home again, home again, jiggity jog

I'm home again from Belgium, Cata's home again from her trip around Europe with her brother, Michelle's home again from Egypt and England, and Steffen and Matthias are back from their German-speaking nations and the others should be home today sometime, so life is very very good. Somehow it just wasn't the same being in the White House without the other girls. It was funny last night how we all just kept saying, "Ah, we're home" in between rounds of cards and watching the last episode of Green Wing (my British doctor show, which I'm working to get everyone hooked on and so far everything's going according to plan). We had a nice quiet little party last night, played a lot of Uno and listened to some awful music (my life in France is soundtracked by bad pop, apparently) and it was just so good to see everyone. Pity we've only got four more months here.

I've been back from India for a year now, which has been on my mind a lot. There are some similiarities between France and India, odd as it may seem. I mean, clearly there are plenty of differences, but underneath the weather and the polish of France, you find that people have roots the same way. The bigger cities are surrounded by all sorts of little towns, each with their own particular customs and foods, and people love their villages. There are a lot of customs about politeness and family and how you act, too, more than in the U.S., and more attention to dress and diet. In the U.S. we have such a ridiculous diversity of food from all different sorts of places. All right, so in Lille you can get sushi and Indian food (and even in Cambrai you can get North African, but that's because of the staggering amount of immigrants from the Maghreb in France), but if you try to go for Mexican, you get a burrito full of asparagus and snow peas with no beans really at all. In general in Cambrai, you can't find black beans and you certainly can't find pinto beans or pecans, and cranberries are a tough search too. Now and again you can get moldy lychees, and sometimes you can find mangos, but overall the variety is just so much less. It's been interesting. I can say the first thing I'm going to want to eat when I get home is some proper Mexican food.

It's back to school tomorrow. I've got a new schedule, so I'll be working MThF from 8 to 6 (which means that three mornings a week, I'll have to catch the bus at 6.55 a.m. and I won't get home until nearly 7, and that's a lot of spider solitaire and Green Wing reruns in the teacher's lounge). I'll have mostly seconde this semester, which are like tenth graders, though I'll still have a class or two of terminale from last semester: the advanced kids I'll still see, and the kids from the professional side of the school, whom I've only seen once so far anyway. It should be fun. Another month of "What is your name? Do you has a boyfriend? Where does you live in the OooEss? Arkansass?" The students in seconde are much more likely to come to class, I think, and more likely to participate, and that outweighs the repetitious questions and the giggling anyday.

The weather's been good so far this year. Blue skies behind the bell towers, green fields, warm weather. It's nice to look out the window and see light gleaming on the old stones and old metal of the building behind my room, which has a little tower for some reason. And it's nice to go down newly discovered alleyways and see the rays of the sun filtering down between the buildings over the cobblestones. Europe really is made up of places where fairytales could happen. Everytime you think you know the town, you discover something new.

I spent a couple of days in Bruges with one of the other assistants and it's all canals and little stone bridges and old portcullises over the river and tall churches with Michelangelo sculptures (okay, just one sculpture, and my delight at seeing it didn't quite compare to seeing the Tamil sign up in Sacre Coeur and still being able to read some of it). There were waffles, of course, and fries with various mayonnaise-based sauces (the Belgians don't seem to understand the delights of vinegar, but since they invented fries I can forgive them) and a bar with three hundred different kinds of beer (of which we sampled only a few, including the Belgian trappist and sour beers and banana beer that tasted like juice) and a magic waiter who taught us a few words of Flemish when I accidentally asked for the bill in French. It was a good time. I met another assistant from Minnesota who's teaching in Alsace and told her about the assistant from the Lyon area that I met on the Metro in Paris. We're everywhere, apparently!

The point of this email is that it's good to be home, even when you've been so many place that you aren't quite sure where home is anymore.