The French Dispatch III: New friends, old friends, and everything in between

‘The French Dispatch’ is a reflection on the experiences of one student on her year abroad in France. In a series of columns, Emily Moss discusses the highs and lows of life in Paris, offering (what she hopes to be) helpful tips and insights to future year abroaders, as well as reflections on cultural differences, the language difficulties that living abroad entails, and the challenges of being a young woman in a city not exactly well-known for being welcoming of those who decide to make it home.

Something that I’d always dreaded about my year abroad was the amount of time that I would be spending away from my friends and family in the UK. The majority of my friends in Cambridge were studying on three year courses, and would be graduating in 2022, before I returned for my fourth year. But it was something I was more or less able to ignore until Easter term of second year, where everything suddenly became quite bittersweet as I realised that so many of my friends wouldn’t be here when I returned. Experiences as banal as doing our grocery shopping together at Aldi, studying in the library, going to the pub or for a swim in the Cam, took on a new significance when I thought about how they may be the last time I do those things with so many of my friends. “We don’t say goodbye, we say see you later!” was something one of my friends, Anna, told me on the day she left Cambridge for the summer. I don’t usually remember things that people have said to me, but the particular poignancy of that phrase seems to have stuck with me, as I wondered, when she said it, how many of the ‘see you laters’ I shouted at peoples’ retreating backs were really goodbyes. 

Before I left for France at the tail-end of a summer spent hurrying around seeing as many friends as possible, I told everyone “we’ll have to stay in touch!”, assuming that I’d somehow manage at least bi-monthly Facetimes with the fifteen or so people I must have said this to. What I didn’t quite appreciate at the time was that everyone leads busy lives (especially when they’re a finalist at uni), and despite well-intentioned promises to stay in touch, in reality I only phone or Facetime a handful of my friends more than once a month. Otherwise, texts seem to suffice. 

And so, whether I liked it or not, I found myself living in a new city, confronting the reality that the majority of my friendships from uni and school would, for the time being, be reduced to occasional Facetimes, text messages, Instagram or Facebook DMs, and brunch/lunch/coffee/dinner dates whenever we were in the same place, where we’d attempt to tell each other a summarised version of everything that’s happened in our lives since we last saw each other. It was quite a strange realisation, but also, in a way, reassuring, since I’d long observed that that would simply be the nature of adult friendships, as you grow up and move to different cities and countries. You mature, and your friendships need to, too. I was fortunate that I’ve never found staying in touch difficult, so I wasn’t too intimidated by this prospect, although it didn’t make it any less difficult when I first moved to France, and was struck almost immediately by how much I missed my friends and family in the UK. 

Thankfully, as time has gone on, I’ve developed something of a rhythm for staying in touch with everyone back home. I may phone one friend every two weeks, or FaceTime another every month, or exchange a few text messages regularly with another. It becomes a habit, so that staying in touch doesn’t feel like an obligation (and if it often does, maybe you should reconsider that particular friendship?). Staying in touch is, I feel, one of the most important skills to learn, or improve on, on the year abroad, because it stops you feeling too lonely, lets you stay in touch with life in Cambridge (which will make re-integrating in fourth year that bit easier—or at least, I’m hoping so), and, most important of all, lets you stay involved in your friends’ lives from a distance, so that you’re still able to be a good friend to them, and them to you.

As well as maintaining my friendships from uni and home in the UK, I’ve also been busy making friends in Paris, which has been the most rewarding part of my year abroad, despite a slightly uphill struggle to begin with, amidst all the chaos of moving to a new city and starting at a new university within two weeks. Studying during your year abroad is supposedly the easiest way to make friends your own age. I’ve found this to be true, although you often have to make more effort than at a university in the UK, because the university systems in the majority of countries don’t typically facilitate making friends as easily. For example, shared student accommodation is uncommon, with the majority of students I’ve met living in privately rented accommodation, and extracurricular activities are rare (ENS Paris, my host uni, is something of an exception in France, being well-known for its Anglophone model for la vie associative, whereby there’s an active students union which organises hundreds of extracurricular activities, across sports, arts, social sciences and STEM).

Still, I’ve found it easier than I’d anticipated to make friends- both French-speaking and other international students. However, being an international student on an exchange programme does mean that integration with French students is often more difficult; at ENS specifically, Erasmus students don’t receive student accommodation at the ENS campus and have a separate orientation week, meaning that it’s more likely your closest friends will end up being other international students. Accepting that it’s absolutely fine for the majority of my friends to not be Francophone has been important, and if anything has added to the richness of my experience studying abroad, because I’ve met people from all over the world! I use my other language, German, with many of my German-speaking friends, as well as a mixture of French and English with Italian, Russian, and Brazilian friends, so just because your friends aren’t Francophone doesn’t mean that you’ll be speaking English all the time! Besides, improving your language skills is, in reality, only one part of your year abroad; making friends, irrespective of their nationality, is ultimately far more important.

Images belong to the author unless stated otherwise.