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i'm leaving on a jet plane... (II)

It's official. Less than one week before I come home! (six days to be precise.) And as much as I know I will miss France once I'm gone, I'm pretty ready to get back and see people and get a real job. I've applied for four so far, lab tech positions at Fred Hutch and UW, and some entry-level environmental microbiology position. No word back yet (it's been one day, to be precise,) but that hasn't stopped me from Ctl-R-ing my inbox obsessively.

Waiting. Waiting. Why is that when you wait for something, the closer it gets the more unbearable the waiting becomes, and not vice versa? I hate to wait.

In other news, visited Amsterdam, and it's a very lovely city. Saw the Anne Frank house (you can walk all through the hiding place) and the Van Gogh museum, then spent the rest of the time just wandering about and admiring the tulips.

Really not much more to say than that. I rode on a motorcycle, and drove it about a foot on my own before I dropped the clutch. I learned the rules to a so-complicated-it-could-only-be French card game, Tarot. I'm almost out of instant coffee, and conflicted as whether on not I should buy more given that I'm only going to leave. Probably will give in and buy some. Now isn't the time to try and kick a habit, anyway :) My bags are packed, I'm ready to go. Going to Paris tomorrow to see the Louvre one last time, and hopefully to see the Opera Garnier for the first time. This weekend might see the Picardie beach, and then it's off to CDG.

Welcome to SeaTac International Airport...

I'll miss the people I met here, the places I've seen, the foot I've ate (? eaten? done et up?), but man that's going to be good to hear!


Now to go hassle the bank about my final paycheck.

and you thought remembering where you parked your car was difficult!

Springtime in the Somme

Today felt like the first real day of spring, it was almost warm (balmy, even, by Picardie standards). Went for a walk in Parc St. Pierre and the cherry trees have blossomed, and there's some bush (musgate or something in French). May 1st is the national worker's holiday...celebrated by not working but by wandering around carrying this flower instead. It made the whole park smell sweet, and as it rained all last night and this morning, everything was in a bit hazy and overwhelmingly green. The Somme might not have many moments, but today was one of them.

Saw Andrew Bird in concert on Friday, after a delicious meal at Tante Jeanne (Aunt Jean) which is a resturant inside a converted old house on the Quai Belue...had grilled fish with cajun rice on top of a delicious dark chewy crepe and all washed down with equally delecious cider from Normandy.

(Speaking of food, strawberries are starting to appear in grocery stores! They're still a bit tart, but maybe it's better that way as slurping up the sugary juice syrup that is left in the bottom of the bowl is one of spring's greatest pleasures, selon moi.)


The concert was also amazing, it's basically a one-man show with the assistance of a drummer/tech guy, just try to imagine Mr. Bird running around in stripey socks throwing down his violin to grab his guitar to throw it behind him to play the glokenschpiel then breaking into a whistling solo, all the while tapping pedals to put riffs into loops and basically creating his songs from the ground up at breakneck speed. Did some Bob Dylan song I didn't know as an encore and it was shiver-inducing.

Had a going away party for the assistants last night in Noyon. Seems that everyone, myself included, is starting to get pretty nostalgic and reluctant to leave France, despite all our previous months of moaning and griping. It's only a month now! Hopefully will get in one more trip out of the country, and a few day trips, before I go. I really feel that I'm only just beginning to get the hang of existing in France now that I'm about to leave. Maybe I'll be back, I've been entertaining the idea of trying to do some graduate school classes here, but so far it's just daydreaming. But sometimes daydreams have a way of working out...

Speaking of finally fitting in, was walking home from the park when I was thwarted while trying to cross a bridge by a puffy white toy dog that was bouncing everywhere on its leash like a yoyo, and making it impossible for me to pass. Finally his slow-moving owner turned to me and explained apologetically while reeling in her puppy, il est juste comme un anglais... "he's just like the english...all you want to do is pass them on the left and they're always in the way!" I just smiled and agreed, knowingly and frenchily.

You know, those english.

Although they're probably more concientous about picking up their dogs' poop...

here comes the sun

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!

notes from normandy

Omaha Beach:

The park and cemetery have been donated to the US by France, so it’s actually part of American soil and in that sense I was in America over the weekend. It’s peaceful and beautiful and it’s almost impossible to take in how many people died on just the sixth of June alone, and equally impossible, when you’re standing on the beach looking back up inland, to see how they managed to successfully retake the villages. If you’ve seen ‘The Longest Day,’ that’s where we were. Drove past the church where the parachutists got stuck in the steeple. Antony kept talking about a thing that clicked that people had to show they were on the Allies’s side…like in that movie “Le Plus Long Jour.” I wonder what Robert Mitchum sounds like dubbed.

Cow Pasture near Isnigy sur-Mer:

The typical French village is alive and well! They’re everywhere, actually, consisting of a boulangerie, a bucherie, a mayor’s office, a church, a post office, a school, and a decrepit bar/tabac. And several cows. Apparently the grass in Normadie is famous for being lush, that’s why the cows are happy and the cheese is so good. Experienced a pasture firsthand, we went to the butcher’s and picked out a small feast of local specialties including, among many other things, a pâté de campagne and some cider. Unfortunately places to buy plastic cutlery aren’t part of the typical French village, so we used our baguettes to scoop and spread. There’s a French term for eating like that, where you get your hands dirty and eat without refinement or planning. Of course there’s a French term for all kinds of eating…they are a nation obsessed…one of these days it will stop surprising me (and one of these days I’ll write down my French quasi-fancy dinner trial-by-fire story, highlights including: 1. you never cut föie gras with a knife, 2. eating a leafy salad continental style is extremely difficult, and 3. a different wine with every course plus champagne before the meal can be dangerous, I am learning the fine art of keeping just enough in my glass to not get a refill but not so much that I have to chug it as the rest of the table waits so we can all move on to the next course. Not very ladylike, that.)

Le Mont St-Michel:

Call me cynical, but I’m getting a bad attitude towards European tourism that goes something like this: You’ve seen one old building, you’ve seen them all. Same thing for Cathedrals. So I was extremely pleasantly surprised by the Mont St-Michel. I’ve heard it can be a super tourist trap (second most visited monument in France, can you guess the first?) but on an early February afternoon it wasn’t busy at all. It’s just a strange place, I haven’t seen anything like it…it reminded me at once of a fort city like in the beginning of Pirates of the Caribbean because it had these impossibly thick fortress walls and cannons, and winding little streets inside, but the abbey itself was more like a fairy tale castle. I’ll refrain from any LOTR references, but they did spring to mind. It was extremely peaceful just walking through the refectory and cloister and scriptorium, whoever built it knew exactly what they were doing because it was full of light and everywhere you turned you’d catch a glimpse of the sea. Wonder what pilgrims thought of it back in the day before there were clusters of tour buses and budget hotels and campgrounds, just the sea and this huge fortresses rising from or floating on top of it.

Rouen:

Got there late at night but it still was charming from the get go, we went to a pizzeria with his older sister and unlike Amiens, where most everything was destroyed in WWI or WWII and rebuilt, Rouen is mostly like it was in the middle ages. Or maybe I mean mediaeval. Either way think lots of woodwork and crooked buildings, and very upscale compared to Amiens, with lots of cute boutiques and cafes and I saw at least TWO MEXICAN RESTURANTS! Too bad they were closed but beginning to realize that life in France is a lot better outside of dear old Picardie. The next day his dad stopped by and we all went to the Sunday market, which, not to overly bash Amiens, is a whole lot cooler than Amiens’s market. I think the addition of fresh seafood was part of the charm, but the colors and sounds and smells were amazing, and his dad made sure that I didn’t miss a thing…Catherine should try that! No, get that cheese she should try it! But Catherine doesn’t know about that, stop, we should get some… It was basically great. Then we all got drinks at a sidewalk café and watched the punky homeless guys drinking beers from cans at 10 in the morning. I guess it’s all over France that “badness” is measured by the amount of mangy stray dogs you have following you.

Drive back to Amiens:

Not much to say here except the moment we hit the border between Normandie and Picardie there was tons of fog and the sun disappeared, leading Antony to quip that Picardie (or Amiens) is the Mordor of France. Et en fait, that’s pretty much true. Fortunately there are plans for future trips out to la France profonde, probably via train because the tolls are the motorways here are ridiculous! But as the French say, it did me well, to get out of the city and breathe some fresh air. Il me fait très, très bien.

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...

der hooten es gooten

Well, Belgium was pretty but it pretty much depressed the Europe out of me. That is to say, when you’re surrounded by a bunch of sophisticated, well-heeled Europeans who speak at least four languages fluently and live in ritzy old houses and bike everywhere in their United Colors of Bennington way… well… I’m kind of hankering to watch football in my sweatpants and eat Rotel from a plastic bowl while drinking something like bud light. And I don’t even like football! (Or bud, really). It’s just that I’m realizing at heart, I’m not very continental. I’m pretty American. And the best thing is…there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that!

So before I talk about what Belgians do v. well, here is a list of things that Americans do best:

1. We’re actually friendly
2. Customer service exists
3. Stores being open at normal hours
4. Stores being open at night
5. Stores being open in the wee hours of the morning
6. Cleanliness
7. Margaritas (and other blended drinks)
8. Mexican food for that matter
9. Did I mention genuine friendliness
10. Marching bands at halftime are cool
11. Wide open spaces. Nature! Natural wonders.
12. We like people. We really really like them.
13. Fast food is… fast!
14. We actually welcome immigrants. And integrate them.
15. Cheddar Cheese. Peanut butter. Rotel. All things spicy.
16. Our dogs are bigger than rats and we pick up their poop
17. We can drive
18. Air conditioning
19. We work hard, and hard work is actually rewarded
20. You don’t need a reason to smile at someone

And now, the things that Belgians do best:

1. Beer
2. Chocolate*

*Ordering transposable based on personal taste

Okay, I know I KNOW there’s lots more than that but I was only there for two days so what can you expect? I brought back a bunch of Coté d’Or chocolate from Belgian supermarkets (just as good as the boutique stuff) for Christmas gifts but then I ate it all. Sorry about that… French chocolate ain’t so bad, either!

Other notes from Belgium…they speak Dutch in the North (well, along with perfect French, English, and German no less) but I didn’t realize this. So panicked a bit on the train when everything switched from French to a language that sounds like… well, English, actually, but as if they were purposely messing words up. Also met the Belgian version of Zoolander at one of our hostels. All looks, no little gray cells…well it was hard to tell as he was a v. dab hand at Uno, and we played it for about 5 hours! (Given that all it did outside was rain, get dark, and rain some more.)

It’s almost time for another weekend, hopefully I will put some pictures up of the Christmas Market soon i.e. hopefully I will brave the cold and take them.

Until then,

ik zie je, & pas goed op jezelf.

(say it out loud and just see if it doesn’t almost make sense!)

fries with that?

A few mornings ago I woke up very grouchy, this probably lingering over from the awful movie we had watched the night before. Les poupes russes, not a bad movie per say except in its moral, which was basically: be a slimy lecherous French guy all you want, in the end you will still get the girl. Then I got out of bed and fell down the stairs. This did little to improve my mood.

Note: My bag and laptop kindly were willing to sacrifice themselves for me and broke my fall, otherwise I probably would be convelescing at the moment.

It's great, I just learned that Amiens has the largest Christmas market in the north of France. This would explain how overnight thousands of pine trees were lashed to lamposts, so that where used to 1.5 people could fit on the sidewalk, now .5 of a person can (how the trees are still green remains a mystery, I suspect it's something similar to the way they process their eternity milk). Also lights are strung everywhere, merry-go-rounds are sprouting up, there's an inflatable fake snow globe in front of l'hotel de ville...and I have never seen so many French people actually at their workplace during normal work hours. Each store has meticilous decorations up, the effect is v. beautiful except for that the pastel huts lined through centre-ville kind of look like a shanty town, a bunch of temporary housing for displaced elves (I think it's the fake snow).

Finally the point of this post was to say I've discovered what the hardest part of speaking french here is -- ordering english products in french. McDo's is awful. A big mac is a beeeg mac, ketchup is keeeeetchup, and unless you put ridiculous stress on the wrong part of the word you will not be understood, or worse, you will be addressed in english that against all odds is even worse than your french. This happens at the Irish pub as well, there's one girl who I'm sure means well but I for the life of me can't figure out how the french say "pint" (so far I've tried "pant" and "peent" and neither have worked) and frankly I'm tired of ordering cidre and then specifying "grand" with my hands to indicate that I don't want a demi, i.e. a wee shot-glass of cider. Unfortunately my inability to mispronounce english means that she assumes I cannot speak french, so I end up having to conduct my entire transaction in broken english, culminating in getting say 2 e 40 back in change, which is french-english for say 3 e 50. And I thought our numbers were easy compared to theirs! None of this four-twenty-nine-teen stuff for me. It will be nice to go to Belgium where they've chucked that system and instead of saying sixty-ten say seventy (well, septane) and instead of four-twenty say eighty (octane). Meanwhile I'll just content myself to answer "voulez-vous du sauce pomme frites?" with a resounding and heartfelt NON.

Will have up pics of elven hooverville soon. For the moment, artistic moments in Parc St. Pierre:



And btw the weather here is morbidly rainy and depressing, do not let these pictures suggest otherwise!

It's not unusual...

because EVERYTHING here is unusual, unusual is the norm, nothing ever turns out like I think it will. For example: when did it become normal to sit on the floor of a shower and discuss Remington Steele w/a guy from Berlin at 3 in the morning? I've come to the realization that being an assistant in France is absolutely nothing like I thought it would be. I mean, nothing is ever quite as you expect it to be, but this is just surreal.

True my French is improving (imperceptibly), I am getting slightly better at teaching, and on good days I almost feel that I am a functional part of French society...but really, I am just a glorified babysitter, I spend my week baking things, bonding w/my stray cat, and occasionally teaching. Weekends are spent in the most unlikely of locations, speaking the usual creole / patois / esperanto of assistants and drinking into the wee hours of the morning. It's not a bad life, I think I'm just starting to feel guilty that I do so little and actually, amazingly, get paid to do this. And guilty that I still don't really speak French, and don't really feel compelled at all to try harder. And guilty that I'm just bouncing around Europe meeting a lot of people I'll probably never see again, and doing nothing serious with my life, no planning for a stable future. The grass is always greener I suppose.

Speaking of baking I had my first major success ! A chocolate cake made entirely from scratch for Jesse's birthday. The cake wasn't too chocolately but the icing was positively decadent!

Family portrait:



And a close up. Notice inspired decor. Like Martha Stewart but w/out the elegance!




Nothing else is really new here, about to repeat the proccess of another week where anything could and probably will happen. Best news is that Kathy is coming to visit me in 10 days!!! Tentative plans to visit Belgium. Should be great! And unusual per usual. Off to go make snickerdoodle dough. C'est la vie, c'est la vie ici...

i'm hanging for some chips, boy!

SHE LIVES! She blogs!

This is about how I feel about attempting to sum up my time in Ireland in one blog post:

But here I go:

10 days in Ireland
3 (min) amount of words a Cork person can say in the time it takes us to say one
2 hours spent sitting on the Bridewell Garda Station steps waiting for Craig
0 Craigs that were released from the Garda Station
1 fake roses bought for me and Jessy to unify the yankees and southerners
1 fried cods left in glove compartments
2 hours taken for Aofie to straighten Jesse’s fro

1 extremely friendly rooster at Looney’s B&B
1 dead body covered w/a blanket at Galway Bus Station [disturbing]
12 other people in our hostel room
5 French people staying in our hostel
1 Swedish guy who looked like a young, blond, Alan Rickman [Jesse’s]
3 traditional music sessions we saw
1 new pairs of shoes bought as mine developed massive holes in the soles

2 nights that are a bit hazy in my memory [and on my camera for that matter]

1 cool Australian / zombie [mine]
100+ Irish guys who thought drag was the best Halloween costume idea
800 (max) amount of people who live on Inis Mór
2 close encounters with cows

moo, lassie

12 miles walked all over the island
10 words I can say in Irish, as taught by cool old man at pub
3 pubs on Inis Mór, total
1 extremely saucy bartender
5 hours from Galway to Dublin with traffic
1 “hostel” that actually had a room for us
1.5 days spent in Dublin, sadly
1 night spent “sleeping” in the airport
60 est. number pints of Bullmer’s Cider consumed

10 est. number of pints I bought for myself or others
50 kilos of potato products consumed [curry chips! tayto crisps!]

EQUALS:

1,102.5 good reasons to go back to Ireland. ASAP.

So I will say, Ireland is everything I hoped it would be. The Irish, not to be stereotypical or anything, were overwhelmingly friendly, generous, talkative (somehow without getting anything done for all the talking. for hours!!!), hilarious, warm, gentle, cheery, prone to public displays of drunkenness, and occasionally v. violent. Ireland was cold and fresh and bright green from the minute we stepped off the plane onto the tarmac, there was good music on every street corner and pouring out of pubs each night, there were pubs on every block, chip and fish stops stayed open all hours of the night, and there were bookshops and used bookstores everywhere. I realize that no place is perfect, but Ireland, for me at least, I think comes as close as anywhere to an ideal place to live. It was, in a word, well…

Grand.

Check out the rest of my photos here (might I recommend the slideshow?)

They are definitely worth 1,000 words. Or 1,102.5. Also, I have some amusing videos but have not figured out how to post them yet. Check back and I may have them up. And I’ll definitely have updates on my not-so-thrilling life back in France. I’m working on a little number called The Carte Bleu blues.

[sneak-preview of chorus: it ate my caaaa-aaard.... now i ain't got no dooooough.....]

When the rain falls, you run & hide your head…

Today in a nutshell:

Down: Woke up and the hot water heater was broken. Felt extremely French as I had not truly showered in 3 days and now have 6 types of cheese in the fridge. Walked two miles (nearly!) to the laundermat to dry my clothes before I packed them. Although the place is open 7j/7, dimaches et fêtes, the door was closed and no one was in sight. I turned the handle, nothing. I pulled and pulled, nothing. It started to rain. I put up my hood and shoved my bag of wet laundry in a doorway and steamed a bit at how obnoxious it is that French people just close things at random times with no explanation or consideration for people who might need desperately to get their laundry dried before they leave tomorrow, it’s just so typically French! The owner probably just slept in or was out for an early lunch or a beer in a tabac, typical, typical, then a random guy turns the handle, pushes the door, and gets his blankets out of the drier.

Up: My clothes got dried.

Up: The winter sky here is incredible. It’s so golden and warm, (even though it’s freezing out) and all the old buildings just glow.

Down: Christmas decorations are going up and this makes me sad as I’m still not sure what I am doing for Christmas, and I’m having a hard time deciding but I need to soon.

Up: Walked by the merry-go-round beside the hotel-de-ville, and there was one little kid going wheeeee! wheeeeeee! wheeeee! the whole time.

Down: Near the supermarket, this gang of teenage guys all descended on me at once and faked grabbing me in places that if hehad succeeded in touching me I would have had to punch him. Ugh.

Up: When looking at granola bars and things to pack in my pack for tomorrow I heard “Catherine! Cathy!” coming from the end of the aisle and it was one of my students from St. Maurice. Made me feel like a real person! A celebrity, even.

Down: Walked by the Beffroi (how Picards say bell tower I guess?) on my way back and it plays whole songs on the hour and made me think of Christmas again.

Up: Random manifestation in front of the post office, bullhorns and banners and leading the crowd was…the extremely elusive academic advisor for all assistants in the department of the Somme! A good story to tell all the other assistants.

Down/Up: Even though it’s sad to walk around a city and not really feel like you fit in, French people are wonderful to watch – they have a certain flair to them, and the way they talk and dress and interact will never cease to interest me, whether it be in admiration or something less nice.

Up: Got an apple tart for dinner at the patisserie across from my house. 1 euro. Drank up the last of my milk that has a distinct brownish tinge to it I’m noticing, maybe because the shelf life of milk here is eternity. But the French wrote the book on pasteurization so I’ll go with it. The taste is actually really growing on me.

Here a few glimpses of Amiens; this is a long post because I leave for Ireland tomorrow and won’t post again for over a week. Hopefully Ireland will be everything I dream it will be…i.e. green, lush, scenic, and full of Irish people and pubs. Something tells me it’s going to be great.

Can you see the rainbow?
(not a cheesy rhetorical question, there actually is one. Look closer!)

Reunion!

One of the assistants here had a birthday and this Saturday was the bash. It was wonderful to see everyone from the stage and hear that they were indeed surviving life in the boonies. It's still strange for people to talk about how big Amiens is, because you can walk everywhere on foot or take a bus, it's nothing like Seattle. But I guess compared to the 6 families and a cow kind of towns, it's a bustling metropolis.


In other news, I realized just how french I am becoming when I looked in my refrigerator and saw that even though I don't have any food and really need to go shopping, I still had 4 varieties of cheese: cambert, gouda, emmental and le vache qui rire :-) I think one of the things I'll miss most when I leave France is the abundance of cheese and fresh bread.


It's good, though. I've been here for over a month, and things are starting to settle down just a bit. It's still majorly emotionally draining but my french is improving! And I was told that my accent isn't too bad, and that it's charming. Yay! This is ostly thanks to convo lessons from my friend Khar, from Senegal. She is also an amazing cook!

Well, tomorrow I go back to classes, I haven't seen these particular ones for over a week so I have no clue what I'm supposed to be doing. Tuesday is pumpkin carving day at St. Maurice, and then Wednesday is the start of the Touissant vacation! Vive la France. I am going up to Ireland with another assistant who has family in Cork. I still am not sure how to thank her for letting me stay with them! I wish I had more European connections, I guess I will just have to forge them as I go.

I guess the only other news is bad news, I'm still feeling pretty sick and half of my neck is unsightly and swollen. Reeeeally don't want to go to the doctor though, so maybe the fresh sea air of Ireland will cure my ills. One can hope! But if not that'll be another paperwork inferno story when I get back. Oh joy.

beautiful spaces, loud empty places

look at the way that we live…wasting our time on cheap talk and wine. Okay, so it was cider and the talk wasn’t bad and we actually weren’t listening to the Eagles, it was Oasis and Green Day at the local hangout My Goodness (an Irish pub that actually has an Irish bartender! youpi!) that caused us to break into song.

But I might add that I have become a major Eagles fan while in France. Go figure!

Well, the designs are coming back for my pumpkin contest. Here are two of the winners I think:

Romain is actually kind of a punk, he’s really really smart/quick to grasp things, but there isn’t one day he doesn’t get kicked out of the classroom for having a rotten attitude. I like him though. Punk.

And here are some designs that are v. creative, even though they’re not terribly practical for actual pumpkin carving.

Other funny thing, when I whipped out the pumpkin for my classes today, this is what they ALL said:

Punks: On va le manger?

Moi: No kids, we are not going to eat the pumpkin. We’re going to make a jack-o-latern.

Punks: Le soup? On va manger le soup?

Moi: No, if we were going to eat it we’d eat a pie. Un tarte.

Punks: Buerk!!! Une tarte du citrouielle!?! ahahaha buerk!
[and other ridiculously Gallic expressions of disgust]

These kids ain't got no taste.

I just may save the pumpkin innards in an attempt to make a pie, though. I have a pan now. I’ll be sure to post pictures of any attempts. :-)