Night, um...who the hell cares? I'm in Italy!

Italy so far equals lots of train riding, glorious sunshine, gelato, risotto, and too many Americans. Linda and I are in Florence tonight, headed to Rome tomorrow for two nights, then on to Napoli chez Carmen for a few days. Photos whenever I get around to it.

Arrivederci!

Night Twenty-Five

Vamos a la Playa

As a reward for successfully surviving our first full week of classes, we went to the beach. It was totally bitchin’.

We started off in Cassis. Here, I’ll show you:



You can see Manosque at the top of the photo. It was about an hour and a half drive on the autoroute. Toll roads are genius, by the way.

So, Cassis is a lovely little tourist town by the sea, and there seems to be some sort of chateau there.



I really have no historical background or culturally relevant information to offer. We drank some coffee and moved on to Ste-Cyr-Sur-Mer, and there we passed a most delightful afternoon. The sun showed up for work and everything. We were happy. Now we’re home, all sunned-out and salty. Enjoy some photographs, won’t you?

Nights Nineteen through Twenty-Four

Laundry, Life

I went to the laverie last Sunday, did my (very expensive) laundry, and read an article in French Marie Claire that profiled a bunch of different women’s sexual histories. Learned the phrases le pire (the worst), elle a roulé sa bosse (something like “she gets around”) and un fétiche, which should be self explanatory.



I feel like I worked a lot this week. Twelve hours of teaching is way more than twelve hours of work (she realizes, far too late). I believe I have now met all of my students at least once. They range in English ability from abysmal to fluent (I have one student who is a native English speaker and speaks the language better than I do. I am tempted to tell him that the system is failing him and he should demand to be placed in a different class, but I need his help with idioms.)

Abilities and enthusiasm for the language aside, I can honestly say that I have enjoyed every one of my classes. Even the students about whose misbehavior and bad attitudes I am forewarned (I crossed paths with a teacher at one of my schools as I was on my way to my first class with a new group. She looked at my class list and her eyes got all wide and she made the you’re-in-trouble face and kind of shook her head in dismay. And then she said, brightly, “Bon chance! Let me know how it goes!” and took off. Thanks. It went just fine, by the way) are not so bad. At least not so far. Timid, defensive, and reluctant to speak English, yes, but evil and out of control, no.

This week I discovered a lovely, bright, deco-ish café with free wifi, and The Fig and I (oh, quickly: I have a roommate who prefers for her exploits not be – how would you say? – blogged about willy nilly – can I use blogged like flung? Welcome to my linguistically-consumed brain. Anyway, she doesn’t want to show up on the blog. But here is the blog, and here she is in my life, so I must find a way. Coincidentally, one wine-fueled night a couple of weeks ago we assigned each other fruit nicknames. I am the Peach. My roommates are The Fig, The Grapes, and The Pineapple, but I’ll leave it to you to guess whom is whom. So, you can heretofore expect to see my roommates referred to by their fruit names on this blog.) Okay, so the Fig and I have become instant regulars (and complete spectacles. Apparently, no one has ever thought to bring a computer to this café before. The wifi was previously decorative. Why is this whole blog parenthetical tonight?)


Les Fruites

Other happenings this week: I experienced the good French graces of one of my professors, who let me come over to his perfectly arty, funktified, Berkeley-lands-in-Provence house and use his computer, I spent a sleepless night hiding from a GIGANTIC bug that kept dive-bombing my bed, and I made a plan to go to Italy for the first break, now a mere week away. Yay!

Last Sunday we took a little road trip to the Gorges du Verdon. Actually, we didn’t quite make it all the way there, but we had a good time anyway. It’s a story best told in photos, I think:

















Last but not least, a new feature: Idiom of the Week.

This week’s idiom, courtesy of the Colombian: Vete a freir asparagus. Juliana claims that this is a Colombian version of “Go to hell.” Go fry some asparagus? More research is required.

Night Eighteen

Nights Fourteen Through Seventeen

Gangster vs. Gangsta

This week I started work. I am working at three different high schools here in Manosque: Les Iscles, the posh new “traditional” high school (except su-hu-per mod – photos in a later post, I’m sure, but picture an architectural expression of Matt’s furniture – it’s very lovely, actually), International, the scrappy new international school, and Martin Bret, the technical high school.

Sorting out where I’m supposed to be when has been quite the project. Everyone seems to think that someone else is in charge of my schedule, but I figured out pretty quickly that no one was, so I decided that it would have to be me. So, armed with a vague idea of how many hours I was supposed to give each school, I went about the process of figuring out who needed me when, but went to bed several nights this weeks with no clear idea of where I needed to be the following day. I showed up at one of my schools yesterday thinking that I was going to do two hours of classes, only to be told “Oh no no. Not today. Maybe next week.” Mais, bon.

Scheduling aside, everything has been peachy. I’ve found all my students completely charming in different ways. The kids at International are appropriately worldly and diverse, and very enthusiastic and warm. I’ve only been with one of my classes at Les Iscles thus far, but I found them quite motivated. I spent today with all my boys at Martin Bret. They are all learning to be car mechanics and electricians, and I passed four delightful hours with four different classes chatting about our favorite American movies, cars, Bill Gates, the significance of baggy jeans, and the difference between gangsters and gangstas. At the end of the last class (the most timid of the four) I busted out my broken French and tried to explain that I am learning too, that I understand that it’s intimidating to speak in another language, and that I promise not to judge them. I hope I got through.

I’m definitely in a crash course on being a language teacher. I’m learning to slow myself down and use what one of my profs calls “transparent words” – words that are the same in English and French (like saying choose, which is closer to the French choisir, instead of pick or select).

The International School has decided to take advantage of my actual, y’know, earned skills and put me in their theatre class. Yesterday they did improvs, and I was quite impressed with what they came up with, considering that improv is tricky even in one’s own language. Choice quotes include “Shut up you stupid…drunk…RUSSIAN!” and “Be quiet! I can’t hear my baby!” Also of note was the moment when the teacher put everyone into pairs and told them that they had to be couples – husband and wife, brother and sister, gay couples, whatever. There were some titters, but really not much of a reaction. The same thing happened in another class when the teacher handed out a dialogue and mentioned that some of the boys would have to play girls. One of them raised his hand enthusiastically and said “I want to be a girl! I want to be a girl!” Dorothy, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.

It’s a glorious Friday evening here, and I’m sitting in the sun on the balcony sipping a glass of rosé as I write this. It was a stressful week, but satisfying, and I’m looking forward to weekend of tranquillité (and laundry – are the two mutually exclusive? Stay tuned.)

Bon soirée,

H


Grabbed this shot of students and petanque players in the park by the school as I left work this evening.


This is a few days old, actually, but it looks like how it felt tonight as I was walking home.

Night Thirteen

Nights Eleven and Twelve

The Nightlife

I am the oldest person on earth…okay, maybe not on earth, but certainly on this planet. Everybody – EVERYBODY – I’ve met so far in the assistantship program is fresh out of college, which, really, is the sensible way to do something like run off to France for 7 months, when you’re in transition anyway and you have no clue what to do with your life.

We were in Marseille for two days last week for orientation, and I noticed that there was a lot of talk amongst the assistants about nightlife, proximity to which seems to be the chief factor in determining a town’s value, as in “Where are you placed?” “Manosque” “What is there to do there?” They don’t mean hiking in the French countryside or sitting on your balcony reading. They mean drinking—drinking and dancing. I’m exaggerating a little bit of course. I know that there are other assistants who, like me, are more than happy to spend their evenings quietly. Plus, I like to drink and dance as much as the next Alabama sorority girl. It’s just not really what I came to France for, so I’m less disappointed than some that Manosque has the nightlife equivalent of Thanksgiving dinner: it’s centered around food, and everyone falls asleep early. There are a few nice-looking restaurants in town, though we won’t be able to afford to eat in any of them until our first paycheques come at the end of October. So, we ate last night in one of the not-so-nice looking ones, a crêperie near our house that specializes in extremely salty chicken and cold red wine. But it’s cheap, and charming in a generic ketchup and faux wood-beam roof sort of way.

Before dinner we went to see Mamma Mia!, the film version of the stage version of ABBA’s Greatest Hits album, with Meryl Streep. We thought that it would be in English with French subtitles, but it was dubbed (except for the songs). We were a little disappointed, as we were both looking forward to giving our brains a break from French (Carmen’s English is very good), but the movie is so broad and campy that it was pretty easy to follow. Also, it cracked me up that every time a song started, Colin Firth went from sounding like Gerard Depardieu to Donovan.

The movie theatre, Le Lido, is adorable, with big cushy red seats that look like they were transported out of a 60s Hollywood producer’s screening room.



When I tried to order a medium Coke, the concessions guy looked at me like I was an alien and said (incredulously and in English) “What language are you speaking?” This is the only problem with living with a bunch of foreigners—we have quickly developed our own language that makes perfect sense to us—a mixture of French, English, Italian, German and Spanish—but none to anyone else. The other night one of us said something like “Puedo dire ça please?”

But we love our little polyglot boarding house, and I think that we all feel like we hit the roommate jackpot. Hopefully we’ll still feel that way in seven months.

Here’s Carmen last night. We are equally addicted to our cameras.



And here are a couple of one of the two main doors into the old village—this is about a block from La Dortoir (our dorm).





The students return tomorrow so our internet access is going to become limited and I might not be able to blog again until next weekend. Have a lovely week.

Nights One Through Ten

Le Début

I have, actually, been blogging. The problem is, there’s no internet in the internat (the internat is the high school dorm in which I am living. It’s not as bad as it sounds). And, upon rereading my earlier writings, I find that they already feel dated and irrelevant. “Do the French not know that they’re staring, or do they just not care?” Duh. It’s clearly the latter.

Also, I’m losing my English (I was helping another American assistant fill out a form and I said “Here goes your name, here goes your phone number.” What?) So, I’m going to scrap the writing for today and just put some up some pictures. Please enjoy.



This is the lovely, warm home of my father’s cousin Philippe and his wife Sylvie, who were kind enough to take me in on my second night in France and check in on me to make sure that I made it safely to Manosque, my new home. The most harrowing moment of the journey was when Sylvie dropped me off at the bus station (and, when I say “bus station,” I mean the side of the road in the middle of nowhere) in Meyrargues to catch the bus to Manosque. There I was, with my 70-pound suitcase, absolutely certain that the bus was never going to come and I was going to have to go to work in an olive orchard (which, y’know…worse fates). As Sylvie drove away, she leaned out the window and said “You may have to wave to get the bus to stop!” Uh huh. But, I needn’t have worried. I waved, it stopped, and I made it here:



Don’t worry. This is the before picture. Here’s the after picture:



Okay, let’s call this the in-progress picture. It’s a little spare, but it’s a roof and a bed, and the view from the balcony…



…is decent:



Here is the view looking down into the courtyard of the Lycée (high school) where we’re living:



And here, of course, are the teenagers. I can’t escape:



Okay, so I arrived. This is Friday. Linda, the German, was the first of my roommates to show up. She brought her parents, who stayed with us in la dortoir for nights, bless their souls. On Sunday we were joined by sweet Julianna, the Columbian. On Tuesday we got Carmen, the Italian, and we were complete. (There is, apparently, a British assistant who will be staying with us from time to time but living in Aix, about 40 minutes from here, and commuting).

This past Thursday and Friday we were required in Marseille for orientation. We spent most of our time running from appointment to appointment (we non-EU people had to get chest x-rays to prove that we aren’t tubercular), but I did manage to take a few pictures.





The American assistants were invited over for dinner at the home of the U.S. Consulate General in Marseille.



I didn’t get a good shot of her house, but here’s one from her balcony that shows the house next to her’s:



So, y’know. Nice neighborhood.

And here’s me in Marseille:



I look very serious, but I was just concentrating on the camera.

I realize that I haven’t posted many pictures of Manosque, my home town. I’ve been trying to avoid running around town with my camera out looking like a tourist, but here are a couple of pictures I’ve managed to take, with many more to come, I’m sure:





Okay, that's a start, right? More to come...