It's winter break, but it feels like it ought to be spring break. All these vacations have spoiled me; after only eight weeks of work, I was pining for a respite. Been a bit sniffly since we got back from England; apparently I picked up a proper cold. But it's all good. It's vacation, we're getting paid in the next few days, and I'm going to Sweden on Wednesday for five days. Hooray! I'll visit my friend Angie in Stockholm and eat a lot of lingonberry jam and get a new stamp in my passport (although I never got one on reentering France, so for all the governments know, I could still be in England). At least I have my carte de séjour now, so I officially live in France. They don't notify you that you can come and pick it up, but Max was going to Lille in the car, so Cata and I thought I'd try. We took our numbers and sat at the prefecture for three hours, doing a little gratis babysitting to amuse ourselves, folding paper airplanes for bored children who liked us so much that their frustrated parents brought them back to us when they wouldn't keep quiet in the room where actual business goes on. Then when it was our turn, the woman interrogated me as I handed over my receipt. "Have you had your medical visit?" Yes, clearly, otherwise I never would have gotten the receipt in the first place. "Have you done this?" I've done everything. "Are you sure it's ready?" Yes? And then I got my card! This whole incident has reinforced the idea that it's okay to tell white lies to bureaucrats, which I'm sure is exactly the lesson I was supposed to have learned.
It was a pretty good week with the students. No one wants to work before vacation and I'd run out of teacher-mandated activities, so we just did the opinion cards and traded tonguetwisters (French children see the words "three free throws" and panic; meanwhile I work my way competently through rhymes about six saucissons qui coutent six sous). I had some sassy ones, but they bent to my iron will. The little brats in seconde 3 insisted they didn't want to read aloud, but they did when I made them do it, so that was an improvement on the last time I had them and I had to send one of them out for boundless exuberance (they bent to my will then, but it was kind of a travesty). They really are so funny sometimes, and their clothes are too. Half of them follow the chav fashions of sports wear (okay, mostly the boys), and the girls are tiny fashion plates. Here are two things that never should have come back into fashion in France: fanny packs and mullets. I swear, the haircuts some of these kids have are straight-up mullets. I have to muffle my giggles every time I see them. "You're not young enough to remember the 80s," I want to tell them, and "your small town isn't the right kind of small town for you to have this haircut." But alas, the hairdressers of France persist in inflicting fashionable, razored, feathered mullets on the teenage girls of France with their jeans tucked into their boots and their bangs swept across their foreheads.
You know you've been in France a while when you develop firm preferences about the bises, the little cheek kisses. I was thinking about this this week because I got the bises from a student for the first time - not one of mine, but one who was in my group for the England trip. I was in the library with my student and we saw him and he kissed her and them me, quite cordial. He had a decent style. What I don't like is when people come over to kiss you and don't even bother to put their cheek to yours, or when they don't make the little noises. My favorite is when the young Moroccan prof comes over and puts both hands on my shoulders and actually kisses my cheeks. But then there's the problem of having to pay attention. I was reading the news the other day when he came over to me and almost turned my face too far and really kissed him. That might have been awkward. It's an interesting phenomenon, the bises. I don't generally do them when it's me coming into a room, and they forgive me my American froideur. There are some people who are good friends of mine whom I hardly ever kiss (all of the assistants, some of the profs) and some people whose names I still don't know who kiss me religiously. Tricky! I'd say they were going out of fashion, except that the schoolgirls are always kissing everyone on the bus and clogging up the aisles.
So after this two weeks of vacation, there are only five more weeks of school. And then Steffen goes back to Germany, and Michelle goes back to England to prepare for going to Spain, and Anna goes back to the U.S., and Katie goes who knows where, and I try to get in a bit more traveling before heading back to the U.S., and Matthias and Cata stay here for a bit longer and then go back to Austria and Costa Rica. And the little white house will be empty. Sad to think about. But for now we're making spinach lasagna and I'm subtly influencing the television preferences of the house by watching West Wing and X-Files and Sports Night, and getting the girls hooked on Bollywood. I win the culture war! Although Michelle had a head start - I already love British tv. So perhaps she wins.
The weather here's been really typical Northern France lately: chilly and rainy and foggy. Yesterday half the sky was storms (dark, foreboding storms), and the other bit was bright bright sunshine. And then it all clouded over uniformly, and then around 11 it started raining like a crazy thing. Today it's just cloudy and cold. But at least it's tending towards spring. It's light now when I leave the house at 6.45, or lightening, anyway, and by the time I get to school at 7.30, the sun is almost all the way up. When I come home at 6.30, there's still some illumination for the green fields left fallow or planted with winter crops and the rich brown of the plowed furrows. That's a lot nicer than leaving in the cold dark and coming home in the cold dark past the posh bakery with its beautiful cakes that we will never be able to justify buying. By my birthday, I'm sure it will be light all the time.
Now back to arguing with my computer and trying to convince the programs that aren't quite compatible with Windows Vista that yes, they really are. Technology, eh?
Sunday, February 25, 2007
Sunday, February 18, 2007
les agneaux égarés
Sorry for the lateness of this email, family, etc. I woke up late because I'm a bit sick and then went out and about, so that took a good chunk of my day, and then I made an early dinner for myself and the girls and worked through some interpersonal drama, but here is the email now.
I am typing on my new laptop! Which still smells like new laptop, and the battery works, and it's not hot enough to cook an egg on, and all of this is rampantly exciting. Also exciting: having gotten back from England! Though really it was more fun to be in England. It's a bit tough getting used to the touchpad on this laptop actually working: I keep closing windows and selecting things by accident.
We spent most of our time in Cambridge. The kids were in host families and so were we, thus neatly circumventing the problems of a bunch of teenagers staying a hotel. Divide and conquer, that's the strategy. And it seemed like the students behaved very well, and most of the host families were really good, except the ones who didn't come to pick up their students on time, or the family that let their kids walk home alone on the second day in the dark, leading to the kids getting lost for two hours and us almost going to the police before we found them. That was stressful, let me say. I was sick that day, just aching and sitting on the couch in a haze while Virginie and Marie-Claude tried and tried to make calls, and then I had to get in the faces of the cranky English people who kept making things worse by shouting and talking about how problems with the students were causing them personal problems in their relationships. Seriously, things we don't need to know about. They kept suggesting that the two boys had gone off to a party or a pub or were out painting the town, and we kept explaining that no, these boys wouldn't do that, they're tall but they're just scared kids right now, in a country where they don't really speak the language, in a neighborhood they don't know at all, and they're cold and hungry.
Fortunately, we found them eventually and that was good. The next morning, two of the girls got lost on the way to the bus stop, but that didn't take nearly two hours to resolve, and there weren't really any problems after that. It's tough to travel with forty-five eleventh and twelfth graders and only four teachers/responsible people (for the record: me, Virginie, who is my responsable and arranges things for me, Marie-Claude, who teaches English in the professional high school, and Gautier, the adorable surveillant who tends a bit to discipline). They do have a tendancy to want to wander off, and then you really feel bad for them when they wander off by accident and end up frightened and confused. None of them seemed to have realized they needed adapters to be able to charge their phones, so we couldn't even call them.
So the first day was the Duxford War Museum, which is lots and lots of little old airplanes, some of which fly through the air in horrifying loops. It was a nice museum, but really too many planes for the students, who had been on a bus approximately forever. I had a group of ten kids, about half of whom I knew and half of whom I didn't, and I sheparded them all around and felt like an actual factual grownup for the first time in a school setting. We watched the engineers restoring the old planes and we looked at the tank museum. Adrian set off an alarm (not that I knew his name at the time; he was just number Seven). We rode the tiny tram for a long time just for kicks and then went to the café, where four of the boys tried to escape from my silken clutches, but I showed them my iron fist and they settled down. Then it was on to Cambridge to meet the families.
Wednesday (the night that Maxime and Florent got lost) we spent in Norwich, looking at the castle and the cathedral and exploring the village. There's a nice museum made out of part of the old castle. I had to keep dragging Nicolas and Laurent back to my group when they would wander off to the main room to eat their sandwiches, but for the most part, everyone behaved really well (except for the bit where they started knocking over each other's block castles, but the fact that they were playing with blocks in the first place was ridiculously endearing). Then we had free time, which meant I went off with the teachers to have actual lunch instead of the pathetic bag lunches our families had made (seriously, they were not tasty, though it was kind of the family to make them) and the kids went off to stuff themselves with sugar and try to find posh clothes on sale. There are all these twisty little medieval lanes around the cathedral in Norwich (Norrich, as Virginie and Marie-Claude took great pride in pronouncing after our host family had corrected us).
Thursday we had a nice guided tour of bits of Cambridge (in French). We saw King's Chapel, King's College, and then Clare College, Trinity College, and St. John's in passing. Sadly, our guide wasn't very interesting, and the kids just aren't always fascinated by Stephen Hawking and J.M. Keynes (I was, but with the French school system, only a small group of them are studying sciences, and only a small group are studying economics, so there was always a large percentage of clueless students). The architecture was lovely, though, and it was nice to see so many students on bicycles. By this point, seven kids of my group had decided we were best friends, which was sweet. The boys would come to me to translate song lyrics and things they'd heard other drivers shouting (being a French bus, the door opened on the wrong side, and so we'd get people angry at us for standing on the shoulder of the road in the path of traffic waiting for the students to debark). In the afternoon we went to see Gainsborough's house and a funny little village called Lavenham where all the houses are crooked wattle and daub painted in picturesque colors.
Friday we left! To a chorus of blame from some cranky host parents, whom I sorted out. It was funny: they were praising the kids at the same time they were yelling at us for being late (we weren't, except that the parents were). Two of the biggest, sassiest boys from the professional side of the high school got kissed on the cheek by their host mom and praised up and down (and they are sweet when they want to be: one of them carried my bags in London just to be nice). We hit the Museum of London on the way and walked up and down Piccadilly Circus. I spent too much money buying delicious vegetarian food and a big block of cheddar cheese, but it was worth it. Virginie had predicted that the kids would all sleep on the bus on the way home, but instead they were awake and singing. A couple of my kids started serenading me, which was sweet. The ones in the back of the bus kept standing up and shuffling around too, which was strictly not allowed. I shouted at one of the worst ones at one point and got an ovation for it. It's like they forget I can speak French, even though I speak French with them all the time when we're not in class. I don't whip out the discipline so often, really, so it's weird to them when I do. A couple of them have started saluting me when I make them behave. I am entertained.
And you know what? It was sunny most of the time we were in England. How weird is that? Plus, once I got there, all I wanted to do was speak French to everyone, even though all the people around me were speaking English.
Today I went to the Cambrai Museum with Anna and her friend Laura, and it was surprisingly large, modern, and well-stocked. There was, of course, a lot of stuff from the old cathedral that got destroyed in the Revolution (too bad: it was apparently the jewel of the Pays Bas and the finest cathedral in all Christendom) and a plan relief of how the city used to look in the 18th century, and a lot of history about how important Cambrai has been (really important! Surprisingly enough!) and then art, art, art from everywhere, and a bunch of bones from the tombs they've discovered by Cambrai. There's a nice bust of Hugo by Rodin, and a piece by Camille Claudel, and a few other vaguely famous things by vaguely famous people. It was very lovely. A nice thing to do on a Sunday. And then when we left, the woman at the desk gave us free stuff. Yes!
So tomorrow it's back to school.
By the by, these are my students singing on the bus.
I am typing on my new laptop! Which still smells like new laptop, and the battery works, and it's not hot enough to cook an egg on, and all of this is rampantly exciting. Also exciting: having gotten back from England! Though really it was more fun to be in England. It's a bit tough getting used to the touchpad on this laptop actually working: I keep closing windows and selecting things by accident.
We spent most of our time in Cambridge. The kids were in host families and so were we, thus neatly circumventing the problems of a bunch of teenagers staying a hotel. Divide and conquer, that's the strategy. And it seemed like the students behaved very well, and most of the host families were really good, except the ones who didn't come to pick up their students on time, or the family that let their kids walk home alone on the second day in the dark, leading to the kids getting lost for two hours and us almost going to the police before we found them. That was stressful, let me say. I was sick that day, just aching and sitting on the couch in a haze while Virginie and Marie-Claude tried and tried to make calls, and then I had to get in the faces of the cranky English people who kept making things worse by shouting and talking about how problems with the students were causing them personal problems in their relationships. Seriously, things we don't need to know about. They kept suggesting that the two boys had gone off to a party or a pub or were out painting the town, and we kept explaining that no, these boys wouldn't do that, they're tall but they're just scared kids right now, in a country where they don't really speak the language, in a neighborhood they don't know at all, and they're cold and hungry.
Fortunately, we found them eventually and that was good. The next morning, two of the girls got lost on the way to the bus stop, but that didn't take nearly two hours to resolve, and there weren't really any problems after that. It's tough to travel with forty-five eleventh and twelfth graders and only four teachers/responsible people (for the record: me, Virginie, who is my responsable and arranges things for me, Marie-Claude, who teaches English in the professional high school, and Gautier, the adorable surveillant who tends a bit to discipline). They do have a tendancy to want to wander off, and then you really feel bad for them when they wander off by accident and end up frightened and confused. None of them seemed to have realized they needed adapters to be able to charge their phones, so we couldn't even call them.
So the first day was the Duxford War Museum, which is lots and lots of little old airplanes, some of which fly through the air in horrifying loops. It was a nice museum, but really too many planes for the students, who had been on a bus approximately forever. I had a group of ten kids, about half of whom I knew and half of whom I didn't, and I sheparded them all around and felt like an actual factual grownup for the first time in a school setting. We watched the engineers restoring the old planes and we looked at the tank museum. Adrian set off an alarm (not that I knew his name at the time; he was just number Seven). We rode the tiny tram for a long time just for kicks and then went to the café, where four of the boys tried to escape from my silken clutches, but I showed them my iron fist and they settled down. Then it was on to Cambridge to meet the families.
Wednesday (the night that Maxime and Florent got lost) we spent in Norwich, looking at the castle and the cathedral and exploring the village. There's a nice museum made out of part of the old castle. I had to keep dragging Nicolas and Laurent back to my group when they would wander off to the main room to eat their sandwiches, but for the most part, everyone behaved really well (except for the bit where they started knocking over each other's block castles, but the fact that they were playing with blocks in the first place was ridiculously endearing). Then we had free time, which meant I went off with the teachers to have actual lunch instead of the pathetic bag lunches our families had made (seriously, they were not tasty, though it was kind of the family to make them) and the kids went off to stuff themselves with sugar and try to find posh clothes on sale. There are all these twisty little medieval lanes around the cathedral in Norwich (Norrich, as Virginie and Marie-Claude took great pride in pronouncing after our host family had corrected us).
Thursday we had a nice guided tour of bits of Cambridge (in French). We saw King's Chapel, King's College, and then Clare College, Trinity College, and St. John's in passing. Sadly, our guide wasn't very interesting, and the kids just aren't always fascinated by Stephen Hawking and J.M. Keynes (I was, but with the French school system, only a small group of them are studying sciences, and only a small group are studying economics, so there was always a large percentage of clueless students). The architecture was lovely, though, and it was nice to see so many students on bicycles. By this point, seven kids of my group had decided we were best friends, which was sweet. The boys would come to me to translate song lyrics and things they'd heard other drivers shouting (being a French bus, the door opened on the wrong side, and so we'd get people angry at us for standing on the shoulder of the road in the path of traffic waiting for the students to debark). In the afternoon we went to see Gainsborough's house and a funny little village called Lavenham where all the houses are crooked wattle and daub painted in picturesque colors.
Friday we left! To a chorus of blame from some cranky host parents, whom I sorted out. It was funny: they were praising the kids at the same time they were yelling at us for being late (we weren't, except that the parents were). Two of the biggest, sassiest boys from the professional side of the high school got kissed on the cheek by their host mom and praised up and down (and they are sweet when they want to be: one of them carried my bags in London just to be nice). We hit the Museum of London on the way and walked up and down Piccadilly Circus. I spent too much money buying delicious vegetarian food and a big block of cheddar cheese, but it was worth it. Virginie had predicted that the kids would all sleep on the bus on the way home, but instead they were awake and singing. A couple of my kids started serenading me, which was sweet. The ones in the back of the bus kept standing up and shuffling around too, which was strictly not allowed. I shouted at one of the worst ones at one point and got an ovation for it. It's like they forget I can speak French, even though I speak French with them all the time when we're not in class. I don't whip out the discipline so often, really, so it's weird to them when I do. A couple of them have started saluting me when I make them behave. I am entertained.
And you know what? It was sunny most of the time we were in England. How weird is that? Plus, once I got there, all I wanted to do was speak French to everyone, even though all the people around me were speaking English.
Today I went to the Cambrai Museum with Anna and her friend Laura, and it was surprisingly large, modern, and well-stocked. There was, of course, a lot of stuff from the old cathedral that got destroyed in the Revolution (too bad: it was apparently the jewel of the Pays Bas and the finest cathedral in all Christendom) and a plan relief of how the city used to look in the 18th century, and a lot of history about how important Cambrai has been (really important! Surprisingly enough!) and then art, art, art from everywhere, and a bunch of bones from the tombs they've discovered by Cambrai. There's a nice bust of Hugo by Rodin, and a piece by Camille Claudel, and a few other vaguely famous things by vaguely famous people. It was very lovely. A nice thing to do on a Sunday. And then when we left, the woman at the desk gave us free stuff. Yes!
So tomorrow it's back to school.
By the by, these are my students singing on the bus.
Sunday, February 11, 2007
another lazy Sunday
Hello! Michelle and I have been virtuous already today. We were up early enough to eat breakfast before it became lunchtime, and we've been to the store for all those little necessities. This is important, because there's only one grocery store near us that's open at all on Sundays, and it's only open until one, which is not always good for young, responsible, sleepy people such as ourselves. It is terribly inconvenient when one is attempting to make dinner and one suddenly realizes there are no eggs or bread in the house (except the stale bread in our stale bread bag, which has injured me before). It is tough to keep ourselves in groceries at the little white house sometimes, because we like to feed people. Everyone comes over here for dinner. It is just love and more love chez nous, and also cookery.
It was a good week. I got a bruise that looked like skid marks at football, but my team finally won for the first time in weeks, and Max came back to play with us, which is always nice for me because he talks to me more than the other boys on the team, who are all serious serious serious (but they play beautifully). He brought some of his grandmother's delicious pickles as well. Thursday it snowed for a bit. I woke up to a miserable half inch of slush at 6.30, but by the time I caught the bus at 7.30 it was raining, and when I got to go home early around noon because all the teachers were on strike and the students weren't going to be at my classes, it was sunny and bright and drying off.
Hard to believe that on Tuesday I'm going to England. This trip seemed so far away when I first heard about it, and now I've got to start packing. Virginie approached me very seriously the other day with something important to tell me, which made me nervous until she started talking: "You know, for England, you have to bring pounds. They don't accept Euro." And now I'll have another country knocked off my list of countries not visited. Nice! A free four-day trip to England, and all I have to do is help chaperone 45 French high schoolers. On second thought, I'm not sure they pay me enough at this job.
School's a lot of fun in general. The kids don't always participate much during the lessons, but I got them listening to "Big Yellow Taxi" and filling in the holes I'd left in the lyrics, which was entertaining, and they did really well. For a bunch of kids who listen to R&B and metal, they seemed to enjoy Joni Mitchell pretty well, and then we pulled out the opinion cards and they really started talking. Some choice quotations:
"Oh, smoking! (like cigarettes) I thought you meant smoking! (makes a gesture like wearing a tuxedo)"
"I am a fashion victim." (True.)
"France is the most beautiful country in the world...because I live there." (Ah, David.)
"David Beckham is the best footballer in the world and I love his wife."
"Miss! How do you say 'how do you say'?"
"Ugly girls should wear makeup."
"All blonds have big breasts." (Said by a rail-thin blond boy)
"I don't like weekends! No school."
And everyone loves Spain because they like the Spanish teacher (and I don't blame them, he's a great guy).
I got cranky at my new haircut and dyed my hair red this week. It was funny when I got on the bus on Friday morning and realized the bus driver had done the same thing. What a faux pas! But I refrained from saying anything to him. Nobody wants to have the fashion sense of an American.
Off to make lunch, I suppose, and think about what I ought to pack.
It was a good week. I got a bruise that looked like skid marks at football, but my team finally won for the first time in weeks, and Max came back to play with us, which is always nice for me because he talks to me more than the other boys on the team, who are all serious serious serious (but they play beautifully). He brought some of his grandmother's delicious pickles as well. Thursday it snowed for a bit. I woke up to a miserable half inch of slush at 6.30, but by the time I caught the bus at 7.30 it was raining, and when I got to go home early around noon because all the teachers were on strike and the students weren't going to be at my classes, it was sunny and bright and drying off.
Hard to believe that on Tuesday I'm going to England. This trip seemed so far away when I first heard about it, and now I've got to start packing. Virginie approached me very seriously the other day with something important to tell me, which made me nervous until she started talking: "You know, for England, you have to bring pounds. They don't accept Euro." And now I'll have another country knocked off my list of countries not visited. Nice! A free four-day trip to England, and all I have to do is help chaperone 45 French high schoolers. On second thought, I'm not sure they pay me enough at this job.
School's a lot of fun in general. The kids don't always participate much during the lessons, but I got them listening to "Big Yellow Taxi" and filling in the holes I'd left in the lyrics, which was entertaining, and they did really well. For a bunch of kids who listen to R&B and metal, they seemed to enjoy Joni Mitchell pretty well, and then we pulled out the opinion cards and they really started talking. Some choice quotations:
"Oh, smoking! (like cigarettes) I thought you meant smoking! (makes a gesture like wearing a tuxedo)"
"I am a fashion victim." (True.)
"France is the most beautiful country in the world...because I live there." (Ah, David.)
"David Beckham is the best footballer in the world and I love his wife."
"Miss! How do you say 'how do you say'?"
"Ugly girls should wear makeup."
"All blonds have big breasts." (Said by a rail-thin blond boy)
"I don't like weekends! No school."
And everyone loves Spain because they like the Spanish teacher (and I don't blame them, he's a great guy).
I got cranky at my new haircut and dyed my hair red this week. It was funny when I got on the bus on Friday morning and realized the bus driver had done the same thing. What a faux pas! But I refrained from saying anything to him. Nobody wants to have the fashion sense of an American.
Off to make lunch, I suppose, and think about what I ought to pack.
Sunday, February 4, 2007
living the high life
Another week is gone! It's hard to believe I've been in France for more than four months. It's hard to believe I'll be in England less than two weeks, and coming home in around three months.
Not a lot happened this week. I was sick on Monday and missed some classes, had a class cancelled on Thursday. The students were much better behaved this week, to the point of sometimes being extremely talkative, and that was pleasant. Some of them didn't come, but I really don't mind when the students who don't want to learn don't show up (although after they get in trouble they probably will come back, and then I will bend them to my will, so there). It's nicer when everyone is there because they want to be, like the one student from premiere who showed up on Friday afternoon and stayed even when I told her she could leave, given that her teacher hadn't given me anything to do. We played Pictionary. Pictionary saves me when the lessons that the teachers give are too short to fill up an entire hour. The cards are a leftover from Kate last year, and I've got a bunch of opinion cards too (give your opinion of whatever is written on the card) and it's an excellent thing to get the kids to talk. My seconde 1 were adorable the other day with the opinion cards: Teddy and Adeline and Kevin and Delphine gave me detailed analyses of football teams, horror films, France, English, math, and makeup. They also bopped along to "Big Yellow Taxi" until my computer arbitrarily decided to die in the middle of the lesson (fortunately after I'd already done the song lesson with the other group and the movie lesson with the one girl who showed up from the speciale class).
So now that the fan on my computer has died and it shuts itself off almost before it's finished starting up, we're all sharing Michelle's computer. Which is good, I suppose, as we end up talking a bit more, but it does make us less efficient.
Feeling okay about my French lately. I have a lot of free time in the teacher's room, so I sit and do not a whole lot, and then the younger teachers We're all come and talk to me. I was knitting the other day and the Moroccan teacher came and chatted to me about it for a while. My grammar isn't always perfect, and I search for words now and again, but I manage to have conversations with the teachers who drive me home on Monday and Thursday. I have a lot of work left to do with brushing up, but I communicate. Except, perhaps, at the hairdressers: I ended up with a short slanty haircut that is rather (rawthuh!) too posh for my little round face, and rather shorter than I asked for, with my sophisticated system of hand gestures. You never really learn the vocabulary for getting a haircut. I would have photos if my computer hadn't died, but you must just imagine it. Mid-neck, I said, because she'd just trimmed it to my shoulders, and she took the scissors and chopped off my hair in a slant from my chin to my earlobe, talking all the time she was evening it out about how thick my hair was. I was just looking on in horror as she cut it all just above my chin. Haircuts are expensive here, too, but I meekly paid up and went home and knitted myself a hat the next day. (Saurabh, I don't need to hear anything from you, I already got it from Steffen.)
It does make me think of how I will never be a genuinely French girl, the kind who grow up wearing nice shoes and having fashionable haircuts that you have to maintain and putting on perfume, the same way I was a good daughter to my family in India, but not ever quite like an Indian daughter. A little loud, a little sassy, rather prone to coming home after dark (to be fair, it did get dark quite early). I make a fine semblance of fitting in most of the time, but at the end of the day, I am still very American, no matter how good I am at this partial assimilation (and generally, I am good at it).
Friday night we (the girls and Matthias anyway) went over to Max and Ellen's apartment for a raclette party. Raclette is an interesting thing to eat: it's like the easy version of fondue. Each person has a tiny little tray and they put cheese in it and melt it on a griddle, and then they pour the melted cheese over potatoes or cauliflower or meat or bread or what have you. It was a good time. Ellen had found genuinely German brown bread (she was quite excited about it, being German), and we all stuffed ourselves and then played football on the playstation. A lot of shouting was involved, just like at regular Tuesday football, where the variety of curses is limited, but entertaining. Mostly they swear in French, the same couple of words, but Steffen always swears in English, and now and again they'll throw in some Spanish or Chti. More fun to play football in person than on the game station, but on a Friday night, you do what you can. And we like hanging out with Max and Ellen. They're a cute couple, and the rest of us are vachement celibataire (really, the only single people in all of France are the foreigners), and it's nice to hang around with them and see how well they get along.
Looks like the project for the day is watching French cooking shows (although it's a rerun) and thinking about how sunny it is outside. Always a glamourous life here, I tell you. We might even change out of our pajamas at some point (it's only one o' clock, no hurry). Until then, we'll just be slavering over the knives on the cooking show, avocado green with cookware envy.
Not a lot happened this week. I was sick on Monday and missed some classes, had a class cancelled on Thursday. The students were much better behaved this week, to the point of sometimes being extremely talkative, and that was pleasant. Some of them didn't come, but I really don't mind when the students who don't want to learn don't show up (although after they get in trouble they probably will come back, and then I will bend them to my will, so there). It's nicer when everyone is there because they want to be, like the one student from premiere who showed up on Friday afternoon and stayed even when I told her she could leave, given that her teacher hadn't given me anything to do. We played Pictionary. Pictionary saves me when the lessons that the teachers give are too short to fill up an entire hour. The cards are a leftover from Kate last year, and I've got a bunch of opinion cards too (give your opinion of whatever is written on the card) and it's an excellent thing to get the kids to talk. My seconde 1 were adorable the other day with the opinion cards: Teddy and Adeline and Kevin and Delphine gave me detailed analyses of football teams, horror films, France, English, math, and makeup. They also bopped along to "Big Yellow Taxi" until my computer arbitrarily decided to die in the middle of the lesson (fortunately after I'd already done the song lesson with the other group and the movie lesson with the one girl who showed up from the speciale class).
So now that the fan on my computer has died and it shuts itself off almost before it's finished starting up, we're all sharing Michelle's computer. Which is good, I suppose, as we end up talking a bit more, but it does make us less efficient.
Feeling okay about my French lately. I have a lot of free time in the teacher's room, so I sit and do not a whole lot, and then the younger teachers We're all come and talk to me. I was knitting the other day and the Moroccan teacher came and chatted to me about it for a while. My grammar isn't always perfect, and I search for words now and again, but I manage to have conversations with the teachers who drive me home on Monday and Thursday. I have a lot of work left to do with brushing up, but I communicate. Except, perhaps, at the hairdressers: I ended up with a short slanty haircut that is rather (rawthuh!) too posh for my little round face, and rather shorter than I asked for, with my sophisticated system of hand gestures. You never really learn the vocabulary for getting a haircut. I would have photos if my computer hadn't died, but you must just imagine it. Mid-neck, I said, because she'd just trimmed it to my shoulders, and she took the scissors and chopped off my hair in a slant from my chin to my earlobe, talking all the time she was evening it out about how thick my hair was. I was just looking on in horror as she cut it all just above my chin. Haircuts are expensive here, too, but I meekly paid up and went home and knitted myself a hat the next day. (Saurabh, I don't need to hear anything from you, I already got it from Steffen.)
It does make me think of how I will never be a genuinely French girl, the kind who grow up wearing nice shoes and having fashionable haircuts that you have to maintain and putting on perfume, the same way I was a good daughter to my family in India, but not ever quite like an Indian daughter. A little loud, a little sassy, rather prone to coming home after dark (to be fair, it did get dark quite early). I make a fine semblance of fitting in most of the time, but at the end of the day, I am still very American, no matter how good I am at this partial assimilation (and generally, I am good at it).
Friday night we (the girls and Matthias anyway) went over to Max and Ellen's apartment for a raclette party. Raclette is an interesting thing to eat: it's like the easy version of fondue. Each person has a tiny little tray and they put cheese in it and melt it on a griddle, and then they pour the melted cheese over potatoes or cauliflower or meat or bread or what have you. It was a good time. Ellen had found genuinely German brown bread (she was quite excited about it, being German), and we all stuffed ourselves and then played football on the playstation. A lot of shouting was involved, just like at regular Tuesday football, where the variety of curses is limited, but entertaining. Mostly they swear in French, the same couple of words, but Steffen always swears in English, and now and again they'll throw in some Spanish or Chti. More fun to play football in person than on the game station, but on a Friday night, you do what you can. And we like hanging out with Max and Ellen. They're a cute couple, and the rest of us are vachement celibataire (really, the only single people in all of France are the foreigners), and it's nice to hang around with them and see how well they get along.
Looks like the project for the day is watching French cooking shows (although it's a rerun) and thinking about how sunny it is outside. Always a glamourous life here, I tell you. We might even change out of our pajamas at some point (it's only one o' clock, no hurry). Until then, we'll just be slavering over the knives on the cooking show, avocado green with cookware envy.
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