Things are starting to wrap up fast in France. The last two weeks I've been traveling with my friend Erin and now I have 8 more days 'til classes are done and 7 days 'til Rachel comes to France. I am starting to wonder how to fit all my accumulated books into my suitcase.
More on the trip:
First I went to a B and B on Guernsey, a British island that is closer to France than the UK. We took the ferry and spent the next five days wandering the loveliest rocky beaches, looking at wildflowers and biking cow path/ country lanes. They have perfected the hedgerow in Guernsey despite Normandy's claims. There were acres of blue bells, ramps ( I sniffed those out quick), bachelors' buttons, pinky things, yellowy things, daisies. Said hedgerows were ablaze with color. There were plenty of gentle Guernsey cows and because I was not in France I drank a lot of milk. We also had peanut butter which elicited comment from the owner of the B and B who was cleaning the algae
(pronounced hard g) out of his pool. " Oh God what are you doing to that poor piece of bread?" I threatened to seal his mouth shut with said gummy deliciousness. I haven't had peanut butter since December. I really enjoyed bantering with people on Guernsey. I can get pretty much whatever I want information or material wise in French, but I never think to joke. On Guernsey, people razzed me to death and it was hilarious, in English, and even more interesting because it was not American humor. We must have been jolly amongst the retirees. Even the customs people were jokey.
Next we followed the poppies down the train tracks south to Nice and a different kind of ocean. I went swimming in the north Atlantic on Easter in Guernsey so I decided to brave the Mediterranean. The water is cold there too and comes in at an angle to the shore. Rocks pound your ankles and there is a lot of foam. The little boys on the beach seemed to like it as well as some older ones in wetsuits, but everyone else was lying around letting the sun pound into their flesh. The people watching was great because everyone was putting on a show of some kind all while pretending they weren't. We tracked people's social goals and their progress for hours. Afterwords we got ice cream in bizarre flavors. We also spent a lovely evening with some Vancouverites and a Brazilian we met in our hostel. I met so many cool traveling Canadians this trip I think I will need to migrate up north more often once I get home.
From Nice we took the train up to Normandy and I decided that I am a northern France kind of girl. I like the big, sparkling green open spaces dotted with houses in dulled stone as apposed to red soil, stucco and azur sea. We looked at the cathedral in Bayeux, the Bayeux tapestry, the Caen Memorial museum, Omaha Beach, the American Cemetery and other D-Day cemeteries and memorials. We took the bus to Arromanches the tiny seaside village where the British installed an enormous pre-fab harbor to supply the allied invasion. We walked the shore, climbed the cliffs and visited a little museum about the harbor whose remnants you can still see poking out of the ocean. We also visited the British and her Commonwealths cemetery which I found very moving. Families were allowed to inscribe a few lines on the graves; there were a lot of Christ metaphores, Erin found one where someone had simply inscribed an address. The American Cemetery was very American in a sea of French things. Big parking lot with those barriers planted with roses, airport style security, a very formal mall ( not shopping, like Washington D.C) with manicured grass and somber pavillions and then there were the graves which must have been lined up with a laser they were so unnervingly straight. The attached museum documented the countdown to the invasion, highlighted the service of specific soldiers and showed their equipment relavent to the task they were carrying out. I have seen a lot of WWII museums and I thought this one was really well done. It forcefully carried across how much organization it took to invade France. I was flabbergasted and for the first time understood why armies need heirarchy to operate sucessfully. A bunch of guys running up on those beaches under machine gun fire could have been an utter chaos and in many ways it was. This museum showed how the soldiers had trained for that chaos and their generals had planned a million ways to control it. Fighting yes, but in many ways an intellectual triumph something I was not at all expecting to think. Imagine Eisenhower's laundry list! There must have been some brilliant and highly organized minds behind all this ( and behind a museum that has me convinced). It helped put those 10,000 naked crosses and stars of David in perspective.
One other thing about visiting the American cemetary. I kept looking around for people visiting their friends'/relations'/ loved-ones graves and I didn't see any likely suspects. Then I realized it is basically too late for all that. At the time when I was born, there were old guys coming to Normandy laying flowers on their buddies graves and then going to lunch in the café with the "Welcome to our Liberators" signs in the windows. Most of this is gone now, passed within my life time, I was really aware that I am part of a new generation; the one who goes to experience a bit of the past and who theorectically carries on the sacred French duty of "mémoire." But why, I wonder? The school kids around were school kid-y, on a field-trip and abnoxious. WWII was something on their museum scavenger hunt list while I was thinking about army heirarchy and the military industrial complex. The oldest people there were seeing bits and peices of childhood and reminicing about playing in the bomb shelter. They were moved and so was I. The American Cemetary had the air of a place that will be maintained for ever ( in perpetuity as they say) but it is funny to see how people's relationships to the memorial change as time goes by even as the memorial itself demands no less of them.
If all this gets to be too much for you in Normandy, you can drink cidre, look at the scenery and think about William the Conqueror's neat little medieval war. He too was a formidable organizer: Mr. Doomsday Book. I checked out his castle and inadvertently ran across his grave in the church in Caen. A nice end to two weeks of gadding about.
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Friday, April 15, 2011
The things you learn about yourself: at home with me in Rennes
When I got off the plane in January in Paris, the first vocab words I missed were ones for smells. Wet pavement mixed with special car exhaust...very strong. I asked "how do you say smell?" but the question isn't that simple. Do you just smell something-- sense it's existence-- or does it reek, is it wonderful, is it frightening? I had no idea this mattered to me that much. In English, "smell" frequently has a bad connotation. I don't know about French. I've learned " Ça pue" that reeks... and "ahhh ça sent bon" that smells good (what I say at dinner time). However I still feel very uncertain when I want to specify: "the room smells close" " my tape player in phonetics class smells hot" " the middle schoolers I work with reek"" the smell of beer" " France smells of urine," " I smell smoke" " Lucie's famous 1.5 hour cauliflower boil..." " the kitchen smells disgusting" " I love the scent of these mysterious and romantic flowers" " Froufrou smells absolutely vile and the guinea pig has his ripe moments" " the pong of lice shampoo: at the swimming pool today I KNEW the little boys had used my towel because the "éloigne-poux" ( put distance between you and the lice) shampoo overpowered the chlorine" " the little boys' socks" " the Camembert in the frigo" " the dishwasher whose aroma they keep in control by shutting the kitchen door at all times" "my clothes when I finally got them clean for the first time in 4 months" " my clothes before I got them clean" " the manure spreader outside of Rennes" " après fish market" " outside the bakery" " riding the bike 4 feet behind the city bus." " different tobacco brands…"
Before I started to speak another language, I had no idea I thought about or talked about smells so much. With my semi-conscience thoughts now on public display, I sound obsessive: " how would you describe this scent?" " Do you smell that?" and no one does. I just got hit with the smell of Lucie burning the bottom of her cake which is definitely still wiggly in the middle-- her oven runs hot and her stove runs on gas. Occasionally the smell of gas fills the first floor and I go running into the kitchen hoping the friction from my socks doesn't spark and set the house on fire. The fireplace too has its own special scent: creosote and sometimes the smells of things that shouldn't be burned. Lucie cleaned the house this week and waxed the floors. You betcha I stopped short each time I entered the house to the scent of a new cleaning product. See how much you learn about the world when you breathe deeply? Are you safe? Do you need to fix something? Run away? Put out your flaming sock? Come to a standstill and enjoy? Do you know Rennes better after reading my smell list? I think those scents will remind me of my time here for the rest of my life. Some of them are universal and others are particular. My host brother and I were looking at American money tonight and my hands did not smell like Euros; they smelled like the Dollar and it was shocking. Soon not only will the scent of American money be so familiar as to be dulled into nothing, but I will have to fit the elongated bills into my wallet once again. No more cheery jingling change burning a hole in my pocket (nothing spends like a 2 euro coin), no more over-cooked cauliflower perfuming my scarves for weeks to come, no more 500 year old church smell, no more bakery and no more Thursday night metro pong though I should get to Vermont about the time the flower scent really starts to hit the way it has here. And what about awareness? Is smell part of my active thoughts 24-7 because everything is still so new here, or has it risen to the surface because I cannot describe something I took for granted at home? Will my sense of smell dull once I start running up and down Poker Hill rd past the cow barn where I have been running for 20 years ? In that vein, does France smell more than America or is it the newness that smells? Is it psychological? Do I smell because I am anxious: the house will burn down, I will asphyxiate in my phonetics lab, I will get lice, that French laundry detergent I added to my bleach was actually ammonia, my dinner will burn in the funny Celsius oven. Remember I do have to eat that cauliflower and let’s not talk about that microwaved frozen zucchini releasing its particulates into the atmosphere…
Whatever the reason why, smell and you put yourself in time and space and place. I am here in Rennes and it is springtime; we are having cauliflower purée for dinner and burned cake for desert; I am going to open the window so I don't choke on the smell of floor wax and then I am going to fumigate my towel. Smell and realize your brain is wondrous made: I am going to save myself from immanent danger, I am storing memories. Smell, and even though you are tongue-tied and helpless, this very fact brings something to mind. It sears the inside of my brain: perhaps it is something that the person who can say it in words will never even know to express.
Before I started to speak another language, I had no idea I thought about or talked about smells so much. With my semi-conscience thoughts now on public display, I sound obsessive: " how would you describe this scent?" " Do you smell that?" and no one does. I just got hit with the smell of Lucie burning the bottom of her cake which is definitely still wiggly in the middle-- her oven runs hot and her stove runs on gas. Occasionally the smell of gas fills the first floor and I go running into the kitchen hoping the friction from my socks doesn't spark and set the house on fire. The fireplace too has its own special scent: creosote and sometimes the smells of things that shouldn't be burned. Lucie cleaned the house this week and waxed the floors. You betcha I stopped short each time I entered the house to the scent of a new cleaning product. See how much you learn about the world when you breathe deeply? Are you safe? Do you need to fix something? Run away? Put out your flaming sock? Come to a standstill and enjoy? Do you know Rennes better after reading my smell list? I think those scents will remind me of my time here for the rest of my life. Some of them are universal and others are particular. My host brother and I were looking at American money tonight and my hands did not smell like Euros; they smelled like the Dollar and it was shocking. Soon not only will the scent of American money be so familiar as to be dulled into nothing, but I will have to fit the elongated bills into my wallet once again. No more cheery jingling change burning a hole in my pocket (nothing spends like a 2 euro coin), no more over-cooked cauliflower perfuming my scarves for weeks to come, no more 500 year old church smell, no more bakery and no more Thursday night metro pong though I should get to Vermont about the time the flower scent really starts to hit the way it has here. And what about awareness? Is smell part of my active thoughts 24-7 because everything is still so new here, or has it risen to the surface because I cannot describe something I took for granted at home? Will my sense of smell dull once I start running up and down Poker Hill rd past the cow barn where I have been running for 20 years ? In that vein, does France smell more than America or is it the newness that smells? Is it psychological? Do I smell because I am anxious: the house will burn down, I will asphyxiate in my phonetics lab, I will get lice, that French laundry detergent I added to my bleach was actually ammonia, my dinner will burn in the funny Celsius oven. Remember I do have to eat that cauliflower and let’s not talk about that microwaved frozen zucchini releasing its particulates into the atmosphere…
Whatever the reason why, smell and you put yourself in time and space and place. I am here in Rennes and it is springtime; we are having cauliflower purée for dinner and burned cake for desert; I am going to open the window so I don't choke on the smell of floor wax and then I am going to fumigate my towel. Smell and realize your brain is wondrous made: I am going to save myself from immanent danger, I am storing memories. Smell, and even though you are tongue-tied and helpless, this very fact brings something to mind. It sears the inside of my brain: perhaps it is something that the person who can say it in words will never even know to express.
Saturday, April 9, 2011
Déjeuner sur l'herbe
Today Lucie announced that we were going picnicking at a lake on the outskirts of Rennes. We took our bicycles to get there and I discovered the famous main-drag canal which has been eluding me lo these many months. We biked along through the greenery and the violent yellow mustard fields past the soccer stadium and out of town. Because I don't speak French very well, my littlest host brother thinks I am about two and takes care of me. He told me each time we started up a hill that I would need to pedal harder and then when we stopped he taught me how to lock up my bike. When I was safely installed on my beach towel, he went to join his brother in the water. With regards to the water,
"she is good," and "she does not have cold." She did smell pretty rank, but I said nothing. They submerged themselves alongside a puppy whose owner was asked by a lady on shore if she gave her dog swimming lessons or if it had learned itself...
The family on the blanket next to us was having a bit of a commotion. One girl had forgotten her bathing suit and decided to swim in her bra. However, her mother was afraid she would get burned and made her wear a shirt with it. This seemed decidedly unfair to the girl in question because as I noticed when I opened my eyes after my nap, every other woman in the group was sitting around casually topless eating lunch in the manner that Americans stereotype the French. I heard that was demoded, but apparently not. The girl protested loudly, but was forced into a shirt. Her boyfriend was there eating lunch with the family and I wonder if she was embarrassed. He faced the lake away from the scene and he and shirt girl hurried away to bury each other in the sand and play soccer. The family remained and after four hours they were all the color of lobsters. How could you eat triple cream cheese and chips naked and in public? They weren't the only ones. I was probably wearing the most clothes on the beach aside from the Turkish ladies who had the tastiest looking picnic ever: kabobs in a huge round bowl and three baguettes crammed into a baby carriage.
After I got tired of laying around and being stared at for wearing clothes, I decided to walk around the pound and find out where the bagpipe noises were coming from. A long ways away, a lone man in a kilt was practicing in the shade of a tree. Everyone walking by was giving him the eye. I'll give him credit for actually being pretty good. I suspect that the guy who plays bagpipes each Saturday at the market has been clandestinely hired to improve pedestrian circulation; he is tortuously out of tune. Our pond piper was spot on. Just around the bend from all this were the model boat guys. This is only an occupation for middle aged men. I am not sure why. They stand on shore in wading boots, tensed and concentrated; their boats sail in formation and their pot bellies are surprisingly coordinated too. A little ways off two other "modelistes" sat aloof. They were outfitted in matching British khaki, boots and smart caps. I worried that when I walked by I disrupted their radio transmission. I hope that their fancy matching outfits were specially intended for afternoons with the model yacht. How bizarre.
After the unsupervised teenaged boys with rouge soccer balls, ciggerettes, hooka and foul mouths got to be too much on the beach, I left on a bike ride in the land of cows outside of Rennes. Super green and lots of manure. It is funny how there are petite villages scattered around the city which seem to be in the middle of nowhere, but have bus service to Rennes and are really only about 5 miles out. It is like being in a different world.
Friday, March 25, 2011
Behaviors
Are people all the world over the same, or are they different? This is a question study abroad students are supposed to mull over as they immerse themselves in local culture. That being said, after two months in Rennes the answer defies me even though I spend the majority of my time here people watching. I have also realized (rather late) that Rennes is a city and I have never lived in a city before. Half the time I don’t know if I am observing urban life or particularly French urban life. At any rate the subjects are plentiful. Here I go:
1# Rules and Regulations.
I have been taught that France has a culture of authority and regulation. This has been foremost in my mind and consequently I see it everywhere whether it is the middle school teacher shrieking at her student who dared use a green hi-lighter when she had specified pink, or the huge “pelouse authorisé” sign at the Jardin des Plantes. Strangely enough, although there are acres of grass (pelouse) at the jardin and there were hundreds of people there on that sunny day, they were all flopped on the authorized side. Lucie told me that once she walked across the “pelouse intredit” and one of the green and orange clad garden workers stood about two feet from her and blew his whistle wildly. I saw one of these patrollers astride a Gestapo-like moto-bike. I don’t know where they found this thing because it looked kind of antique. Instead of a side car, he had a bucket of rotting plant material and of course his whistle. What fun you could have roaring through the sloping forbidden grasses on that thing…
What do you do however when the rules defy your objectives? My bus driver Tuesday thought he was driving a Citroën instead of a segmented caterpillar. In true spirit, he breaked VERY late for two successive stoplights and went roaring across the crosswalk into the roundabout when his two-ton vehicle refused to submit. The lady at the crosswalk paused to lecture him. His next action blew my mind. He called his supervisor to complain that the stoplights were not regulation and he had been compelled to break very hard because of this irregularity. The city of Rennes has got to fix its stoplights... Now why didn’t I think of that? Evading personal responsibility much? The busses are on time in Rennes (and fabulously convenient), but there is a minute slip room depending on who gets on and off; the lights could not possibly be green each time the bus goes by. I’ve been wondering about this guy for days.
#2 French afternoons.
People in Rennes spend an inordinate amount of time on park benches. This is where I get shaky on my French behavior or urban behavior, but in my experience, Americans don’t seek out park benches in the same manner. You are on a park bench because you have to be there: your feet are tired, you are waiting for something, you are stranded in some way. Not so in France. In the afternoons between 4 and 7 about the time the American in me is perishing from hunger, people sit on the benches obviously doing nothing but enjoying the scenery, the sun, the people, not working etc… If they are young men, they might have beers, if they are girls, they will have cigarettes, if they are elderly, they will be blinking in the sun and taking off their scarves. If they are mamas they will be with other mamas and will have to get up periodically to make sure their toddlers don’t pinch their fingers in the ever fascinating and incongruous elliptical trainer planted in the grass. (Let it be noted that I have never seen anyone over the age of 5 actually exercising on these mysteries). Middle aged men run rather professionally and the occasional teenaged or twenty something girl jogs with her friend looking super out of her element and usually wearing regular but de-moded clothing. I can’t be certain why I feel this way, but it seems to me that people approach this time of day and its God given right to in-you-face leisure as reason #735 why the world turns around each day. Released from school ( which gets out around 5pm), work and daily responsibilities for a short while, people postpone dinner and relax. All of this in public too. This is definitely not American behavior in my experience. At home during this time I am frequently trying to charge through something and figure out a way to eat dinner. The idea of culturally supported doing-nothing is totally foreign to me. Don’t those people sitting on the bench in the sun for two hours have something to do? cries the American within me. Despite philosophical difficulties with the concept, I got to admit it is rather nice; I am out there too.
At the same time as this meta-level perhaps cultural, perhaps urban tendency to flock towards parks, there is plain old garden variety human activity. In France, people get on the wrong bus and fume in frustration as they are carried out of town. French educators use the French language to get into professional tiffs when their territory is threatened. French girls crying on a bench are given French cigarettes and French Kleenex by their French friends. French middle school boys shove each other and French middle school girls giggle. All this mundane and wonderful kind of stuff could go on anywhere. Some of my favorites:
The teenaged boys who had jumped the fence behind the toddler exercise equipment and were orderly tagging the wall. They had set up a boom box on a picnic table and had some cans there too. They kept pulling an Impressionist painter and jumping back over the fence to view their work from afar. When I showed up they were conferring about their signatures. During all this, no one was giving them any trouble and a few people were curiously checking out what they were painting. When they were done, they jumped the fence, brought their cans to the recycling, and left leaving only a lingering scent of spray paint.
The metro. What can I not say about the metro? It is transportation yes, but I seem to have a sort of romance with it. Yesterday there was the cat-lady with the bag of newspaper strips who was weaving pot-holders during morning rush. The night before, it was just me an a very sad hipster boy wearing skin tight jeans and a stylized sailor jacket with at least thirty buttons and a metal squirrel emblem. He had his i-pod jammed in, and his black-rimmed glasses magnified his huge tears. Once it was the jolly Senegalese guys with shopping bags filled with strawberries. During the late mornings it is the Turkish ladies or the Algerian ladies with their groceries, baby carriages and brilliantly colored outfits. At night it reeks of cigarettes and booze and people pass around "juice bottles." At all times of day it is an experience of intensely personal anonymity and when people come out of their metro masks, it is also a time for heavily muscled rough looking men to coo into baby carriages and escort elderly ladies over to the chairs. In short: fabulous.
With all this now on the table, I still don’t know about my beginning question: universality of humanity or not? People seem to have the same basic behavioral motivations as Americans (frustrations, jealousy, tears, chivalry towards old ladies and mamas, crazy happiness), but in cultural context they manifest themselves differently and it takes me a while to see clearly (me realizing the French teachers were establishing professional turf case in point). I watch this stuff happening, but I also see it happening apart from me. I am charmed and sometimes it seems as if everything makes sense. I am staggered and I walk away wondering what on earth I am doing here a stranger in a strange land. I know how to get around in Rennes and I am starting to know exactly how my French skills are used in Rennes, but while I walk amongst the flowering March magnolias and wait for eternity for dinner I can’t help thinking how different I am from all this.
1# Rules and Regulations.
I have been taught that France has a culture of authority and regulation. This has been foremost in my mind and consequently I see it everywhere whether it is the middle school teacher shrieking at her student who dared use a green hi-lighter when she had specified pink, or the huge “pelouse authorisé” sign at the Jardin des Plantes. Strangely enough, although there are acres of grass (pelouse) at the jardin and there were hundreds of people there on that sunny day, they were all flopped on the authorized side. Lucie told me that once she walked across the “pelouse intredit” and one of the green and orange clad garden workers stood about two feet from her and blew his whistle wildly. I saw one of these patrollers astride a Gestapo-like moto-bike. I don’t know where they found this thing because it looked kind of antique. Instead of a side car, he had a bucket of rotting plant material and of course his whistle. What fun you could have roaring through the sloping forbidden grasses on that thing…
What do you do however when the rules defy your objectives? My bus driver Tuesday thought he was driving a Citroën instead of a segmented caterpillar. In true spirit, he breaked VERY late for two successive stoplights and went roaring across the crosswalk into the roundabout when his two-ton vehicle refused to submit. The lady at the crosswalk paused to lecture him. His next action blew my mind. He called his supervisor to complain that the stoplights were not regulation and he had been compelled to break very hard because of this irregularity. The city of Rennes has got to fix its stoplights... Now why didn’t I think of that? Evading personal responsibility much? The busses are on time in Rennes (and fabulously convenient), but there is a minute slip room depending on who gets on and off; the lights could not possibly be green each time the bus goes by. I’ve been wondering about this guy for days.
#2 French afternoons.
People in Rennes spend an inordinate amount of time on park benches. This is where I get shaky on my French behavior or urban behavior, but in my experience, Americans don’t seek out park benches in the same manner. You are on a park bench because you have to be there: your feet are tired, you are waiting for something, you are stranded in some way. Not so in France. In the afternoons between 4 and 7 about the time the American in me is perishing from hunger, people sit on the benches obviously doing nothing but enjoying the scenery, the sun, the people, not working etc… If they are young men, they might have beers, if they are girls, they will have cigarettes, if they are elderly, they will be blinking in the sun and taking off their scarves. If they are mamas they will be with other mamas and will have to get up periodically to make sure their toddlers don’t pinch their fingers in the ever fascinating and incongruous elliptical trainer planted in the grass. (Let it be noted that I have never seen anyone over the age of 5 actually exercising on these mysteries). Middle aged men run rather professionally and the occasional teenaged or twenty something girl jogs with her friend looking super out of her element and usually wearing regular but de-moded clothing. I can’t be certain why I feel this way, but it seems to me that people approach this time of day and its God given right to in-you-face leisure as reason #735 why the world turns around each day. Released from school ( which gets out around 5pm), work and daily responsibilities for a short while, people postpone dinner and relax. All of this in public too. This is definitely not American behavior in my experience. At home during this time I am frequently trying to charge through something and figure out a way to eat dinner. The idea of culturally supported doing-nothing is totally foreign to me. Don’t those people sitting on the bench in the sun for two hours have something to do? cries the American within me. Despite philosophical difficulties with the concept, I got to admit it is rather nice; I am out there too.
At the same time as this meta-level perhaps cultural, perhaps urban tendency to flock towards parks, there is plain old garden variety human activity. In France, people get on the wrong bus and fume in frustration as they are carried out of town. French educators use the French language to get into professional tiffs when their territory is threatened. French girls crying on a bench are given French cigarettes and French Kleenex by their French friends. French middle school boys shove each other and French middle school girls giggle. All this mundane and wonderful kind of stuff could go on anywhere. Some of my favorites:
The teenaged boys who had jumped the fence behind the toddler exercise equipment and were orderly tagging the wall. They had set up a boom box on a picnic table and had some cans there too. They kept pulling an Impressionist painter and jumping back over the fence to view their work from afar. When I showed up they were conferring about their signatures. During all this, no one was giving them any trouble and a few people were curiously checking out what they were painting. When they were done, they jumped the fence, brought their cans to the recycling, and left leaving only a lingering scent of spray paint.
The metro. What can I not say about the metro? It is transportation yes, but I seem to have a sort of romance with it. Yesterday there was the cat-lady with the bag of newspaper strips who was weaving pot-holders during morning rush. The night before, it was just me an a very sad hipster boy wearing skin tight jeans and a stylized sailor jacket with at least thirty buttons and a metal squirrel emblem. He had his i-pod jammed in, and his black-rimmed glasses magnified his huge tears. Once it was the jolly Senegalese guys with shopping bags filled with strawberries. During the late mornings it is the Turkish ladies or the Algerian ladies with their groceries, baby carriages and brilliantly colored outfits. At night it reeks of cigarettes and booze and people pass around "juice bottles." At all times of day it is an experience of intensely personal anonymity and when people come out of their metro masks, it is also a time for heavily muscled rough looking men to coo into baby carriages and escort elderly ladies over to the chairs. In short: fabulous.
With all this now on the table, I still don’t know about my beginning question: universality of humanity or not? People seem to have the same basic behavioral motivations as Americans (frustrations, jealousy, tears, chivalry towards old ladies and mamas, crazy happiness), but in cultural context they manifest themselves differently and it takes me a while to see clearly (me realizing the French teachers were establishing professional turf case in point). I watch this stuff happening, but I also see it happening apart from me. I am charmed and sometimes it seems as if everything makes sense. I am staggered and I walk away wondering what on earth I am doing here a stranger in a strange land. I know how to get around in Rennes and I am starting to know exactly how my French skills are used in Rennes, but while I walk amongst the flowering March magnolias and wait for eternity for dinner I can’t help thinking how different I am from all this.
Friday, March 18, 2011
odds and ends
Going away from Rennes for a week and then coming back made me realize what a great city it is. Rennes is overflowing with places I like to wander around in and its architecture is awesome. Right now the air is clogged with the smells of gardinias, siringas, mimosas and forsythias. There is light in the evening for a long time and the combination of mysterious violent purple blooms, heavy smells, and the golden rays of the setting sun makes for an intoxicating 6: 30pm walk around my neighborhood. Truely suburban paradise: everyone riding their bikes home from work, people talking to each other through open, screenless second story windows, ladies with their babies on the front stoop, older ladies gathered at convenient street corners, middle school boys yelling through letter slots and eating entire sleeves of cookies before dinner, old men out for very dignified walks with the prerequisit wooden stick and wool hat duo. I like it so I go out in it. Rennes is a bike city so sometimes I go out in the bike lane and pretend I know French traffic laws and am accustomed to abiding them on a bike. It's fun and I can cover a ton more ground than on foot. Last Thursday I took Lucie's bike along the canal path where the mules of the pre-desiel-engine houseboats used to walk. After a while it goes into the country and is green green green and covered with sheep and cows pumping out Breton dairy products. I rode really fast out and then turned around and the wind hit me. Ohh! The way back I went through downtown and had my first cobble stones with bicycle experience. Bump bump bump bump.
I am also making great strides with my host mom's little boys who have been rather distant with me. This week they are not at all obsessed with their top collection which was previously a near constant occupation and thus they are now available for other fun activities such as throwing cereal with me around the kitchen when their mom isn't home, playing the piano with their toes ( I told them that is how Americans do it), playing violent games of croquet around tree roots and contesting my awesome* chess skills ( I won for the first time ever last night). When they are not beating me at chess, the pauvres suffer under their mother's current mania for spinach and zuchinni themed dinners and make up for their lack of nourishment by eating entire loaves of brioche bread before dinner.
Nourishment leads me to the next event of note: the North American invasion of Rennes. Last weekend Lucie was gone mountineering with ice picks and crampons and ropes so she told me to invite people over to her house which was possibly the nicest gesture ever. However, little known by me, Erin, Zoe and Bjorn had planned a birthday surprise for me. Thursday, one day before I thought everyone was coming, Erin, the mistress of stealth, had me positioned at the metro stop waiting for one of our Rennes friends who I had invited to dinner. Apparently I had a really spectacular slack jaw when Zoe and Bjorn surfaced on the escalator instead--their faces pressed against the plexiglass at my knee level. I just about died and then they mobbed me and took me out to dinner at a Mexican restaurant. Afterwards I was led to a secret location which turned out to be the anglophone bar the Funky Monkey. There someone else had miraculously arranged all of my fellow American study abroaders to swing by and wish me happy birthday. The bartender was even in on it; he brought me some sort of Roman candle bedecked cream covered shot that he made me take without my hands which I executed flawlessly AND avoided being captured on camera. Fun. The rest of the weekend we spent wandering around Rennes, staying up too late laughing and eating. Eating a lot. My favorite was a pancake meal we had after a long walk by the canal. We used Lucie's party crepe maker and were able to fry lardons ( French bacon chunks), cook pancakes and make impromptu toasted cheese out of Camembert all while sitting at the table. To make up for our lack of syrup I made a carmelized butter, apple, sugar, cinnamon dish on the stove. YUM! I thought I would never eat again, but the first 2 days after they left were marked by massive hunger on my part. Come back friends! I really enjoyed how my stomach ached from laughter.
I am also making great strides with my host mom's little boys who have been rather distant with me. This week they are not at all obsessed with their top collection which was previously a near constant occupation and thus they are now available for other fun activities such as throwing cereal with me around the kitchen when their mom isn't home, playing the piano with their toes ( I told them that is how Americans do it), playing violent games of croquet around tree roots and contesting my awesome* chess skills ( I won for the first time ever last night). When they are not beating me at chess, the pauvres suffer under their mother's current mania for spinach and zuchinni themed dinners and make up for their lack of nourishment by eating entire loaves of brioche bread before dinner.
Nourishment leads me to the next event of note: the North American invasion of Rennes. Last weekend Lucie was gone mountineering with ice picks and crampons and ropes so she told me to invite people over to her house which was possibly the nicest gesture ever. However, little known by me, Erin, Zoe and Bjorn had planned a birthday surprise for me. Thursday, one day before I thought everyone was coming, Erin, the mistress of stealth, had me positioned at the metro stop waiting for one of our Rennes friends who I had invited to dinner. Apparently I had a really spectacular slack jaw when Zoe and Bjorn surfaced on the escalator instead--their faces pressed against the plexiglass at my knee level. I just about died and then they mobbed me and took me out to dinner at a Mexican restaurant. Afterwards I was led to a secret location which turned out to be the anglophone bar the Funky Monkey. There someone else had miraculously arranged all of my fellow American study abroaders to swing by and wish me happy birthday. The bartender was even in on it; he brought me some sort of Roman candle bedecked cream covered shot that he made me take without my hands which I executed flawlessly AND avoided being captured on camera. Fun. The rest of the weekend we spent wandering around Rennes, staying up too late laughing and eating. Eating a lot. My favorite was a pancake meal we had after a long walk by the canal. We used Lucie's party crepe maker and were able to fry lardons ( French bacon chunks), cook pancakes and make impromptu toasted cheese out of Camembert all while sitting at the table. To make up for our lack of syrup I made a carmelized butter, apple, sugar, cinnamon dish on the stove. YUM! I thought I would never eat again, but the first 2 days after they left were marked by massive hunger on my part. Come back friends! I really enjoyed how my stomach ached from laughter.
Monday, March 7, 2011
Update from a globe trotter
The past week was vacation for the city of Rennes. I thought there was going to be a stampede of revelers last Friday afternoon at 5 o' clock as people fresh out of work and school paraded the town. I waited 'til the crowds had cleared and boarded the train for Gevena. The ride across France was one of the most beautiful I have ever taken. Everything is so green this time of year and there were puddles and rainbows. I was charmed. Despite being rural, the hand of man is firmly there; you can tell that the land has been worked for a thousand years which is a very interesting sensation.
Erin and I spent Geneva day one trying to find something to eat on a Sunday. We also visited the Red Cross Museum and took a walk along the lake. The next day we made ourselves all day sandwiches and took a really iffy hike at my insistence before gratefully boarding the train to Venice.
Venice was lovely, jammed with French tourists and offered a combination of sun and surprisingly enough snow. I loved watching the guys in boats. They had such comraderie and would shout stuff to their friends on shore as they rode past. It seemed like everyone knew each other and they were so kind to tourists. Wandering the streets was the most fun, but I also enjoyed the Doge's Palace and the Naval museum.
Florence was just like the movie Room with A View. I had the sound track running through my head as I climbed about on the bridges and the hills. Beautiful. I walked around in a kind of euphoria clutching my ever present gelato cone. I also visited all the museums of stautes and church art and had several really nice meals. I sampled a tripe and pig ear concoction and found it good. I have several new pasta sauce ideas including one with pumpkin and rosemary which was far removed from the mid-western pumpkin loaf. Who'd of guessed?
For the way back I took an overnight train from Florence to Paris. We all woke up early to some French lady insisting to the conductor that we were actually in Switerland despite the fact that we had crossed into France. They talked for a long while and slowly everyone filed out of their "couchettes" to stand in the corridor with them and watch the sun rise over the decidedly French hills. It was lovely.
For pictures try: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=302855&id=637287248&l=8f25029f02
Erin and I spent Geneva day one trying to find something to eat on a Sunday. We also visited the Red Cross Museum and took a walk along the lake. The next day we made ourselves all day sandwiches and took a really iffy hike at my insistence before gratefully boarding the train to Venice.
Venice was lovely, jammed with French tourists and offered a combination of sun and surprisingly enough snow. I loved watching the guys in boats. They had such comraderie and would shout stuff to their friends on shore as they rode past. It seemed like everyone knew each other and they were so kind to tourists. Wandering the streets was the most fun, but I also enjoyed the Doge's Palace and the Naval museum.
Florence was just like the movie Room with A View. I had the sound track running through my head as I climbed about on the bridges and the hills. Beautiful. I walked around in a kind of euphoria clutching my ever present gelato cone. I also visited all the museums of stautes and church art and had several really nice meals. I sampled a tripe and pig ear concoction and found it good. I have several new pasta sauce ideas including one with pumpkin and rosemary which was far removed from the mid-western pumpkin loaf. Who'd of guessed?
For the way back I took an overnight train from Florence to Paris. We all woke up early to some French lady insisting to the conductor that we were actually in Switerland despite the fact that we had crossed into France. They talked for a long while and slowly everyone filed out of their "couchettes" to stand in the corridor with them and watch the sun rise over the decidedly French hills. It was lovely.
For pictures try: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=302855&id=637287248&l=8f25029f02
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Things I enjoy getting agitated about
#1. Taking my baby steps in French-English translation I bring to you:
American English ( that weed spreading in the British linguistic garden) explained by a linguistics scholar from Bretagne. Check out my difficulties dealing with French comma usage!
"A force that attracts, not by its intellectual strength, but, like tabloids, pornographic films, drugs, Pandora’s Box or the apple held out first by Satan and then by Eve, by its novelty and then its capacity to stir up our unhealthy curiosities. Maybe even immoral!"
I read all ten pages of this beauty basking in his poetic descriptions of my language ( real English is the language of Shakespeare, but Americans don't understand this). He positively out does himself with metaphor. I only hope that he succumbed and can actually speak American English.
#2. How do you like your cream?
My host mom eats butter pretty much straight. She most frequently cuts cheese sized hunks of it to put on grilled bread-y bits which she floats in her chicory. She puts a good 1/4 cup of it into our vegetables, in the soup, rice, potatoes, in chocolate. There is a pat of it in and on everything. With this in mind, I was surprised the other night to see her cooking my egg in olive oil ( ditto with greasing the cake pan). We had roughly the following conversation :
me: " you don't cook your eggs in butter?"
L: " No"
me: " I just thought that since you like butter so much you'd make your eggs in it"
L ( insulted): "What do you mean I like butter so much? I never cook with butter--it's bad for you. I am very careful about this. Do people do that in American?"
I should add that I like eating butter with my host mom, this was just a rather confusing conversation which taken at face value seems to suggest that cooking with butter is bad while eating it good. Either that or my host mom cannot resist the butter dish when she is at the table. In any case, I cannot resist the Camembert which I eat in the same quantity and on the same bread-y bits as she her butter. Note to all enthusiasts: if you are modeling data in French using a pie chart, you refer to each section as simply "a camembert."
#3. How all things ( despite the labeling) actually come from Bretagne: the subject of my history class which I have felt necessary to re-name from " France in the world" to" France at the center of the world."
Ever wondered where your Parmesan cheese comes from? Probably not because it is a controlled origin substance ie only Parmesan if made in that little chunk of Italy. However in this day and age of globalization and the unquestionable innovation of the Breton people not to mention their unparalleled cheese-making skills and the actual unremarkable nature of Parmesan which makes it easy to knock off, that Parmesan actually comes from a factory in Bretagne. The Italians no longer make cheese, only lables.
Butter: the Chinese know what good butter is. It comes from Bretagne and they import it secretly because of trade restictions. However, nothing else will do.
Pork: Breton pork is the pride of the region. Ham you think is Italian is actually Breton raised and shipped to Italy via refrigerated trucks which crowd a particular intersection in Rennes every day at 18h00. Once the convoy reaches Italy, the Italians dress up the pork and sell it.
#4. Aspects of colonialism and global French activities explained: why I was writhing during my two hour stint of France in the World this evening.
a) The French built the Panama canal, but they " didn't arrive at paying for it." American banks bought them out. No mention of the huge French bank scandal associated with the Panama canal, the faulty design plans and malaria all which did the French in. Yeah the Americans got in there with their new money and Big Stick Diplomacy aspirations, but there was a bit of engineering envolved on their part...
b) The French emancipated all the slaves in their Empire in 1848. Because they all wanted to be French citizens and the French could not deny the logic of their desires.
c) The slaves "came" from Africa to work on the sugar plantations like it was a garden party. How droll. I disagree with the verb choice which he used repetedly.
This list goes on and on. My professor simply amazes me with his opinions on the world and his knowlege of Breton beet production. Despite the fact that I am banging my head on the desk during his class, he is actually really nice and keeps inviting us into his office to practice our French and partake in his vast knowledge. I am convinced he knows everything about France, most things about Europe, lots about Asia and a fair bit about the U.S. He has lived in Vietnam and traveled in Asia extensively. He vacations in Italy where he enjoys Breton products with Italian labling( ditto with Breton butter in China). He stage manages Roman ruins in Rennes and is the only person who remembers that there is a random Roman wall chunk in the court-yard of the languages building at Univerité de Rennes II. He even likes the EU. I cannot fit this man into any kind of mold, therefore it is probably good that I sit in his class and become overwhelmed by the choice bits of information he purveys. Wonders never cease.
American English ( that weed spreading in the British linguistic garden) explained by a linguistics scholar from Bretagne. Check out my difficulties dealing with French comma usage!
"A force that attracts, not by its intellectual strength, but, like tabloids, pornographic films, drugs, Pandora’s Box or the apple held out first by Satan and then by Eve, by its novelty and then its capacity to stir up our unhealthy curiosities. Maybe even immoral!"
I read all ten pages of this beauty basking in his poetic descriptions of my language ( real English is the language of Shakespeare, but Americans don't understand this). He positively out does himself with metaphor. I only hope that he succumbed and can actually speak American English.
#2. How do you like your cream?
My host mom eats butter pretty much straight. She most frequently cuts cheese sized hunks of it to put on grilled bread-y bits which she floats in her chicory. She puts a good 1/4 cup of it into our vegetables, in the soup, rice, potatoes, in chocolate. There is a pat of it in and on everything. With this in mind, I was surprised the other night to see her cooking my egg in olive oil ( ditto with greasing the cake pan). We had roughly the following conversation :
me: " you don't cook your eggs in butter?"
L: " No"
me: " I just thought that since you like butter so much you'd make your eggs in it"
L ( insulted): "What do you mean I like butter so much? I never cook with butter--it's bad for you. I am very careful about this. Do people do that in American?"
I should add that I like eating butter with my host mom, this was just a rather confusing conversation which taken at face value seems to suggest that cooking with butter is bad while eating it good. Either that or my host mom cannot resist the butter dish when she is at the table. In any case, I cannot resist the Camembert which I eat in the same quantity and on the same bread-y bits as she her butter. Note to all enthusiasts: if you are modeling data in French using a pie chart, you refer to each section as simply "a camembert."
#3. How all things ( despite the labeling) actually come from Bretagne: the subject of my history class which I have felt necessary to re-name from " France in the world" to" France at the center of the world."
Ever wondered where your Parmesan cheese comes from? Probably not because it is a controlled origin substance ie only Parmesan if made in that little chunk of Italy. However in this day and age of globalization and the unquestionable innovation of the Breton people not to mention their unparalleled cheese-making skills and the actual unremarkable nature of Parmesan which makes it easy to knock off, that Parmesan actually comes from a factory in Bretagne. The Italians no longer make cheese, only lables.
Butter: the Chinese know what good butter is. It comes from Bretagne and they import it secretly because of trade restictions. However, nothing else will do.
Pork: Breton pork is the pride of the region. Ham you think is Italian is actually Breton raised and shipped to Italy via refrigerated trucks which crowd a particular intersection in Rennes every day at 18h00. Once the convoy reaches Italy, the Italians dress up the pork and sell it.
#4. Aspects of colonialism and global French activities explained: why I was writhing during my two hour stint of France in the World this evening.
a) The French built the Panama canal, but they " didn't arrive at paying for it." American banks bought them out. No mention of the huge French bank scandal associated with the Panama canal, the faulty design plans and malaria all which did the French in. Yeah the Americans got in there with their new money and Big Stick Diplomacy aspirations, but there was a bit of engineering envolved on their part...
b) The French emancipated all the slaves in their Empire in 1848. Because they all wanted to be French citizens and the French could not deny the logic of their desires.
c) The slaves "came" from Africa to work on the sugar plantations like it was a garden party. How droll. I disagree with the verb choice which he used repetedly.
This list goes on and on. My professor simply amazes me with his opinions on the world and his knowlege of Breton beet production. Despite the fact that I am banging my head on the desk during his class, he is actually really nice and keeps inviting us into his office to practice our French and partake in his vast knowledge. I am convinced he knows everything about France, most things about Europe, lots about Asia and a fair bit about the U.S. He has lived in Vietnam and traveled in Asia extensively. He vacations in Italy where he enjoys Breton products with Italian labling( ditto with Breton butter in China). He stage manages Roman ruins in Rennes and is the only person who remembers that there is a random Roman wall chunk in the court-yard of the languages building at Univerité de Rennes II. He even likes the EU. I cannot fit this man into any kind of mold, therefore it is probably good that I sit in his class and become overwhelmed by the choice bits of information he purveys. Wonders never cease.
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