it's snowing little rabbit!

big soft snowflakes everywhere!!! *

* more accurately, it was snowing but blogger was down yesterday

Not much else is new except 1. I cannot walk in the snow & wiped out twice, 2. I cannot BELIEVE what Matt's high school english teacher wrote in the front of his Great Gatsby book (if you haven't read it stop reading NOW)

mesdammes, messieurs, dans quelques instants _____

Requisite transportation fiasco story in short:

Trains to Paris, Belgium, etc. = great
Trains to nearby little blinkandyoumissit towns = disaster

So I was trying to go to Noyon to visit some other assistants, and to get there you take a train in the direction of either Compeigne or St. Quentin, but transfer in Terignier. I bought a ticket to Noyon leaving at 17h33, and encountered my first problem. Should I take the 17h33 to Compeigne or the 17h33 to St. Quentin? These kind of moments always remind me of those “choose your own adventure” books…do I take train A (turn to page 16) or train B (sorry you’ve just been eaten by a giant squid, start over!) After a flurry of text messages I decided Compeigne, but being the savvy train traveler I am, I made sure to check the monitor to see if it TERIGNIER was among its stops. It was not! After consulting with a man in the help booth, I hopped on the train to St. Quentin and it left immediately. A bit disconcerting because it wasn’t 17h33. It was 17h15. Enter that altogether too-familiar pull of opposing gravitational forces as the express train reaches its full velocity while my stomach sinks all the way down to my shoes as I realize once again

I’M ON THE WRONG TRAIN.

But then again this happens a lot. Next step is to find the controller (before he can find me) and beg his mercy. Usually he sits in the very back, but he wasn’t there. Lurched all the way to the car in front (much to the annoyance of the people in first class) and still no controller! I could see the driver through the window but figured I probably shouldn’t knock. Went back to my original seat. Eyebrows were raised around the cabin. What would the bewildered foreigner do next? Being the savvy IhavenocluewhatI’mdoingorwhereexactlyI’mgoingbutdadgummitI’mgonna-
getthere traveler I am, I knew just what to do. Clueless female with a map act. Works every time! I had that sucker out for only about 30 sec and was only at the mildly perplexed stage when the previously quiet, introspective guy next to me interrupted. Did I need help?

Well, oddly enough…

A few minutes later I had my new itinerary for getting to Noyon figured out (in fact he was a SNCF train employee) leaving me a whole hour to chat. He gave me a nice, candid run-down of all the regions of France (only cows – that’s beautiful – Corsican mafia, you’ll get shot) and also marched me to the ticket machine in St. Quentin and made sure I got the right ticket for the right destination. Which I could have very well done myself, I might add, had I had to. Ah, clueless female with a map act, you’re making me lazy.

The two hour stopover in St. Quentin was long enough for me to realize that St. Quentin is sketch. Sat down on a bench and began to notice a horrible smell, due to a guy who out of boredom I guess was toasting his thumb with a lighter. Sought refuge in the only other open seat, hidden in the recesses of the vending machines. There was a guy at the hot beverage machine that was making me nervous, taking a good 15 min to put his coins in, all the while furtively texting people and peering out the window, pulling off a drug deal no doubt. I stopped minding though when I saw the crazy homeless prophesying man doing wide gesticulating circles on the other side of him.

Finally, after two hours, I had was ready to hop on the train in the direction of Paris, Noyon being a stop along the way…for one of the trains. I opted not for the 19h56 (sorry, your tether to the spaceship has snapped and you are eventually consumed by the fiery atmosphere of the planet X’nBer oh please tell me someone else remembers these books!) but the 20h: You get on the train and find every car is deserted. You sit alone under the flickering fluorescent lights, it’s so silent and eerie you actually would prefer the company of a sketchy St. Quentin guy to this strange solitude. Then one walks into your car and sits down, facing you. And another. And another. You suddenly realize just how much you like solitude. Do you: 1. Go to the WC (waiting until the train starts moving and resisting the urge to show St. Quentin excatly what you think of it) or 2. Flee upstairs.

How about all of the above? Fortunately Noyon was only a few minutes away and soon I was happily greeting my fellow assistants at the station. Fin.

Oh yeah, the party was fun, too :)

cocorrrrrrrrico!

So had my first bus wreck this morning. It wasn’t bad, just some big truck thinking it could squeeze past the bus while it was at a stop. It could not, and took the driver’s side mirror off with a crunch. After listening in to enough conversations to realize that the bus was not going anywhere anytime soon, I got out and walked the rest of the way to school, using the 15 minutes to formulate a French translation of “so there was this truck, right…” only turns out when I finally got to school the teacher was out sick, not bothering to tell me, and I didn’t have to work today. So went back to the bus stop and waited with an elderly French matron who kept glaring at me as if I was the reason the bus was unusually late. And when it finally arrived it had a shattered mirror ducktaped to its side. Ah, la France.

Went for a walk in the countryside the other day. It was great, I had gone to Parc St. Pierre for my usual communing with nature (it’s hard in a city,) fortunately, I now have a French boyfriend with a car and similar nature-communing needs. We hiked for probably about two hours, and I learned a bunch of vocabulary relating to the forest. It’s like I’m having a second childhood, going everywhere and asking “What’s that? What’s that? What’s THAT?” Luckily he is patient. (Moss. Ivy. DIRT!)

We ended our walk in a village with beautiful old houses with huge gardens and roosters crowing in the background…apparently a lot of grandparents are selling these houses and moving to retirement communities because the grounds require so much upkeep, not to mention the roof and the windows and the heating bill and… I think that’s what he was saying, I was a bit distracted. Just large open green spaces, cold fresh air with a hint of smoke drifting across the field from some distant fireplace…mmmmm. I am not a shoe made for the city. Fortunately ‘se ballader,’ a French verb that means “to take a lesuirely ramble through the countryside” might become a Sunday afternoon tradition.

Which means maybe by May I’ll have picked out my future countryside home?

this is the captain speaking...

To sum up my flight(s) back:

9ish : Arrive at SeaTac, check luggage.
10ish: Arrive at gate for 11:30 departure.
11:30 : Plane hasn’t landed.
12:00 : Nope, still no plane.

etc., etc., etc. won’t bore you with being over-fueled in Cincinnati or the wing breaking in New York. But suffice to say all my flights were late.

I’m not sure about this, but I think according to some UN treaties, the conditions of modern air travel fall under the category of torture. At least cruel and unusual punishment, considering I could have probably overnighted myself to France with UPS for less money and comparable comfort. Came to this realization and others at 3 am somewhere over the Midwest. Others: I’ve seen comfier coffins. And kayaks with more legroom. And these blankets have all the warmth and manageability of SaranWrap. And I’m never ever ever ever going to be able to fall asleep. And

And the next thing I know we’re on our final descent into Cincinnati.

Sweeeeeet.

So oddly enough it’s not too strange to be back in France. Back to my usual routine, showed up at school and the class time had changed, ensuing typically French discussion:

Them: We changed the class schedule while you were in the US. Why didn’t you know this?

Me: Mais…bah…euh… (shrug)

It’s nice to hear all the bells chiming the hours, to buy my baguettes fresh, have a café with friends, to see twelve year olds smoking, to walk down the road dodging dog poop and wondering just what in the world they are fed to get such results…ahhh, la France.

Learned a few new things today: Where to buy shoelaces (the shoelace store, duh,) the grammar books I bought at Martells that are imposssible difficult for me are in fact designed for and used by primary students, and that the chips in the marble courtyard walls of the main public library are from gunshots during World War II. Go figure huh?

Someone asked me today when I was walking home where Rue Delpech was. I told them “c’est juste la,” just up the street, and although I’m only 78% (fine 72) sure if that’s really where it is, darn it felt good to answer in French and feel like I knew something. Time to prepare for my tough class tomorrow, unless it’s been changed as well.

I wouldn’t know.

a spoonful of tea & a piece of a madeline...

It’s past midnight.
Officially I leave for France tomorrow, and a little philosophical musing is in order.


It’s weird (it was weird) to be back. I keep saying this but it is. All the houses look the same. Not the same as when I left, but the same as each other (except for the white ones w/heavy wooden beams tacked all over the front in some early 80’s approximation of a Barvarian villa). I mean every fourth house on my street is the same, and the fact that no one seems to go outside much makes it seem like a neighborhood of overgrown dollhouses with lawns so perfect and green they must be plastic. After living in Amiens, where seemingly everything is made of stone, the green roominess of suburbia seems fake, like we’re all characters in The Sims or the Truman Show. Not that I have anything against the suburbs.

So I did a little stream of consciousness while walking today, trying to remember/reconnect to the place where I’ve spent most of my life. To start off, who else remembers when Redmond Town Center was a golf course and T&D Feeds was around? Associated memory: Mom buying dog food while my sister and I ran to watch the chicks in the back under the heat lamps. And at the (old, no-longer-existent) Redmond Elementary when the wind would shift so the smell of wet barley/dog chow/whatever it was it smelled like vomit would wash over the playground and incite mass imitations of puking. Sometimes we’d get the smell of cows towards summer but education hill usually blocked it. Speaking of it, the hill’s always steeper than I remember it being. I used to walk up to Nike park with my grandmommy when she’d visit, back when my known world was infinitesimally small, limited to what I could reach on foot (kind of like it is now in France) and how I had these elaborate systems of remembering where places were. The park came after the pink tree (mimosa) and the stretch of sidewalk that some dog mistook for the Hollywood Walk of Fame and walked through the pavement when it was wet. Unfortunately they cut the tree down, and repaved.

It’s only a short stretch between the new (because the old one that I went to got torn down, of course,) junior high to the intersection and the road up to the high school, and maybe I’m paranoid, but it seemed like cars were slowing down as they passed by me, that some drivers were staring. (Obligatory comparison to France: If you don’t drive everywhere in Redmond but instead opt to walk people either assume your car broke or you’re poor or something, while if you dress up in spandex and prance down the street at an ungodly hour of the morning it’s viewed as normal. Whereas in France prancing is highly discouraged. They walk places, too.)

As I passed by the road up to high school, the pleasant “funny, I’m a stranger myself here” feeling continued to ebb as people continued to slow down imperceptibly to see who I was and if they knew me and I started to remember the flip side of home, the reason you can never truly return if you’ve truly been gone, i.e. that even though the place you call home may change, in your absence you change even more. And just as you expect that home is somehow sacred and will somehow remain constant, home expects you to sink right back into the space, the role you left behind, to sink right back into who you used to be.

The high school is (surprise) new but the pool next to it is the same one I used to beg to go swimming at each summer. Pool, summer, sherbert-striped ice cream trucks and the far-off roar of hot air balloons rising… the sound that would empty all the houses on this street as we’d count the balloons, sometimes 5 or even 6, hanging like inverted tear drops over the stinking cows and their stinking fields. So what is it here I’m longing for, exactly? Is home a physical place or only in the mind, found in the presence of friends and family or in vague childhood memories?

Sorry this post is long and rambling. Bear in mind Proust covered the same subject in a mere 4,000 pages in A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, “in search of lost time” or “the remembrance of things past.” Or 8.9 pounds of nostalgic harkening-backs to childhood. Frankly, you lucked out.

And frankly, I’d better start packing.

...still feeling Proustian?

Happy New Year!

I hearby resolve to post on a more regular basis. And I never make New Year's resolutions.


I'm at home right now, enjoying central heating and the ability to leave the lights on. Packing shouldn't be too difficult this time, considering I haven't finished un-packing yet.

Back to France this Friday. Expect more thrilling exploits once I get there, but for the time being I'm going to relish these last few days in Redmond.

It's French tradition to make New Year's wishes for friends and family, so happy New Year all, let's hope it will be a good one. Anything could happen! Yay? Yikes!?! I guess we'll see...