Bonjour à tous! Desolée de ne pas avoir écrit pendant – Oh sorry! Aren’t I in France anymore? Apparently not. Having thoroughly enjoyed my extended wine-tasting holiday, sorry, study year in France, I am now back in the fair old town of York to complete the fourth and final year of my degree. Having spent many a homesick hour missing my friends from university and pining after Yorkshire’s diverse pleasures of real ale, plentiful ducks, and strangers who call you “love”, I am certainly happy to be back. However, things don’t seem quite how I remembered them. For a start, the vast majority of my friends have graduated, leaving a sparse (though very lovely) selection of electronics students and post-grads. It was my intention to befriend as many freshers as possible, but as soon as I let slip that I’m practically collecting my pension (I’ll be 23 this year), they run screaming, as if the five year age difference means that I’d rather spend a night knitting and watching Antiques Roadshow than dancing my socks off in Toffs. But it is not only the issue of friends that has surprised me. The university itself seems to have changed, moved on. There is a constant sense that this isn’t my place anymore. What was once “my university”, a playground for all of my hopes, ambitions and expectations, now belongs to a generation of people who weren’t even born when I was watching Kylie and Jason get married on ‘Neighbours’. The feeling of not belonging is definitely the strangest thing about being back in York, and is a side effect of an Erasmus year. I feel, well, a little bit foreign. I’m not claiming that as year in Paris has made me a beret-sporting, Citroën-driving cliché of a French person, but I can certainly see York life from a foreign student’s perspective. From the freezing cold winds and constant rain, to the bendy lumps of dough that Costcutter tries to pass off as baguettes, the downsides of living in York are slowly making themselves apparent. All of a sudden I can pinpoint this strange feeling I’ve been having. I’m homesick for France. Jennifer | 
