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.

Fine, make me spend a week in Paris. See if I care.

I’m determined to get this written up and posted by the end of the day, because starting tomorrow, I will be entering novel-writing mode. I’m going to attempt to do NaNoWriMo again, and that means that these blog posts may become more sparse for the month of November. Don’t worry, I’ll be back by December with lots of new stories to tell.

Last Sunday, just before I was set to take off for my break, I got an e-mail from SNCF saying that I should check their website since they had lots of cancellations due to grèves. Sure enough, when I went and checked, my train was canceled, and this called for some last minute reshuffling of my schedule. The girl I was going to meet up with in Strasbourg had already told me that due to a last minute change in plans, she wouldn’t be making it to Strasbourg, either. So I did some quick decision making and ended up deciding to stay in Paris the entire time. I’m disappointed that I didn’t get to Strasbourg, but I know I have plenty of breaks in the future, so I’ll definitely try to get there next spring. And there are worse things than a week in Paris.

Early Monday, despite the fact that my train was canceled, I headed to the train station to try and get another train into Paris, hopefully that day. It was far simpler than I had imagined, and I ended up getting a train that arrived only a little bit later than my original train was supposed to. To my surprise, I arrived without any other trouble and once again managed to navigate the Metro without any disasters. I like the Paris metro—I’ve never once gotten lost taking it, though I do occasionally get confused upon exiting.

In Paris I was staying with another Marquette alum, Amelia. She was one of the roughly three other people who studied French at Marquette (so that’s a slight underestimate…maybe there were seventeen other French students at MU. On a good day.), and she also happened to study abroad with me in Avignon a few years ago. Once again we’re back in the same country doing the same program, and lucky for me, she was nice enough to put me up for my trip.

As soon as I got in we went to a grocery store to procure food for a Avignon-style picnic at the Luxembourg Gardens right by Amelia’s apartment. We had some chèvre, basil, and tomato sandwiches on a fresh baguette with wine and chocolate, and it was simply lovely. Some of my favorite memories of Avignon are the many picnics we had on the Ile, and it was fun to relive that.

Tuesday morning, once I managed to pull myself out of bed, I set off for the Palais Garnier. I was feeling a little bit desperate to take in some culture while in the city, and I really wanted to see a ballet while in Paris (there are very few ballets performed in farmland). They still had tickets available for 8€, though they obviously weren’t the best seats in the house, so I grabbed two of those for that evening. I had no real destination for the rest of the day, but I was pretty desperate to wander around the city a little bit. I stopped by the Galleries LaFayette, which has a gorgeous dome, because they already had their Christmas decorations up. Under the dome they had a huge Christmas tree, and there were presents hanging from the ceiling. It was quite impressive. My wanderings then lead me down Rue des Italiens, which I selected for no real reason whatsoever. After continuing that way for a while, I turned left because I happened to notice a nice view of a church and Sacré Coeur in the background. I thought that it might’ve been Place de la Madeline, but once I got there I discovered that no, it was Notre Dame des Lorettes, and that apparently there is no limit on the number of impressive looking churches in Paris. I meandered my way through the streets, stopped in a few stores, bought a quiche for lunch, and managed to resist spending 4€ on a tall mocha from the first Starbucks I’d seen in over a month.

After my ambling morning, I got back on the metro and went out to Parc Monceau, which Amelia had recommended to me. I was lucky enough to have gorgeous weather pretty much the entire time I was in Paris, and that afternoon in particular was quite nice for wandering around the park. It’s a pretty whimsical place, with statues and monuments plopped down at random intervals. According to one of the signs on the outside, it was created as an attempt to make “a truly French park,” and it definitely had that feeling. I sat and scribbled for a while in the sun when I got tired of wandering, and then I made my way back to Amelia’s to chill for a bit before the ballet.

I knew nothing about Paquita going into it, but I didn’t particularly care—I just wanted to see a ballet. And I did indeed get to see it, or at least 60% or 70% of it. I was expecting to have seats in the back, but I wasn’t expecting to have seats that looked directly across at the other side of the audience rather than at the stage. We missed a chunk of the dancing that was taking place on the left side of the stage because of the odd angle, but I enjoyed the ballet nonetheless. I was a little confused story-wise about what was going down—all I got from the first act was that there were gypsies, and some evil guy among the gypsies was trying to kill a Prince Charming-esque character (who was fittingly blond), but Paquita had a thing for the prince, which we gathered from the fact that they did a pas de deux together. The bad guy hired some evil people (who we knew were evil because they were wearing black capes) to help him out, and then invited the noble dude over to dinner. Paquita found out about the plan, and after much hilarious gesticulating, she was able to save Sir Blondie. End Act I. In Act II, Sir Blondie brought Paquita back to the court, and there was a ball and lots of dancing. There was also some very confusing gesticulating towards a painting of the king, and upon checking with Wikipedia, we learned that due to a piece of jewelry Paquita wore, they realize that she was also a member of the nobility and had been kidnapped by the gypsies as a child, which meant that she and Sir Blondie (a far removed cousin) could get married. Hurray!

Aside: Paquita’s world premier was done by the Ballet de l’Opera National de Paris in 1846, the same company that we saw perform it. That was pretty awesome to find out.

Almost as exciting as the ballet (though without any bandits running around) was the building itself. For those of you who have seen the 2004 movie version of Phantom of the Opera, this is the building it takes place in (though they just built a set to make it look like that). There is an amazing main staircase, incredible arches everywhere, mosaics covering the ceiling, and one hell of a chandelier. You do not want that thing dropping in the middle of a performance. The building itself also has an interesting history—they had a lot of trouble building it because it was on top of an underground lake (the inspiration for the phantom’s lair) and the chandelier did in fact fall at one point, killing one person. The outside of the building is just as impressive. See photos from my last post for details, there’s no way I’ll be able to do it justice.

After the ballet let out, Amelia and I went out to dinner at a restaurant recommended to her by one of her private English students. I ordered duck, which was delicious, and Amelia was braver than me and got beef tartare. It was a great meal, but we had a rather annoying waiter who was being a punk and seemed to dislike us for speaking in French to him when he spoke to use in English (and yet he had befriended another group of annoying American girls doing shots). We had to ask twice for the check, and ended up getting it from someone else. That was the downside of the meal, but I’m going to choose to remember the food instead.

Wednesday was entertaining in that very little went right. Amelia and I headed to a café to enjoy some coffee, but we managed to randomly pick an outrageously priced café and I ended up paying almost 5€ for my café au lait. Oy. I spent the rest of the day reminding myself that it was really, really good coffee. From there, we went over to La Conciergerie, which is the prison where they kept Marie Antoinette. I had heard good things about it, and I really wanted to visit it. We got in the line, which was the same as the line for Sainte Chapelle, and decided to stop and see Sainte Chapelle as well. After a long line and a security check, we got in to discover that La Conciergerie was closed until the day I left. Excellent timing, France. We decided that we might as well see Sainte Chapelle (especially since it was free for Amelia). In theory, it should’ve been free for me as well, but apparently my lycée didn’t give me whatever card it was they should’ve, so I ended up paying to get in. THEN, because France really wanted to make a point, we got in to discover that a good chunk of the chapel was closed for reconstruction. At this point, I shrugged, laughed, and took pictures of what I could see.

We walked over to Pont des Arts afterwards, which is a bridge with chain link fences on the side. The fences have lots of locks hanging on them—apparently it’s a thing for couples to leave locks there with their initials and the date. I assume people come by to cut them off periodically, but there were a couple locks that were older, including some from before I was born. At this point we decided it was lunch time, and so we headed to a market to grab some cheese and fruit to bring back to the apartment for lunch. In the afternoon we met up with one of Amelia’s friends, Marina, who is also a teaching assistant in Paris, and we stopped at a costume store since they were looking for Halloween costumes. Halloween is definitely not popular with the older generations here (I asked about it and was told that a lot of people don’t like it since it’s so close to All Saints’ Day, which is a really big holiday here…I thought the whole point of it was that it’s the day before All Saints’ Day, but what do I know? I’m just a stupid American!), but some of the younger generation seems to get into it, and companies definitely use it in their advertisements. We walked back over to the Luxembourg Gardens afterwards and sat and chatted over there. I tried to stop by the Montparnasse Cemetery that evening, but it keeping with the rest of our Wednesday, it was closed. I ended up staying in since I was feeling rather exhausted. I forgot about the whole part of travel that makes you want to sleep for twelve hours at a time.

Thursday morning Amelia and I went back over to the Montparnasse Cemetery (after stopping for pain au chocolat, which we did pretty much every day I was there), which was open this time. Hurray! There are a lot of famous people buried there, but I was most interested in seeing the graves of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre. I like existentialism, so a trip to their graves was necessary. I probably should’ve searched out some other famous graves, but instead Amelia and I just wandered the cemetery (which really feels a lot more like a garden or a public park than a cemetery), taking pictures of things. We found a bench after an hour or so and sat down to people watch and talk. I spotted a guy who looked remarkably like Cyrano de Bergerac, complete with a heavy cloak, a mustache, and long curly hair. It was a low-key sight-seeing trip, but I enjoyed the chance to catch up with Amelia and just take everything in. Once our stomachs started making noises, we decided to set off for lunch, even though it was already after 3pm. Whoops. Later that afternoon we went over to Cité Université, which felt more like a college campus from the US than the middle of Paris. There were lots of people running and students wandering around. It’s a very international school, and each country has its own housing place for the students from that country. There’s a pretty park that we walked around for a bit, and then we headed off to meet Marina for dinner.

I had demanded pizza while I was in Paris, since I have been having a terrible time finding decent pizza in Rennes. They have pizza, but it tends to be covered with salmon or chèvre, and while I do love my chèvre, it does not belong on a pizza. Where’s the mozzarella? Anyway, one of Amelia’s friends had recommended a delicious pizza, and I was quite satisfied with it. I just had a plain cheese pizza, but it was very good. And then, because I hadn’t consumed nearly enough calories yet over the course of my trip, we all got profiteroles to share. Yayyyy profiteroles! And, best of all, we had a very nice waiter, so that just made the experience even more enjoyable. He totally got a tip.

From there we headed back to Amelia’s, where we drifted off to sleep while watching Amélie.

Friday I headed back into Rennes, and I arrived delighted to discover that fall had stopped by while I was gone. The trees are finally changing colors, and it’s gorgeous. I was starting to worry that they just didn’t have a fall here (or at least not one with pretty colors, which is the whole point of fall as far as I’m concerned), but thankfully that is not the case. I’ve spent the weekend running errands, doing laundry, and trying to get back on top of everything I can before I lose the next month of my life to writing a novel. Tonight I’m going to be hanging out with a bunch of people (largely Americans) who have no objections to celebrating Halloween, even if tomorrow is All Saints’ Day. Classes start up again on Wednesday, and hopefully (fingers crossed) there will be students. That would be nice, wouldn’t it?

I’m afraid this has not been one of the most interesting blog entries I’ve ever written, probably because I’m too busy trying to finish it to be exceptionally entertaining. Sorry about that! You could file a complaint, but I might not get around to reading it until December 1^st.

Happy Halloween!

Paris: Proof

While I try to put together a coherent blog about the last week, you get to look at pictures!

1) Galleries LaFayette is already all decked out for Christmas. Guess that's what happens when you're in a country with no Halloween and no Thanksgiving...


2) I looked down a street while wandering and caught a gorgeous view of Sacre Coeur behind another church, Notre Dame de something or other.


3) Parc Monceau, a lovely and whimsical park.


4) Palais Garnier at night, after seeing Pacquita (a ballet). Otherwise known as the Phantom of the Opera opera house!


5) What SHOULD have been the front of Sainte Chapelle, but France was being France, so instead we have a picture of a picture of the front of Sainte Chapelle!

Postcards, Work, and Upcoming Adventures

Oh dear, it appears I’ve gotten rather behind on the blogging. This always happens…the more I have going on, the less time I have for blogging, but the more things I have to blog about. This is a dilemma.

First of all, I’m announcing a postcard contest (largely as a means of getting people to send me things). While I’m normally quite neurotic about putting my address on the internet, I do not believe anyone could find me out in farmland if they tried, and since I don’t even have a street address, I think I’m safe. Unless the cows decide to attack. Then I’m a goner. ANYWAY, my address is:
Katherine Jacob
Le Vallon
35230 Noyal-Chatillon-Sur-Seiche
France
Those who send me the coolest postcards will get fame and fortune when I post photos of the postcards on my blog, and I will get things to hang on my wall. Everyone is happy! To motivate you, we have the two postcards I have already been sent. The first came from Hope, and is of a candy store in Ohio:

The second came from Anna, and is an American Girl postcard:

Now it’s up to you guys to try and top those two (and, most importantly, give me things to put on my wall, which is in dire need of decoration).

Picking up from last Friday, we did have quite a few students on strike again that day. I had three classes, which were fine. The only one that stood out was the last one, with a small group of six terminales. They were working on an immigration debate, and I had a lot of fun helping them out with it. They were each assigned roles and they had to plan out the arguments they were going to make. It reminded me a lot of the plays we used to do in high school French that involved such wonderful situations as me being a fortune teller and Kayla being Paris Hilton, or Kelsey and I running out of a restaurant because we didn’t have enough money to pay for the bill. I strongly approve of putting on plays as a means of teaching language, and the kids were having a blast working on it. One of the girls spoke English really well, which was great, except that one of her best friends could barely speak at all, so girl one just kept translating for her. Efficient, yes. A good way to learn English, no. This happens a lot, I think because there are so many different levels of English in each class, and I’m still trying to figure out the best way to address it. With just a small group of students, it’s not too hard, but when you have twenty kids at a time, it’s a little more tricky.

Friday evening was most exciting. Yannick, the former boarder, had finally moved out (two weeks late due to French bureaucracy, as usual) and I finally got to unpack my suitcases and get settled in my real room. My new room gets internet reception, which is awesome, and I also get a bathroom to myself now. I’ve never had my own bathroom before in my life, so I may get a bit spoiled this year. I also have my own kitchen now, which I’m really excited about. It’s nice to be able to cook my own food again and decide when I do and don’t want to eat. Of course, Denise is still terribly afraid that I’m starving to death, so she tends to bring me soup and dessert every night. I will not object, especially if she keeps brining me semoule, which is a rice pudding type of dessert. It is amazing and the best non-chocolate thing I have ever tasted in my life. I do not know how I survived this long without it, nor can I even begin to figure out why it’s so good. Denise taught me how to make it, and all that goes in is some milk, then the semoule, then some sugar. SO GOOD.

Friday evening I also began to feel as though I was coming down with a cold, and Saturday this fact was cemented, and I was less than pleased. I thus didn’t do anything terribly adventurous on Saturday, just went for a run, did some grocery shopping (where I bought five kilos of potatoes since there was a ridiculous sale…something tells me I’ll be eating a lot of potatoes in the future), and then had dinner with one of the teachers at the school and his family. He has two daughters, who are five and ten, and his wife is also an English teacher, although she works in a middle school. I forget the name of what we had for dinner, but it was essentially melted cheese and bread. Gotta love the French—they understand that melted cheese, a little salad, and some bread constitute a perfectly delicious meal. Yum! There was also apple crumble for dessert, which I was excited about. The French don’t really get into the apple products in the fall aside from the occasional tarte aux pommes (which is more tarte than pommes), so I was glad that someone understood the importance of apples topped with butter, flour, and sugar, served with a side of vanilla ice cream. I had a really fun time, and they also lent me some English books to read. Considering the fact that I’m fast exhausting Chicago Public Library’s online book selections, this was very appreciated.

Monday was an almost normal day at school, with both students and teachers present, though I did have one class canceled. Nothing too interesting happened, although I did lead a small group discussion on a photo of the border between Mexico and the US. The English classes focus on a lot on presenting documents, since that’s what the terminales have to do on their bac exam at the end of the year. It’s an interesting way to go about learning a language—they learn a lot about giving descriptions, but I’m not sure that they’re learning anything all that useful should they actually want to speak English in their daily lives. The bac is hugely different from the AP French exam that I took when I was in high school—the only similarities are that there is a listening section, and for some of the sections, there’s also a section where they record themselves. There’s no multiple choice, and all of the essays involve presenting documents. After class I went into Rennes to run some errands, and I successfully procured a travel mug, which I was quite desperate for. I also picked up some small things to decorate my room—a picture of telephone booths in London to hang on the wall, a matching trash can, a rug, and a fleece blanket. The blanket was bought just in the nick of time, because it got COLD this past week.

I slept in late on Tuesday, largely due to some cold medicine Denise gave me. The French do love their pharmacies and medicaments, and I have finally been convinced by the cold medicine I took this week. It kept me functioning quite well! Once I finally woke up, I worked on laundry and lesson plans, because there was (surprise, surprise) another grève. Grève=no buses=Katherine stuck in farmland. Sigh.

Wednesday several professors were striking again. I think there might’ve been some students striking as well, but there seemed to be a decent number of kids there. I had a really good class with some terminales who are reading My Antonia. I hadn’t read the book before, and while I liked it, that was largely due to the fact that I love pioneer stories and was raised on Laura Ingalls Wilder. And even for me, the end got very slow and boring. The kids reading it are not at all fans of the book, and the professor spends class time simply going over reading comprehension questions on the text and having the students read out loud. In theory, this is also what I’m supposed to be doing with my half of the group. However, I am an English major who likes to hear what everyone has to say and who wants to get past reading comprehension and into thematic discussions, so that doesn’t work so well for me. I end up powering through the comprehension questions and then work on starting a discussion. This didn’t work very well the first week, largely because I suspect many students hadn’t read. Then, however, I gave them a lecture about reading and about looking up (or at least asking about!) words that they don’t know. This week the discussion was much more successful, probably because in addition to the fact that the students had read, I also asked them what they thought about the book. The general consensus was that they hated it, and I told them they were perfectly entitled to think that as long as they gave me proof. We ended up having an excellent class discussion about what things Cather could’ve done to make the book better, and I had an absolute blast. Yay for lit discussions!

Wednesday afternoon Adriana and I went into Rennes to fight with bureaucracy in an attempt to get free transport and to enroll in Social Security here (medical coverage). We did not succeed in getting free transport (we both got redirected to other offices), but we did finally get registered with Sécu. Of course, once we get paid we have to go back there to give them more forms, but such is life in France. After that adventure, I met up with two other assistants at a place that I had been told had excellent hot chocolate. It was quite delicious, and it was nice to socialize a bit since I’d spent the last weekend nursing my cold in solitude. Three other assistants ended up joining us, and we stayed there for the rest of the afternoon, chatting and joking, and it was quite enjoyable.

Wednesday night was the first frost, and I woke up Thursday very cold. Sigh. And, to make matters worse, the students were on strike again, meaning that I had a very boring day at school. I took the bus after classes to Noyal, the town where my address technically is, even though it’s about three small towns away from where I’m actually located. This was where I had been told to go for free transport. Naturally, there was lots of confusion there, and after a phone call to someone in Rennes, it was determined that I should go back into the city (but to a different office this time) since the people in Noyal didn’t really know what to do with me. Sigh again. Still no free transport. Maybe by March…

Some students were still on strike Friday, but a surprising number of them decided to make an appearance on the last day before their week and a half long break. I spent my first class working with various small groups on Indigenous/Native American history. They really didn’t know a lot about the subject, so I gave them some vocabulary and then talked a little about the relationship between Europeans and Indigenous Americans. I only had about twenty minutes with each group, so we didn’t have time to get much beyond that. Later in the morning, I had one really good session with terminales. I was working with a group of eight, and I had them working on the following Frazz comic strip:

Yes, I make my students read my favorite comic strip. This will continue until the end of the year, so for their sake, I hope they like it. I had blocked out the text on the last panel, and so we spent the first part of the time talking about national anthems, patriotism, and how they feel before a big test. No one was very interested in talking, so I finally just called on people (turns out that when you don’t give them a choice they actually have quite a few things to say). I had some of them guess why you might want to sing the national anthem before a test (one student said it would give the kids courage going into a big test, which I thought was a reasonable guess). After that I revealed the text that had been missing and we started out by attacking the vocabulary and expressions used (it was definitely tough for them, since there’s an implied precursor to Frazz’s if-clause, celebrities in France don’t sing the national anthem before big events, and they had no idea what it meant to make a moment last). At the end we finally pieced together what was funny about the comic strip, everyone got it, and I was quite happy with what they’d done.

That’s about it for now. I have been thoroughly boring thus far this weekend—I was supposed to go to a dinner party, but it was canceled. So I’ve been hanging out in my lovely room and getting ready for my upcoming adventures. I leave on Monday for Paris and Strasbourg, which I’m very excited about. And, even better for you, that means I will have pictures to post when I return and maybe you’ll get a break from endless text (the crowd goes wild). Don’t worry, I’ll still have novellas to post about what I did during my adventure, it’ll just take longer to get those up than to post the pictures.

Happy Fall to everyone, and go eat something pumpkin-y for me…I would kill for some pumpkin bread right about now.