franglophone folle

Photos are up!

2010-06-09T12:31:00.003+01:00

Augh I know I know I've been incredibly lazy. When I don't have class anymore, I actually get even less accomplished because I have too much time to do it in. But! I've finally put up pictures of our epic trip to Barcelona and Lisbon, which you can see here, here and here. Yes, I had to use three Facebook albums because there were too many pictures to fit in one. You'll see why when you hit the photos of Sintra, near Lisbon. CRAZY AWESOME INSANITY.

Blog posts to come when I find the notes I made during the trip...

The Volcano Chronicles, or, Carbon Particles Are Way Sneakier Than You'd Think

2010-04-24T09:25:00.003+01:00

We're back from our trip to Barcelona and Lisbon exactly a week later than expected, thanks to Eyjafjallajökull, the Icelandic volcano that decided to spew a huge cloud of ash into the air the night before our scheduled departure from Lisbon on Friday the 16th. It closed down most of the airports in Europe (although Reykjavik's airport remained ash-free thanks to wind, which is one of the more ironic aspects of this story) and trapped hundreds of thousands of travelers in foreign cities. And we were part of it all!

There will be photos and stories about the craziness, but now I have to plan lessons and try to make up the week of classes I missed in the one week I have left of teaching. Yes, that's right, I only have a week left of teaching now, which is ridiculous. So! Stories about street food and beaches and football games and castles and trams and nightclubs to follow. ¡Hasta pronto!

Why Do They Let Me Teach Their Kids?

2010-04-01T16:07:00.003+01:00

I play a game with my students to make them practice using "could" and "might" to speculate about situations, since French doesn't really have an equivalent. So I give them a situation and make them compete to try to come up with the most possible reasons, and I tell them that if their sentence makes me laugh, they get extra points. For my own personal amusement, I use the names of people I know. The following are actual student sentences, with the grammar cleaned up a little bit, elicited from the situation "Amelia is very tired today."

She might have spoken with her boyfriend. (When I said, "But that doesn't make you tired!" I got the most suggestive eyebrow raise I've ever received from a 15-year-old.)
She could have spent the night outside with a pink elephant in a gay bar.
She could take Russian lessons at night.
She might take wrestling classes at night.
She might have woken up in Africa.
She could have watched a TV show about tuna.
She might have been taken by a UFO.
She could have been in penguin-land, where it is night for 6 months.
She might have gone to a party with the rugby team.
She could have spent a torrid night with Brad Pitt, Jude Law and Johnny Depp in the same time.

Seriously, I couldn't make this stuff up.

Nice is Nice is Nice

2010-03-31T20:48:00.013+01:00

We decided to take a little break in the middle of the long 6-week stretch between February and Easter vacations (our lives are really tough) and take a train trip somewhere. Tickets for Nice turned out to be cheaper than tickets to Amsterdam, so south we went!

On Friday night, we headed in to Paris to catch our 10:09 train, which would get us to Nice at 8:30 Saturday morning. First-class tickets were only €5 more expensive than second class, so of course we bought those, as the train didn’t have any sleeper cars. We settled into our roomy, cushy seats with iPods, snacks, and books, and had a surprisingly enjoyable trip. In the morning, I turned towards the window and was greeted by this:

So I immediately woke Logan up and we snapped oodles of pictures (thanks to my NEW camera’s high-speed burst mode, I took over 100 pictures in two minutes, which on the plus side ensured at least a few good shots, and on the minus side meant I had to go through over 100 pictures to find those good shots). The train stayed along the coast for the rest of the ride, offering ever-changing views of the ocean and the sun and the clouds. It was a lovely welcome to the Côte d’Azur!

Once we arrived at the train station, we oriented ourselves and walked the 10 minutes to our hotel, which was two blocks from the ocean, tucked behind the famous Hôtel Negresco. I can totally see why it's famous:

Our hotel, Le Lido, was much less fancy, but more than made up for it in cleanliness, friendliness, and proximity to the beach. We were able to check into our room and take showers, which enabled me to survive the rest of the day despite my lack of sleep (first-class seats may be comfier than second-class ones, but that doesn’t mean they in any way resemble a bed). Then the owner of the hotel, Diane, gave us a map and pointed out the places of interest, including a supermarket so we could get cheap groceries.

Then it was time to head to the beach, which to my surprise had pebbles, just like the Normandy beaches!

Logan, of course, had to defy the ocean by building a wall. I watched from a comfortable distance (his shoes are waterproof, mine are not) but eventually had to join in the fun by building precarious towers.

By this time we were a bit sick of sitting on pebbles, so we found a café with ocean views and had some coffee. What I love about coffee in France is that you’re not really buying a drink, you’re buying a place to sit in the sun and chat and people-watch, all of which we did for a while. Then, since it was after noon (by how much I’m not telling you) Logan had his first French Riviera beer.

After that we got a bit antsy, so we headed along the beach up to a place that looked as if it would have good views. We were right.

Yes, those are people sunbathing, some of them topless. It was sunny out, but not that warm, in my opinion… I guess after a long cold winter of staring at the beach and not being able to enjoy it, any sun is better than none.

Continuing around the hill, we saw the Monument aux Morts, the memorial that every French city and town has to commemorate the soldiers who died in WWI and WWII, and sometimes others. This one was particularly striking, built into the hillside as it was.

By this time we were quite hungry (who knew that sitting on a train all night could be so exhausting?) so we found a place with outside seating and each ordered and inhaled an entire pizza. Mine had shrimps and mussels on it, which made me happy.

The hill overlooking the city was calling to us, especially since we’d heard there was a waterfall on it. We followed some maze-like paths up to the top, overtaking a group of older tourists who said something about young legs as we passed, which would have been funny except that I’d really wanted to take a break at that point and couldn’t, to uphold the reputation of young people everywhere. But the trip was worth it, as we saw Nice spread out before us:

The top of the hill also had many layers of old fortress walls and dungeons and such, but the highlight was definitely the waterfall, which we found by trial and error and eventually by following the sound of falling water.

It was impossible to walk in front of it without getting sprayed, but it was still sunny enough that the mist felt good, and it delighted the children, of course. As the sun started to go down, we walked down the other side of the hill and back along the beach to the supermarket, to buy supplies for our evening plans.

One short shopping trip later:

Yes, that’s an itty-bitty can – it cost so little I couldn’t resist. Part deux of our little pique-nique?

The bag contains peanut-flavored puffed corn snacks, something which is very popular in France even though nobody here likes peanut butter. I absolutely love those things and have been known to inhale a whole bag by myself if I’m not paying attention. The beer is because you can’t have a picnic on the beach without beer.

Alas, even in the south of France the sun has to set, so when it got cold we headed back to the hotel room, watched some bad French TV, and fell into bed, exhausted.

The next day our only agenda was to spend time on the beach, so we headed along the Promenade des Anglais (the wide pedestrian area parallel to the beach) only to find tents and barriers along the road and general excitement. As it turned out, there was a Paris-Nice bike race that was ending that day! We found out that the race would end around 2:00, giving us plenty of time to get in our lazing around on the beach.

Then we wandered around town in search of a bakery open on Sunday, that ever-elusive species, and hit the jackpot when we found one that sold pan bagnat, a regional specialty of garlic-rubbed bread, peppers, tomatoes, lettuce, tuna and anchovies. I got one, but Logan didn’t, which left him with no defense against my tuna-garlic-anchovy breath for the rest of the day. It was delicious, in any case.

We found some perches on bollards to watch the end of the bike race, which was actually pretty cool despite not knowing who anybody was. I cheered just as loudly as everybody else when the winner flew by!

As the crowd dispersed, we headed into Vieux Nice as a change from the beach. Most of the stores were closed (welcome to France on a Sunday!) but the little streets were fun to explore

and we came across an ice cream place with over 50 flavors of gelato, from the ordinarily delicious (nutella, raspberry, pistachio) to the bizarre (basil, lavender, violet). Logan got cactus and I got Dragibus, with gummy candies in it, as a nod to my old favorite, bubble-gum ice cream from King Kone at home. They were both pretty good, but it was really the novelty of eating ice cream outside without getting cold that made me happy.

We also found a pretty fancy-looking but still reasonable restaurant called Le Tire-Bouchon (The Corkscrew), so we went back to the hotel to get all gussied up, then came back to wander some more so as to not be the first ones there. The Promenade des Anglais was gorgeous at night.

Dinner was spectacular – we had an amuse-bouche of toast triangles and tomato sauce, followed by potted rabbit with roasted garlic and toasts for Logan, and cream of watercress soup for me. Then I had pork medallions in sage sauce, with purple potatoes and some other sort of root vegetable, and Logan had a fish filet with apple and cider sauce. It was delicious, and we had wine, and then there was dessert! Logan got licorice-flavored crème brûlée, which could have been gross but wasn’t at all, and I had tiramisu with berries, which came on a plate drizzled with raspberry coulis and honey, and I’m not ashamed to admit that I spooned those right up. The portion sizes for everything were perfect, too, so we were satisfied but not full to bursting. It was really a lovely evening.

The next morning was our last chance to watch a sunrise in Nice, so we dragged ourselves out of bed bright and early and walked down to the beach to find…
this. A tad underwhelming. We still had fun testing out various camera settings and taking lots and lots of wave pictures (many more photos on Facebook!), and finally we were rewarded with this:

At this point, a delightful aroma started to waft towards us, and, having skipped breakfast, we tried to find it. A short while into our quest, we were rewarded with the bakery of our own favorite supermarket, which was offering a breakfast deal of two croissants or pains au chocolat, a small fruit juice, and a coffee for €2,30. I could have kissed the lady behind the counter. We took our booty back to the beach and enjoyed our breakfast while taking our last looks at the Mediterranean. Then it was back to the hotel to collect our bags and off to the train station to catch our train… It was a wonderful, stress-free break from our usual weekend routine, and we even got a little tan! It was gone in a week, of course, but we enjoyed our color while it lasted.

Marrakech, or, ils sont fous ces Marocains !

2010-03-22T23:16:00.017+01:00

Marrakech, you crazy city. The word “insanity” doesn’t even begin to cover it.

One of the first things you learn in Marrakech is how to cross the street. I hereby present a strategy that (probably) won’t get you killed:

Identify a good place to cross. The painted crosswalks mean absolutely nothing to anybody, but if it makes you feel better, by all means locate the nearest one.
Find someone whose skin tone is at least a few shades darker than yours, or who’s wearing a headscarf or robe, who is also crossing in roughly the same place.
Position yourself on the non-traffic side of your new guide and do exactly what they do. This may mean pausing in the middle of the road as cars, trucks, buses, scooters, motorcycles, bikes, horses and carts, and donkeys rush, zoom, whoosh, trot, or plod by on both sides, but trust the drivers and your guide: they’ve been doing this since they were but babes in arms.
Don’t look back. Really, don’t.
Put a little extra spring in your step as you climb the 8-inch curb on the other side, so the drivers can see you’re making an effort to get out of their way.
Quietly celebrate not ending up as the number 6 bus’s new hood ornament.

Luckily for you, I took a video of an intersection so you can see just how crazy it really is! The woman in yellow is a pro: cool as a cucumber.

What actually surprised me the most at first wasn’t so much that the streets are absolutely insane, even the extremely narrow ones in the souks (markets), but that it’s surprisingly not terrifying to walk places. Even with our luggage the first day, walking up and down and around trying to find the hotel, there were bikes and scooters and carts coming both ways down the 7-foot-wide streets and not once was I afraid of being run over. If you keep to your path and don’t accelerate, decelerate, or change direction quickly, everybody adjusts to your path and you get through without incident. It’s quite beautiful, actually – a bit like a ballet.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. We arrived at the Marrakech airport on February 10th, got out onto the tarmac, and instantly shed a layer and giggled with glee. It was warm. Then we got our passports stamped

and headed into the terminal to find a bank. I gave the lovely man 145€ and he gave me 1595 Moroccan dirhams, which made me feel very rich. One euro is 11 Dh, so you basically divide the dirhams by 10 and chop off a little more to get euros. One dollar is 8 Dh.

We got outside and found the bus to the main square of Marrakech, Djemaa el-Fna. A round-trip ticket for the 30-minute ride cost 30 Dh. It’s okay to laugh incredulously at the price; we spent most of the week doing that, actually. So we hopped on the bus and glued ourselves to the windows. There were snowy mountains in the distance, and palm trees and cacti close up, and everywhere people on scooters with no helmets, people driving donkeys, even camels! Dromedaries, with one hump. We’d gotten a map of the bus route, so we compared that with my Google map of the riad (small bed-and-breakfast) we were staying in and figured out where to get off. When we got to Djemaa el-Fna, the bus driver came back and asked why we weren’t getting off. I showed him the map, and he said no, that street is clear on the other side of town from where your map says, you should get off here. He then handed us a better map, pointed out the street we were looking for, and helped us off the bus. We hadn’t rolled our suitcases three feet before we were accosted, in French and in English, by the row of men sitting waiting for the tourists. “Bonjour! Are you looking for a hotel? You already reserved? Where? Mine’s better!” Many firm “Non, merci, ça va, on est bien”’s later, they left us alone and we had ten free steps before the next batch got to us. Trying to look like we knew what we were doing, we continued into the Djemaa el-Fna proper. Oh lordie. Everyone had set up their little umbrella, under which women were advertising henna designs for your hands and men were either charming real cobras or holding pet monkeys for photo ops. Giving the animals a wide berth, we tried to find a street name, any street name, anywhere at all, and were frustrated. We got all the way into the souks, then realized that that was not where we wanted to be and turned around. Finally we found a name that matched something on our map and thought we were getting close. Down that street and up another one, fending off would-be guides left and right, we still hadn’t found anything helpful. A French couple stopped and asked if we needed help, having seen us on another street, and as we were puzzling over the map another group of men came up and offered to help. At the end of our ropes, we told him the name of our hotel and he called his friend over to lead us there. As he led us down progressively smaller and less-well-maintained streets,

I started to worry, but soon he brought us to this door.

Notice the tiny little piece of paper in the upper right? That says 70 Riad Zitoun, Jamaa House. That is the only indication you get. A young woman in a headscarf came to the door, nodded when I gave my name, and led us up the stairs. She showed us the room, then wrote our names down (doing a much better job in French than I’d do in Arabic) and took my 999 Dh ($125) for four nights. Then we collapsed on the bed, exhausted.

I had a small culture-shock-induced breakdown, but soon decided that the best way to fix that would be to get out and eat something. We found little pastries for 1 Dh each (cue slightly hysterical laughter on my part) and enjoyed ourselves looking at all the beautiful things for sale (and saying “non, merci” five times a second). I tried to bargain for some black suede ballerina flats and got him down to 300 Dh from 650, but I still didn’t think they were worth it and I didn’t want to buy the first thing I saw, so I tried to back out gracefully, which is apparently not cool at all. After many protests about how we’d wasted his time, we escaped and continued on to Djemaa el-Fna, where we discovered that the stands selling fresh-squeezed orange juice charged 3 Dh a glass. We stood next to the cart with our glasses, sipping our lovely sweet juice and watching people, and suddenly I felt much better about life.

Then we walked out past the Koutoubia, the main mosque

to the more European part of the city, where there are wider streets, gardens, and McDonald’s, KFC, H&M, and other American and European stores. But the sidewalks reminded us where we were:

By the time we got back, it was darker

and Djemaa el-Fna was filled with temporary restaurants, all selling the same dishes for the same prices, but each with its own hawker to bring in the wide-eyed tourists. Taking it all in stride (kinda), we chose a place and sat down. First, we got round leavened bread with tomato sauce and spicy sauce, both of which were fantastic. Logan ordered chicken tagine and I got a meat tagine. Tagines are those round dishes with pointy tops used to make stews – ours had potatoes, carrots, onions, sweet potatoes, and tomatoes, as well as the tenderest meat I’ve ever had. We also got a “grande” bottle of water, which turned out to be 1.5 liters, for 5 Dh. I could barely finish my meal, and the best part was that the whole meal, total, for the two of us, cost 75 Dh. You can’t even get an entrée for that in France, and certainly not of this quality. Fat and happy, we snagged the rest of the water bottle to brush our teeth with and returned to the hotel for bed.

The next morning, I awoke briefly at the dawn prayer call (half-asleep, I thought it was Logan groaning for a second), then woke up fully at breakfast, which was waiting for us outside our door. Hot coffee and hot milk (but no sugar!), mini croissants with creamy filling, round breads with jam and weird moldy-cheesy butter, tangerine juice, and sweet mint tea.

Then we set out to enjoy the souks. I found another shoe place (there are millions), selling patterned flats this time, and sat down prepared to bargain with Abdou. He asked our names, made rhymes with them (“Chez Lisa, il y a de la bonne pizza, chez Logan, il n’y a rien!”), and told me I looked like a princess in the shoes. We settled quickly (probably too quickly – I should have started lower) on 220 Dh, or 20€, and he threw in a few mini shoe-shaped keychains as well. Then he asked if we wanted tea and we couldn’t refuse (mint tea is known as “Moroccan whiskey” because everybody drinks it all the time everywhere) so we sipped the tea, sweetened with huge chunks of sugar, and chatted about Morocco and the US. At one point he asked Logan how many camels he would trade for me, which is probably just something he says to every tourist, but I nearly spat out my tea as Logan tried to judge what an appropriate number of camels would be. We took our leave, much more amicably this time, and wandered the souks a bit more. I apologize for the lack of pictures of the narrow, bustling streets of the souks, but if you even slow down while walking, the three nearest vendors will jump on you, so I shudder to imagine what would happen if you brought out a camera. There are so many beautiful things to look at, though: shoes and slippers in every color of the rainbow, scarves in every material and pattern you can imagine, embroidered tunics and dresses, robes, leather bags, cloth bags, pottery, copper teapots, tea glasses, cushions, furniture, spices, soaps, all spilling out of doorways and stacked higher than you’d think possible. By the end of the trip, I had perfected walking by and looking just long enough to see what I wanted to see without getting accosted. I also became mysteriously unable to speak or understand whichever language they chose to yell at me in, which helped.

To relieve the claustrophobia a bit, we wandered over to the mosque, which has gardens around it. We spent a nice long time sitting in the sun, admiring the palm trees and watching people. We saw a lot of groups of young women, some in headscarves and some not, dressed with varying degrees of modesty (from loose pants, long tunic and headscarf to stilettos, painted-on jeans, tight shirt – and headscarf!) walking around with linked arms, giggling and enjoying the sunshine. I liked that all of them seemed to have the freedom to dress how they wanted, and that they granted their friends that freedom as well. Marrakech, being very touristy, is quite tolerant, which I appreciated for my own sake. Tolerant, that is, until your heathen self gets too close to a mosque, which Logan learned to his chagrin many times over the course of our stay. This is about as close as I’ll ever get to a mosque, as I don’t particularly enjoy being yelled at in French and English by groups of small boys.

By this time, we were ready for a drink and a bathroom, so we headed to a pretty touristy-looking café. I went to the bathroom and experienced my first squat toilet, which was… eye-opening? thigh-punishing? frightening? But I managed without slipping, falling, touching the walls, or doing anything else unfortunate, so I’m quite proud. Do I get flowers or something? Baby’s first squat toilet?

After that ordeal, I was ready for some coffee, which was delicious. We sat in the sun and watched traffic for a while – this was where the video above was taken, so you can see why the traffic was worthy of attention – and then got some gelato and sat in the sun some more. For dinner, we went to the stalls again, this time with a fellow assistant named Keri who had arrived that day. We agreed to meet the next day to go to a museum, then went back to our respective beds.

The next day, we tried to take a shortcut to meet Keri, which failed in a spectacular fashion when we realized we were actually at the museum we wanted to go to, clear on the other side of the souks from where we were supposed to meet Keri. Many apologetic text messages later, Keri arrived and introduced us to Roz, a Brit she’d met at her hostel. Roz, Logan and I decided to go into the museum, the Musée de Marrakech. It was built in an old palace, so the architecture and ornamentation were just as interesting as the exhibits themselves.

The exhibits were pretty awesome, though, especially the one with textiles from various regions of Morocco. This was a belt, silk embroidery on silk, designed to be wrapped around the waist multiple times. I just loved the geometric pattern.

There was also an exhibit about tea, it being such an important part of Moroccan culture. I mean really important:

That’s a lot of tea right there.

After chilling out and imagining what it would have been like to live there, Roz showed us the way back to Djemaa el-Fna, right through the souks. At one point, a vendor, seeing Roz and me trailing behind Logan, yelled “Good businessman! Have two wives!” and we all cracked up. Oh, Morocco, you slay me.

We hung out writing postcards near the mosque for a bit, or rather, I wrote postcards while Logan took pictures, but I joined him when I realized that you could see the crazy mountains from there.

Intellectually, I know that they’re really far away, but don’t they look close enough to touch?

After dinner, we went out with more assistants (apparently everyone in the Académie de Rouen decided to go to Morocco in February) to have tea on a rooftop terrace. It was gorgeous and warm, and the tea was served in individual teapots:

It was so lovely to sit and sip our sweet tea and chat about our crazy adventures so far in Morocco.

The next day, Logan and I got up relatively early to visit two more historical sites near the Musée de Marrakech: the Madersa Ben-Youssef and the Qoubba des Almoravides. The Madersa (or madrassa) was a Qur’anic school, built in the 1500s and allied with the Ben-Youssef mosque right next door, and it is beautiful. It contains a prayer room, washrooms, and lots and lots of student rooms, all built around small courtyards to let in natural light. The rooms overlooking the main courtyard were for visiting dignitaries, and were accordingly fancier. Logan and I wandered around pretending that we were first-year students moving into the dorms (“Hey Mom, look, my bed is lofted already! And I’m on the ground floor! Sweet!”), which, while basic, were quite lovely:

Just seconds after this picture was taken, there was a minor tragedy: I dropped my camera on the hard tile floor of the courtyard, and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put little Kodak EasyShare together again. The following pictures, therefore, are courtesy of Logan. Here I am, hiding my grief:

(Don’t worry, this story has a happy ending: the camera was unfixable but I bought a reasonably-priced shiny new blue one which is actually much nicer!)

The carved cedar in the main courtyard was ridiculous. I love the aesthetic of all the architecture, because it’s always abstract and geometric and my little pattern-oriented brain goes into overload.

We also got to see some furnished student rooms, complete with a teapot and brazier to make your own tea in your room! It was neat to imagine what the daily life for a religious student was – very different from my college experience…

We emerged into some rain, which soon passed, and continued on to the Qoubba, which was constructed to provide visitors to the ancient (11th-century) mosque with a place to wash. There were remnants of the individual washing stalls, as well as a central trough with an incredibly ornate dome that, according to the notice board, used every single arch style then known to Islamic architecture. I, for one, believe it.

Then it was back to the hotel for a well-deserved rest. We had a dinner date with the rest of the Rouen crew, so we went to a real restaurant where I ordered a beef tagine with prunes and almonds.

Happiness, thy name is tagine. At dinner, we arranged to meet some other travelers, Jay and Kate, the next day to see some palaces.

First on our list was the Palais Bahia, built in the late 19th century by a vizier for his concubines. It’s huge, with courtyard leading to courtyard, garden upon garden, and every surface covered with carved wood, sculpted plaster, or intricate tile work.

It was a bit overwhelming to try to focus on all of the beautiful details, but luckily there were kitties to distract us!

Kate tried to make friends with it, but it’s seen too many tourists come and go to dispense its affections so easily.

After the cool beauty of the palace, we headed out to the walls of the ancient city to see the most impressive gateway, the Bab er Rob.

It was hard to imagine the ancient majesty of it with all the scooters and cars whizzing through, but it was neat anyway. We found some lovely mountain views, then headed back into town to have a snack. Some luscious-looking pastries lured us into a bakery, where we also found large glasses of some delicious-looking substance, which we promptly bought. This entire table of mouthwatering goodness cost less than 7 euros:

Yes, those different layers were all different flavors – raspberry, strawberry, something creamy and delicious, mango… Feeling much more energetic, we set out for the Saadian tombs, which were built in the 16th century. We couldn’t go all the way inside, but they were quite impressive anyway.

I especially liked a particular bit of tile that looked woven:

After braving the restrooms (I will never complain about French public bathrooms ever again ever) we set off for our last stop, the Palais Baadi. This one was much older than the Bahia, built in 1578, and is mostly ruined (thanks to a different prince who stripped all the decorations to take them to his own palace – nice guy!), but the main walls are still there and you can walk around to really get a feel for the huge scale of it.

Jay and Logan got yelled at for exploring the sunken green areas, but the guard just gave them a nasty look while they climbed back out. We also found our way into the tombs, where I kept expecting somebody to leap out of any of the myriad dark holes and rooms, instantly turning my hair white forever. Luckily nobody did, but it was still quite dark and creepy.

We emerged, blinking, and made our way up to the top of the palace, where we got to see the storks who nest on the walls up close and personal. Then it was off to find more tea on a terrace close to the palace, where we sat and watched the storks for a few hours, chatting about the UK (Jay is from London) and Australia (Kate’s an Aussie) and the US. Then it was back to our new hotel, which we’d seen briefly in the morning to drop off our bags, but now had a chance to really explore.

We’d planned this hotel switch because we wanted to treat ourselves, but couldn’t quite afford to do it all week, so for the last three nights we moved to a nicer place, which turned out to be right next door to our first hotel! The new one was absolutely gorgeous, complete with a central courtyard

with orange trees and banana trees. Our room had lovely details

and a skylight with a nifty shade mechanism that we spent a good ten minutes playing with, because we’re four-year-olds:

After oohing and ahhing over everything in sight, we got dressed up and went out to one of the fancier restaurants on Djemaa el-Fna, because it was Valentine’s Day!

We couldn’t take pictures, but the restaurant is on the second floor, so we had a lovely view out over the square. We ordered the tasting menu, which gave us little tiny portions of everything – first all sorts of marinated veggies, then two kinds of tagine and couscous, then crêpes with honey and orange slices with cinnamon. It was delicious, and there were dancing girls! Which was a little bit odd, but the second woman dragged a female guest up to dance with her, then a male one, which was pretty funny. After that, it was all we could do to drag our fat bellies homeward, but we managed.

The next day we hit up our last two museums. First, the Dar Tiskiwin, which has textiles and artifacts from Berbers and other Saharan tribes. I’m fairly certain that the museum was in someone’s house, but it was interesting nonetheless, especially being able to see the blankets and rugs and bags and tents that were a part of daily life in the tribes. There were also some really neat leather belts that were embroidered with leather, which I made Logan take a picture of for my mother:

We headed out of the maze of tiny little streets and across Djemaa el-Fna to check out a park outside the city walls, but were stopped in our tracks when a woman grabbed my hand and squirted henna on it. I’d been planning to get some henna done, but not in that manner… But being afraid of conflict with strangers, as I am, I let her do it, then bargained her down to less than half of her asking price, which was still ridiculous. Logan was angrier than I was, I think, but it did come out nicely:

And I had the eminently satisfying chore of picking the paste off after a bit!

We wandered around the park, which is called the Cyber-Park because there are free Internet kiosks (with a frustrating touch-screen) scattered around, then went back home, stopping at the Koutoubia for more pretty pretty pictures.

On our way, we stopped to get a little picnic, then ate it in our lovely hotel courtyard.

In the bag are two flaky cream-filled pastries, two muffins, and two dense honey-filled sweets, which we got for 12 Dh. There are also pomegranate and pistachio yogurts, which were just as delicious as they sound. Mustafa, one of the turtles who lives in the courtyard, didn’t want to join our picnic, despite the delicious crumbs we put in front of his little nose.

Then it was time for our last museum, the Dar Si Saïd, which specializes in tradition Moroccan crafts. Unfortunately, we couldn’t take pictures, but there were wood carvings and jewelry and metalwork and all manner of lovely things. The best part were these little sedan chair-like things, which apparently would be attached to an eight- to ten-foot diameter wheel to make a small Ferris-wheel-like ride for kids. There was even a picture to show us how it worked! Logan and I got really jealous, though.

For dinner that night, we went to a stall that we passed every day, where a young man was selling something scrumptious-looking. As we watched, he put ground meat and red onions on his hot plate, squirted them with oil, and cooked them for a bit. Then he added an egg, hot sauce, rice, and olives, mixed it all up, and shoveled it into a split roll.

It was hot, filling, spicy, and cheap – only 10 Dh for a satisfying meal. We ended up going back a few times, and bringing friends, because providers of good street food should always be rewarded.

The next day, as we were wandering aimlessly trying to figure out what to do on our last day, we ran into Keri again. She wanted to go see the Jardin Majorelle, a European-style garden outside the city that has a reputation for being calm and relaxed, something that is all too rare in Marrakech. We joined her, and after a rather long walk out, we were rewarded by cool greenery accented with brightly-colored buildings and reflecting pools.

It made a nice change from the hustle and bustle of the old city, and since we had to pay to get in, nobody hassled us! I particularly liked this cactus; you can see the outlines the leaves left on each other as it grew:

The wind soon picked up, and as none of us had umbrellas or even sweaters, we hurried back to the old city. We escaped the rain, luckily, and after dinner met up with the assistants again to have tea at our favorite place, the one with the terrace and individual teapots. This time, they recognized us, and let Logan pour the tea!

Finally, we couldn’t put it off any longer and had to go back home to pack. Our hotel served us breakfast early in the morning so we could catch the bus back to the airport, and we spent the ride looking out the windows to say goodbye. At the airport, we had more stunning mountain views.

This was the last enjoyable moment for quite some time, since as soon as we got through security, we saw that our flight had been delayed for three hours. Luckily, the other assistants were on the same flight, so we hung out together, without food or water (they didn’t take credit cards and none of us had any cash left), until our plane was finally ready. One last farewell out the plane window

and it was back across the Mediterranean to France. I was sad to leave, and not only because an assistant’s salary goes a lot further in Morocco than in France. As stressful as it could be at times, I actually liked the constant interaction and attention, even if it was just to sell me something. I liked being able to speak French with most people and have conversations (although I really want to learn Arabic, just so when they assume I only speak English or French I can whip out something in really insulting, really slangy Arabic and watch their faces), I liked the friendliness and helpfulness we encountered most of the time, and I loved the sensory overload. I’m definitely going back sometime, hopefully with a giant empty suitcase so I can bring back all the tea sets and cushions and bags and tagines I drooled over all week.

More pics, as always, here.

Una Notte a Milano

2010-03-02T11:04:00.006+01:00

I know, I know, I'm living in France, my blog name is French, I'm supposed to love this country, and yet I spend all my time traveling outside of it. But can I help it if EasyJet is cheap and, well, easy?

We had two weeks of vacation in February, so we decided to go to Milan for a day and then to Marrakech, because the flights were actually cheaper that way. We arrived in Milan in the afternoon, found the airport bus with no problem, and were dropped off at the Stazione Centrale. Following my poor-quality Google map, we found our hotel (after only getting lost once), which was pretty basic, but clean and cheap and with the smallest elevator known to man.

We dropped our stuff off, then set off to find downtown, this time with a decent map provided by the taciturn front desk man. On the way, we found a supermarket and spent a lovely 20 minutes looking at all the different brands and products available in Italy. We snagged some lovely buttery cookies and kept going until we found a square with some interesting sculptures:

Somehow I don't think those have been there since the founding of Milan...

Continuing on, we found some lovely covered galeries, which I think are Europe's answer to shopping malls.

There are some in Paris, too, but these were bigger and even more elaborate, lined with super-fancy designer stores and expensive cafés. They also had gorgeous tiled floors:

Go Romulus and Remus! Suckle that wolf!

After drooling over the many pretty things in the windows, each of which cost more than a month's salary, we continued on our way and soon found the main reason to come to Milan:

The Duomo di Milano is the fourth-largest church in the world, and in my opinion, one of the most striking and elaborate. It looks beautiful from far away, then as you get closer you notice more details with every step, so that when you're right in front of it it's just as captivating and intricate. We couldn't go inside, but we spent a long time just standing in the middle of the square and drinking in the beauty. Then we walked around it (there was, of course, construction, there being a European law that requires that the most famous landmark in any city I travel to be covered in scaffolding while I'm there) and marveled at each and every façade, because they were all very slightly different.

By this time, we were cold and hungry, so we found a restaurant. After dinner, we wandered some more and saw a streetcar that had been refurbished as a dining car! It had a little kitchen and tables and lace curtains, and it traveled around the streets while the clients ate. Unfortunately, I didn't have my camera out, and my reactions weren't quick enough to grab a photo, but it was really cool.

Then we caught a subway home (hooray one more to add to my list!) and packed up. There are a few more pictures on Facebook if you just can't get enough.

The next morning we headed out to the station with enough time to grab breakfast in a little café. We both had cream-filled croissants and cappuccinos, which were fantastic. Our trip to the airport was uneventful, and our flight had the most gorgeous views: we flew over the Alps, the Pyrenees, part of the Mediterranean, and finally the Rif and Middle Atlas mountains in Morocco. Of course, at the time we didn't know where we were, so we just kept looking out the window and saying "Look! Mountains! And again! And more mountains!" I definitely recommend the Milan-Marrakech flight for those of you who are crazy about mountains (Dad, I'm looking at you).

Our crazy adventures in Marrakech will be up in the very near future - stay tuned for tales of monkeys and insane drivers and bargaining and orange juice!

Hooray Greece!

2010-02-08T12:08:00.005+01:00

This is Part III of III; if you haven't read Parts I and II please scroll down to do so.

We arrived back at our hotel and settled into our new rooms, then realized that Casey and Anna's room led to a fire escape! We climbed up (and up, and up), skipped the broken step, and reached the roof of the hotel, from which we could see the Acropolis.

Then we all went to bed, because everybody except Logan and I was leaving the next day. We woke up to see them off, then went back to bed and emerged at a more reasonable hour for breakfast. I'm pretty sure we each ate two whole oranges every morning, just because they were so sweet and yummy. After breakfast, we went to the Acropolis, finally, where we got our student tickets and joined the huge crowds mobbing the place. Despite the crowds, it was really neat to see the ruins we'd been admiring from afar all week close up.

I love how you can really see the absolute perfection of these immense buildings. It's just astonishing.

We spotted another forested hill to the southwest, and, being heartily sick of the crowds of tourists, we decided to go explore that one. We ran into some creepy outbuildings and heard some loud barks, so we continued on rather quickly and saw a jogger. Figuring that he wouldn't jog around here if there was a danger of being mauled by an attack dog, we stopped worrying and continued up. We discovered that we were on the Hill of the Muses, later named Philopappos Hill because of a monument to Philopappos on the top. There were some neat remnants of buildings that had been carved into the hill.

Closer to the top, there were even more, including a Lisa-size niche!

At the top, we ate an orange we'd saved from breakfast and enjoyed a different perspective of the Acropolis. Then, as it was getting close to the fateful 3 pm closing time and we wanted to see the Temple of Zeus, we headed back down the hill.

The Temple of Zeus is HUGE.

One of the columns had fallen in the 1800s and nobody has had the money to put it back up, which is sad in a way but I found that it gave a much better idea of the colossalness (colossality?) of the structure.

After taking all our pictures, we sat down on a bench to await the inevitable yelling ladies kicking us out, which they did, but very politely for once. Then we wandered down a new street and discovered a country club with an open gate, so we walked in and tried to look like we belonged. They might have been fooled for a little bit, but then I saw a playground and all bets were off.

After our little hike, we were pretty hungry, so we found a gyro place and got delicious delicious mystery meat for €1.80 apiece. Seriously. They were fantastic, and we ate them while sitting on a marble step and watching the world go by. Making our way back to the hotel afterwards, we saw a very welcoming café with a patio and decided to stop to get some coffee. I managed to order something iced and got this, which was almost too purty to drink.

Logan had a regular coffee and we people-watched for a while, then headed back to the hotel for a brief rest before setting off for the Acropolis Museum.

The Acropolis Museum may well be one of my favorite museums in the whole world, right up there with the Musée de Cluny in Paris, the Victoria and Albert in London, and the Boston Science Museum. It's a beautiful modern building right at the foot of the Acropolis, and its subject is so precise that it can afford to have lots and lots of details, which I love. Unfortunately, no photos were allowed, so you'll all just have to go there yourselves! You start by walking up a ramp where, on both sides, daily-life artifacts from the Acropolis are displayed. There were children's toys, pots and pans, jewelry - all the things that really bring a civilization alive for me. Then you get into all the friezes and metopes of various temples, some of which are explained and some aren't. There are two floors of that, then the top floor has the metopes and friezes from the Parthenon itself. Or rather, it would, if the Brits would just give the Elgin Marbles back already. Seriously, England, everybody else has done it, the Greeks have the perfect place to display them, stop being silly.

The wonderful thing about the top floor is that the metopes are arranged exactly how they were on the Parthenon, so it's really easy to imagine what it would have looked like. Also, you can look out the floor-to-ceiling glass and see the Parthenon itself. It's the best way I can think of to display the originals inside to protect them, but still give the most authentic experience possible. We stayed upstairs until the absolute last minute, when the guards politely started herding us down the stairs. Then we watched a video in the entryway of statues being moved into position in the museum, which was really neat too. Finally, the guards gently but firmly kicked everybody out, and we got some great pictures of the museum from the outside.

Then we went back to the hotel, and we must have been tireder than we thought, because we fell into bed and were too tired to get up for dinner.

The next morning we awoke refreshed and determined to find those elusive fresh fish and meat markets. We were not disappointed. Huge warehouses crammed full of stalls, shiny fins and scales everywhere, and always, always the shouts of vendors hawking their wares. They instantly pegged us as tourists, of course, so as we walked by the shouts turned to English, but we were too busy taking in the sights to care. There were octopi of all different sizes, from palm-size to head-size; the same variety of squids (the little ones are really cute); every single kind of fish I've ever imagined, rays, shrimp, shellfish... It was overwhelming but gorgeous. We slipped through a doorway and found ourselves in the meat portion of the market, which was just as interesting, although slightly more unnerving as there were lots of heads looking at us wherever we went. Calf heads, rabbit heads, chicken heads... There were even whole calves and goats hanging upside down. I was too wimpy to take pictures, but Logan did and you can see one of them here.

We emerged, blinking, and found a supermarket to buy lunch. We made out like bandits, with fresh tzatziki, little toasts to eat it on, sour cherry juice, and granola bars. We sat down in a little square and ate, then went back to the hotel to collect our luggage and leave the country. The plane trip was uneventful, except when we took out the potato chips we'd bought and discovered that the bag was about to pop because of the pressure change!

As we were flying over France, Logan looked out the window. "That's weird," he said, "the roads and things look like little islands with bridges connecting them, but I know we're over land. What could possi-Oh. Damn. It's snow." Realizing that he was right, I immediately lamented my lack of winter coat - it had been warm when we left France, and we certainly didn't need winter clothes in Greece! After retrieving our luggage, we both put on as many layers as possible and braved the cold. A man at the bus stop, seeing us shiver and swear, even offered Logan a cigarette, which was quite sweet of him. Despite the cold, everything was running on time, and we got back to Rouen without a hitch.

More pictures on Facebook, and as we're heading to Milan and then Morocco tomorrow, there will certainly be some interesting stories from there! À plus tard!

Oh Jesus SANTORINI

2010-02-07T13:10:00.009+01:00

Part II of our modern Odyssey. If you haven't read the first bit, please scroll down to do so.

The six of us caught the express bus to the airport at an ungodly hour, then waited around for our plane because of course it wasn't on time. The plane was nearly empty, so we all spread out to get window seats so we could see the Aegean Sea. We touched down on Santorini less than an hour after leaving Athens, got our luggage, and were met by our lovely hotel person. When we arrived at our hotel, a maze-like (to get to our room, we had to go into the gate, down 4 steps, turn right, go down one step, duck under a balcony, go up another step, make a U-turn, and climb our 4 steps) collection of buildings just outside the main town, they offered us breakfast, which we couldn't refuse. We got slices of lemony cake, tea, coffee, and "toast", which in Greek apparently means a grilled ham-and-cheese sandwich. After breakfast, we walked into the main town to get our bearings. Some geography:

Santorini was formed from a volcanic explosion. The middle island is the caldera of the volcano, which still emits sulfur and other smelly things. Unfortunately, the boat trips out to it only happen during the main season, so we had to admire it from afar. The western edge is all layered cliffs from different kinds of volcanic activity, while the eastern edge slopes into the sea much more gradually, creating all the beaches. The main town, Fira, is pretty much in the middle and our hotel was a little north of that.

Figuring we'd explore on foot first, we set off to the west side of the island. There were some gorgeous views of the caldera:

And of the town, which nestles into the hillside and invites exploration of all the tiny little whitewashed streets and steps and alleyways and switchbacks.

Everything was more or less deserted, Santorini being mainly a tourist town, which was occasionally creepy but usually nice, as I bet it's utter chaos in the summer. Casey and Anna eventually went off to investigate the possibility of renting four-wheelers, my parents set off to wander along the cliffs, and Logan and I saw this path leading down the cliff to the harbor and could not resist.

It was a pretty easy path, with long switchbacks and wide steps at each corner, but the paving was quite uneven and the donkey dung made for unpredictable obstacles. We made our way down, pausing to contemplate the ocean

and study Greek snails.

As we descended, we noticed doors, windows, and even fortress-like things built into the hillside, which only filled us with more curiosity and lured us down to the bottom.

At the bottom, we discovered the creepiest, emptiest part of Santorini yet: the port. Apparently in the summer, one or two huge cruise ships dock every day in the port, so the postcard, souvenir, and cold drink businesses do quite well. In the winter, however, it's absolutely deserted, giving it a real ghost town feel. Logan and I explored the caves along the water's edge,

then walked up to the doors in the cliff we had noticed from the path. This was when "creepy" started to edge into downright "scary", at least for wimpy li'l me, because these were obviously abandoned houses built right into the cliff. But the windows were boarded up and they were clearly deserted. Some entryways were full of junk; others looked marginally cared-for, but overall it just creeped me out and I kept bugging Logan to go back to the docks, where at least we were out in the open so we'd see the zombies coming. But then Logan saw that the fortress-thing we'd seen from above had a gun on it, so of course he had to go check that out, ignoring my protests. Sure enough, there was an anti-aircraft gun built onto a little gun deck, for what purpose we have no idea. That's when we finally climbed back down the little stairs and went out on the dock again. There was a huge metal buoy-like thing on the dock that Logan went to explore while I sat down and watched the waves for a while.

When Logan came back, we noticed a little rock slide, so we went over to play with the rocks. There was a variety of colors, and Logan noticed that the black rocks seemed lighter than they should have been. Hmmm, we thought, this is a volcanic island. Volcanoes produce pumice stone, which floats. How awesome would it be if we found floating rocks!? So, for science, we chucked a few black rocks in. They sunk into the ocean, never to be seen again, and we returned to the rock pile. The red rocks were even lighter than the black ones, so we tried those. They sunk a bit slower, but still they sunk, and we returned, dispirited, to the rock pile. This time, we found some white rocks that were much lighter. We threw those in and... they floated!

So cool.

Then my jacked boyfriend hurled some massive rocks into the water:

See the vein in his forehead?

After all that physical exertion, we were hungry and tired, so we headed back up the path. We could have taken the cable cars, but that cost money and we are cheap. It didn't take that long to get back up, though, and we made our way into the center of town to try to find some sustenance. As we crossed the main road, we saw a yellow four-wheeler coming towards us. I looked again and saw my brother and his wife, wearing helmets and sunglasses and generally looking pretty bad-ass on their ATV. We chatted for a bit, they sung the praises of their machine, and Logan and I continued to a roadside kiosk where we bought delicious herby potato chips and green apple Fanta and mandarin orange Fanta (which I have not yet seen outside Greece, which is a pity because they are delicious). Then we went back to the hotel to snack and rest and write postcards. A bit later, there was a knock on our door and my father was chivvying us out to watch the sunset, which I initially whined about but when I got to the top I shut right up.

Oh, Greece, you treat me so well.

After the sunset, our intrepid ATVers returned and we headed out to find dinner. Right down the road from the hotel was a nice-looking little taverna, so we went in and met the lone waitress, who spoke amazing English and told us all about all the dishes, setting our mouths watering right away. We settled on tomato balls, a Greek salad, little fishes, another fish dish, and other things I've forgotten... The tomato balls were definitely a highlight: minced tomatoes mixed with all manner of delicious things and fried. And the little fishes were just that: whole little fishies, sprinkled with herbs and fried. You eat the whole thing, so the bones make for a great crunch! Then we got a delicious honey-soaked cake for dessert and rolled home, fat and happy.

The next morning we got up bright and early to start our ATV adventure! We rented 3 machines, got a brief driving lesson from Tony, and set out south to find those black sand beaches. We got sick of traveling in a convoy for a bit and decided to split up, so Logan and I stopped to take pictures (on Facebook) and watched the others ride off. After tooling along happily for a while, we saw a cool building on top of a hill and decided to ride up to it to see what we could see. Our poor machine labored up the hill at about 4 kilometers per hour, but we kept at it and were rewarded for our efforts by a sign that said, in Greek and English, “Military base – photos forbidden in all circumstances”. But it didn’t say no trespassing, so we went around the next bend and saw two ATVs parked along the side of the road! A short walk up brought us to the rest of our wayward family, who’d seen the building and had the exact same thought process. There was a monastery on top of the hill, as well as a gigantic radar installation, but the monastery was closed and we couldn’t take pictures, so we just looked all around, then headed back down the hill. Shortly thereafter, we found a grocery store and bought bread, cheese, olives, chips, and soda for lunch, then found a deserted-looking farmyard to eat it in. This was our view from lunch:

Emboldened by the lack of life, we walked along the spine of a little hill to investigate the fields of “ostrich nests” we kept seeing. They’re actually grapevines, I think, but they’re arranged in neat rows of nest-like tangles, so Anna named them ostrich nests and it stuck. The paths around the fields were made completely of pumice rocks, which were weird to walk on – like spongy gravel. There was also a little abandoned building, so we had to explore that, of course.

On our way back, we suddenly heard someone yelling in Greek, very loudly. There was no one in sight, though, so we just continued on. When we reached the crest of the hill, we saw a man herding two donkeys who had apparently come loose, judging from the dangling ropes around their necks. Luckily, it was the donkeys who were the targets of the shouting, not us. We meekly made our way back to the lunch spot to pick up our gear, then hopped back on the machines. Destination: Kamari, the best black-sand beach.

Sure enough, the sand was black!

The insane among us (Casey and Anna) went full-monty-into-the-freezing-ocean swimming, while the less crazy (everyone else) just waded in. But the beach was completely made of pebbles (I felt right at home, being the good little Norman I am), which are really not comfy to walk on in bare feet, so the paddling was short-lived. Still, the fact that it was warm enough to even think of wading in January was pretty amazing.

After the beach, we set off for Ia, on the northern tip of the island. Ia is the town that all the postcards of Santorini are taken of, because it’s all white buildings and hillsides and blue-domed churches and donkeys. We drove right by our hotel, since it’s on the island’s main road, and continued north. There were some beautiful roads to drive on, with beautiful views for the passenger, so both Logan and I thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. When we got there, we were greeted by some donkeys – they’re really useful as pack animals on Santorini because most of the houses are on streets with steps in them, so wheeled machines do you no good whatsoever. We found another grocery store, where we bought more bread and cheese and olives and oranges, and Logan and I found some sour cherry juice that turned out to be fantastic. Logan and I also couldn’t shut up about the prices, since even island prices were so much cheaper than France. Does Greece need English language assistants…?

We left the ATVs along the main road and headed into town, where we were soon adopted by a stray dog we called Stavros. Every tourist group gets one, apparently, and they stick with you the whole time you’re in Ia, making sure you get where you need to go. We spent an hour or so just walking around and enjoying the sun and the view. Every single corner brought a new spectacular vista of ocean, islands, volcano, white houses, and blue domes, but since my camera was slowly dying I only took a few photos, including this one of which I’m inordinately proud:

Lens flaaaaaare!

Then we found the perfect sunset-watching spot and set up our picnic dinner. The young’uns went to explore the ruins of an old church, accompanied by our faithful Stavros (picture and longer biography on Logan’s blog). We got back and started on our picnic just in time for the sunset. It was beautiful and the food was delicious – so simple, but so good. I miss the olives rather a lot.

When the last glimmers had faded into the ocean, we set off back to our trusty steeds, still accompanied by Stavros. Who followed us practically halfway back to Fira, despite our best efforts to shoo him back. He kept up with the ATVs! Finally, we just focused on driving and he eventually fell behind, but we were duly impressed.

That night, the young ones headed out to a bar to taste some ouzo, which we’d been told we shouldn’t miss. The bartender gave us a few glasses to share, and I got a Mythos beer. Ouzo is strong, and I think the reason it’s so licorice-flavored is to mask the bathtub-gin quality of the alcohol. Still, I drank my entire beer, a few sips of Logan’s ouzo, and most of my delicate flower brother’s ouzo, because he couldn’t handle it, and was feeling quite happy by the time we left. Needless to say, Logan drove home, me holding onto him and giggling all the way.

In the morning, slightly the worse for wear, we watched the sunrise from my parents’ balcony and went out for a last hurrah on the ATVs. Logan and Casey got to try my parents’ machine, which was more powerful than the others.

Don’t they look tough?

Then we headed back down to the port for the Epiphany ceremony, which apparently involved a cross being tossed into the sea to symbolize Jesus’ baptism. We were quite early, so I sat and watched the waves again, with the added fun of watching my boyfriend try to defy them.

After the ceremony, we hopped onto the cable cars (free because of the holiday!) and went back to the hotel for another picnic lunch, this time on the balcony. Logan and I packed, then visited our favorite food stand for some more mandarin-orange Fanta, which I think I might like even better than the lemon kind, which has had my unwavering allegiance since I got it by accident last year while ordering a sandwich.

Then we hopped into the hotel van, which took us back to the teeny-tiny airport (they X-ray your checked luggage before you give it to the check-in counter ladies to check, and there’s only one security line), where we waited, nostalgic already, for our plane. It was such a brilliant three days, especially the ATVs – now I completely understand why Vermonters are so attached to their four-wheelers. They’re SO MUCH FUN!

Logan’s and my last few days in Athens to come shortly. Stay tuned!

Oh Lordie GREECE

2010-01-24T20:05:00.012+01:00

You know how the longer you put something off, the harder it is to do? (See also: job applications, French papers, scary phone calls). However, here I am typing, thanks to Logan's motivation and having run out of stuff to read on the Internet for the moment. Greece was so amazingly epic that I'm a little frightened of writing about it, because I'm worried I won't be able to capture the fun and joy and pure delight that was our winter vacation, but here goes anyway.

On New Year's Eve, Logan and I awoke at an ungodly hour to get to our plane in time, which was of course delayed for de-icing. However, we survived the EasyJet scrum (they don't assign seats, so first on the plane gets their choice of seats, and French people's elbows are sharp) and got seats next to each other for the 3-hour flight to Athens. Close to landing time, I looked out the window, turned to Logan, and said "Toto? We're not in Kansas anymore..." because Greece's topography puts France to shame.

We walked outside, shed 3 layers of clothing (thank you Mediterranean), bought tickets (as soon as the man at the kiosk saw our bewildered expressions and luggage, he wordlessly handed us two tickets for the center of Athens) and hopped on the bus, remembering to validate our tickets like the French-trained people we are. The entire bus ride in, I bored Logan to tears by trying to sound out all the signs we passed, having no luck until "Logan! Logan! That sign! That sign right there says 'orthodontist'! How cool is that?!?!?!" Logan was less than thrilled, preferring to stick his head out the window to enjoy the warm breeze through his hair. We got to our stop, got off, and before I could even look around to get my bearings and find the hotel, I heard a "There they are!" and my parents emerged from the crowd! They had staked out the bus stop to wait for us, which was surpassingly sweet of them. They led us to our hotel, where Logan and I immediately jumped into the shower and changed into more weather-appropriate clothing. Then we got the welcome spiel from Jasmine, one of the hotel workers, who told us where to go and what to see and where not to go. Then Casey and Anna came back from Internet-caféing and there were more hugs all around. Then we went out to dinner, which was okay (much better meals were had, and will be written about in great detail).

It being New Year's Eve, and the Athens party being in Syntagma Square, 10 minutes from our hotel, Logan, my dad, and I stayed out to party. Everybody else went home, exhausted from jet-lag (I guess a 7-hour time difference is harder to adjust to than a 1-hour difference... Score one for Europe!). We got to see the guards at the parliament building, who, similarly to the guards in London, put up with tourists mugging for the cameras next to them all day. We didn't get too close, but I did manage to take a picture of their hilarious leg-stretching routine.

See the pom-poms on their shoes? And their tights? And skirts? Greece 1, London 0 on this count.

Soon after, it was midnight and there were fireworks! Hooray! What a lovely way to spend New Year's.

Then, sleepy and chilly, we went back to the hotel, and bed.

The next morning, we woke up and went downstairs to discover a breakfast of rolls, butter, cherry jam, marmalade, hard-boiled eggs, olives, coffee, tea, and oranges. The oranges were small, seedless, and the sweetest and juiciest I’ve ever had the pleasure of eating. Also, since Logan doesn’t like olives, I got double portions of them all week. Yum yum.

After breakfast, Logan and I wanted to wander around a bit to get our bearings. Everyone else had been there for two days already, so they showed us around as we made our way to the fish and meat market we'd heard about. On the way, we discovered to our great delight that orange trees line every single street,

providing passers-by with handy projectiles for throwing at relatives and friends, or for bowling! Here, Casey shows off his form.

When we reached the market, it was closed, it being New Year's Day (the mixed blessing of traveling during the slow season: you get everything to yourself, but places are open sporadically, if at all). We wandered through the flea-market-y part, though, which was crowded but interesting. Then we stopped at a cute little café, which was apparently the thing to do at this time of day because everyone was sitting outside enjoying iced coffees. I managed to order an iced coffee from a more-complicated-than-Starbucks variety of coffee drinks, and perked right up (some might say too much) after that. It was just about then that it hit me that it was January 1st and I was outside in a light shirt and was almost too warm. Right then I started hatching plans to get stuck in Greece for longer. Before leaving, I made a trip to the bathroom and nearly fell down the stairs as I descended:

Yup, those are ruins. Under the foundations of the café. I admit that I tested the glass floor with one toe before stepping on it, not quite believing that I was actually meant to walk on it. Coolest bathroom I've ever had the luck to visit, by far.

After our break, we headed up onto the Areopagus, a hill just to the west of the Acropolis where the ancient court of law used to meet. A brief Athens geography note: the Acropolis is actually the name of a hill with a whole bunch of famous buildings and temples on it, including the Parthenon, a few theaters, a temple to Athena, and much more. So now when you go to Athens, you won't mix up the Acropolis and the Parthenon for the first three days like I did! The More You Know™

There was a beautiful view of Athens from the top, and it was gorgeous and sunny, so we hung out on top philosophizing for a while.

Just being outside in the sun with a t-shirt on was such a novelty for all of us that we indulged for a while. But we had plans to be up on yet another hill, Lykabettos, for the sunset, so we had to get moving. We took a neat little path that wound around the side of the Acropolis, between houses and up over rooftops, offering different views of Athens from every turn. Then we hopped onto the subway (very well-designed, and all the stations are made of marble, because the Greeks have to do something with all the marble just lying around, so why not make all the streets, sidewalks, squares, and stations out of it?) and took it a few stops over to Lykabettos. After getting our bearings, we started walking up part of the hill to get to the funicular that would take us the rest of the way, pausing now and again for more orange bowling. Eventually, the roads turned into paths, and we started to suspect that we'd missed the funicular, which was confirmed by a helpful man. So we decided to walk the rest of the way up the lovely (marble of course) path.

At the top, there were gorgeous views,

and a little church with lovely mosaics and a golden plaque with inlaid precious stones (again, I forget just how shiny real jewels are until I see them for real), and (eventually) a sunset that was worth waiting for.

Right after the sunset we headed down, because it was cold and windy. Part of the group took the funicular down to rest their old bones, while Logan and I scampered down the path. Having arrived at the funicular (which was absolutely not at all where it was indicated on our map), Logan and I decided to plot a little ambush. We gathered our ammunition and waited behind a car for our unsuspecting prey. The instant they poked their noses out of the station, they were met with a punishing barrage of oranges. And by "punishing barrage" I mean "four oranges slowly rolled along the ground over to their feet". They were at least mildly surprised, though. Then we discovered drains along the sides of the stairs leading down, and had to find out where they led, for science!

Then there was late-night orange bowling, which got much more exciting since there were no pedestrians.

The next morning, we were up bright and early to catch a 7:00 bus to Delphi, because everyone likes a good oracular consultation. However, the 7:00 bus was full, despite the best efforts of some impressively fiesty Greek ladies to convince the company to get another bus. So we bought tickets for the 10:00 bus and the four young'uns set out to explore the area and forage for food. We found a lovely little sandwich place that was playing really good music and bought coffee and snacks (and found out where Greek policemen go for their coffee!). Venturing further afield, we found a bakery that was open and walked inside, whereupon everybody's eyes widened, and I'm pretty sure my jaw dropped. There were stacks of delicious things piled upon stacks of luscious things; there were cakes, cookies, honey-oozing pastries, chocolates, even little tiny chocolate-covered ice cream bars! We spent at least five minutes looking around and calling everybody else over every time we found another scrumptious-looking delicacy. Finally, we calmed down a bit and made a few selections, then took them over to the woman, who'd been watching us with a smile on her face the whole time. When we asked how much, she just shook her head, and despite our protests she wouldn't take any money for anything. We brought our spoils back to the station, where my father decided that he needed more food, so we went back to the bakery and bought enough food to keep a classroom of 5-year-olds hyper for a month, easily. Thus fortified, we enjoyed our three-hour bus ride to Delphi, at least until it started to pour.

Because oh yes, it was pouring in Delphi. And guess who hadn't brought her umbrella? Or practical shoes? Or a decent coat? That's right, faithful readers, your blog girl was woefully underdressed for the occasion. However, after the initial shock of getting drenched, then the secondary shock of learning that the actual Delphi site was 3 kilometers away, I decided to put on a happy face and make the best of it. It also didn't hurt that our entire walk had views like this:

We entered the site at 2, knowing full well that it closed at 3 (as does almost every historical site in Greece, for reasons unknown and unfathomable) and that the yelling ladies would start their rounds soon. Determined to enjoy ourselves anyway, we set off up the hill. There were ruins of temples, treasury buildings (for holding the treasures brought to the oracle), a theater, various altars, and something called “The Rock of the Sybil”, which is supposedly where the oracle sat, breathed the mysterious vapors, and delivered her prophecies. Unfortunately, we didn’t have time to go to the museum, which would have given a bit more context to our visit; as it was, we just read the labels (often carved out of marble, because what else are you going to do with the stuff?) and tried to guess at what everything was for. Then the yelling ladies started to yell, and we walked slowly back down to the gates, pausing where they couldn’t see us to take more pictures. (A note about the yelling ladies: Greece employs numerous loud-voiced women and men to protect its national heritage. They seem to prefer this technique of monument protection to, say, putting signs on things that tell you where you can and can’t go. The main problem I have with them is that they have no uniform, nametag, or anything that would denote them as official, so you never know whether it’s just some crazy person yelling at you for no reason or whether you should actually pay attention. And they’re everywhere.)

Casey and Anna wanted to see the Temple of Athena, further down the road, and at this point it had stopped raining, so Logan and I joined them. This area was free to enter, so it didn’t close at 3 and we had time to wander around and enjoy it. Three of the columns in the main building had been restored, so it was easier to see what it was supposed to look like. Pictures on Facebook, as always.

There were also olive trees growing everywhere, so Casey and Anna decided to find out what a fresh-from-the-branch olive tastes like.

Logan and I acted as the controls for this highly scientific experiment, reasoning that if Casey and Anna got sick, we would know it was the olives. Seriously, though, who tastes an olive and thinks, “Wow, this will taste great once I soak it in water, wash it, drain it, slit it, soak it in salt water, and add oil!”? I mean, I’m glad they thought that, because olives are delicious, but come on.

Later on, we found a different kind of tree and the boys decided to perform another experiment, leaving me as the only control.

I cut off the movie there because I suddenly realized I could have been filming the untimely demises of my brother and boyfriend, but they survived so it’s okay. After that adventure, we walked around the temple site some more and saw a small gladiator arena with two boys fighting in it, an ancient gnarly knotty olive tree, and more ruins. Then we hiked back up to the town and called my parents to find out where they’d gotten to (the joys of having two European cell phones in a group), only to spot my dad coming toward us, having seen us through the window of the cozy café they were sitting in. We joined them to have hot chocolate and warm up. Then we went back to the bus stop, where we found a pizza place and got an amazing vegetable pizza that we scarfed down in about 8 seconds. The restaurant’s kitchen was on one side of the street and the dining room on the other, meaning that the waitresses took their lives in their hands every time they needed anything from the kitchen. We cheered them on, then got on our bus back to Athens. I amused myself by sounding out advertisements, (I hated phonics in 1st grade, but I guess I’ve changed since then) then fell asleep, exhausted.

The next day, the three couples decided to do our own thing in the morning, then meet up to see the market area, then go to a restaurant some friends had recommended for lunch. Everybody else went to the Acropolis Museum, but Logan and I slept in, then realized we didn’t really have time to go to the museum, especially given the huge line that stretched out the door and across the porch. However, the museum is built on top of ruins (like everything else in Greece), and they put glass panels in the entry porch so you can look down at the ruins beneath your feet. They also had some areas that were open, with walkways around them. So we amused ourselves for quite some time taking pictures of mosaics, wells, walls, and pipes

and trying to guess what it had all been used for. Then we saw a kitty wandering through the ruins! There are stray cats everywhere, so we shouldn’t have been surprised, but we were a little jealous of the cat for being able to go anywhere she wanted, without risking the yelling ladies.

Then, since the area around the Acropolis was free (it being the first Sunday of the month), we decided to circumnavigate the Acropolis to get to the meeting point. There were some neat statues on display (again, pics on Facebook) and another theater, which was either well-preserved or well-restored.

We sat down and pretended to watch a play for a while, then eavesdropped on a French mother telling her kids about the theater (the main argument for learning a foreign language is that it widens your eavesdropping possibilities), then started around the hill. We discovered oodles of cool caves, each dedicated to a different god, that had been used as offering sites. We even got to go into some of them without incurring the yelling ladies’ wrath! Then we noticed that it was getting late, so we finished our tour and got out onto the real streets and to our meeting place only half an hour late.

Luckily, everybody else had been late too, so there were no hard feelings. Logan and my dad went off to see the Agora, or the ancient market site, while the rest of us set off in search of the elusive fish and meat markets. Which were closed, once again, because apparently they’re only in the morning. Unfazed, we wandered through the flea market section again and Anna and I nearly bought some boots, but remembered at the last minute how stuffed our bags had been on the way there and prudently resisted.

We met back up with Logan and my dad and headed to the restaurant, where we quite literally ordered one of everything they had cooking. We had stuffed tomatoes, moussaka, something moussaka-like but filled with a variety of vegetables, Greek salad with fresh feta, meatballs… Thankfully, Logan Hollow-Leg was there to finish everything up, so we even ordered doughnuts with honey for dessert. A towering plate of doughnut balls arrived, swimming in honey, and before we could even start to eat them the owner brought over a pitcher of honey, just in case our teeth weren’t rotten enough, I guess. The doughnuts were delicious but hard to finish, so we were all the more surprised at a couple who had ordered one plate of doughnuts EACH and managed to finish all of them. Greeks know how to eat.

After that, we all needed a nap, so we went back to the hotel for some relaxation. And to pack, since we were leaving the next morning for Santorini, widely regarded as the nicest of the Greek islands. All I knew about it was that it was an island, it was in the Mediterranean, and there were black and red sand beaches. I needed no convincing.

Installment II: Oh Jesus SANTORINI to come in the next few days, as I get back into the habit of this whole blog thing. Thank you for your patience!

Paris for Christmas

2009-12-27T20:06:00.010+01:00

Being the hopeless romantics that we are, Logan and I decided to go to Paris for Christmas. Also because this may well be the only time in our lives that it costs 10,30€ to get there, rather than a few hundred. So I made reservations at the best restaurant in the world and at the hotel Logan and I stayed in last spring, and we hopped on the train. Another assistant, Darcy, was also going to Paris (to meet her family for Christmas), so we got to chat with her on the train. I love running into people I know randomly in Rouen; it makes me feel very popular.

Once we arrived in Paris, I realized that I'd forgotten to look up the address of the hotel. No matter, I boldly declared, I remember the street it's on, we just have to walk up it until we find it. Twenty minutes later, after walking up "Rue du Faubourg St-Denis" and down "Rue du Faubourg St-Martin" ("But I'm sure it's on a Rue du Faubourg St-Something!") and having two French people ask if we were lost and needed help, I admitted defeat and called a friend to ask him to look it up online. "Oh, Rue du Faubourg Montmartre! And it's in the 9th arrondissement, not the 10th... Okay, thanks so much!" We were relatively close, though, so we walked it, and 10 minutes (and infinite sense of direction jokes from Logan) later we were checking in. It's a lovely hotel, reasonably-priced (especially if you choose a room with a shared bathroom and shower - they have sinks in every room), and always scrupulously clean. And the neighborhood is friendly enough that you don't need to worry about getting mugged on your way back home. It's quirky, too - the rooms are all very oddly-shaped

and they picked turquoise and burgundy-red for the walls, which doesn't sound like it works but it does. We dropped off our luggage and had enough time to shower and dress all fancy-like (because it's us, and we're in Paris) before heading out to Le jardin d'en face, my favorite restaurant in the whole wide world. It's in Montmartre and I learned about it when I studied abroad two years ago, and I've been singing its praises ever since. It's tiny - only 26 seats - and the décor is nothing special, the tables are crammed together, the napkins are plaid, the silverware is not fancy... but everybody there is cheerful and friendly, the food is absolutely fantastic, and you can get three generously-portioned courses for under 25€, which is rare in Paris. So I enjoyed my œuf cocotte au foie gras (soft-boiled egg in a mini casserole dish with cream and foie gras, eaten with toast fingers) and my tartiflette au magret fumé (potatoes, onions and cheese baked in a casserole with thin slices of smoked duck and walnuts on top) and my wild strawberry and blueberry sorbet and then had to roll back down the hill. Logan had pumpkin-chestnut soup with crème fraîche and cheese and garlic croutons (I must find a recipe), filet mignon de porc with a gooseberry-porto sauce and mashed potatoes, and apple sorbet "drizzled" with Calvados (apple brandy) that turned out to be more "soaked" or perhaps "drenched" in Calvados - I nearly passed out just smelling it. But it was all so good - I have never once eaten anything less than spectacular there, and at this point I've tried most of their menu. If you are ever in Paris you must go there, no excuses. We got coffee afterwards and sat there talking and people-watching until after 11 (we'd gotten there at 8) and it was such a relaxing way to spend the evening. We went over to Sacré Cœur afterwards to take some pictures, which came out beautifully (I'd like to take some credit for that, but it's hard to take a bad picture of that place):

The next morning, Christmas Eve, we set out for the Louvre, because Logan had never been and we get in free because we're teachers! We meant to stay there for a few hours, then hit up the Musée d'Orsay, but we didn't get to the Louvre until 11:30, and then... well, it's the Louvre, and despite being tired and hungry we stayed there until nearly 4:00. We spent a lot of time in the Mesopotamian art section, because it's cool stuff, and there were statues.

There was also a pillar with Hammurabi's Code on it, with the whole "eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth" thing:

There was a handy translation of some of the interesting bits, as well, and I was surprised to see that it's not all horribly draconian, unfair punishments - there were some pretty smart ideas. For one, if a wife commits adultery, both she and the man she cheated with are tied together and thrown into the water, which is better than just the woman getting stoned to death. Also, if an adopted child rejects his adoptive parents and goes back to his birth parents, the ungrateful little wretch gets his eye pulled out. See? Harsh, but just, after a fashion.

Then we swung through Napoleon III's apartments, which had these really cool conversation chairs.

See? That way there's no awkward middle person on the couch that you always have to talk around. So smart, those Frenchies. There was also some classy gold/black décor, which was actually a haven of simplicity compared to the rest of it.

Then it was time for the objets d'art section, where there were SO MANY SHINY THINGS I kept getting really distracted. I'm like a magpie, really. First, there was this,

which is actually a feeding bottle from an old charity hospital. It's so gorgeous, and yet at the time was probably just a tool to facilitate feeding an invalid, nothing to be oohed and ahhed over. I like it, though.

Then there were cabinets and cabinets of tiny gorgeous things, only two of which I'll show here:

I was drooling the whole time, though. Little lacquered or enameled or gilded boxes with inlaid mother-of-pearl or lapis lazuli or emerald, earrings with pearls, brooches with diamonds, necklaces with rubies... I tend to forget how pretty real jewels are until I see them in person, and then I remember all of a sudden. Still, woman cannot live by jewels alone, so we decided to head over to the Musée d'Orsay to take in some Impressionism. The museum is housed in a former train station, so it's very light and airy and they kept the big ol' clock!

I had art history class there when I studied abroad, so it's nice and familiar and I look really smart because I've learned about most of the famous paintings in it. I even remembered why some of them were famous! We had to do a bit of a whirlwind tour because the museum was closing in an hour, but we did manage to see most of the highlights, and Logan got a picture of a lion statue so he was content. Then we got herded out with the rest of the tourists and wandered towards the Champs-Elysées and the Christmas market there. On the way, we got sucker-punched by beauty, which happens all the time in France (okay, maybe not in Le Havre) and had to stop and take pictures again:

That's the Grand Palais, seen from across the Pont Alexandre III, which is made of reinforced concrete (and is the only reason I know how to say "reinforced concrete" in French). Right after that, it started to rain and I got really hungry, so I got a grilled salmon sandwich at the Christmas market on the Champs-Elysées, which was horrendously overpriced (thanks, Paris!) but delicious. Low-blood-sugar crankiness averted, we wandered through the Christmas market a little more, then went back to the hotel to dry off.

At about 10, we headed up to Sacré Cœur to attend the singing service at 11 and the midnight mass after that. We arrived at the church at 10:30 and it was already packed, but we managed to squeeze in at the back. The service was quite lovely, despite not being able to see much, and the program had all the words to everything printed out, so Logan and I learned a lot of French religious words that I'm sure will come in handy someday... We also got to sing Lo How a Rose E'er Blooming (with very different words), Silent Night, Angels We Have Heard on High, O Come All Ye Faithful, and Il est né, le divin enfant, so that made me very very happy. It's not Christmas until I get to sing Christmas carols! There were lots of call and response chanty bits as well, where a nun would sing a line and then everybody would mumble back in some vague semblance of a tune. It did make it more interesting than just reading everything, though. Then it was communion and I practically had to physically restrain Logan from going up to take it ("But they're getting crackers! I want a cracker!") because we're both heathens, at least in the eyes of the Catholic Church. When all the incense-swinging and blessing of the little crackers was over, it was 1:40 AM and we had a métro to catch at 1:49... The last métro, as a matter of fact. So we hightailed it down those oh-so-picturesque steps which are not nearly so picturesque when you're walking down or up them, ran into the station, waited for the elevator (Abbesses is the deepest station in Paris. I've taken the stairs exactly once, and it would take the four horsemen of the apocalypse to get me to do it again) and emerged on the platform a safe three minutes before the last train. The hilarious part is that we weren't catching the last train because of a crazy party; no, we were coming back from church.

The next morning was Christmas! We woke up, lazed around, ate breakfast, and finally got out the door at about noon. Our destination was the skating rink in front of the Hôtel de Ville, because really you can't overdo the "skating in front of Hôtels de Ville" thing in France. We rented our skates, left them our shoes, and clomped onto the rink. This time, there wasn't as much water on top, which was already a plus, and they had a separate area for kids and people who can't skate, so the ice was nearly free of tripping hazards. It was sunny, too! We alternately skated and took pictures (and sometimes did both at once, with hilarious results) and it was a lovely way to start Christmas. Here's proof, since it didn't happen unless my feet were there:

Then we went to the Jewish district for lunch, figuring that things would be open there. Sure enough, there was a huge crowd of tourists who'd thought the same thing, but we still managed to wander around and get some falafel (oh sweet delicious food of the gods, how I've missed you). Then we walked back to the Pont Alexandre III, clearly becoming our favorite bridge, and took more photos, this time of the Eiffel tower because it's purty.

Then we wandered around the Champs-Elysées for a while, going into lots of car stores because they were open, and because my travel buddy is a car fanatic. BUT! In the Toyota store you could make free buttons! Mine got ruined because the guy making them was an idiot, but Logan's lovely coloring job on a Toyota in front of the Paris skyline was made into a gorgeous button, which he couldn't stop taking out and looking at for the rest of the day.

Then we hopped a métro back to our street and got a Nutella-banana crêpe, which magically made all my tiredness melt away... We also found a few bodegas that were still open and bought cider and champagne and snacks. We drank the cider while watching a Charlie Chaplin movie that a French station had decided to air (with French translations of the explanatory frames - hilarity ensued), then put on more layers and headed out to the Eiffel Tower. There was, as expected, a ridiculous line, but we were excited so it didn't matter. When we got up to the top, we bravely ventured outside to take pictures, but couldn't last much longer than 10 minutes because of the wind, which was strong enough on one side to knock you back. We persevered, though, and got some lovely views of a lit-up and breathtaking Paris.

We also blew bubbles at the top, although, lucky lazy people that we are, the wind mostly took care of that for us. Then my camera ran out of batteries, so I just walked around looking at Paris from all directions until it was time to go back down. Paris, je t'aime...

Back at the hotel, we toasted to Paris at Christmas with our cheap champagne, then fell into a deep, well-deserved sleep.

With our one remaining day in Paris, we decided to go to another of my favorite museums, the Musée de Cluny, which is the Middle Ages museum. Not only do I love that place, but they were having a special Astérix exhibition, which is my idea of heaven. On the fences around the museum, they had Astérix parodies of famous art, and inside, in addition to all the awesome Medieval stuff, they had some of the original panels, Goscinny's typewriter, and some background on how Goscinny and Uderzo created the books. AND they had books for sale in the museum shop! I bought Astérix et les Goths, and now I'm hoping fervently that I don't already have that one in French.

We had time for one last crêpe (lemon and sugar for me, cinnamon and sugar for Logan) and then we headed to St Lazare and thence to Rouen. More photos in my Facebook album, if you wish.

~FIN~

Frankfurter Weihnachtsmarkt

2009-12-22T00:22:00.002+01:00

The morning after our wonderful Hanukkah party, Logan and I got to see what a real Weihnachtsmarkt should be, in Frankfurt! The French train company, SNCF, was having a special Christmas market sale, so tickets from Paris to Frankfurt in a TGV (train à grande vitesse - train with big speed) were only 78€ round-trip. Plus, Logan's brother Austin was there for a business trip! So we caught that 6 AM train from Rouen to Paris (shoot me now), took a little ride on the métro to another Paris train station, and arrived in Frankfurt at 1 pm, where Austin met us on the platform. We went to our hotel to freshen up, then headed out to the wonder that is a German Christmas market.

Germans know Christmas markets, or Weihnachtsmarkts, as they call them because they are German and short words just aren't how they roll. For one thing, the mulled wine (Glühwein) comes in real mugs, not little plastic cups like in France, and for another, they give you 25 cL at a time. Twenty-five centiliters of wine can make you completely forget about the cold, which is of course why they do it, since it hovered around freezing the whole weekend.

For another, Germans believe in good, filling food to fortify you against the cold. There were sausages and candied nuts and cheese-filled pretzels and sweet chocolate-covered pretzels and candies (mulled-wine flavored!) and French fries and flammkuchen and--okay I'll stop now, but you get the point. There was delicious food everywhere, and the smells alone could have kept me going for a few days. Plus, they cook everything right in front of you so you get to see how it's done! One place did this to cook their sausages:

That giant grill actually swings from side to side so they can regulate the heat a little bit, and every so often they chuck more meat on it and it sizzles and releases heavenly aromas and it's really quite easy to think you've died and gone to heaven, if it weren't for your pesky hands and feet being blocks of ice.

The nuts are made in gorgeous copper bowls with a mixer to keep them from getting stuck together, and if you're lucky when you buy them you get hot ones.

We didn't discover this all at once, however. For our first sausages, Austin led us to the stand he'd discovered the day before. I got a bratwurst, to stay classic, and Logan got a currywurst. These are reasons #147 and #148 that I am not a vegetarian (bacon is #1). Bratwurst are always 3 times as long as the little breads they're in, so they stick out either end and there's no way to eat them gracefully. For currywurst, they stick the sausage in a little chopping machine (so cool), pour curry ketchup over it, sprinkle more spices on, and hand it to you with a little forklet and a roll. Then you stuff the roll full of sausage bits and die of happiness.

Bellies sated, we wandered around further, pushing through the gigantic crowds of people and occasionally catching glimpses of purty things, like this church:

Then we ducked into a shopping mall to warm up a bit and I saw this Christmas tree in a store window:

Yes, those are teeny-tiny little sweaters!

How cute is that? I now have a brilliant idea for my Christmas tree next year...

By this time, Logan and I were asleep on our feet, so we headed back to the hotel to watch curling, which is really far more interesting than you give it credit for. A few naps later, we forced ourselves back out to an Irish pub because we heard the football game would be on. I ordered a 50 cL beer and managed to drink the whole thing in the time it took Logan and Austin to get through three beers each! I'm very proud. There was karaoke as well, so that was amusing to watch, but after a while Lisa was a sleepy little puppy so we went back to the hotel room and slept like the dead.

The next day, Sunday, everything was closed except the Christmas market and a few bakeries, so we went into an Austrian bakery. I ordered hot chocolate and they brought me a tall glass of hot milk, a little dish of chocolate paste, and a little whisk. Mmmm DIY hot chocolate. The paste dissolved really easily, and then I slid the whipped cream from its saucer onto the top, and then I took a picture so I could remember that moment forever.

I also had apricot strudel, which kept reminding me of that scene in Inglourious Basterds, but I enjoyed it anyway.

More wandering around the market, where they sell everything from incredibly tacky Christmas ornaments and decorations to adorable toys and hats and scarves, and then we went to the train station to see Austin off. Then we decided to go back to the hotel for a nap, and when we woke up this is what we saw out the hotel window:

The sausages were calling to us, so we went out again and this time I got a currywurst, with extra spices because I like to live dangerously. We also saw a large dog putting his paws up on a butcher's counter and begging for scraps, which he was duly given. Only after cooing over that did we see the big dog's little friend, who was being carried inside his owner's jacket to keep him warm. The puppy got scraps too, and the happy dogs continued on their way, leaving a chorus of "Awwwww..."s in their wake.

I finally got a clear picture of that gorgeous church, too:

On Monday, we... wandered around the Christmas market again! Neither of us had done any research on anything else to do in Frankfurt, so that was our fallback. Also, Glühwein never really gets old, and you can keep the mugs as a souvenir! The buildings around the main square were quite pretty, although we learned later that they're all new, having been rebuilt after Frankfurt got bombed to bits in WWII.

Hmm, half-timbering... Feels like home!

Then we found some ancient bath-house ruins and had to scamper around those for a while:

(This one's Doric - for Ionic and Corinthian see my Facebook album!)

Then it was off to the train station to leave Deutschland :(. At one of the stops along the way, there was snow! Thinking it would be the only snow I saw before Christmas, I memorialized it:

And here we are, relaxing in our TGV before our epic feat of awesomeness to catch an early train back to Rouen:

See, our train got into Gare de l'Est at 20h53. There was one train from Gare Saint Lazare to Rouen at 21h20, and one at 23h50. Everyone, including me, said it was impossible to get from Gare de l'Est to St Lazare in 27 minutes, but Logan said "Why don't we try? Nothing to lose!" so we did. It was like a well-oiled machine; we placed ourselves right next to the doors, hopped off as soon as the doors opened, and walked rapidly but calmly to the end of the platform, following signs for the RER E, which would take us directly to St Lazare. The signs pointed us out of the station onto a street with absolutely no indication of where the RER was. So we picked a direction, which turned out to be wrong. Unfazed, we turned back and realized that the other direction had a gigantic flight of steps up. Slightly fazed this time, we dragged our suitcases up and continued along the street, which was one of the creepier streets I've ever been on. Finally, after a few turns, we found the RER station, which was a multi-level labyrinth the likes of which I've only seen in Portal, or perhaps at my lycée here. There was a train leaving in a few minutes, and we managed to get to the platform just as the doors were closing. I started running, then gave up, seeing that I wouldn't get there in time. Then the train didn't leave, so we started running again and got to the train. I feverishly pushed the "door open" button, but nothing happened. Ever hopeful, I moved to the next car and tried that one. Miraculously, the doors slid open! Logan and I got inside, trying to look casual, the doors closed, and the train moved away. I got out the tickets for the Paris-Rouen train and we prepared our exit. We plunged out of the train and through the station, looking for the nearest sign for "Trains Grandes Lignes". Which again pointed us out to the street, because the RER stations are never actually connected to the big train stations. Luckily, I know this neighborhood a bit better, so I got my bearings and we started walking to St Lazare. Up the escalator (working this time! France likes me better this year than last year), through the hall, to the departures board to check where our train was, to the ticket-validating machines to stamp our tickets (boy do they get pissy if you forget to do that), to Voie 26 and onto our train with 5 minutes to spare. We ROCK.

Of course, we still got home at an ungodly hour, and Logan had to stay over and take the train to Le Havre in the morning for his 9 AM class, but all in all I was pretty proud of that. Twenty-two minutes for the win!

Awesome Weekends; or, I Love My Friends

2009-12-20T17:51:00.004+01:00

My life is so much fun right now that I keep on doing awesome things instead of blogging about them, which is great for me but not so much for you guys. So.

On December 4th, we had our last English assistants training day. Afterwards, we all went out to O'Kallaghan's, an Irish pub (don't cast aspersions on us for not going to a "traditional" French café; O'Kallaghan's is one of the few places in Rouen that doesn't care if you bring 25 of your closest friends all at once to take over half of the bar) to have a few drinks. I got my favorite drink there, a Black Velvet, which is Guinness, cider, and blackcurrant syrup, because it's the only way I can drink Guinness (I know, I know, I'm ashamed). More assistants kept coming and bringing friends, so we got to talk to lots of people. Alex, an assistant from last year, even did some break-dancing for us! Then we all got hungry and decided to go to an Indian restaurant Kinzie knows about. So 15 of us trooped down the road and took over the restaurant, which was incredibly good but a tad overpriced. But I will do anything for naan and chicken korma so I was pleased. Then after dinner none of us wanted to just go home alone, so Kinzie invited everyone over for drinks and we stayed at her apartment, drinking cider and Bénédictine and wine, until 1:30 or so. It was really nice to trade cute and not-so-cute stories about our kids and learn about other people's experiences.

Saturday morning, we did absolutely nothing, but we'd made plans to go skating with Megan and Kinzie and Amber in the afternoon, so we managed to drag our butts out of bed in time to do that. As it turned out, even renting skates was free, which made my day. Except I got skates that were too big, so my ankles turned in instantly and remained so all afternoon.

And it was raining slightly, so the entire rink was covered with water, making the possibility of a fall even less appealing. Or making life more interesting, depending on your point of view. The rink was quite crowded, with little kids absolutely everywhere creating little erratically-moving tripping hazards.

I was very proud of myself for only bumping into one, who didn't fall because I selflessly and heroically fell down instead, then limped around with my damp leg for the rest of the afternoon. Here's the crew:

Finally, Kinzie and Amber decided to practice their twirls! Such grace, such beauty.

Then it started to rain in earnest so we headed back to our respective homes, after agreeing to meet for a rock opera that break-dancing Alex was crewing for that evening. It was at the university and it was AWESOME, albeit really really weird. Shirtless vocalist/guitarist with musicians in tuxes and masks, singing in English with French supertitles about breaking free from society's rules and not being sheeps (English plurals are hard). But the music was great, the keyboards especially, and there was a theremin! Which is my favorite instrument ever just because of the sci-fi factor. Here's the show's link if you'd like to experience the insanity for yourself: http://www.echoes-rachel.fr.nf/

Then after that, Kinzie, Amber, Logan and I went to the Boîte à Bières because it's my favorite bar in all of Rouen. Very low-key - people are there to talk, not to try to take people home, so you don't have to dress up and it's pretty quiet and there is a 12-page menu of beers and you can get sausage for a snack! So we stayed there until closing time, just enjoying the beer and the company and talking about everything under the sun. Then we wandered around and discovered a little tiny street with an arch over it that I had never seen before, so we had to explore that, and then we kept trying to say goodbye and failing miserably, and we didn't actually get home until after 3. I have such good friends.

Sunday was pretty relaxed because of the sleep deprivation and the POURING RAIN that started 5 minutes before we were going to leave for the market... So no market for us. The rain did stop later, though, and we went out to the Christmas market near the cathedral and bought some roasted chestnuts and mulled wine and enjoyed the festive spirit and pretty lights.

Then I had a pretty uneventful week at school, except for Friday, when I got to bake Christmas cookies with half of my favorite class! I gave them the recipe in English and told them to speak English the whole time and they did remarkably well. At first they were shocked when I finished mixing the dough with my hands, but after 15 minutes they'd all gotten into rolling and cutting and decorating. They were helpful and funny and they asked great questions and I want to take them all home with me... I'm so glad I get to see them every week!

Friday night was the first night of Hanukkah, so my part-Jewish roommate Megan and my fascinated-by-all-things-Jewish roommate Lauryn and I had a Hanukkah party! Megan made amazing latkes (and had to grate all the potatoes with our laughably small grater, for which she deserves an award), Lauryn brought delicious cinnamon star cookies, Logan and I made kugel, and Kinzie made matzah ball soup. Then we realized that we didn't have a dreidel, so Kinzie made one out of matzah meal!

But we didn't have much matzah, so the dreidel went into the pot as a matzah ball. Then I realized that we only had 3 bowls, so we got creative:

Then we improvised some yarmulkes for the boys:

Everything came out beautifully, despite the improvisations, and we mumbled the blessing and stuffed ourselves silly and drank most of the alcohol in the house and sat around talking until the wee hours.

Kinzie also whittled us a dreidel out of a cork, because that woman has mad skillz.

Finally we had to kick everyone out at about 2, because Logan and I had to wake up at 5 to catch our 6 am train to Paris, and thence to Frankfurt! To be continued...

Thanksgiving!

2009-12-06T22:13:00.002+01:00

Yes, did you not get the memo? Thanksgiving is now celebrated in December. Yupyup.

...

Okay, so I'm really just a horrible procrastinator and have not gotten around to writing about the absolutely phenomenal Thanksgiving celebration we had at Kinzie's apartment. So here we go!

On Thanksgiving, I got to school to plan lessons for a bit, then went to lunch. Because of a group of American high-schoolers who were visiting, the cafeteria had made "Thanksgiving dinner"! There was turkey with airelles, which are huckleberries. Or maybe bilberries. Or perhaps whortleberries. My dictionary doesn't even know. In any case, they're the closest thing to cranberries that exists on this continent, and they're pretty good, just smaller. Because everything is bigger in America, as I tell my students. There was also Waldorf salad (with a helpful explanatory note, because the French kids were confused), spicy potatoes, and lemon meringue pie, all of which was incredibly good. It was really sweet of the cafeteria workers to do that - we all appreciated it very much.

After lunch, I had 4 hours of class in a row, so I did 4 hours of Thanksgiving lessons in a row. I showed the kids a lot of pictures of foods and of my family ("This is my cousin, and that's one of my aunts, and my uncle, and another aunt, and another cousin, and a few more uncles..." "Madame? Vous... euh, you 'ave a very large family?" "Yes, my father is one of eight children." "QUOI? Euh... what?") and of Bush pardoning the turkey because this picture is absolutely priceless:

So the lessons went pretty well - it got a bit noisy but the kids were interested for the most part. I was exhausted, though, so when I went home I had to relax a bit before starting to make the pear crumble I'd promised for the meal.

The crumble finished baking 3 minutes before we had to leave, so my roommates and I set out for Kinzie's house, a few minutes away. Lauryn made cranberry relish that had apples and walnuts and other delicious things in it, and Megan made green beans with garlic and almonds that made the whole house smell like buttery garlic. We were definitely already in a Thanksgiving mood. When we arrived at Kinzie's, we met her mother, grandmother, and little brother, who are all incredibly lovely people. Sharing Thanksgiving with them was truly special, because it felt like they all adopted us for the day when we couldn't spend it with our own families. Kinzie's roommates Fabi (Costa Rican) and Xiao Liu (Chinese) were also there, as well as another American assistant, Darcy. And the food... Kinzie's family had been cooking all week, I swear, and Fabi made goat cheese and caramelized onion appetizers, and Xiao Liu made sautéed mushrooms and eggplant, and there were mashed potatoes and cornbread and real stuffing and noodles and carrots and olives and asparagus and oh my sweet lord in heaven it was all SO GOOD. I apologize for the blurriness but I was, understandably I think, a tad eager to eat at that point:

Also, there was way more alcohol there than at my family's Thanksgivings, which is a tradition I may just have to bring back - I brought my Calvados & Crème from last year (it tastes a bit like Bailey's) and my Bénédictine (sweet nectar of the gods) and there was wine and cider and it was nice.

Here is my plate, photographed while we were going around the room saying what we were thankful for:

It was a bilingual party, so everyone who could said what they were thankful for in French for Xiao Liu and Fabi, and then Kinzie translated for her family. It was wonderful to hear everybody's heartfelt thanks, especially since we were all away from home and needing our traditions. I am so lucky to be in France, in Rouen, and to have met all these incredible people. Especially incredible people who eat Thanksgiving with chopsticks:

"I'm much more comfortable like this!" she says.

So we ate and drank and ate some more and drank and had dessert (my crumble came out beautifully!) and talked about France and the US and our families and all in all it was one of the best Thanksgivings I've ever had. Sometimes you have to change your traditions a little to figure out what exactly a holiday means to you, and I've never felt this thankful to be where I am, doing what I'm doing, with the people I'm with. Life is good.

More Photos!

2009-11-24T17:33:00.000+01:00

Hello again my faithful readers, this just to give links to a few Facebook photo albums of what I've been doing lately.

First, the Foire St-Romain, which is perhaps the best thing ever:
Oh carnivals, how I love you

Second, photos taken during a walk/goof-off session with Logan and Kinzie:
I <3 my friends
And a story to accompany them: After we had exhausted the hilarity of the merry-go-round-ish thing (go look at the photos, it's quicker than explaining) we hopped off, tottering slightly, and were accosted by the Frenchman who'd been watching us with amusement the whole time. "Hey, aren't you guys too old for that?" Kinzie and I replied, simultaneously, with "Bah non! Jamais! You're never too old for that sort of thing!" and continued our walk. Mystify at least one French person per day and your life will never be boring!

Le Havre: it doesn't suck quite as much as I thought it would

2009-11-22T13:55:00.001+01:00

And we’re back to posting in not-so-real time… I started this post a few weeks ago and am only getting back to finish it now. So I’ll stick dates in to make things clearer.

Franglophone Fou has arrived! I went to pick him up at the airport on Wednesday (Nov. 4), which went off without a hitch (except when I got un tout petit peu lost… Shush. Charles de Gaulle is big and complicated). Here we are being cute on the train:

Sitting a few seats in front of us was my chorus director! She recognized me and said hi, although I have a feeling she was trying desperately to place me.

Logan was too jet-lagged to do anything much, but we did manage to cook dinner (roasted vegetable and goat cheese sandwiches again, because that’s never going to get old) before he went to bed. Then he was off to Le Havre on Thursday to meet his teachers, one of whom graciously offered to pick him up at the station.

On Friday (Nov. 6), I headed off to Le Havre after my last class. About 20 minutes before we were meant to reach Le Havre, I noticed that the train was traveling more and more slowly. “Ah well, I imagine we’re going through a town or a small station – we’ll speed up again soon,” I thought gaily. An announcement came on and I snatched my headphones off to hear: “Ladies and gentlemen, because of [incomprehensible french word], our train will go more slowly than usual. Please excuse the inconvenience.” At this point, I looked out the window and saw a small lake alongside the train, then saw a signpost sticking out of the lake. Wait… Something is not right. No, that’s not a lake, that’s a road. Perhaps that incomprehensible French word was “flooding”? My guess was confirmed immediately by the sight of a warehouse with water past its foundation. The tracks were clear, though, so the Petit Train Who Could continued chugging gamely on. Then the train stopped. Completely. Nowhere near a station or a town or anything. Another announcement: “Ladies and gentlemen, because of flooding and mud, only one track is open. Trains are taking turns, and we’re waiting for a train from Le Havre to come through so we can continue. Please be patient; the SNCF apologizes for the inconvenience.” Annoyed rumbles from passengers – I texted Logan and plugged back into my iPod. Half an hour later, the other train whooshed through and we limped on our way. I arrived in Le Havre about an hour late, and Logan was there to guide me through the rain and wind and ickiness. Because it was raining, of course – what were you expecting? Bienvenue en Normandie!

We took the bus back to Logan’s prison cell (not entirely an exaggeration) and made a lovely romantic dinner with the cheapest stuff we could find at the Super-U down the road. Also, the previous tenant (also an English assistant) had left wine glasses! La classe, hein?

The next day, we were very lazy (I blame jet-lag and the presence of Logan’s external drive and its oodles and oodles of movies and TV shows) and stayed in most of the day, only looking out the window to confirm that yes, it was raining. Again. At one point, the sound of the rain changed and we looked outside to see:

Yes, that’s hail. It continued for about 5 minutes, then stopped, and then the sun came out and it turned quite nice, although a bit windy. We decided to take advantage of this to go downtown and buy Logan a shiny new French cell phone. Handily, there were four cell phone stores in a row on a street near the Hôtel de Ville, so comparison shopping was very easy. After looking at every single pre-paid phone in every single store (and playing with all of them, too, which amused the saleslady to no end – I tried to explain that the feel of a phone is very important but she just kept looking at Logan incredulously) Logan ended up getting a very sexy slidey phone (you know, the kind where the top part slides up to reveal the rest of the keypad) which he still never stops playing with. We wandered around downtown a bit and found this awesome pedestrian bridge:

The next day (Sunday the 8th), we walked to a bakery we’d discovered the day before that is open on Sunday afternoons (Hallelujah!) to buy a baguette. Here is Logan, looking as French as you can get:

We walked down to the ocean to have a picnic, where we saw an adorable dog, chasing stones into the surf:

The ocean view was also pretty spectacular:

We had noticed lots of signs pointing to various tourist attractions and giving the walking time, so we thought we’d follow the ones saying “Jardins suspendus” (hanging gardens) because it sounded cool. They pointed us up a hill

and said “Jardins suspendus – 15 min”. Fifteen minutes? We can do that, we’re young and strong. Ten minutes later, nowhere near anything and with the signs still saying 10 minutes to the gardens, we started to doubt their accuracy, but figured we might as well keep going.

As we were walking up (and up and up), we spotted a little boy in a pirate hat, lion’s-mane-yellow velveteen coat, and rubber boots wielding a blunderbuss and running around. Fighting back jealousy and an urge to tell his father how awesome he was, we continued on to the gardens, which were closed. There are greenhouses and other things there, though, so we’re planning to go back in the spring. So as not to waste the walk, we headed out to a lookout point, where we found le petit pirate again! This time, we noticed that he had a leather belt and a Jolly Roger sash criss-crossed across his chest as well. Best. Costume. Ever. He and his (sadly uncostumed) friend were looking out to sea, shouting to their fathers about what they saw. “Daddy, look! It’s a pirate ship! I can go on it because I’m a pirate!”

(Pirate ship is teeny-tiny, clearly planning to board the cargo ship next to it.)
“Yes, you can. What do you see on the pirate ship?”
“Nothing, it’s too far away!”
“Look closer, I’m sure you’ll spot something.”
“Oh! Cannons, of course!”
“Yes, well done! But now we have to go home…”
The boys ignored him, of course, so out came the parental manipulation:
“Hey boys, who has the treasure map?”
“I do, I do!” (waving a piece of paper)
“So, do you think the pirates are on the ship? Or perhaps they’ve gotten off and are sneaking inland to our house to steal our treasure!”
“Oh no!” (running back to the car)

So that pretty much made our day. Then it was back to home sweet prison cell, and thence to Rouen on Monday (since I have Mondays free).

Fécamp !

2009-10-30T13:26:00.009+01:00

I went to Fécamp last year, at the very end of the year, but never blogged about it because I am lazy. So this year the procrastination bull is being taken by the horns, and this post is the first in what will hopefully be a long line of travel posts that get written very soon after I return from said travels.

Well, we can hope, can't we?

Fécamp is a relatively small town (about 20,000 inhabitants) on the Normandy coast, a little northeast of Etretat. Not only does it have pretty cliffs and pebbly beaches and Norman charm, it also has a palace! But not a royal palace; no no, this palace was built for advertising, pure and simple. You see, in 1510, a Venetian monk named Dom Bernardo Vincelli brought exotic herbs and spices with him to the Fécamp abbey. Dom Bernardo became the abbey's pharmacist and created a "health elixir" from these plants and spices. This elixir was used in the abbey until the French Revolution (no mention of how alcoholic the stuff was at the time, but if it's anything like it is now, it certainly had some medicinal purposes...). Then the recipe was lost until a businessman, Alexandre Le Grand, saw that he could make a killing from "rediscovering" this lost recipe, steeped in ancient lore. So in the late 1800s, Le Grand created Bénédictine, an amber-colored liqueur made from 27 plants and spices (not distilled essence of Benedictine monk, as I thought at first. So no Brother Cadfaels were harmed in the making of this drink). Being a savvy businessman, he trademarked it (waaaaay ahead of his time), started to export it (the Palais de la Bénédictine is still the only place on earth that it's made), paid talented graphic designers to make posters and stained-glass windows advertising it, and built this ridiculous Gothic-Renaissance palace to promote his brand:

So yeah, the guy took his brand seriously. It paid off, though - 150 years later, Bénédictine is still widely sold, exported all over the world, and blogged about by silly expat Americans. There are worse fates. Also, it's delicious (full disclosure: I am drinking some as I blog. For inspiration, of course. The inspiration that only 80-proof liquor can provide).

Before I get into the palace and its museum, however, I will share the rest of our excursion. Ben, Lauryn and I took a train and a bus from Rouen to Fécamp. We disembarked, then realized that we had no idea where to go, not having any maps. But wait Lisa, didn't you say you'd been there before? Why yes, dear reader, I have. I didn't know where to go last time, either. Brave Ben found a map, which directed us to the tourist office, which directed us in turn to some viewpoints. So we set off on the route highlighted for us, which took us to this path:

Certain of finding homeless people around every corner, we bravely entered the mysterious doorway and confronted the narrow, winding path. Also, there were stairs. Lots and lots of stairs. Halfway up, I paused to document how far we'd come:

Then we encountered a helpful tourist information board, which told us that this path, up which we had been huffing and puffing, was the very same path up which pilgrims and sailors would climb, sometimes on their knees or in bare feet, to reach the chapel at the top. Didn't stop us from whining, though.

Finally, we reached the chapel, which was quite lovely.

The real draw, however, was the view; cliffs, village, ocean, beach.

We walked along the cliffs for quite some time, taking oodles of pictures of all sorts of lovely views (more pics here)

until we got hungry and had to head back down. Ben had invited an Estonian friend, Nikita, who in turn brought his Canadian friend Kaylee (no, she hasn't heard of Firefly). They got to Fécamp just as we returned to town, so we met them and set out to find lunch. We were planning on going to a bakery, a cheese shop, and a butcher shop to make our own sandwiches, but because this is France everything closes at lunchtime, just when you'd want food. So some of us went to the one open bakery and got pre-made sandwiches, and some of us found the one kebab place and got greasy, lamb-y, delicious kebabs. Oh how I have missed them. We hiked to the beach to eat,

and then the bravest member of the group went wading!

Also, because of the stones, the waves make a really neat tinkly sound as they recede, from all the pebbles moving around. I tested the video function of my camera to try to capture it:

Yes, the cameraman is a scaredy-cat. Now shush.

Next, we hiked to the Palais de la Bénédictine, which is Fécamp's real claim to fame. It has a museum of sacred art, as well as a "how Bénédictine is made" section. One of the museum's highlights was the stained-glass window made to advertise Bénédictine:

Yes, that is an angel bringing Alexandre Le Grand a bottle of Bénédictine. Because he must have had divine inspiration to create something so delicious! Or something...

I also liked the small room of engraved manuscripts, which were so gorgeous and detailed that it's hard to believe they were created by people. By candle-light, no less.

The second part of the museum, having to do with the fabrication of Bénédictine, was a little more interesting. First, we walked through a room full of herbs and spices, showing where they come from and what they're used for. There were bowls and jars full of them, as well as these works of art:

The ceiling of this room had 5 stained-glass advertisements for Bénédictine. I wish advertising were still this luxurious and well-designed...

Then, it was down to the basement, where the magic actually happens. There's an incredibly complicated process, involving four different mixtures of herbs, which are distilled and aged separately before being mixed together, aged again, having honey and other things added, then finally aged some more. All I really took away from it, though, were the dozens of huge oak barrels:

There's a little sign at the top saying "14,000 litres". And there were a bunch of these! All this big!

Then it was down into a deeper basement with smaller barrels, connected by some gorgeous red piping, labeled with enameled plaques. The French just do it better:

By this time, some of us were really ready for the free tasting that awaited us at the end of the visit:

Here we are!

And the gorgeous amber liquid itself:

Then, of course, there was the boutique, where I restrained myself (I still have most of the bottle I bought last year) and only bought one postcard and a bag of Bénédictine bonbons. We tore into the candy on the way home, ensuring constant entertainment from the quiet shrieks as the candy part melted, giving way to the much stronger Bénédictine flavor.

Thus ends the lovely trip to Fécamp. I love that I can just decide that I want to go to the coast, hop on a train, and get there in about an hour for under ten euros. France, je t'aime.

Partner in Crime, and Other Updates

2009-10-25T14:20:00.005+01:00

Oh dearie me so much to catch up on!

First, and most exciting, Franglophone Fou (well, he's really more of an anglophone at the moment, but that's going to change rapidly) is coming to join me in the joyous insanity of being an English assistant in France! Franglophone Fou, aka Logan, managed to nab the last English assistant spot in the region, in Le Havre. It's less than an hour away from Rouen by train, and he has free housing there; we both got really really lucky. So I've spent the last few weeks translating oodles of e-mails from French to English and English to French, summarizing visa requirements, and generally smoothing the path for him, since I've done it all twice now and I speak French. The translating has been really fun - it's pretty straightforward stuff, but it's still satisfying when a certain phrase clicks just right in one of the languages.

Second, my chest x-ray and medical visit both went swimmingly (this time it was a woman who didn't pull up my shirt and didn't lecture me about having scoliosis, so definitely an improvement from last year) except that they didn't have the little sticker to put in my passport, so I have to go back to collect that tomorrow. This year, instead of having to go to the oh-so-intimidating Préfecture to get our titres de séjour, they've streamlined the process and all we need is the sticker! So as of tomorrow I will be all set with the immigration office, and the only paperwork I'll have left will be for Sécurité Sociale.

Third, we have Internet now! Well, we've actually had it for about a week and a half, which may or may not be why there have been no blog posts for a while... I am a very easily distractible person, and part of me (related to the part that still thinks I'll eventually read every book in the world) likes to catch up daily on every single web page I read regularly. This, obviously, poses a problem, but it's getting better.

Fourth, I've started teaching for real, and this year I got the idea (from one of our training days) to say that my classroom is a little tiny part of the USA, so when the students walk in, they speak English and everybody's happy! It worked the first few classes, so we shall see how it goes as they become more comfortable with me and less intimidated, and therefore chat more. The students are much the same as last year - some are amazingly motivated and adorable, and some quite simply hate English (one boy actually said, when the teacher asked if he had heard where I come from in the US, "Non, mais on s'en fout, quoi" (No, I didn't, but I don't give a shit anyway). What a lovely way to start class!). I did run into two of my best students from last year out and about in Rouen; both of them approached me, remembered my name, and chatted for a bit in English! It's those students that make it all worthwhile.

Fifth, I finally cleaned up my room, so I can now share before and after photos. The night I arrived:

I know, I know, the horror, the horror. It didn't stay like that for long, but then I just shoved everything into my closet or onto my shelves or my desk, and things stayed there for waaaaaaaaay longer than I'd like to admit. But then life got much prettier when I finally just girded my loins and dealt with it, with these happy results:

Hooray for clean rooms! Living here will (I fervently hope) make it easier for me to get rid of things back home that I haven't used in ages, because I can live quite happily on everything I have here. Except I do miss my sewing machine... and my lap desk... and my comforter cover... Okay, I will never be a minimalist, and I'm at peace with that.

Sixth and finally, I went on my biggest market trip so far this year, having a few recipes in mind. First, a roasted vegetable and goat cheese sandwich for lunch, which turned out beautifully if I do say so myself:

I cut part of an onion and half a zucchini into slabs, drizzled them with olive oil, and chucked them into the oven for a bit (a red pepper joined them later). Then I took my plain fresh goat cheese (not the kind with a rind) and added lemon zest, oregano, and thyme. Put that all together, along with some salad greens, on good fresh bread and you have happiness in the palm of (or in this case, all over) your hand. Yumyumyum.

I also bought persimmons, which my Russian roommate from last year introduced me to. The nice man at the stall asked me when I wanted to eat them and picked out a nice range of ripeness so they won't all go bad at once, a service that is very common at the market and incredibly useful. One looked like it was about to burst from juicy sweetness, so I ate that one today and it was very good. Once you get your mind wrapped around eating something that looks like a tomato but tastes sweeter than any other fruit I know of, persimmons are delicious.

On the way home, I screwed my courage to the sticking point and went into the poissonnerie whose oysters and mussels and clams always look so good and yet so scary. I tend to become a vegetarian when I cook for myself, only because cooking meat frightens me deeply, so I'm trying to conquer that fear. My recipe is for bronzed sea bass with lemon-shallot butter (from The Pioneer Woman, who is hilarious and wonderful and has really good recipes). I couldn't find "sea bass" in my online dictionary, but the Pioneer Woman, always helpful, said that halibut or salmon would work too. Armed with the French translations of those varieties (flétan and saumon, for those of you who care), I stepped into the briny world of lobsters, scallops, and more whole fish staring at me than I've ever seen in one place. There were even flounder! Being all flat! The only fish they had available as a filet was something called "cabillaud", but it was white and looked innocuous enough, so I bought a small chunk and headed home, my reusable pink shopping bag full to bursting with fresh delectables. After making my delicious delicious sandwich, I decided to look up what kind of fish I'd actually bought. "Cabillaud", I typed into my trusty French-English dictionary. "Cod", it told me. Oh. Good to know. Here's hoping cod works with my recipe...

Wow, this is kind of turning into a cooking blog. Sorry about that. I just really enjoy having enough time to plan meals and shop for them at the market - I feel all grown-up and French!

Comment dit-on "jury-rig" en français?

2009-10-05T08:40:00.003+01:00

I have arrived! Got here with absolutely no problems, despite the complexity of my means of transport (bus, plane, plane, bus, walk through Paris with gigantic bags, train, car) and the escalator at the Rouen train station was working! (In the past, the likelihood of the escalator’s working was inversely proportional to the size of my bags.) Anne, my professeur référent, invited my American flatmate Lauryn and me to dinner, which was lovely, and then I went back to my apartment and slept for 12 hours.

Speaking of the apartment… it’s just downstairs from the one last year, and since it’s not right under the roof, it’s much bigger and nicer (carpeted bedrooms!). It’s still free, and we have another American flatmate, Megan. So it’s all USA, all the time, instead of the mini UN last time.

Friday was the welcome day for all the assistants, and this year 11 of us renewed, which is an unprecedented number (thank you stock market crash) so they read our names to the whole auditorium! After hearing about all the paperwork, which was just as confusing the second time around, a few of us went out for drinks and I had my first demi-pêche in months. Oh, how I have missed demi-pêches… After that, I went back home and fixed my curtains so they don’t drag on the ground, and now my room looks mildly more civilized, at least.

Saturday, Lauryn and I tried to start the phone/Internet process, but will have to wait for some paperwork. It shouldn’t take as long this year, but I’m still betting it’ll be November before we get us some sweet Internet love. Also, the McDonald’s no longer has wifi, due to construction, and my old favorite Internet café has doubled its prices, so until I figure out a new routine, don’t count on regular anything. Hooray France!

After the phone disappointment, our other flatmate, Megan, called to invite us to lunch with her teacher, the teacher’s boyfriend, the teacher’s two sisters, and assorted other teachers and significant others. We went to a lovely little restaurant called Le bistroquet, where I had a salade de mer. It had lettuce, tomatoes, smoked herring, smoked salmon, and this really delicious seaweed that wasn’t too briny. The three of us tried to keep up with the rapid, slangy French conversation, but really only talked when one of the Frenchies took pity on us and asked us a direct question. There were lots of grammar jokes, so my little nerdy self felt right at home.

Saturday night, I finally decided to tackle the closet problem: no rod (seriously, French people care so much about their clothes that I fail to understand why NONE OF MY CLOSETS EVER HAVE RODS IN THEM). I had bought some cheap rods that were meant for curtains (all I could find, in three different stores), some fishing line, and some screws, and my closet already has adjustable shelves, so I had a plan. First, though I had to take the sliding doors off the closet to be able to get at everything. No problem, right? I’ll just yank. Except that they weighed a ton, and I had to figure out the mechanism so I’d be able to put them back on. So I pushed and pulled and slid and finally got one out, staggered across my room with it to put it out of the way, and turned my attention to the other one. Same process, except this time something fell off the top. And the bottom. Uh-oh. By careful inspection of the other side of the door, I managed to shove everything back into place, but the bottom piece (the part with the wheel that rolls along the track – rather essential to a sliding door’s function) kept falling out. Well, I’ll deal with that later, I thought, and turned back to the closet to tackle the straightforward task of getting the shelves out. They were just resting on three brackets, the brackets hooked onto vertical tracks to allow adjustment, so I simply lift the shelves out, pop out the brackets, and replace the brackets and shelves where I want them, right? Well, no. Nothing is ever that easy in France. First, the shelves were particle board, and I swear each one weighed as much as a small cow. Second, the shelves were cut to the full width of the closet, despite the slight jamb on one side, so much angling and tipping and near-dropping of shelves and grunting was required. Finally I got them out, set them aside, and adjusted the brackets. My plan was to put one shelf as low as it would go, then attach the rods to the bottom of the other and place it high enough above the first to be able to hang clothes. Next problem: how to attach the rods. Here is where the title of the post really starts to mean something; I present to you my wardrobe.

The magic floating closet rod! Oh wait, the only magic here is the magic of modern synthetics.

Yes, those are screws with nylon fishing line tied in (bowline) knots around them and threaded through the rods. I’m officially changing my name to MacGyver tomorrow. If this doesn’t work, I have other plans, but everything has stayed up for over 24 hours now, and everything that needs to hang is hung, so I’m calling this project good.

Except wait… weren’t there doors on the closet? Oh right, there they are, patiently leaning against the wall waiting for me to restore them to their rightful place. I taped up the mechanism on the bottom that kept falling down, which worked a treat, and cajoled/shoved/begged/pushed the doors back into place. And almost tipped over backwards doing so, as they’re floor-to-ceiling doors and we have 8-foot ceilings. Then I untaped the doohickey and lo and behold they slid! French closets 0, Lisa 2 (see last year’s entry).

Sunday was market day, as always, so I took my flatmates and off we went. Everything is just as I remember, down to the locations of the stalls and the fresh chèvre with cracked pepper on top (France, I love you so much). I got zucchinis and onions and chèvre and a demi-baguette and cider-apple bread and will now proceed to eat myself silly. Oh, how I have missed France.

And the insanity continues...

2009-09-17T00:46:00.002+01:00

I'm going back! To Rouen! To my same school! To my same free apartment! Ouaaaaaaiiiiiiiiis !

Will the second year of teaching mostly ungrateful French 15-year-olds English grammar and vocabulary be as entertaining as the last? Will I get Internet in less than 3 months this time? Will I overstuff myself on cheese and baguettes and pains aux raisins? (Okay, I already know the answer to that one.) Will I become completely unable to speak English? Will I actually come back permanently to the US and get a real job afterwards? Stay tuned to find out!

Things I Love About France, or PLEASE DON'T MAKE ME LEAVE I WON'T GO I WON'T GO I WON'T GO

2009-04-06T16:47:00.002+01:00

I've got two days of nearly complete unexpected free time, because my regular teachers on Mondays and Tuesdays are in the US with a group of students ("We can't smoke in the US? What do you mean? And they don't do bisous? What kind of godforsaken place are they taking us to?") and my favorite teacher, the one I was going to do a lot of make-up classes with, is sick. So today I decided to get a sandwich and sit out by the Seine for a bit to enjoy the springtime weather. And now, while the so-American-it-hurts oatmeal-raisin cookies I'm making for a Hispano-Franco-Germano-American dinner party tonight cool, I'll type up some of the things that have made me happy lately.

Old men playing pétanque in the gardens of the Hôtel de Ville every sunny afternoon; you can tell they've been coming to the same place at the same time with the same friends and the same beer for decades, and will continue until either their last breath or until they can't properly throw the pétanque ball, whichever comes first.
Young men playing pétanque in the gardens of the Hôtel de Ville every sunny afternoon who will grow up to become the old men; let the circle be unbroken.
The trip-trap, trip-trap of high heels clicking on the street, setting up a unique French-city rhythm (extra points if the street is cobblestone and the women remain unfazed).
French couples cuddling in parks, by the Seine, on benches, because they're young and French and in love and really, does it offend anyone all that much?
Chèvre paninis eaten by the Seine on a sunny day, washed down not with a Coke, but with a Coca (I swear, it tastes different if you call it a Coca).
Inventing French words that make enough sense to make French people laugh, like "Let me combobulate myself" in English. Most recently, I was following a teacher "louchement" - sketchily, creepily - and we laughed for a good five minutes. Louchement should totally be a word.
The fact that one of my French friends has a scar on his forehead from a pétanque ball that bounced wrong when he was 8. Seriously. How much more French can you get?
Trees! Blossoming! Everywhere! Forsythia, magnolia, and a bunch of others I can't identify so I just call them purty.
Awesome European friends, some of whom are close enough that I now have couches to crash on in France, Germany, England, Spain, and Italy, among others.

Fête Internationale !

2009-03-29T02:40:00.003+01:00

So, I just got back from an international party at the Italian, Spanish, German, Chinese, and Columbian girls' apartment (où je me suis un tout petit peu bourrée la gueule, mais bon c'est une histoire pour un autre jour, ou pour jamais) where there were two Italians, two Spaniards, two Germans, two Chinese girls, one Belgian, one English guy, five Mexicans, and me. And as I was walking home, I realized that I can't remember the last time I spoke to a truly monolingual person. Sure, there are people here whose second language isn't very good, but even those are few and far between. And people who speak three languages nearly fluently are actually quite common. It's just such a change from the US, where speaking even a few words of another language is so rare.

And I sense that this could go on, but really my half-drunk musings are only interesting to me, so I'm cutting myself off. Only three more weeks of teaching, and only 7 more weeks in France! They'll have to drag me away kicking and screaming - I don't want to leave. Especially now that I've started to make French friends.

Vampires!

2009-03-11T16:06:00.002+01:00

They attacked me! Oh no!

And by "vampires" I of course mean the lovely people at the Etablissement français du sang (French Blood Organization), and by "attacked" I mean that I went there voluntarily to give blood. I would like to say that it's because I'm selfless and a good person and all that, but I think really I was just curious about what kinds of snacks they would serve afterwards (I was not disappointed).

I had called up before vacation to find out if I could still donate, being a foreigner and all, and the woman barely listened to me before asking if I wanted to come in and donate that day. I couldn't then, but I set up an appointment for today. So on Monday night I made myself a hamburger - I even found Worcestershire sauce! - and last night I had lentils, in an attempt to get my hematocrit up to normal-people levels (although in France it only has to be 12 for women, and I think in the US it has to be 12.6). Then I looked up the questionnaire online to make sure I knew what they'd be asking me (you'd think that the word for malaria would be "malarie", but no, it's "paludisme"), drank my weight in water, and set off for the collection center.

They of course had no record of me in their system, so everyone thought I was a first-time donor, but luckily I had my American Red Cross donor card, so I showed them that and they were reassured that I wasn't going to faint on them or anything. The doctor who did the mini-physical loves English, so he was really excited to see me and conducted most of the exam in really good English, aside from a few medical terms he didn't know. He also asked if he could have my e-mail so he could practice his English with me, so I gave it to him and we'll see if he follows up. My hematocrit was 12.4, so that was good, and everything else was fine. On to the ickiest part!

All the women working in the blood-drawing area were wearing white coats with skirts, tights, and boots. Welcome to France. The procedure was mostly the same, except that to my great delight they used alcohol instead of iodine to clean my arm, so I don't have a gigantic sticky brown stain to deal with. Also, they didn't bother to cover the needle with a gauze pad - apparently the French have a stronger constitution than we weak Americans and can stand to look at a needle poking into their arm. I even watched as it went in, so I felt quite brave. I was also given water to drink while donating, which I swear helps it go faster, and we had chairs instead of those stupid bed-like things the Red Cross is now using in the US that make me get a wicked head rush when I'm finished. So the donation went without a hitch, they filled all their little sample tubes, and I got to go through the door marked "Restauration".

There was a whole little kitchen, with a stove and microwave and everything, and the nice woman working there asked what I would like to drink - they had hot drinks, fruit juice, iced tea, mineral water, and even Coke (although I don't know about the wisdom of serving a diuretic to people who've just lost a pint of fluid). So I got pineapple juice, and then she asked if I wanted some apple tart with it. Which of course I did. So she brings all this out on a little tray, with real dishes, and then I notice the little basket of Petits Ecoliers and madeleines and apricot-filled cookies sitting on the table right next to the basket of individually-wrapped portions of Président cheese and butter. The apple tart was delicious, as were the two other kinds of cookies I tried. France definitely wins in the snack department.

Then it was back to the bus and back home to eat more lentils and drink my weight in water again. This is the best I've ever felt after a donation, and I don't know if it was just because I really paid attention to drinking water, or because I could sit up during it (seriously, Red Cross, get a clue), or because of the apple tart, but I'm seriously considering going back in two months, right before I leave, because why not? Maybe they'll have something chocolate next time...

Whirlwind Tour

2009-03-02T00:29:00.002+01:00

Okay, so I'm back from Lyon safe and sound (and probably about eight pounds fatter - we ate a truly inconceivable amount of food). And I would post about it now, except that I'm leaving for AMSTERDAM in about 6 hours. Woo! There will be posts about Lyonnais food and museums and Roman ruins (never let three girls loose on sparsely-fenced ruins with cameras) later, but now I'm going to go unpack and repack and try to remember my towel this time.

Adorable Children, Oatmeal Cookies, Peanut Butter, and Aerobics

2009-02-18T21:54:00.005+01:00

As I predicted, the advent of Internet in my apartment heralded the advent of Lisa-never-posts-on-her-blog-anymore-itis as well. I do apologize, and I will try to get better (as the novelty of Internet wears off more and more - really, one can only check Lifehacker once a day).

So, a few vignettes, in no particular order. (I like vignette postings because I don't have to actually organize my thoughts or think of transition sentences or anything. If only you could write papers this way.)

A few weeks ago, a fellow assistant named Ben told me that one of his teachers has a daughter in my school who doesn't get to see the English assistant, and that she would really like to. So I found out her name and class and asked her English teacher if I could come in at least once. The teacher was really excited for me to come, so last week I did the question-and-answer session yet again, for a class of 15-year-olds. They were adorable - really enthusiastic, and even the ones who weren't very good asked lots of questions. After class, the girl who had requested my coming in came up and said, in English, "Ben said you were really nice and it was true!" Unfortunately by the time the idiotic grin had disappeared from my face and I could once again formulate a coherent sentence, she had left the room, but hopefully next time I see her I'll be able to thank her properly. That made my week.

Last Friday, I decided to have a "Soirée Princess Bride" at my house, so I invited a bunch of assistant friends (it ended up being mostly Americans, with Ben, who's English, as our token European) over to watch The Princess Bride and eat oatmeal cookies and drink milk. All I did Friday was bake cookies, clean the house, tidy my room, and rearrange the living room furniture, and now I totally understand the Pre-Party Panic that grips my mother before parties. What if there's not enough food? What if there's not enough to drink? What if the cookies don't turn out? What if nobody has fun? What if they think the movie's stupid? I will never make fun of her again. I understand. Fortunately, everything came out beautifully, even the oatmeal cookies with their European substitutions (real brown sugar and vanilla extract are impossible to find in this country), and my friend Christine brought fresh cow's milk that she buys directly from the farmer and we all had milk and cookies. And muscat, which is a really sweet, really alcoholic wine that I've become addicted to, and after serving it at a few gatherings at my house I'm now known for it. You're supposed to have it as an apéritif, but we tend to drink it whenever the fancy takes us.

My craving for peanut butter, which has been steadily growing in intensity ever since Christmas break, got to the point of no return today and I decided to go on a hunt. A lot of stores sell Skippy, but it'll be a cold day in hell before I think of that as peanut butter. So I went to a new store, near the market where I go every Sunday. It's huge - a real supermarket - so I was very hopeful. First I found the Skippy, right next to the Nutella and all the jams, but I decided to look further. In my methodical, aisle-by-aisle search (I'm not very good at finding things in American grocery stores, let alone French ones) I found chips, lentils, red beans, chickpeas, cereal... Lugging my basket (French stores don't believe in shopping carts) I rounded another corner and found Nirvana: the international foods aisle. It started out with Great Britain, with a helpful Union Jack above the shelves: McVitie's, liquorice allsorts, lemon curd, marmalade, and tea. Then Great Britain sort of merged with the US, and there were Oreos, various salsa/queso substances, and... DR PEPPER. Now, I rarely drink soda, but there in the aisle of the Intermarché it was a sight for sore eyes. I love Dr Pepper. So I picked myself up a can (99 centimes) and scanned the shelves again for peanut butter. There it was... in the British section? It was a brand I didn't know, but it had sugar rather than corn syrup like Skippy, so I figured I'd try something new. I continued down the aisle to the "Asia" section, where China, Japan, India, and various other generically-Eastern cuisines sat side-by-side, and sometimes mixed-up, since clearly they're mostly the same - no distinct cultures or languages or anything (French people have a good deal more unconscious racism than Americans do). I did find some curry powder that looked nice, though. Then it was time to lug everything back home and make myself a peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich to eat with my Dr Pepper. Nothing has ever tasted so good.

Finally, a brief gym incident: during classes the instructor plays a constant high-speed mix of techno remixes of pop songs, a lot of which are in English and very familiar to me. Sometimes this helps, like when I can't do another crunch and "Shut Up and Drive" comes on, and sometimes it totally throws me off, like when I'm trying to remember the step routine and "I Kissed a Girl" comes on and I am compelled to sing along and then I fall off the step. Not so much with the multi-tasking. Today, during cardio dance (basically we just prance around, but I do break a sweat and it's fun) we were going over a particularly difficult skippy bit and an extremely-sped-up version of "Truly Madly Deeply", by Savage Garden, came on. Savage Garden was one of my very first CDs, so in addition to a burst of nostalgia for 7th grade, I had to mouth the words, and therefore messed up. Then I got back on track and managed to mostly ignore the song for a while. Then a new song came on, and it sounded incredibly familiar but I couldn't place it, so while I was trying to figure it out I just flailed about anyhow, occasionally on the beat, to the great amusement of all the French girls in the class, I'm sure. Finally some of the words came through: "I Touch Myself", by the Divinyls. Oh yes. At that point I pretty much went all out with the mouthing along, because why not?

And there you have it: snippets of my wonderful life. I'm on vacation next week, and the week after (woo!) so I'm going to Lyon for a few days, then Amsterdam for 6 days. If anyone has recommendations for either city, let me know!

That 10-year-old girl is wearing high heels and skinny jeans to school…

2009-02-15T22:28:00.001+01:00

...but it's okay, because it's France.

Grève Générale

2009-01-29T20:28:00.002+01:00

Living in France requires learning very quickly which strikes you can ignore and which you can’t. Every week, some union or other calls for a strike; there are posters stuck up on buildings and flyers handed out at the market but nothing interferes with my life at all. So I’d gotten out of the habit of actually reading any of the posters, since the dates on them would usually come and go without the slightest change to my daily routine.

Well, that came to a stop this morning, when our doorbell rang while I was in the shower, getting ready for my 10 am class. A friend of Olesya’s, a student at the lycée, came up to the apartment and explained that the students had blocked the door of the school and no one could get in, so no classes today! But before giving in too much to that old snow-day feeling (there is nothing quite like it in the world) I called my teacher to make sure. “Oh no, it’s not completely closed! You can sneak in the back way – just take Rue des Minimes instead.” Grumble grumble grumble. I told her cheerfully that of course I would be right over. (Note to self: when the signs say "Grève Générale", pay attention - that means the buses don't run either, and even our notoriously lazy and strike-averse school gets into it.)

As soon as I walked out my door (a good 7-minute walk from the school) I could hear the shouting. Part of me wanted to go to the front door of the school, just to see a real French strike, but the sensible part of me that didn’t want to get étripée (gutted) told me just to head up Rue des Minimes. Which I did, to find an older man and a few students, one of whom was mine, standing outside a locked door. “Can we get in this way?” I inquired in French, thus blowing my cover for the student who was there (hey, desperate times, desperate measures). “Yes, someone’s going to come open up for us.” Except that when the door did open, the older man entered and they shut the door in our faces. “But… but… I’m a teacher! I swear! I know I look 18 but really I’m 22 and I’m a teacher!” A few minutes later the door reopened to let someone out, whereupon they let the rest of us in. I still don’t understand, but hey, ours not to reason why, ours but to sigh and say “Welcome to France”.

I made my way to the photocopy room, where the shouting was even louder since it’s near the front entrance. I peered out the window to see a fairly large crowd of students milling about and shouting. There was no organization whatsoever, and the only coherent slogan I heard was “Tous ensemble” (all together). Some of the students were banging on the metal scaffolding near the entrance, just because it made a huge racket with very little point or purpose. So I printed out my lesson plan and went calmly off to the staff room, where everything was just as normal. Michèle and I headed off to class, where there were no students to be found. “Little buggers!” she said. “I saw some of them outside!” Five minutes later, there were still no students to be found, so we decided to head back to the staff room and have coffee. I asked why students were striking – I mean, it’s not like they get paid, or need health insurance, or anything – and the teachers informed me that they want more class hours.

More time spent in school. They’re striking because they want to spend more time (and they already spend 40 hours a week) at school.

Really, the French are beyond comprehension. I love them dearly, but the reasoning behind their whims escapes me, and always will.

I had two more classes, one where half the class showed up (we watched part of Obama’s Inauguration speech – I’m going to have it learned by heart if this continues) and one where none of my three students came, so I used the time to write this blog entry. I also got suckered into coming in on Saturday to make up the class that nobody came to today, so now I have to remember to wake up Saturday morning, after an evening at Emilia’s house where we may or may not play a new drinking game wherein every sentence you utter must contain at least one word in French and one in English. I promise to try to remember the best Franglais to report back here; I have a feeling it’s gonna be good.

Excuses, excuses

2009-01-23T15:04:00.002+01:00

So there are a bunch of French grammar things that I've had trouble with for quite some time. (Translating that sentence, for one--the whole idea of "to have done/been doing something for a certain amount of time" is expressed completely differently in French. They use the present, even though the thing you've been doing started in the past. Wicked confusing.) I always just assumed that they were particularly tricky bits of grammar that I learned once, but not in all their intricacy, so I didn't have a perfect grasp of the details, and I've been asking various long-suffering French people for mini-lessons when I make an error in conversation. Well, I just discovered that I never really properly formally learned all these little grammatical joys, and it all goes back to the French department at my university totally screwing me over freshman year by forcing me to take a French class that was too easy, then making me skip a class so I wouldn't be bored two semesters in a row. In that class that I skipped, one learns the first half of "La grammaire à l'œuvre", a wonderful book whose second half I know practically by heart. I brought the book back to France after vacation, thinking I could use a brush-up, and lo and behold, every single construction I'm a bit shaky on is in the first half. That's my excuse, anyway, and I'm sticking to it. Now, off to study when the past participle agrees with the direct object!

One more sign (tout frais!)

2009-01-20T13:27:00.002+01:00

You say, as I just barely said, "They're called flats because they don't have any talons." ("talon" meaning "heel" in French) Yeah, that one made the English teachers I was talking to laugh for a good five minutes.

Signs you've been in France too long:

2009-01-18T17:02:00.003+01:00

You've developed an inability to complete even the shortest sentence, in French or in English, without at least two, and depressingly often all, of the following words: bah, quoi, or euh. (Bah oui! C'est la France, quoi.)
Paying 4€ per load for laundry seems quite reasonable.
Life without bakeries every 10 meters is not only meaningless but impossible.
These sentences make perfect sense and are perfectly grammatical: "I have a lot of envy to see that movie!" "I have horror of students who chat during the entire class." "I have du mal speaking English now."
You've started to add up your purchases in your head in a store so you can give exact change at the till.
You say "Chut!" instead of "Shhhh!" even when you're speaking English.

More to come, as I think of them...

That man is spitting on the sidewalk…

2008-12-21T10:35:00.001+01:00

...but it's okay, because it's France.

I’m wearing brown boots, black leggings, and a brown top…

2008-12-16T14:27:00.001+01:00

...but it's okay, because it's France.

Vignettes

2008-12-16T14:22:00.003+01:00

All right, so here are some scenes from recent weeks, with no relation to each other other than that they all made me happy.

A few weeks ago, Emilia and I were making our regular Sunday market trip and we stopped at the stand that sells yogurt and fruit juice and such for really really cheap to check what they had that week. The younger man who works there happened to be in front of the stall arranging packages, so he helped us put our juice in our bags (carefully avoiding crushing my chèvre) and generally made himself useful. As we were walking away, we heard him say to his co-worker, “Those are the regulars – they come every week!” So we were happy to be recognized and to have somewhere to be “regulars”. I’m sure it doesn’t hurt that we’re young and foreign and female, either…

And another market vignette: two Sundays ago, Emilia and I were accosted (seriously, we were walking by minding our own business and they started yelling, “Les filles! Les filles! (Girls! Girls!)) by two young men selling cheese, wanting us to taste their wares. So we did, and they told us that it was very good with wine, as an apéritif, and that if we were having a party it was perfect. Then they gave us another one to taste, and said that they really liked it, so we should invite them to the party, and we were all laughing and joking, and the cheese was quite good, so I said I’d get some. One of them jokingly offered me the whole huge chunk, saying, “If you get this one, you’d have enough to invite us over for drinks…” and it was hilarious. I ended up getting a pretty big piece, and since I hadn’t looked at the price per kilo (which was probably their plan) it cost 11€. Cue heart attack, but then “for me” it was only 9€. Which was still a lot, but hey, I got a good story out of it, and Frenchmen make me happy. Then, last Sunday, they recognized us again and waved bits of cheese at us to taste, and we both said that we still had the cheese from last week, but they told us to taste it anyway, we weren’t obligated to buy anything. So we tasted, and they told us it would be good as an apéritif again… So we thanked them and said we’d be back the next week. Next time I’m going to check the prices, though – no more being distracted by flirting!

And, speaking of Frenchmen… A couple weeks ago a French guy invited me out with his friends, telling me to bring Olesya too because “nous sommes de méchants garçons – we are very naughty boys” and he didn’t want me to be all alone. The conversation ranged over many topics, including French stereotypes, American stereotypes, “prudish” Americans (I managed to convince them that not all Americans are uptight), Sarah Palin, history, philosophy, travel stories, and of course sex. We ended up going back to his house and staying there until 3 in the morning, because we were having so much fun. I was absolutely dead the next day, though, because 4 hours of rapid French conversation with older Frenchmen who are only too willing to take whatever you say the wrong way is exhausting. It was hilarious, though, and now he wants me to teach him English. So that’s fun.

And the best English mistake my students have made so far: Michèle is having her classes write surveys about things teenagers are interested in (music, fashion, movies, cell phones, etc), give the surveys to their class, and then analyze and present the results. So I’ve had to listen to dozens of presentations of survey results, some interesting and some not-so-interesting, and help her grade them (grading is hard. I appreciate my own teachers so much more now…). In the Seconde 10 class, which is one of her favorites, a student named Julien, who’s kind of the class clown, was giving a presentation about fashion. He said something like “Zees survey shows zat the testes of teenagers…” The first time he did it, I didn’t really notice, but then he went on to say a few more sentences involving the “testes” of 15-year-olds and it was all I could do to keep from bursting into hysterical laughter. I didn’t want to interrupt his presentation, though, so I didn’t say anything. By the end, I’d kind of forgotten, so we went on to the next presentation. However, the other students had obviously decided that since Julien’s pretty good at English, he knew the correct pronunciation, and at least two other students also said “testes”. By this point I wasn’t sure what to do, so I decided to ask Michèle after class. When I explained to her what “testes” meant, she was shocked – not a word she had learned in school, I guess. Anyway, the next time I saw the class she asked me to tell them. So I wrote “tastes” on the board and had them pronounce it, then wrote “testes = testicles” and explained that that’s how they’d said it in their presentations. Cue about 5 minutes of hysterical laughter from the whole class, including Michèle and me, and Julien blushing beet-red but still laughing as hard as everyone else. It was actually a really great way to break the ice between them and me a little bit, because we could all laugh together about something. And I bet none of them will ever mispronounce “tastes” again.

Finally, a story that sums up the biggest cultural difference between France and the US: My chorale sometimes has all-day rehearsals – the last one was from 10 to 5, and we must have spent at least 2 hours eating lunch, because this is France. Anyway, at rehearsal last Tuesday we were discussing the next all-day rehearsal, and someone suggested starting later, to which there was a general outcry of “But then we’ll only have an hour for lunch! That’s impossible!” Emilia and I just looked at each other, then burst out laughing. Oh, the French.

A Day in the Life of an English Assistant

2008-12-10T12:05:00.001+01:00

So, I just had a really good day, so I thought I’d relive it by describing it, which will also give you an idea of my typical day. Well, kind of typical. I only teach on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays, so this is a typical day 3/7 of the time (well, usually I’m slightly better-prepared):

I wake up at 6:15 (Thursdays are my earliest day), get dressed, eat breakfast (yum Weetabix and yogurt yum) and head to the school, a 7-minute walk away. It’s raining cats and dogs, it’s cold, I’m sleepy, and I have no idea if the activities I’ve prepared for today are going to work, because I thought of both of them the night before… So I'm a little worried. I head to the réprographie (photocopier room) to print out the activities and make copies. Just as I’m finishing, the bell rings for my 8:00 class and I have to race through the rain, into a building, up 50 steps, back into the rain, and into another building, fighting crowds of students who stop the entire flow of traffic to do the cheek kissy thing. Oh, the French. Finally I get to the classroom, where I take half the class up more stairs to the little room I’m allowed to use. I’ve prepared a role play about planning a vacation to South Africa, so I explain it to them (all in English) and most of them seem to get it. It goes pretty well with this half, so I begin to feel better about it. Then I take them back down to the room and pick up the other half, who are much weaker. It takes almost twice as long to explain what they have to do, and even then I have to ask one of the better ones to explain in French to the others (which is my way of avoiding speaking French myself). But everyone eventually gets it, and two girls in particular are really getting into it, so I ask them to perform it in front of the class. They do it really well, amid giggles, and everyone gives them a round of applause at the end. I teach them how to say “Yay!” or “Hurrah!” instead of “Ouais!” which they seem to like. Then I go back to the staff room to touch base with the teacher and tell her how it all went. She’s pleased because when she got the group back from me, they were already excited about English and really thinking in English, so my mood is rapidly improving.

Then it’s back to the réprographie to make copies of the superlative pages of my yearbook for my next class, at 10:00. This is the Seconde 10, the class that brought you teenagers’ testes. I haven’t ever had them as a group yet, so I have no idea what they’re like. I get half the class for the whole hour – I’ll do the same activity with the other half next week. I troop downstairs with them to an empty room, they all file in and sit down, and I ask them to say their names (even though I haven’t a hope of remembering them, except maybe Julien). I do a mini-presentation about American high schools (all they know about them comes from High School Musical, so they have a lot to learn) and then tell them about yearbooks and superlatives. I pass around my yearbook so they can see the baby pictures of all the seniors and the senior pages, which is fascinating for them – French high schools don’t do yearbooks. Then I give them copies of the superlative pages and they are absolutely enthralled. After a bit, I do some superlative grammar, and we talk about the superlatives – “What does ‘tardy’ mean? and ‘gullible’?” “You were most studious?” and laugh about them. I also have to explain what “truest Vermonter” means, which is hard, because “hick” is not a word that transcends cultures. Then I ask them to come up with superlatives of their own, and they think of some pretty good ones – sexiest, truest Norman, most likely to be a movie star, best-looking, etc. I’m actually disappointed when the bell rings, because I’m having fun. This class has become one of my favorites – there’s a really nice vibe between them and me where they quiet down and pay attention when I ask them to, but there’s room for some playfulness and gentle teasing (like when I told them I was in Scholars’ Bowl in high school… Have you ever had 11 French teenagers laughing at you? It’s an experience, let me tell you.) And even when they’re joking around, they’ll often try to do it in English, so I let them – for one thing, it’s funny, and for another, every word that they say in English is a little victory. A lot of them also understand my little sarcastic asides, so they laugh and it makes me happy.

Then back again to the réprographie, where I photocopy my little Thanksgiving blurbs for my next class and chat with Martine, who takes care of all the photocopy/transparency/equipment stuff and who is really nice. Then off to lunch in the cafeteria with the English teachers, which is always fun because it’s a whole table of language nerds and they like to ask me how to say things in American (I am the only American in the entire school, so I’m the ultimate authority – bwa ha ha ha ha). As I’m cleaning off my tray, Bertrand asks if I’d like to have a drink with him tomorrow night to help him with his English, which of course I would, so he invites me to his flat.

Up more stairs, to a class that I only see every other week, which is why I’m doing the Thanksgiving thing a week after the actual holiday. Apparently they were disappointed last week to not see me, so they’re looking forward to me today, which is always nice to hear. I ask them what they know about Thanksgiving, which always brings forth shouts of “dinde! turkey!” and I tell them that turkeys say “gobble gobble gobble” in English, which always gets a laugh. Then we do my Thanksgiving activity, which finishes with presentations by the students on the little blurbs I’ve prepared (Pilgrims, the first Thanksgiving, football, presidential turkey pardon, etc). I show the students how to draw a hand turkey, and one of them does so and shows it in his presentation, which is surprisingly touching. The last presentation is the turkey pardon, which is always hilarious, especially since I found a picture where Bush and the turkey have the same expression. This class is also nice – they’re up for anything and have good attitudes for the most part.

Back down to the staff room – by this time, the skies are actually blue, there are white fluffy clouds, and it’s much warmer out. I plan next week with a few teachers and relax for a bit. Then I have one-on-one work with older students to help them prepare for the big scary test at the end of high school – I have different students every week. One has an amazingly good British accent – a little on the Cockney side (I fink, etc) but very natural, so afterwards I ask him why and it turns out his parents are both English. So we chat for a bit, and I curse the fact that dating students is frowned upon, because he’s really cute.

Then I go back home, have a snack, and read one of my French books (they’re meant for teenagers, but I’ve spent the last four years reading classic French literature and I think I deserve a break) before going to the gym for a “barre sculpt” class, which is weights and such. It’s a good 20-minute walk to the gym, but that’s why Ipods were invented. Also it’s more exercise, which is good because France doesn’t really believe in low-fat food. After the class, I depart, muscles shaky but feeling good, and come back home, where I have another snack and write this blog post.

So that’s a Thursday – Mondays are much the same, Tuesdays I only have two or three classes in the morning and chorale at night, Wednesdays I go to the teacher-training college for conversation groups with student teachers (half in French, half in English so everyone gets to practice), Fridays I stay in bed until an embarrassingly late hour, Saturdays I do museums or shopping or walks, and Sundays I go to the market in the morning and the internet café in the afternoon. Life is good.

My 33-year-old colleague is hitting on me...

2008-12-07T15:37:00.002+01:00

...but it's okay, because it's France.

(First in a series, the idea for which came from my brilliant and talented older brother. Thanks bro!)

Thanksgiving!

2008-12-07T15:29:00.003+01:00

One of the American assistants, Keri, graciously volunteered to have a Thanksgiving gathering at her apartment (which she shares with an Australian and a Brit), so on the Saturday morning after Thanksgiving I got up early to make squash with orange sauce (no Thanksgiving vacation here, remember – I had 5 hours of class on Thanksgiving Day). I’d bought something vaguely resembling a pumpkin at the market the previous week, and it looked sufficiently orange and squash-like, so I thought it would probably work. I had to buy a vegetable peeler and a measuring cup (which of course only had liters on it, so some quick work with the converter on my cell phone was needed) and my professeur référent, who is amazingly nice, offered to lend me a casserole dish. Thus armed, I began the process of peeling, cubing and cooking the squash.
You will perhaps notice the three different stages that the squash is at: this was because my only saucepans are the ones you see in the picture, i.e. tiny.
So I had two pots going at once and still had to do it in three rounds. Luckily, I had music and Nutella for fortification:
My ill-equipped kitchen does not, of course, have a masher, so I used a fork.
So it wasn’t the smoothest squash with orange sauce in the world, but hey, it worked. After cooking and mashing for a while, I had enough squash and it was time to make the sauce. I’d bought potato starch instead of corn starch because the box was smaller, and come on, how many times am I going to use any kind of starch between now and April? Thanks to a conversation with my wise and wonderful grandmother, however, I knew that potato starch would work. I also only had granulated brown sugar, not having been able to find anything else, but I figured it would all melt and make no difference whatsoever. Finally, I didn’t have a juicer, so I had to juice the oranges with a fork. Despite all the modifications, though, the sauce eventually thickened and I poured it triumphantly over the squash. Time to stick it in the oven for a bit. 350ºF, my mother said. Okay, that’s 175ºC. Now, to set the oven temperature…
Do you see any temperatures on those dials? I didn’t either. So I set it at about 4, which is right in the middle, and prayed. Here it is, in all its warm, fragrant, orange-y glory:
Then there was the problem of transporting it to the party, which was about 10 métro stops away. I covered it with plastic wrap, wrapped it in towels, and gently placed it in the bottom of a shopping bag, haunted by visions of the bag giving way and splattering squash, orange sauce, and broken crockery all over the street. It made it successfully to the party, though, and took its place among the other delicious things that other assistants brought:
Here are the turkeys (yes, there were two – there were more than 30 people at the party):
Dindes, they’re called in French. And they say “Glou glou glou” instead of “Gobble gobble gobble”. Here’s my overly-filled plate:
See the very-obviously-straight-out-of-a-can cranberry sauce? That doesn’t exist in France – cranberries barely do, and certainly not cranberries in the highly processed and indescribably delicious form of canned cranberry sauce. So one of the assistants had her mother mail her a can of cranberry sauce, which totally made my entire Thanksgiving. I went back for seconds on cranberry sauce and nothing else, actually.

Finally, a picture that doesn’t begin to capture how full the apartment was:
I can tell you that in that picture, there is a Brit, an Australian, and a German, and just out of frame there are more Germans, more Brits, some Mexicans, a Columbian, and some French people just for fun. Conversations were held in English, French, German, and Spanish, and all in all it was an amazing party. I was impressed with the cooking that people had done (most people just brought bread or wine or cheese, but there were also mashed potatoes, two kinds of stuffing, green beans with ginger, cranberry sauce, pumpkin cheesecake, pecan pie, and a few salads) and with the multiculturalism of it all. The non-Americans were all curious about Thanksgiving, so it was fun to talk about that. Also, at any given moment at least three languages were being spoken, so language-dork Lisa was happy. Afterwards, I went home with leftover squash, so I could also continue the Thanksgiving leftover tradition by eating that for a few days afterwards. No hot turkey sandwiches, though, which I miss. Still, it felt enough like Thanksgiving that I didn't miss it as much as I thought I would. Yay expats!

London, Part Deux

2008-11-30T17:53:00.008+01:00

On Monday, thanks to Emilia, we took a “Royal London” tour from the same free tour company (the guides live on tips, but that way you can tip only as much as you thought the tour was worth, which I think is a lovely idea). We met at Wellington Arch:
Where everyone on the tour had to go around saying where they were from, so instead of just saying the USA I said Vermont, because Vermonter pride goes deep, and after the introductions a guy about my age came up to me and said he was from New Hampshire, so we bonded. It also turned out that he’d done cross-country, so he’d been to my high school numerous times to run on the trail. Which is pretty cool. And then, as we continued talking, I discovered that he’s a language assistant in France too – he’s in a suburb of Paris. So we talked about French kids and ~~how obnoxious they are~~–I mean, how much we love them.

By this time, we’d gotten to Buckingham Palace, where we were just in time to watch the changing of the guard. Having seen it once before, I didn’t feel like fighting my way through the crowd of tourists to climb onto the railings, as I did when I was 18, so I took a few pictures from further away and listened to the band (which played the James Bond theme again!). Here’s the palace:
The Queen was not in residence at the time, which you can tell because her special Queen flag wasn’t flying. We did get to hear stories about various people who’d managed to sneak into the palace, including a drunk Irishman who wanted to talk to the Queen about his problems. So he jumped a fence, got into the palace, and proceeded to wander around, setting off so many alarms that the security guard thought the system had gone haywire and restarted it (I’m pretty sure he got fired after that). Somehow, out of the hundreds of rooms in the palace, the Irish guy found his way to the Queen’s bedroom, where she was sleeping the sleep of a contented monarch, secure in the knowledge that she had two personal guards posted outside her door at all times. However, one of the guards had gone to the bathroom, and the other, in classically British fashion, had spilled tea on himself and gone to clean it up. So plastered Irish guy is free to enter the Queen’s bedroom, open the drapes on her bed, and sit down to tell her all about his problems. All of which he does. The Queen, meanwhile, is being unfailingly polite, but pushing her panic button surreptitiously. No one answers, of course. After about 10 minutes, there’s that awkward pause when someone runs out of things to rant about, and the Irish guy takes out a cigarette and asks the Queen if she’s got a light. The Queen, showing admirable cleverness, says “No, but I believe my guards outside the door do – why don’t you go ask them?” By this point, bladders and tea spills having been taken care of, both guards are back, and they grab the Irishman as he comes out of the door. No harm done. He was taken for a psychiatric evaluation, and is now in some sort of institution, I believe, with the best crazy-person story ever. After that, I think the palace security staff had a few more rules about when they could take breaks…

Anyway, I managed to take a few pictures of the ridiculous fuzzy hats of the palace guards:
And another as they were marching past us at the end:
Unfortunately, as it’s winter, they’ve got their gray winter uniforms on, instead of the red summer ones. This happened the last time, too – clearly I have to plan my trips better.

We continued to walk around the palace, and got to another entrance, also guarded. This was our opportunity to act like classic, obnoxious tourists, so we did:
We made sure to thank him afterwards, though. And to not touch him, because if you do anything that interferes with their (very real) job of guarding the palace, they are perfectly within their rights to elbow you, nudge you, or poke you with the pointy thing at the end of their big scary gun.

Then, as we were walking to the next royal destination, we heard the strains of “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” floating towards us. Lo and behold, some Monty Python demonstrators holding signs saying “There is only ONE Palin” (referring, of course, to Michael Palin). I slowed down to sing with them, and then had to run to catch up with the group, so my picture isn’t very good:
Still, though, you can see the lumberjack and the Spanish Inquisition guy and all in all it made me really happy.

One final guard in a funny hat for your viewing pleasure:

Then we passed the WWII museum, which sounded really interesting but we didn’t have time to go to it. We did learn that we were standing on the famous War Room, where Winston Churchill hung out and made all those decisions during the war:
If you happen to have x-ray vision, you can totally see the room itself. If not, it just looks like a paving stone, and I apologize.

On our way to Big Ben, we passed this building, which made me think of my engineering friends again:
Clearly London treats engineers better than the US does – you get gilt lettering!

Then there was Big Ben, which is really rather impressive. It seemed really familiar and I was wondering why, and then I remembered the 3-D jigsaw puzzle that I did of it a long time ago… So the way to educate your children about architecture is to make them do 3-D jigsaw puzzles of all the famous buildings in the world.

And I lied – one more London official in a funny hat:

Then the tour was over and Emilia and I went in search of good fish and chips, which we found at a restaurant called The Rock and Sole Plaice (haha). I got cod, I think, and it was delicious. Somehow I managed to finish my entire huge plate o’ fried things, and thus fortified we headed back to Oxford Street and Uniqlo so I could have company while spending far too much money on that coat, which I had decided to get. Emilia approved of it, so I bought it, and it turned out to only cost £72 with a student discount (and when I checked the exchange rate, that was only $115. So I’m really glad I got it). It’s beautiful and warm and elegant and very very European and I love it.

That evening, Jenna and I thought about going swing dancing, but it was rainy and icky and I’d been walking all day, so we decided to stay in the dorm and go to a showing of Caramel, a movie that took place in Lebanon (I think) and is about a bunch of different women and their love stories and stuff. It was really good, and there were Lebanese pastries, so I was happy.

On Tuesday, my last full day in London, I decided it was time to really see the British Museum, not just pop in for half an hour like I had last time (the joys of free museums…). Also, Emilia being the fellow language dork that she is, she wanted to see the Rosetta Stone. So here’s me being a huge nerd.
And the grin on my face is not because I’m being photographed, but because I’m next to what is quite possibly the coolest language artifact in the history of the world, since it allowed Jean-François Champollion (who was even more of a language dork than I am) to realize that hieroglyphs were an alphabet, not just pictures, and to decode them. Here’s a close-up of the cartouche containing the name Ptolemy that first clued Champollion in to the nature of hieroglyphs:
Champollion read the Greek on the bottom of the stone and figured that the three inscriptions said the same thing, then thought that the word in the cartouche was probably a name, and matched it up with the Ptolemy he found in the Greek part. From there, he basically did a giant, really really hard cryptoquip to figure out the rest. Seriously, how cool is that? If I’d been around in the 1800’s I would totally have been a Champollion groupie. “Jean, mon petit chou, how do you say ‘love’ in Egyptian?” with much batting of eyelashes. Okay I’ll stop being a dork now. Sorry about that…

After looking at all the pretty statues, we went to the mummy room, which was awesome. There was a whole group of Japanese tourists, so taking pictures without giggling schoolgirls miming mummy poses was difficult, but I did manage to take a few. There was an exhibit of a mummy that had been unwrapped in the 1800’s in one of those parlor demonstrations that were all the rage for a while, so all the organs were neatly laid out and labeled in this little box. Here’s the uterus, apparently:
And the pericardium:
Just looks like wrinkled brown leather to me, but then again, I’m used to seeing my organs a few centuries fresher.

Moving away from the gross stuff (I’ll spare you the classic explanation of how to make a mummy, which everyone learned in third grade anyway) there was this beautiful beaded drape (restored – wouldn’t you like to have that job?) made to go over a mummy:
Mom, I think that should be your next beading project – ought to keep you busy for awhile!

Then we wandered through the Bronze Age section, where there were so many shiny things I could barely concentrate on one at a time. Just call me a magpie. Here’s a necklace thingy:
And an awesome shield that was apparently only decorative, because it would have been far too heavy to carry into battle.
Finally, there was a display with all sorts of pretty little rings with various motifs on them, including this one:
I couldn’t quite make out what the image was, so I read the description, which said that the phallus symbol was apparently a good luck charm. Whatever floats your boat…

After the museum Emilia headed off to do her own thing while I went to Westminster Abbey, having decided that I could afford to spend a ridiculous amount on one tourist attraction, at least.
Unfortunately, you can’t take pictures inside, so that’s the only photo I’ve got. After shelling out my 9£, I took the included audioguide and turned it on, to be greeted by the voice of Jeremy Irons. Yes, the audioguide to Westminster is read by Jeremy Irons. Happy, happy Lisa. It was a very good guide, too – lots of interesting facts, and they even had a few recordings of the choirboys singing that you could listen to as you walked around. I particularly liked the Lady Chapel because the ceiling was incredibly delicate and intricately carved. I also liked the memorials of various famous people – they’re all over the walls and floors because there are so many of them, so you’ll be wandering around and suddenly realize you’re walking over Dylan Thomas, or some such person. The Abbey also has a little garden, near the small cloisters, where people who work there actually live. How cool must that be? “So, where do you live?” “Westminster Abbey, actually. Perhaps you’ve heard of it?” I also got to see the coronation chair, where the monarch sits to be crowned – it’s nothing special to look at, really, because it’s made of wood and really old so it looks rather chewed up. For coronations they cover it with fancy cloths. There were lots more interesting things, but I can’t remember them and in any case they’d be more fun with photos, so you’ll just have to go to London and see it for yourself!

After the Abbey it was back to Goodenough for dinner and election-watching, which was phenomenal and amazing and really really tiring. Then back to home sweet France, which I had missed. I actually felt more like a foreigner in London than I do in France, I think because in London no one’s impressed that I speak the language, so I’m just the silly American asking stupid questions, whereas in France they’re all like, “Ooh, cute little American trying to speak French! I’ll be nice to her!” Anyway, it was a bit of a relief to be back in France. Also I missed baguettes. French carbs just taste so much better.

These Brits are Crazy...

2008-11-23T16:58:00.007+01:00

And now, the post you’ve all been waiting for: LONDON! The home of posh accents, guards in funny hats, and most importantly mint Aero bars. Seriously, those things are like crack. See, the original Aero was lovely enough – it’s just a chocolate bar, but the inside has bubbles in it, so it’s wonderfully light and if you’re patient enough to let it melt on your tongue it feels awesome. So then the brilliant chocolate scientists at Nestlé had the brilliant idea of putting minty deliciousness inside, and the mint Aero was born and quickly took up residence in a special place in my heart. And my hips. But I digress.

So I took the Eurostar to London, which was fun, although since it was dark I didn’t realize we were under the English Channel until we were already halfway through, and then it was just weird to think of the tons and tons of water above us. As soon as we came out my phone started buzzing, and I thought oh no, someone’s trying to call me and I’ll have to ignore it because it probably costs about 8 € a minute to talk on my French phone in England, but lo and behold, it was a text message from my French cell phone company telling me how much everything costs in England! So, while slightly creepy that they knew where I was, it was nice to know how much I was actually spending to communicate with people. It wasn’t too expensive, either, which came in very handy for coordinating with people. London is a big city, bigger than I really realized, and sometimes even a street corner is not an exact enough place to meet someone.

My lovely friend Jenna met me at St. Pancras and we walked to her room, which is in a kind of a dorm called Goodenough College. Apparently some nice man named Goodenough gave lots of money to have these buildings erected so students from any university in London would have somewhere to live. There are common rooms, a cafeteria, and even a pub, so it’s quite a nice place. Also it kind of looks like Hogwarts:
That’s the central courtyard, where there is a plaque honoring the time Her Majesty the Queen came to Goodenough. I found little inscriptions everywhere, actually, each one for a different year, each one commemorating Her Highness. Oh, the English and their Queen.

I arrived quite late at night, so we just chatted and then went to bed. The next morning, Thursday, I didn’t get my butt out of bed for a loooooong time, because the siren song of free Internet called and I was weak. So finally, after checking all my webcomics and reading all my blogs (ironically, the fact that I don’t have Internet at home in France makes me more likely to write blog posts, but less able to publish them) I decided to walk down to the main shopping area near Jenna. I took advantage of the fact that there are American-style pharmacies in England (France still hasn’t caught on) to buy mascara and cold medicine and candy bars and Ribena (mmmm blackcurrant juice), all in one handy store. Seriously, France, join the club and start some real pharmacies, instead of those tiny little places where everything is behind the counter and costs the earth. Then I found a little place to get a jacket potato (baked potato, for those across the pond) where the cashier thought I was German, for some reason. Maybe because I still had euros in my wallet, or because I’m pretty sure my brain was still in French mode so I bet my English wasn’t the greatest. Anyway, then I wandered along Oxford Street, window-shopping, and found this store called Uniqlo.

Uniqlo is a Japanese brand with nicely made basic clothing, including a bunch of cashmere. I’ve been looking for an elegant single-breasted black wool jacket, with no belt or pleats or extraneous details, for quite some time, and it’s been almost impossible to find. So when I saw my dream jacket on a mannequin, I thought, Well, it’s pretty, but it’s probably going to end up being either synthetic or prohibitively expensive. So I looked at the tag, which said 79.99£. The pound is no longer quite double the dollar, but it’s close, so I figured about $150. So I looked at the label: 90% wool, 10% cashmere. I tried it on. It fit perfectly, looked amazing, and was so soft… But $150! screamed the sensible part of my brain. Warm and fuzzy! screamed the reptile brain. So I put it back on the rack and decided I would consult with Jenna before spending half of my monthly food budget on a coat. By that time I was tired and hungry and cold, and it was raining (you’d think I would have vacationed somewhere where the weather’s actually better than Normandy, but no, I had to pick the one place that’s just as famous for rain) so I decided to go back home. Not having a transportation card yet, I thought I’d just walk, because it didn’t look like a long way on the map… Forty minutes later, when I finally got back to Jenna’s dorm, about all I could do was sit there and watch House episodes online. When Jenna got back, we had a nice relaxing dinner in the dining hall and I got to meet some of her friends, who are awesome. Then we went back to her room for tea and stayed up far too late chatting, because we’re girls and that’s what we do.

On Friday, my fellow language assistant Emilia, who was also visiting a friend in London, found a free tour of Old London, so we went to that while our respective hosts went to class. The tour was great, and given by a very handsome young Londoner named Alex, so we thoroughly enjoyed it. We saw a lot of places that would have been really neat to go into, like the Tower of London…
St Paul’s Cathedral…
the London Eye…
But our friendly guide informed us of the prices of all those places and we promptly decided that we could do without them. I think that since most of the museums in London are free, the other tourist attractions decided that they could charge exorbitant prices so as to ensure that tourists spend the same amount of money they would in a different city.

We walked along the banks of the Thames (I seem to have a habit of spending time in cities with rivers running through them – I like it) and this beautiful bridge came into view:
“London Bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down…” I started to sing, only to be told by a smiling Alex that the bridge before our eyes was in fact Tower Bridge, not London Bridge. Oops. This is London Bridge:
Not much to write home about, huh? London Bridge has the more interesting past, though – I’ve forgotten some of the stories, but I do remember the one about why Brits (and all sensible people, as Alex reminded the Americans) drive on the left. So, many many years ago, when London Bridge had houses and shops and such built on it, there was very little room left for traffic, so they had to decide on some rules of the road. If, as you were riding your horse across the bridge, you met someone you didn’t like very much and fancied a bit of a duel, it made much more sense to draw the sword hanging at your left side to fight the man coming at you on the right. So the powers that be proclaimed the left side of the road to be the correct one, and so it persists to this day, albeit with fewer swords and bloodshed and such.

We then headed towards the one bit of London that still looks like it did way back in the Middle Ages – the reason the rest of the city doesn’t is that London has burned to the ground numerous times (you’d think that after the first they’d have learned to not build everything from wood…). On the way, we passed this street:
Which of course made me hungry for spotted dick and plum pudding and suchlike things. Anyway, here’s the medieval bit:
Cute little winding streets yay! It’s easy to forget how very old London is, because most of the buildings are new, so it’s nice to see some evidence that it was actually there many years ago. It’s not like Paris, where nothing much has changed for centuries and you can easily imagine yourself back in time.

Then we went back towards the Thames to see the Millennium Bridge, which wasn’t actually finished until some years after the millennium, and cost some astronomical sum to build. Then, on the opening day, as hundreds of people walked across it, it started to bounce and wiggle about and generally misbehave, because the engineer had forgotten to account for people subconsciously walking in step and so setting up sympathetic vibrations (right, engineering buddies?). So they had to pour more money into it to stabilize it. Even Alex agreed that this was typically British. The bridge is quite nice, though, and it doesn’t wiggle anymore – believe me, I tried.
Then we saw the Royal Courts, which didn’t have any funny stories attached to them, but they were pretty:
Then the tour was done, and since we’d been walking in the cold for the last three hours, Emilia and I decided to ask Alex where we could get a good pasty (as in a meat pie, not anything related to strippers). He recommended a place near Covent Garden, so we set off. Along the way, Emilia spotted a classic red London phone booth across the street, so we stopped to be touristy and take photos. I took about 5, and they all had cars or taxis or buses in them, so I gave up, but when I got home and looked at my photos on a bigger screen, I realized that one of them had come out, in a way:
See it? So you’ve got two of your London stereotypes in one – convenient, no? Anyway, we continued on to the Cornish Pasty Shop, where I ordered a steak and Guinness pasty and a pint of cider. It was delicious. Partway through, I remembered to take a picture:
See how much of the cider (it was called Scrumpy Jack’s, which just about made my day) is still there? A pint is a lot, and I was extremely giggly and happy when we got up to leave. I may or may not have actually skipped through Covent Garden…

We both had to get back to meet our hosts, so we walked back to the Thames and walked along it to the nearest Tube stop (I had bought a week pass, which made me very happy – the Tube is quite nice and there is actually a recorded voice that says “Mind the gap”!), occasionally pausing to take pictures:
Again with the Queen… Seriously, these Brits are crazy.

When I got back to Jenna’s room, I very quickly helped her pick out clothes for a party she was going to (only people from her program were invited, so I had to stay home) and she rushed off. After watching more House episodes, I headed out to try to find dinner and found a fish and chips stand. Mmmm fried deliciousness. The man had given me all sorts of condiments, so I did a taste-test of all of them: vinegar, tartar sauce, ketchup and mayo. The vinegar was the best, although I’m turning European enough that I like mayo on French fries now. After recovering from the grease, I got dressed up and headed out to meet Jenna and her friends. We ended up heading back to the apartment of one of the members of her program, which was really lovely. I had a great time meeting all of her friends, and we didn’t get back home until about 3 am.

We managed to rouse ourselves the next morning for brunch, where we organized a trip to the National Portrait Gallery. I wasn’t expecting to like it that much, because I don’t generally like portraits, but there are really detailed explanations of who most of the people are, so it was quite interesting to read about them. Especially the royal families, who were so inbred it’s a wonder more of them weren’t imbeciles. I also spotted this lovely bewigged man:
who happens to be Robert Boyle. Any chemistry nerds out there? Yes, this is the Boyle of Boyle’s Law, which states (as far as I can remember) that the more you squish a gas, the less space it takes up. Logical, yes, but if you lived in the 1600’s you got to state a lot of obvious things and stick your name on them.

There was a temporary exhibition as well – I forget the name of the artist, but it was to benefit an AIDS charity. It was a wall of nude black and white photos of athletes, and it was beautiful. Just the elegance and grace of the human form, without any distracting elements or tackiness or anything. I especially remember a female swimmer (I think) with long black hair perfectly arranged against her pale back.

After that, Jenna had to go practice (the life of a violin performance student is tough) so I went and geeked out in the Egyptian section of the British Museum for a little bit. And when I say geeked out, I mean that I almost completely ignored all statues without writing on them, going straight for any hieroglyphs and trying (mostly in vain) to remember my hieroglyph alphabet. I did remember ankh dja s, which is the abbreviation for “life, prosperity, health”, and a few letters here and there, but mostly I was just comparing the different styles of hieroglyphs. Then it was time to go home and make dinner – we’d bought lettuce, cherry tomatoes, mozzarella, and bread, and Jenna has a basil plant in her room, so we made tomato, basil and mozzarella salad and it was delicious. Of course, we had to take pictures, or “food porn” as Jenna calls them:
So pretty! And so yummy!

It was raining again, and we didn’t feel like doing anything special, so we went to the TV room with some other Americans to watch Back to the Future, which Jenna hadn’t seen (cue chorus of “What? Impossible!”, which is why I didn’t tell anyone that I hadn’t really seen it properly either… When you’re as pop-culturally challenged as I am, you learn early on just to keep your mouth shut in situations like that.) Anyway, it was nice to get some American culture for a change.

On Sunday morning, homesick for my regular French market (that’s going to be the thing I miss most about France – I can’t even go a week without it) I did some research and found the Camden Lock Market. Jenna and I set off to meet Emilia at the market. On the way, we passed the playground near her dorm, where sheep apparently just roam around. One was close to the bars, grazing, so we said good morning to it.
When we got to the market, we realized it was more for clothing and accessories than fruits and veg, but that didn’t matter. There were all sorts of stalls selling ethnic food, all of which were priced at 4£ a serving, making the decision much harder. I ended up getting lamb curry, which was absolutely delicious. Thus fortified, we plunged back into the confusion of stalls and shops built into the stone walls. Jenna found a beautiful vaguely-ethnic-looking top that we convinced her to get because it looked great on her, and then she had to go back and practice. Emilia and I continued to wander and found a stall selling Marimekko-esque handbags (not at all the quality of Marimekko, but the patterns were bright and lively and awesome) and I gave in, telling myself I needed a medium-sized bag:
Impractical, perhaps, but oh so purty. Emilia bought one as well – hers had cherries on it.

Continuing our wanderings, we came across a stall selling doughnuts of every variety imaginable. After taking close to 10 minutes to decide, I got a custard-filled, chocolate-and-nuts-topped one, and Emilia got a caramely one, I think. Here we are pigging out:

They were so good. Gooiness is next to happiness, I think.

We continued to explore the market, finding new things we coveted at every turn, then having to reason with ourselves (“No Lisa, you don’t actually need those legwarmers… or that scarf… or that shirt… and what makes you think you can fit it into your luggage anyway?”) so as to not walk out of the market with double what we came in with. Finally, we came across another stall with handbags, this time more elegant, and met our match. I got this one, which matches my turquoise scarf perfectly:
And Emilia got a really cute little one made of little bamboo slats, perfect for holding one’s cell, lip balm, and credit cards on an evening out.

Finally, we extricated ourselves, stopped at Sainsbury’s on the way back to the Tube to buy candy bars, and headed home for dinner. We had a date with a certain man of mystery that night, a man whose taste in women is as impeccable as his dress sense, who never loses his cool… Yes, James Bond. Emilia, her friend Sarah, Jenna and I all had tickets to see the new movie at Leicester Square, which was exciting because it was London and the movie had just come out and because, after all, Daniel Craig is an extremely attractive man. So here we are in front of the marquée:
The atmosphere in the movie theater was great – everyone was excited, they clapped when the curtain went up, all of that. The movie itself… I don't want to burst anyone’s bubble, but I would wait for it to come out on video. Also, make sure to watch Casino Royale (that was the last one, right?) before this one, because if you’ve forgotten what happened in Casino Royale you’ll be a bit lost in Quantum of Solace. The whole movie felt like one big long action scene, even more so than in most James Bonds (and I like Bond movies in general). There wasn’t enough plot to tie it all together, and even the love scene (yes, there was only one) was rushed and almost cursory. But it was fun to see it in London, in any case.

All right, this has been obscenely long, for which I apologize. The rest of London next week sometime, and after that tales of history teachers, mispronunciations, and getting hit on (always with the getting hit on, I know, but this is France. That's how life works here).

2008-11-09T17:21:00.004+01:00

So, still catching up – the week before vacation. For election reactions (and some profanity - seriously that's the only thing I could think of to title it) please scroll down to the post just below this one.

There’s this history professor who likes to tease me – he’s the one who kept saying he liked Sarah Palin, just to annoy me. Anyway, I observed one of his classes once, and he told the students that I was a new student from the US, and that they should be nice to me so I’d come back. When I didn’t show up for the next class, of course, the students all asked after me and were worried that they’d driven me away, or something, and he just laughed… He likes to mess with people’s heads. Anyway, we’ve always spoken French together, so on Friday (Oct 17), when he came up to me and said, in heavily accented but grammatically correct English, that he’d like to practice his English with me, I was quite taken aback. He said that he and his friends often go out for coffee, and that I should join them sometime to speak English, so I gave him my cell number. I don’t think he was hitting on me, but it’s hard to tell with French guys… It'll be fun to speak English, anyway, and hopefully I can get some French practice in too.

On Saturday, I was extremely productive and bought a telephone for our newly-opened telephone line, cleaning supplies to give the apartment a proper cleaning, and my Carte 12-25, which costs 49€ but gives me up to 60% reductions on train tickets, so if I go to Paris three times I will have paid for it. In the afternoon, I met up with Emilia and Nicola, a British girl, to go to the Festival du Ventre (literally Stomach Festival, but what they mean is regional food festival). The entire center of Rouen was closed to traffic, and the streets were lined with stalls selling cider, wine, beer, caramel, bread, jam, pâté, sausages, duck confit, whole rabbits… It was packed, but the three of us squeezed our way in to taste and buy and chat and it was brilliant. The man selling caramel was intrigued by our accents, so we talked with him and he threw in a few extra candies for us (seriously, being a young woman in France is awesome. I’ve gotten a few euros worth of free stuff already, and that’s without even trying to lay on the charm). I also got a butter and sugar crêpe, the first street crêpe I’ve had since getting here, and it was magnifique. We got to taste some freshly-pressed apple juice, and we bought farmer’s cider from the same place, with a warning that it wasn’t pasteurized so would continue to ferment and thus fizz when we opened it. Then, laden with our booty, we returned to the shopping streets and looked at boots for awhile. I found some that I almost bought, but they weren’t very good quality at all and they made my ankles look thick. So I was just about to give up when I saw this brilliant pair of black flat boots with laces up the back, and I’m totally a sucker for laces. So I tried them on and they made me happy and I bought them.

Thanks to the lacing, I can stuff my jeans into them, which comes in very handy. It does take me about 15 minutes to put them on, though.

Sunday was really nice, so after the market Emilia, Nikki and I went to a café, sat outside, and got demi-pêches, which are half-pints of beer with peach syrup. Very much a girly drink, but delicious and refreshing. While we were deciding what to get, Bertrand walked by and said hi, and since I totally wasn’t expecting to see him I was all discombobulated and managed to stammer out the only thing to come into my head, a very formal greeting. So he chuckled and informed me that we could tutoyer each other, which made me happy (tutoyer means “to use ‘tu’”, the informal pronoun, so when someone tells you to tutoyer them it means you can relax a bit and treat them more as equals). The trick is remembering which people have told you to tutoyer them and which you have to keep being formal with – at this point I’ve got 7 teachers I can tutoyer, so before I open my mouth I have to run down my little mental list to check. Anyway, we enjoyed our demi-pêches, and the sun, very much – it was nice to relax before our first full week of work.

Monday I only had three classes – ordinarily I’ll have four or five, but the other teachers wanted me to start after vacation. In all three, all I did was stand at the front of the room and answer questions about myself (imagine all the following in a thick French accent): “Vat is your name?” “Vair are you from in ze USA?” “Do you ‘ave a boyfriend in France?” (My response to that one was “Dear lord, I’ve only been here for three weeks! Give me time!”) “Vat are your ‘obbies?” It was fun, though, and since I didn’t have to prepare anything it was easy. In one class, they asked me if I often went out to bars in Rouen, and I said I didn’t really know any. One boy replied “Eef you want, we could go out togezzer sometime…” Whereupon the entire room burst out laughing, and I blushed beet red. Apparently that boy is a total ladies’ man. They start them early here.

Tuesday I had one class, where I did exactly the same thing. In the afternoon I went to the stationery store to buy another organizer, because I have 14 classes with 6 different teachers to keep straight, and my head is starting to explode. Also I needed another excuse to go to the stationery store. I’m starting to need a pen/paper/notebook/tape fix about every week or so – someone should probably stage an intervention soon.

On Thursday, I had three classes again, all of which asked me questions. I’m seriously going to start saying my name is Grunhilda if I have to do this much more. It’s really good for the students, though, so I suppose I shouldn’t complain. I also met Isabel, the Spanish assistant. She is super-nice, and speaks French really well, so I had a great time talking with her. She also lives really close to me, which is convenient because we’re going to try to teach each other our respective languages. She already speaks English a bit, but she wants to practice, and I’d like to remember my Spanish, so it’s perfect.

Thursday night, a bunch of Americans, North and South, went out for drinks. We went to Murphy’s and The Underground, Irish and English, respectively. I have to stop hanging out with Anglophones. I did discover that I like Krieg beer, though, which increases the number of beers I like by half. Also, I found out that my Australian friend didn’t get her carte de séjour – that indispensable piece of paper without which you are an illegal alien. So I started to worry a little bit about my own appointment to get mine the next day.

Friday morning I was exhausted, sick, and probably very slightly hung over, and I had two classes with my least favorite teacher, the one who doesn’t really know what she’s doing. She was also very tired, so the two of us were not such a great team. We managed to come up with some things to do, but it was very disorganized, and I think the students could tell, which is never good. So that was frustrating. Afterwards, I went home to get my paperwork in order for the notorious appointment at the Préfecture to get my carte de séjour. I brought copies of everything I could think of, including my plane and train tickets, because I was so worried about ending up like the Australian girl. I was called up to the window only half an hour after my scheduled appointment, so I was only stewing for 45 minutes or so. I gave all my paperwork to the woman, who inspected it all very carefully (I believe I actually prayed when she looked at my translated birth certificate), took three of my identity photos (I came to France with 12; I have two left), and gave me this beautiful, precious document in return:
This isn’t the actual carte de séjour, it’s just the temporary one – I have to go back in December to collect the real one. But it means that I’m not an illegal alien! And I can go home for Christmas! Hurray!

When I got home, I had a message on my cell phone telling me that my Internet was up and running, and that I could set everything up. Yay! I thought to myself. This day is getting better and better! So I opened up our shiny new Dartybox (the “box” is the all-in-one Internet/TV/telephone doohickey), plugged everything in, typed in all the passwords… and nothing. No Internet, no phone, no nothing. To make matters worse, I read the price list again and found out that instead of the 0.25 cents a minute that I swear the guy in the store quoted us for a call to Russia, it was actually 0.25 euros a minute. In other words, 25 cents a minute. Which is prohibitively expensive and absolutely ridiculous. So when Olesya got home, I had to break the news to her, and she was understandably pissed. We decided to cancel that service and try to find a cheaper one, but canceling involves sending a registered letter, and I had had such a bad day that I couldn’t handle it, so I put it all off till Monday. I knew this whole Internet was going to be a saga, but I never imagined it would get this bad… On the bright side, not having Internet at home makes me a lot more productive.

Saturday was much better, especially since I stayed in my pajamas all morning eating chocolate and watching The West Wing. Bradley Whitford is the cure for all that ails you. I had a meeting at 4:00 with Isabel, who is Spanish and so didn’t come until 5:00 (I never really believed that cultural difference until now). We spent a lot of time chatting and not so much talking about how to start a chorale, but we did eventually nail down some particulars. Then she made me speak Spanish for a while, which was INCREDIBLY DIFFICULT because French has chased all the Spanish I ever knew out of my head. It was fun, though, and my little linguistic-dork brain is all happy because I have to continue thinking in French even when speaking Spanish so that I can ask Isabel questions in French. Did I say my brain was happy? I meant that it EXPLODED. Then she spoke English for a while, which she speaks a lot better than she thinks she does. Her accent isn’t terribly strong, and I like it, so I keep on getting sucked into the rhythm of it and forgetting to correct her, even though she wants me to. It’s going to be a lot of fun doing this with her, especially since she’s a language dork too, so when we get together we geek out about language all the time. Oh, and my Spanish is going to become Spain-Spanish – I’m already starting that lisp thing, so all you South-American-Spanish speakers beware.

That evening, Emilia and I went to another movie (they’re only 3.90€ if you’re under 25, which is a bargain even in the US). This one was called Cliente, and it was mentioned in the New York Times, in an article called “France. Sex. Problem?” The movie is about a young man who’s married but desperately needs money, so he turns to prostitution without telling his wife. One of his clients falls for him, of course, and drama ensues. The reason for the NYT article was that apparently there was a lot of controversy surrounding the movie because of its portrayal of an older woman, la cliente, who likes sex and is willing to pay for it. The movie was good, although I didn’t understand a lot of the funny bits. I did learn lots of new words, though, most of them unrepeatable in a family blog such as this one.

Sunday Emilia and I went to the market, as usual. Walking back, Emilia said “Tiens, regarde!” (Hey, look at that!) To which I replied “Regarde quo—salut têtes de sangliers, vous allez bien?” (Look at wha—oh hi, wild boar heads, how are you today?) Yes, there were wild boar heads, two of them, carefully arranged on a table on the sidewalk, to what point and purpose I do not know. I love France. Soon after that, I stopped at a bakery to buy a baguette for a cider and cheese party, and I lucked out and got a baguette that was still warm. There is nothing in this life that beats walking down a French street with a bag full of fresh produce and cheese bought at an open-air market while tearing warm, crusty-on-the-outside, fluffy-on-the-inside pieces off an 80-centime baguette.

That evening, Emilia, Alex and I went to the fair on the banks of the Seine. It’s a real American-style fair, with all sorts of rides and carnival games and delicious, delicious fair food. The food tends to be modeled on American carnival delicacies, but with a uniquely French twist: I got a hamburger, but it was on quality bread, and there was a fried egg on it. Also, the French fries were put in the bun with everything else, and eaten with a little plastic fork. Emilia got a hot dog, which was normal except that it was put on a baguette. After our heart attacks, we wandered around, checking out the rides. There were some really good ones, including haunted houses, bumper cars, lots of Tilt-a-whirl imitations, and roller coasters. Emilia and I decided to go into a funhouse, which was a lot better than the ones I’ve been in in the US because no one’s scared of getting sued here. There was a slide at the end, which pretty much made my day. After that, we went on a roller coaster, where I discovered that everyone screams in the same language. Then we got some barbe à Papa (literally Papa’s beard, actually cotton candy) and wandered around some more. We were going to go on some more rides, but at that point it started to rain quite hard (welcome to Normandy!) so we took refuge in a heated tent with some hot chocolate to see if it would stop. It didn’t, so we all went back to my apartment to have cider and cheese and baguette. The cider definitely fizzed – if Emilia hadn’t warned me to open it in a saucepan we would have lost half of it down the drain. Alex doesn’t like alcohol, so Emilia and I drank the whole bottle ourselves. My French definitely improved by the second glass. Eventually, Emilia had to leave to catch her bus (I miss the night buses in Paris – there’s one here that goes pretty close to both my house and Emilia’s, but it only comes once an hour or so) so finally I went to bed.

Monday was the first real day of vacation! Inspired by my chats with Isabel, I bought a Spanish grammar book and set to relearning verbs. Verbs are hard. Also, the book is in French, which leads to the same sort of head-exploding that happens when I talk to Isabel. I’m sure it’s good for me, in some sick way, but dear lord it’s difficult to read about a grammatical principle in French and then apply it to Spanish. I also went to the stationery store again, this time to buy a new little notebook and inquire about my favorite kind of fountain pen, the Plumix by Pilot. I have one, and I love it very much, but when I was in Paris I saw them in tons of different colors and I’ve been wanting a red one for a while now. I showed the nice man my pen, and he delivered the heart-wrenching news that Pilot doesn’t make that style anymore! He showed me the equivalent, but they’ve gone and splashed stupid cutesy graphics all over it, and made the grippy part opaque and rubbery. I explained to the man that what I liked about my pen was the simplicity of it, and he tried to console me by saying that maybe Pilot would start making them again, but I was very sad. So hold onto yours, Amelia – who knows whether we’ll ever see them again?

On Tuesday, I finally felt able to deal with Darty, so I went to the store to ask how to cancel my service and get reimbursed for the first month’s bill, since I never got any Internet so I didn’t want to pay for anything. They informed me politely that I would have to send a registered letter saying all of that, so I got the address and went home to write a business letter in French. Since I don’t have a printer, I hand-wrote it, which is a lot more acceptable in France than in the US, or at least I hope it is. That done, I set out with a clear conscience to window-shop a bit. I found a great second-hand store with a ton of skirts, so I tried all of them on, but only one fit. It’s a short black knit pleated skirt, perfect to wear with brightly-colored tights and black boots, which I already have! Ah, retail therapy. Then I did laundry, in preparation for my trip to London, but did not succeed in flirting with the cute dorky boy reading his newspaper. Still, clean clothes are enough of an accomplishment.

Post about London as soon as I've written it, and then I'll be caught up! Hooray!

Fuck Yes.

2008-11-09T17:15:00.003+01:00

I know, I know, I was supposed to blog in London and I totally didn’t. In my defense, there’s a lot of stuff to do in London, and a week is really not that much time. Also I’m lazy. So we’re going to go non-chronological for a bit so I can talk about the election while it’s still fresh in my mind.

I watched the election in Freddie’s, the pub in the Goodenough College building where my friend Jenna lives. The room was packed, mostly with Americans although there were lots of Brits, some Canadians, and at least one Dutch kid.
I couldn’t find a good seat, so I was tempted to yell “All non-American citizens out! This is our election, dammit, and it’s my life that’s going to be affected by it!” but I didn’t. Eventually I managed to squeeze in next to Jenna’s friend Jeff. Keep in mind that this was at about 2 in the morning, London time (9 pm East Coast time). The room was quite loud, everyone hoping that Obama would win (pretty much the entire world wanted him to win, as far as I know). I forget what time exactly we knew it was over – maybe 3:30 or 4? Anyway, CNN called it for Obama and the room went CRAZY. Everyone stood up, screaming and shouting and clapping and hugging everyone in sight, even the non-Americans. It was amazing. We all continued to stay up to watch the speeches (I thought McCain’s speech was actually quite good – very gracious) and I woke Jenna up to watch Obama’s speech. He is magnificent. Such a good orator, such a smart man, such an amazing symbol of America. There were quite a few people who admitted to crying, including me. I overheard an English guy saying, “It’s just amazing that for the next four years, this man will be giving the State of the Union address” and that’s when it really hit me that Barack Obama will actually be President. We get to listen to him speak, we get to watch him on TV – we can finally be proud to be American again, something that I haven’t felt in at least 8 years.

At this point it was already 5:30 in the morning, so we decided it didn’t make any sense to go to sleep, and went back to Jenna’s room to have tea. That was when I remembered that I hadn’t packed a thing, and that since I’d bought two scarves, two bags, some stocking stuffers and a nice big wool coat, it was going to take some effort to fit everything into my already stuffed suitcase. Luckily it all fit in eventually, and I had time to take a half-hour nap before heading off to St Pancras to catch the Eurostar. I was still incredibly giddy from the election and had to fight off the urge to tell everyone on the train that the world had just changed and that I had had a part in it (Vermont was the first state Obama won! Go us!).

Back in France, I’m the only American most of my colleagues know, and certainly the only American they talk to on a regular basis. So I’ve had a lot of really interesting conversations, most of them along the lines of “Wow, your country can actually do things right every once in a while. Well done!” I also have to talk about it in most of my classes, and I can’t seem to wipe the idiotic giddy grin off my face when the students ask me if I’m happy with the election results, so they laugh every time, but I don’t mind. I haven’t been this hopeful in years.

Démarches Administratives

2008-10-29T13:20:00.002+01:00

Okay, time to talk about all that paperwork I alluded to, lest you think my days are filled with nothing but walking down beautiful streets eating baguettes.

Monday (Oct 13th) was the day the technician from France Telecom was meant to come, but I got a message saying he couldn’t come until afternoon, so I called him at about 9 to ask if he could come before 2 pm, when my X-ray appointment was. He said he probably could, so I was all set to expect him around 1 pm. My housemate Nikki’s parents were staying with us because hotels are expensive, and at 9:30 that morning I had just lent her father, Joe, my keys so he could go to the store. About five minutes after Joe left, my cell phone rang. It was the technician, calling to say he was at the front door and needed to be let in. I said I’d be down in a minute and headed for the door. Now, my apartment door is stupidly designed, and you need a key to get out as well as in, because there’s no knob to turn the deadbolt. I tried the door in the hopes that Joe hadn’t relocked it, but he had. So there I was, still in my pajamas, trapped in the apartment with no way to let the phone guy in. I called him back to try to explain, and he reacted in the time-honored French fashion by stating over and over again that it couldn’t possibly be true, that the situation was impossible, and that I was joking. (Seriously, all French people do this. No matter what’s happening, if it’s not to their liking, their first reaction is “Non, c’est pas vrai! C’est pas possible! Vous plaisantez!” I’ve actually started to do it too, hilariously enough.) I apologized a million times and begged him to wait 5 minutes until the man with the keys came back. He said he would, but after 5 minutes he’d leave, because he had other places to be and he was a busy man, etc. Then he asked me what the person who’d left looked like, so I had to explain that he was Scottish and didn’t speak a word of French, so would not understand why a strange man was following him upstairs to his daughter’s apartment. This whole conversation took longer than you would believe, because of the technician’s frequent interruptions to remind me how impossible it was, how busy he was, and how crazy I was. Finally there was nothing to do but wait for Joe to get back, so I took the opportunity to put real clothing on (it’s much easier to be firm with French people when you’re properly dressed). Finally, we heard Joe in the hallway, and right behind him was the phone guy, who’d obviously managed to communicate something to Joe. The phone guy came in, waved a little black machine at the phone outlets, looked at our phone and told us we needed to buy a converter to plug it in, and left, after saying that his 55 € fee would appear on our first bill. So that was that.

A little later, I headed out to buy a converter (and got hit on by the security guard at the store, who then proceeded to call me three times in three days so I cut him off after that – he wasn’t even that cute). I plugged the phone in, plugged the converter into the wall, and found that the phone (which was ancient) did not work. The saga continues…

So that afternoon, most of the assistants from outside the European Union had appointments to get chest X-rays. Olesya and I arrived really early because we were worried about finding it, so we were the first ones called in. We were both put in little rooms with doors at both ends and told to take off everything above the waist. Then the woman opened the other door and told me to come into this big room with machines everywhere. Remember, I was naked from the waist up. I stepped onto a platform and then had to face a screen while she put a lead apron around my waist. Then I had to flatten myself against the screen, head up, and hold still. After that thoroughly dehumanizing experience, I was allowed to get dressed and go back out to the waiting room, where I told all the other assistants what to expect. A little later, they gave me my X-rays, which were really cool to look at (I also got a piece of paper saying they were normal, so that was reassuring). They’re really only checking for tuberculosis, because apparently everyone in France is vaccinated so they can’t do a PPD like in the US.

The cattle call continued the next day, this time for medical visits. I could make a joke about the French and their love of paperwork, but I’m pretty sure it’s even worse to try to get into the US, so I’ll refrain. I had my height and weight measured (in kilos and centimeters) and my vision checked (in French, of course – I’m really glad there were no Gs or Js on the little card because I would have gotten them mixed up and then probably been kicked out of the country) and then had to go into a little room with a man who asked a few questions, then without so much as a by-your-leave hiked my shirt up to listen to my heart and lungs. (Insert obligatory crack about buying me dinner first here.) He then proceeded to tell me that I have scoliosis, just a little bit, and embarked on a long, detailed explanation with lots of comparisons to suspension bridges, despite my assuring him that I did, in fact, know what scoliosis is. Comparing notes with other assistants afterwards, it sounds like most Americans have scoliosis, so either our screening system in middle school doesn’t work, or French people are more picky about their spines being straight. Then we were all given appointments at the prefecture of Rouen to get our cartes de séjour, which are like temporary green cards. The amount of paperwork required for that is staggering, but we’re lucky, because they set aside a block of appointments for assistants so we all got one within a few weeks. If you miss the appointment or don’t have the correct paperwork, you can’t get another appointment until February, which means that after your visa expires in December, you will basically be an illegal alien. This also means that you cannot leave France because you won’t be able to get back in. So, no pressure!

After that ordeal, we went and got kebabs and sat in a park to eat them. Kebabs are basically Europe’s answer to fast food – there are little hole-in-the-wall kebab places everywhere. They basically spear a bunch of raw meat on a gigantic vertical spit, then let it sit there cooking all day, occasionally scraping the outer layer off to feed to their lucky customers. When you order one, they split a big ol’ roll open, put sauce and lettuce and tomatoes and meat and (this is my favorite part) French fries on it, and hand it to you, whereupon something invariably falls out. If you’re lucky it’s only a French fry. I hadn’t had one since Paris, and I’d forgotten how amazing greasy mystery meat is… Hamburgers don’t even come close.

On Wednesday, Emilia and Pepetonio (nickname for José Antonio, I think – he’s an assistant from Mexico) and I went to the Musée des Beaux Arts, which is only 2€ for students (my Tufts student ID just says 2008, so I plan on taking full advantage of that). The museum is lovely, and the best part was the Impressionist section, where they have one of the Monet paintings of the cathedral (of course) and that Monet painting of a street in Paris on a national holiday (celebrating the Exposition Universelle of 1878, as some quick internet research tells me), with all the flags so it’s all blue, white, red everywhere. I really like that painting, so it was great to walk around a corner and find it. We got museumed out before we’d seen everything, so we’ll have to go back.

Thursday was another training day, this time for the English assistants only. Mostly it was boring and not very helpful, but I did meet an English girl called Nicola who was very nice, so it wasn’t a total loss. Also, I discovered that most of the Brits, Australians, and New Zealanders who are assistants are actually in their third year of university, when people in their programs are required to go abroad (like Nikki, my flatmate). The Americans and Canadians, on the other hand, have mostly finished college and are doing this because it’s a cheaper way of putting off the real world than grad school… I mean, because France is a beautiful country, full of wonderful people that we want to get to know and intelligent students to whom we want to teach our mother tongue. So in general, the North Americans speak better French and know what they’re doing more than the others, which hopefully will combat some American stereotypes.

Thursday evening, Emilia had the brilliant idea to go see Giovanna d’Arco, by Verdi, at the Théâtre des Arts. Similar to student rush in the US, tickets can be had for 5€ right before the show. So we dressed up (I wore that lacy skirt that makes my mother call me a whore) and waited in line (where most of our fellow cheapskates were wearing jeans – Paris this is not) and got tickets! I hadn’t done any research beforehand, so I was quite surprised when a horse walked on stage in the first 15 minutes or so – this production was very livestock-happy (horses, goats, doves, chickens, and a dog all made appearances). There were supertitles in French, so despite not knowing the story I could follow along, and I enjoyed it. I did occasionally wish that the characters would just get on with whatever they were doing, rather than singing about it for 10 minutes, but that’s par for the course with opera, I believe. At any rate, I felt very cultured, and that particular opera was very appropriate, since Rouen is where Joan of Arc was burned at the stake (about which the city still feels guilty – there are all sorts of plaques marking where she was burned, where her remains were finally taken, and other things like that, as well as a gigantic church named after her).

Friday I had three classes with a professor who is very nice but hasn’t the foggiest idea what she’s doing. This is her first year teaching, so she tends to think that we can come up with something to do in the 15 minutes before class starts, which we can’t because I have even less idea what I’m doing than she does. Happily, I only have two classes a week with her ordinarily, Fridays being only when I want to. The classes weren’t a total disaster, and I did get the kids talking a little bit, but it seemed very spur-of-the-moment and I wasn’t totally comfortable. The students were supposed to talk about what they would like to say to Sarkozy, which sparked a lot of interesting and funny reactions. One kid wanted to tell him that all his promises were just a “pack of lies” (I don’t know where he learned that phrase, but I encouraged him to use it).

Okay, now off to London for a week! Things will get less chronological because I'm going to try to post about London while I'm there, then come back and fill in the missing week or so. I'll eat some fish and chips for you all!

Sunny Wednesday

2008-10-27T17:04:00.006+01:00

Heads up: I posted two posts at once, so if you want to read this in chronological order, read the post below this one (called "Getting Settled, Part the Second") first.

On Wednesday (this is still going back awhile – October 8th, to be exact), it was actually nice out. I decided to en profiter (take advantage of it) and took a little walk. I found this little street called “Rue Eaux de Robec” which means “Waters of Robec”. Don’t ask me who or what Robec is or was, but the street is purty. I discovered very quickly where it got its name:
It reminded me of Freiburg, Germany, where there are little streams along a lot of the streets. Hurray bächle! The street also has a lot of antique shops with huge windows full of all things old and fascinating.

I got to the end of the street and turned towards home, whereupon I saw this.
I’m forever getting surprised by various towers and things in this city, not only because there are so blamed many of them, but also because I have an astonishingly bad sense of direction and can never orient myself in relation to landmarks. It’s rather nice, really – kind of like an Alzheimer’s patient getting to read the same books over and over again. This particular surprise is the Abbatiale Saint-Ouen, which I pass every day.
I really really like it, especially the spire.
There are signs in front of it warning you to keep off the grass, which is pretty common. What isn’t so common is the next sentence on the sign: “Danger of falling rocks”. I guess that’s why there’s scaffolding towards the back of the church…
That yellow thing is an elevator (I call them “lifts” more than half the time now, since I hang out regularly with a Scot, a Brit, and an Australian – by the end of the year my accent will be incomprehensible) and I really wanted to hijack it and go for a ride, but I thought the French would probably frown on that so I kept walking. As I got a bit closer I noticed that there were gargoyles, so I tried out the digital zoom on my camera and took a picture of one.
I really enjoy gargoyles – it always strikes me as odd that immensely majestic, solemn buildings like cathedrals have playful little carvings all over them.

I had a lunch date with my professeur référente, Anne, at her house. She lives in Mont-Saint-Aignan, which is one of those suburb-y things to the north of Rouen. I got there a bit early, so I took my time walking to her house and took some pictures along the way. There were some lovely brick houses with neat details around the windows.
I stumbled upon yet another church – it always cracks me up because French people are actually a lot less religious than Americans, but there are SO MANY CHURCHES here.
Finally I got to her house, which was lovely, and had lunch with her and her 15-year-old daughter. It was delightful, and Anne tried to get her daughter to speak English, but of course she wouldn’t. Afterwards, as I was waiting for the bus, a little girl and her mother walked up to the stop. The girl asked, in French, if the number 8 bus had gone by yet, so I told her I’d only been waiting for a minute and didn’t know. She and her mom sat down next to me, and the mom said something to her daughter in English, with an American accent. I decided to blow my cover and asked, in English, if they were American. As it turned out, the father is a professor for an American study-abroad program, so the family lives in France during the school year and goes back during the summer. The little girl is 8 and has been coming to France since she was 5, which explains her French, which was really good. It was nice to speak English, though.

When I arrived back at my street, there were trucks and busy-looking men all over the place – I guess one of the houses was being renovated. The cool part was this nifty rig:
I couldn’t get close enough to take a proper picture of the base without the men looking at me, but it’s got little stilt things that can be individually adjusted so it’s level even on a hilly street like mine. The legs have the added benefit of making the structure look like it’s floating, since its wheels are lifted off the ground. Cool, huh?

That evening, as I was making dinner, I was reading that book of short stories by Maupassant that I’d bought, having run out of English books in the first 4 days. The stories are all creepy (the technical word is fantastique) but they’re good creepy – lots of people going insane from fear and such. So I started reading one called “Who Knows?”, where the main character had come to Rouen to escape something horrible that was haunting him at home. He was walking around the city and came to Rue Eaux de Robec, which he described thusly (I’ve put the French in so those who speak it don't have to suffer through my translation):

Un soir, vers quatre heures, comme je m’engageais dans une rue invraisemblable où coule une rivière noire comme de l’encre nommée « Eau de Robec », mon attention, toute fixée sur la physionomie bizarre et antique des maisons, fut détournée tout à coup par la vue d’une série de boutiques de brocanteurs qui se suivaient de porte en porte.
Ah! Ils avaient bien choisi leur endroit, ces sordides trafiquants de vieilleries dans cette fantastique ruelle, au-dessus de ce cours d’eau sinistre, sous ces toits pointus de tuiles et d’ardoises où grinçaient encore les girouettes du passé!

One evening, around four o’clock, as I was walking down an improbable street where a river as black as ink called “Eau de Robec” runs, my attention, fixed on the bizarre antique physiognomies of the houses, was suddenly turned aside by the sight of a series of antique shops all in a row.
Ah! They had chosen their place well, these sordid traffickers of ancient things in this fantastic little street, above this sinister stream, under these pointed tile and slate roofs where antiquated weathervanes still creaked!

So that was Maupassant’s impression of my cute little street with the flowers… The man did in fact go crazy towards the end of his life, so perhaps we can forgive him some atmospheric exaggeration. Anyway, it was neat to see that not much has changed in Rouen since the 1800’s – I bet some of the proprietors of the antique shops are the great-great-grandchildren of the ones in Maupassant’s day.

On Thursday, I observed one of Michèle’s classes. She was working with terminales, so their English was quite good. Their accents are adorable, and I know I’m going to have to correct them, but it’s so easy to just get lulled into thinking that h’s are silent and “th” is pronounced “z”… I also had a meeting with the CPE, who is I think the equivalent of the dean of students. They deal with absences and punishments, but also keep an eye on the students’ general wellbeing, so if something goes wrong they can help. I learned what I can and can’t do to the kids (apparently corporal punishment is illegal in France – and just when I’d bought a nice springy ruler!) and saw how the attendance system works.

On Friday, I did the most teaching I’ve done so far, in Anne’s class. She didn’t tell them who I was or why I was there or anything, so they had to ask me questions to find out what they wanted to know. It was a good exercise because the “information gap” (language teachers love information gaps) was real, and they were genuinely curious. They wanted to know who I was voting for (the American election gets a lot of press over here) and what I thought about France and whether I had a boyfriend. It was a lot of fun, though, and the kids were cute.

When I got home, it was so nice out I decided to en profiter again, because here you never know how long the sun will stay shining, so I changed into my bright pink tights and black-and-white striped dress and walked to the park behind the Abbatiale to read my book. It was absolutely lovely, and the people-watching was good too. And there were, of course, Frenchmen to comment on my appearance, because this is France and I am a young woman.

That night a bunch of us went to O’Kallaghan’s again, where there was a live band doing covers of mostly American songs (Are You Gonna Be My Girl, Black Betty, Born to Be Wild… all hilarious in a French accent). It was fun, but we were supposed to meet up with some other assistants who never showed up. As it turned out, they were there, but there were so many people we just didn’t see them. This is why cell phones were invented, and why you tend to get left out if you don’t have one.

Saturday was a beautiful day as well (must have been some sort of record) so Emilia and I had coffee outside in the Place du Vieux Marché. I love French terraces because you can just sit there for as long as you want, chatting and enjoying the sun and people-watching. We were also enjoying the weird church (named for Jeanne d’Arc, who was burned at the stake there) in the middle of the square. This picture doesn’t do it justice, but I haven’t got a better one yet.

On the way back, I found the perfect idea for a Christmas present for me! I know you always complain that I don’t start my list soon enough, so here’s one idea:
How cute is she? And isn’t she a lovely color? She was almost small enough to stuff into my handbag, but that back wheel just wouldn’t fit in.

Getting Settled, Part the Second

2008-10-27T16:52:00.005+01:00

And more explorations:

Saturday we went shopping again, although neither Nikki nor I wants to buy too much until we get our salaries. First we stopped at the cathedral to actually go inside. It was magnificent; all lacy carved stone and stained glass windows and gorgeous little details. There was also a little model of the cathedral, which not only made me happy but also gives an idea of the overall shape of it:
There were dozens of stained glass windows, all this size:
They depict various biblical stories, and they were all done by different artists, dating from the 1400s to the 1950s. One said that it showed Saint Nicholas, so I looked up expecting to see Santa Claus. I should have remembered what I learned in Tufts chorale:
Those boys in the barrel had been cut up and pickled, I forget why, and Nicholas brought them back to life (if any chorale members remember more of the story, please let me know – all I remember is that bit, and the cute little boys that sang the pickled boys’ roles).

There was also a cute little staircase, the bottom part of which was built in the 15 or 1600s, and the top in the 1800s.
It always interests me to see the dates that a cathedral spans – this one was started in 1205 and completed in the 1800s, with repairs after WWII (where it got pretty badly bombed).

Then we returned to shopping. Olesya bought a lovely white wool coat, and some boots. On the way back, I stopped at a bookstore near our apartment and bought a book of short stories by Maupassant (very appropriately, because he lived in and wrote about Normandy) and a book that seems to be the French version of Anne Frank, except this girl survived. Since I’m not taking any classes, for the first time in 13 years, I think I’ll try to read a lot of French books.

On Sunday, Nikki and I went to the market. It was raining, so there weren’t quite as many people as the last week, but it was still quite bustling. There was a tent with second-hand clothing, which as you know is like crack for me, and I found a light sweater:
And a cute little light coat:
For 3 € each. Nikki also found a really nice H&M coat for 8 €. Clearly this tent is going to be dangerous. We then went merrily off to buy vegetables, after first walking all around and seeing vegetables, fruits, flowers, meat, cheese, dried fruit, nuts, fish, shellfish… She likes markets just as much as I do, so we had a great time looking around. I also decided to buy some sausages, because buying meat has always frightened me and I want to get over that. I got some nice herbed ones that didn’t look too scary (staying away from the boudin noir (black pudding) – I’m not quite French enough for that yet). I cooked them that evening with zucchini and onion and they were quite good.

On Monday, I went to the school to sign papers, and ran into an English teacher who took me to lunch, then into her classes. We went to the school cafeteria, where we get to cut in line because we’re teachers (woo!). The teachers also get a special room to eat in, where in addition to pitchers of water, there is cider. The alcoholic Normandy kind. At lunch. In a school building. Where the teachers are going to have to go back to class in an hour. Hurray for France! I didn’t have any, because I was sitting with three French people I didn’t know and didn’t want to make an ass of myself. The conversation got quite animated, talking about the economic crisis, which I can’t even discuss intelligently in English, so I just watched, understanding maybe 6 words out of 10. It was interesting from an anthropological standpoint, though – French people are hilarious when they get really into a discussion, and it doesn’t take much to get them to that point. One of the professors also started teasing me about how much he liked Sarah Palin, and how she was such a good example to women everywhere. I was mostly sure he was joking, but I didn’t want to get into a huge argument with him just at first, so I didn’t say much. He came up to me later and assured me that he’d been joking, which I thought was nice of him, since I probably looked frightened. I was forgetting that in France it’s totally okay to disagree vehemently with someone one second and kiss them on both cheeks politely the next.

The teacher I was with has “secondes”, who are the equivalent of our sophomores (it goes troisième, seconde, première, terminale, confusingly enough). In the first one, I just watched from the back, but in the second I stayed up front and helped her answer questions, which was fun. A few of the students had the guts to ask me, in English, where I was from and how old I was and stuff, which was great – they seemed to be excited to have me there.

Afterwards, I went shopping to get some clothes hangers, finally, and something to organize the growing mountain of paperwork that I’ve just been tossing onto a pile. I also got four folders; I don’t know if you’ve experienced the joy that is a French folder, but they are magnificent. They’re really more like little portfolios – they have sides that fold in all around and elastic bands to keep them closed, so you can fit hundreds of pages in them without trying to stuff them into a pocket, like in the US, and nothing falls out because all four sides are closed. They are, of course, ridiculously expensive, but they make me so happy they’re worth it.

On Tuesday, the last day to turn in my paperwork (with a bank account number) in order to get paid at the end of October instead of the end of November, I still hadn’t opened a bank account (banks are closed Mondays here because they’re open part of the day on Saturdays). So I arrived at the bank at 9 am sharp, prepared to grovel, on my hands and knees if necessary, for an appointment. The man asked, doubtfully, if I had an identity card, so I gave him my passport. He asked for proof of address, even more doubtfully, so I whipped out my carefully-prepared “attestation de domicile” and gave it to him. He asked for a pay stub, which of course I don’t have, so I handed him my teaching contract. Finally, he said he was going to go photocopy my passport, but I handed him copies of the identity page and my visa page, whereupon he finally looked impressed and gave me an appointment later that morning. The woman I met with, with the unfortunate last name of “Rat”, which means the same thing in French as it does in English, was absolutely delightful. We ended up chatting a bit while she was setting everything up, and she asked me how to say “cathédrale” in English so she could direct the tourists who always come in. At the end, she gave me a little binder to hold my bank statements, a card-holder, a key ring, a pen, and approximately 4 million pieces of paper covered with teeny-tiny legalese, in French. I tried to skim it, and as far as I can tell I didn’t give them the right to take all my money or kill my first-born, although I couldn’t swear to it. Afterwards I got the best accomplishment high I’ve ever had – that’s the most complicated thing I’ve had to do yet here, and I did it completely in a foreign language and even managed to form a little bit of a relationship with the person.

This sense of accomplishment was short-lived, since I had a meeting with my professeur référent, Anne, right afterwards. She’s very nice, but she’s never organized the assistant thing before, so she has no idea what she’s doing and neither do I. A lot of teachers simply don’t have the time to work with me, since English classes are only 2 or 3 hours a week, so we might have to schedule things outside of class for me to get enough hours. I’m sure it will work out eventually; I would just like to get a clearer idea of what exactly I’ll be doing, and no one seems to be able to tell me. Everyone is very nice and welcoming, though.

After the meeting, I handed in all my paperwork, so hopefully I will get paid in a few weeks! I took the opportunity, while waiting for the secretary, to take a picture of the hallway:
Sometime when there aren’t any kids around, I’ll try to take a picture of the outside of the school. I don’t mind (much) looking like a tourist on the streets of Rouen, but I absolutely cannot be gawking at the school one minute and expecting the students to treat me with respect the next - I have enough trouble getting them to shut up as it is.

Getting Settled, Part the First

2008-10-19T16:40:00.003+01:00

Okay, so now I’ve spent enough time on French keyboards (the top row goes AZERTY instead of QWERTY, the M is where the semicolon should be, you have to press shift to get to the numbers, all the punctuation marks are in different places...) that I’m starting to forget how to type on American ones, and my left pinky keeps going for the “Q” key when I want to type “A”. Qrgh!

Anyway, on to what happened during my first week (Sept. 30th and on). On Tuesday morning, around 8:00, I woke up to hear people in the apartment. After a moment of panic, I realized that it was probably just my new roommate. So I went out into the hall in my pajamas to greet her. What I hadn’t realized was that of course her professor and the vice-principal of the school would be with her, so there I was, in a ratty old T-shirt, hair sticking up, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes, and having to make polite French conversation to impeccably-dressed French people. Luckily, Olesya came out of her room at that point too, hair still in curlers, so I felt better. It was at that point I learned that the new assistant, Nikki, is actually from Scotland, not England as I’d been told. So her accent is charming and I could listen to her talk for hours. Also, she says “wee” instead of “little”, which I’d honestly thought only happened in books. Her French isn’t very good, so when it’s just the two of us, we speak English. I didn’t get to talk to her much that morning because she went straight to bed, tired out from traveling.

That afternoon, I met up with another American assistant, Emilia, to get some respite from speaking French constantly (which really tires you out at first). Using my handy-dandy Viking guide, we went to a tearoom called “Le Five O’Clock”, where we had orange-flavored hot chocolate and scones and pear-berry charlotte. It was all quite good, and just as we were about to finish, a woman at a nearby table came over and asked us, in very good English, whether we would like to go the cinema that evening. She explained that she had two vouchers to get into the theater for cheap, but they expired that day and she wasn’t going to have the chance to use them, and she likes English people, so she offered them to us. After thanking her profusely in French and English, we went to the Centre Commercial (mall) where the theater is. We got to take the métro, which made my little public-transportation-loving self very happy (tickets only cost 65 centimes if you’re under 25, which makes my little penny-pinching self very happy). We had some time to kill before our movie, so we went to H&M, where I bought some cute bobby pins and two pairs of tights, kelly green and bright pink. I don’t know if I’ll have the guts to wear them, but if nothing else they can be long underwear in the winter. The movie was called “La Fille de Monaco” (The Girl from Monaco), and it was… weird. Like most French movies. But I understood most of it, which made me happy. Then we took the métro back into Rouen proper (there’s only one line, so it’s very easy to navigate – the buses are where it gets confusing) and I walked home in the rain. Without an umbrella.

Wednesday, the three of us housemates decided that we needed Internet, so we girded our loins (well, I girded my loins – the other two were just moral support) and went into a store and asked numerous stupid questions of a very patient, very kind man. Our situation is complicated because we have to be able to call the US, Scotland, and Russia, which are not only three different countries, but on three different continents. The poor man who was helping us had to make all sorts of calls on our behalf, but by the end I had a nice list comparing two different plans for Internet, TV, and telephone. After that ordeal, we needed a reward, so we got hot chocolate and sat down for a bit. When I get back to the US, dealing with Comcast is going to be so easy. Then we shopped for a bit, and I finally got an umbrella, because in this city you literally might need one at any moment. I’ve seen the sky go from rainy to sunny to cloudy to sunny to rainy in the space of five minutes, and apparently it just gets worse from here on in. I know all my pictures have been lovely and sunny, but that’s just two days’ worth – a more accurate picture of the view from my bedroom window is this one:

We left the centre commercial (it was raining again) to go back to Rouen proper, to a stationery store. On the way there, I saw another Internet/phone/TV store, so I made myself go into that one too, just to check if it was any cheaper. This time it was a lot easier, since I’d asked all the questions already and I knew the vocabulary, and this one turned out to be cheaper! So I thanked the nice man and said I’d come back the next day with the appropriate paperwork. Then we finally got to go to the stationery store, where I could have happily spent hours. There’s paper, and pens, and markers, and planners, and stickers, and folders, and files… I’m a nerd, I know, but those stores make me so happy. I managed to restrain myself, buying only a planner and a wastebasket for my room. Then we all trooped home, exhausted, but with the promise of Internet and free calls home to cheer us up.

The next day, Thursday, I awoke to the gentle sound of raindrops tapping on the roof, a sound whose charm is rapidly fading. I had another Anglophone date with Emilia, and this time Nikki came too. We went to the Crêperie Mont-St-Michel, where for 10 € you can get a glass of cider (hard, a Normandy specialty), a savory crêpe, a sweet crêpe, and coffee. It was absolutely delicious, and served to us in part by the 10-year-old son of the owner, who was adorable. Afterwards, I decided that the time had come to buy a pair of rubber boots, because I was sick of having wet feet all the time. They’re not quite as common here as in the US, but I did see them in stores, so I figured it wasn’t a huge fashion faux pas.
They’re not cow boots, but they’ll do.

Next, I went back to the Internet store, armed with paperwork. The woman informed me politely that I would need to go to France Télécom to get a telephone line before I could get Internet. Grumblegrumblegrumble.

Next on my list to buy was a rod for my closet, which is huge but useless, having no shelves or rod or anything. Nikki wanted curtains, so we went to this huge fabric/home furnishings/notions store called Toto. It’s mazelike, with three different entrances and shelves floor to ceiling, but the people who helped us were very nice, especially when I was trying to explain that Nikki needed thicker material for her curtains because we live next to a middle school and there are wide-eyed little boys just across the way. I found a pressure rod that looked hefty enough, nodded my way through a half-understood explanation from the man who was helping me (I think he was talking about having to screw it in, but I’m not sure – he had a lisp), and then got to walk home with a yard-long rod poking out of my bag. I put it up, then realized that I had no hangers. Such is life.

On Friday, I awoke again to the dulcet tones of raindrops, but this time I was prepared. I put my rubber boots on, opened my umbrella, and shouted my defiance to the cloudy skies. Whereupon it stopped raining. It started again in a few minutes, though, so I was vindicated. It was the orientation day for all the assistants in the entire region, so Olesya, Nikki and I hopped on the bus to the IUFM, which is the teacher-training school. The first part of the day was mostly in French, with short speeches in each of the 8 languages being taught in the region this year (English, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Chinese, Russian and Arabic). It was really neat to hear all the languages, especially Portuguese and Russian, which I always think sound like the other one. (The trick is that Portuguese has a lot more zh-sounds, and Russian has a lot more k-sounds.) We learned that there are 5682 assistants in France this year, speaking 15 languages and representing 53 countries. In my region, there are 163 assistants (of which 110 speak English), speaking 8 languages and representing 26 countries. This means that the English speakers come from the US, England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand (I’ve probably forgotten a couple). Which means that the poor French kids, most of whom have only heard British accents, will have to decipher this mix of dialects. It’ll definitely be good for them, but it will be hard at first.

We split up into language groups in the afternoon, so we could hear about all the paperwork in our native languages. The French authorities ask for everything but your first-born child, and I’m pretty sure they’d ask for that too if they thought they could get away with it. It’s especially bad if you’re not from the European Union (yet another reason to be jealous of Europe) because you have to get a temporary green card to be here for longer than 6 months. It was during this session that we saw “concubinage” listed as a possibility for marital status, which made us nearly hysterical. I looked it up later and found that it meant “common-law marriage”, which is much less amusing than it should be. Afterwards, I made plans with Emilia and a Canadian boy named Alex to go out to an Irish pub. On the way home, I stopped by France Télécom to try to get a telephone line, but since there hasn’t been one in our apartment for a few years, they have to send someone over. I got an appointment for a week and a half later, which isn't bad, considering that this is France. The saga continues…

Olesya came with us to the pub, where there were snakebites and something called black velvets on the menu. The snakebite was half Guinness, half Kilkenny, and the black velvet was that plus blackcurrant syrup. Having been informed by a certain Jumbo with Australian connections that blackcurrant concoctions are delicious, I ordered the black velvet, as did Emilia. It was HUGE, so it took me about 2 hours to drink it, but it was very good. About halfway through, my French started to improve dramatically, or at least I thought it did… We walked home (well, I skipped part of the way – it’s embarrassing how much of a lightweight I am, and how hyper alcohol makes me) and went to bed.

Dieppe - First Sunday

2008-10-11T12:29:00.007+01:00

My colleague Michèle invited me to go picnic at the ocean on Sunday, so I went to the marché to buy some cheese before meeting her. The marché was brilliant – I wanted to take pictures, but there were so many people jostling about I don’t think it would have worked. It’s in a big square, and there are flowers, fruits and vegetables, cheeses, meats, and even clothing, and everyone is shouting about how delicious their merchandise is, and it’s all very French. The man at the cheese stall was very nice and gave me little pieces of cheese to taste so I could decide, and I actually liked one that had a suspicious blue streak in it! Aren’t you proud, Mom? So I got a wedge of that, then trekked to a bakery and bought my first baguette. Baguettes are 80 centimes of pure happiness, especially if you have cheese too. Then I went to the school to meet Michèle. She’d told me that a Norwegian teacher, Nils, was also coming with us, so when I saw a tall blond man wandering around near the school entrance, I approached him and asked if he was waiting for Michèle, which he was. So we chatted for a bit, and I found out that my high school has a program where Norwegian students study here for three years, so there are a few Norwegian teachers to help them out. Then Michèle arrived, about half an hour late (welcome to France!) and we piled into her little car and headed for the coast.

The drive was interesting, and made me really really happy that I don’t have to drive while I’m here – everyone seems to know to the millimeter where exactly their car is, and they even drive over the curb if necessary to squeeze past other cars. But I haven’t seen anyone hit anything yet – it must be one of those skills you’re born knowing if you’re European, like dressing well and liking wine.

The beach at Dieppe was not exactly what I was expecting, although it was quite pretty:
Yes, those are rocks, not sand. And yes, they continue all the way down to the water. And yes, they are exquisitely painful to walk on.
Nils and Michèle stripped down to their swimsuits and hopped right in the water, but it was a bit windy and I hadn’t brought a sweater, so I just hobbled down to the water and waded for a bit so I could say I’d gone in. The trek back up to my shoes was less painful because my feet were numb from the frigidity – this is the English Channel, remember. It didn’t seem to bother Michèle, who stayed in the water for a really long time, while Nils and I watched in wonder from the shore:
When she finally came out, she didn’t even look cold – I think perhaps one of her ancestors was a penguin. She’d brought pasta salad, Nils brought a roasted chicken, and we had cheese and strawberries for dessert. Afterwards, we got back into the car, I thought to go home, but Michèle had other plans. Her family is from here, so she wanted to show Nils and me all around the area. Our first stop was a little church where Georges Braque is buried.
He was a contemporary of Picasso, and he also designed the stained glass windows in the church.
It’s a very simple church, not like the Gothic craziness of the cathedral, but I liked it.
Also, there were funny carvings on the columns, the significance of which no one remembers, although the little information booklet did mention something about a sailor vomiting.
This is a view of the coastline from the church – I think it would be nice to be buried in a place like this.

Michèle’s next idea was to climb down to the seashore. We found a path that led right up to the edge of the cliffs, where there were many signs indicating that those who valued their lives should not continue on.
But our fearless leader just kept walking, and I didn’t want to be branded a coward the first day (especially as I don’t know the French for “wimp”), so I kept on as well. Happily, the path was quite easy, switchbacking down the cliff into a little valley that led to the shore. This is a view from the shore back up the valley; we came down the right side.
We walked along the shore for a while, which became sandy pretty soon, much to my delight. I took off my shoes so I could wade in the little pools left behind by the tide:
Michèle hadn’t brought her camera (she doesn’t even own a digital one, so Nils and I teased her about being a dinosaur) so she made me take this picture, with the rock and the pool in the foreground and the cliffs in the back and the pretty sky (we were lucky – it rains ALL THE TIME here, because we’re just the right distance from the ocean that we get some weird weather pattern).
Then I went closer to the cliffs – they’re mostly made of white rock, but there are horizontal bands of a darker rock that must be harder, because it isn’t worn away as much.
Here’s Normandy in a nutshell: cows and cliffs. No need for a fence when you’ve got a huge drop-off, right?
We found another little valley, this time with stairs, to climb back up and find our way back to the church. Luckily, Michèle and Nils both have a good sense of direction, because I would have been utterly lost.

After we got back to the car, which smelled of chicken and cheese and strawberries, all slightly too warm (we opened the windows very wide), we drove off to see the cathedral of Dieppe. I swear, every little town in France has its very own cathedral, complete with stained glass and flying buttresses and everything. It’s mildly ridiculous.
This one had a little tiny staircase to get to the organ, which I really liked.

Michèle had one more stop planned – the ruins of a castle, probably built to protect against a British invasion (I’ve forgotten the name and the purpose – I was tired, okay?). We weren’t allowed to go inside because rocks still fall down sometimes, so we walked around the outside of the moat.
By this point, it was getting late enough that the sun was starting to set:
So we went back to the car, where I almost fell asleep, and drove back to Rouen.

On Monday, I met Michèle to observe a few of her English classes, which was interesting. She speaks with an English accent, as do her students, so it will probably be a bit hard for them to understand me at first, but it’ll be good for them to hear a different kind of accent. She was using Calvin and Hobbes comics in one of her classes, so that was pretty neat. When I got home from the school, my Russian housemate, Olesya, was there. Her French isn’t great, but it’s the only language we have in common, so that’s what we speak. She’s got a great memory for vocabulary – if she asks me about a word once, she remembers it and uses it well, so I think she’ll improve quickly. It’s also really good for my French, since I have to figure out alternate ways to say things, without resorting to English. We went food shopping, then wandered around Rouen at night – the cathedral is just as pretty when it’s dark out:
And, finally, proof that I am actually here, and not just lifting pictures from the Internet to trick you all:
More on the Internet saga (it’s going to reach epic-poem-length before it’s through, I’m sure) and my housemates and paperwork (alongside “single” and “married” and “divorced” there was an option called “concubinage”, which caused us no end of amusement) later on!

franglophone folle

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Dieppe - First Sunday