Aren't I Going to Get a Reputation for Being Soft on Turkeys?

My students are more or less familiar with Thanksgiving, as apparently their primary school teachers talk about it with them. They don’t quite understand the concept of cranberry sauce or stuffing, but turkey makes sense to them, as does apple pie (I have decided that, in order to keep their brains from exploding, now is not the time to explain the difference between a French tarte aux pommes and an American apple pie).

The older generation, however, hasn’t the slightest idea of what Thanksgiving is. I tried to explain it to my host parents at dinner on Sunday (they still very kindly invite me to eat with them about once a week), and much confusion resulted.

Katherine: It’s a holiday where you honor the history of the country.

Host Parents: Like Armistice Day! (French Veterans’ Day)

Katherine: Um, no, it’s to honor the first British people who came over for religious freedom and they had a hard time but the Indians helped them plant and hunt and it celebrates that they’ll have enough food for the winter. (I am pretty sure this is roughly what my sentences sound like in French—more or less coherent, but rather rambling, with spotty grammar, and without all of the social and historical commentary I'd add in English)

Host Parents:…What’s it called again?

Katherine: Thanksgiving.

Host Parents: Huh?

Katherine (in a French accent this time): Thanksgiving.

Host Dad: Oh, it’s the feast of St. Kevin!

Katherine: No, Thanksgiving.

Host Parents give blank stares.

So, despite the fact that I won’t be celebrating Thanksgiving and actually will be working on Thanksgiving, I feel the need to be somewhat cheesy and list the things for which I am thankful on this most unusual Thanksgiving:

1) The lovely people who put Love Actually up on YouTube. It’s absolutely my favorite holiday movie and I sat down and watched it yesterday to celebrate the beginning of the holiday season.

2) To have somewhere to live. And not just in the roof over my head type of way, but I saw a lot of people really have to struggle to find housing in France, and I had somewhere waiting when I arrived.

3) Being back in France. I was really unhappy about having to leave the first time, because I felt like there was so much left to do. Last year, while I was waiting to figure out what the heck I would be doing with my life, I was terrified that I’d end up stuck in one place for the rest of my life. Instead I’m off in France, where even the street harassment is entertaining—some guy on the metro hollered at me last weekend and told me I was charming.

4) My fantastic French family, in particular, Denise. This is a woman who brings me soup almost every night, won’t let my buy my own potatoes because she says she has plenty, lets me use her washing machine and helps me figure out how to operate it, is terrified that I’m going to starve to death, taught me how to make semoule, which is some rice and milk and sugar thing that is freaking delicious, runs for medicaments the minute I mention I have a cold, and tells me she loves having me around because she’s never had a daughter before. My first day in France she took me to my school and to the grocery store and showed me how to find them, and two days later she drove me into Rennes to go with me while I got my transportation card. I love this woman.

5) The fact that I am almost done with my godforsaken novel. The writing process has been much harder this year than it was last year, and I’m absolutely sick of the novel. That said, I’m nothing if not stubborn, and I’m going to finish it if it kills me. And it might.

6) Going to see Trophée Eric Bompard this weekend!

On a non-Thanksgiving train of thought: I am losing my English. I knew this was going to happen, and I’m sure it will come back, but now when I speak in English I talk about going to the supermarket or seeing a film at the cinema. This is not necessarily incorrect English, but it’s definitely not my dialect, where we go to the grocery store and see movies at movie theaters. Grade school is now primary school, and at this rate I’m going to start talking about how things are in America instead of how things are in the US.

And now I leave you with my favorite Thanksgiving poem from preschool.

“Gobble, gobble,” said the turkey, “soon it will be Thanksgiving Day.”

“Will you eat me? How you treat me! I think I’ll run away.”

The Rain in Rennes OR Running Away from Farmland

As it has been two terribly long weeks since my last update, I figured I would attempt to edit down my oh-so exciting life into one blog post. It was remarkably easy. Weekdays, whether or not I worked (I’ve had a ridiculous number of classes canceled lately), I have been in farmland, plugging away at the novel, expanding my repertoire of foods I can cook without an oven (I do a lot of boiling and sautéing), and sneaking in a run whenever there’s a half hour without pouring rain (an increasingly rare occurrence).

I’m afraid I don’t have anything all that interesting to say about work due to the aforementioned ridiculous amount of canceled classes combined with holidays. I only worked one hour on Wednesday, so I ended up having a nearly five day weekend. Thursday I didn’t do much, since there were very limited buses due to the holiday, but I was starting to feel a little stir crazy, so I started to investigate what was going on with the assistants in Rennes this weekend. Quite a few of them seemed to be heading out of town, but Julia (who also went to college in WI—we bonded over stories of cold walks to class) invited me to come in and stay overnight at her apartment. I took her up on this and headed into the city Friday afternoon.

She had a couple of options for the evening, and we ended up meeting up with one other assistant, Lauren, and going to see Les Petits Mouchoirs, a French movie. I haven’t seen a movie since being here, which appalls the French, but I was in the mood to be entertained. It was an emotional rollercoaster of a movie with a large cast. One of the things I love about French movies is how they often have several different plots that are eventually woven together, or that connect in some way. It was a good movie, though if it had been slightly less of an emotional rollercoaster, I would not have minded. There were previews for some other movies that caught my interest (well done, people who put together those previews), so I have a few more I’m hoping to see in the next few months.

After the movie we headed out for a late dinner. I was craving pizza (let’s face it, I’m almost always craving pizza, and since I don’t have an oven, it’s a bit impossible to make my own) so we went to grab pizza at either the best or the second best pizza place in Rennes (it depends which assistant you ask) and split a bottle of wine. It was a lovely meal, the pizza was delicious, and I was content. We then went and had some hot chocolate at Lauren’s apartment while we waited for another group of assistants (including two Spanish assistants visiting from Nantes) to finish their dinner. Once they were done, we met up with them and headed off to a bar called Cactus, which is quite the interesting locale. It has a train that goes around the ceiling delivering shots, lots of music, several TVs showing music videos that do not correspond with the music playing, and occasional screams and yells coming from the rooms in the basement. We didn’t stay too late since it was rapidly nearing my pumpkin hour, plus most of the other assistants were getting up early to head off on various day trips.

Saturday morning I finally got to go to Marché des Lices, a huge market held each Saturday in Rennes. I’d wanted to go for a while, but when you’re out in farmland you have to get your act together to get up on a Saturday morning. Julia and I headed over there to meet Emma, and we wandered around. I got some produce (including ROMAINE, yay!), tried lots of samples, and was introduced to kouign, an amazingly delicious Breton pastry covered with carmelized sugar. Yum. It’s going to be my replacement for Ann Sather’s cinnamon rolls until I make it back to the states, for sure. I also bought a small piece of a chocolate cake that really was more like fudge than cake. I ate part of it last night for dessert, and just so you know how rich it is, I couldn’t finish it. This is possibly the first chocolate anything that has been too rich for me to consume entirely, so that alone makes the cake pretty exciting.

After we finished our shopping, we went to a small tea house that I LOVED. Emma had recommended it, and I’m going to have to start going there all the time. The tea was amazing, the server was really nice, and they had a bunch of tea sets that I’m going to want to buy for myself for the next six months, no matter how impractical it is to transport a tea set back to the US. We stayed there, munching on kouign and chatting, for a good hour, and then decided it was time to switch establishments and find somewhere to have lunch. We went to a tartine bistro and all three of us ended up getting a pesto, tomato, and mozzarella tartine, and all three of us ended up quite happy with our choices. I’d been wanting pesto ever since I’d tried some store bought pesto last week that turned out to be terrible, so I was very satisfied with the choice. After lingering there for a while, Emma headed back to her apartment and Julia and I started to wander back to her apartment. On the way, we stopped at the Franco-American Institute in Rennes. Julia had a few library books from there to return, and I was delighted that they had some used English books for sale. I grabbed two books (for a whopping euro, so my bank account wasn’t too upset with the decision), and hopefully those (as well as a few books I’ve borrowed from English professors) will hold me over for at least a little while.

After we left, we went back to Julia’s apartment for some tea and hung out there for a few hours until I headed back to farmland. It was a quite successful foray into civilization, with lots of good food and company. And now I want to go back into Rennes next Saturday, too, because I’d forgotten the joys of socialization.

So, thus ends this absolutely action-packed update. If I actually get some teaching done this week, I suppose I might update next weekend. Otherwise I’ll be updating after Thanksgiving, with news on how our attempts at a French Thanksgiving go as well as lots of skating gushing. I’m heading to Paris for a day and a half the weekend of Thanksgiving to see Trophée Eric Bompard, a Grand Prix figure skating competition, and I’m very excited. I haven’t seen a senior level skating competition live since I was 12 and I went to US Nationals, and this is my first time at a Senior International event. Fun times will be had.