Twas the Night before Christmas vacation

SPEAK GOOD ENGLISH

         If you think you’re fluent in English, I’ve got some news for you: teaching grammar will humble you real fast. Since I started teaching private lessons, I’ve been discovering all sorts of fun questions that I don’t even come close to having answers to. Such as, “how come we can only abbreviate the word “have” when it is an auxiliary verb ?”

hmmm…just let me google search that one real quick…

EUPHEMI$M$

         My student Patricia says that French people excel at creating things (art, poetry etc) but they’re not blessed in the field of marketing. While America, on the other hand, is awesome at selling just about anything.

I don’t know that this is entirely true. America's strength in advertisement is undeniable. But Paris is the number one tourist destination in the world, so clearly they’re selling something right.

Then I remembered that my class of business students keeps referring to “American chemical food.” It took me a while to figure out what they were talking about. “Oh, additives! We don’t eat chemical food, we eat additives.” 

How are you going to get people to eat something called “chemical food”? Come on, folks. And these were business students! It’s true, they’re going nowhere in marketing if they don’t learn up on some euphemisms.

        Patricia likes blanket statements more than your average bear, but maybe she’s on to something. Maybe Paris’ tourist popularity is more about the quality of their product than their ability to market it? I don’t know that I buy into it, it’s an idea I’ll have to chew on for a bit.

JOLLY OLD SAINT CHRISTMAS DAD?

         Today in class we played holiday bingo. The vocabulary words that come with the American Christmas tradition are weirdly specific, so I have some flash cards to introduce the words they might not know. "Elf, Reindeer, Carolers, Wrapping paper, chimney." I do not expect them to know these words. "Then we have easy ones like snow, present, christmas tree, Santa Claus..." 

WHO?

"SAN-ta Claaws," I enunciate. 

This is greeted by blank stares. FOR REAL? You know the jolly dude in the red suit, big bearded fella? hangs out with elves?

Ooooh, you mean Père Noël. We thought you called him... Christmas Dad or something.

Um. No. Sometimes he's called "Father Christmas", but that's like how you can call Michael Jackson "The King of Pop." His name is Santa. 

Amelia, proud soldier against the War on Christmas.

If all goes well, I'll be back in the Minnie-apple in 24 hours! Can't wait!

Snow, Snow, go away! Come after Saturday so I can volare!

OÙ EST LE BRAWNY MAN WHEN YOU NEED HIM?

France doesn't believe in paper towels. This bums me out. I get that it's more ecologically friendly to not have them around, but what do you do if, theoretically, you spill an entire cup of coffee on a chair and all over the floor of the teacher's lounge?

Search frantically for anything remotely absorbant. Printer paper? hmm, no. Clothes I'm wearing?...no,no, bad idea. The bathroom only has an air dryer. Toilet paper? Well, it's a sorry substitute, but it's what we've got. 

This leaves little flecks of tissue on the chair cushion but the floor looks pretty good. 
Back away slowly, no one will know it was you. Except the principal who just walked in the lounge and saw what you were doing... 
Excuse me? Did I put water on that? Uh, no, ma'am. I was more focused on the drying than the wetting. I will get right on that.

The students in my next class comment that something smells like coffee.


I SING, YOU SING, WE ALL SING FOR GIPSY KINGS

         The Friday after Thanksgiving, coming back from the Eiffel Tower with Claire on the 6, a man with a microphone and a guitar starts serenading the train. This is normal. Usually they sing a couple songs, pass around a hat for spare change, then hop off and move to the next car. Most passengers ignore the performers entirely and pretend like this isn’t happening.

         Today our singer is a Spanish speaker and he’s performing Gypsy King songs. He’s pretty talented and people in the packed train start to toe-tap along. When he starts to sing “Volare,” a British man on the train knows the words (kind of) and starts singing too. At first, people stiffen up at this break from the social norm, but little by little, more people join in and it turns into an all out sing-along. Gipsy Kings unite us all.

if you don’t know this song, you need to discover it now:

AHH! The weather folks are predicting heavy snow for Saturday when I'm supposed to be flying out! Apparently Charles de Gaulle is not equipt with the necessary snowplows, please everyone cross their fingers for me! If it could just wait until after my flight takes off that would be golden.

LOST IN TRANSLATIONING

valet

The longer I live in France, the more I see how we borrow from each other's languages and how we do it wrong. For example, in French, “valet” is not a person who parks your car at an expensive restaurant. A “valet” is either a manservant to a king in the olden days, a Jack (as in cards), or a handy piece of furniture that holds up your suit (one of these came with my studio, actually). 

The French don’t ever use this word for someone that parks your car. We just made it up.

         On the other hand, when the French borrow an English word, they love to add “-ing” to the end of it. The present continuous (i.e. I am eat-ing, you are talk-ing) is a tense that doesn’t really exist in French, and they seem generally confused about how to use it. So they use it all the time. You wash your hair with a bottle of “le shampooing” and you leave your car in “le parking.” Not a parking ramp, not a parking lot, just “le parking.”

         I got spam in my e-mail this morning advertising for a “family shooting.” This sounds like domestic violence, but it’s accompanied by an image like this:

Is this like a “before” picture? 

Nope. What they were trying to say was “family photo shoot.”

Or maybe what they meant was this:

VDM

FML (aka “vie de merde”) moment of the day:

        On the train into Guyancourt this morning, we're lining up on the stairs to get out at the St-Quentin-en-Yvelines stop. The train stops short and I face-plant into the butt of the man on the step in front me. Pardon me, sir.


TABOO SQUARED

         While playing taboo with a group of students today, a boy draws the card “Baby.” For those of you unfamiliar with this game, you get a word and you have to make your team guess it without saying any of the forbidden (or “taboo”) words listed on the card. 

For example:

Great linguistical exercise. 
So, this boy goes,“If you make love without a condom you’ll have this.” 
He knows the words "condom" and "make love"?!? 

And so does the rest of his group.
“BABY!” They get it on the first try.

The weather outside is (relatively) frightful.

A PLEASANT WALK

Paris got about 4 inches of snow yesterday and is all up in arms about it. My first reaction, being born and raised in Minnesota, is that they are a bunch of pansies. But in all fairness, this sort of snowfall never happens here and they don’t have the systems in place to deal with it. It’s been over 24 hours and the sidewalks are still treacherous because no one shovels or salts. Walking from the metro, I almost wiped out 3 times.

This morning the train arrives on time, 7:30am, at the Gare St. Quentin-en-Yvelines. I make it out to the bus stop with plenty of time to catch what should be the next bus. All along the stretch of bus shelters outside the train station, people are bundled in their jackets and hats, looking around longingly for any sign of a bus, preferably their bus. All in vain. There are no buses today. Yeah, none. Despite roads that have clearly been plowed, it appears that the transit officials have decided it is too unsafe for buses. Or that they can make use of a day off. Either way, no one’s coming. One by one the waiting people realize the situation and walk away from their respective shelters towards whatever alternative they've selected: walking to work, phoning someone for a ride, going back home to bed.

The other man waiting at my bus stop happens to be a fellow teacher from my high school. I’ve seen him before at the cantine, but I forget his name. It’s Ruddy. He knows the bus route by heart so he proposes we walk it. I’m not sure my frenchie boots are up for this, but I figure what the heck? 
The streets and sidewalks are in terrible shape. Everytime I get into a rhythm, I make a bad step and almost fall to my doom.

Ruddy is the électrotech teacher. I don’t understand all of what this involves, but it’s essentially mechanics and electricity. In France, this is a normal high school subject. Because of liability concerns, I’m sure that electricity class will never exist in American high school. Isn’t someone bound to get zapped?

Ruddy’s a foreigner too, from Guadeloupe. I know very little about Guadeloupe, but I almost feel like we’re compatriots because we come from the Northwestern hemisphere. That doesn’t happen much over here.

We talk about being immigrants in France. About racism here and how people react to us differently, me being a white girl and him a black man. We talk about education and what it means to people from different backgrounds. Whether it’s a strength or a weakness to work hard young. Have you lost your childhood or gained character? We talk about what the Créole language means to Guadeloupe’s identity. How I learned French and how he’d like to learn English. I don’t even notice that we’ve been trudging through snow for 45 minutes until we arrive at the school. My socks are wet and I have a total of 7 students for the whole day, but I don’t care.

some more backtracking…

DAY DE DINDE

         I based all of my lessons on Thursday, November 25th around Thanksgiving. I started each class by asking what they had heard about it and they knew surprisingly little. All of them knew that it was about “dinde” (French for turkey). Maybe it had something to do with pilgrims? They didn’t really remember. 
This meant I had a lot of explaining to do.

         First of all, we call “dinde” turkey. This confused them. “Turkey? Like the country?” Yes, actually, spelled the same but unrelated. “Maybe turkeys come from Turkey?” Uh, maybe.

         Then there’s cranberry sauce, cranberry’s don’t exist in France. It’s only just starting to show up as a flavor of juice. Mashed potatoes, now that they know. Sweet Potatoes, not too hard. Green beans, yes. But green bean casserole, that they did not get. Like potatoes au gratin? Why? Why would you do that to green beans?

Ummmm…why not?

jucy lucy

         I think “why not?” is the reasoning behind a lot of American cuisine. Deep fried turkey? Why not?  Cheese in the middle of the burger? Why not? (that’s a Jucy Lucy, a popular Minneapolis burger, for those of you not from the area)

         After explaining traditional foods and customs, I selected one student to go up to the board and draw while the rest of the class looked at an image and described it to him in English. Some were simple like a turkey next to a pumpkin, some were significantly more complicated.

         I have a class of seniors that can be pretty sassy. One kid in particular is a bit of a know-it-all. He’s pretty sure he’s already fluent in English (trust me, he’s got a lot to learn) and he’s always trying to challenge me on things. He volunteered to go up and be our artist. This is the picture I used:

The class struggled a little bit and Know-It-All was acting like he was too cool for this activity. They managed to get across that it’s a boy running from a turkey. He’s got glasses. And a hat, but not on his head. The drawing was kind of coming together. One of the girls goes “he’s got an axe in his right hand.” Know-It-All was like “yeah. yeah, yeah, okay, axe in his right hand,” and starts drawing a weird cylindrical shape. Several members of the class repeated “an axe!” and he was like “yeah, I know, AXE, I know.” But he just went into more detail on his cylinder. After a while it became clear that what he was drawing was this:

He was a little embarrassed, but we all had a good laugh.

Boule de neige!!

         Huge snowstorm in Paris today! As I was walking over to the Grand Explorer’s park to take some snowy photos, I saw a couple of guys having a snowball fight. As I got closer, I realized that they weren't teenagers, but average adult men in their 40s. One of the guys turned to me all excited and cried "boule de NEIGE!!" (snowball!!) with a big childish grin on his face. I couldn’t help but smile with him.

now for a little back tracking...

BIENVENUE CLAIRE!

         Claire came to Paris! When she got into town she was pooped, so we camped out in my apartment for the day and downloaded the last 2 months of our lives (making a quick outing for a baguette and two pain au chocolat).

         Tuesday, I had to work the whole day, but in the evening we went out to an awesome French restaurant in the financial district called “La Bourse ou La Vie.” Rochelle introduced me to this restaurant in October and I’d been waiting for an excuse to go back.

photo courtesy of Mlle Claire Fieber

         After packing ourselves full of steak au poivre, fries and wine, we went out to a bar to meet my student/friend Antoine and his friends.

         Claire memorized two French sentences before her trip: “Je ne parle pas français” (I don’t speak French) and “Parlez-vous anglais?” (Do you speak English?). These are the essentials. Later on she picked up “I don’t understand” and “Where are the toilets?”
        Antoine’s English is limited and one of the friends who came didn’t speak English at all. This made communication within our party pretty difficult. The non-english speaking friend would get frusturated with all the English and Claire would cycle through her handful of French phrases “uhh yeah, I don’t speak French… umm, where are the toilets?” We managed to enjoy ourselves all the same.

         Wednesday we decided to get in a bunch of sight-seeing, since we still hadn’t done any yet. We started by going to Versailles to see the chateau. For some reason, they’ve put a modern Japanese art exhibit through the rooms of the castle. I would like to know whose idea this was and give them a good shaking. The statues are interesting and cool, but they are terrifically out of place in a 17^th century castle. This is not a case of being “stronger than the sum of their parts.” If anything, they were mutually detracting from the appeal of the other. For example, leading up to the entry of the infamous Hall of Mirrors:

It's hard to tell from this photo, but trust me when I say that the level of detail on this girls boobs was unnecessary.

that's all for now. later y’all!

Last Call for Fall

…YOU GONNA EAT THAT?

         The week I got back to Paris was Chris’s last week. There was no way he’d be able to cram 6 months of accumulated belongings into his suitcase, so he invited me over on Thursday to collect his Parisian hand-me-downs. I am a compulsive gleaner. Like a human raccoon. I will wash and wear the clothes I discover in the lost & found, I will eat your leftovers, I will ride the bike that has been rusting in your garage. I really can’t help myself. It's hard for me to see things go to waste. People tend to look down on this, but it seems silly to waste things out of principle, to act like things are unusable because somebody else used to own them. Whatever. Chris didn’t mind giving me his leftovers and I certainly appreciated taking them. 

I came away with bags of loot, including (but not limited to):

- a big ol’ orchid (I got a lot of looks carrying this on the metro)

- top notch olive oil, balsamic vinegar, mustard. I’m in condiment heaven.

- all the fixings for miso soup (I tackled this one for the first time on Thursday night and I’m not sure I made it right, but it was still deeeelish. Miso soup with a baguette…too weird? I’m just enjoying the fruits of globalization)

- an awesome photography book called Paris, Mon Amour. It’s a collection of old photos taken in Paris. I realize that it's a circular sort of pleasure to look at pictures of Paris while I’m in Paris and to get caught up in the romantic image of Paris while living in the reality of it. But I love it. When I'm fed up with crowds and I’ve seen one too many dog turds, it reminds me why I came.

         To top it all off, Chris let me use his washing machine to get caught up on laundry. I’ve got a mountain of karma to pay back.

VIVE LE CHEAP WINE

         While my laundry was in the machine, we went down to a brasserie nearby to get some drinks and dinner. It turned out that this particular Thursday was a kind of unofficial national holiday. Every year on the third Thursday of November, France celebrates the début of Beaujolais Nouveau. This is a kind of wine that’s only fermented for a couple weeks after the grapes are harvested and then they put it up for sale. Most French people will tell you this wine is mediocre and that it leads to a killer headache. It's even served chilled, despite being a red, to mask the taste a little. But, as it is the first drinkable wine of this year's harvest, everyone agrees that it is cause for celebration. Bars and brasseries all over Paris were having specials. There appeared to be a lot of day drinking, including at my high school where they had set up a spread of the wine and some meat in the teachers lunchroom. Despite all of my co-workers’ warnings, I ordered a glass of Beaujolais Nouveau at dinner. I actually thought it was decent, but that just shows how little I know.

         Along with the wine, I ordered my first French cheeseburger. I was quite impressed. My only disappointment was that they served it with American cheese. As in the Kraft stuff that comes individually wrapped. Why would you even allow that stuff to cross the border?

LE SENIOR DISCOUNT?

         Speaking of cheese, on Saturday, November 20^th (yeah, I’m behind, get over it) there was a big farmer’s market on Rue de Reuilly. Chris and I went as a kind of last hoorah for the farmer’s market season. It’s crazy to me that we were out doing this 2 weeks ago, now it’s full blown winter here.

         Chris got a sausage at a “sanglier” stand. I had conveniently just learned what this word meant in a conversation with my student, Antoine, when he was telling me about hunting in Corsica. Sanglier is wild boar. Chris let me try a bite and it was good, but, in typical Amelia fashion, I decided to peruse the whole market before making a lunch decision. At the end we came back, but it was too late and they had already turned off the grill.

         While we were meandering around and trying to decide what samples to taste, an old woman ran into me from behind. Despite having bumped into me, she looked at me enfuriated and erupted in a long French tirade about how “some people” are “poorly raised.” Well, excuse me, for inconveniently existing where you wanted to walk. We just pretended she wasn’t there and she muttered hatefully for a while but eventually moved on to harass some poor young man at a cheese stand. Bonkers. We tried to keep a distance from her, but it seemed like everytime we turned around she was there. Chris suggested that maybe she was trying to pick our pockets. He was kidding, but I think that would be a brilliant strategy for theft. Being an old woman would mean that no one ever suspects you. You can bump into people and feel up their pockets and they’ll just write it off as you being old. If anyone catches on, you can get really indignant and rant about how they’re poorly raised. It's poor form for them to talk back to you as you are their elder. This is my back-up plan for old age, if the retirement funds for my generation are gone by the time I’m eligible for them. 

RECONNAISSANCE MISSION

         Sunday, Chris’s boss at the International Herald Tribune hosted a going away dinner for him. The food was ridiculously good. I learned that a “kir royale” is a kir with champagne in lieu of white wine. The meal was multiple courses, the main dish being ostrich. I, along with half of the other guests, thought that it was just a high-quality cut of beef until she offered us “more ostrich.” Umm, excuse me? It was delicious and lean though. Ostrich is red meat, who knew?

         She and her husband are both Americans, but they are ex-pats through and through. They've lived in France for 20 years or something now. They have a house outside of Paris and 3 kids who were born and raised in France. Two of the kids are in high school and it was cool to hang out with French high schoolers who speak fluent English. I used this opportunity to interrogate them about some things. They explained the system to me a little more (trust me, it’s complicated). And they talked about the requirements for the BAC and how their language teachers fall short. It was like getting a secret window into the French high schooler mentality. Back at school the next Tuesday I felt like I was "in the know."

         Monday morning Chris flew back to the United States and…Claire landed here! I will recount our Parisian adventures together next time!

Oh, something I forgot to mention about London before: did you know that the word "pants" in England means "underwear"? They call pants "trousers." Jeez, that's a recipe for a embarrassing confusion.

à la prochaine!