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!

Of Baguettes and Bises

It’s been a while since we had a nice little cultural lesson, and since my week mostly consisted of work, I’ve decided to spare you the rundown on that in lieu of some cultural tidbits.

Our first subject of anthropological investigation is the baguette de tradition française. Slightly shorter and a tad bit stouter than the standard baguette (it also tends to run about 35 centimes more than your standard baguette), this variation of the baguette has a law dictating what can be put in it and what name it can be sold under. I’m not kidding. It can only be sold using the terms baguette, tradition, and français. Those can be in any combination, but if it uses those terms, it can contain nothing more than flour, yeast, salt, and water. On the side of the bag it comes in, it cites said law and informs you exactly where the flour comes from.

And it is delicious. This is the most important part. Don’t get me wrong, a standard 60 centime baguette over here is way better than any baguette you’ll get in the States (for the closest approximations in the Chicagoland area, see Devon Market on Devon and Granville or the French Nuns on the West Side who go from church to church selling baked deliciousness). But a baguette tradition…YUM. I could easily go through one on my own in a day, eating a some with salad, dipping a little in soup with dinner, having a bit with some goat cheese, and then having some with Nutella for dessert (not that I ever buy Nutella—nope, not me, I am far too health conscious for such things, right, Mom?).

Now, on to the bises, or kisses. Most people are well aware of the cheek kisses (one on each cheek) associated with the French. As I learned very quickly in Avignon, these greetings are not as straight forward as they seem—in Provence, you have to do three kisses (no matter how many, you ALWAYS start by bringing your right cheek to the other person’s right cheek—God help you if you start on the wrong side), and supposedly it’s four in areas of Northern France. Here in Bretagne, it’s only two, but I’ve also picked up many of the other similar social niceties.

First of all, les bises are not limited to adults, though they do depend on gender. Women will faire les bises when they meet other men or other women, but men only share them with women. When men meet other men, they shake hands and occasionally pat each other on the back. All of my lycée students do the exact thing that adults do, and I’m quite a fan. First of all, there is something adorable about boys who still look like they’re about twelve and who haven’t quite reached five feet tall when they shake hands to greet each other. So cute. Second, this is all SO much more refined than the way American teenagers greet each other. I was lucky if any guys I knew in high school grunted and slightly lifted their chin in my direction to indicate that they’d seen me. And even when I saw my close friends, we’d just smile and maybe wave if they were across the hall. Les bises are a very classy way to open and close interactions with people, and we need to find a way to introduce them in American high schools, stat.

Age does come into consideration for children. When children greet or say goodbye to an adult, they don’t do the full routine. Instead, they just give the adult one kiss on the cheek. Every time the grandchildren come over, they come find me and give me a kiss on the cheek. Again, highly adorable.

The only downside to all of this is that if I try to start using les bises when I’m back in the US I’m going to seem pretentious. Guess I’ll just have to stay here.

Before I end this, I’ll give you the entertaining student quotes of the past few weeks. First of all, one student informed me that, for Christmas, he’d given his sister red lips. My brain immediately started picturing a pair of red lips wrapped up with a bow on top until he gave me the French translation: rouge à levres. Lipstick. Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. That makes much more sense. We also had some fun geographical conversations—one student told me he wanted to live in the US when he was older. When I asked where in the US, he responded, “Canada.” “Canada’s not in the US,” I said, a bit perplexed. “Really?” He asked, quite taken aback. Today I had another student inform me that Chicago was in Michigan, which was news to me (I gently suggested that maybe he meant close to Lake Michigan, but he was pretty convinced it was in the state of Michigan). Geography classes clearly aren’t what they used to be.

I hope all is well wherever you are and that you’re making it through the winter without getting too cold. I’d tell you about the weather we’ve been having, but then all you people in the Midwest might try to kill me, so we’ll leave that little detail out. Bon courage!

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…