In the shadow of the French Alps
Maya Arun - 12 September 2025

Anjum Rabbi in front of the Louvre, Paris

Anjum in a cave at Le Fort de Bastille

Grenoble

The Eiffel Tower
In the summer of 2024, Anjum Rabbi took a leap of faith and a few flights to get to Grenoble, France, where she studied French literature at via the e3 French Alps program.
Anjum had never left the province before, let alone the country, so flying halfway across the world was a truly daunting experience.
Every part of the journey, from getting on a plane for the first time to finally arriving in Grenoble was starkly new and filled with surprises. For one, Anjum was expecting Grenoble to be more metropolitan. And although the mountains were familiar enough, the lack of wildlife was unusual to Anjum, who was used to the ever-ominous presence of bears in the Canadian Rockies.
Despite throwing herself into the deep end, she quickly found distraction in her class and the culture of the French.
“I noticed they're really protective over their culture. When I would go around I could see it — how they have a specific way bread and cheese has to be made. That was such a contrast to Canada. You can just tell by the way they interact they really are protective of their culture.”
Anjum’s class was small — with only nine people, they became a tight-knit group, and she was able to get to know her professor better.
Anjum took the popular “bulle,” or “bubble,” a cable car that took her from the city centre to Le Fort de la Bastille, where she had an aerial view of Grenoble. From afar, the mountains look surreal, like something out of a painting — the folds of the hills furling in and out into rugged terrain. Looking down from atop the hill makes the city seem so calm and yet so abundant with life. Anjum was able to look past the city’s identity as the “capital of the French Alps,” to its 2000-year history, reflected in its grand architecture that in turn reflects modern-day life.
On a field trip around Grenoble, Anjum and her classmates were tasked with figuring out what parts of the city were older and what parts were relatively new. They eventually discovered that the city’s Old Town housed much of its Gallo-Roman architecture. With its impressive buildings, ancient squares and lively marketplaces, the area was rich with culture, but lacked the modern shine and sparkle of other parts of the city.
“When you got to a certain point, you could kind of see the buildings looked newer, the roads were nicer and the crosswalks were a lot newer. I think it was kind of about how there's a disparity between the poor and people who are more wealthy there.”
Although she was enchanted by the city, Anjum’s class let her remove the rose-coloured glasses that one might adorn when travelling abroad, and see the city for all that it was. Every place, no matter how picturesque, holds its own complexities and contradictions. Grenoble’s tapestry, woven in with ancient stone and modern glass, is exactly what makes it a sight to behold.