inside Rhodes

Fac de Droit

I am spending the year in Poitiers, a small city in Midwestern France.

Most mornings, the sky is as white and as blank as a canvass.  A dense fog hugs the banks of the Clain and scatters the light from departing buses.  Central Poitiers was built on a hill.  As you descend, medieval stonework and nineteenth-century façades dissolve into strip malls and car-dealerships.  Mopeds fly down sloping streets at intimidating speeds.  Heading towards campus, the road is flanked by Kebab shops and Indian restaurants claiming to specialize in “la cuisine tandoorienne.”  From the bus stop, well-dressed students stream towards the Fac de Droit and intermingle with their slightly less polished counterparts from Lettres et Langues.  Against the colorless sky, the university buildings appear a cold, institutional grey.  Students holding cigarettes and small paper cups of coffee linger in the square separating the two faculties.  Just above the entrance to the Fac de Droit someone has scrawled “Grève Général” in sharp uneven letters on the stone (a relic from the widespread student strikes last spring).

My Iberian colocataire and I have an Arabic class at eight o’clock on Tuesday mornings.  She has already been to Morocco and has no problem with the trilled r’s, but I am slightly better than her at distinguishing between [h] and [?].  When it comes to pronouncing [t??], we are both lost.  Walking around the city, you occasionally see fliers put out by the Reseau Contre l’Islamitisation de la France plastered on the glass windows of bus stops.  I have not seen any official numbers, but Poitiers gives the impression of being a city of immigrants, mostly English and West African.   That in addition to the large student population has spawned a surprisingly urban atmosphere in a town of under 90,000.  Bridges and underpasses sport some of the most elaborate tags I have ever seen.  Last weekend, I had the chance to visit La Rochelle, a slightly larger city on the Atlantic coast about 150km to the west of Poitiers.  While I may not have gotten to see enough of it, I was struck by how different the graffiti was from that of Poitiers (regional styles of graffiti?).  I am just now starting to get a sense of the city’s quirks: the fog that does not dissipate until noon, the anti-Muslim propaganda, the street art.  Hopefully in the next post, I will have something a little more anecdotal to share.