Fine, make me spend a week in Paris. See if I care.

I’m determined to get this written up and posted by the end of the day, because starting tomorrow, I will be entering novel-writing mode. I’m going to attempt to do NaNoWriMo again, and that means that these blog posts may become more sparse for the month of November. Don’t worry, I’ll be back by December with lots of new stories to tell.

Last Sunday, just before I was set to take off for my break, I got an e-mail from SNCF saying that I should check their website since they had lots of cancellations due to grèves. Sure enough, when I went and checked, my train was canceled, and this called for some last minute reshuffling of my schedule. The girl I was going to meet up with in Strasbourg had already told me that due to a last minute change in plans, she wouldn’t be making it to Strasbourg, either. So I did some quick decision making and ended up deciding to stay in Paris the entire time. I’m disappointed that I didn’t get to Strasbourg, but I know I have plenty of breaks in the future, so I’ll definitely try to get there next spring. And there are worse things than a week in Paris.

Early Monday, despite the fact that my train was canceled, I headed to the train station to try and get another train into Paris, hopefully that day. It was far simpler than I had imagined, and I ended up getting a train that arrived only a little bit later than my original train was supposed to. To my surprise, I arrived without any other trouble and once again managed to navigate the Metro without any disasters. I like the Paris metro—I’ve never once gotten lost taking it, though I do occasionally get confused upon exiting.

In Paris I was staying with another Marquette alum, Amelia. She was one of the roughly three other people who studied French at Marquette (so that’s a slight underestimate…maybe there were seventeen other French students at MU. On a good day.), and she also happened to study abroad with me in Avignon a few years ago. Once again we’re back in the same country doing the same program, and lucky for me, she was nice enough to put me up for my trip.

As soon as I got in we went to a grocery store to procure food for a Avignon-style picnic at the Luxembourg Gardens right by Amelia’s apartment. We had some chèvre, basil, and tomato sandwiches on a fresh baguette with wine and chocolate, and it was simply lovely. Some of my favorite memories of Avignon are the many picnics we had on the Ile, and it was fun to relive that.

Tuesday morning, once I managed to pull myself out of bed, I set off for the Palais Garnier. I was feeling a little bit desperate to take in some culture while in the city, and I really wanted to see a ballet while in Paris (there are very few ballets performed in farmland). They still had tickets available for 8€, though they obviously weren’t the best seats in the house, so I grabbed two of those for that evening. I had no real destination for the rest of the day, but I was pretty desperate to wander around the city a little bit. I stopped by the Galleries LaFayette, which has a gorgeous dome, because they already had their Christmas decorations up. Under the dome they had a huge Christmas tree, and there were presents hanging from the ceiling. It was quite impressive. My wanderings then lead me down Rue des Italiens, which I selected for no real reason whatsoever. After continuing that way for a while, I turned left because I happened to notice a nice view of a church and Sacré Coeur in the background. I thought that it might’ve been Place de la Madeline, but once I got there I discovered that no, it was Notre Dame des Lorettes, and that apparently there is no limit on the number of impressive looking churches in Paris. I meandered my way through the streets, stopped in a few stores, bought a quiche for lunch, and managed to resist spending 4€ on a tall mocha from the first Starbucks I’d seen in over a month.

After my ambling morning, I got back on the metro and went out to Parc Monceau, which Amelia had recommended to me. I was lucky enough to have gorgeous weather pretty much the entire time I was in Paris, and that afternoon in particular was quite nice for wandering around the park. It’s a pretty whimsical place, with statues and monuments plopped down at random intervals. According to one of the signs on the outside, it was created as an attempt to make “a truly French park,” and it definitely had that feeling. I sat and scribbled for a while in the sun when I got tired of wandering, and then I made my way back to Amelia’s to chill for a bit before the ballet.

I knew nothing about Paquita going into it, but I didn’t particularly care—I just wanted to see a ballet. And I did indeed get to see it, or at least 60% or 70% of it. I was expecting to have seats in the back, but I wasn’t expecting to have seats that looked directly across at the other side of the audience rather than at the stage. We missed a chunk of the dancing that was taking place on the left side of the stage because of the odd angle, but I enjoyed the ballet nonetheless. I was a little confused story-wise about what was going down—all I got from the first act was that there were gypsies, and some evil guy among the gypsies was trying to kill a Prince Charming-esque character (who was fittingly blond), but Paquita had a thing for the prince, which we gathered from the fact that they did a pas de deux together. The bad guy hired some evil people (who we knew were evil because they were wearing black capes) to help him out, and then invited the noble dude over to dinner. Paquita found out about the plan, and after much hilarious gesticulating, she was able to save Sir Blondie. End Act I. In Act II, Sir Blondie brought Paquita back to the court, and there was a ball and lots of dancing. There was also some very confusing gesticulating towards a painting of the king, and upon checking with Wikipedia, we learned that due to a piece of jewelry Paquita wore, they realize that she was also a member of the nobility and had been kidnapped by the gypsies as a child, which meant that she and Sir Blondie (a far removed cousin) could get married. Hurray!

Aside: Paquita’s world premier was done by the Ballet de l’Opera National de Paris in 1846, the same company that we saw perform it. That was pretty awesome to find out.

Almost as exciting as the ballet (though without any bandits running around) was the building itself. For those of you who have seen the 2004 movie version of Phantom of the Opera, this is the building it takes place in (though they just built a set to make it look like that). There is an amazing main staircase, incredible arches everywhere, mosaics covering the ceiling, and one hell of a chandelier. You do not want that thing dropping in the middle of a performance. The building itself also has an interesting history—they had a lot of trouble building it because it was on top of an underground lake (the inspiration for the phantom’s lair) and the chandelier did in fact fall at one point, killing one person. The outside of the building is just as impressive. See photos from my last post for details, there’s no way I’ll be able to do it justice.

After the ballet let out, Amelia and I went out to dinner at a restaurant recommended to her by one of her private English students. I ordered duck, which was delicious, and Amelia was braver than me and got beef tartare. It was a great meal, but we had a rather annoying waiter who was being a punk and seemed to dislike us for speaking in French to him when he spoke to use in English (and yet he had befriended another group of annoying American girls doing shots). We had to ask twice for the check, and ended up getting it from someone else. That was the downside of the meal, but I’m going to choose to remember the food instead.

Wednesday was entertaining in that very little went right. Amelia and I headed to a café to enjoy some coffee, but we managed to randomly pick an outrageously priced café and I ended up paying almost 5€ for my café au lait. Oy. I spent the rest of the day reminding myself that it was really, really good coffee. From there, we went over to La Conciergerie, which is the prison where they kept Marie Antoinette. I had heard good things about it, and I really wanted to visit it. We got in the line, which was the same as the line for Sainte Chapelle, and decided to stop and see Sainte Chapelle as well. After a long line and a security check, we got in to discover that La Conciergerie was closed until the day I left. Excellent timing, France. We decided that we might as well see Sainte Chapelle (especially since it was free for Amelia). In theory, it should’ve been free for me as well, but apparently my lycée didn’t give me whatever card it was they should’ve, so I ended up paying to get in. THEN, because France really wanted to make a point, we got in to discover that a good chunk of the chapel was closed for reconstruction. At this point, I shrugged, laughed, and took pictures of what I could see.

We walked over to Pont des Arts afterwards, which is a bridge with chain link fences on the side. The fences have lots of locks hanging on them—apparently it’s a thing for couples to leave locks there with their initials and the date. I assume people come by to cut them off periodically, but there were a couple locks that were older, including some from before I was born. At this point we decided it was lunch time, and so we headed to a market to grab some cheese and fruit to bring back to the apartment for lunch. In the afternoon we met up with one of Amelia’s friends, Marina, who is also a teaching assistant in Paris, and we stopped at a costume store since they were looking for Halloween costumes. Halloween is definitely not popular with the older generations here (I asked about it and was told that a lot of people don’t like it since it’s so close to All Saints’ Day, which is a really big holiday here…I thought the whole point of it was that it’s the day before All Saints’ Day, but what do I know? I’m just a stupid American!), but some of the younger generation seems to get into it, and companies definitely use it in their advertisements. We walked back over to the Luxembourg Gardens afterwards and sat and chatted over there. I tried to stop by the Montparnasse Cemetery that evening, but it keeping with the rest of our Wednesday, it was closed. I ended up staying in since I was feeling rather exhausted. I forgot about the whole part of travel that makes you want to sleep for twelve hours at a time.

Thursday morning Amelia and I went back over to the Montparnasse Cemetery (after stopping for pain au chocolat, which we did pretty much every day I was there), which was open this time. Hurray! There are a lot of famous people buried there, but I was most interested in seeing the graves of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre. I like existentialism, so a trip to their graves was necessary. I probably should’ve searched out some other famous graves, but instead Amelia and I just wandered the cemetery (which really feels a lot more like a garden or a public park than a cemetery), taking pictures of things. We found a bench after an hour or so and sat down to people watch and talk. I spotted a guy who looked remarkably like Cyrano de Bergerac, complete with a heavy cloak, a mustache, and long curly hair. It was a low-key sight-seeing trip, but I enjoyed the chance to catch up with Amelia and just take everything in. Once our stomachs started making noises, we decided to set off for lunch, even though it was already after 3pm. Whoops. Later that afternoon we went over to Cité Université, which felt more like a college campus from the US than the middle of Paris. There were lots of people running and students wandering around. It’s a very international school, and each country has its own housing place for the students from that country. There’s a pretty park that we walked around for a bit, and then we headed off to meet Marina for dinner.

I had demanded pizza while I was in Paris, since I have been having a terrible time finding decent pizza in Rennes. They have pizza, but it tends to be covered with salmon or chèvre, and while I do love my chèvre, it does not belong on a pizza. Where’s the mozzarella? Anyway, one of Amelia’s friends had recommended a delicious pizza, and I was quite satisfied with it. I just had a plain cheese pizza, but it was very good. And then, because I hadn’t consumed nearly enough calories yet over the course of my trip, we all got profiteroles to share. Yayyyy profiteroles! And, best of all, we had a very nice waiter, so that just made the experience even more enjoyable. He totally got a tip.

From there we headed back to Amelia’s, where we drifted off to sleep while watching Amélie.

Friday I headed back into Rennes, and I arrived delighted to discover that fall had stopped by while I was gone. The trees are finally changing colors, and it’s gorgeous. I was starting to worry that they just didn’t have a fall here (or at least not one with pretty colors, which is the whole point of fall as far as I’m concerned), but thankfully that is not the case. I’ve spent the weekend running errands, doing laundry, and trying to get back on top of everything I can before I lose the next month of my life to writing a novel. Tonight I’m going to be hanging out with a bunch of people (largely Americans) who have no objections to celebrating Halloween, even if tomorrow is All Saints’ Day. Classes start up again on Wednesday, and hopefully (fingers crossed) there will be students. That would be nice, wouldn’t it?

I’m afraid this has not been one of the most interesting blog entries I’ve ever written, probably because I’m too busy trying to finish it to be exceptionally entertaining. Sorry about that! You could file a complaint, but I might not get around to reading it until December 1^st.

Happy Halloween!

Paris: Proof

While I try to put together a coherent blog about the last week, you get to look at pictures!

1) Galleries LaFayette is already all decked out for Christmas. Guess that's what happens when you're in a country with no Halloween and no Thanksgiving...


2) I looked down a street while wandering and caught a gorgeous view of Sacre Coeur behind another church, Notre Dame de something or other.


3) Parc Monceau, a lovely and whimsical park.


4) Palais Garnier at night, after seeing Pacquita (a ballet). Otherwise known as the Phantom of the Opera opera house!


5) What SHOULD have been the front of Sainte Chapelle, but France was being France, so instead we have a picture of a picture of the front of Sainte Chapelle!

Postcards, Work, and Upcoming Adventures

Oh dear, it appears I’ve gotten rather behind on the blogging. This always happens…the more I have going on, the less time I have for blogging, but the more things I have to blog about. This is a dilemma.

First of all, I’m announcing a postcard contest (largely as a means of getting people to send me things). While I’m normally quite neurotic about putting my address on the internet, I do not believe anyone could find me out in farmland if they tried, and since I don’t even have a street address, I think I’m safe. Unless the cows decide to attack. Then I’m a goner. ANYWAY, my address is:
Katherine Jacob
Le Vallon
35230 Noyal-Chatillon-Sur-Seiche
France
Those who send me the coolest postcards will get fame and fortune when I post photos of the postcards on my blog, and I will get things to hang on my wall. Everyone is happy! To motivate you, we have the two postcards I have already been sent. The first came from Hope, and is of a candy store in Ohio:

The second came from Anna, and is an American Girl postcard:

Now it’s up to you guys to try and top those two (and, most importantly, give me things to put on my wall, which is in dire need of decoration).

Picking up from last Friday, we did have quite a few students on strike again that day. I had three classes, which were fine. The only one that stood out was the last one, with a small group of six terminales. They were working on an immigration debate, and I had a lot of fun helping them out with it. They were each assigned roles and they had to plan out the arguments they were going to make. It reminded me a lot of the plays we used to do in high school French that involved such wonderful situations as me being a fortune teller and Kayla being Paris Hilton, or Kelsey and I running out of a restaurant because we didn’t have enough money to pay for the bill. I strongly approve of putting on plays as a means of teaching language, and the kids were having a blast working on it. One of the girls spoke English really well, which was great, except that one of her best friends could barely speak at all, so girl one just kept translating for her. Efficient, yes. A good way to learn English, no. This happens a lot, I think because there are so many different levels of English in each class, and I’m still trying to figure out the best way to address it. With just a small group of students, it’s not too hard, but when you have twenty kids at a time, it’s a little more tricky.

Friday evening was most exciting. Yannick, the former boarder, had finally moved out (two weeks late due to French bureaucracy, as usual) and I finally got to unpack my suitcases and get settled in my real room. My new room gets internet reception, which is awesome, and I also get a bathroom to myself now. I’ve never had my own bathroom before in my life, so I may get a bit spoiled this year. I also have my own kitchen now, which I’m really excited about. It’s nice to be able to cook my own food again and decide when I do and don’t want to eat. Of course, Denise is still terribly afraid that I’m starving to death, so she tends to bring me soup and dessert every night. I will not object, especially if she keeps brining me semoule, which is a rice pudding type of dessert. It is amazing and the best non-chocolate thing I have ever tasted in my life. I do not know how I survived this long without it, nor can I even begin to figure out why it’s so good. Denise taught me how to make it, and all that goes in is some milk, then the semoule, then some sugar. SO GOOD.

Friday evening I also began to feel as though I was coming down with a cold, and Saturday this fact was cemented, and I was less than pleased. I thus didn’t do anything terribly adventurous on Saturday, just went for a run, did some grocery shopping (where I bought five kilos of potatoes since there was a ridiculous sale…something tells me I’ll be eating a lot of potatoes in the future), and then had dinner with one of the teachers at the school and his family. He has two daughters, who are five and ten, and his wife is also an English teacher, although she works in a middle school. I forget the name of what we had for dinner, but it was essentially melted cheese and bread. Gotta love the French—they understand that melted cheese, a little salad, and some bread constitute a perfectly delicious meal. Yum! There was also apple crumble for dessert, which I was excited about. The French don’t really get into the apple products in the fall aside from the occasional tarte aux pommes (which is more tarte than pommes), so I was glad that someone understood the importance of apples topped with butter, flour, and sugar, served with a side of vanilla ice cream. I had a really fun time, and they also lent me some English books to read. Considering the fact that I’m fast exhausting Chicago Public Library’s online book selections, this was very appreciated.

Monday was an almost normal day at school, with both students and teachers present, though I did have one class canceled. Nothing too interesting happened, although I did lead a small group discussion on a photo of the border between Mexico and the US. The English classes focus on a lot on presenting documents, since that’s what the terminales have to do on their bac exam at the end of the year. It’s an interesting way to go about learning a language—they learn a lot about giving descriptions, but I’m not sure that they’re learning anything all that useful should they actually want to speak English in their daily lives. The bac is hugely different from the AP French exam that I took when I was in high school—the only similarities are that there is a listening section, and for some of the sections, there’s also a section where they record themselves. There’s no multiple choice, and all of the essays involve presenting documents. After class I went into Rennes to run some errands, and I successfully procured a travel mug, which I was quite desperate for. I also picked up some small things to decorate my room—a picture of telephone booths in London to hang on the wall, a matching trash can, a rug, and a fleece blanket. The blanket was bought just in the nick of time, because it got COLD this past week.

I slept in late on Tuesday, largely due to some cold medicine Denise gave me. The French do love their pharmacies and medicaments, and I have finally been convinced by the cold medicine I took this week. It kept me functioning quite well! Once I finally woke up, I worked on laundry and lesson plans, because there was (surprise, surprise) another grève. Grève=no buses=Katherine stuck in farmland. Sigh.

Wednesday several professors were striking again. I think there might’ve been some students striking as well, but there seemed to be a decent number of kids there. I had a really good class with some terminales who are reading My Antonia. I hadn’t read the book before, and while I liked it, that was largely due to the fact that I love pioneer stories and was raised on Laura Ingalls Wilder. And even for me, the end got very slow and boring. The kids reading it are not at all fans of the book, and the professor spends class time simply going over reading comprehension questions on the text and having the students read out loud. In theory, this is also what I’m supposed to be doing with my half of the group. However, I am an English major who likes to hear what everyone has to say and who wants to get past reading comprehension and into thematic discussions, so that doesn’t work so well for me. I end up powering through the comprehension questions and then work on starting a discussion. This didn’t work very well the first week, largely because I suspect many students hadn’t read. Then, however, I gave them a lecture about reading and about looking up (or at least asking about!) words that they don’t know. This week the discussion was much more successful, probably because in addition to the fact that the students had read, I also asked them what they thought about the book. The general consensus was that they hated it, and I told them they were perfectly entitled to think that as long as they gave me proof. We ended up having an excellent class discussion about what things Cather could’ve done to make the book better, and I had an absolute blast. Yay for lit discussions!

Wednesday afternoon Adriana and I went into Rennes to fight with bureaucracy in an attempt to get free transport and to enroll in Social Security here (medical coverage). We did not succeed in getting free transport (we both got redirected to other offices), but we did finally get registered with Sécu. Of course, once we get paid we have to go back there to give them more forms, but such is life in France. After that adventure, I met up with two other assistants at a place that I had been told had excellent hot chocolate. It was quite delicious, and it was nice to socialize a bit since I’d spent the last weekend nursing my cold in solitude. Three other assistants ended up joining us, and we stayed there for the rest of the afternoon, chatting and joking, and it was quite enjoyable.

Wednesday night was the first frost, and I woke up Thursday very cold. Sigh. And, to make matters worse, the students were on strike again, meaning that I had a very boring day at school. I took the bus after classes to Noyal, the town where my address technically is, even though it’s about three small towns away from where I’m actually located. This was where I had been told to go for free transport. Naturally, there was lots of confusion there, and after a phone call to someone in Rennes, it was determined that I should go back into the city (but to a different office this time) since the people in Noyal didn’t really know what to do with me. Sigh again. Still no free transport. Maybe by March…

Some students were still on strike Friday, but a surprising number of them decided to make an appearance on the last day before their week and a half long break. I spent my first class working with various small groups on Indigenous/Native American history. They really didn’t know a lot about the subject, so I gave them some vocabulary and then talked a little about the relationship between Europeans and Indigenous Americans. I only had about twenty minutes with each group, so we didn’t have time to get much beyond that. Later in the morning, I had one really good session with terminales. I was working with a group of eight, and I had them working on the following Frazz comic strip:

Yes, I make my students read my favorite comic strip. This will continue until the end of the year, so for their sake, I hope they like it. I had blocked out the text on the last panel, and so we spent the first part of the time talking about national anthems, patriotism, and how they feel before a big test. No one was very interested in talking, so I finally just called on people (turns out that when you don’t give them a choice they actually have quite a few things to say). I had some of them guess why you might want to sing the national anthem before a test (one student said it would give the kids courage going into a big test, which I thought was a reasonable guess). After that I revealed the text that had been missing and we started out by attacking the vocabulary and expressions used (it was definitely tough for them, since there’s an implied precursor to Frazz’s if-clause, celebrities in France don’t sing the national anthem before big events, and they had no idea what it meant to make a moment last). At the end we finally pieced together what was funny about the comic strip, everyone got it, and I was quite happy with what they’d done.

That’s about it for now. I have been thoroughly boring thus far this weekend—I was supposed to go to a dinner party, but it was canceled. So I’ve been hanging out in my lovely room and getting ready for my upcoming adventures. I leave on Monday for Paris and Strasbourg, which I’m very excited about. And, even better for you, that means I will have pictures to post when I return and maybe you’ll get a break from endless text (the crowd goes wild). Don’t worry, I’ll still have novellas to post about what I did during my adventure, it’ll just take longer to get those up than to post the pictures.

Happy Fall to everyone, and go eat something pumpkin-y for me…I would kill for some pumpkin bread right about now.

On Social, Economic, and Political Issues in France OR How France Went Insane

Hello from France, land of insanity. Today we will have a lecture on the current crises plaguing France and how those crises interact with the life of a young American teaching assistant. We'll begin the lesson with some important terms: grève (a strike) and manif/manifestation (a protest). Take notes. Those words will reappear quite frequently in our discussion.

The first crisis, which is the least serious, is that of heightened terrorist warnings for Americans in France. For the time being this does not concern us all that much, since our teaching assistant is in farmland near Rennes, with mostly cows as neighbors, and she is not overly concerned about terrorists coming to get the cows. That said, she does hope to travel to both Paris and Strasbourg for her upcoming break, and while she'd rather not die, she is not going to stay among the cows for a week and a half with no work.

Crisis number two has already been discussed several times, but since the French just won't stop striking, we have to discuss it again. The French are still annoyed that Sarkozy wants to raise the retirement age by two years, Sarko is still planning to do it despite all the grèves and manifs, and since everyone's too stubborn to back down, the strikes continue. There was a very large one on Tuesday, there’s going to be a manif Saturday, and our teaching assistant’s school is talking about striking next Monday and Tuesday.

In addition to the fact that she will not be able to teach, the grèves also mean that the teaching assistant becomes rather stranded in farmland. The metro in Rennes continues to run since it’s automatic, but the buses pretty much stop, and if they work, they’re running late and are packed. So transportation becomes quite an issue, and as a result, socializing does as well (farmland is highly populated with cows but sparsely populated with twenty-somethings).

Crisis number two is not limited to those with jobs—in France, anyone who so chooses can go on strike, and this includes students. Yes, I know that you think you ought to have a job as the whole point of going on strike is to stop doing one’s job, usually as a means of getting more pay or better benefits. You are all wrong. Today all of the students at our teaching assistant’s school decided they were going to join in the party and go on strike, too. In today’s classes, she had one class with no students, one class with one student, and another class with a whopping nine students. According to the teachers there, the students will likely be on strike again tomorrow since it is a Friday and no one wants to go back to school on a Friday after striking on a Thursday. One teacher even suggested that they might grève all next week as well since there’s a vacation coming up at the end of next week. If that is the case, our teaching assistant would be very bored since she still has to go to school so she gets paid. And she wants to get paid. Plus she doesn’t think it would kill the French to work a little more, but she’s not going to say that since she might get shot if she did. But she does think it’s cool that high school kids care about this stuff, though she wishes they’d care a little more about their English classes.

Our third crisis stems from the second crisis. Petrol workers are among those striking (they’ve been on strike for a while, not just for a day here and there) and they’re not letting anyone get in to transport any gas out. So now people in France are starting to worry about running out of gas, and there are lines at gas stations. According to some spokesperson quoted in The New York Times, there are enough reserves to last a month, but the French people are panicking nonetheless.

Thankfully, this is one crisis that doesn’t worry our teaching assistant. Unless the buses run out of gas and stop running, as that would once again leave her stranded.

Crisis number four is actually an American problem, since the French are benefitting from it. The exchange rate between the dollar and the euro has the euro doing very, very well. The dollar was at its strongest against the euro in several years sometime in May. The euro gained on it a bit over the summer, but it held steady at about $1.30 to €1 until mid-September (the point at which our teaching assistant arrived in France). In the past month, the dollar’s lost over ten cents, and the exchange rate is now hovering around $1.41 to €1. The teaching assistant is seriously miffed, as her rent is costing more and more each month despite the cost in euros not changing at all. She looks forward to getting paid in euros at the end of October and thus not having to pay attention to the exchange rate again until she returns to the US, when she’ll change all her euros back into dollars. No doubt at that point the dollar will suddenly become ridiculously strong and she’ll lose money switching over her euros.

We'll now conclude with some personal anecdotes from our teaching assistant:

1) I tried to explain baseball to my host family two nights ago. It was exhausting. I'm pretty sure there are no translations for outfield, batter (l'homme qui frappe!), bases, home plate, home run, strikes, and a number of other terms. And if you hadn't spent your whole life hearing those terms, then they mean nothing when I try and use them to explain the game. I don't think I they quite got the idea of things. And then they wanted to know about American football, and I didn't even know where to start on that. They don't even know what a yard (the unit of measurement, not yard as in lawn) is...I told them football was like soccer except the points were different and you could use your hands, and you could tackle people. Very inaccurate, I know. Do you have a better explanation?

2) Apparently when there’s an inch of snow in the area life shuts down. Everyone’s been telling me that the metro stops, schools are shut down, and no one leaves the house. Also, it sounds like most people are scared to death to drive in the snow, so no one touches their cars. Essentially, everyone hibernates until the snow goes away. I’d suggest the US adopt this, but then those in Milwaukee would easily spend six months of the year without ever leaving their houses.

3) I had three terminales yesterday itching to ask me a question about what something meant in English. What was this phrase that had them so intrigued? Holla back, and specifically, hollaback girl. I'll take it. I even got all linguistic on them, explaining that holla comes from the verb to holler. They were excited to figure out what it meant, and I was excited that I could provide information that their teacher (a male in his upper fifties) could not. Everyone wins!

Au revoir from le pays aux foux.

Escuela!

This week was the first full week of classes at the lycée, though I use the word ‘full’ rather loosely since we are in France. I will not be working Tuesdays, due to some odd French idea that teachers should have one of the five weekdays off. I thought that was the point of a weekend, but I’m just a silly, overworked American, so what do I know?

Monday we had an orientation for all the language assistants in Ile-et-Vilaine (my region of Brittany). It was in Rennes, so in theory I had it easier than a lot of people to get there. Of course, that doesn’t account for my ability to get amazingly lost. It turned into quite the adventure, and the moral of the story is this: do not, ever, trust google maps in France.

Okay, so that’s actually a bit of an overstatement, since I’ve been using it to much success until this point (as have many of the other assistants). However, it just so happens that they place Lycée Victor et Helene Bausch over two metro stops away from where it should be. And, Brittany being Brittany, it was of course pouring rain. Naturally. That’s okay, it wouldn’t be a real adventure if you weren’t dripping wet and rather cold in addition to being lost. It turns out we were at least a twenty minute walk away from the school. The entertaining part was meeting all the other lost assistants along the way. I met Patricia, from Argentina, Carmen, from Spain, Rachel, from the US, and a good dozen other people whose names I have since forgotten. Once we made it to where the school was supposed to be, we got led astray because the bus stop for the school was actually at some government building that resembled a school, so we wandered around there for a while first. And when we found the school, we ran into another big group of lost assistants wandering the grounds lost. There were several buildings to the school, and no one knew what building we were supposed to be in, so we did some more wandering then. One of the guys had asked a teacher for help finding out where we were supposed to be and she just scolded him for being late, so that wasn’t hugely helpful. By this point I was melodramatically wailing that I was leaving Brittany and moving back to Provence.

Eventually we all arrived, at least a half hour late, dripping wet, and very cold. Adventures ahoy! I don’t think we missed too much, and once we got there we just listened to people talk at us all morning. Not so exciting. Lunch was quite entertaining—I sat with one American, one Canadian, one Spanish (is that how you refer to someone from Spain? I think so, but it sounds odd), one Austrian, and one British (that also sounds odd). Yay for multiculturalism! It was a lot of fun talking to people and I liked that French was usually the only common language. In the afternoon, we were divided into groups based on the languages we’d be assisting with, and a teacher from the lycée talked to us about our role. It was really interesting to hear some pieces of advice that sounded contrary to what we’d hear in the US. Our leading teacher told us to never ask the kids for their opinions, because “they have no opinions!” I was taken aback by that, since in the US we usually encourage students to talk about their opinions. We also got a serious lecture about how we should never, ever discuss religion. Apparently even mentioning that the reason the pilgrims came to the US was for religious freedom is off limits and will have kids complaining that this isn’t Catholic school. After an exercise about how to structure a lesson (the two girls I worked with and I made the central ‘document’ of our lesson the lyrics to “Papa Don’t Preach”), we were released.

I decided to go with another group who promised they would get me to the metro at some point. We ended up walking all the way back into the city, but it was nice to move a bit after sitting most of the day. The group was composed of mostly British and American girls, and I met another girl who’d gone to school in Wisconsin (Beloit) who knew one of the girls I went to high school with, so that was quite exciting. Once we reached the center of the city, I hopped on the metro, then the bus, ate dinner with Jean-Paul and Denise, then crashed because I was exhausted from getting up at quarter to seven. I can’t believe I used to get up at 4am several times a week of my own free will. I don’t think I knew what sleep was before I got to college.

Tuesday it was supposed to be sunny. It was not. I went for a run in the rain, which was rather unpleasant, and then I went to run a few errands in Rennes. Much excitement, as you can see. Oh, except Jeanne and Nicholas were over again (yes!) and I showed them pictures of Sue and the Field Museum since they were big fans of dinosaurs. It was fun.

Wednesday was my first real day of work, but it was rather uneventful. My first class, which was a bunch of premieres (second year of French high school, equivalent of juniors since there are only three years of high school over here), was taking a test and the teacher had divided the class in two. I was charged with watching one group and making sure they didn’t talk to each other. Terribly eventful. I didn’t have a class after that, but I went with the same professor to her next class so I could be entertained. This class (also premieres) was much smaller—it only had seven students. I talked with them a little bit about where I was from and tried to get them to ask me some questions or talk to me a bit. They weren’t very chatty, although there was one girl who had a lot of interesting things to say. She’s an exchange student from Ecuador here for the year, and her level of English is much higher than everyone else’s in the class. After that course, I went to a class of terminales (seniors, not the terminally ill) with a different professor. They’re currently reading My Antonia, and I’m excited to work on that with them. Of course, they’re mostly concerned with basic plot comprehension, so I rather doubt I’ll be able to go off on rambles about genre and theme and competing discourses. That’s unfortunate.

My day concluded there, since my school doesn’t have class Wednesday afternoons. I do not understand why. I’m rather entertained by the French work ethic. Last time I was in France I was attending an American-based institute, so we didn’t get a whole lot of holidays. True, we didn’t have classes on Friday, but that’s not unheard of in the college world. Classes were rarely canceled, and I only saw two grèves (strikes) the entire time I was in Avignon. I’ve already had several classes canceled this week, and thanks to the threatening retirement reforms, the French are grèving like there’s no tomorrow. There’s at least one strike and protest (manif) every week, and there have been a couple weeks with two. Also, I’ve just now started work, and there’s a week and a half break coming up in two weeks. They have quite a different view of work in relationship to the rest of their lives, which is both refreshing and irritating (would it really kill a bank to be open on a Monday? Really?).

Thursday I had a later start, which meant I got to go for a run (this time in only a drizzle instead of rain. Hurray!). My first class was canceled, so I ended up eating lunch with Adriana and several other professors, which was fun. Cafeteria food here is AMAZING. I cannot say enough good things about it. They have an impressive variety of cheese and fruit and yogurt and desserts at every meal, accompanied of course by some delicious bread, and the entrées are pretty darn good, too. I was surprised at first that the teachers ate the cafeteria food, but I quickly understood why. I’ll probably be eating at the cafeteria several times a week, particularly because I only have to pay €2,40 a meal. Quite a good deal! My next class was a bunch of secondes. I can’t decided if secondes are more like freshmen or sophomores. They’re the same age as sophomores, but they act more like eighth graders if you ask me. I introduced myself to them and answered some of their questions. Whenever they ask how old I am, I’ve been saying 73. I don’t want the younger ones to know how young I am (the terminales are calm enough to keep my age from being an issue), but messing with them also gives me a second to see how good their English is. You can pick out who can understand quickly by the laughs and the mutterings of “Soixante treize? C’est pas vrai!” You can also see who just nods and is clearly not paying attention. Anyway, several of the male secondes (once they stopped trying to ask me out on a date) decided that I was useless since I told them I didn’t watch much soccer. It might have also been the fact that I told them my favorite movie was The Sound of Music…which is not at all a lie. I did manage to impress them with a picture of Chicago pizza. It got a pretty good reaction out of them, which I thought was hilarious. My last class was another class of secondes—35 of them! Poor French teachers. I just observed that class. They were working on listening comprehension and correcting apostrophe and irregular verb errors.

Friday I was supposed to start early, but my first class had a test, so the professor told me not to come, and the professor of the second class decided he wanted me to come in later and work with a group of terminales later in the day rather than the secondes. I slept in, which was quite nice, and even nicer was the fact that I woke up to SUN and weather in the 70s. Thank goodness. The terminales were a much more expressive group than the last terminale group I’d seen. The first question I got asked was whether or not I’d met Michael Jordan, and the kid who asked that is my new best friend for knowing something about Chicago. There was another kid who was quite curious about my political views, and kept asking me what I thought of Obama, Sarkozy, and politics in general. I decided to be diplomatic and just say that most politicians were better than Bush. It’s hard to go wrong in France if you put down Bush. The second half of the class was spent discussing stereotypes that the French have about Americans and that Americans have about France, which was pretty fun. My last class of the day was canceled, so that was my ‘full’ work week!

Friday evening I went out with a group of about twenty assistants. One of the German assistants who’s teaching in Bains-de-Bretagne wanted to come in to Rennes for his birthday, and his roommate is British and spread the word to all the English assistants. We went to the Irish pub because it was the only place with enough seating for all of us, and it was a really good time. I ended up at a table with mostly Germans and Austrians, and one other American, and it was fun getting to know them. I feel like I tend to meet more of the English language assistants, so I was excited to talk to people from other countries. It was also fun to speak all French since that was the only common language. I spent a lot of time talking to Sarah (German) and Thomas (Austrian)—Sarah’s an assistant in Vitré, and Thomas in Fougères. Thomas is really into movies and the poor thing got stuck sitting next to the girl whose favorite movie is The Sound of Music. He kept going on about various films that were amazing, both international and American, NONE of which I had seen. He made a list of them for me to look into. Sarah has a pretty cutting sense of humor, so naturally she and I hit it off. She says that there are tons of castles and medieval buildings in Vitré, so at some point I’m going to visit her. All in all, it was a very fun evening and I’m sad that I made friends with people who don’t live in Rennes. I do this a lot.

The rest of this weekend will probably be pretty quiet. It’s still gorgeous out, thank goodness, so I plan on taking advantage of that. I need to come up with some vocab on indigenous North Americans (which I can handle) and new technology (which I cannot handle and know nothing about), and that’s about it.

A la prochaine!