Mon residence en haut.... (My dorm up high....)

After cooking dinner last night, a few friends and I discovered that right outside the hallway window on the second floor of Rabot, you can climb out onto a gravel-covered landing, which is the roof of the cafeteria!  It’s completely safe and better yet, it offers the most spectacular view of the city at night.  From as far left to as far right as the eye can see, the city stretches out underneath us, a sea of old buildings, an expanse of tiny lights.

I’m quite overdue in creating a word-picture of where I am living this semester!  Though at times le Residence du Rabot is inconvenient due to it’s location on the side of a ridge, my friend Elizabeth and I agree that there is nowhere better to live.  I am extremely fortunate that, after a long day, I can reach the top and anticipate being greeted by a wonderfully refreshing breeze, as well as the opportunity to gaze at the city and, just above it, the mountains that border it on every side.  It even makes the 15-minute hike up 150 meters (about 500 feet--I consulted Google Map) worth every step!  But even the walk up is lovely—first, an ancient set of stairs, and then a winding road through the forest toward home  (check out these pictures…I tried to capture each “stage” of my walk up, more or less.... the first one is taken from the other side of the river, and that's the bridge we take to get to the stairs.  you can actually see MY building in this first picture: it's the small one above and a little left of that first long building in the trees... you're a champ if you followed that ;)

 

 

Rabot is actually a cluster of five buildings, and about 500 students live up here.  They stuck a lot of international students in this dorm because it’s cheaper, but there are a good number of French students up here too!  I live in a building called Chartreuse, named after the set of mountains just behind us and a well-known liquor famous to the area.  Unlike the main city of Grenoble, everyone up here says hello to each other in passing.  You’re also bound to meet more people in the kitchen than anywhere else in the building. ;) And you'll see just as many black and grey cats lurking around as you do people, sometimes.

Since it used to be a French fort, I love the old stone walls and the amazing view that I have from my window of the even older Bastille.  The Telepherique are glass gondolas that you can ride on to get to the Bastille, the highest point in Grenoble, and we always joke about buying a year pass so that when we get close enough, we’d jump to the rooftop of Rabot.  If anything, earlier this week Elizabeth and I had a good laugh about throwing our groceries and laundry from them….

My room is all to myself, and just enough space I need for what I brought (which isn’t much!). I have a wall separating my main space from a small nook where I have a sink and a mirror, as well as a small closet.  In the main area I have a teeny refrigerator, a huge desk, which accumulates piles of brochures like dust, and an equally huge bookshelf.  One shelf is my ‘pantry,’ another, for my books and folders, another, for my toothpaste and hair ties.  It is quite the split-personality bookshelf.  But my favorite part of my room is the window: two large, white panes swing out to welcome in the fresh air, and I almost always have them open!  If you're looking to be amused today, you can watch the video to the right.... I made it for my family.  Excuse the drying laundry and the 'roller coaster' film job....the cinematography is a little lacking and I take on a ghostly appearance at the end, but all the same, I thought it would be fun to share with you where I live!

I’m thankful that I brought just enough pictures from home to make my space feel quite comfortable and cheerful, but I’ve also been accumulating brochures from different things I’ve done/visited and have a collage started on the wall above my desk.  I’ve started to put up a few passages of Scripture in French.  I also found these gorgeous greeting cards at my favorite bookstore in town with incredible pictures and awesome French quotes on them by different philosophers and writers.  I didn’t want to buy them because they were really expensive, so I actually grabbed my favorites and took a picture of them in the store, in a corner…. haha don’t tell!  I simply wanted to remember the quote and write it down, but still, I felt like a really bad person!  So those quotes are hanging in various places around my room too.  Here’s a good one.... translated from the french, so it's not quite as beautiful (you’ll probably have heard them all by the end of my semester):

The child walks joyfully, without thinking about the path ahead; he believes it to be infinite, seeing not the end.

Alfred de Musset, French poet and novelist

I’m trying to see through the eyes of a child while I’m here.  I’m trying not to think so hard about the ‘end’ I have in mind for this semester, which involves lots of different expectations for myself in terms of language, relationships, and even spiritual growth…. I simply want to love the journey, and rejoice in what the Lord brings me every day!   Still, letting go of expectations is really hard for me to do.

There are a lot of different grassy areas around Rabot with equally spectacular views of different parts of the city and mountains.  I’ll never, ever, get sick of these mountains, and you can expect that I’ll write about them often.  Three mountain ranges surround Grenoble, and especially in the morning, experiencing the Lord’s glory is simply unavoidable.  From my window, the mountains to the west catch the first rays of sun as her brilliance slowly uncovers each peak from the top down.  On nice days like today, the rising sun silhouettes the mountains to the east, which I stare at as I walk downward toward school, but individual rays sometimes escape upward and make these mountains glorious.  The sky to the south catches the rosy beginnings of the day, and the mountains often sit serenely in a mist of blues and purples; it always seems like the scene of a painting. 

It’s all breathtaking to me, really…. yet maybe even more than that, it’s breath giving.  That is, I truly receive life and joy and peace from the Spirit of God simply when I look at those mountains.

A picture is worth a thousand words?  For me, these pictures represent a thousand prayers of adoration to a Beautiful God.

these were all taken from my dorm window ;-)