Grenoble: Living and Writing in the French Alps

I am preoccupied with place.

As an ecologist, writer, reader, and traveler alike, my fascination is understanding what makes a place. Perhaps this is why, though I never imagined starting my science career outside of my home country, the United States, I ended up in Europe.

First, Cambridge, England, for my PhD. The chance to live in—and thus learn—a place so saturated with specialness was one I couldn’t pass up. I spent four years exploring the nooks and crannies of Cambridge and writing about them in my first blog, The Cambridge Placebook

I’ve taken this practice with me to my next apprenticeship with place: a plant ecology postdoc in Grenoble, France, at the base of the French Alps. Here, I’m writing to a whole new mountain-ridged horizon (on Substack, at Anne of Green Places). And learning once again how to make a place into a home.

And now I’ve become a Contributor to MyFrenchLife Magazine to share all of this with you.

I ‘live’ in France: a new life in Grenoble

Novelty is a special experience, a perk of being human. Moving to a new country is like drinking from a novelty firehose. Just looking at your GPS dot hovering in the middle of France on Google Maps is a thrill, the surreal beginning of constructing this new wing of your identity. Arriving in the city where you’re going to live is like hatching slowly, cracking open a new door or window, and populating new vistas with each foray. Everything has a sheen of potential meaning.

The mountains help—the Alps rising at the end of the street, the Alps still winter-white and so mantled with iconic personality that I can get anyone’s attention with that one addendum to where I live. But I also get to have that sparkle in a city that, although it is the largest city in the French Alps, isn’t famous for its architecture or pristine streets. I hadn’t heard of it before I applied for the postdoc that brought me here.

I arrived in Grenoble in the dark, at the end of a long day lugging two heavy bags and a cello across France by train, to an AirBnB in the ‘hypercentre.’

First impressions

In the morning, just stepping out into the alleyway and around the corner to a French chain grocery store, where I would avoid speaking and puzzle over all the chèvre and shelf-stable milk options, was thrilling.

Looking up to the ridge behind it, where the city simply stopped and old stone fortifications took over, was another level of thrill. I couldn’t see more than a faint outline of the real mountains that day thanks to trapped mountain valley smog—but later, rain rinsed the sky, and looking down the street to the mountains as I unlocked the door to my new apartment was enough to make me shiver and think:

I live here.

On my first afternoon, I hiked to the fort I had seen from below. This took me out of my little corner of concrete and expanded my understanding of Grenoble to include the river, Isère, and its riverbank detritus and traffic and colorful riverfront buildings; and then the beginning of the Chartreuse Massif, built up with stairs and abbeys and stacked houses, crisscrossed with switchbacks.

Then I got the view, albeit smog-hazed, of the high rises, cemetery, winding river, geometric tile-roofed hypercentre, and mountains ringing it all. Three arms of a convergent valley: Grenoble.

My first impression of my workplace, the campus of Université Grenoble Alpes, a vital organ of Grenoble (1 in 5 Grenoble residents are researchers, according to a PR video by the university ), was muted by gray weather. But my colleagues were welcoming, and my desk window looked out at the wooded foothills of the snowy, craggy Belledonne range. Opposite them were the folded stone and plateau of the Chartreuse Massif.

By the next week, the sun had come out; soon, my daily walk was a delight of blossoms and birds.

Grenoble: all new to me

Grenoble isn’t a huge city, but it is the most urban place I’ve lived, so the graffiti, the traffic, the excellent little network of trams, the trash on the riverbanks, the jumbled varieties of disrepair and stateliness lining the streets, the brutalist municipal buildings, the vibrant murals—all of this was new to me.

Criss-crossing the city center to look for an apartment took me down avenues with grand European facades, walking streets with glitzy shops, graveled public squares and parks, and narrow urban residential streets with dive bars and garbage bins and balconies with plants and people parallel parking.

On the tram, I gazed out the windows and noted passing street art or museums to come back to.

One puzzle piece at a time.

In the months since, my writing has helped counteract the inevitable onset of routine and its dampening of the senses.

Writing about Grenoble—its leafy and rocky places, its bird migrations and alpenglow, its buildings and characters—keeps me looking and listening. I highly recommend it.

The best part is, you’re invited on wanderings as I find new streets to walk & mountains to climb. Allons-y !

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