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.

The long-awaited Christmas update

I’m still alive, I swear. Just suffering from the post-Christmas back to work syndrome. I haven’t dealt with this syndrome since I was in high school—in college you can ignore the fact that you’re going back to work and focus on the fact that you’re going to be in the same city as your friends again. Alas, after an even more exciting break than those I used to have in high school, getting back to work is even harder. However, the first week is almost over and it seems as though I’m going to survive, so it’s about time I got around to writing up my vacation.

Despite Eurostar’s fabulous breakdown, they managed to barely pull things together in time for my trip. I had a very long day, as I left my place at 7AM to catch a bus into Rennes, at which point I switched over to the metro to get to the train station. Hung out at the train station until getting on my train, which took me to Paris. I then got to take another train to get from the Montparnasse station to Gare du Nord, where I had a bit of down time before checking in for my Eurostar train. I was delighted about the fact that you do actually have to go through customs, meaning I got two more nifty stamps in my passport. Eurostar still wasn’t running at its normal speeds, but it got me to London in plenty of time to hop on the Tube (in case you’re counting, that’s vehicle number six of the day) to get from St. Pancras station to Paddington station. I then had some time to kill in Paddington before my train to Swansea left, so I treated myself to a lovely peppermint mocha from Starbucks. Mmmm. Delicious. I then had a train ride to Swansea before our family friend, Padraig, picked me up in his car. It took roughly thirteen hours and eight vehicles, but I made it. Huzzah!

Last time I was in England it was after spending about five or six weeks in France. At the time, as it was the most time I’d ever spent out of the US, six weeks felt like a TERRIBLE amount of time to go without my native language (because we did SO much speaking French among the IAU students, REALLY), and I was utterly delighted to be back in an Anglophone country. This time around I was mostly looking forward to getting a taste of Americana (thus starting off the trip with Starbucks) and seeing family friends. I wasn’t really thinking about the language, although it turned out I should’ve been, because I FORGOT ENGLISH. Not conversational English, but social niceties like sorry and excuse me and all that fun stuff. Anyway, apparently 3.5 months living with a French family, working with French people, and not using any language besides French on the streets means that even if you do write regular blog entries in English, read plenty of novels in English, and have a good number of friends in the area with whom you speak only English, you will lose your social fluency in English. I had a number of moments during my trip when I absolutely froze because I couldn’t remember the English equivalent of “je suis désolée pour vous deranger…” I also discovered during my stay in Wales that I could not for the life of me understand a lot of Welsh accents. I usually pride myself on understanding all accents of English, but it turns out that is no longer the case. I felt as if I was listening to rapid-fire Spanish, where I could pick out the occasional word, but I mostly just tried to nod and smile at the right points in the conversation. Thankfully I could handle the accents in London pretty well, which kept me from utter despair.

I stayed with our family friends, Ruth and Padraig, in Wales. It was wonderful to be in a home-like atmosphere for the holidays, and they made me feel so welcome. I was offered lots of delicious food, given a steady diet of tea, and there was even a fireplace for me to sit in front of. Even the weather was in on it, since there was a good four inches of snow on the ground. That’s not at all normal for the area, and as a result, no one shoveled. Apparently the normal idea is that it isn’t worth shoveling since the snow will melt soon anyone—the only problem was that the snow stuck around for a good week. I’m amazed I didn’t once fall flat on my face, despite wearing impractical (but adorable) shoes the entire trip.

The first day I was there Ruth and I went into Swansea’s city center to hit up a bookstore (YAY for books in English!) and stop in some other shops. I had a terrible time selecting books, as always, but finally picked out three (all three of which I finished before I made it back to Rennes—so much for restraint), and then we made our way to a lovely café near the river in Swansea. We had hot chocolate with Bailey’s (YUM). After popping in a few other stores (including Boots, so I could pick up my favorite hair gel which is sadly unavailable in France), we went to Tesco, an impressive supermarket (erm, grocery store, that is) that provided me with two things of utmost importance: oatmeal and brown sugar. My mornings have been absolutely fabulous since returning to Rennes and getting to eat that for breakfast. I don’t remember when I started eating oatmeal for breakfast (I think it was probably around age nine, the point at which my mom cut me off of Lucky Charms), but once I got started on it, it was my staple (aside from a brief foray my senior year of high school into Honey Nut Cheerios and from the five months I spent in France in 2008, when I had to resort to cold cereal). There is nothing better on a winter morning than tea and oatmeal with a bit of brown sugar. After I stocked up on my kilo of oatmeal and kilo of brown sugar, we headed back to Ruth and Padraig’s.

I went to Midnight Mass with Ruth and Padraig on Christmas Eve and discovered, much to my shock, that there are several Christmas carols that have different tunes in the UK than they do in the US. And they aren’t completely different songs—the lyrics are the same—but the tune is different enough to completely confuse you. The first song they sang I didn’t know, but when I saw that they next one would be “O Come Let Us Adore Him,” I figured I was good to go. Not! There was another one that again had the same lyrics, but apparently a more traditional tune, but I can’t remember what it was. Anyway, I was rather perplexed by the whole thing. It’s odd, because I’ve come to anticipate plenty of cultural differences, but there are always some that can’t be anticipated. Different tunes to Christmas carols? Who knew? Anyway, you’ll be happy to know that Silent Night has the same tune in the UK (probably because we all stole it from the Germans), and I just decided after mass that I’d have to do my own singing of “O Come Let Us Adore Him.”

I was able to skype with my family on Christmas day, which was fun. It was morning for them, so I got to watch them open all of their presents. The rest of the day was spent cozily inside (I’ll never be able to make it through another Chicago winter again), mostly watching movies.

On Boxing Day (which, apparently, has nothing to do with the actual sport of boxing), we went over to Mark’s, one of Ruth and Padraig’s friends. He had his sister, his aunt and uncle, and another family friend there (and Sasha, the one-eyed cat). We had a delicious meal around 2pm, which was my first meal of the day, and I ate enough to make sure that it would be my only meal of the day. I would just like to say that Yorkshire pudding drowned in gravy is kind of delicious and I think I may need to start making these for holiday meals. We also played Trivial Pursuit for several hours in the evening, but everyone else totally had an advantage, since it was the UK edition of the game. I had no idea what half of the events were that they referenced, let alone why certain things happened at those events. I was, however, able to supply some valuable information about what Disney duet Celine Dion sang.

On Monday the 27^th I bid farewell to the incredibly hospitable Ruth and Padraig, and I hopped on a train back to London to spend a day and a half there on my own before going back to France. I had even splurged on a hotel (though a very modest one with shared bathrooms) as a Christmas present to myself. My train was a little late getting in, and I naturally wandered around the station in circles for about ten minutes before I finally got my bearings, but after that I easily made my way to my hotel and checked in. I then set off in search of a cheap dinner (ended up grabbing assorted food from a grocery store and thus spending approximately 2 pounds, go me!), and then decided it was time to start profiter-ing. I wandered down Edgeware Road for no particular reason other than it was close to my hotel. It ended in a huge intersection near Hyde Park, and since I was a little wary of getting lost in Hyde Park (as I got lost last time I entered a British park), I decided to make my way down Oxford. The roads were SWARMED with people, very few of them actually speaking English. I heard more French than I probably do on the average work day (since my goal is always to make the kids speak English). It was a massive shopping day, and while I’d entertained ideas of buying a few things, I changed my mind after stepping two feet into a store and realizing just how packed it was. Turned around and decided to return to walking.

Once I was thoroughly exhausted, I turned around, headed back to my hotel, took a shower, and collapsed. I got up early, grabbed breakfast (yay for hotels that have breakfast included and bring you your own pot of tea!), and then headed off. I took the Tube to the Tower of London, which I had my heart set on seeing. It was a little pricey to get in, but it was absolutely worth it. Yeoman Wardours are traditionally the guards of the Tower, but they really function more as tour guides, and they are hilarious. Ours was cracking jokes about Scotland, Americans, French, Germans, men, and women, and asked at one point if there was anyone he had managed not to offend yet. He also pointed out that only Britain would have a monument to traitors to the crown—there was a monument to all the people who had been beheaded there, including Anne Boleyn, Katherine Howard, and Lady Jane Grey. There was another Yeoman Wardour doing a tour inside a chapel where most of those people are buried (I don’t understand what it is with the Brits and burying people under churches…first Westminster, now this), and he was also fantastic. I had the choice of going in to see the Crown Jewels, which I considered, but there was a line roughly two blocks long to do that, and I didn’t need to see some pretty stones THAT much. Instead I opted to walk around the outside walls, which had some gorgeous views of Tower Bridge.

Once I was all historied out, I left. I had no other big plans for the day, but I was determined to get more walking in. I ended up walking pretty much the entire central area of London, all the way back to my hotel, over the course of the afternoon and evening. I walked by St. Paul’s, got slightly lost (whoops), saw the Bank of London, figured out where I’d gotten turned around, walked by St. Paul’s again, made my way to Fleet Street (home of Sweeney Todd and the historical printing and publishing center of London), stopped near Somerset House (another large palace), walked to Covent Garden and meandered around there until I got sick of the crowds, then continued my way up Oxford. I stopped for dinner at Hummus Bros, the same restaurant I stopped at last time I was in London, since I knew it was both delicious and affordable. I took a slight detour to the theater district, which made me very jealous, and then I went back to Oxford and continued my way back to the hotel. Once again, I pretty much collapsed from exhaustion once I got there.

I left the next morning to head back to France. My last train from Paris to Rennes got diverted and arrived two hours late, which I was not happy about, but other than that the trip was fine. And what happened when I got back to my room? Yup, I collapsed. And slept about 13 hours.

OKAY. The Christmas entry is now done. I can go take care of some lesson planning, and you can go do whatever it is you need to do. I’ll be back in a week with a (hopefully) shorter post. Bonne année!

Return of the French

French, my old friend! You’ve come back to me! I missed you so! After about a week (which, I’ll admit, was a bit longer than I anticipated it taking) my French started to come back to me. Monday was the first day I felt like I was starting to understand a decent amount again, and Tuesday evening I was able to spit out what I wanted to say. Success! Today my hosts even commented on the fact that I was getting much better. I make no promises about using the correct verb conjugations or gender (it’s been over two years since I took a French grammar class), but I can once again pronounce things and circumlocute quite well. As Betsy Warrington Ray, heroine of Betsy and the Great World (my personal travel guide), says:

“The way to talk German, is to talk German. If I bothered with forms, and genders and cases and tenses, I’d be tongue-tied. I just string along the words I want to say, and put Nicht wahr? at the end.”

Back in the day I wanted to be able to speak French perfectly, but I’ve decided life’s too short for that, plus I still have a dozen other languages I need to learn. Imperfectly will have to do!

We’ve had guests for dinner the past three nights, which has been quite entertaining (and I’m sure this is part of the reason my French has improved). Night number one (which will go down in history as the night of liver, brains, and tongue, as those were the meats consumed) two neighbors came over. There was a crazy amount of yelling at the beginning because the neighbors didn’t want to stay for dinner and the Ligers were trying to make them. I was laughing my head off the entire time. It was finally decided (after much protestation) that they would in fact be staying, and we discussed, among other things, the price of corn, the handsomeness of Obama (I was sure to mention that he was from Chicago and that Michelle went to Whitney), and how no one practices religion anymore. I love that topics that might be considered taboo in the US (for example, religion) are spoken about so bluntly here. Jean-Paul flat out asked me if I was at all religious and then whether or not I practiced. Then he went on a spiel about how no one practices religion anymore—even him.

Tuesday night Jerome, one of the Ligers’ older sons, came over with his two kids (Jeanne is five and Nicolas is nine). Kids don’t go to school on Wednesdays over here, so they stayed overnight until Jerome could come pick them up the next evening. Jeanne and Nicolas are absolutely adorable—Jeanne and I colored together, and Nicolas very proudly showed me his English workbook. It’s interesting to see the difference in the emphasis put on English in the country (yes, I’ve sadly admitted that I’m not in a suburb, I’m in the country) as opposed to even a small city like Avignon, where it seemed like all the high school aged kids spoke English. All of the Liger sons had eight years of English in school, but they all maintained they learned nothing from them. They start English much younger than we start foreign languages (usually at seven or eight years old) and take it until they finish high school, but apparently without speaking it much. All the Ligers were shocked when I told them I’d only had six years of French, and I was shocked that they didn’t learn more despite starting at a young age—all my linguistics courses seem to suggest that if you throw a young kid into a foreign language, they will magically learn how to speak it. Then again, this is a really agricultural region, and I suppose if you’re going to work in agriculture, you don’t really need to know English. We also discussed organic food (and its ridiculous cost), the Chicago Bulls (while the older generation associates Chicago with Al Capone, people in their thirties tend to associate it with the Bulls, and I’m always happy to discuss the greatness of Michael Jordan with them), and figure skating. The Ligers keep telling their youngest son, Kevin, to take me to the ice rink in Rennes. I’m not going to bother to wait around for him—when he’s not at school, he’s on the computer or with his girlfriend—and have decided that next Wednesday I’m taking a field trip to the ice rink. It will be excellent.

Wednesday was the third night of guests, although this was just one guest—Yannick, the current renter who needs to get his butt out of here so I can have his room and the cool bathroom. J He wanted to know what hospitals were like in the US (he works at a psychiatric hospital), but he mostly wanted to know all about working conditions, since there was a greve planned for today (yes, they’re still protesting any thought of changing the retirement age). He kept asking about minimum wage, social welfare, whether or not there were strikes in the US (nothing at all like the strikes here!), and we had a fun little exchange regarding vacation time. After I told him that I thought minimum wage was about $7/hour (it’s 8€/hour here), he responded, “With four weeks of vacation, right?” Then I laughed. No. He was utterly appalled that most people just get two weeks and that some people don’t even take the vacation that they have. He has ten weeks of vacation a year (which I think is really just excessive, but what do I know?) and thus decided he would not be moving to the US any time in the near future for work. We also had an in depth conversation about insurance differences between the US and France, which was the first time my Econ class from last time I was in France actually was useful. Thank you, Prof. Alcaras.

Other things: weather here was good up until today, which has been cloudy and rainy. I did some laundry today in a tiny, 19-year old laundry machine. Due to the fact that I mentioned that we ate a lot of chili at home, Denise went out and bought some microwave Mexican food for me…I can’t say I’m looking forward to it, because a) it’s microwave food and b) Europeans RUIN Mexican food. I know it’s going to be awful, but I want to be polite…hopefully it’s better than I’m expecting. I went into Rennes last Saturday with a former assistant who’s now attending law school in Rennes, and we went to a ridiculously huge flea market. ‘Twas insane. We spent at least three hours there and didn’t get through half of it. I bought a mug for tea (if you want a decent sized amount of tea at my house, you have to drink it from a bowl, because you can fit about two tablespoons in their teacups), a 2€ hairdryer with a diffuser, and then Stefanie gave me some small bowls that had come as part of a set (she only wanted the bigger ones). I also met two of Stefanie’s friends. They’re Columbian and are going to school here, and we went and had some iced tea with them later in the day. They were very friendly, and it was fun to meet some other non-French and hear what they were doing here. It was also entertaining since the only language we all had in common (French) was no one’s first language

I went to my school once this week, but I’m going again tomorrow and I’m hoping I can observe some classes next week, so I’ll hold off on talking about school until then.

A bientot!