Firstly, an apology.
It’s been an entire five months since the last time I wrote anything for you guys. Now I understand that in some ways that is tragic but equally I’m not sure how many people actually follow this blog so maybe it’s only me that needs to worry about how tragically long it’s been… Either way, I am sorry and I promise to try and do better.
Secondly, new directions (not the lead show choir group of Fox’s ‘Glee’, obviously).
This blog has previously been focused purely on food, and for good reason. I love food, evidently. It’s also one of the things I would say I’m better at writing about, mostly thanks to my passion and limited, but existent, knowledge on the subject. But as any of you who follow me through any form of social media (I’m pretty sure that’s all of you because how else do you accidentally stumble upon www.jamiecheung.com?), I have made a big change in my life recently and temporarily displaced myself from the UK (probably a wise decision considering our current political situation…). I am now living and ‘studying’ (I used said term loosely) in the picturesque city of a thousand fountains; Aix-en-provence. Thanks to this new direction my life has taken, I figured that it’s only sensible to let the blog follow. Food is still going to feature heavily, how could it ever not, it’s me we’re talking about here, but I am also going to be writing more about life here more generally and what life as an exchange student in Provence is like. As always I love to hear your feedback so if you like the new direction the blog is taking then please let me know through any of the various social media platforms I have linked through the website, equally, if you don’t like where it’s going, I am open to all the savage criticisms you may feel the need to throw my way.
I’m just going to give you a brief overview of my arrival and initial thoughts/feelings in this post because I don’t want to overload/bore you to death with an incredibly long post…
So; allons-y. My journey began on August the 23rd when I shipped myself out here from London Luton to Marseille Provence airport, two phat suitcases and my guitar in hand. The physical journey itself was a bit of a mission with a 3am start, a multitude of delays and my insistence on taking a full sized, six string piece of wood along with me. Anyway, I took a taxi from the airport and was dropped at the gate of this mysterious land we call Les Gazelles. Don’t be fooled, I have not moved into some majestic safari park, it’s far from that. In fact it’s pretty far from anything a British University student would recognise, but more about that later. After much struggling, the first real French encounter happened.
I should take this opportunity to explain my French language situation; I do not study French as part of my degree or otherwise, much to the disgust of literally every Erasmus student I have met since being here. I do, however, absolutely adore the language, I love watching French TV and studied it at GCSE level as well as doing a brief stint of classes in first year as a kind of extracurricular experience thing. All that being said, my conversational ability is not terrible and thus for me to suggest I am completely lost, linguistically, in the streets of Aix would be a bit misleading.
Back to the story, I queued for an unnerving amount of time considering how nervous I was, eventually handed over my paperwork and all of the student loan I’d graciously received the day before in exchange for my keys. I was told to go and find my room where someone would meet me to inspect it and finish the handover paperwork. That was done and I was left on my own, for the first time, in a completely foreign land. My first thoughts were almost all centered on my concerns about the kitchen situation but the kitchen is going to have it’s own post. Make of that what you will.
And so there I was, I unpacked into my 9m2 room with “tri-functional cabin” which is what they call our bathrooms. A fitting name, I must say, given their likeness to the bathroom one would expect in the bunk of a ferry. And my adventure began. I’m going to leave settling in until the next post because I know people have other things to do with their days than spend it all reading whatever waffle I’ve written.
Thank you so much if you’re still with this blog, it means a lot to know people, somewhere, are reading it and, hopefully, enjoying it. I’ll write again soon…
J