St. Laurent du Pont

The five of us went on an impromptu trip to St. Laurent du Pont, a little village at the foot of the Chartreuse Mountains to visit Pierre's sister. Finally stuck my shoes in some real snow.

Vizille

This last weekend I finally decided I needed to move my butt and go somewhere. A couple of friends and I decided to visit Vizille, a small town about 25 minutes away, with a chateau that doubles as a French Revolution Museum, and really nice park surrounding it. I won't bore you with the detailed history (i.e. I don't feel like Googling it) but, in short, it was the place where the 1788 tennis court meeting was held, during which and a meeting of the estates general was demanded, which subsequently led to the revolution, bloodshed, guillotines, etc. You get it. 

Putting up a "Je Suis Charlie" sign

Park in front of the Chateau/museum

Just for the record, she attacked me

Galette des Rois - King's Cake

Last Sunday the people I live with invited me to have a slice of Galette des Rois - king's cake - with them to celebrate le Jour des Rois, or L'Epiphanie, which commemorates the coming of the Three Wise Men.

The cake itself is made differently according to region, but here it's a puff pastry filled with almond paste and it's dangerously good. No matter what the specific recipe is, the important part is the fève, which is a little ceramic trinket in the cake, whoever gets the slice with the fève is the king or queen for the day and is supposed to wear a crown.

The next day I had a private lesson, and the family gave me more cake. A few weeks ago after our English lesson the girl told me her and her mom decided they were going to bake one typical French dessert every week and asked if I would be interested in taking home a little bit each time. Do I want you to give me cake? Why do you even have to ask? So they've been fattening me up, and last week's weapon on choice was Galette des Rois.

And then the next day when I babysat, guess what they offered me?

Tu versus Vous: The Never Ending Struggle

In French, like in nearly every other language, there is a formal and an informal way of addressing people: vous and tu respectively. I've been learning this language for more than a third of my life and I still sometimes have difficulty knowing when to use what. As an anglophone I'm not naturally wired with this distinction. As a basic rule, when in doubt, use vous, but it's not that simple. It's more polite, but it also creates a certain distance between you the the person you're addressing and can make you seem cold, and in certain situations (from what I can tell) it can be considered almost insulting.

Sometimes it's easy to feel it out:

Meet a random old lady on the street: Vous 

Talk to a small child: Tu

In a job interview: Vous

Among friends of friends at a party: Tu

But often you run into gray area, which is what I face at my schools. The principle vous me, I vous him, it's all good. But the teachers all tu each other, and they all tu me. I started off by vousing all of them, and only one of them specifically told me I could tu him and all the other 4th grade teachers. Problem: I deal with 17 or 18 different teachers a week, I have no clue who teaches fourth grade, and during that first week I didn't want to deal with remembering who I called what. At the same time I would have felt weird saying vous to some of the teachers and tu to the other ones. So I did what I probably shouldn't and kept right on vousing him and all the other teachers, even though it's starting to feel weird and way too formal, and it makes me something of an outsider. Today another teacher told me to tu her... shoot I don't remember which one it was.  

English, why you no prepare me for this? 

Poland for Christmas

This year I finally got to spend Christmas with my family in Poland. Overall it was really relaxed and relatively uneventful and filled with lots of cake. I talked with my grandma a lot, filled up on good tea and food, watched TV, missed WiFi, got groceries, etc.

Getting to Poland was quite the journey. I took a tram to Grenoble, train to Paris, bus to airport, flight to Modlin, bus to Warsaw, and then a train to Bydgoszcz. Overall I think it was something like 19 hours. And then coming home I had to do it all over again. At some point on the first train I put instant coffee in my yogurt because I was so tired and had no hot water. That was a low point. And yes, that does mean I brought my own instant coffee. It's an addiction, leave me alone.

I spent the first couple of days with my cousin and his wife in Warsaw, where we ordered the biggest pizza known to man, visited Stalin's gift to Poland (the Palace of Culture), and hung around drawing family trees and talking a lot. It was really great, not only because these are literally the two nicest people I know, but because I was able to speak my native language with them: mostly-Polish-with-random-English-thrown-in (they both lived in England for 10 years), not many people speak it. Although for the first few days my brain kept trying to say things in French, I kept popping out random pardons, d'accords and ouais. It took a few days before I didn't have to consciously think of what I was going to say before I said it.

On my way to Bydgoszcz I learned that my great-uncle had died at the age of 94, and I ended up going to his funeral and seeing loads of extended family I never thought I'd see again, and a lot more I didn't know existed.

I met my baby nephew for the first time.

I caught some sort of a virus and spent nearly a week too tired to do anything besides sit and watch TV. Talking was a struggle, which was annoying since most of what I did there was talk to people. I had absolutely no appetite and anything I ate made me feel sick (but it was the holidays and I was surrounded by Polish food so naturally I still ended up gaining 6 pounds, no joke). My grandma finally made me go to the doctor. I reluctantly went. I don't like doctors.

I welcomed 2015 by drinking what tasted like sugared rubbing-alcohol with my grandma, and exchanging życzenia (basically what you wish the other person in the new year) which I don't think is a thing in the U.S. (it should be). It wasn't the most exciting of new years celebrations, but at that moment I wouldn't have wanted to be anywhere else.

Then the next day I made the long trek back home where nothing interesting happened except for the conversation I had with a Congolese man on the tram. Although I was so dead by that point it might have been a hallucination. It started at 4:00 am and I was able to flop onto my bed a bit before midnight.

We even got a little snow

Christmas in Bydgoszcz

Went to go see my cousin's band (B.O.K.) in concert. Maybe standing in front of speakers in a crowded room isn't the best way to deal with a virus, but I'm really glad I went

Yum, drugs

What?? It's hard enough to read this shiz in English

Happy New Year :) I promised I wouldn't share this post-shower photo, but I love it too much

Wigilia part 1

I swear all this kid does it eat

Wigilia Part 2

Warsaw Uprising Museum, some of the armbands of the underground movement members

Soviet "liberators," Warsaw Uprising Museum

Palace of Culture. Thanks Stalin

Our Christmas Tree. I've never decorated one of the kitchen table before, very efficient

This made up 80% of my diet

And the journey back home begins...

Christmas in Echirolles (is a confusing time)

Anyone who has ever taken any interest in French current events is well aware of it's changing demographic, but it's one thing to read about it and another to see it firsthand. The country is historically catholic, but because of the huge waves of North African immigration and the decline of catholic influence, you're more likely to see people going to the mosque than going to mass. This is especially apparent in Echirolles, where a large majority of people aren't what the French call francais de souche (literally souche means stump, and it refers to a person who is "pure" French, or whose French roots go back generations).

Case-in-point: teaching a Christmas lesson. This is the last week before the winter break so I decided to have a low-key Christmas-themed coloring activity day with my 2nd/3rd grade students (I'm just as ready for break as these kids are, and I had no desire to try to talk over a class of 20 screaming kids for 40 minutes). I started off the lesson by asking the class who celebrates Christmas, expecting maybe half the class to raise there hands. Three kids raised their hands.

"Okay, who doesn't celebrate Christmas?" Almost every hand shot up. Instead, most of them celebrate l'Aïd (explanation here). From what Wikipedia tells me, it's a celebration of Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his own son before God intervened.

(Side note: I asked the students what traditions they have, and I got a lot of the same responses I got when I asked about Christmas traditions in some of my other classes (family, food, snowmen, etc.). Then one girl bluntly said they kill a sheep. I was a little shocked., Thinking maybe I understood her wrong, I moved on to the next kid, but then I turned to her again, too curious to resist: "like...a live sheep?" A few of the kids made the knife -across-the-throat gesture and the teacher looked at me and gave a slight shake of the head. I'm not quite sure if he meant "don't get into this" or "she's bs-ing you.")

At the same time it's interesting to see the interaction between this and laicité, the French version of separation between church and state which has become something of a national obsession. For example ever since 2004 students are forbidden from wearing any sort of religious symbols, be it a cross on a necklace, a headscarf, a yamaka, etc. So often here you'll see students or, in my case teachers, take off their headscarf before entering the school, and then putting it right back on as they leave for lunch.

I'm not making any judgments, just making observations,  just want to make that clear, these subjects are always a little touchy.

Walk

Pictures of the trails behind Echirolles that go up to Haute Jarrie and beyond. I know, I know, I've already posted a bunch of photos from this place, but it's amazing and deserves more. 

International Dinner

One of the assistants hosted an "international dinner" (basically a pot-luck) tonight. There were some other assistants, a couple French girls, and a girl from Portugal. I spend 95% of my time here with people either under the age of 11 or over the age of 35, so I sort of started thinking that French people my age didn't actually exist. It was really nice to prove that theory wrong. And it also made up for this year's failed Thanksgiving (I'm pretty sure I ate enough to last me the rest of the week.)

And people also complimented my food, which was a big deal considering how self-conscious I am about my terrible cooking.

It made me feel old...in a good way, if that's possible. Up until now, pot-lucks in my mind were this: one person brings the cheapest bread they can find, another person brings a cheap Nutella knock-off product, a third brings some chips, we meet under a tree in a park somewhere because we have nowhere else to go because either we live at home or our apartment is too small, and there you go. But we had real food, like...a chicken and fish and stuff. It was great.