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.
Saturday, February 19, 2011
A Day of Photo-Journalism
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=297511&id=637287248&l=59bf0c1ad0
Click on this link to see a day at the market, in down-town Rennes and along the canal. A big walk!
Click on this link to see a day at the market, in down-town Rennes and along the canal. A big walk!
Thursday, February 17, 2011
Teaching English
This week I had my first hour of "stage" at a local school. I take the #1 bus out to a building with copper sides and teach 13 and 14 year olds English. My weekend project is to figure out the names of English grammar constructions so that I know if the kids have actually mastered the past perfect or not. I was really excited at how welcome I was at the school. When I entered the janitor was fixing the door and he greeted me and pointed me in the right direction. Mariette an English teacher and a really really nice lady took me around and introduced me to all her colleagues and Monsieur le Directeur. It seems from my tour that there are whole ( really nice) sections of the building cordoned off for the teachers. Kids hang out either in the classrooms or outdoors and the teachers get the nice couches and the coffee pots etc... It is in these areas that they gather to gossip shamelessly about their students and to complain about the drama of the day. I got to go to lunch with the teachers and after we had cut everyone else in line we whisked off into a teachers' side lunchroom and I learned about the bad kids' exploits of the morning, the profs who had eaten too much in London over the weekend and the vagaries of the French tutoyer ( the informal you). The school lunch was actually pretty tasty: better than the university fare by far. My experience in the classroom was an eyeful. My teacher was extremely harried ( it was all that cake in London perhaps?) and she knew EXACTLY how she wanted me to procede which of course was not how I wanted to do it. My first moments with her were not like touring the building with Mariette. Without evening allowing me to introduce myself she demanded that everyone ask me questions in the present perfect. They wrote them down on paper while I was left in the lurch--standing in front of the class without yet being formally awknowledged. Then I called on people and answered their questions. French classroom dynamics are very different from American ones. The teachers lash out to maintain order, but I also suspect as a kind of game both with the students and amongst themselves. As I was answearing questions about whether or not I like to listen to music, I became aware of a disturbance which I decided to ignore. The teacher however interrupted me angrily and said " excuse me, I am afraid we are going to have to stop class because Mr. So and So is being disruptive." All eyes on the back of the room, she demanded that the miscreant go to the corner. I confess I was rooting for him when he a) refused to answer her and b) refused to move. Ohhh she was mad mad mad and he just sat there arms crossed with everyone else adding to the drama as noisily as they could. Impass, or so I thought for all of a sudden she said " that's it, we're leaving. Everyone out. If he won't leave, we will" and so we all left and everyone pushed and shoved each other in the hallway and then filed into the room next door and sat down in perfect order. The whole affair was so bizarre that I actually thought little of it and kept on talking. Things that happen in French instead of English are like this...surreal. People can ask me to do things or meet at a certain time and place and I won't do them even though I understand the words. Nothing seems quite true in French-- in my mind passing the butter in French isn't actually passing the butter. Things remain theoretical probabilities while the English they are physical realities. That and the fact that she actually asked him to go to the corner. How could that be real? I was looking around for the dunce cap because that is what happens next in storybooks.
That was an interesting debacle, but the rest of the class period was really fun and the kids were cute and mischievious but also visably curious and shy. I sat there feeling torn because I am going to be teaching them alone and need to have respect and attention, but I was also totally with them against their teacher who was demanding respect and attention in her own way. After class she started telling everyone she met about the events of the morning. It was almost as if she had whipped up the drama for the lunch table. This kid, I was reassured in English, was very bad and I would not be teaching him as he was going to "some sort of trade school" she translated distainfully. I watched a movie for French class at St. Olaf which criticized the limitations of the French education system. One is the fact that only the really brilliant and motivated students benefit from the teacher, and those who can't handle the classroom and its culture of obedience are systematically discounted and left behind. This is the first thing I ran into in the classroom. I am only teaching those kids who already speak a lot and have the most potential. The others wait it out until tradeschool while the teachers complain about them spitefully in the lunch room. For an American used to hearing lip service to fair chance in schools and in fact seeing a lot of effort to help everyone suceed, the anti-democratic nature of this school was really striking. I now understand the worried cocktail conversations I've been overhearing about children and school. If you don't make the grade and make it early, you are toast.
That was an interesting debacle, but the rest of the class period was really fun and the kids were cute and mischievious but also visably curious and shy. I sat there feeling torn because I am going to be teaching them alone and need to have respect and attention, but I was also totally with them against their teacher who was demanding respect and attention in her own way. After class she started telling everyone she met about the events of the morning. It was almost as if she had whipped up the drama for the lunch table. This kid, I was reassured in English, was very bad and I would not be teaching him as he was going to "some sort of trade school" she translated distainfully. I watched a movie for French class at St. Olaf which criticized the limitations of the French education system. One is the fact that only the really brilliant and motivated students benefit from the teacher, and those who can't handle the classroom and its culture of obedience are systematically discounted and left behind. This is the first thing I ran into in the classroom. I am only teaching those kids who already speak a lot and have the most potential. The others wait it out until tradeschool while the teachers complain about them spitefully in the lunch room. For an American used to hearing lip service to fair chance in schools and in fact seeing a lot of effort to help everyone suceed, the anti-democratic nature of this school was really striking. I now understand the worried cocktail conversations I've been overhearing about children and school. If you don't make the grade and make it early, you are toast.
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
flowers that bloom in the spring tra-la
I am not sure when this happened, but all of a sudden it is no longer winter in Rennes. People are still dragging about in their black wool coats, but we have flowers and green things and that scent of springy-ness that for some reason smells the same here as it does everywhere else. The camilia outside my house is starting to weep pink petals and by the church in town the massive shrubberies have started putting out white and pink flowers. Yesterday I rounded the corner on my walk in the Parc du thabor/jardin des plantes and came across a hillside of crocuses.
These crocuses were probably the most (only??) spontaneous display in the whole park. The neon orange clad city workers labor each day to clip and trim and tease reluctant plants into order. The result is quite impressive. To enter you walk through the standard French municipal green gate and then sweep up a wide stone opera staircase with banasters and Ming-vase-sized flower pots. Chosing right or left, you wander up through crawling vines( crawling only in the right places) and past a tumbling stream bed that must have water piped into it during summer. There are acres of green grass, large stately trees, a circular goldfish pond, a Victorian arboritum ( I think this must be the "des plantes" bit because otherwise what a ridiculous name for a park: The Garden of the Plants). The carousel is not running right now, nor are the fountains, but someone has planted hundreds of spring flowers. There are dozens of varieties of ducks in their own pen. There is a rose laberynth with each variety carefully labled. There are dozens of varieties of trees in the rose garden too-- all on stakes and pruned to be a meter high. Yesterday when I was there, the orange workers were wrestling with what I can only call a rose serpent. It was a vine about an inch in diameter with giant thorns which was being neatly wrapped around trelising. The end result was hundreds of feet of vicious looking thorns tamed around posts and wires to resemble a gently undulating high tension electric line about nine feet off the ground. It must be lovely and romantic in summer time a regular cosine wave of roses. In February it looks like Constantine wire. I was super impressed: how do they DO that?
The park near my house is not nearly as formal as this downtown monument. It is low and marshy with ducks, a picnic area and a 90s playground and a 21st century playground. This 90s baby knows which one she prefers! There are huge signs warning you not to walk on the ice and also a display about natural consciousness in the urban environment. The roar of the Rocade which is the periferal highway cuts through the omnipresent mist. I am not sure how you can trumpet the environmental conscienceness of landscaped duck ponds, but Rennes does do a wonderful job with providing little bits of green space for every single appartment dweller. There are snaking paths and parks amidst all of the subsidized housing-- I keep getting lost there amidst the paths and the highrises.
These crocuses were probably the most (only??) spontaneous display in the whole park. The neon orange clad city workers labor each day to clip and trim and tease reluctant plants into order. The result is quite impressive. To enter you walk through the standard French municipal green gate and then sweep up a wide stone opera staircase with banasters and Ming-vase-sized flower pots. Chosing right or left, you wander up through crawling vines( crawling only in the right places) and past a tumbling stream bed that must have water piped into it during summer. There are acres of green grass, large stately trees, a circular goldfish pond, a Victorian arboritum ( I think this must be the "des plantes" bit because otherwise what a ridiculous name for a park: The Garden of the Plants). The carousel is not running right now, nor are the fountains, but someone has planted hundreds of spring flowers. There are dozens of varieties of ducks in their own pen. There is a rose laberynth with each variety carefully labled. There are dozens of varieties of trees in the rose garden too-- all on stakes and pruned to be a meter high. Yesterday when I was there, the orange workers were wrestling with what I can only call a rose serpent. It was a vine about an inch in diameter with giant thorns which was being neatly wrapped around trelising. The end result was hundreds of feet of vicious looking thorns tamed around posts and wires to resemble a gently undulating high tension electric line about nine feet off the ground. It must be lovely and romantic in summer time a regular cosine wave of roses. In February it looks like Constantine wire. I was super impressed: how do they DO that?
The park near my house is not nearly as formal as this downtown monument. It is low and marshy with ducks, a picnic area and a 90s playground and a 21st century playground. This 90s baby knows which one she prefers! There are huge signs warning you not to walk on the ice and also a display about natural consciousness in the urban environment. The roar of the Rocade which is the periferal highway cuts through the omnipresent mist. I am not sure how you can trumpet the environmental conscienceness of landscaped duck ponds, but Rennes does do a wonderful job with providing little bits of green space for every single appartment dweller. There are snaking paths and parks amidst all of the subsidized housing-- I keep getting lost there amidst the paths and the highrises.
Thursday, February 3, 2011
Why this Thursday was good enough for two posts
#1. I finally found the park near my house after 2 weeks of getting lost or showing up when it was closed. I have found that a lot of things I try to do in France require 5-6 re-tries. It was worth it to run in a big green field in the morning sun. I even had to take off my sweatshirt it was so warm. Mamas with toddlers strolled about, but the high-tech playground was empty.
#2. I rode the bus with some very nice girls and found the school where we will be visiting classrooms to teach English. They have a copper roof and a kind of Zen-like garden. Swank.
#3. After getting back on the bus I drop-of-the-hat recognized the neighborhood we were traveling through as containing a hairsalon for which I had a coupon. I impromptu leapt of the bus and while searching for the salon came across a SNCF ticket booth and was able to buy train tickets to go to Paris this weekend. My French ticket buying skills were perfectly normal even though I made the guy search about for days/ times.
#4. I got a rather complicated hair cut and it doesn't look bad. This involved a lot of gesticulating/ excitement. The French word " shampooing" threw me for a bit of a loop. I am also given to understand that I have horrendously dry and damaged hair. I was able to politely refuse the 14 euro cream and make semi-normal conversation with the coiffeuse despite the fact that I had no idea what she was saying.
#5. After I entered the metro and everyone in the car was honest-to-God covering/ plugging their noses/mouths and laughing. I have a cold and could smell nothing. I wonder who it was and why s/he didn't notice the world was gagging. It was super weird to notice a bad smell visually.
#6. In the library bathroom I was attacked by a middle aged woman who noticed the abnormal amount of hair on my coat (result of the haircut). She proceeded to FREAK out and spent at least five minutes clucking and wiping me down with wet toilet paper. She managed to involve everyone in the bathroom with this process and a girl my own age got rather annoyed and said I all needed to do was get some scotch tape and go to town. Toilet-paper lady wouldn't listen and started in on the hair-dressers of today. I managed to escape her and then ran into the girl again who griped about some people creating drama out of nothing...
#7. I ate a pastery called "un suisse" that was not very good. It involved gelatin and mini-chocolate chips inside pastery. Does anyone know what this thing is? I wondered if the gelatin was supposed to be citrus flavored. For 28 centimes I also bought a sugered pop-over that was really good.
#8. Despite my afternoon snacks, I thought I was going to die before dinner. However, it was worth the wait because we had crepes which we cooked at the table on a party griddle. We ate these with ham, any kind of cheese we wanted and mushrooms. We also fried eggs on the griddle and I shocked the world when I flipped my egg. I decided it must be an American thing: the French only cook eggs sunnyside up.
#9. For desert we melted chocolate bars onto our crepes. I found a banana. Lucie put an enormous amount of butter with my chocolte and she added salt to hers. Mine was so buttery I decided to go the salt route as well... I am not sure about the salt/ chocolate mixture, but God do I love melted chocolate with banana. The little boys make fun of my inordinate love of chocolate, but then again they keep sneaking me squares when no one is looking so...
#10. Said chocolate jokers love their toy tops SO MUCH that they sleep with them each night. There is a TV show for kids with anime type characters who use tops as weapons to fight evil and have epic adventures. The retail sales of the special tops complete with really intense launchers are astronomical. There are no more " toupies" in the stores. I personally can't play tops for 6 hours a day, but they love them.
#2. I rode the bus with some very nice girls and found the school where we will be visiting classrooms to teach English. They have a copper roof and a kind of Zen-like garden. Swank.
#3. After getting back on the bus I drop-of-the-hat recognized the neighborhood we were traveling through as containing a hairsalon for which I had a coupon. I impromptu leapt of the bus and while searching for the salon came across a SNCF ticket booth and was able to buy train tickets to go to Paris this weekend. My French ticket buying skills were perfectly normal even though I made the guy search about for days/ times.
#4. I got a rather complicated hair cut and it doesn't look bad. This involved a lot of gesticulating/ excitement. The French word " shampooing" threw me for a bit of a loop. I am also given to understand that I have horrendously dry and damaged hair. I was able to politely refuse the 14 euro cream and make semi-normal conversation with the coiffeuse despite the fact that I had no idea what she was saying.
#5. After I entered the metro and everyone in the car was honest-to-God covering/ plugging their noses/mouths and laughing. I have a cold and could smell nothing. I wonder who it was and why s/he didn't notice the world was gagging. It was super weird to notice a bad smell visually.
#6. In the library bathroom I was attacked by a middle aged woman who noticed the abnormal amount of hair on my coat (result of the haircut). She proceeded to FREAK out and spent at least five minutes clucking and wiping me down with wet toilet paper. She managed to involve everyone in the bathroom with this process and a girl my own age got rather annoyed and said I all needed to do was get some scotch tape and go to town. Toilet-paper lady wouldn't listen and started in on the hair-dressers of today. I managed to escape her and then ran into the girl again who griped about some people creating drama out of nothing...
#7. I ate a pastery called "un suisse" that was not very good. It involved gelatin and mini-chocolate chips inside pastery. Does anyone know what this thing is? I wondered if the gelatin was supposed to be citrus flavored. For 28 centimes I also bought a sugered pop-over that was really good.
#8. Despite my afternoon snacks, I thought I was going to die before dinner. However, it was worth the wait because we had crepes which we cooked at the table on a party griddle. We ate these with ham, any kind of cheese we wanted and mushrooms. We also fried eggs on the griddle and I shocked the world when I flipped my egg. I decided it must be an American thing: the French only cook eggs sunnyside up.
#9. For desert we melted chocolate bars onto our crepes. I found a banana. Lucie put an enormous amount of butter with my chocolte and she added salt to hers. Mine was so buttery I decided to go the salt route as well... I am not sure about the salt/ chocolate mixture, but God do I love melted chocolate with banana. The little boys make fun of my inordinate love of chocolate, but then again they keep sneaking me squares when no one is looking so...
#10. Said chocolate jokers love their toy tops SO MUCH that they sleep with them each night. There is a TV show for kids with anime type characters who use tops as weapons to fight evil and have epic adventures. The retail sales of the special tops complete with really intense launchers are astronomical. There are no more " toupies" in the stores. I personally can't play tops for 6 hours a day, but they love them.
A few pictures of campus and the church near my house
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| View from our student lounge: observe the fine sundial and then the distinct lack of sun. |
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| The church near my house and my steadfast landmark. The clock forever reads four and Sundays the chimes go bonkers. |
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| View from Batiment E: home of international students |
Sunday, January 30, 2011
Saturday part II: Family
After I had arrived back from market, my host host mom Lucie had gone off to her rock-climbing-in-caves class( English translation???). The house is such where it is impossible to tell if anyone is home so when people started pounding on the door at 12h30 exactly and she didn't answer my cries I didn't know what to do. The people it turned out were her parents and little sister who arrived carrying arm loads of things and wanted to know why I hadn't let them in sooner. I finally got it out of them who they were and after that it was much less awkward. Lucie showed up a few minutes later with her boys whom I had never met. When I met Augusin (9) and Auraud (7) I could tell I was supposed to do something because they paused and looked insistent. Looking around me I realized everyone else was doing a two cheek bisou. Our introduction complete, they took me off to demonstrate their hi-tech top collection which comes with launchers. Each top spins for about 3 minutes and they can duel. The hyper-toupie with balancing mechanisms was unbeatable for time. I liked being in the midst of a family because the langauge flowed and I learned lots. Lucie's sister Camille is 17 so her French is hip and with it. I learned so much just listening to people, but by 11pm last night I was ready to drop from exhaustion. When everyone was moved in, we dined and had intense conversations about wine, cheese, osysters and American pizza. The family had traveled in America and was impressed by the varying and dramatic country-side; outraged however by the enormous pizzas they were served( take out if you can imagine such a thing) which they were convinced could only fit into the grossly enlarged stomachs of the Americans. A discussion of "Zuper Zize Me" followed. Coup de grace: I have never eaten at Mcdonalds. Yes yes double yes! This morning the grandma asked me if I habitually ate large sausages and eggs for breakfast to which I also responded in the negative. To get her goat however I mentioned that I ate peanut butter toast. A nice shudder followed.
Americans may stuff themselves, but we had the biggest variety of foods ever yesterday. I want the family to show up more often. People kept passing food off on me and depite seconds I was starving each time we ate again. I think the difference here is portion size and the idea of courses which is foreign to me. Eating a four course meal sounds gigantic, but not if each course is miniature. Meals were not as formal as I expected, but got really intense from all the bantering. Everyone sits really close together and talks in each others faces all at once. They tease the little boys mercilously which is just as well because ohhh are they mischievious. Everyone was really nice and chatted with me too. I hope they come back soon because they seemed like really interesting people with excentric interests such as para-gliding. I want to hear more weird things about America too. Camille the 17 year old who is about 400 times for sophisticated than I am told me that after her one month homestay in Ohio she was surprised to see that I was skinny and that I was not a slob. She was weirded out that Americans wore their pajamas around the house and t-shirts outside the house. I didn't have the vocabulary to tell her it was all by design on my part. I didn't bring any t-shirts and I purposely do not set foot out of my room without being fully clothed. I do wear socks around the house which I think is a bit gauche, but I stand firm...
I went for a long walk in the afternoon and I do hope that while I was gone they had a nice chat about something weird that I did unknowingly. When I returned we played some chess and I helped de-shell the langoustin ( English translation??) which was entertaining and splattery (see my glasses). I thought they were lobster chunks for the longest time, but no. In Bretagne they are served in tomato sauce with herbs and rice. They are probably eating them right now at the family patriarch's 90th birthday party.
Besides stopping over to take Lucie+ the boys to the b-day partay, Lucie's parents had come to see her improv theater group compete against another team. I went too. Rennes is really great for people watching and improv theater attracts a very interesting lot. They locked the audiance out of the theater for some reason and everyone was standing around in the cold griping about it. Camille, summed it up to the assembled throng: "oh, they are artists." Pacified, everyone lit up fresh ciggerettes. Once it started, the improv show was really fun and the audience voted after each skit as to which team did the best job. There are rules to this type of theater and an arbitre who showed up wearing an umpire outfit with a kazoo. Everyone boo-ed him in and he dead panned bad-cop the entire time. It was a riot. I especially enjoyed when the skits parodied Americans, British and Bretons. The British and Texas twinged French accents were really good. Thank God I don't sound quite like that. The "Texan" was of course an American military type who was requisitioning Breton vintage cidre while armed with a machine gun. The three year old next to me was just gawfawing for some reason. I still can't believe how much WWII creeps into everyday life around here and these were young people making up the jokes on the spot.
Americans may stuff themselves, but we had the biggest variety of foods ever yesterday. I want the family to show up more often. People kept passing food off on me and depite seconds I was starving each time we ate again. I think the difference here is portion size and the idea of courses which is foreign to me. Eating a four course meal sounds gigantic, but not if each course is miniature. Meals were not as formal as I expected, but got really intense from all the bantering. Everyone sits really close together and talks in each others faces all at once. They tease the little boys mercilously which is just as well because ohhh are they mischievious. Everyone was really nice and chatted with me too. I hope they come back soon because they seemed like really interesting people with excentric interests such as para-gliding. I want to hear more weird things about America too. Camille the 17 year old who is about 400 times for sophisticated than I am told me that after her one month homestay in Ohio she was surprised to see that I was skinny and that I was not a slob. She was weirded out that Americans wore their pajamas around the house and t-shirts outside the house. I didn't have the vocabulary to tell her it was all by design on my part. I didn't bring any t-shirts and I purposely do not set foot out of my room without being fully clothed. I do wear socks around the house which I think is a bit gauche, but I stand firm...
I went for a long walk in the afternoon and I do hope that while I was gone they had a nice chat about something weird that I did unknowingly. When I returned we played some chess and I helped de-shell the langoustin ( English translation??) which was entertaining and splattery (see my glasses). I thought they were lobster chunks for the longest time, but no. In Bretagne they are served in tomato sauce with herbs and rice. They are probably eating them right now at the family patriarch's 90th birthday party.
Besides stopping over to take Lucie+ the boys to the b-day partay, Lucie's parents had come to see her improv theater group compete against another team. I went too. Rennes is really great for people watching and improv theater attracts a very interesting lot. They locked the audiance out of the theater for some reason and everyone was standing around in the cold griping about it. Camille, summed it up to the assembled throng: "oh, they are artists." Pacified, everyone lit up fresh ciggerettes. Once it started, the improv show was really fun and the audience voted after each skit as to which team did the best job. There are rules to this type of theater and an arbitre who showed up wearing an umpire outfit with a kazoo. Everyone boo-ed him in and he dead panned bad-cop the entire time. It was a riot. I especially enjoyed when the skits parodied Americans, British and Bretons. The British and Texas twinged French accents were really good. Thank God I don't sound quite like that. The "Texan" was of course an American military type who was requisitioning Breton vintage cidre while armed with a machine gun. The three year old next to me was just gawfawing for some reason. I still can't believe how much WWII creeps into everyday life around here and these were young people making up the jokes on the spot.
Saturday 1: Market
Weekends appear to be a relaxed time for people in Rennes; they sleep, go to market, eat, walk their little dogs and then go out to one of the gazillion cultural events offered. I must have a lingering Protestant work ethic problem, because yesterday morning bright and early I bounded out of bed ready to conquer something. I decided on Les Lices which is the large Saturday morning market in the center of town. For most of the week I was convinced the center of town was in the opposite direction from where it actually is. Saturday morning this all became apparent to me and I used my new-found knowledge to make the 15 min walk into town. When I got close, I started following people with empty shopping baskets and walking against those with leeks and cauliflowers peeping out. The market must be at least 1/4 of a mile long covered with open air vegetable and fruit stands organized around two thoughroughfares. Off to the side are rotisseries and prepared stands. The fish people get their own little corner and under a large barn roof are the bakeries, butchers and cheese people. The market starts out with flower stands either fresh cut, or ready to plant. They also had orange and lemon trees bearing fruit. Everyone seemed to have their favorite vendors who were selling everything from olives and American avocados to new Breton potatoes, leeks and really good looking cauliflower. I wandered around snitching clementine samples and trying to memorize the names of obscure vegetables. After I had finished with the produce I entered the hall of bread/meat/cheese. The bread was pretty impressive and much more rugged/rustic than the bread of Paris. They were selling heavily crusted baguettes, kitchen sink sized loaves which they hacked off pieces on demand to be sold by the kilo and these large, relatively flat burned up things which reminded me forcibly of some of the bread coming out of our bread oven at home (attention: they were selling it for a good price). For the less intrepid or the toothless, there was plently of milk bread. I was also fixated on the butchers' cases. The chickens were lined up like an Easter chocolate display except they were whole, raw chickens. The army of posed four legged mammals I thought were dogs turned out to be rabbit. After buying a pain au chocolat and sampling some young cheese I exited into the fish market which is in the open air for a reason. Ahh fish. The first guy I came across was filleting a very flat, very skinny fish with a huge blade. He also had a large display of langoustin and oysters. Other people were selling sea urchins, weird periwinkle things, St. Jacques de Compestella shells which I recognized from 10th grade history as the shell pilgrims used to sew onto their shirts. Anything fishy, and it was there. I got some sort of weird morbid pleasure out of eating my pain au chocolat while staring at salty white squiggly things; everything tasted of fish and it was great. I did need to know how one eats the spiney sea-urchin so I asked my host grandpa and it turns out he has gone sea-urchin fishing with his brother. They wore gloves, brought knives and after they had scraped the urchins off the rocks, they split them open and ate them raw. You eat the sex organs and apparently they are exquisite... I found it ironic that half an hour later they had a rather derogatory conversation about how the Chinese eat everything complete with a traditional French poem to that effect. I gotta say you'd have to be pretty hungry to think to scrape off a sea urchin and eat around the spines. So bizarre how something that must have been an act of desperation back in the cave man era is now a really really really expensive delicacy.
Thursday, January 27, 2011
Thursdays in Rennes
Today I correctly set my French cellphone alarm clock to 6:56AM and bounded* out of bed for my 8h15 class on writing French. Like a true city girl, I took the subway to get there. In class we talked in very general and concrete terms about what characterizes a narrative and then read a few selections of things that were strangely enough not narratives. It is interesting to be in a class of French language learners whose first language is not English. I never thought how much English influences my approach to French, but there it was staring me in the face. The French words "narratif" "crétain" " chronologie"were giving people fits; I have more trouble with really understanding why the author chose the grammar he/she did.
My English to French translation class was a different animal. French students have been taking their classes since September and this one I waltzed in on for second semester. I arrived without the documents and spent class piecing together the English original as well as the French from stuff I pulled out of the air. My head was spinning. The professor however was really passionate about emotion in langauge and had all sorts of interesting insights on the differences between English and French. English is apparently very dense and very succinct. The French like to explain things. This cleared up for me why the French I had to translate in my other French to English translation class was so full of untranslatable run-on sentences. When you go French to English ( which is infinitely easier for me) you essentially try to find ways to get rid of commas. I gotta learn to write with all of the commas too.
Other areas I need to work on: lunch time. Today was day two in the Restaurant Universitaire that I can honestly say I had no idea what I was eating. In cases like these it is always some white starchy thing that while unrecognizable has a pleasant enough flavor. Time the first it was salt, and this time it was nugmeg. Fake potato?? Maybe?? But why would that be piped accross a ham filled croissant like icing? St. Olaf cafeteria has me spoiled!
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| King of the garden |
My English to French translation class was a different animal. French students have been taking their classes since September and this one I waltzed in on for second semester. I arrived without the documents and spent class piecing together the English original as well as the French from stuff I pulled out of the air. My head was spinning. The professor however was really passionate about emotion in langauge and had all sorts of interesting insights on the differences between English and French. English is apparently very dense and very succinct. The French like to explain things. This cleared up for me why the French I had to translate in my other French to English translation class was so full of untranslatable run-on sentences. When you go French to English ( which is infinitely easier for me) you essentially try to find ways to get rid of commas. I gotta learn to write with all of the commas too.
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| Gate number one |
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| Under the camellia |
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Rennes Impressions
I have been in Rennes for two days now and am still getting my bearings. My host family's home is between a church and a large orange crane and to make it home from my explorations I march around in squares attempting to zero in on it. Each street is named after a famous French person preferably someone of Breton origin, but others will do in a pinch. A sentence underneath each road sign explains who he was and what he did( I have yet to find any lady streets if they are lurking). Nearby we have Gabriel Fauré St which I ran down today.
I am living in a neighborhood built in the 1930s. My French numbers are shaky and to me the house seems a lot older. It was built to house the railroad workers. My host mama thinks it poignant that a railroad worker today could not afford to live here. The houses are in rows and have large over-gown shrubs/ flowering trees and nice yards protected by high fences. In our yard we have mysterious flowering tree which overhangs the gate. It has blossoms that look like pink roses except that it is firmly a tree. It is the sort of thing one would kiss one's 19th century mailman lover underneath as he made his daily rounds. I can't figure out why it is blooming in January.
A very large and dog-like rabbit maintains jurisdiction over the yard. He likes to come up and sniff you when you enter the gate and he frequents the compost bucket up on the porch. He will receive food by hand and sometimes he presses his face up against the glass door of the kitchen. I am to feed him stale bread if I like. I was very glad to hear this because I was afraid the stale bread was for me. People in Rennes seem to prefer their bread/brioche as Melba toasts. Breakfast=this fare which I am unaccustomed to. My host mom also really likes honey tea with more honey added and we drink that compulsively. It is rather tasty and certainly takes the chill off. I also like how she has Camembert for dessert.
I am still trying to get to know people at Université de Rennes II. All the St. Olaf students showed up late and all the other exchange students know each other already. When our classes start I am sure it will be better. However today in my translation class at La Fac ( the regular French university) I met two students who helped me figure out what was going on in a class that has been meeting since September. They were really very nice and their French was SO FAST. I have heard that French students really unite and share their work readily. This seemed to be true as people were reading, correcting and sometimes copying my notes without my asking. The professor is British and all the kids love him. It was funny for me because he translated the French into English phrases that I had never heard of-- some of which I thought made absolutely no sense. All and all a very exciting class. More to follow I am sure.
I am living in a neighborhood built in the 1930s. My French numbers are shaky and to me the house seems a lot older. It was built to house the railroad workers. My host mama thinks it poignant that a railroad worker today could not afford to live here. The houses are in rows and have large over-gown shrubs/ flowering trees and nice yards protected by high fences. In our yard we have mysterious flowering tree which overhangs the gate. It has blossoms that look like pink roses except that it is firmly a tree. It is the sort of thing one would kiss one's 19th century mailman lover underneath as he made his daily rounds. I can't figure out why it is blooming in January.
A very large and dog-like rabbit maintains jurisdiction over the yard. He likes to come up and sniff you when you enter the gate and he frequents the compost bucket up on the porch. He will receive food by hand and sometimes he presses his face up against the glass door of the kitchen. I am to feed him stale bread if I like. I was very glad to hear this because I was afraid the stale bread was for me. People in Rennes seem to prefer their bread/brioche as Melba toasts. Breakfast=this fare which I am unaccustomed to. My host mom also really likes honey tea with more honey added and we drink that compulsively. It is rather tasty and certainly takes the chill off. I also like how she has Camembert for dessert.
I am still trying to get to know people at Université de Rennes II. All the St. Olaf students showed up late and all the other exchange students know each other already. When our classes start I am sure it will be better. However today in my translation class at La Fac ( the regular French university) I met two students who helped me figure out what was going on in a class that has been meeting since September. They were really very nice and their French was SO FAST. I have heard that French students really unite and share their work readily. This seemed to be true as people were reading, correcting and sometimes copying my notes without my asking. The professor is British and all the kids love him. It was funny for me because he translated the French into English phrases that I had never heard of-- some of which I thought made absolutely no sense. All and all a very exciting class. More to follow I am sure.
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