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?