The internet's back, and so am I

There were lots of technical difficulties in my life this week--no internet at home, plus my phone credit expired on Monday, and as we didn't get paid until yesterday, I was unable to buy more phone credit unless I wanted to use some of my American money. And I didn't.

However, the internet has made its return, I can call whoever I want, and today was the last day of work before a two week vacation. Life is good.

Due to aforementioned technological difficulties, I have not yet gotten around to writing anything about my nostalgia-filled trip to Avignon last weekend. However, I can tide you over with some pictures!

1) Chateau in Vitre (for all you francophones out there, please mentally insert accents where needed--I currently feel too lazy to copy and paste them into blogspot).


2) Remember that time Lauren and I bought a chicken? Voila. Photographic proof.


3) My lovely cousin Nicole sent me canned pumpkin and a highly entertaining book. Yay Nicole!


4) Avignon, where skies are apparently always blue. I don't think I've seen a sky without clouds since I was in the US last summer.



5) Le Pont d'Avignon revisited!

Britney Spears, the California team in the Super Bowl, and Jerry Cans

Here's what's been happening around here, along with some things that didn't make it into my last update.

Meat and Potatoes
One Saturday morning a few weeks ago, Lauren and I returned to Marché des Lices. Naturally, I bought a Kouign Amann, and I also made Lauren try the super rich super yummy chocolate fondant cake (which I can never buy again as it is the only thing in the world I’ve found that is too chocolatey for me), but before long my stomach demanded real food, and the smells from the pre-made food stalls were calling. They have rotisserie chickens, and since my protein intake is about nil (excluding what I get from hummus and nutella), I decided that would not be a terrible idea. Lauren said she’d go in on a chicken with me, so we bought a rotisserie chicken as well as a serving of the delicious potatoes they roast beneath the chickens (potatoes cooked in chicken fat=delicious). We headed back to Lauren’s to feast, and it was quite yummy.

Britney and the News
I don’t have a TV here, so I keep up on news with the radio. I enjoy the retro-ness of it. I have a radio in my kitchen, so I listen during breakfast in the mornings and dinner in the evenings. You can often get some pretty hilarious music combinations on French radio—and I heard one of my strangest ones Monday morning. There I was, half asleep and preparing two cups of tea, listening to the very serious morning news, when all of a sudden I heard the strains of something that reminded me of sixth grade.

Some person at Radio Rennes who speaks a trace amount of English thought it would be funny to make that the background music to a news piece about the justice system. I was laughing hysterically at first, figuring that it was just a random selection, when suddenly it dawned on me. The serious announcer was talking about determining culpability, and in the background, you suddenly hear Britney Spears wailing, “I’m not that innocent.” Ahhhhh. Enlightenment dawns.
I’m still not sure it was the most appropriate song choice, though.

On Dictionaries
I had a traumatic experience when studying in Avignon due to carrying my French-English dictionary in plain sight. Not a mistake I will make again. However, for some reason, that mistake made me decide not to bring my French-English dictionary with me AT ALL on this trip. Clearly my brain was addled by the shoe-selection process (and just for the record, I totally miss the few pairs of shoes I left behind—I comfort myself by browsing all the shoes on the DSW website, filling up a virtual shopping cart, and then closing out of the window to keep my bank account functioning). Anyway, a multilingual game of Apples to Apples made me realize how terrible my French vocabulary is, so I start reading Harry Potter in French in an attempt to solve that problem. While I have learned several useful words (including more than one word for owl), I officially regret not bringing my dictionary, because I can only look up words on the internet or at work. For future reference, bringing a dictionary to a foreign country is a very good idea.

California, here we come
When I start classes or end up with a few free minutes at the end I try to talk with the kids about pop culture, holidays, anything, really, as long as it’s in English. Last Wednesday I was surprised that several of them had actually heard about Christina Aguilera’s issues with the National Anthem at the Super Bowl, since the Super Bowl was not on the French radar. One guy then asked me who’d won the Super Bowl. “The Packers,” I said, with a fist pump to support my adopted state (and the only football team I care about at all).
“Where are they from?”
“Wisconsin,” I said, “which is where I went to University.”
“That’s too bad,” he said, shaking his head. “I wanted the team of California to win.” I gave him a perplexed look.
“There wasn’t a team from California playing in the Super Bowl,” I said, a bit confused.
“That’s too bad,” he repeated. “I like California.”
At this point I burst out laughing. People here are oddly obsessed with California.

The day the French knew more English than the American and Australian
Once upon a time (over a month ago, but post-Christmas) I was spending time with one of my classes of secondes. This particular class had an Australian exchange student here for three months (during Australia’s summer vacation), which meant that for a short amount of time I was not the only native English speaker in the school. The class was working on vocabulary to talk about what things they would want to have on a desert island with them. One of the options? A jerry can. Oddly enough, this was one of the few words the kids did not need translated for them—the teacher moved on quickly, until he was stopped by me and the Australian. “What on earth,” I asked, “is a jerry can?” The fact that Aussie had never heard of it either made me feel even more justified. According to Wikipedia, a jerry can is a robust fuel container made out of compressed steel. However, the teacher was unwilling to simply tell me that, and he instead made me guess the origins of the word for the class. Hmph. Curse that Socratic method.
There was another similar topic in the same class wherein the students were talking about fire lighters. While the Australian and I could easily guess what they were talking about, neither of us had ever heard of anything called a fire lighter before.

Because brunette chicken is not acceptable. And don’t even get me started on redheaded coffee.
When walking around Rennes one day, I received a flyer for a restaurant entitled BCC. What, you may ask, does BCC stand for? Blond Chicken Coffee. Fittingly, the first page of the flyer depicted lots of chicken and fries combo meals, and the second page showed various coffees. I did not know there was a difference between blond chicken and standard chicken, much less blond coffee and standard coffee, so the name of the restaurant confused me a bit. The best part of the flyer, though, was the logo. It was clearly ripped off of the Starbucks logo, only instead of a mermaid in the middle, there’s a random blonde woman looking over her shoulder, trying to seduce you so that you will come buy her chicken and coffee. Maybe only blondes are allowed in the restaurant?
Sometimes it’s best if the French just stick to speaking French.

Et voilà! The next update will discuss my soon to be had adventures in Avignon...and there will be pictures. I swear.

Not dead, just busy

January, WHERE DID YOU GO? You were barely here, and you’re leaving already?

To all of you who were very concerned, I am not dead. Just busy. And no, the snowstorm that managed to cripple even Chicago did not make its way over here. Our highs have been bounced back from just below freezing a week ago (it was painfully cold, and confirmed to me that returning to Chicago winters is going to be difficult) to the mid-50s for the past few days. I went running in a t-shirt Friday. It was excellent—I’m just hoping that winter is gone and the temperatures steadily increase from now on.

Anyway, some updates on life. Teaching is going well. I have a new schedule for the second half of the year. I no longer have Tuesdays off, and I have to be up around 6:30 most days since I’m working a lot more mornings (I know, my life is SO hard—though I still think I need to make up for all of the sleep I lost in high school when staying up past midnight doing homework and then pulling myself out of bed to go skating at 4AM). It’s been fun meeting some new students, although I’m starting to lose hope that I will ever learn all of their names. Considering there are quite a few who I only see once every two weeks, and some even less frequently, I was just barely starting to remember the names of the first group of students. That said, I do finally have one class where I know everyone’s name (granted, said class only has 16 students in it, but still).

I’ve shifted teaching methods recently and started working more off of text based documents. On their big exam at the end of their high school careers (the bac), it’s more likely that they’ll have photos and cartoons, but articles tend to offer a lot more vocabulary, and it also gives them a more concrete subject to talk about. I’ve pulled some articles off of the Time for Kids website, and I’ve also been using articles from The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (they’re a bit more comprehensible than articles from The Chicago Tribune or The New York Times). I’m pretty happy with how this has been going.

I’ve also started giving a private English lesson once a week to a 14 year old girl. It’s nice to get back to one on one tutoring since I did so much of that in college—it feels very familiar. She’s very nice and motivated, and it certainly doesn’t hurt to have a little extra money.

I’ve made a few trips to Vitré the past few weeks to visit Caitlin, who’s an assistant there. A few weeks ago Lauren and I did a mid-week trip there to make funfetti cupcakes (Caitlin has a full size oven, which is extremely rare for studios in France). Aside from our baking, we also walked around the town and explored their castle a bit—it’s still in use today, it just houses bureaucratic offices instead of Dukes and Duchesses. They’re doing a lot of excavation just around the castle, because about four or five years ago they somehow discovered that there were more ruins buried in the same area, some of which date back to Roman times.

This weekend we did another trip to Vitré, along with David and Amanda, who are assistants in Fougères. Lauren and I got in around five, and we accompanied Caitlin on her grocery shopping trip. David and Amanda got in right as we got back, and we all sat around being French and having afternoon coffee. One of Caitlin’s friends also showed up and we all headed off to an Indian restaurant for dinner. I can’t remember if I’ve gushed about Indian food here yet, but I only discovered it over Christmas, and it’s my newest addiction. I do not understand how I managed to miss out on it all my life. My house in Chicago is FOUR BLOCKS NORTH OF DEVON, FOR HEAVEN’S SAKE! Anyway, the food was delicious, and I also had a semoule cake for dessert, which was amazing. We made our way back to Caitlin’s, and then we assembled a mushroom and sausage strata for breakfast the next morning. By that point it was about midnight. Caitlin’s friend had to head home, and I was not feeling up for the shenanigans that the others seemed to anticipate, so I decided to be true to my old lady self and crash early. It sounds like they had a fantastic time, but I do not regret my decision to sleep AT ALL, since they didn’t make it back until 5AM. The next morning (once they all pulled themselves out of bed), we enjoyed the delicious strata and sat around chatting until we all departed for our respective homes.

I’m afraid I don’t have much else to add. I’m trying to pin down my travel plans between now and May—I’m going to Avignon for the weekend in two weeks, and I’m going to Brussels with Caitlin the second week of March. We have the first two weeks of March off for vacation, but I’m hoping to get a position teaching at a language-intensive workshop for the first week (again, extra money=never bad). If I get that, I plan on splurging on a trip to Copenhagen for Easter (I LOVE SCANDINAVIA). Also trying to figure out if it’s at all feasible to do a weekend trip to Switzerland. At some point you just have to accept that you cannot get it all in and admit that Europe cannot be done in a year. I will do my best to be back within, say, a week, with an update (and potentially pictures). Good luck digging out of the snow!