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.