Admittedly I haven’t blogged in a while, but the past few months are pretty easily summed up: me, asleep in my sleeping bag, cold and sick and very sick of France. But out of this I’ve become great friends with the general practitioner down the street and after several rounds of antibiotics and several missed days of work and a two week holiday in a slightly warmer climate, I am finally well and spring is slowly but surely arriving in the Somme. And I’m finding frenchiness more bemusing and less aggravating. Some examples:
- They eat their popcorn sugared and not salted. Unless they let their American girlfriend pick out the popcorn and she finds the one tub of salted amongst rows of sugared and doesn’t stop to think that maybe having only one tub of salted is indicative of something, such as always inexplicable French taste. In this case they eat their popcorn salted and make (v. french) faces all the while.
- There are two words for people to use when asking for a drag of someone else’s cigarette, un bouffé is formal and un touffe is informal, which is fine but really, when would you ever ask a formal relation for a drag? But if you ever have to ask the CEO for a puff or Jacques Chirac for that matter, there is a word for you to employ, just in case.
- The neverending “horses are pets” vs. “horses are dinner" debate. One might liken eating a horse to eating a pet dog, but that’s usually met by the rebuttal that hey! dogs probably taste good too. and cats. and cute little songbirds and wee rabbits and probably bambi too, preferably w/a bechamel.
Classes are fine, (that is if they aren’t cancelled,) and we had a meeting of ‘harmonization’ the other week in which the Inspection Académique provided us elementary assistants tons of pedagogic material and taught us how to design our lesson plans. Which is great, but it might have been to have done that at the start of the schoolyear, rather than after 6 months of trial-by-fire teaching with only one month left to go.
Will post more about my and Jessie's Italy and Croatia adventure later, but you can view the photos at the links below:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2003972&l=77402&id=136700102
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2003980&l=b44b6&id=136700102
but for now, as the italians love to say, ciao ciao ciao!
