We have just changed the clocks here in France, which suddenly meant that we all stayed up way too late last night, but people kept coming by for no apparent reason. And then they'd learn that it was my birthday and wish me happy birthday and ask all kinds of questions. But it was a good day despite the fact that we were all sick and/or lethargic. I made garlic mashed potatoes and fake meatballs for dinner and then later baked a cake from a plain mix to which we added cinnamon, nutmeg, and the maple syrup Aunt Mim sent. Tasty! We watched my birthday movie and then spent the rest of the evening listening to Disney music for reasons which are inexplicable.
Today is Sunday and it's after one, which means there's nowhere to go and nothing to do, but that's all right. We've all got books and more movies and things to eat and look at. Not nearly as exciting as Friday, when we took about a hundred students to Paris to go to a science museum (Palais de la Découverte) and the theatre. And of course, in my group were the only two students who have ever really given me a lot of trouble, but they actually behaved surprisingly well. They tried to escape the boring weather lecture, but everyone was trying to escape, and the girl was quite nice to me. It was the older boys who were worse behaved, and that was at the theatre. I can understand not really wanting to watch the play - it was baroque, and a bit odd - but be civilized, children. It was nice for me to get to hang out with the other teachers, as well: I know them all by sight, but I don't always know their names (because everyone knows me, so they forget to introduce themselves). We had a tasty dinner. Overall, it was still an excellent trip. We drove around the Arc de Triomphe, close enough to see the flame that marks the tomb of the unknown soldier, and we drove past the Eiffel Tower, close enough to see it from top to bottom (and the view from the theatre when it was lit up in the evening was gorgeous). Paris certainly is magical.
It's sad to think of how little time we've got left. Bit of stress in the maison blanche, but we try to work around it and not break into shouting or tears too often (only once so far, fortunately). I ought to start packing and tidying up, I suppose, or at least straightening up the things I'm going to leave for next year's assistant and writing my letter. Strange to think what I'll do without the beautiful tower of St. Gery to draw me home.
Sunday, March 25, 2007
Sunday, March 18, 2007
cloudy sunny cloudy sunny
In Cambrai the weather is cloudy but clearing, sort of. It was raining, and now we get drifts of white clouds and drifts of grey clouds and glimpses of bright blue sky. Now it's clouded over again, only to go sunny half an hour later. I'm sitting in the living room writing this: the window to the left and the one in front of me show slices of blue sky and bright sunshine, and the window to the right is thick cloud. Michelle's taking her visiting friends around for the tour of Cambrai and canal in a bit, but I think I'll stay in; I have some artsy and writing projects to finish. Steffen's sister and her boyfriend are here too. It's a big weekend for visitors! St. Patrick's Day, you know, which meant that all the pubs in town were serving Guinness and whiskey, and that everything was packed when we went out dancing and we couldn't even get up without losing our seats, so we didn't end up dancing at all, but at least I got a free Guinness glass (a tiny one). And then we came home and ate chocolate pie.
Today we have big plans to make spinach and goat cheese lasagna, since Cata's not back from Spain yet, so we can still cook with goat cheese without hearing a number of complaints. Though we might get some anyway - she didn't tell us what time she'd get home, although she got cranky with me for not saying what time I'd be home from England when I went. Ah, the joys of cohabitation. It is good generally, though: our tiny house that occupies three has so many unofficial inhabitants. Yesterday we even got Steffen to vacuum for us. Actually, he volunteered while I was sweeping in preparation to mop (and believe that the kitchen floor looks so much better than it did yesterday, given that at points I was on hands and knees with a sponge). So that was pleasant, having our half-housemate actually do some tidying up when generally we can barely coax him into doing the dishes. But he still can't cook for anything.
It was a good week at school. My classes that don't generally behave behaved pretty well, though I'm not sure they actually understood what the lesson was trying to convey. They're learning about the American west and the frontier and it's rather impossible to explain to French children what the frontier meant to the pioneers, and what it still means to the American spirit. The French have pretty much always known where their boundaries were since the time of nos ancetres les Gaulois. They've been conquered a lot more than they've been doing the conquering. I tried to explain how much hope the pioneers and the immigrants had for the wide, wild lands of the West, but the landscape is different, both physically and emotionally, from the soft rolling French countryside. So eventually we just played with the opinion cards. With the older classes, I had my favorite student show up with one of my kids from last semester whom I technically don't have anymore, but it's always nice to know that they like me enough to come to class even when they don't have to.
Next Friday I'm going to Paris with a significant number of the kids. We're going to the theatre. I'm not sure what we're seeing - some Russian or German play in French, I think - but it should be fun, and it's a nice little birthday present for me, since we won't be back until after midnight, and then it will be the 24th and I'll be 22. I've told Michelle I expect to see a frosted cake and a pile of presents on the table. And I get to go to Paris for my birthday like I wanted without having to pay for it! Nice! Although what I really wanted to do was pick up Fragile Things and take it to Neil Gaiman's book signing. I miss books in English. The French books I've found are kind of hit or miss. I read Powerbook by Jeanette Winterson in French and it was excellent, but the Discworld books are rather awful. I suppose I could get actual French books by actual French authors, but why on earth would I want to do that? They're probably all depressing. (I'm kidding, but only half.)
I've done the dishes, and I can't do any laundry until Steffen's is done, so I suppose I'll go back to futilely trying to copy my music off my iPod onto the computer. Oh, Windows Vista, you're certainly pretty, but you give me problems. Or maybe I'll attempt to perfect my Scouse accent before the Liverpudlians get back, so they can be amused.
Have an excellent Sunday!
Today we have big plans to make spinach and goat cheese lasagna, since Cata's not back from Spain yet, so we can still cook with goat cheese without hearing a number of complaints. Though we might get some anyway - she didn't tell us what time she'd get home, although she got cranky with me for not saying what time I'd be home from England when I went. Ah, the joys of cohabitation. It is good generally, though: our tiny house that occupies three has so many unofficial inhabitants. Yesterday we even got Steffen to vacuum for us. Actually, he volunteered while I was sweeping in preparation to mop (and believe that the kitchen floor looks so much better than it did yesterday, given that at points I was on hands and knees with a sponge). So that was pleasant, having our half-housemate actually do some tidying up when generally we can barely coax him into doing the dishes. But he still can't cook for anything.
It was a good week at school. My classes that don't generally behave behaved pretty well, though I'm not sure they actually understood what the lesson was trying to convey. They're learning about the American west and the frontier and it's rather impossible to explain to French children what the frontier meant to the pioneers, and what it still means to the American spirit. The French have pretty much always known where their boundaries were since the time of nos ancetres les Gaulois. They've been conquered a lot more than they've been doing the conquering. I tried to explain how much hope the pioneers and the immigrants had for the wide, wild lands of the West, but the landscape is different, both physically and emotionally, from the soft rolling French countryside. So eventually we just played with the opinion cards. With the older classes, I had my favorite student show up with one of my kids from last semester whom I technically don't have anymore, but it's always nice to know that they like me enough to come to class even when they don't have to.
Next Friday I'm going to Paris with a significant number of the kids. We're going to the theatre. I'm not sure what we're seeing - some Russian or German play in French, I think - but it should be fun, and it's a nice little birthday present for me, since we won't be back until after midnight, and then it will be the 24th and I'll be 22. I've told Michelle I expect to see a frosted cake and a pile of presents on the table. And I get to go to Paris for my birthday like I wanted without having to pay for it! Nice! Although what I really wanted to do was pick up Fragile Things and take it to Neil Gaiman's book signing. I miss books in English. The French books I've found are kind of hit or miss. I read Powerbook by Jeanette Winterson in French and it was excellent, but the Discworld books are rather awful. I suppose I could get actual French books by actual French authors, but why on earth would I want to do that? They're probably all depressing. (I'm kidding, but only half.)
I've done the dishes, and I can't do any laundry until Steffen's is done, so I suppose I'll go back to futilely trying to copy my music off my iPod onto the computer. Oh, Windows Vista, you're certainly pretty, but you give me problems. Or maybe I'll attempt to perfect my Scouse accent before the Liverpudlians get back, so they can be amused.
Have an excellent Sunday!
Sunday, March 11, 2007
springtime in Cambrai
When I left for Sweden, I stopped at Odéon on the 4 Metro Line for a lot of coffee. Paris in the early morning light was curled into itself like a snail shell found in a garden, each arrondissement pearly under the weak sun of the end of winter. Paris, city of love, city of lovers. I have not found love in Paris. For me, it is a city of bridges and of keys. I do find keys in Paris: a tiny anonymous key to one of ten thousand interchangeable locks on diaries with pasteboard covers. Someone's house key, which I left on the curb where I found it, though I took the small one. There are a million others just like it.
When I left for Sweden, Paris was shading towards spring and Stockholm was still locked into winter, snowy and slushy and chilly. Not as cold as Iowa, certainly. Stockholm lacked some of the bone-chilling cold of Iowa, certainly: it never really got below freezing. It was like home, really, about as cold as Arkansas, with considerably more snow. And it was pleasant. Fewer blond people than one would expect, but cobblestones and twisty streets like France. And to me, the Swedish subtitles looked a bit like German, at least enough that I could recognize some words. But it was a wintery place, and we ate wintery food, like the goat cheese with walnuts and honey and lingon jam that I had in the vegetarian restaurant, and the roasted veggies Angie made.
When we landed at Beauvais, outside of Paris, it was spring. The fields were greener under the brighter sun, and the sides of the road were touched with color: white from the snowdrops and the shrubs and trees like popcorn and the daisies buttoning down the grass, pink from some other sort of blossoming tree, and yellow from dandelions and daffodils and the forsythia. The light has gone from winter silver to spring white gold, and outside the maison blanche, there are violets. We've started taking long walks by the canal on the more and more frequent sunny days, just because we want to bask in the sunshine (and hey, Mom, I'm wearing my sunscreen that smells like India and everything). Cata has a photo of me standing under one of the trees that's just exploding into blossom, and none of us can stop smiling. Even though it's still a bit chilly, we have the windows open to let in the fresh air, and it's warm enough to go out without a coat.
There's an organic market today across town, but we're not going, because it sounds more fun to sit on the Grand Place and eat ice cream. If that isn't a spring and summer food, it's hard to say what is. We keep buying fruit for the house as well, a sure sign that winter's slipping away. I may make a fruit salad later: we've got a can of lychees and a can of mangos and a couple of yellow plums and nectarines that need using and I've got my trusty shaker full of ginger. Plus, I've started drinking coffee (with cardamom and cream, generally) instead of tea. Change of season.
Work starts again on Monday and I'll be glad enough to go back. I miss my students, and I like having a little more structure to my day than "Wake up, stumble downstairs, eat some yogurt, and argue peaceably about what we're going to do for the rest of the day, which ends up being sit around with our various computers". Although on Wednesday, we did go to Valenciennes to teach Cata how to bowl, and to play pool and air hockey and dance on the Dance Dance Revolution machine and wow some schoolchildren with our impressive skills. I've lost three fingernails this week: right thumb and ring finger to the bowling ball, and then right index at random. I also cut partway through my left index fingernail while I was slicing up (vicious! Lethal!) stale bread to make a vegetarian loaf. Been a bad week for my hands.
After this, only a few weeks of school left! Tragic. But for now I'll just try to enjoy the moment. Some of the old German assistants from a few years ago are visiting, and they've shown us some of their old favorite places around town, which are our new favorite places. So we're off to bask in the sunshine and chatter away in our patois, and it'll be lovely.
When I left for Sweden, Paris was shading towards spring and Stockholm was still locked into winter, snowy and slushy and chilly. Not as cold as Iowa, certainly. Stockholm lacked some of the bone-chilling cold of Iowa, certainly: it never really got below freezing. It was like home, really, about as cold as Arkansas, with considerably more snow. And it was pleasant. Fewer blond people than one would expect, but cobblestones and twisty streets like France. And to me, the Swedish subtitles looked a bit like German, at least enough that I could recognize some words. But it was a wintery place, and we ate wintery food, like the goat cheese with walnuts and honey and lingon jam that I had in the vegetarian restaurant, and the roasted veggies Angie made.
When we landed at Beauvais, outside of Paris, it was spring. The fields were greener under the brighter sun, and the sides of the road were touched with color: white from the snowdrops and the shrubs and trees like popcorn and the daisies buttoning down the grass, pink from some other sort of blossoming tree, and yellow from dandelions and daffodils and the forsythia. The light has gone from winter silver to spring white gold, and outside the maison blanche, there are violets. We've started taking long walks by the canal on the more and more frequent sunny days, just because we want to bask in the sunshine (and hey, Mom, I'm wearing my sunscreen that smells like India and everything). Cata has a photo of me standing under one of the trees that's just exploding into blossom, and none of us can stop smiling. Even though it's still a bit chilly, we have the windows open to let in the fresh air, and it's warm enough to go out without a coat.
There's an organic market today across town, but we're not going, because it sounds more fun to sit on the Grand Place and eat ice cream. If that isn't a spring and summer food, it's hard to say what is. We keep buying fruit for the house as well, a sure sign that winter's slipping away. I may make a fruit salad later: we've got a can of lychees and a can of mangos and a couple of yellow plums and nectarines that need using and I've got my trusty shaker full of ginger. Plus, I've started drinking coffee (with cardamom and cream, generally) instead of tea. Change of season.
Work starts again on Monday and I'll be glad enough to go back. I miss my students, and I like having a little more structure to my day than "Wake up, stumble downstairs, eat some yogurt, and argue peaceably about what we're going to do for the rest of the day, which ends up being sit around with our various computers". Although on Wednesday, we did go to Valenciennes to teach Cata how to bowl, and to play pool and air hockey and dance on the Dance Dance Revolution machine and wow some schoolchildren with our impressive skills. I've lost three fingernails this week: right thumb and ring finger to the bowling ball, and then right index at random. I also cut partway through my left index fingernail while I was slicing up (vicious! Lethal!) stale bread to make a vegetarian loaf. Been a bad week for my hands.
After this, only a few weeks of school left! Tragic. But for now I'll just try to enjoy the moment. Some of the old German assistants from a few years ago are visiting, and they've shown us some of their old favorite places around town, which are our new favorite places. So we're off to bask in the sunshine and chatter away in our patois, and it'll be lovely.
Sunday, March 4, 2007
not France but Sweden!
Hello, all!
This is my last day in Stockholm with Angie! It's been a great vacation. Extremely relaxing. We've just been wandering around the city, eating vegetarian food, talking about our favorite tv shows, and comparing the various countries we've visited. Last night we went out to a sports bar to watch some song competition having to do with Eurovision and free slots left. There was a lot of cheering and a lot of hissing going on. The place was packed! And then we did karaoke. I have learned some important Swedish phrases from watching this and some random television, such as "jag måste kyssa dig" (I must kiss you) and the words for "naked", "wonderful", and "for king and country". So that will serve me well. But I can also say "I don't speak Swedish!" and "Do you speak English?" so that's all right.
Today I think we're going to visit some gardeny place and I'll teach Angie how to use the newly augmented contents of her spice collection. The weather hasn't really been the best for sightseeing - rather slushy and cloudy - but it's been pretty mild. The girls were afraid I would freeze, but it's so much warmer than Iowa was. Colder than Cambrai, but often enough above freezing, so I am toasty as a little piece of toast in my coat and scarf. No problems. But their concern was cute. It's so nice to actually find vegetarian food in Sweden. In the restaurants, in the grocery stores, wherever you go, there's always some vegetarian option, and it isn't a salad with the meat hastily taken off. Plus, there's lingon jam everywhere, and that's almost as tasty as cranberry sauce. Mmmmm. I approve of Sweden, yes, I do. It is clean and fairly friendly and easy to navigate. Expensive, though. I keep trying to divide kronor by rupees instead of Euro, and that's bad news for my bank account. But! In general everything is lovely.
It's been strange to come to a place where it's dark at six again. In Cambrai it's been so light that I don't wake up to church bells anymore: starting at 3.30 or so, I can wake up to the chirrup of birds in the trees and on the theatre, and some of the trees are budding and blooming. Hopefully the frost won't kill the blossoms. But here in Stockholm, it's still brown and bare, except for the snow and slush. This is the farthest north I've ever been! How exciting.
I had some more things to relate, but they've slipped my mind for now. The rest of vacation looks to be incredibly relaxing. The girls and I have been cleaning the house and cooking a lot. There's fruit in the maison blanche again, which is good, and we've all been paid, which is excellent. I have some writing to do when I get home. It's so strange to think that after break, there are only five more weeks of school and then it's over. I can't believe it's March already. At least I've got birthday plans to distract me. Neil Gaiman, one of my favorite authors, is having a book signing in Paris on the 24th, so I think I'll play the birthday card until someone comes with me. It'll be great.
This is my last day in Stockholm with Angie! It's been a great vacation. Extremely relaxing. We've just been wandering around the city, eating vegetarian food, talking about our favorite tv shows, and comparing the various countries we've visited. Last night we went out to a sports bar to watch some song competition having to do with Eurovision and free slots left. There was a lot of cheering and a lot of hissing going on. The place was packed! And then we did karaoke. I have learned some important Swedish phrases from watching this and some random television, such as "jag måste kyssa dig" (I must kiss you) and the words for "naked", "wonderful", and "for king and country". So that will serve me well. But I can also say "I don't speak Swedish!" and "Do you speak English?" so that's all right.
Today I think we're going to visit some gardeny place and I'll teach Angie how to use the newly augmented contents of her spice collection. The weather hasn't really been the best for sightseeing - rather slushy and cloudy - but it's been pretty mild. The girls were afraid I would freeze, but it's so much warmer than Iowa was. Colder than Cambrai, but often enough above freezing, so I am toasty as a little piece of toast in my coat and scarf. No problems. But their concern was cute. It's so nice to actually find vegetarian food in Sweden. In the restaurants, in the grocery stores, wherever you go, there's always some vegetarian option, and it isn't a salad with the meat hastily taken off. Plus, there's lingon jam everywhere, and that's almost as tasty as cranberry sauce. Mmmmm. I approve of Sweden, yes, I do. It is clean and fairly friendly and easy to navigate. Expensive, though. I keep trying to divide kronor by rupees instead of Euro, and that's bad news for my bank account. But! In general everything is lovely.
It's been strange to come to a place where it's dark at six again. In Cambrai it's been so light that I don't wake up to church bells anymore: starting at 3.30 or so, I can wake up to the chirrup of birds in the trees and on the theatre, and some of the trees are budding and blooming. Hopefully the frost won't kill the blossoms. But here in Stockholm, it's still brown and bare, except for the snow and slush. This is the farthest north I've ever been! How exciting.
I had some more things to relate, but they've slipped my mind for now. The rest of vacation looks to be incredibly relaxing. The girls and I have been cleaning the house and cooking a lot. There's fruit in the maison blanche again, which is good, and we've all been paid, which is excellent. I have some writing to do when I get home. It's so strange to think that after break, there are only five more weeks of school and then it's over. I can't believe it's March already. At least I've got birthday plans to distract me. Neil Gaiman, one of my favorite authors, is having a book signing in Paris on the 24th, so I think I'll play the birthday card until someone comes with me. It'll be great.
Sunday, February 25, 2007
and it isn't even spring
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?
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 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.
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