Sean Griffin
Staff Correspondent
LYON, FRANCE—For those expecting the standard issue overseas article about “unforgettable experiences” and “life-long friendships,” I apologize; my pen is far too pompous and I too vain (my willingness to include a reference to personal vanity in an over-contrived newspaper article the most dangerous and ironic evidence yet).
I do, however, pledge to avoid the smug entitlement and firm onset of condescension so often present in the overseas memoirs of Pepperdine’s cultural gentry. I understand the formula: Student travels abroad, student encounters cookie-cutter educational episodes that ultimately enlighten student with a profound new understanding. However, I am not feeling particularly revolutionary and cowering meekly before the shameful tyranny of peer pressure. And abstaining from literary fratricide, here are few clever, shallow sentences from a year abroad (for dramatic purposes, please play Green Day’s “Good Riddance” and read aloud):
I have learned …
… that Frenchmen have uni-brows more fortified than the Maginot Line. Couple this with a national zest for tight jeans and huge, fluffy jackets and the Saturday night metro station is like a 1950s science fiction movie. From a distance, groups of Frenchmen appear like large, restless beanbag colonies perched upon denim toothpicks.
… that I haven’t learned French. My own attempts are a dashing combination of eyebrows, index fingers and cheap grunting. I look and sound like a farting mime imitating a puppy. This has led to conversations that read like a veterinarian playing bilingual charades with a profound golden retriever.
… that third world countries are idle men in cheap suits whose only visible job requirement is facial fur. I am not speaking of your petty, run-of-the-mill Charleston Heston descending from Mount Olives-type beard. Oh no, these are small woodland chin mammals that can, and will, viciously attack livestock and house plants.
… that if traveling to France in the immediate future, one should memorize the following phrase: “I’m Canadian. Bush wets himself, eh?” Take consolation with thoughts of the paradoxical phrase “French military.”
… not to peruse and examine my French family’s wine inventory while they’re on a three-day holiday, especially if by “peruse” I meant partaking in a previously opened bottle and by “while on a three-day holiday” I could mean the exact moment a French parent opens the cellar door. Positively, this will enable that once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to listen to hysterical French screams of “wine vandal” and will also acquaint one with the joys of in-house padlocking.
… that Dr. Gary Wheatley Hart is God.
And finally, in the grand tradition of all melodramatic overseas articles before me, we have learned …
… that the world is large and we are strangers to many places. This was our humble moment to smile and weep for everyone and then understand that there is no great privilege or destiny in any of it. We have seen roses in cardboard boxes and thorns in palaces, and we have screamed and kicked and drank against this great motionless curtain of inequality. In us, if only for a moment, there was something that dared to flicker boldly against the vast, gray apathies of complacency.
A hand, however weak, that reached out from vain temporality to grasp beauty and truth, and when these let us down, to accept compassion.
I will not try to encapsulate or judge the Lyon Program. It is too much to debase with my own heavy-handed opinions. But love it or hate it, every single one of us will attest to the slogan on the back of our sweatshirts: “Lyon: The Real Overseas Program.”
April 03, 2003