aucun adieu

I am bad at good-byes. I always feel like they are too small and sudden and awkward to really express how meaningful it is to have known a person for a time. And the longer they last, the worse I think...because it's like I'm trying to say something that really just can't be said, and I'm not doing it justice. So if I ever leave you with a short and sweet goodbye, this is the reason.


I am doing exactly that to this blog.
I waited too long to write this post, and now I feel that I have so many things I could write that it is not possible to write anything at all.  So I leave you with an anticlimactic last post. Apologies.

To make up for it, I'm starting a new blog since I can no longer write on this one since I am no longer in France. You may disagree with me, but...new season, new blog. Time to move on. I'll write about the last few weeks in Europe as the thoughts come to me.

(just because i don't live in france anymore doesn't mean i no longer have anything to say)

stringsonsky.tumblr.com

a la prochaine !

-beccaleigh

songs from france

my favorite newlyweds

So this blog is called La Cueillette, which, if you remember, means the harvest, usually of fruits or nuts or something. It's also called Songs From France. Now, there are songs from France.

They are here and they are waiting to be listened to. By you.

D and L and I recorded four in the small guesthouse next to the pool. Curious? Hmmm???

We had an incredible time together playing shows and talking to people about music and also about everything else. There is so much I could say about it, but if you would like an idea that is better than what I could say with words, watch this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DsjZf4BLf7Y

That was an impromptu couple of songs we played in Cordes sur Ciel, which means "strings on sky." An appropriate place for sharing a love for music with strings. Medieval village. Absurdly beautiful. Lots of dancing little kids that came out of nowhere when we started playing.

Also this. This is what our day-to-day life was like for three weeks. Um...yep. What a gift.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kP8tHlLCo7k&feature=autoshare

I have just returned from a visit to Angers, in the Loire Valley, where I was visiting a dear friend who I met two years ago in Rennes. Since we hadn't seen each other in two years, and also the weather wasn't great, we spent a lot of time in the kitchen making way too much food and catching up on life.

angers

pad thai for two

On the train on the way back...well I should say "one of the trains" because it required four trains for me to get from Angers to Albi.....anyway, on one of the trains, for some reason my seat was in first class, which I didn't realize until I was about to get on the train (sometimes train booking is weird like that). It was great because first class train seats are way better for sleeping in. So I wake up when the controlleur comes through to check our tickets, and there are these people in my car speaking Spanish...I don't speak Spanish, but I've spent enough time in Spain to be able to tell that they were not Spanish. Anyway this one guy was acting as their translator, and he says excitedly to the controlleur, "do you know who this lady is? she's Che Guevara's daughter." At first I though maybe he was joking because the French are always joking. But he wasn't.

This is my last week of teaching, and my goodbyes to students already feel so nonchalant. I guess maybe it's because they're high schoolers. Or they are just too awkward to know what to do. Or I am. Or everyone is. Anyway in France no one says goodbye. They all say à bientôt...see you soon. Thank goodness for that. It's funny though because nearly all of the people I said à bientôt to the last time I lived in France, I did see again. It wasn't super bientôt or anything, but it was soon enough.

goin to carolina in my mind

Sometimes when I'm daydreaming I go to this one barn in the countryside outside Greensboro. It's one of those picturesque "farmland of America" type places. There are chickens and a couple of donkeys or whatever down the hill from the barn. Probably there are some goats also. To get there from the highway you drive down this looooonnng road through a gate that probably has a welcome sign on it. But....this is a special barn.
I have done much dancing in this barn. Every fall during my college years, the Quaker folks around the area would put on a barn dance, and we would all hop in the back of someone's truck and head out there to do some serious folk dancing. All of the Quaker mommas would make pies, so on the first floor of the barn there are like 20 pies and hot cider. The second floor is this huge high-ceiling'd room where all the dancing happens. You can hear it/feel it when you are on the first floor, and I always sort of had the impression that maybe people were going to stomp right through the floor.
The best part about the barn though, requires going up some stairs from the second floor into a loft where you can watch everyone dancing down below, and then climbing up a ladder from there to the roof of the barn, where you can see the most stars ever. That's where I go when I'm daydreaming.

I could look at the same stars here, and it would probably be even better because Albi has basically zero light pollution. But there's just something about North Carolina.

cathedrals in the hearts of the people that i know

J'apercois la fin qui arrive, et ça fait peur un peu. En fait, ce n'est pas la fin qui fait peur mais l'inconnu qui m'attend de l'autre côté de l'atlantique. La nostalgie pour ma vie en France existe déjà...je regarde autour de moi et je vois la beauté, ma famille bizarre et internationale, les habitudes que j'ai....un petit café l'après-midi, le matin sur la terrace sous le rosier, tout ce qui est vieux, plus vieux que mon pays entier...

Bon bref, tout ce qui m'attend est aussi beau. Mon coeur est plein de musique...une musique qui est venue avec moi en France et qui va repartir avec moi quand je partirai. Je peux espèrer que je ne perdrai la musique de la langue. Certes, il y a d'autres langues qui m'attendent....

Ce matin je suis allée à la messe pour la première fois depuis décembre ou janvier, et partout dans la cathédrale il y avait des enfants qui faisaient n'importe quoi, et ils avaient tous des feuilles de palmier puisque c'est le dimanche des rameaux....et moi je suis un enfant, feuille de palmier dans la main, admirant le mystère autour de moi...

D and L and I are calling this the "Mega-mystery Tour." Life is a mega-mystery. What else can I say? They arrived here late Monday night, and our first week together has been a joy. Singing with them again is like coming home. I'm amazed at how little difficulty we encountered piecing our voices together again for the first time in six months. People's response to the music so far has been interesting and really varied. We played our first show in Toulouse on Wednesday night at a "café culturel" that seems to have some pretty strange and intriguing regulars. I had been to a show there before, and that show was extraordinarily different from our own....at the one I went to before, the bar was really crowded and loud and all the lights were on, and some people were listening but most were just having their Friday night entre amis. At our show, they turned down the lights and it was completely silent the entire show. I was so surprised...not at all what I expected. It was really good though, especially for certain songs that are quieter and more subtle...our second show was nearly the opposite. We left out any quiet songs because there was so much noise that no one would have been able to hear them. The noise was caused mostly by a fountain though, not necessarily by people. It was a beautiful show, nonetheless. I don't think I've ever sung that loud in my whole life. Belting=not my strong point. Yet.

In other news, last weekend I went on a really wonderful day-road-trip with Pierre, Brent, and Neill to Carcassonne. We listened to some Ryan Adams with the windows down and ate some cassoulet (for the first and probably last time...I think that was the most fat I have ever consumed in a single sitting), got slightly lost in Castelnaudary, and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. I will tell you more about it with some pictures.

saturday morning's rose garlic

oh albi, you so charmant

These days, the only time that I don't feel like a giant is when I come out of one of my high schools, the technical school, and have to push my way through the mob of students on their cigarette/hang out break to get out to the outside world. This high school is, I would say, about 90% boys. And most of them are tall, large, rugby-playing boys. Normally this statistic is not to my advantage. However this morning as I pushed my way out to my sunny Friday afternoon, I smiled to myself as I waded relatively unnoticed through a sea of them.

In the States, I am slightly "taller than average," for a girl. In France I am, I dunno, "extremely taller than average?" Most shoe stores don't carry my shoe size (when I ask I get wide eyes, a chuckle, and an 'ah non madame,' without even looking in the back). And I spent about two months looking for a pair of gloves here, and finally I gave up and bought a giant pair of handmade mittens from the grand bazaar in Istanbul. And I wear like the second-to-largest pants size that exists. That is not even possible. How can that be possible? I guess my real question is, why are French women so petite ? They are tiny and minuscule.

Here is my hypothesis: in America, we have so much space. So much. So in the past couple centuries we've just evolved to fill up more of the space. Everything we have is more spacious. Our homes are more spacious, our cars, our lawns (lawns: do not exist in France), our cities are sprawled way the heck out, and we still have miles and miles of countryside with seemingly nothing in it.. So we grew into them. The spaces. Everything over here is closer together and smaller in general. I think it's not really a big deal to go from here to Paris (or to Spain, or whatever), but to the locals, it is a JOURNEY.

Speaking of journeys, this morning I made the journey from my house to the Saturday market one block down the street. One of the things I love about living in a small town in southern France is this. There is a couple who I always buy something from even if I don't really need it because I just really like them and one of them always has their baby in one of those tummy pouch things. They sell dried fruit, nuts, beans, lentils, olives, spices, etc. Their stand is the only place in France where one can find black beans. So, when Brent and I feel nostalgic for Mexican food, we stock up. One time she said to us, "you know, we sell stuff at a lot of different markets around here, and out of all those places, I only have two customers that buy black beans, and it's you two." And proud of it. The first time I bought black beans from her, a very small elderly woman was standing next to me and she said, "I have never seen black beans before...."

baby pouch

Also the guys who I buy onions and garlic from are always so funny. One of them has such a strong accent I can hardly understand anything he says (unfortunately he's always the one who tells me how much it costs, so I just kind of have to guess usually). I picked up this one head of garlic, and the one guy said, "no don't get that one, it's not as pretty as the other ones," so he handed me two different ones, and then when I was paying he put the less-pretty one into my basket, c'est offert ! il m'a dit and then his camarade threw in an extra red onion "because it's the end of the morning," which wasn't entirely true, I think they were just pleased that a young, not-quite-awake-yet American girl wearing pink sunglasses was so interested in onions and garlic on a Saturday morning.

home / home?

One time I was talking with Micka about how last summer I lived in a house in Greensboro with three other girls. And he asked me, "well how did you do it?" and I said "quoi ?" and he said, "you know, like who did what in the house? Who did the cleaning? Who made dinner?" and I found it impossible to explain to him that we all kind of lived on our own terms, we all cooked for ourselves and rarely ate together because our schedules were vastly different. Really our only rules were to keep the common spaces clean and try to take care of things that need to be taken care of as you see them. He didn't understand. He explained to me that before he got married, when he was living in collocation, that he was in charge of cooking, and his roommates cleaned up. They had dinner together every night, like a family. At first I thought this absurd...how could twenty-something-year-old boys manage to keep up such structure in their lives? And wouldn't that remove some aspect of freedom? I suppose the answer is that yes, it would. However, lately I've been wondering to myself what it would have been like if we had committed to that. It would have been amazing! And economical, en plus. College students kind of write off home structure as impossible, undoable, ridiculous. In our house we "aspired" to have dinner together once a week on Tuesday nights, and we didn't actually do that a single time the entire summer. It's like the difference between living next to someone and living with someone. Structure (centered around meals of course) is so essential here. It does create kind of an obsession with food that I'm not always crazy about, but it is a kind of peace and solidity you can count on every day at least once a day (for many French folks it's twice a day...they often go home and have lunch with their families before going back to work). They even break bread together when they eat at MacDo...they sure love MacDo, but they sit down in the "restaurant" and eat it with other people. MacDo's in France are actually pretty hip places to hang out...they all have free wifi and a lot of young people just sit in them chatting away for hours like you would do in any café. I'm not endorsing MacDo...it is horrendous. But I have to admit that Europe's weird embracing of it is somewhat interesting.

The other day I bought my airplane ticket back to America. La fin commence.

travels with steinbeck.

When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. Four hoarse blasts of a ships whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping. The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage. In other words, I don't improve; in further words, once a bum, always a bum. I fear the disease is incurable. I set this matter down not to instruct others but to inform myself.


When the virus of restlessness begins to take possession of a wayward man, and the road away from Here seems broad and straight and sweet, the victim must first find in himself a good and sufficient reason for going. This to the practical bum is not difficult. He has a built-in garden of reasons to choose from. Next he must plan his trip in time and space, choose a direction and a destination. And last he must implement the journey. How to go, what to take, how long to stay. This part of the process is invariable and immortal. I set it down only so that newcomers to bumdom, like teen-agers in new-hatched sin, will not think they invented it.


Once a journey is designed, equipped, and put in process, a new factor enters and takes over. A trip, a safari, an exploration, is an entity, different from all other journeys. It has personality, temperament, individuality, uniqueness. A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.
                                                                                                               -John Steinbeck

enfin le soleil

My house is full of people right now. I've always loved houses full of people, and it was a rare occasion chez moi when I was young, so it makes me happy even if I don't really know the people who are currently occupying my house. It's like a holiday or something (knowing France, it probably is a holiday and I am just unaware).
One of the people currently in my house is a guy named Philip, who was Micka's housemate for a few years when they were strapping young men or whatever. Philip hates cheese, for which he is ruthlessly mocked, mostly by Micka. He has very long eyelashes and a long face, which make me think irreversibly of the Grinch, though Philip is not at all a Grinch. He mumbles when he talks, and the first time he came to visit in November or whenever, I remember not understanding hardly anything he said. Now I only have to say quoi ? comment ? every once in a while, which is good because after a while that becomes truly penible.

It is also penible to always talk about the weather, but I must tell you that the sun and sudden burst of warmth is making Albi radiant. It has never been more charming. When the sun is out, I love every minute of living here. It changes everything. Today I took my lunch down by the Tarn and was staring wistfully across the water and found myself thinking, I could live here forever.... and then I had kind of a moment of reveille when I realized where my thoughts had gone and I began to laugh at myself. Of course a picnic by the river in perfect weather would make me feel like I never want to leave.

Speaking of leaving (and I mustn't, for it makes me all anxious) that is unbelievably soon. I've been here for five months now. I am on the home stretch of my work contract (month of March, one week at the beginning of April, and one week at the end of April) which is simply unreal. I was talking to Philip about this the other night, and he said something interesting to me, which is that now that I have really seen what it is like to live here, I can make an informed decision about where to live. Huh ? Whachoo mean, Philip? Well what he meant was, if there ever was a time to say, yeah why not live in France for a while/forever, now would be it.
When I was in Istanbul I met up with my friend's sister Hayley who lives there. I didn't know her before, but I figured it would be fun to have dinner with her or something since, you know, I was in Istanbul. So we did and it was great, and anyway she's been living there for five years. She moved there to teach when she was about my age, and just kind of stayed. And for her it just makes sense for her to stay, at the moment she sees no reason to leave, she has made a life there. The best part, the true reason why she has no desire to leave Istanbul, is because of her bed. "But I love my bed," she said. Her perfect Turkish bed can't go back to America with her, so she stays in Turkey with the love of her life, a bed.

Oh dear, I am attached. It's like when you find a kitten and your mom is like, no you can't play with it, no you can't bring it home even for just one night because you'll get too attached and then when you can't keep it, it will be like the world is crashing all around you.

Micka admitted today that he might even shed tears when I leave. But with dignity, clarified Philip. Yes, with dignity, I agreed. If Micka, strange little man that he is, who yells at me for touching the dishwasher and when I'm baking yells from upstairs ça sent cramé !!!!! even though he knows very well that nothing is burning and he is just trying to get to me, if he sheds so much as one single tear when I leave, what kind of sorry state will I be in? But I mustn't talk of leaving, for there is still time that remains.

more istanbul : the blue mosque

ten days in istanbul + a brief bonjour in paris

There is clearly too much to say about the past two weeks. I'll spare you. In this moment, I am munching on hazelnuts (findik), trying to hold onto precious memories of Turkey. I might write about this in installments, kind of. I think I will begin at the end, that being, this morning, back to work.

It is an incredibly beautiful day. As much as I dreaded going back to work, I had to admit to myself that the fact that it is no longer dark and freezing out when I leave my house at 7:45am truly improved my general attitude. The deep of winter is over, it seems. I haven't put my winter coat in the armoire yet, but it's tempting.
When I arrived at work this morning, my intention was to make some photocopies before going up to my classroom. I do this pretty much every Monday morning. This morning, however, when I went to use one of the machines, there is a rather large woman standing in front of it looking at me like I have something weird on my face or that I just really shouldn't be there. It seemed to me that she was protecting the machine from me, an intruder. I was kind of afraid of her.
"Um, can I....?"
"No." she responds.
"Well, I just wanted to make some copies..."
"That's my job. That is why I'm standing here. I am the one who controls the machine. Mondays and Thursdays." she is having a bad morning, I guess. I hand her my thing and tell her I want five more of them. I suppose the reason she was so short with me is because she knows that her job is completely useless. Surely she must know this. Why would a job as useless as hers even exist? Only in France would such a useless job exist. I've been making my own copies for five months and have somehow missed out on the inconvenience of having to ask someone else to make them for me, even though the machine is right there and simply pushing a button myself would suffice. La honte.

That being said, I suppose I will tell you some things about Istanbul.

First I will tell you that Turkish Airlines is the only way to fly. Turkish food (yes please) and free wine. And hazelnuts instead of peanuts. The free wine was a super plus for me because I was kind of nervous. The thing I was nervous about was figuring out Istanbul public transportation to get from the airport (on the European side) all the way to Üsküdar (in Asia). Really it was fine, and I had it all planned out. The only thing was, once I found the right ferry to take from Europe to Asia, I had to buy a token from this machine, and I couldn't figure out how to work it, and this man was trying to help me, and then it wouldn't take my bill, and finally this guy standing next to me just hands me a token and walks away. "Thank you!!" I yelled after him in English, for at this point I didn't even know how to say that much in Turkish.

Speaking of learning Turkish, that is what Brent and Ryan and I attempted to do with much of our down time. I'd forgotten how exciting/frustrating it is to begin a new language from scratch. I hope the neighbors could hear us repeating, "do you know English?" "I am American" "You are Turkish" "My Turkish is very bad" "Excuse me" "Excuse me" "Excuse me" "how are YOU?" dozens of times in the living room of Hannah and Stephie's apartment.

ryan, my very tallest travel bud

I liked staying in Üsküdar because not very many people on the Asian side speak English. Considering I don't speak Turkish, this being something I enjoyed is probably funny to you. But it forced us to use the little Turkish that we did know, a lot of hand gestures, and a lot of apologetic smiles. And as a result, we got to know our neighbors a little. The man at the bakery down the street knows us (I at least know how to ask for five simit, please), the guys at the kebab stand by the port know us, especially Brent and Ryan (they once ate kebab from there three times in the same day...I can't really blame them, since it cost 2.50 lira, or less than one euro. Brent paid for it later though) and the guys at the juice stand next to it started to recognize me, fumbling to ask them to make me my (nearly) daily pomegranate juice. After these three rituals we would hop on a ferry back to Europe, and see what we could see.

teşekkür ederim, juice man.

spice bazaar

In Turkey they are always drinking tea. We are severely lacking in rituals like this in the States...if we paused like 5 times a day for a glass of tea, we would probably be a lot less stressed out in general. (additionally if we paused to pray 5 times a day as in Islam...) One day when Ryan and Brent and I were exploring Taksim area by ourselves, we stopped in this little underground bookstore (again, always looking for a good bouquinerie) and the guy who owned the place started chatting with us, and eventually invited us to sit and have tea with him in his shop. This happened to us a couple of times...typically Turkish, I suppose.

Sometimes I feel like, aesthetically speaking, perhaps I was born on the wrong side of the world. My personal aesthetic is so much closer to that of eastern cultures than that of western ones. I practically melted at the Hagia Sofia (ayasofya) staring up at the ceiling, the walls...yellows, blues....even Arabic, inside all the mosques, a beautiful script almost like some kind of circular dance...

ayasofya

Something very funny about Istanbul is that everyone is always trying to guess where you are from. It's their favorite game to play with foreigners. As long as you don't open your mouth, they can never know. And they nearly never guessed American for us. The would often guess German, especially for Ryan and Brent. But everyone always assumed I was Turkish. And then they wouldn't believe me when I assured them that I am not. Brent got some hilarious comments about his beard, now quite long and bushy (he somehow thought this would make him fit in more in Istanbul), my favorite one being, at the Grand Bazaar, a man yelling at him "YOU LOOK LIKE A GRANDFATHER." Another good one, though not beard-related, was walking under the Galata Bridge where there are all these guys standing outside seafood restaurants trying to get you to come in, and one guy says something to Brent in English, and his colleague says to him, in English, "That is not even an American!"

I should mention that I stopped in Paris for a few days on my way back to Albi to visit my friend Martin. And also it had been like 2 years since I'd been to Paris, so I was itching to go. Those days were spent wandering (a lot), eating really good falafel, and being thankful that I am not Parisian. No one could deny, however, that Paris is full of charm. And my last day was the loveliest...Paris could not have given me a more beautiful ending to my vacation.

in which becca and brent go to istanbul

saint sebastian (october) / rodez (february)

I hate packing, so I am not doing it. Yes, I am leaving tomorrow morning. Yes, I should have done it already. But it is difficult to sort out the small amount of things that fit in my backpack. I am prepared to wear the same two sweaters every day for two weeks. For the sake of fitting other important things. For example, my knitting. And Thomas Merton.

This past week, Paca and Mino were here (Micka's parents) helping to take care of the house, since Micka and Corinne were off skiing. They are both in their 80's, both hard of hearing, and both just yell instead of talking at normal volume. I believe Mino has always done this, not just because of her old ears, but because she had like 7 brothers and sisters, and you have to be loud to be heard in families like that. Paca reads a newspaper in English every day, and also he freaks out about bread. "ISN'T THERE ANY BREAD IN THIS HOUSE???" knowing full well there are two loaves in a basket just out of reach. During the war, there was never enough bread. Now, in Paca's household, there is always too much bread. I think at one point while they were here, there were about 4 loaves in the bread basket. One for each person currently staying in the house. None of us even eat that much bread, really. Especially not for French folks. Mino told me the other day that in about a week, she and Paca will have been married for 62 years. Well done, you two.

While Brent and I were in Spain, we bought a disposable camera, and he just got it developed the other day. I think we'll do it again in Istanbul....there is something really charming, and maybe even truer, about the gritty quality and weird lighting in disposable camera photos. And also you forget about them for a while, and then all of a sudden, there are your memories. Digital is too instantaneous. I've always preferred film, but my poor old Nikon doesn't seem to want to re-close the shutter anymore...

champagne and popcorn

dinner of champions.

But really, don't worry about me, I have been cooking like a champ. I even made my own cheese yesterday. From organic raw milk that I bought for one euro at the market. I told this to my friend in Paris, who was astounded, imagining that I had fabricated cheese and then left it in a cave for some years only to just now get it out, and voilà, fromage ! I'm not that dedicated. It was fresh cheese. It took like one hour instead of 5 years. Anyway, the champagne and popcorn dinner was a result of a feast-lunch (are you sensing a pattern?) we had at Neill's host family's house on Saturday. I thought I would never be hungry again.

proof: bread. i made this.

The previous day, I was in charge of dinner (ooo) since Micka and François were at a comic book convention, and Corinne was working late, so I went to the marché couvert to get some carrots. The vegetable man, who is always interested in what exactly I'm planning on doing with the vegetables I buy from him, thinks that I am in high school. He said, have you just come from school? I simply say no, having la flemme to explain to him that actually I'm nearly 23 years old and that in fact, I teach high school students. It doesn't bother me terribly much, since he is very souriant, that is to say he smiles a lot, and as I was leaving he handed me a date stuffed with pink marzipan or something and instructed me to eat it. Which I then did.

When Corinne got home she was carrying a big heavy-looking cardboard box. I asked her what was in it and she said, "half a lamb." Literally half a lamb. She showed me all the different parts and everything, neatly wrapped in plastic by one of her patients, who I suppose raises lambs somewhere nearby. Dinner with her is great...she tells fantastic stories. She was warning me about having "aventures" with strange boys you encounter on the street and told me this crazy story about how one time when she was 24 she was traveling in Greece with her best dude-friend, and this German boy stopped her in the street and told her it was impossible for her to continue walking without him getting to talk to her for a minute. You have to understand, Corinne is beautiful now, and when she was 24 she was a total knockout. I mean, I probably would have fallen in love with her on the street too. Anyway so they are speaking broken English since she doesn't speak German and he didn't speak French, and turns out this guy is like a billionaire, or his father is, which means that effectively he is. A billionaire. She lets him know she's not interested, and yet. ! The day before they leave Mykonos, they go back to their hotel room to find that it is COVERED in flowers. Like, the guy had bought every single flower on the island, which is absurd since they were basically all imported and therefore very expensive. Thousands of flowers. And do you know what Corinne says? She says, "but I don't have a vase!" So the hotel man gives them these giant trash bins, and they fill them with water, and then they go to the nearest Greek Orthodox church and donate all the flowers in the name of the Holy Virgin, because they don't know what else to do. And of course the church people think they're nuts. But anyway. This guy pursued her for like 3 years or something, all the way to Morocco even, which is where she was living at the time. So the moral of the story is, watch out ladies, any minute a German billionaire might try to drown you in flowers and woo you with his German charm.

dissonance

You know a bar is probably a good one when it is named after Pieter Brueghel the Elder. When his beardy face is on the wooden sign that hangs outside by the door, and inside, paintings and drawings, especially the one of the impossibly giant fish with the contents of like the entire ocean spilling out of its mouth. And there is this jazz band playing, and the drummer has a red mohawk and is wearing a red sweater and a red jacket, but none of them are quite the same shade of red. But I wasn't really looking at him, or any of the musicians..I was looking at the double bass leaning beautifully in the corner, and I was wondering to myself, why would you be playing an electric bass right now instead....? They were good though, really.

I think that the French think that art is a waste of time. Which is ironic because Paris used to be the artistic center of the universe, and also the government pays artists to stay alive and make art (really it's true). But I think the general attitude is that it's a waste of time. And you certainly don't study it in school. For example François is apparently quite good at drawing and used to do it a lot when he was a kid, but I was talking to him about it last night and what he said to me was, "now I don't have time." Well clearly that isn't true. He's 17 and trying to go to medical school in a couple of years, but he certainly "has time." He spent like 9 hours playing violent video games yesterday.

Something my students will do sometimes, is when I give them something to do, they will look up at me and say, "but this doesn't inspire me." Well I'm sorry, but if you were the ones who got to decide what we do in class, we would sit around eating cookies and talking about Spongebob (bob l'eponge). It's not like I pay absolutely no attention to what interests them. For example next week we are going to talk about a Bob Dylan song, since they told me they like Bob Dylan. So much better than Bob l'eponge.

I know I talk about language a lot, but you must forgive me, because it's what's in my head. Lately I've been experimenting with "debates" or really, "disagreements" in French. Désaccord can mean disagreement, and it can also mean dissonance, like in music. The French language lends itself to disagreements, but once you disagree, the problem is that you then must defend your disagreement. Then it becomes complicated, and even hours later after much reflection and WordReference.com, you come to realize that there are somethings you simply cannot say in French. This is of course a preposterous statement since French is "the most superior language in the world." (People around here truly believe that, and they will tell you so. Even if they speak no other languages. This astounds me daily.) Then you think to yourself, well, since language frames the way that we see the world, maybe the person with whom I am discussing  has never even had the thought that I just tried and failed to translate.

sailing alone around the room

I hardly realized it was halfway through January.

The other day on my day off I decided to explore a village about 30 minutes from here called Cordes-sur-Ciel. It's on a big ol' hill, which as I was walking up to the top, the steep cobblestone street reminded me somewhat of Olinda, a village I went to one time in Brazil. We mounted the hill in a tiny Volkswagon going the wrong way down a one-way street, and the car didn't quite want to make it, and the hill was so steep that I was sure we were going to slide backwards to our deaths. But we made it to the top and ate tapioca with quejo and coconut.

cats-sur-ciel

Anyway, Cordes-sur-Ciel is a ghost town in January. Every single store, museum, and restaurant is closed until Easter. It was astonishingly quiet, and I saw more cats than people. The one interaction I did have with a human was a lady asking me for directions, how to get to the church or something. People always ask me for directions. Either I always look like I know where I'm going, or I look like a local, or I just look approachable. Someone has asked me for directions in every country and city I've ever been in, I'm pretty sure.

Sometimes I wish I was teaching little kids for the sole reason that they are endlessly entertaining (unlike high school students, who are endlessly lazy). My Wednesday afternoons with Paul-Emmanuel and Pierre-Olivier are a nice repose from high school attitude. Not that they don't have attitude sometimes (especially Pierre-Olivier) but they are just so precious I can't help but be attached to them. One time I was trying to teach Paul-Emmanuel about emotions and expressing feelings, so I was making faces at him and asking him, "what am I?" so that he would answer with "happy," "sad," "angry," etc. So when we started this game, I was smiling a great big toothy smile at him and asked, "what am I?" and he said, "ben....tu es belle, comme toujours." Uhhh well you are beautiful, as always. What a little heartbreaker. Briseur de coeur.

My French is coming along, I think...I am starting to think in French about half the time, which is good I guess.  I still have days sometimes when my French just goes all out the window, when I accidentally say, "It looks like it might cry today" instead of "It looks like rain." Or when I just feel stupid because I have to go to the pharmacy and say to the pharmacist, "excuse me, but I am in need of some liquid for my lentils." I still don't know if there is a different word for contact solution, but she got the idea. And then some days I realize how little I understand French grammar because it is horribly complex. My friend in Paris corrects me usually, but it interrupts my train of thought and then I feel like whatever it was I wanted to say isn't even worth the complicated sentence I would have to construct in order to say it. But even the French have arguments amongst themselves about what is "technically" correct. What would the Académie say ???

midnight in toulouse

midnight in paris toulouse.

So as I mentioned before, on New Years eve we went to Toulouse for a nuit blanche, which I couldn't quite believe I was doing, but it turned out to be pretty great. Nothing could be bad about champagne at Place du Capitole and chatting in French with a guy you met right before midnight who is trying to charm you (and succeeding) saying things like, tu sais, je danse très bien... and, tu dois me rendre visite à Paris... and, at midnight, normalement j'aurais un peu de gui dans ma main, et tu devrais m'embrasser...


We ran into an assistant from Canada who we'd met at the stage d'acceuil, and he seemed to know everything about everything, but he kept saying "pardon my ignorance" as a preface to whatever random fact he was about to enlighten us with. Pardon my ignorance, but I believe Charleston has survived the most natural disasters of any city in history. Ah bon?

Also, I figured out how to type in proper French on this thing, and the way I do that is by switching my keyboard to a French keyboard, which makes me type about a hundred times slower (I type reeeeally fast normally) but I think it's good for me to practice typing on one anyway. The thing that annoys me the most about it is that you have to press shift to type a period. Whose idea was that anyway?