Les Illuminations!

The moment I've been waiting for for the past month and a half has finally come: the Christmas lights have been switched on!

It was this whole big production on Saturday evening complete with fireworks and a light show. The streets of Laval were actually crowded with people who had come from all over the départment to see the lights. It was so nice! Vicky came up from Nantes for the weekend.

The fireworks lasted about half an hour and then the lights suddenly went on. I have to say, they are pretty cool. 2005 seems to be the year of Jules Verne in all of France (I think he died in 1905) and so the theme of the lights this year is Jules Verne. That may explain the whale in the river:

The first picture is my favorite view. It includes a lit-up image of the painter Henri Rousseau (a native of Laval) and a sign that says "LAVAL" in lights Hollywood-style.

More Christmas lights pictures to follow.

Thanksgiving à la française

Last week I celebrated my first Thanksgiving away from home. Hannah (the other American living here) and I were invited to another foyer in town where they were having a big Thanksgiving meal. The American assistants living there (Amy, Andy, Rocky & Virginia) had organized this huge dinner and done most of the cooking and they asked if we could come along since there wouldn't be a Thanksgiving celebration in our foyer. There was turkey, mashed potatoes,stuffing, gravy, sweet potatoes, corn, pumpkin pie, apple pie, etc. It was the most typically American Thanksgiving meal I'd ever had - and I had to come all the way to France for it!
The American assistants did a whole presentation for the French people about Thanksgiving and told them about how you eat everything together at once. I think the French people were weirded out by this concept but they played along. It was a nice long meal except for the one guy who kept making jokes about putting gravy on everything, about hamburgers, McDonalds,and about his general dislike for Americans.

Later on that night we went out to celebrate Jenny's 21st birthday. The group consisted of all of us English Assistants from this foyer and about 6 of our French friends (who are not surprisingly all male). The French guys always peer pressure us into staying out later than we want to since almost all of us have to be at work at 8 or 8:30, so we ended up at "La Petite Cabane" which is the only "club" in town. For some odd reason I got stopped by no fewer than 3 guys who were really excited to practice their English with me "I euhhh speak euhhh eeenglish! You euhh speak euhh eenglish?" I usually humored them for a few minutes or so before finding a nice way to get out of it. The evening ended with an impromptu rendition of Mariah Carey's "I Can't Live (If Living is Without You)" since the DJ actually played that. In the club. Don't ask.

The next morning (as most Friday mornings usually are) was especially painful to be at school. I decided that the only way I could put a stop to my Friday morning yawning sessions in school was to a. eat a bigger breakfast and b. walk to school in the cold weather to get my blood flowing. So I ate and I walked up the HUGE hill and at some point it started snowing! The snow lasted on and off all morning but didn't accumulate much and was gone by that night. Here's the view of the snow from my room:

Friday afternoon - it goes without saying - is prime nap time. Other assistants and I send text messages all morning to each other about how we can't wait to get out of school so we can nap in the afternoon. I won't lie, I slept from 2-5pm. I know one day it will catch up to me, but for now I'm enjoying my naps guilt-free!

Never a dull Tuesday

Today has been an excellent day so far. The mail brought great things this morning: my first letter from home (thank you, Davin), my French social security card (for the doctor and pharmacy and stuff - it's a miracle I've even received this card as most assistants never see theirs), and a free movie ticket that I was promised when I opened up my bank account almost 2 months ago!!

School this morning was fine. It's around the corner from where I live so I woke up a mere half an hour before school started. It was fabulous. That school is the really nice school and I'm really just an assistant there because the teachers are really good about their English lessons. I'm always impressed by how much English they've managed to teach the kids. With the first group I reviewed "If you're happy and you know it" with varying degrees of success (as usual). With the second group I take half the class into this big multipurpose room where we can move around and play lots of Simon Says-type games. The teacher hands me a piece of paper with the games she wants me to do with them. She's my favorite teacher because she's just so good at what she does and the kids seem to retain what she teaches them.

After my two hour lunch break - where I prepared what to teach that afternoon and had the obligatory baguette and cheese sandwich -I walked to my other school a little early in hopes of printing something off a computer. I was surprised when they told me that there was actually a functioning computer and printer but when I showed them a USB key the Directrice laughed and said "first of all you're in France, second of all you're in this school (read: they get little or no funding) so there's no USB." I wondered how a computer that was running Windows XP couldn't have a USB port, but I didn't push it. Of course a male teacher came in and insisted there was a USB port and so I was able to print my sheet for the kids. There was a lot of commotion as one teacher was leading me to the room with the computer while a bunch of little kids were yelling "HELLO" at me and another teacher was trying to invite me to her house for dinner tonight.

Tuesday afternoons in the school where I am the English teacher are the toughest and most tiring. I have one group of kids that are angels compared to their classmates and I actually think that they'll learn something from me this year. When I told them it was time to go back to class they pretended they were glued to their chairs and couldn't move. One girl went so far as to glue-stick her bottom so as to perhaps literally be stuck to the chair. My only reaction was "uhhhh...maybe you shouldn't do that." Every class made turkey hands today in honor of Thanksgiving and when I was showing them their classmates' work I accidentally mispronounced a boy's name. The kids started laughing and the boy started crying (!) It turns out that his name is "Josselin" but I pronounced it "Josseline" and that's a girl's name. He's very sensitive about this and I felt so bad - I apologized a few times and said I didn't do it on purpose and the other kids were trying to comfort him and help me and they kept saying "it's not her fault, she's English, she didn't know!" I felt so bad.
The next class was with the little spawns of the devil that just cannot stop talking. I tried to kick one kid out and he would just not budge. I told him that if he didn't leave that this would be his last time in English class. Then he started crying. But he never did leave..

Last class of the day, one whole hour with the 7 year olds. There was a new kid and about 4 different kids felt the need to point it out to me. But all they would say is "there's a new kid" and not point to him or tell me his name. Another girl chewed my ear off for a few minutes about her Dad being a gendarme and her Mom being a something or other (I didn't get what it was and neither did the kid sitting next to her and since she got mad at him for not knowing I just played along). After we practiced "Happy Thanksgiving""How old are you" "What's your name" and the corresponding answers for an hour and colored at the end I said "Goodbye" and the new kid goes to me "Oh, you speak English?" Seriously...

Oh yes, and one last thing: in this school a few of the kids have taken to calling me "Dora." At first it was because they just didn't know how to say my name and now it's just funny to them to call me "Dora the Explorer" only in French so really, "Dora l'exploratrice." They think they are sooo funny when they come up to me in the schoolyard and say "Salut, Dora hahaha!" It's cute but it's getting old fast.

I'm being picked up later for dinner at one of the teachers' houses. She's warned me that her family might have a lot of questions on New York. I'll update you tomorrow on how it goes.

Really good week

Last week was a really good week, I saw a play on Wednesday night, a comedian on Friday night and I went to a concert in Le Mans on Saturday night. I actually understood most of the play and got the jokes. This week is seeming a whole lot less productive so far. The big event on Sunday was watching Newlyweds and The Real World (Austin) on German MTV. It was so nice to be able to watch TV from back home and after a while I wasn't even that distracted by the German subtitles! It seems that France doesn't have its own MTV so they use Germany's MTV which seems kind of dumb because all the programming is either in English or German. I suppose it's good for watching videos - unlike our MTV, German MTV still plays them.

I also did laundry yesterday - I multitasked and read French Glamour while the clothes were washing. Everytime someone comes into the laundromat you're supposed to say "bonjour" to them. There were about 2-3 different guys that came in while I was there. They kept coming in and out and I'm pretty sure I "bonjour"ed one of them at least twice which made me look like a rude idiot who didn't remember saying bonjour to him a mere 2 minutes before. Vicky told me that she heard that it's rude to say bonjour to people more than once in a day. Oops. Then there was the guy who asked me for 20 cents and I just smiled and did the little laugh I do when people say something and I pretend I know what they said. It occurred to me that I couldn't just giggle this one off so I apologized and said I hadn't heard him. Then he asked again and I handed over the 20 cents. The most annoying part of the laundromat is the dryer. It just doesn't dry. You pay 50 cents for 7 minutes and after the 7 minutes are up your clothes are just as wet as when you started - they're hot, but not dry. I've realized that using the dryer is literally the definition of throwing your money away so I'm going to stop. Besides, now that they've turned on the heat in the foyer, the clothes dry surprisingly quickly. The only bad part is having to explain to everyone who comes to your door that you just did your laundry "hehe" and that's why there are socks, underwear, towels, etc all over your room. And it doesn't help that I never remember the French word for laundry. It always takes about half an hour to find hangers and places to hang my clothes around the room. I've taken to hanging them all on the curtain rod which must look really funny from outside. My English friends were waiting for me downstairs to go to dinner and when I opened the window the first thing they said was "nice drawers!"

I spent the day reading and trying to think of ways to teach the kids about Thanksgiving. I think we're going to do turkey hands this week. Tomorrow is the day I dread because in the school where I am the English teacher with my own classroom I have one period of decent kids, one of really talkative annoying ones, and a whole hour with the 7 year olds. They're really cute but it's so hard to teach them. Last week we did "How old are you?" "I'm 7." I didn't even bother to teach them the "years old" part because I knew it was futile. Besides, all they wanted to know was what "I love you baby" translates to in French. I kid you not. When they got too rowdy I just handed out something for them to color in. That usually shuts them up for a few minutes. After teaching in that school on Tuesday afternoons I'm usually really exhausted. Luckily there's never school on Wednesday!

Blog beginnings

So I meant to start this blog way over a month ago when I first got here to Laval, France to do the English teaching assistantship but of course laziness and dealing with the French bureaucracy prevailed and it's only now that I'm getting around to figuring this thing out. It's not that blogs are hard to setup or figure out, it's just that I have so much to say that I don't know where to begin! Un/Fortunately for my blog audience, I only work 12 hours a week so I have lots of time to update this thing. Here goes nothing...

I'm including a picture of a hot dog stand that I saw in Aix-en-Provence during our vacation there a few weeks ago. I found it hilarious that they advertise it as the "real New York hot dog." Too funny.

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I have a blog. Not sure how this works...