On a typical weekend in Grenoble, France, I’m quite busy. Though my workload in France is rather limited, I’m often busier than I am with all my schoolwork in Canada. I fill my time with sports and something I’d almost forgotten existed in my past two years at Carleton: a social life.
Whether I’m going on one-night trips to local cities, meeting my girlfriends for lunch, or exploring Grenoble’s nightlife, I don’t often feel like I’m sitting around doing nothing. However, this weekend was different.
It seemed like all of my closest friends here had gone out of town, and since I’m still patiently waiting for my OSAP to come in, I didn’t really have the financial resources to go anywhere. After returning from my nearly month-long travel binge a week ago, during which I visited Barcelona, Paris, Amiens, Dublin, Galway, Edinburgh and Glasgow in just over three weeks, I was quite content to just stay around here and hang out with my remaining friends.
I had it all planned out: Friday, I would meet a French friend for coffee to fill my self-imposed daily French quota, then I’d spend a quiet Friday evening watching a movie with one of my Canadian friends.
Saturday, I would go for a solid run, get my hair cut, buy new boots to replace the ones I left in Scotland to keep my bag under the airline’s weight limit, then head to a friend’s place for dinner followed by a little soirée at another friend’s.
Sunday, I was going to wake up and meet some friends to climb a mountain. Sounded like a pretty ideal weekend, until it went totally not as planned.
It started Friday, when my French friend cancelled our coffee plans at the last minute. Although I was slightly disappointed that I couldn’t spend the afternoon practicing my French, I made up for it by meeting some Canadian friends for lunch at one of our favourite restaurants, where they serve baked potatoes done up with really delicious toppings as a main dish.
As always, this was quite enjoyable, even if I was spending some of my last remaining euros.
It was then, though, that my movie-watching buddy decided she was going to hit up the slopes this weekend. My Friday night plans with her were totally shot.
I managed to salvage the night by attending a party in one of the residences. But after a hard day of doing nothing, my friend and I left rather early, deciding we were too tired to be social past 1 a.m.
Despite Friday’s early bedtime, my productive Saturday didn’t end up happening either. My OSAP didn’t arrive conveniently on Friday as I had hoped it would, meaning I really could not justify spending any cash beyond necessities (read: chocolate and wine).
I took Saturday as a day to once again lounge about and do nothing. Saturday evening was about the only thing that went as planned — I had dinner at a friend’s, then we headed over to our American friend’s place for a little get-together.
We left early because we had planned to catch a bus the following morning at 9:30 a.m. to a nearby mountain for a hike. But in keeping with the trend of this weekend, I got a nice surprise as I was trying to fall asleep: I somehow got food poisoning, and was up all night writhing in pain. Needless to say, after a long, awful night, climbing a mountain in the morning wasn’t really an option.
So here I sit, attempting to keep some kind of food down. Since everything is closed on Sundays in France, I can’t really run any errands, and my weak stomach isn’t going to allow me to go for my daily run.
This weekend is proof for all my envious friends in Canada that living abroad isn’t always all it’s cracked up to be — even in France you can have weekends that are total fails!
