If you don’t know what “sans domicile fixe” means, it is a term used to descrive homeless. Better yet, I am homeless in France in a city where I barely speak the language and know no way around town. Actually it is not as bad as it seems, I am not living in a gutter somewhere nor am I begging for food or euros from strangers. I am residing, for the moment, at Hôtel Europe, which is located in downtown Grenoble.
It all happened when I first arrived and waited for an hour and a half at the wrong bus station in Grenoble looking for a taxi-whch there were none and the next taxi could only make it to the train station by 4:00 pm- so I was off to a stressful start. I managed to find out that there was a train going to the main train station, so I jumped on to find out my original housing plans were no longer where I would be living. Crystal, another CEA student who was living in the same residence hall as me, waited outside the train station for me with as our advisor dropped some other students off in a taxi. So we went to this other residence hall that was about 45 minutes away from our campus by using the tram (which our other residence hall was literally on campus and five minutes away). Patrick, our advisor, argued with the lady at the front desk about our mode of payment since we have already paid CEA who paid the people at the original residence hall (so he needed to get money back from them to pay the other people). This went on for about an hour and we finally checked out the rooms
They were not too bad-just remodeled! We entered and they were very very small. The first thing I noticed is that I didn’t have a bed… oh wait the bed gets pulled down from the ceiling. My best way to describe the mattress is that it reminded me of being a baby… the hard foam with the plastic that covered and protected the exterior. I sucked it up, knowing that this is what I should expect as I was living in a residence hall in France and not the Hilton. This was all a part of the cultural experience right?
Not until we found out that we shouldn’t go anywhere north of where we were past dark… since basically everything is north as we lived in a suburb of Grenoble. In order to meet with the other students in the program or do anything we had to pass this special area, which in the states it would be the government funded housing or the ghetto. We were warned to look out for guys who carried small man purses from Louis Vuitton or Prada as those were not used for money or cell phones, but for guns- especially going through that neighborhood.
Crystal and my parents freaked out because we have paid $10,000 to this program and this is what happened. Well they also didn’t understand that it had nothing to do with CEA and they were doing their best to find us new homes. So they basically demanded that we get out of that residence hall and move into a hotel until they found something.
You can bet there were a few awkward moments with our advisor after he received a phone call from the VP of CEA.
So we are staying at the hotel for the weekend and Sunday afternoon we are moving in the Fairholm House- which is a house that has 8 CEA students already in it. We will be crashing on mattresses in the huge house, sharing two bathrooms with 10 students for a week until we get to move into another residence hall (if it even has any openings). Think The Real World.
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