Weather, Work, Winter Solstice, and Wanderings

Weather: The sun just came out yesterday for the first time in two weeks. I wish I were exaggerating. The second of the two weeks was particularly miserable since there was never ending rain. I never thought of myself as someone who minded rain or weather all that much. When we first got our school assignments, a lot of other assistants were complaining about the weather in Brittany. I rolled my eyes and generally felt superior because really, if I could get through 3.5 winters in Wisconsin and another 18 in Chicago, surely some rain wouldn’t bother me. These worrywarts were clearly a bunch of southern wimps who had no idea how bad cold could get or what a real Midwestern winter was like.

Yeah.

Maybe I’m just going soft, but I will now officially state that I was very, very wrong and that everyone else whining about the weather was right. I never think of Chicago or Milwaukee being sunny—you want sun, you go to Provence—but I have since revised that opinion. You do not usually go more than a day or two without at least seeing some sun. And when the windchill is forty below, at least you have sun to look at. Not so, here. Here, even if it doesn’t usually dip below freezing, there is rain, more rain, mist, fog, and then even more rain. Anyway, thankfully the sun is back and hopefully it’ll stick around for a day or two.

In other weather news, we had a fantastic weather diversion about a week and a half ago with the presence of snow. Everyone, everyone, told me that it never snowed in Brittany. Rain, cold, yes. Snow, no. Well, they lied, because there were some definite snow flurries. I was thrilled by this, much preferring snow to rain. I went off to school as normal, quite cheered up by the Christmassy weather. I arrived at school to find that there were pretty much no students.

No, not another grève. Instead, all the school buses had been canceled due to the snow (and at this point no snow had even stuck to the ground!). More than half of the school uses the school buses to get there, so there went that half. And, in the wonderful solidarity the French share, when half the school can’t get there, everyone else decides to stay home, too. My first class had no students, my next class had one, and my last class was canceled because the professor couldn’t make it. You see, in addition to the school bus people being terrified to drive, so was the rest of the region. I had been warned that when it snowed, people didn’t go out, and it turns out that was completely true. It wasn’t exactly necessary that day, but the next day there was actually the thinnest layer of snow on the ground, which had fallen over night and not melted! Naturally, the school buses were canceled again. In all fairness to the French, the area is really not at all equipped to deal with snow, even just the slightest bit. They hadn’t plowed or salted the roads (or the sidewalks, which led to me almost killing myself as I tried to walk into school). I actually had a few students in my first two classes that day, but no one showed for the last one. During a fifteen minute break in the middle of the day there was some more snow falling, and it also managed to stick to the ground for a full, oh, ten minutes before it melted. The students immediately took advantage of this by having a snowball fight outside during the break. I felt bad that they had to scrape the ground to get up enough snow to make a snowball, but they didn’t seem too bothered by it.

Work: As a combination of the snow, exams that were going on a few weeks ago (it was the end of the trimester), and various other things going on this week, I have had a lot of classes canceled lately. Shocker, I know. I’m getting a bit frustrated about how much I don’t get to work, especially because I’ve discovered that I absolutely love teaching high schoolers. I taught a class Monday morning on one of my personal favorite Christmas songs, “I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas.” The class first had to fill in the blanks on a worksheet with the lyrics, while listening to the song a couple times. They were singing along with the song by the second time through, which made my heart happy. We then went over some of the harder constructions and the occasional tricky word before I put them in pairs. They had to write a dialogue between a child who wants a hippo for Christmas and a parent, and then each group performed it for the class. They got quite creative with the dialogues (one girl’s rationale for needing a hippo was that her dear pet crocodile had just died), and I had a great time watching them. Even better, their regular teacher told me yesterday that they absolutely loved the lesson. That was easily the highlight of my week. Now if I could just once work all of the hours I’m supposed to in a week!

Winter Solstice Markets: This section is actually about Christmas Markets, but Christmas doesn’t start with a ‘w’ so for the sake of consonance, and, more specificially, alliteration (awww yeah, who paid attention in English class in HS?), we’re going with Winter Solstice.

The Marchés de Noël opened at the beginning of December, and this week I had a chance to explore them a bit. One reminded me a lot of the St. Nick’s Bazaar at St. Gertrude’s, with lots of people selling jewelry, knickknacks, incense, delicious looking chocolate covered fruits, and, of course, lots of food. I had a delicious galette saucisse, a slightly-less delicious tartine jambon et raclette (too dry and too salty), and, best of all, some tartiflette. Tartiflette is a delicious concoction that consists of potatoes, butter, onions, small pieces of ham, and probably some more butter. The portions of tartiflette are huge, so I brought a bunch back with me and will be enjoying it as a side for my dinners for the rest of the week.

The other Marché de Noël in Rennes is at Place de la Mairie, and it was clearly the more expensive of the two markets. They had artists doing demonstrations, but I was scared to get too close to anything, because the prices were so outrageous. I did not want to be the one responsible for breaking a €300 piece of pottery just to get a glimpse of the potter at work. Though there were some very pretty pieces of jewelry and such, they were all far out of my budget.

Wandering: I decided this week that it was time to forego a Saturday morning run in lieu of a Saturday in the city. Yesterday I returned to the Marché des Lices, which is the only place I’ve found that has romaine lettuce regularly, and while I was there I picked up some Kouign Amman, because I couldn’t resist (I have since discovered that the name, which is in Breton, translates literally to butter cake). I then talked Adriana, the Spanish assistant, into going back to the tea house I was at last time. One of these days I’m going to splurge on some loose leaf tea from them, because it’s amazing.

From there we did a lot of wandering. We stopped by the Marchés de Noël, entertained ourselves in a kitchen store (I so want to own everything in that store, even though that would only be practical if I decided to stay in one place for an extended amount of time), stopping in a grocery store, and ducking our heads in any other stores that called to us (I successfully managed to not buy anything despite the fact that Adriana kept dragging me into shoe stores, which sorely tested my resolve). The other big stop that I had for the day was at the Franco-American Institute, which has a lovely library of books in English. I am going through severe book withdrawal, and so I had decided that something needed to be done before I started ordering massive amounts of books from Amazon UK (books which I would then somehow have to take back to the US…or leave here, and then go and purchase more copies of in the US, because I like having my own copies of books). For some odd reason, several things which are free in the US (such as checking accounts and libraries) are not so in France, so I had to shell out €20 for my library card there. However, I also checked out the second two books in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, and after doing some quick conversions in my head, I realized that if I’d wanted to buy those two books, it would’ve cost me €21. So the library card already saved me more than my initial investment, and now I have a large supply of English books to read for the next five months. Phew!

Weather Part II: I wrote this over several days, so I have another weather addendum. We had exactly one day of sun and one day of partial sun before the clouds came back (yesterday). If anyone knows of any jobs where I can live in Provence for the rest of my life, please do let me know. I miss having months of sun at a time…

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.