[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. :)