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.

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.

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. 

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.

Gate number one

Under the camellia

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!

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.