Saturday mornings are one of the best things about living in Lyon, because I get to go to my market. There are a lot of different markets in Lyon, and they happen almost every day except Monday, but my favorite is the Marché de la Parc Tête D'or, a fifteen minute walk from my house. It's big enough that I can find almost anything I want, but not so big that it takes ages to see everything. Best of all, it stays open until 1:30p, so I can go even if I don't manage to make it out of the apartment until noon.

It's open year-round and I've gone most weeks since getting here, but this time of year is so lovely - everything is ripe and beautiful and delicious, and as soon as you get close you can smell strawberries. Today it was just such a perfect place, and so full of the good things in life, that I couldn't keep a smile off my face as I did my shopping.

As if all that weren't enough, it's cherry season now! Cherries are one of the very best things about summer. I could eat them all day, and I would buy them at almost any price. Fortunately I didn't have to follow through on that, as things are not expensive at my market. :)

Here is a picture of my new favorite booth. Why yes, man behind the counter, the way to make me a loyal customer is in fact to feed me free cherries while I wait in line. :D

Seriously, how could you resist this?

Everything looked so delicious that I may have gone a bit overboard today, but I still didn't spend much more than 20€. Here is my bounty:

There were a lot more cherries when I first bought them, but I couldn't resist eating them while I walked home. They were perfect.

The purplish pods between the peas and the green beans are my experimental food for the week. They were labeled as "coco rouges" and I was instructed to shell them, but not to eat them raw. We'll see what I come up with.

It's been a good week. Almost everyone I've seen over the past few days has made a special point of telling me what an improvement they've noticed in my French since the beginning of the year, which although I still have a long way to go, is still very nice to hear. Last night I went out to dinner with two of my teachers from School 2, one of whom is Scottish (but has been in France for decades) and the other of whom is French. Conversation was in French, and I was able to not only follow what was being said but actively participate, with only a few instances of asking the Scottish teacher for a word or phrase. At one point, she complimented me on my accent by saying that I've done a better job of getting rid of my American accent in French than she has with her Scottish one, which I'm not sure I believe, but it was awesome to hear. (That's not to say that I pronounce everything correctly in French; just that when I mispronounce things, I'm at least doing it with sounds that exist in the French language, rather than sounds from American English.) I also got a compliment about it today from one of my coffee guys, and to top it all off, I just took a placement test for a French class I'm hoping to take in June and got the highest level they give. Of course, that's from a written (largely multiple choice) test and does not reflect the difficulty I still have thinking on my feet when trying to speak, but still, a huge confidence-booster.

(The one person who does not seem happy to see my linguistic progress is my old nemesis the concierge, who seems to resent the fact that I can now communicate my demands that he do his job and fix things, preventing him from simply staring at me like I am a crazy foreign lady and waiting for me to go away. I think he is frustrated that he has to make up real excuses now. But seriously though it would be nice to have a single working light in the corridor on my floor. And a light in my kitchen. And a working freezer compartment in the refrigerator. And a working back burner. FIX MY THINGS DAMMIT.)

Okay, I'm off. It's a beautiful day, and I'm heading out to a Brazilian music festival with Ana, then to Michael's for raclette and Eurovision and fun and friends. More anon.

Today was my last day at work. I won't say I'm sad to be done with teaching, especially since I'm lucky enough to be bowing out right at the time of year when kids see sunshine through the window and lose their minds at the thought of having to waste their time on stupid useless English. But overall, it's been a solid year, and my kids have been really sweet to me over the past few weeks as they've found out I was leaving. Among other things, I have received:
- Four classes' worth of sweet things written about/to me on blackboards
- One "card" (i.e. sheet of paper) full of adorable goodbye messages, including my favorite, "you will miss me" (written totally accidentally and non-ironically - the grammar of that phrase is the opposite in French, "vous me manquerez").
- One surprise party, including homemade cake from one of my girls! :)
- Three dinner invitations by teachers, at least two of which I will happily accept
- An unexpected 20€, since they are actually refunding my money that I never spent at the school cafeteria and forgot I had even given them
- Many many lovely sentiments from various members of the staff, especially at School 1. Okay, only at School 1; no one at School 2 actually realized I was leaving apart from the teachers I work with. But I'm okay with that.

So I've come to the end of this phase of things, and today I realized suddenly that I have no idea what to do with myself, now. "Suddenly" isn't entirely accurate; honestly, for about two months I've been thinking about very little other than what my Next Big Thing is going to be. But I forgot to think about what happens in the meantime, before I leave here, and what I want my days to look like.

As I type this I'm sitting out on my balcony, the one with the gorgeous 14th-floor view of the rooftops of the city and the full yellow moon. I have these moments here, looking out at this view or walking next to the river or noticing the way the warm afternoon light plays across the buildings on the presqu'île, where I can't imagine ever leaving this place. I've been struggling with that a lot lately, and for all the time and thought I put into it, I don't seem to be any closer to convincing myself what to do.

If you asked me to list everything I want in a city, Lyon has almost all of those things:
- It's really, really beautiful.
- Getting around couldn't be any easier - transit goes everywhere with decent regularity, and if I'm out after the metro I can take a free bike from anywhere in the city to anywhere else, or I can just walk. Relatedly, I can also get from this city to almost anywhere in western Europe with a minimum of hassle. At absolutely no point during this year have I thought "man, this would be way easier if I had a car."
- It's safer than basically anywhere else I've ever lived, at least in my experience (I don't have stats to back it up, but it feels true).
- There are innumerable small, non-chain shops in which to buy basically anything I need.
- There are not one but two rivers, which is something I've missed since leaving Boston.
- Financially, living here is really easy, especially since I'm eligible for a hefty housing subsidy and (of course) really cheap and available healthcare.
- It doesn't snow very much or rain all the time.
- Supermarkets here are kind of awful, but actual markets along the lines of farmers' markets in the US are everywhere, and almost every day, and cheap. Since I don't like buying packaged things and I do like buying real food and interacting with the people who sell it, that is pretty awesome.
- I get to speak French here, which I love. Although really, it could be any of my languages and I'd be just as happy.
- As a whole, people here are very friendly and polite, and patient with my limited French.
- And then there's an intangible - something. I feel easy here, like nowhere else I've ever lived. Even in the middle of winter, I never had a day where I walked out of my apartment and thought "damn, I hate it here." That sounds like a low bar to set, but it hasn't been true of anywhere else I've ever lived - that's not to say I've hated them consistently, just that they've all had their moments of that. Here, if I'm having a bad day, I can almost always make it at least a bit better just by going out into the city. I'll see something beautiful or interesting, or I'll have a short chat with my coffee guys, or I'll overhear a funny conversation and be proud of myself for understanding it. Something.

So Lyon has all of those things, which is great. But here is what Lyon doesn't have:
- Any opportunity for meaningful work. I could, without much hassle at all, come back here again in September and do the same job again. It would be even easier this year since I have all my lesson plans, there would be a minimum of grief, I would meet the new assistants and make friends, and it would probably be a pretty fun year. I'm not saying that's not appealing in some ways, but I'm kind of at a point in my life where I want to have a real job, one that's going somewhere and doesn't have an end date. One that involves me doing work that's actually useful to someone, rather than the glorified babysitting gig I have now. And ideally, one that pays more than the bare minimum necessary for survival, so I can have a bit of a safety net that isn't my parents (not that I don't appreciate all the help they've been giving me! Hi, Mom & Dad). And in France, with my current qualifications, I basically can't get that. I don't have a European BA, and frankly although it's much better than it was a year ago, my French isn't up to the task. My options here, as far as I can tell, are either a) English assistant or b) bartender in one of the numerous Anglophone bars around here. Neither is exactly what I'm hoping for.
- Quite frankly, very many friends. I met a lot of amazing people this year, who I consider good friends and hope to stay in touch with - but they're gone, they've moved back home. I didn't get to know a lot of French people this year, mostly because even after eight months, my language skills are not really to the point where I can consistently follow conversation among native speakers. Especially if that conversation is taking place somewhere remotely loud, like a restaurant or a bar. Don't get me wrong, I've met a lot of friendly French people and several of them have gone out of their way to include me in things, but at a certain point I get tired of constantly asking people to repeat themselves (or more likely, pretending to follow the conversation until someone asks me a question and I get caught out).
I know I would make friends here eventually; the bigger and more important point is that I really miss the friends I already have, back home. Of course, this is where it bites me that I've moved seven times in the last six years; it's not like it will ever be realistic again for me to want to have my good friends all in one place. And that's part of what goes into this too - I'm getting tired of moving, and I can't decide where to stop.

There are other things that play into this, of course. With my relatively limited language skills, there's a lot going on around me that I don't really get, and that I would very likely be troubled by if I did. I only have the barest sense of how politics work here, so issues that would really get to me back home just sort of aren't part of the picture when I think about France. I'm definitely not saying ignorance is bliss here, and it's getting less true as I understand more, but I can't help wondering how much is going on beneath the surface that would start to bother me if I stayed here for longer.

Last night I had a really interesting conversation with Michael and Imogen, two of my Australian friends, about race and how it's perceived and dealt with in the US vs Australia vs France. One of the conclusions that we came to is that issues of race seem to be a lot less dealt with here than they are back home. I'm not trying to say that in the US it's something that's been taken care of or that we deal with it effectively, but I think most people who live in the States have had to at least think about racial issues at some point in their lives. Most people (not all, but most) are reasonably good about avoiding blatant racism, even if they're not so great at questioning the stereotypes that they hold on a subconscious level. Here, despite the fact that there are some pretty serious racial/cultural/ethnic tensions going on between ethnic French people and the north African community, it just doesn't really seem to have taken hold that racial slurs are serious and potentially hurtful even if you think you're just kidding. The other night I was at a small get-together at which a French guy, the friend of a friend, said something that roughly translates to "man, it's really hot in here! I should buy myself a little Indian child to fan me with palm fronds." Our mutual friend, who is an Anglophone, reacted pretty much the same way I did: wide eyes, and what essentially boils down to ". . . did that just come out of your mouth??" The reaction from the French guy was basically "oh come on, English speakers are soooo PC, it's totally obvious I was just kidding, why are you making this into an issue." And honestly? I don't think he was lying; in his own head, I don't think he is racist. Unfortunately, that's not the same thing as actually not being racist, and it's a pretty widespread attitude here.

Another (though comparatively minor) example comes from my classroom - for several weeks I was showing all my classes photos of some of my friends, and they would describe what they saw in the photos, try to guess their hobbies and jobs, and ask me questions about their age and family and whatever else they could figure out how to say at whatever level of English they had. One of the people I showed photos of was a friend who was born in the US and is of half-white, half-Korean descent. When I asked the kids to describe this particular friend, in almost 100% of my classes someone would pipe up with "She is Chinese!" To which I would reply, nope, guess again. Eventually someone would go ahead and ask me "what is her nationality?" and I would say, well, she was born in the US, so she is American. One of her parents was also born in the US, and the other was born in Korea. And every single time, the response from the kids was basically "hey, that was a trick question! We already guessed right when we said she was Chinese, and now you're just nit-picking." I didn't really get into it with them, largely because of language barrier issues, but I did try to express the fact that this is an American person, just like everyone else who is born in America and everyone else who decides to become American. Nationality and ethnicity are so divorced for me, having grown up in a place where they are basically different by definition (you can't be "ethnically American"), that it still really jumps out at me how much that is not the case here. Half my kids, if I ask their nationality, will tell me they are from Algeria or Tunisia or Morocco. A few of them really were born in north Africa, but if you ask them specifically, most of them were born in France, and many of them have never been to "their country" at all. Which, in terms of who they consider themselves to be, matters exactly not at all.

I'm not trying to add fuel to any "they just won't integrate" arguments. It's not just that the kids self-identify that way; it's that a whole lot of ethnically-French people would 100% agree with what they're saying and would (at best) be confused if the kids tried to describe themselves as French. They have French passports, which from my American perspective kind of settles the question, but somehow what passport you carry and what nationality you are considered to be don't have to be the same thing. I should make the point that these are not radicalized kids; these are not the kids you heard about a few years ago rioting outside of Paris. I teach in good, fairly middle-class schools where kids get disciplined for "excessive rudeness to teacher" and "refusal to take out his workbook until 45 minutes after the start of class" (quoting here from discipline notices on the teacher's room bulletin board), and there are basically no fights or violence of any kind. This is an extremely mainstream view. France is a country that bans "all religious symbols" (meaning the hijab) from its public schools, then turns around and holds school-sponsored Christmas tree sales every December. This is a contradiction that got me funny looks every single time I pointed it out; if I got any response at all, it was "well Christmas trees aren't really Christian; it's just a tradition we have" [note: the French for "Christmas tree" doesn't actually contain the word "Christmas," so that sounds slightly less ridiculous on its face than in English, but not much]. Leaving entirely aside the fact that "no religious symbols" is enforced if a girl wants to cover her hair, but not if a student (or teacher, cough) decides to wear a crucifix necklace.

Anyway. That got long-winded and a bit off-track. What I'm saying is that in terms of almost anything rational, I should probably be making plans to move back home. I'm qualified for at least some of the kinds of jobs that I'm interested in, and I can get things done without a ton of effort trying to figure out what people are saying to me, and I miss my friends a lot. And even though I'm not really ready to say that our culture is better than French culture, I understand it better and have a better handle on what its pitfalls are. Every time I sit down and write this out and really pore over all the details of staying and going, I convince myself that I should start looking for a job and an apartment in DC. And then I turn off my computer and go really anywhere at all in this city, and I can't shake that thought of how can you ever leave this, how could you be thinking about walking away. So I don't know what to do, and I don't make plans, and I find myself at the end of my job with no real idea of what is supposed to happen next.

In any case, my lease runs out in a month and four days, so I suppose I'll have to know by then. In the meantime, it's summer, and summer is one of my favorite things.

I had hard time with my high school government teacher. I found him overly sarcastic, and was put off by (among other things) his habit of imagining he'd told us things that he had mentioned only in other classes. But on the second Thursday of school that year, after we filed in, he got us quiet and asked us just to listen. I remember I'd been dreading that day and the flag-waving that would come with it - it had only been two years, it was only about six months after the start of the war, and I was prickly about what seemed to me the exploitation of an essentially private grief. I remember trying (and failing) to get across why it so upset me that people who had watched on TV from far away should feel entitled to just as much grief as people who had actually lost someone they knew and cared about, as if the abstraction was worth just as much as the actual lives. There's a debate to be had there, I know, but I still fall squarely on that side of it. What I'm saying, I suppose, is that I was waiting to be upset by whatever came out when my teacher turned the cd player on.

What he played couldn't have been further from my expectation: Pie Jesu, from Fauré's Requiem. It's a fairly quiet piece, and high, a soprano without much to back her. In that moment it was the perfect gesture to make, marking the day with solemnity and respect and stillness and the beauty of her voice. When it was finished he moved on with class without a word about it, letting the music speak for itself.

A week ago I returned from a beautiful and blissfully email-free vacation to find a message waiting from the mother of a childhood friend. He had missed a bend driving in the middle of the New England night, gone off the road, and died instantly. It had been a dozen years since we'd seen each other and at least a year since last we spoke, but somehow he was never entirely out of my thoughts - a light in the back of my mind that I knew was shining somewhere in the world, if not near me. My twelve-year-old self was so sure that we were supposed to be in each others' lives that in the face of all evidence, I never shook off the assumption that we would find ourselves in the same place again and pick our friendship up where it left off. And now he's buried in Massachusetts and I'm in France, trying to figure out how to believe in finality.

A few days ago Michael mentioned offhand that there was a Belgian orchestra visiting Lyon to play the Requiem, so last night the two of us and Hannah went to see it. I guess it's not cool to just openly like things now, so even the program was full of self-deprecating notes about famous people who hated Fauré and swore they would turn over in their graves if his music were to be played for their funerals. I don't care, particularly; I don't need to have sophisticated taste. To my ear they played well, and the Irish soprano had a lovely voice.

When the concert was finished, we went down to the berges du Rhône to celebrate Hannah's last night in Lyon. While we were in the auditorium, half of Lyon had been watching their soccer team go down in utter defeat before Bayern. Much to our confusion, the remnants of the crowd were nonetheless in perfectly good spirits, drinking and chatting and even singing in the streets. We spent the rest of the evening just enjoying each others' company, laughing (particularly at Hannah's fake-indignant opinion that all these happy people should rightfully be going home to cry over their defeat) and talking about what happens next. Then Hannah and I velov'd home together for the last time and said goodbye.

It's a shame that the first entry in a while that I write all the way through is such a low one; it really has been a very happy several months for me. I have a folder full of half-written blog entries that I put aside and then don't get back to until they seem irrelevant, but I'll try to make something of them soon.

[I've been jotting down things to write about for months without ever quite getting around to actually posting. No more! I have a shiny new computer, several weeks without guests, I'm almost done lesson planning for the next few weeks and best of all it's no longer February, the month when all I want to do is sleep. Hooray!]

Since I like black coffee, typically I prefer to save money and make it at home. But before I got around to buying a coffee maker (and figuring out where to keep one in my "kitchen"), I got in the habit of buying my morning espresso from these two guys who run a coffee cart essentially right in front of my building. They're pretty much the nicest and friendliest guys ever, and talking to them never fails to put a smile on my face - and given that I am still definitely not a morning person, that's well worth the paltry 1€ that they charge for a black espresso. They also remember my order and start making it when they see me coming across the square. Here's a picture, stolen from their Facebook page:


I don't think I can get away with calling them friends, given that we don't even know each others' names, but I'm happy to be able to chat to them a bit before dealing with my morning commute. And they seem to enjoy telling me things about Lyon, at least judging by the way one of them sulked when he found out someone had already explained the Fête des Lumières to me before he got a chance to.

They both lived briefly in the UK (which is where they got the idea for a mobile business selling coffee that you drink while you walk - neither concept has caught on much here), but their English isn't all that much better than my French, so they're really patient and willing to teach me how to say things. A few days ago it was really foggy, so while I waited for my espresso I asked the word in French. One of them gave it to me and asked the word in English in return, whereupon his friend jumped in with "je sais, c'est 'frog!'" ("I know it, it's 'frog!'") Adorable. :D It's impossible to be too self-conscious about my speaking after that, so I just go for it and find myself explaining things like the US environmental movement and death penalty politics and exactly what we do on Thanksgiving that I had no idea I knew enough words to express. My spoken French is still largely a mess, but as one of them told me, "tu te débrouilles" ("you manage"). It's getting there, if still more slowly than I want.

This being France, their hours are flexible - ostensibly they're open 6-6, but they have no problem closing early if the weather is too stupid to make it worth bothering. I find that refreshingly sane - in this society, they can trust that their customers will think more along the lines of "good, I'm glad they're not out here freezing to death in this sleet" than "dammit where are they they're supposed to be making me my double caramel mocaccino."

Anyway, what reminded me that I wanted to write about them was that on Friday morning they had the radio on, and one of them (on the right in the photo) was absolutely belting along with Radiohead's "Creep" in his French accent. I waited to see, and yup, he kept right on going when he hit the falsetto. Made my day. :)

I wasn't sold at first, but I'm really starting to come around to French Sundays. When I got here there were so many things I needed to get done that I found it really frustrating that everything was closed. But it's pretty easy to plan around that, and I've definitely started to appreciate the idea of a day in the week that is just your own time. You can't run errands, so it's not your fault when you don't, and even the transit is infrequent, which creates the perfect excuse and opportunity for staying home and catching up on whatever you want to do. Like blogging. :)

December was a busy month, in the best way. I wasn't sure how the holiday season would go, being far away from home, but it was filled with friends and good cheer and general loveliness.

The holiday season kicks off in Lyon around December 5th, which is the start of the Fête des Lumières, or Festival of Lights. A few centuries ago there was plague in France, and evidently the city fathers negotiated some sort of bribe with the Virgin Mary that they would light candles for her forever if only the plague didn't come to Lyon. It didn't, and over the years the tradition of putting candles in the windows on the night of December 8th has morphed into an over-the-top, all-out, four-day lighting extravaganza complete with short films projected onto buildings, laser shows, and fireworks. What seemed like all of France descends on the city (especially this year, because the first day happened to be a Saturday), and it's a huge city-wide party. People set up tables everywhere to sell spiced wine and roasted chestnuts, and all of the light shows are free, and I had a thoroughly excellent time. One of the main things is that different organizations will commission light shows tailored to a specific building, so that the projection fits it perfectly, and it will seem like the action is happening in the building with characters going in and out of doors and windows, and cool things like that. Here's a video of the show at Cathédrale Saint-Jean, which is about the design and building of the cathedral:
(It's probably better to watch this one with the sound off, since it's mostly just crowd and wind noise.)

Here's the show at the Préfecture, which was probably my favorite.


I went three days out of four, and had a ton of fun. One of the coolest displays was this little courtyard where they had set up two projectors, one at either side pointing to the opposite wall. They were just projecting moving geometric shapes, but between the two walls, they had strung up this totally crazy display of very thin wires. Some were strung straight across, and then from them hung all different curled and crumpled wires going in all directions. In the dark you couldn't see that there were wires, you could just see little squiggles of light dancing in the air as the lines and shapes hit the wires and moved across them. That's probably a really confusing explanation, but it looked really neat.

I think my favorite night was the first, because even though the crowd was way too big for the city streets here, everything was so festive and the crowd was really happy and I made some new friends - Michael brought his roommate Sonia (an assistant from Georgia who I had met before but not hung out with) and Darius, the German assistant from his school. Toward the end of the evening we also ran into a bunch of the other German assistants, all of whom speak English that puts my German to shame, and we drank cheap vin chaud and spoke three languages and had a beautiful time.

Next up: Christmas in Berlin. :)

French bureaucracy reminds me of those logic games we used to play in 6th grade, the ones that you solve by making a grid and marking off boxes until you're left with the right answer. I can't think how to explain them, so here's an example. There's always a point where there's some key piece of information that you didn't notice or didn't get the significance of, and once you figure it out you can X out the rest of that row, and that leaves just one space in a certain column, so you have that answer too, and suddenly the whole puzzle is complete. The difference, of course, is that I knew all along what I needed and just didn't have it. But no longer! After three and a half months on the job, I finally have my pay stubs, and have spent the week destroying my to-do list. Somehow, getting that paperwork seems to have coincided with a period of what I can only describe as Being In The Zone - literally everything I have needed to do has suddenly been easy. Bureaucrats have decided not to care whether I made appointments, and have smiled at me and accepted my sometimes-questionable paperwork and my bad French and told me everything is going to be fine. Offices have mysteriously added lunchtime hours on my busy days. Strangers have stopped to give me directions to half-hidden locations before I even realized I was lost. There is simply no way that it can last, so I've been trying to do as many things as possible before the magic wears off.

In the past week, I have:
- Sorted out my medical visit/visa validation (appointment is next month) and obtained an official paper stating that it is in process and I haven't actually overstayed
- Obtained paperwork from my landlord stating how much I pay in rent in order to qualify for a housing subsidy
- Submitted large sheaf of paperwork demonstrating my (lack of much) income in order to get said housing subsidy, which might be as much as half my rent. This included sweet-talking them into accepting the aforementioned official paper in lieu of an actually valid visa.
- Changed my address with my bank, who will hopefully now stop sending me things at my school.
- Submitted paperwork to enroll in state health insurance. Technically I have been covered since I started work on Oct 1, but I'm not in their system until this goes through, so I would have had to pay out of pocket and then file for reimbursement after my paperwork was in. Now, hopefully I won't have to deal with any of that if I get sick. (And I might even be able to get the bloodwork I'm about to be due for, wouldn't that be cool.)
- With pay stubs in hand, went to the community center a three minute walk from my apartment to ask about their sliding-scale yoga classes. Found out I can go for only about 3.75€ per class, which is excellent! I like this country.
- Booked tickets to Copenhagen next weekend! Procrastinating really paid off - this morning tickets were 100€ round trip, down from almost 300€ a couple days ago. Teesa will be there for a conference type thing, so I'll have good company and a free hotel room. Excellent. :)
- With the help of the kind-hearted stranger mentioned above, made my way to the city's lost-and-found warehouse in the middle of nowhere to retrieve my stolen wallet. I didn't mention this here, but right before the holidays someone came up behind me at a very crowded metro station and unzipped my bag, which was slung across my body but behind me. My own fault; it's almost the only dodgy part of town, and I know better than to keep my bag where I can't see it in that kind of crowd. I noticed within about five minutes and immediately canceled all the cards, but what I've really taken out of this experience is that Lyon has some of the world's most considerate thieves. They took my wallet out of the bag, but left everything else, including my ipod, camera, cell phone, passport, keys, and notebook. They then apparently removed the small amount of cash, but left everything else (US drivers license, credit cards, transit card, etc) and left the wallet someplace where it could be found. In the wallet was my meal card for School 2, so the city sent me a letter there to let me know. Seriously, where else would that happen? This is a good city.

Today I also had the latest in a series of funny encounters with my building's concierge, which is roughly analogous to a superintendent. These started shortly after I moved in, when I went to go and let him know about some minor problems with the apartment. Since my French is fairly shaky, I tend to prepare for things like this by going over the whole speech in my head, and this one started off with me telling him which apartment I live in (which is tricky because French numbers are not my friends). When I found him, he immediately threw me off my game by saying "oh, you're the girl who lives in apartment 1404," which I still have no idea how he knew. This of course left me flustered, and what I said came out something like this:

"My roommate and me, we have some small problems. We have... the... burning thing? For [in Spanish] cooking? I'm sorry, for [in French] cooking? There are two? This one, the one here, the front one, he works. But the other, the one back, he doesn't work. Oh and also, we have three... we have... we need three lightbulbs. We have three lights who not work. The one, the one in the bedroom? And the one in the hallway. And the one, the one in the toilet, but there are two, but this one [motioning up] he works, but the other [motioning] he doesn't work. And also I need one these, I don't know how you say [pulls shelf peg out of pocket]. It's for the shelf of my desk, I have three, but I need one more, for the shelf. The shelf of my desk."

It's worth mentioning, at this point, that he is also not a native speaker of French. Anyway, he decided it would be easier for me to show him than for us to actually communicate, so he said he would come up in ten minutes. And then never showed.

Encounters, two, three and four were all similar. I would run into him by random chance, and we would have this exchange:
Him: "Oh! I have a package for you."
Me: "Oh, okay. Don't you leave a note in my mailbox when there is a package?"
Him: "Yes, but I couldn't." [Note: our mailboxes have large slots in the top, such that anyone can easily leave a note at any time.]
Me: "Oh. Why not?"
Him: "[Something I didn't understand.]"
Me: "..."
Him: "..."

So as a side note, if you are planning to send me a package, it is probably best to let me know so that I can arrange to accidentally run into him and be told about it.

Encounter five was in the elevator. Three Germans got on a couple floors below me, and the concierge got on a few floors below that. When they saw him, one of them said [in French] "Oh! We've been looking for you." He said "Okay. I have to go to the basement, but I'll be right back. I'll be back in two minutes, two minutes" and got off on a different floor. Immediately after the doors closed, one of the Germans said [in German] "Uh huh. Sure. Suuure you'll be here in two minutes. I just bet you will." So at least now I know it's not just me, hehe.

Anyway, today I finally got around to writing down all of the things that I told him were broken in October and handed him the list. He looked very surprised and acted as if he had never heard any of this before, and promised to fix things "soon." So, we'll see.

I have a huge note file I've been keeping of things to post about, and now that all these errands are out of the way, maybe that will actually happen more. I'm curious to know whether anyone is still reading after all the radio silence, so drop me a comment if you are! And now, I am very late to dinner at Hannah's, so I'm off. (Hi, Hannah! See you in five minutes.)

En route to Berlin!

Well hello there, Lyon-Saint-Exupéry. We meet again. I have to say I'm impressed with the ease of navigating you so far - check-in was painless, security was shockingly quick, your staff is friendly and polite, and you even seem to have saved this terminal's only electrical outlet just for me.

Just in case you were getting ideas, though, I want to point out that no amount of good treatment on the ground will make up for a repeat of 2007's airplane-with-a-shattered-windshield experience.

Do I make myself clear?

Thanksgiving in pictures

Thanksgiving was some of the most fun I've had since being here. We ended up having thirteen people, including six Americans, two Brits, one Australian, one German, two Spanish and one French. We had a lot of fun introducing people to new foods, and everyone seemed to have a really great time. :)

(Note: most of these pictures are stolen from facebook, and are not mine.)

Ryan, Hannah, Maty and I spent most of Wednesday preparing, so Hannah's first Thanksgiving experience was as a cook instead of just as a guest. Here she's learning to make "winnebagos" (or rutabagas, if you're not Michael). So delicious. :)

Maty (pronounced mah-TAY), doing battle with the pumpkin. You can't get canned pumpkin in France, so we bought a whole one and then cut it into chunks and cooked it in the microwave. (More on French microwaves in a future post, probably.) Then we spent literally hours forcing the cooked pumpkin through a sieve to give it a smooth texture for pie. Maty realized that using a whisk with a mortar-and-pestle motion would make it go way faster than just pushing (which basically didn't work at all), and subsequently got stuck finishing it. It was so worth it, though.

Making whipped cream for the pie. (I'm not sticking my hand in it; I'm sprinkling in sugar.) Everyone was really in awe of the fact that I made whipped cream with a whisk instead of a mixer, hehe. It's really not that hard.

We decided that turkey was too much of a hassle, and I'm glad we did - some other assistants special-ordered one (which I gather was seen as somewhat similar to ordering a whole sheep instead of some mutton) and paid something like 99€, or in other words about $10/lb. Instead, Ryan and Hannah made amazing chicken, which was made with carrots and onions and oranges and roasted standing upright on the beer cans. The beer steamed up and made it moist and delicious, and also made for some amazing gravy.

We were afraid we were going to run out of food, so we made something like 2kg of mashed potatoes, which was absurd. Also pictured: stuffing, gravy, chicken, brussels sprouts, rutabagas with burnt onions, corn casserole (which was amazing), and cornbread (which was - well, the taste was mostly there, but the texture was closer to a brick than we might have hoped).
Quite the spread.

Delicious, delicious pies. Two pumpkin, one apple. All our hard work with the pumpkin was definitely worth it here. I don't think anyone except the six Americans had tasted it before, and everyone was fairly suspicious of the idea of a sweet pumpkin dish, but as far as I know everyone really liked it. (Especially me - pumpkin pie is probably my favorite dessert. :D)

Hannah and Michael

Raquel, Lizzy and Hannah

Ana, Raquel, Ryan, Lizzy, Michael, me and Hannah. :)

And a last shot of pie, because it really was that delicious.

Overall, a night of good food and better friends. As it should be.

One of my favorite things about living here is that it seems so much easier to make little connections with the people you run into on your daily routine. This morning I slept in and then went to my favorite outdoor market, which is my favorite basically because it's open later than the others and I can go even if I sleep past 11am. The people there are starting to know me, I think, especially the man who sells mostly onions and garlic. He has all these different varieties, at least five or six kinds of onions, and last week I asked him something along the lines of "There is kind of onion that makes less to cry?" Sadly the answer was no, and I suffered for my (delicious) rutabagas, but he was very nice and this week he gave me a big smile and recommended some new things for me to try.

A few blocks from my apartment there is a bakery that sells what might be my new favorite food, quiche oignon. Basically, you take caramelized onions and put them in a pie crust with some cheese and maybe some egg or something, and it is so delicious. The main thing stopping me from eating them every single day is the fact that the bakery keeps strange hours, and I can't figure out what they are. But when I do, I'm going to be in trouble. Between that and the amazing kebab place I discovered literally around the corner from me, it's been a good few weeks for food.

Speaking of food! Ryan and I hosted Thanksgiving a week and change ago, and it went exactly the way I'd hoped. Almost everyone we invited was able to make it, a majority of whom had never celebrated Thanksgiving before, and the food and company were both excellent. I've stolen a lot of other people's photos of the event, and I'll post them later on. Ryan, Hannah, a girl from NY named Maty and I cooked most of Wednesday, and had a ton of fun. Lessons include the fact that making pumpkin pie from scratch takes basically a year, especially if you have no mixer; French ovens have an internal logic all their own that no conversion chart will explain; cornbread made from ingredients that are almost like what you get in the States will not turn out as expected; and French kitchens may come with an oven and four burners, but that does not mean they are wired to allow you to use them all. But in the end everything was absolutely delicious, and the evening was a great success. Probably half the dishes were things most people had never heard of, let alone tasted, and the idea of a pumpkin dish that was sweet instead of savory inspired great suspicion. But everyone came around after tasting it. Also! I made rutabagas (as my family always does for holidays), and in France you can get them, but they're very pale yellow instead of orange. It turns out that when they are a less alarming color, everyone eats them and thinks they are delicious, instead of being afraid of them and thinking they are weird. Michael (who is Australian) for some reason could not keep the word "rutabagas" in his head, and decided instead to refer to them as "winnebagos," which I kind of love.

Now I'm running out the door to go to the Fête des Lumières, about which more later. Two posts in one week, go me! :)

My birthday yesterday was lovely. It was one of the days when my classes don't start until 10am, so I got to sleep in, which was much appreciated. Things went mostly smoothly at school, or what passes for smoothly at School 2 - one teacher complained to me that I "missed" her 9am class that I wasn't scheduled for; one teacher had her last day before her maternity leave and we still have no information about who her replacement will be; and a kid sang to himself all through my lesson and then showed up outside another of my classes to make faces at us through the window. So, relatively smooth.

In the evening I went downtown to meet Hannah, Michael, Steven, Ryan and François for dinner. At Michael's excellent suggestion we went to a place called l'Épicerie, which is cozy and friendly and delicious and also affordable on an assistant's stipend. It was the first time anyone except Hannah had actually met François, so I think after three months or so of hearing about him they were starting to wonder if he was an imaginary friend. It was good to catch up with him again - our schedules have been at odds recently, so it was only the second or third time we'd managed to get together since I moved off of his couch and into my apartment. He's currently interning with some branch or other of the French police, which he's really enjoying but which means things like armed robbery attempts have been interfering with his social plans.

Anyway, everyone seemed to get along really well, and I was pleased to find that I understood most of what French was spoken. I communicate in French a good amount here, especially with Ana, but I still have some trouble with native speakers in situations like restaurants and bars when there's a lot of ambient noise. But I don't think I had to ask for translations at all, which made me smile even if only maybe a third of our communication was actually in French.

After dinner François and Ryan headed home, and the rest of us met up with Ana at one of the péniches (bar-boats) that docks along the banks of the Rhône. I mostly seem to go there at odd times (like 8:30 p.m. on a Monday), so this may not actually be true, but they always seem to be quieter and have a much better atmosphere for talking than the other places we go (which tend toward loud and jammed). This is also the time of year when everywhere seems to be selling hot spiced wine, which is one of my favorite things. Not the most exciting birthday, but pretty much exactly what I wanted.


I really am going to try to neglect this less. I've been taking notes on things I want to talk about, but it never quite seems like the right time to spend a few hours writing about them. I'll make the time, but not tonight.

Thanks to all for the birthday wishes. :)

I've been feeling pretty quiet lately, so I took it slow for most of the break. Plans to travel never really came together, but I'm not too broken up about it. The first month and change here were pretty whirlwind, getting my bearings and meeting new people and learning my way around, and I think it was good to step back for a little while and take some space to breathe.

It's getting to be the time that we've been warned about, when it's all not quite as shiny and new as when we arrived, but when things still don't come naturally and you can start to get worn down. I'm keeping an eye out, with my history of tanking when the sun gets short, but this year I think things are going to be okay.

Today when I was walking near Bellecour I bought a paper cone of roasted chestnuts from a man with a cart. I've never had them before, but the smell of them caught me as I walked by, and they were exactly right - smooth and nutty and smoky and warm in my cold hands.


Hannah came over and we drank wine out on the balcony to celebrate the anniversary of last year's election. Thinking about that time is strange for me. I miss virtually nothing about it, and I have clear memories of what a misery it was. I also remember not feeling, all that often, like anything I was doing mattered at all. But it's been my experience that intensity on that level always leaves me with a nostalgia for those moments of joy that are so much more vivid for being stolen and rare.

On the whole I much prefer things as they are now, when joy is something I can look for almost every day. But this day last year there was delight and tears and there were fireworks, even in Alaska, and it was beginnings and endings and waiting and getting ready to move.

It's strange it's already been a year, I guess is what I'm trying to say, and it's strange it hasn't been three. And I still don't know what's next.

Picture post!

Théâtres Romains, or the Roman Theatre. It's still used for rock concerts in summer.

For any "Top Gear" fans out there. (I'm looking at you, Alice :D)

Hannah, Jack and I made the mistake of thinking the name of this place was funny enough to warrant eating there. The food was awful, like KFC in terms of grease but with basically no taste. (So, it could be argued, a successful melding of "UK" and "KFC.")

Exotic Poker Drink. Mediocre, but good compared with the food.

Me and Ana. :)

Cool building near my apartment.

No one believes me about these ads, so I started taking pictures of them. They're "translated" into French in small print, but it doesn't say the same thing at all. The picture is kind of small, so here's what it says:
"'I keep thinking of how we first met and of that way you looked at me - it lasted only an instant, but meant so much and now you've joined Baron Vassilo's office supplies company.' From 'The Most Private History of Baron Vassilo."

But this is the one that's really amazing.
"We're very happy and we're such a good match. We like spending time together. There's nothing romantic in it, but we agree on one thing: All those bastard Martians can fuck off back to Mars."

Say what??

Drinking sangria with Steve and Ana (and Hannah and Michael, not pictured) under a bridge in the rain.

The really funny part about this picture - which I took out my front door - is that I live on the 14th floor.

Here are some boring pictures of my apartment for those who have requested them:

My room. It looks like I didn't put my clothes away; in reality that's where they belong, since I don't have a dresser or drawers.

Other view of my room

Living room/roommate's room, depending on time of day. The bed is what's known in France as a "click-clack," or in other words a sofa bed. The little teeny room at the end is our kitchen.

Pretty much our whole kitchen. Again, it's not that things aren't put away, it's that there is no "away." That cabinet you see next to the microwave is 100% of our storage space for the moment.

Living room from the kitchen

And finally, our gorgeous view. Eastward, too, which makes waking up pretty easy. Pretty sweet.

Oh man, it's been a while. I think the easiest thing to do is to start with a cast of characters. Here goes:

Ana - a Spanish assistant from Salamanca. I've seen a lot of her lately, which has been really fun. And good for me - she doesn't speak English, so it's mostly when I'm with her that I really speak French. She works in the same school as Hannah and Ryan, and she, Ryan and Raquel are roommates. Their place is about a 5-10 minute walk from my first school.

Hannah - I've mentioned her here before, I know. She's from Berlin and is one of the first people I met here. She also lives right near me, which is excellent because we can walk home together if we decide to stay out past the oh-so-late hour of midnight, when transport stops running. (Hi, Hannah!)

Jack - British assistant who works in a primary school. Also one of the first few people I met.

Marie - my roommate, a French art student. I don't know her super well yet, but she's really friendly, and also a little punk.

Michael - another assistant, this time from Australia. He speaks really good German as well as French, which means hanging out with him and Hannah is a lot of linguistic fun. No, seriously, I'm not being sarcastic. I love it.

Pierrick - Marie's friend who lives in our building. The spelling of his name is a total guess. Hanging out with the two of them is fun, mostly English with a little French, and always silly. They like to ask me to interpret the lyrics of bad-but-fun American pop songs, with hilarious results.

Ryan - assistant from Michigan, lives with Ana. Since we see each other mostly around her, Ryan and I speak to each other almost exclusively in French, to the amusement of a French kid who we met at a party.

Sara - assistant from New York. She is a ball of energy and lots of fun to be around. Fun fact: she was a flying carpet for Halloween as a kid, but not the one from Aladdin.

Steven - assistant from the UK, though I forget exactly where. He like pub quizzes, and comes up with team names like "Team It Takes Three Entire Weeks to Open a Bank Account in Lyon" and "Team SFR Takes A Month to Start Your New Internet Connection In Lyon" (both true, btw). One of those people who seems to know everyone, and very fun and friendly.


And now, excerpts from the past three weeks, in no particular order.

On the ninth, a week after starting work, we had our orientation. It was equal parts self-explanatory and confusing, with (on the one hand) a lot of information we'd necessarily already gotten from other sources since we were already on the job, and on the other hand tossed-off references like "oh, and of course you all know you're required to buy civil insurance, you should look into that, good luck" (not, of course, referenced in any of our paperwork or mentioned by any of our schools). On the plus side it didn't last long, and during the second half of it we met with other people who were teaching the same school levels as us to trade about lesson plans, discipline, dealing with our schools, etc. Frustratingly (for me), the woman who was facilitating decided to do it in French, although she speaks English (being an English teacher) and the orientation groups were split by language. I'm getting much much more comfortable in French, particularly with understanding, but this was a lot of detailed information that I really wanted to understand thoroughly. Fortunately, enough people started asking questions in French, gave up, and switched to English that she eventually gave up and stuck with that language.

The ideas people gave were somewhat useful, with different games we can play with the kids and stuff like that, but it turns out that almost everyone else has vastly fewer classes than I do. I have 21 different groups, and really it's closer to 30 or 35, because with several of them I'll take half the class each time-slot, meaning I'll see a particular student once every four weeks instead of every two. (Most people I've talked to have a total of 10-15 groups, so more like 20 half-groups at most.) That really makes it hard for me to see how I'm supposed to build any kind of relationship with the kids - it's hard to demonstrate consistency when seeing me is so rare that it's necessarily outside of routine. But still, at least some of the suggestions seem like they'll be useful - not least the suggestion to inform the teachers at School 2 that I'm entitled to two weeks of observation before they get to send me off by myself. (They claimed that they'd "never heard of that" and "it must be a new policy," despite it apparently having been on the books pretty much since the program was conceived. But they did finally agree.)

My favorite moment was toward the end when we got into a conversation about things that are different in the US and the UK, touched off by a reference in some of the suggested materials to "lollipop ladies." Apparently that's what they call crossing guards, because the stop signs they hold look like big lollipops. Anyway, that led to discussions of different holidays, like Thanksgiving for us or, for the British kids, Guy Fawkes Day. They explained it to us thusly:

[Explanation of the plot and how he was captured]
"Yeah, and then he was burnt on a bonfire."
"No, hung, drawn & quartered!"
"THEN burnt on a bonfire."
"And on Guy Fawkes Day all the kids go around with effigies in wheelbarrows and burn them! It's really cute!"
[American] "Yeah, that sounds . . . cute. . ."


Most of my non-working (and non-hanging-out-at-my-apartment) time lately has been spent hanging out with Ana and Ryan and co, and that has been excellent. As mentioned above, talking to Ana means speaking French, and since a) I have no choice but to speak one of my foreign languages with her and b) she's not a native speaker either, any self-consciousness disappears. I've also found that I'm much better able to understand French when spoken by native speakers of Spanish, which is useful for now but probably not great in the long run - the reason it's easier is a combination of over-pronunciation of letters that are really meant to be mostly dropped, and a word-order that's familiar to me from Spanish but not technically correct, or at least not in common use. But for now the main thing for me is just to get out and get talking, and for that it's been perfect, not to mention a lot of fun.

Also, my previous experience with tutoring ESL and with interpreting a bit for friends who aren't native to English, I seem to have a bit more of an awareness for who, at any given time, can't follow the thread of a conversation - remembering that Ana can't follow when we go into English, that some British non-assistants can't follow into French, and that most people can't come along into Spanish or German. That's not to say that I'm the only one who notices things, but I do a good amount of filling Ana in on what's going on during detours into English, which is both good practice and a lot of fun.

Being Spanish, A is also of the opinion that lunch is a Meal, for which cold sandwiches and the like are Not Appropriate. Since their place is so close to my School 1, I've gone there for lunch a few times when our schedules mesh, which has been really nice. Ana claims not to like cooking, but last time I went over she made something called "arroz a la cubana," or Cuban-style rice. It doesn't sound like something I would like at all, but it was actually really delicious, not to mention easy:

- Cook some rice.
- Put some tomato sauce in a pan and heat it until it's hot enough to boil. (She apparently normally uses straight tomato sauce, but she didn't explain when she asked me to pick some up, so I got veggie pasta sauce and it worked really well for this.) Into the hot tomato sauce, crack as many eggs as you have people. They should each be in a separate part of the pan, and if possible you shouldn't break the yolk. You can't really stir it without messing up the eggs, so she just sort of jiggled the pan every now and then to move things around slightly. Keep cooking it until the eggs are as cooked as you want them.
- Meanwhile, fry two or three bananas in butter until they're blackened and almost falling apart.
- When the eggs are done, serve everything together.

I'm not really that big on eggs and normally I hate bananas, but this was inexplicably delicious.


Another cool thing of the past week was that Steve Yang (of TJ and UVA fame) dropped by for a visit, passing through from Paris to Geneva (and points beyond). My apartment is teeny tiny (pics to follow), so Ryan and Ana and Raquel generously offered to host him for me. Highlights include a tasty dinner at a local bouchon (a type of traditional Lyonnaise restaurant), another tasty dinner at a local vegetarian place Steve had read about, and general wanderings around the city. At one point we also decided to hike up from Vieux Lyon to Fourvière (aka the Elephant). There's a funicular you can take (which wikipedia informs me is the oldest still-used funicular in the world), but we decided to walk up about a million stairs instead, which seemed like a much better decision before the skies opened. By the time we made it to the top we were thoroughly drenched, but still in pretty good spirits. As a teacher at my school pointed out to me, in winter in Lyon, warm winds bring rain and cold winds bring sun. So we might have been soaked, but at least it wasn't too freezing.

More soon. (Also, see below for another entry.)

[I actually wrote this last week, but was holding off posting it until I'd written something else, so as not to leave things on a complaining note.]

It's been an overwhelmingly good month so far, with just a few frustrations. I want to get those things out of the way so I can talk about how awesome everything is, so I suppose this will be an Entry of Complaints. It won't be too long.

By far the biggest frustration has been sorting out my apartment. Which has been kind of a saga. Here's the deal:
I spent 2-3 weeks trying to find somewhere, anywhere, to live. This included a lot of emails/phone calls/texts and a very few apartment visits. Finally I found a girl who wanted me to be her roommate! Her name is Marie and she is a 20-year-old art student. The place is tiny, but in a good location, great view, decent price, and it's not like I have much stuff, so who cares if it's not very big.
Hilariously, it was after I finally found something that it got complicated. Marie had signed a contract with the rental agency to pay the entire rent, with the understanding that when she found a roommate, she and said roommate (me) would go back in together and write two new contracts, each for half of the original amount. Problems arose when I tried to go in, because I didn't have a French guarantor. I offered first my American parents, then the LocaPass service I mentioned before, and finally to pay the entire eight months of rent in advance (I would have borrowed it from my parents and paid them each month instead of the landlord). No dice. They do have a system whereby people are allowed to pay in advance, but a) it's only for people who are staying at least twelve months and b) you pay in six-month chunks. Why would they take my word that I would pay the 2nd six-month chunk, but they won't take my word that I'll pay for eight months? I have no idea.

François (who was still putting me up through all of this) had been telling me that I needed to be patient because France can get pretty bureaucratic, and sometimes you just need to accept that things happen slowly, and look for a different solution. But when they refused even to accept my $4000 in advance - effectively cutting off the last alternative left open to people without French guarantors - he completely lost patience with how ridiculous things had gotten. He talked to his parents about it that night and they agreed to become my guarantors, which (as I mentioned before) is a hugely generous act, since in the worst case they could wind up owing a ton of money. My parents wrote them a letter to assure them that if anything were to happen they would (of course) be reimbursed immediately, but even so, I'm really really lucky to know such kind people.

Of course, that's not to say that things are actually resolved yet. Marie gave me the keys, so I moved in last weekend, but I'm still not officially on the lease. When we went over with Mme Bargel to get everything taken care of, there was a wrinkle - because Marie is getting a new contract, they're refusing to use the paperwork she and her father filled out last month - apparently they think he might refuse to guarantee her for 360€ and will insist on guaranteeing her only for 720€. Or something. Meaning she's supposed to show back up with him, despite the fact that he lives an hour+ away and works full time, and the rental agency has no late or weekend (or lunchtime) hours. So finally they agreed to mail him the contract, which he'll sign and mail to Mme Bargel, and she'll sign it and give to François who will give it to me and then Marie and I will go back to the agency and I will finally have a legal address. Well over a month after arriving. It doesn't matter much - I'm living there already, after all, and the front desk people know I live there, and I can get mail etc. But there were a few things I had to do that required addresses (most notably, opening a bank account) and I'm tired of my official mail showing up at school where I don't see it for days.


The second complaint is semi-related.
Last Saturday, having moved the night before, I decided to go shopping for a few things that I needed around the apartment. As background, something you may or may not know about me is that I really, really dislike large stores. I'm more or less okay in anything up to the size of a Target, especially if I have a list and can get in, grab what I want and get back out. Anything larger than that, like Fred Meyer, super Target/super Walmart [is that what they're called? the ones with grocery stores included], Carrefour etc begins to pose a problem I can't really explain. It's not claustrophobia, and it's not really a result of there being so many people around. It's that there's too much stuff, and finding things takes ages, and you can actually sort of get lost if you don't know your way around, and it starts to get a little overwhelming. Generally speaking this doesn't really cause me trouble - I can avoid going to those places most of the time, and when I do go it almost never takes more than 15 or 20 minutes to get what I want and leave. I grumble about it, but it's no big deal. With all that in mind, I decided to grit my teeth and go to Ikea.

Which was pretty much the worst idea I have ever had. It turns out that in Europe, Ikea's floor plan is essentially a maze. You go in the front door, and from there on there's only one path through the store, which winds through every single room. So (especially on a Saturday) you're in a crush of people, moving alternately too fast and too slow, trying to make sure you don't miss any of the things you need and trying to get past the useless crap, and where you go is almost completely out of your control. Off the top of my head, I can't remember ever having had a more thoroughly miserable shopping experience. I was fine for about twenty minutes. And then I wanted to be done. And then I needed to be done. And after two and a half hours, I was finally out of that godforsaken store. I was miserable enough that I only wound up buying about three things, partly because I (mistakenly) thought I would get out of there sooner if I got less stuff, and partly because there's no way to go back for things you've forgotten that are kept in the first part of the maze.

I have no real explanation for why it got to me as much as it did - why it went beyond frustrating to a genuine loss of composure - but I do know that I'm never setting foot back in that soul-sucking place ever ever again. Why that seems like a smart marketing strategy is utterly beyond me.

One long trans-atlantic phone call later I was fine (thank you, Google Voice), but I still don't know what I'm going to do about the rest of the things I need.

It's been a really hectic few weeks, but good. First, school stuff:

I'm on a two-week rotating schedule, which I am calling Week 1 and Week 2, because while my schools both call them weeks A and B, they are (of course) on opposite weeks. I'm pretty sure all the schools in the area begin on the same day, so I have no idea why that should be, but there it is. I don't work on Fridays, but each of the 8 days that make up my cycle is completely different. There are 4 classes that I see twice during that period (so, once per week) and there's one class that I see once, but for two hours. The rest of the hours are all different classes, and there's one block that is split over three different beginners classes, meaning I see each of those groups once every six weeks. (But of course it's not really every six weeks, because every six weeks I have two weeks of vacation.) In all, I have 21 different groups. I haven't counted the kids in each class, but most of them have pretty close to 30 kids, so I'm working with at least 500 different students. As soon as I realized that, I immediately gave up on learning any names. I'm also working with at least nine different teachers, most of whom seem to be very friendly, but none of whom really understands at all what my job entails. So it's been interesting.

I've been trying to keep detailed notes about how classes have been going and what i've been doing in each of them, because I have no earthly hope of just remembering. So far it's mostly gone well. For most of the first week the kids just asked me questions about myself, mostly the same questions as before over and over and over. My two least favorite (yet common) questions are "what do you like" and "what are you like." How am I supposed to answer that? I've also gotten "Are you greedy" at least twice, and other questions that are clearly just excuses to show off new vocab, like "Is someone in your family expecting a baby?" It leaves me with the impression that they don't think of English as just the mode Americans/Brits/etc use to express themselves, but rather the entry into a different world, in which nothing needs to actually make sense. They're not asking me questions that a normal person would ask another person to learn about them; they're just stringing together whatever they can out of the vocab they know. Sort of like magnetic poetry. I'm being unfair; I also get lots of perfectly reasonable questions. But honestly, they would never ask anyone these things in French. It sort of makes me understand a little better the explanation given as to why I meet with some of the 6ème classes (who don't really understand anything I say yet): "We just want them to realize that English-speaking people exist in the real world." Fair enough.

The whole "ask the assistant a lot of questions" thing plays out really amusingly with one of the teachers, because her strategy with the younger kids is to have them repeat things a lot, on the theory that the more you say something out loud the better you understand things. If you sort of understand something when you hear it but you don't actually get how the construction works, that becomes clear when you try to say it. So the kids get these slips of paper each class with spaces to mark their points up to 20, with 2 points for asking a question without making any grammar mistakes or for being the first person to correctly repeat something complicated or difficult that I said, and one point for repeating something correctly after the first person already did so. So in other words, every single answer I give is repeated 10 or so times as she calls on different kids. Sometimes it's fine, and sometimes it takes on an oddly mantra-like quality. "What is your name?" "My name is Rosalie." "Her name is Rosalie. Her name is Rosalie. Her name is Rosalie. Her name is Rosalie. Her name is Rosalie. Her name is Rosalie." "Do you like France?" "Yes, I like France." "Yes, Rosalie likes France." "Yes, Rosalie likes France." "Yes, Rosalie likes France." "Yes, Rosalie likes France." "Yes, Rosalie likes France." "Yes, Rosalie likes France." "Yes, Rosalie likes France." "Yes, Rosalie likes France." "What is your favorite color?" "My favorite color is green." "Her favorite color is green." "Her favorite color is green." "Her favorite color is green." "Her favorite color is green." "Her favorite color is green." "Her favorite color is green." "Her favorite color is green." "Her favorite color is green." "Her favorite color is green." "Her favorite color is green." "Her favorite color is green." "Her favorite color is green." I can't help laughing at it sometimes.

The upside of having so many classes is that, most of the time, I can pretty much do the same lesson (modified slightly for level) for two weeks. I'm not really that creative, and since I don't work more than four hours a day at most it doesn't really get boring, so I definitely prefer it that way. For this past week (and at least part of next week) I used a powerpoint that I put together about me, my family, DC, UVA, the work I did for Obama, and my road trips to and from Alaska. They all seemed to really enjoy it, especially the "typically American" things like my parents' house, my graduation cap and gown, and anything to do with Obama, who is kind of a rockstar here. (Any mention of his name is immediately followed by at least one adorably French-accented yell of "yes we can!") It was also pretty easy to tailor to different levels - for the younger kids it's a good excuse to practice numbers ("I have thirteen uncles, seven aunts and fifty-six cousins;" and "my grandfather is ninety-seven years old"), and with the older kids we got into a discussion about how universities are different in the US and Europe.

I'm not really sure what my next lesson plan is going to be - the only request I've had from any of the teachers is to "talk about the Pledge of Allegiance," and so far I haven't thought of much beyond "it's really pretty creepy" and "little kids don't understand what they're saying" and "I agree that it's weird it mentions God, yes we do sort of claim to be secular like France." But hopefully I'll think of something else interesting to say. Something, ideally, that does not involve them needing to understand the words "pledge," "allegiance," "indivisible" or the construction "for which." I'm sure it will be fine.

Anyway, so far most of the kids have been a lot of fun. The little ones don't speak much English at all (I mostly respond in English to their French, or the teacher translates for me) but they seem eager to learn, and the older ones are a little more jaded but much better able to communicate, so it's fairly easy to keep them entertained because we can have actual conversations. There are really only two classes I'm alarmed about. One is a 4ème (age equivalent to 8th grade) "non-Euro," so non-advanced. The teacher is actually one of my favorites so far - she made a big point of reaching out to me by email before we met, and warned me that the class was a little rough, and assured me repeatedly that I would never be sent out on my own with any who were badly behaved and that if they were bad, I could send them back and I would never have to see them again. I kind of thought she was overdoing it with the warnings - I'm not all that easily intimidated - but honestly she was actually pretty understated. The kids are completely insane. She spent at least 80% of the hour on basic behavior control, and if anything she erred on the side of ignoring things she could have responded to. There are 30 kids, and they spent the hour standing up, throwing things at each other, moving tables, kicking each others' chairs, pulling chairs away if another kid stood up so that he'd fall when he tried to sit, stealing pens/pencil cases/notebooks/anything not nailed down from each other, making short hooting sounds every time the teacher's back was turned, and just generally being completely out of control. Even the kids who wanted to participate in the lesson were awful, with several of them whining if she didn't call on them every single time they raised their hand or shouting "moi! moi! moi!" ("me! me! me!") when they wanted to be called on. Fortunately for me, none of this is my problem - my job was to answer the questions they asked me, and not to speak when the kids were too loud for my answers to be heard, and to let the teacher deal with all behavior issues. So I left the class a bit shocked, but not in bad spirits. The teacher and I decided that at the beginning I'm only going to take four or five of these kids at a time (I'm allowed to take up to half the class), and I think that should be pretty manageable. But Jesus.

As a side note, the way that class spoke to me has made me really wonder about the relative courtesy implied in different French question constructions. When I first showed up outside the classroom, one of the kids said "vous êtes qui?" ("who are you?" or, literally, "you are who?"). That inverted form of question is pretty common, and I've noticed it most often with "where" questions like "tu viens d'où?" ("you're from where?") and "t'habites où?" ("you live where?"). I really need to actually ask someone who speaks good French about this, because as an English speaker, I am having a hard time shaking the sense that there is some sort of rudeness or almost snideness about this form. In other words, I tend to hear it as "and you're from where, exactly?" Which is probably not fair. It's probably fine. But still, "vous êtes qui?" set my teeth a bit on edge. It sounds not so much like "who are you?" as "who are you?"

The other class I'm worried about is the equivalent 3ème, which is the kids who were in the above class last year. I was supposed to see them on Wednesday, but the teacher emailed me to ask if I could skip that class this week and come to her next class instead. She showed up to that class a minute or two late - because her previous class, the one I'm supposed to have but haven't met, had made her cry. (In fairness, as she herself pointed out, she's pregnant and therefore not particularly difficult to make cry at the moment. But still!) So that'll be interesting. Though if they're really that bad, there's a chance she can decide that I just won't see them at all, and I'll meet with the later class as a permanent schedule change. Which classes I see are completely up to the teacher, which means I don't deal with most of the rough stuff. But yeah, still really not sure what to expect from that.

Anyway, the above notwithstanding, things are generally going very well at school. All of the staff and teachers have been really friendly and helpful, and the kids really do seem to have fun talking to me and get excited about the chance to speak real English to a real American, and even when things don't go perfectly, I never work for more than four hours at a time.

Have to run now, but a post about non-school things is soon to come. For now, two pictures:

Really, English textbook? Really?

Well-meaning teacher could not understand why I saw this and just started laughing. "Let's all draw Rosalie's family tree" might not be the best easy activity for my little 6ème kids.