and life in Grenoble are huge, and others are subtler. For instance, my bathroom features a bathtub with a hand-held extension to shower and no curtain. So every morning I take a combo shower/bath sitting exposed in a chilly bathroom rather than my usual steamy shower standing in comfortable privacy.

Simple things like milk and crackers are different here: I’ve only been able to find demi-écremé milk and have yet to find crackers.

I had been fairly forewarned about the bureaucracy in France, so I am not too shocked by the fact that I need my student card to open a bank account. I am also a master at procrastinating (still haven’t gotten my house insurance yet!), so I don’t really mind having to go back to the bank two weeks later to finalize an account once I have registered for classes.

And rather than having the somewhat reliable and at least frequent OC Transpo service to get me from my apartment to the downtown core, I have just bought a bike. The buses from my area of town stop running at 8:30 p.m., making getting downtown a bit frustrating for me.

My ride is a used mountain bike that cost me 30 €, plus 13 € to join the bike co-op that I bought it from and 20 € for a super bike lock to prevent it from getting stolen (which, according to the security guard at my apartment, sounds inevitable). The breaks squeal like pigs, which makes biking in traffic without a helmet all the more frightening.

Despite being in the middle of the Alps, Grenoble is known as the flattest city in France. I can get downtown in 10 minutes on my bike and to school in 20.

Considering there are bakeries on every street corner, chocolate in all the cereal and cookies in the first aisle with the fruit and veggies, I am glad I will be getting a good amount of exercise. My mom said I would be rolling off the plane when I come home in February, but I am hoping that will not be the case.

I think the biggest difference here is definitely the fact that France runs like clockwork, and I am not quite in sync. Lunchtime is from 12:00 to 1:00 p.m., and you have to eat then because all the stores and businesses are closed, and some things may not re-open until after 4:00 p.m. I have yet to figure out what re-opens when. The stores seem to be open here until around 6:30 p.m., I guess to make up for all the time they are closed; but you cannot even try to get fed before 7 p.m., which I am sure I will eventually get used to. As they explained to us at the orientation, in Canada you can eat anything, anywhere, but not so much in France.

But, although you cannot buy peanut butter at the grocery store without paying an arm and a leg, you can buy Nutella. And as expected, there is an IKEA, even in Grenoble. It is reassuring to know that some things are the same — like I can furnish my kitchen for the next six months at a cost of only 35 €.