Amis

I just wanted to add a quick note to promote a blog of one of my fellow assistants in neighboring Nevers: http://lifeinfrogsville.tumblr.com/.  Maisie is a Londoner teaching in ecole primaire, and it was her birthday that we celebrated last weekend.  Her "10 Commandments of Being French" is pretty funny, although I would quibble with the one about beef--pork seems to me to be far more omnipresent.

La guerre des etoiles

I am currently in the wine country south of Dijon, staying with a friend of a friend who has the added distinction of being a vineyard owner.  Since the countryside is very beautiful here, and I am blogging from my hostess's computer and so cannot upload my photos, I will hold off on exclaiming about rustic location until I have the wherewithall to show some of the views as evidence.

For the moment, things are very quiet here.  It is a rainy sunday afternoon and Kellen, my vinter-hostess, is preparing to roast a chicken with vegetables from her garden.  This morning, her two children (10 and 7-ish) were watching Star Wars: Episode II, and I joined them for some of the fight scenes.  Kellen is an american expat, so they are more-or-less bilingual, but they were watching it dubbed into French, which improved the whole thing immensely.  In good geek-girl form, I consider George Lucas's later additions to be an almost unforgivable blot on his oevre, but the execrable dialog is much better en francais.  Lines such as "Bien fait, mon jeune paduan" and "Tu vas payer, Duku, pour tous les jedis qui sont morts aujourd'hui" go from being painfully embarrassing to pretty amusing.  I had to hide my smiles from the kids, who were fully emotionally invested in the story, and informed me  in their melange of English and French, that "Maitre Yoda" was going to save the day.

Winter is coming (already)

One aspect of living in a the Loire valley that I had not anticipated is, well, that it is a river valley.  The fog rises off the river in the mornings like it wishes it was in an Edgar Allen Poe story.  Sometimes, I get up an look out my window and this (exhibit A >>)  is all I can see out my window.  It is beautiful, but quite spooky, and I am glad I am not out driving in it.

Other mornings, like this one, the sun is shining brightly high in the sky, but the fog lies low in the pockets of the rolling countryside, covering the fields and spinnies in a bluish muffler.  I spent the night in Nevers last night with Aurelie, and as we were driving the thirty-five minutes it takes to get to Cosne on the highway, we kept going over miniature rises and coming upon unexpected reservoirs of fog lingering before the sun's rays became too bright.

The downside of a sunny day, though--and it has become a very sunny one, post 10am--is that it is freezing.  Aurelie had to scrape the ice of her car before we could leave this morning.  After a week or so of summery weather when I first got here, the last two weeks have skipped fall and taken us directly to winter, complete with cold, damp, and wind.  The heat was not on in the school last week, which meant that the conversation in the staff room consisted of a lot of people sitting in their coats saying, "Merde, il fait froid!" to each other in various stages of outrage.  Fortunately, they turned on the heat in the personal apartments over the weekend, and as of today, it is finally on all over the building, so it is much more comfortable inside at least.

The Epic Voyage of a Clic-Clac

Listen my children and you shall hear....a tale of valiant struggle, heroism, feats of daring, and triumph over daunting odds.  Noteworthy, even during a weekend of high adventure in the streets of Nevers (speeches, strikes, anniversaries, proposals of marriage...but more on that to come), the journey of Therese's futon is an epic unto itself.  Read on...

First: the setting--Carrefour, the Target of France; the time--a gray and prematurely cold Saturday afternoon in October; the cast of characters--four daring English teaching assistants devoid of automated transportation but stout of heart.  Pictured above are Therese, the mission's leader, new tenant of a beautiful but unfurnished apartment and new owner of a bargain futon or, in the French, "clic-clac" (for real!!),  Maxine, and Kali (yours truly was holding the camera).  Our mission: to carry the futon from its place of origin to its new home.

The prospect of this task astonished the unassuming Frenchwoman who sold us the futon and brought it out for us on an industrial-sized hand truck.  Undaunted, though, we boldly set off, traversing the five-block distance with only a handful of stops along the way.

Ignoring passing motorists, ambulances, curious passersby, and our own trembling arms, we finally attained the sanctuary of Therese's apartment.  It was only once inside, however that our troubles really began.

The first set of stairs was a challenge in itself, but worse awaited us around the corner of the next landing:

Faced with this herculean challenge however, we did not blanch, but put our shoulders to the wheel (or rather, the futon), and bravely soldiered on, scaling the heights with minimal damage to our backs and our dignities.  Lest any reader, amazed by the narrow and alpine nature of this last staircase, doubt the veracity of our accomplishment, I offer proof in the form of the view of us at the summit, resting after our labors.

From there it was but the matter of a few more feet of pushing, and the futon was in Therese's apartment, where its arrival was welcomed with appropriate expressions of glee and victory.

Diner a la campangne

Last night I was invited by one of the professors at my school to have dinner at his house.  He is a history teacher, but he has an advanced-level class on English-language European history, and he wanted to have the opportunity to practice his English with me.  His wife is also English-speaking (she works with British foreign exchange students as part of her job), so it was a bi-lingual evening. 

If the language of the night was not predominantly French, however, the setting certainly was.  M. Meunier and his wife live about 20 minutes outside of town, absolutely in the middle of the countryside on an actual farm, surrounded by bucolic fields of corn (wheat, to Americans), and vineyards.  It was like a travel brochure for the region.  I desperately wished that I had had my camera with me, although it probably would not have been quite the thing for me to be taking pictures of my hosts.  The farm belonged to Mme Meunier's parents, and her brother now runs it, while they live in the farmhouse.  The building itself is from the 19th century (coming from a state where most buildings are 100 years old at most, it is constantly amazing to me how common it is to live in a more-than centenarian home in Europe).  When we arrived, Mme. Meunier and their little girl were out in the farmyard, looking for the cat, who had disappeared that morning--it turned out she had accidentally become locked in an armoire, from which she was rescued shortly after my arrival.  The little girl, who is two and a half, was absolutely darling.  She was in love with the cat, and when she invited me to join her in coloring before dinner, she insisted that I draw "un chat."  It reminded me of Le Petit Prince: "dessine-moi un mouton."  I could communicate pretty well with her, although with my shaky comprehension and her shaky pronunciation, trying to understand her was a bit like trying to understand French spoken over a New York subway operator intercom--fuzzy, and prone to fading in and out.

Diner itself was for the most part delicious, although I am still having minor culture shock moments over bizarre French meat options.  Take for example, a snack that we had as an appetizer, whose name unfortunately escapes me--it was a pre-packaged bit of fish, make from the leavings and unused bits of a fish carcas reconstituted into to breakfast-sausage sized cylinder, which you then dip in mayonnaise and eat.  I kid you not.  I don't think this is to everybody's taste, even in France.  M. Meunier admitted that it was not his, so I did not feel so bad about being unable to manage more than a few bites of mine.  The rest of the meal was lovely, though--simple but high quality ingredients, just like they always say about French cooking.  I think that this time abroad is going to usher in a whole new era in my understanding of cheese, although that may be a topic for another posting in and of itself.

Out on strike

The last two days have been very exciting for a lot of people in France, and more-than-usually quiet for me.  The cause?  A national strike over the age of retirement, which the Sarkozy government wants to raise from 60 to 62.  This has inspired industrial, service, and professional unions to a series of strikes, which have been going on sporadically since before my arrival.  Yesterday, even the students in my school walked out in protest.  It is sort-of inspiring to see high school students responding with action to questions of social justice, when cynicism and apathy are so rampant among teenagers everywhere I lived growing up (no offense, Obama generation).  It would probably be more inspiring if I imagined that most of the students were more excited to protect the pensions of their elders than they are to cut school, go into town, and get a kebab....but perhaps it is better not to ask those questions.

I am not sure of my own perspective on the strike issue.  I certainly do not know enough about the problem to debate any French person on the subject, but it is odd--of all my friends and relations over 60, the majority are not even about to retire, and if they did, the pensions their jobs provide would not be able to support them in comfort.  Many of them have not worked at one job long enough to earn a significant pension.  I guess it seems, from my millennial-generation perspective, that the workplace culture of staying 40 years with the same company and then living off the pension accrued during that time is giving way to one which is more fluid and one in which people live longer and stay active later in life.  Of course, that is a young person's idea, and an American's.  Here, I see older middle-aged white guys driving the steam shovels that are fixing the road down in the village (something I have never seen in the States), and I understand that after a career of work in heavy industry, 60 is about time to retire and live in state-sponsored comfort.  So I don't know what to think.  Fortunately, the Sarkozy government is not calling on me to mediate.

One thing I do know, is that the strike has thrown a monkey wrench in my activities for the last couple days.  I have had almost nothing to do for two days,  and because of train travel being suspended, I can't take advantage of the freedom to go to the neighboring town and visit friends (Cosne does not have much of a happening scene.)  Classes were more or less canceled yesterday, which I had anticipated, but then the strike continued on today, in an impromptu and inconvenient manner (which I suppose was the goal).  I was working in the teacher's lounge on my lesson plans this morning, when the students from the high school's professional campus staged a rally in front of the main building.  It was like the storming of the Bastille, minus the starving peasants, violence, and destruction.

Bonjour a tous!

This is the official start of the travel blog I will be writing during my year (make that seven months) in France. I am staying in the town (really, village, but people get testy if you call it that) of Cosne-Cours-Sur-Loire. Like this Hawaiian fish, the name is more majestic than the reality.

However, majesty is not a quality that should be associated with the French, at least not since certain noteworthy heads of state lost theirs....but let's not bring the civil war--excusez-moi, Revolution--into it! Suffice it to say that there are many positive adjectives I can associate with my new locale, the most appropriate of which is mignon: cute (see above).

That is the view from the kitchen window of my little apartment. I am staying at the school where I teach, at an amazingly cut rate, with the only side effects being 1) that it is deathly quiet on weekends and 2) that I carry around the awareness that my life-work situation closely resembles a Victorian governesses' without the prospect of a Mr. Rochester in the future, or even a Rawdon Crawley. But c'est la vie!

It is actually quite amazing how much of what I have seen so far of France looks like France is supposed to look. I realize that sentence it quite redundant, but it's true that when you grow up hearing about a place in books, movies, tales, and myth, you pretty much expect that the reality is not actually going to be that way. True, I have yet to see anybody wearing a red beret, bicycling with a baguette in their wicker bicycle basket, or curling their mustaches, but the country houses are whitewashed with high-peaked roofs, the farmland is green and rolling, and people do both bicycle and buy baguettes (just not at the same time). I sometimes forget that, as a girl from California, I am used to a landscape that is much bigger and rougher, and an architecture that is much younger-looking than things tend to be in Europe.

...Speaking of California, just because things seem excessively French here, does not mean that I am not also having to navigate the unexpected episodes of globalization: This afternoon, over a petit cafe I was sharing with some of the teachers, the principle of the middle school, a man of years and dignity, asked me if, in American English, the word "girl" was spelled with an "i" or a "u." It seems he had been watching this video. (West Coast represent!!)

I think I have written as much English as I should allow myself for the day, but I will try to update this regularly (I hope not famous last words), with anecdotes of my experiences of small town life and touristic adventures.