Catch-up

I've been bad and haven't blogged in a very.long.time. Sorry. After being sick last week, I finally started back at work on Thursday to finish off my one-day workweek with a bang (and yes, thank you for asking...it was an exhausting workweek/day!). On Friday, I paid a visit to the doctor since I still wasn't feeling 110% after almost a week. Playing true to the rumors of an over-medicated French population, she prescribed me 5 different prescriptions for stomach cramps and a low appetite! I only filled 2 of them, however, as I didn't feel it was necessary to spend the following week doing nothing but popping pills. It was another adventure in French paperwork, of course, because I have not yet received my carte vitale, my health insurance card. Because I sent my page-long receipts from both the doctor and the pharmacy to the insurance people after my appointments, I will supposedly be reimbursed for most of the costs, which I desperately need to happen soon (it's either the reimbursement or pawning my [undoubtedly valuable] body organs...which would most likely necessitate an obscene amount of paperwork, so I'd prefer not to go there).

I spent the weekend with friends, going to movies (Home - weird French psychological drama (*) and La Guerre des Miss - dumb/funny French film about a fictional beauty pageant in rural France (***)) and eating lots of good food. And the great news in the PACA region is that the snow is ALMOST all melted! Finally, we can keep our balance in the streets without needing ski poles or spiky boots - such a treat.

In the schools this week, I embraced the momentous events in the homeland and taught the kids about Martin Luther King Jr. and President Obama, which ended up being an excellent topic of discussion for all ages. Even some of the 7-year-olds had learned a bit about MLK, and EVERYONE knew about Obama. We briefly discussed racism, the civil rights movement, and the new American president, and they were full of questions - I'd really never seen the kids as well-behaved or attentive. They asked me many questions about what segregation entailed for the African Americans in the 20th-century, what racism means (hoooboy - tricky to explain to kids and in French!), and even about Obama's quest for a new dog. Despite their youth and relative isolation in small-town Provence, they really seemed to appreciate that the Obama era could mean changes for the whole world.

This weekend, Whitney and I will be going to Avignon to visit some language assistants from that area of the Vaulcuse department, people we haven't seen since our October orientation. It should be fun! Hopefully, I'll have some good photos to post next time...

Of Snow and Sickness

What a week! On Tuesday evening, a giant snowstorm struck the Provence region and succeeded in creating a stir much bigger than its 19 cm were worth (this is coming from a MN girl who failed to get snow days for all but a handful of snowfalls in during a lifetime spent as a student - I'm clearly biased). I opened the shutters on Wednesday morning expecting to see the usual early-morning grey everywhere, but the white blinded me as it covered everything in sight and fat snowflakes continued to fall from the sky. A brave few people were trudging through the drifts, carrying umbrellas against the cold precipitation (sooo funny). Hannah and I stayed inside for many hours until we decided that it was absolutely necessary to pick up some food and do some shopping in the boutiques - it was the first day of the big sales, after all!

We soon learned that everything in Provence had been shut down for several days, from the main autoroute connecting Marseille to Aix-en-Provence and all regional schools and universities to bakeries that weren't able to receive new bread supplies and the movie theatre that wasn't able to receive the week's new movies. Newspapers said that it was the biggest snowfall in over 20 years. It was very beautiful, but I gotta say, I didn't come to the South of France for the purpose of building a rockin' snowman!














Hannah had to leave on Thursday to catch her train to Paris so that she could make her flight to Chicago on Friday. After dragging her suitcase over a million kilometers of ice and slush to the train station, we learned that the trains wouldn't be running until that evening and the buses wouldn't be running till the next day. Stranded! She ended up having to take a very expensive taxi to get to Aix but ended up getting to Paris that same night in the end. It was a bummer to have her week-long visit end on such a sour note, because we had such a nice time together.

A teacher friend invited me to go with him to an apartment-warming party (called pendre la crémaillère) in Marseille on Saturday. I met lots of other teachers at the party and got to spend almost the whole day speaking in French, which was a nice treat after having spent so much of the past few weeks speaking English. On the way back to Pertuis, we stopped in a tiny, pretty fishing town on the coast called Carry le Rouet, and then we drove to Aix for dinner. We ate a squid/olive pizza that was actually pretty good (which reminds me: I tried shark for the first time this past week at a Chinese restaurant -- it honestly tasted a lot like chicken). When we were driving out of Carry, we saw a motorcyclist lose control and skid onto his side in the middle of the slippery street. A pair of teenage girls called an ambulance, and we waited till they came until leaving the site. The man seemed to be okay except for a hurt shoulder and an almost-positive state of inebriation. When he heard my accent, he started speaking English with a heavy French accent, saying, "No problem! Zank you, zank you," and then when he saw that the ambulance was there, "F*ck! F*ck!" Nice. He was going to be fine, but it was an interesting experience, to say the least.

I went to bed late last night and realized that I wasn't feeling 100%, which I justified as being due to the time (3:00 am). However, I woke up this morning to a bout of le gastro, the stomach flu. I have thus spent an uneventful day in my bed and in the bathroom, mostly miserable. For those you that know me at all, you know that the stomach flu is hell on earth for me, so I was very appreciative when Whitney stopped by and brought me a 7Up and my landlord/friend offered sympathy and to help me with anything. I called the director of my Monday school to tell him that I won't be able to make it in tomorrow; I plan to stay in bed for at least the next 24 hours. No matter where you find yourself in the world, being sick still is the worst.

La Rentrée

I'm back in France and it's 2009! I feel like a slacker/bad person for not having blogged for the past couple weeks, but it hasn't been for lack of thinking about it...just for lack of time & energy. Here's a brief and incomplete rundown of the last two-and-a-half weeks:

I finished up my Christmas lessons at my schools, and the kids had so much fun making Christmas cards and singing carols. Some of them were sweet & made me Christmas cards, too:

On the 20th, I took the TGV from Aix to Paris, where I spent a couple days walking around the city and nursing my bad cold before flying out of Charles de Gaulle airport on Monday, the 22nd to go home to Minneapolis for Christmas. Paris was so beautiful! I’ve never loved the city more than this past trip when it was all decked-out for Christmas. The boutique and gallery windows were loaded with lights and glitter, and people laden with bulging shopping bags crammed the sidewalks and metros. All of my hatred for Paris’s crowds, dirt, and stress disappeared completely. I stayed at Hotel Marclau again, where I had stayed last September before moving south. This time, I had the awkward privilege of hearing an adolescent couple make loud love in the room next door. The walls were so thin that I heard every whisper and moan, oh yes I did. Thanks to my powerful and overwhelming cold/flu medicine, however, I was knocked out for 70% of it and didn’t care during the remaining 30% of their exciting night.

Galeries Lafayette

A bistro near Notre Dame

Crowds on the Champs-Elysées

Père Noël at a Christmas market set up in the shadow of La Grande Arche at La Defense

My flights home went well with only short delays of a couple hours, and I arrived in Minneapolis 2 hours later than scheduled. I saw Greenland (mountainous and snowy) from the plane, in addition to northern Canada (flat and snowy). On my flight to Detroit, I sat next to an Airbus engineer from Michigan, who is living in Toulouse for 6 months although he doesn’t speak any French (he said he just speaks English to everyone and most people understand…*groan*). He takes a suitcase full of wine (=12 bottles) with him every time he returns to the USA, and he never is stopped by customs (note to self: follow his lead in matters of alcohol importation). About an hour before our plane flew over Greenland, record-breaking turbulence took over the plane and set many people into a panic (*cough* no comment). The nice engineer next to me royally freaked out, his arms flying around to first grip both armrests with violent earnestness and then to reach his hand up to begin praying. Needless to say, he did not make me feel calmer, so I chose to focus on watching License to Wed (terrible movie, and it would have been a crying shame to die this way) as if my very life depended on it. We actually survived in the end. After a long delay at the airport in Detroit, I finally made it to Mpls-St. Paul, where my family, some friends, and my dog were waiting for me. So nice!

My brother, my sister, and me (making a face like my mom sometimes does...huh!)

Me and my mom waiting for a table at P.F. Chang's

Lucy!

When I got to my parents' house, they had a big surprise waiting: they had completely re-done the flooring, paint, carpet, and ceilings. Apparently, they had spent months sledge-hammering the floor, installing a new sliding door, getting everything re-painted, and more, and they had not said a word the whole time! It smelled like New House, echoed like the Grand Canyon, and was just beautiful.

I was only in Minneapolis for 6.5 days, so I packed everything in. I went to a happy hour with friends from my previous life at Target, visited my grandparents, did the whole Christmas jig with the family, spent time with some of my best friends, and otherwise enjoyed my time in the USA. Aside from spending time with some of my best people, I also enjoyed the other delicacies of American Life: squishy carpet, bathrooms full of products, spicy food, hand lotion up the wazoo (I'm just cheap), central heating, my heated blanket, my DOG, large & square license plates on cars, poop-free sidewalks, driving a car rather than walking everywhere, and the bright & shiny stores that are open oh-so-late at night (=after 7:00 pm). It was amazing.

On Monday, December 29th, I flew out of Minneapolis to go back to Europe via Chicago. During my flight to Chicago, I sat next to a nice Catholic priest from Eritrea. He currently lives in Berkeley and travels around the US counseling immigrants from Ethiopia as they adjust to the country and on family matters. On the flight from Chicago to Frankfurt, I saw Ireland, England, and the Netherlands right after dawn, which was really lovely. Flying into Germany, we zoomed right over tiny little mountain towns into a very foggy Frankfurt.

After landing in Frankfurt, I sat at the airport for a couple hours with my suitcase and a pair of very heavy eyelids. Even after a big cup of coffee and a half-meal (I’m not a good eater when I travel), I was practically a heap of clothes on the floor. I took a train directly from the airport to Brussels (4 hours), where I connected to another train going to Lille. While I was in Brussels for 20 minutes, I had to go through UK Customs screening because my train was continuing from Lille to London! I wish I had been able to stay on that train, but I'm saving that city for another day.

My train arrived in Lille after just a 30-minute ride, and after searching for the Etap Hotel-Lille Centre for 30 minutes without any luck--exhaustedly clunking my 49-pound suitcase over a million kilometers of cobblestone sidewalks, I found it. I met up with my friend from Paris, and we went out for dinner at a crêperie, where I ordered a chicken and lardon salad. The crêperie was decorated very modernly and our food was delivered to the sole waiter through a little dumbwaiter in the wall next to where I was sitting. Due to my sleep-deprived and travel-overloaded brain, I was awed by this magical occurrence that was part of the quotidien for the sleek-haired Lilliputian waiter (do they call inhabitants if Lille Lilliputians? If not, they should). We spent the next day--New Year’s Eve--sightseeing around Lille. We walked around for hours looking at the city and also doing a little shopping as a hobby. Lille is a very pretty and very cold city, and it's architecture is quite different from that of Provence -- more like England's or the Netherlands's. Most of the time in Lille, I was colder than a frosty snowgirl and sleepier than Rip van Winkle, but coffee and a long nap helped matters tremendously.

In the evening, we walked to the grand place in vieux Lille, where the heavily decorated and brightly-shining Ferris wheel was spinning full speed and a crowd had gathered to welcome in 2009 together. There were many groups of single young men in addition to families with small children, some elderly people, the obligatory smooching couples, and many drunks of all sizes, genders, and ages. A group of people in one of the Ferris wheel cars was tossing out small stuffed animals every time their car passed overhead the crowd, and you would not believe the commotion this caused! Stampedes of drunken men trampled my feet and shoved small children in their desperate quest to be the proud owners of tiny pink elephants and funny purple ducks (I have one that I named Violette, although I can’t claim that I caught it myself…my friend did, and he also snatched a little lion that he named Jack.). After too long standing in the cold waiting for the peluche gods to shower us with baby toy animals, my frozen toes were all too pleased when we finally called it quits around 1:30 am.

Classically pretty in Lille

Lille's architecture is curly and colorful

In front of the Ferris wheel just after midnight on New Year's

On the the first of January, I boarded the noon train from Lille to Aix. Even though it took almost 5 hours in the TGV, it wasn't a big deal because I slept and looked out the window as the landscape changed. One of my favorite parts about traveling is coming back home, and returning to Provence is always an overwhelming experience that I imagine to be par with winning $1000 or finding a long-lost love. I just love this region; it's almost always sunny, and there are blue mountains and long stretches of rocky & scrubby fields, acres of vineyards, little villages dotting the horizon, and beat-up chateaux scattered on the sides of cliffs. There's nothing like it, and I was so relieved to return home after so much travel.

I got to my place about 7:15 pm, and less than two minutes later, I had a lovely surprise: one of my best friends--who I had met while studying in Avignon and have kept in touch with since--knocked on my door! I knew she was coming, of course, but I had expected her the following day. Our other friend from Avignon had been planning to join her for the trip to visit Provence but had needed to stay home at the last minute. My friend is staying with me for a week here in Pertuis before train-ing up to Paris and then flying back to Chicago, and it's been such a treat to catch up and show her my life here. I'm sorry to say, though, that I think I've been a rather boring hostess due to the lasting effects of travel inebriation, but we've had a fun and relaxing few days.

Hannah during our visit to Aix-en-Provence

Other than that, nothing much is new. School re-started on Monday, and although I was thoroughly dreading getting back in the saddle, it's been very rewarding to be teaching again. Also, the weather is SO cold right now that it's supposed to snow for real tonight. The kids are overjoyed, but apparently everything shuts down here if they get more than ~2 inches of snow at a time. This presents a big, big problem, because tomorrow is the first day of Les Soldes, the biannual 4-6 week period of time set aside by the Economic Minister of France during which department and clothing stores across the country have heart-shatteringly good SALES! We have solid plans to go to Aix tomorrow *for the sole purpose of boosting France's economy*, so if there are any problems with buses or trains, I will sob frozen tears into my empty hands. You shall be kept updated on this potential disaster.

Thanks for reading all that, if you did, and thanks for humoring me, even if you didn't make it all the way through. This was an overwhelming long post, I know, but I had to get caught up and ease my conscious all at the same time. ;)