It’s September, it’s back-to-school season and although all that means to someone of my age is that it’s time to go back to Brownies, I thought I’d give you a quick tour of my year abroad student room in Switzerland. That’s partly because this is a travel blog and partly because I had a film camera at my home uni and no one wasted film on their student bedroom back in 2003-07. I had my first ever digital camera in Switzerland and therefore I could afford to take a few photos of the room.
So, very quick recap: I studied French and Spanish and as such, I had a compulsory year abroad. I spent it in Switzerland studying French. I should have gone to Spain for the second semester but I begged to stay in Switzerland the whole year. I lived in a French-speaking town in the west of Switzerland called Neuchâtel and I attended the Institut de langue et civilisation françaises at the Université de Neuchâtel.
See, I had a student ID and a Swiss permis de séjour, the little bit of legal paperwork required for me to live and study in Switzerland. No picture but I also had a demi-tarif, a card which allowed me half-price travel on all trains and buses and I have a pile of coursebooks and packets of work which only recently reappeared after fifteen years in a cupboard.
Anyway. I lived in the Cité Universitaire, a tower block less than a five minute walk from my language school. I have a vague idea that there was a laundry room in the basement and some tables – I swear we went and sat there when one of the teachers from my home uni visited halfway through the year but I don’t think we went there any other time and I must have done some washing throughout the year but I guess that sort of thing doesn’t make quite the impression that mountains and cities do and I don’t really remember it at all.
I lived in an ensuite room on the seventh floor, south-east facing, with views over the hospital, the Red Church, the lake and across to the Oberland, sixty miles away, although I could only see that as a faint blue shadow on really good days. My entire far wall was a big wide window and it opened to a degree that it wouldn’t today, which meant I could lean out a long way and watch the sunset if I wanted.
Back at my home uni, I’d spent my first year in a small shared student house on the edge of campus, where five bedrooms shared one tiny kitchen and one reasonable-sized bathroom. In my second year, I shared a rented house in town with three other people where I mostly hid in my room for the entire year and tried not to see my housemates. To have my own private ensuite bathroom was a luxury beyond anything I’d ever imagined. True, I also tried not to see my floor-mates but I befriended a girl on the fourth or fifth floor, Jemma from my own uni, although we’d managed to never have a single lesson together in the two years we’d spent on the same French course back home, and over the year I got to know her floormates quite well.
So, this is my room. It was quite long and thin. The far wall, where it wasn’t window, was proper Alpine wooden panelling. The wall on the left was bare brick and the wall on the right was bare concrete. I covered that brick wall with postcards – everywhere I went, I bought postcards with maximum views and minimum text and I made a display in the corner above my bed and along the wall. When I left, I bought some photo pages for my scrapbook and moved them all into there. That was a good design decision and one I’d like to recreate in my office when I have my own house. Not least to take a photo of it that’s actually in focus.
The concrete wall was pretty well covered with a shelving unit and a couple of local maps. That’s partly for decoration, because anything’s prettier than a concrete wall, and partly for practicality, especially the city map, which I was probably still consulting a year in. Yeah, the more of that wall hidden the better.
I brought so much stuff and I didn’t tidy the room for the photos. I’m almost ashamed to show you. And yet at the time, it didn’t feel that messy and Angela, my other great friend, said that my bathroom was the cleanest she’d ever seen in her life, and as she was eight years older than me and Jemma, that felt like a lot of life to us.
And yet I took so much stuff! Judging by the British food on the shelf, and that it was apparently October 20th, this was very early on in my year. On the one hand, I’d have eaten all that food fairly quickly and that would have given me three extra shelves and been able to get properly settled in, with a place for everything. On the other hand, what I know of myself is that I probably would have made it messier by the day.
I only took half a dozen books – and my massive French dictionary, of course – and a few boxsets of DVDs. Streaming media wasn’t a thing back then but P2P file sharing was and… well, I got myself banned from the building’s wifi for downloading the entire series of Father Ted. What did I do with myself with no internet for a big chunk of the year? Well, I went to the station regularly to print another batch of photos and I created a scrapbook, which is how I was able to find my documents so easily for the first photo in this blog. I probably had some writing project or other at the time and there’s probably a backup CD with that scraps of that on it and I guess I went out more evenings than I ever did before or since.
I can see a box of 35mm film camera. Did I use it? Did I even have a film camera? What happened to the photos, if I did take them? Is there an undeveloped roll somewhere in a filthy corner of this house containing another set of Switzerland photos? Well, now I realise that I can see a camera too and it can’t be my 2005 digital camera because that’s what I’m taking the photos with.
I’m hugely helped in the mess by the fact that my dad drove me there. He likes driving, especially on the continent, it’s only (only!) fourteen hours and other than the hotel stay, it was a free mini-holiday. And it meant that I had the luxury of being able to take whatever I could pack into the back seat and boot of a Renault Clio instead of whatever I could pack into a suitcase. Why oh why I thought I was going to meet a caving club, I don’t know. I was never going to use that entire bag of caving stuff! I did use the three sets of poi.
I thought this photo was from a town square in Switzerland by night but judging from the mud and grass, this was from a caving trip in my final year, possibly in Yorkshire?. Still, imagine it into Switzerland because I did take them out a few times. This particular set sting like hell if you hit yourself with them, and I do, a lot. Now, why did I take juggling balls? Two sets, probably. I can’t tell from here whether the blue fluffy things are juggling balls or rice-filled homemade poi but I suspect the former because I don’t know what I’d use for the strings. I can’t juggle!
This is the only other picture I can find of my room. This is the following June. I’m clearly not using the desk for my laptop anymore but the big difference is the pictures on the window. We did a presentation each term and because it was 2005-06, we used OHP film. So I had to buy a packet and eventually it occurred to me to print some favourite pictures and let them glow on my window. I have no idea where the pictures went but the packet of OHP film is actually still on the shelf in my office. I notice there’s a Lonely Planet guide to Switzerland on my desk. That’s not mine; it belongs to my triplet Angela. I bought the Rough Guide so we had two different books, two different perspectives and I’ve been a Rough Guide fan ever since. Maybe I borrowed it, because this is from my trip to Bregenz and I probably found it useful to have a guide to the complicated set of trains I needed to leave the country for the day.
Anyway, you can see my external shutters from here. Although the window opens fully, they’re obviously operated from the inside, from the pole in the middle. I assume they also roll up, even though there are no pictures of it, because I took a lot of pictures of the view and surely I wasn’t always poking my camera through the slats?
On that note, let me leave you with a nice rainbow over the lake and my beloved (if loud) red church.