Marching through

Things have been going by way too fast and the future is coming at me like a race car. As I mentioned before; I sent in my request for next year and if all goes well, my plans are to stay here again another year and perhaps even longer if possible. Gradschool? Nationalizing myself? Foreign legion? Possibilities are endless! Otherwise, life here has been anything but boring and allow me to share a few of the highlights of the past month.

So, a couple of weeks ago, I was asked to help teach an English workshop for elementary school teachers. That morning I was to meet the instructor outside her house at 8am so we could car pool together to our destination and I amazingly managed to show up on time despite drinking and partying and getting to bed at 4 in the morning the night before. I was feeling a bit weak in the stomach and in the head, but I was functional nonetheless. Suddenly I got a call from her and she was telling me that her nose won’t stop bleeding and that I would have to drive us to the school. Although I assured her that I could drive and that she shouldn’t worry, these were mostly words of comfort for her, since truth be told, I hadn’t driven a car in France in over 10 years and even then it wasn’t in a big city. I nervously stepped in the car, adjusted the mirrors and realized that we were parked on an incline. I was driving a stick and as anyone knows, if you’re not used to the clutch, you’re just going to A) roll back wards B) rev the engine C) stall the car or D) all of the above. A couple minutes later I got a hold of the vehicle’s transmission and we were on our way. So despite all of my initial worries it really wasn’t all that difficult driving in France after all! It was actually really fun! Although it was a bit surreal, being strung out as I was, driving in a stranger’s car in a foreign country with the owner in the passenger seat having a massive nosebleed.

My next story involves one of the most proudest teaching moments I’ve had yet. So I have a class of 3rd graders who are a bit more behind than my other 3rd graders. I was getting a bit frustrated with them spending a quarter of our class time going through our warm up exercises consisting of me asking them simple questions (“What is your name?”, “How old are you?”, etc. etc.) So I decided that enough was enough and I resorted to bribery. I promised them that if we were able to finish our warm-up exercises in under 7 minutes, I would bake them cookies. So the first week, they were at a rather disappointing 15 minutes. The second week, they hauled ass and got their time down to 9:45. And then the next week, they totally blew me out of the water with 6:10. After stopping the stopwatch, they looked at me and were squirming out of their seats with anticipation. I smiled at them and slowly wrote it out on the board starting with the seconds. As soon as I wrote the 6 on the board, they all jumped out of their seats and yelled “OUAIS!!!!!!” I’m pretty sure the whole school heard them. So I kept my promise and baked them chocolate chip cookies and even though I had lightly burned most of them, they loved them.

I also grew a few more wrinkles a couple weeks ago. My birthday falls on the day after St. Patrick’s Day and I normally like to go out and celebrate the lively Irish holiday on the 17th and then move right on to celebrating my birthday after midnight. This year was no different and I got a pretty large group of us – about 20 I think – to go out and do a little bar hop. Well that was the initial plan anyway which quickly had to be changed since all the pubs and bars and even the streets outside were filled to the brim with partyers. We quickly gave up trying to purchase alcohol at the bars and decided to buy cans and bottles at convenience stores and just sat outside and partied with the crowd. It was a very relaxing, fun and very drunken evening. But midnight came around and everyone gathered around me and began singing Happy Birthday in 4 different languages: English, French, Spanish and German. I was beet red with embarrassment and didn’t hesitate to hug and thank everyone. It was definitely a birthday to remember.

This photo doesn't do justice

the amount of people there

A wonderful picture of my friends here.

Me and Emily, the old farts in the program,

pulling our best 'old fart' faces.

Just a little drunk. Mostly happy :)

My bashful face during my
quad-lingual birthday songs!

Other than that, it’s just been the same old same old. Tuesday night happy hours, weekend aperitifs, and whatever in between. I don’t think I’ve had a dull week in quite a long while to be honest!

So today is April Fool’s Day and the kids here say Poisson d’avril which means April Fish. Like in the states, they play jokes with each other and unlike the states, they run around and stick paper fish to your back when you’re not looking. Oh and speaking of cultural differences, I’m sitting here in a computer lab and the kids behind me are playing an educational video game on WW1 and they have to try to cross the no-man’s land without getting killed and they are guided by a character telling them about the horrors of war. Um… I guess we had the Oregon Trail?

PS: They just finished, leaned back and said together: “We won!”

Vacation Done.

So here I am, Monday night, just had dinner and made it through my first day of work from vacation not only intact but feeling in good spirits all the same. My February vacation was a mix of relaxation, amity and idiosyncratic adventures. While I could have gone off and had some wild escapade somewhere on my own, I don’t think I would have come home with the same sense of warmth and harmony I feel after the two weeks spent with one of my greatest friends in the world: Julie G.

My first week in Bastia was definitely a shining moment in my current life here in France, but the second week was just as wonderful. Our story begins with an unfortunate turn of events when, the day after I left Corsica, Julie came down with another disabling cold (her third in a month). So when she flew into Lyon on Monday, we pretty much came straight home and spent the week here inside during which time I took care of her - whilst earning the nickname, ‘undertaker’ - and continuing our In Treatment marathon. We did manage to walk around Lyon for a few hours throughout the days and by the end of the week, Julie mustered enough energy to hop on a train to Geneva to visit an old acquaintance from Denison, Markus Bettels, who was an amazing host and showed us nothing but hospitality and kindness and who even bought us a $40 bottle of wine. Oh and Geneva was alright.

It’s a smaller city with a weird mix of old middle ages and 70s/80s “modern” architecture mashed together. Julie was still sick and we didn’t see a whole lot of the city but we did manage to visit the UN building where occurred one of the more humorous moments of our trip: forgetting we had a knife for our picnic lunch as we sent our bag through the x-ray machine. Opsie.

All in all, these past two weeks were very memorable and wonderful and I was really sad to see her off on Sunday. I really miss having a really, really close friend like that close by and friends like her are one in a million.

Of Corsica!

Click on photo to enlarge

I’ve finished my first vacation in a long time and I’m feeling pretty damn good! I feel genuinely decompressed from work and life and I’m ready to get cracking on these next few months ahead with a renewed sense of vigor.

So, a week ago, I left for Corsica, and to put simply, my visit there was relaxing, fun and filled with little pleasures appearing around every corner. I mostly stayed in Bastia which is the capitol of Corsica and is an old port city stuck between the sea and the mountains. It’s a very small city and most of the buildings have not been taken care of in decades. Everywhere you walk, façades are crumbling and spider webs of phone lines, power lines and laundry line paint over the cracks and chips. While decay of this kind might have a negative connotation with normal people, Julie and I agree that there is a certain beauty to this decay. It gives it character. It’s the opposite of sterile and clean and new. It’s old and rustic and crumbling and forgotten. Corsica’s an interesting place, actually. Despite the fact that it’s a part of France, you never really hear about it. Instead you tend to hear more about France’s other outer-continental conquests like Algeria, Morocco, Martinique, Haiti, etc etc. Corsica, despite being closer geographically and politically than all of these other places, is just this entity, 1/13th the size of Ohio, floating in the middle of the Mediterranean. This old, forgotten piece of furniture in the attic hidden behind a wall of boxes.






Even the people are different. They do not strike me as French even though they speak French, watch French television and movies dubbed in French; listen to French music, etc. Despite this linguistic link, they are a population à part. They seem hardened and weathered. Open and jovial but at the same time reserved and cautious towards strangers. The difference between the populations really hit me when I came back to Lyon and everyone on the mainland just seemed so...soft. When I first arrived on Corsica last week, Julie took me to a drumming circle she attends where a bunch of people around our age get together to bang on various homemade percussion instruments to play Brazilian drumming music. I got to bang a pot with a drumstick and we rehearsed a number for a couple hours. Later that evening, we went out to a bar where half of the people in the group were very nice and very open (Men will greet each other with the bise here in Corsica. Something that’s reserved between very close bonds like Father and Son on the continent) and the other half would barely even talk despite efforts on my part to say hi. This weird dichotomy between the friendly, carefree Mediterranean stereotype and the cautious native of an island that’s been fought over and battled over for centuries made my head turn a bit as I soon became unsure of how to act and react around this population.

While I had a lot of time to spend observing and pondering the lives on these people on this island, it’s important to note that fun was had as well. Despite Julie still being at work, we managed to do so many things. There was the drum circle night and a Valentine’s day party the following night with the same group of people. We took a bus to Erbalunga, a small village north of Bastia that has a historical watchtower that normally has no public access inside, but Julie and I hiked to the shortest wall facing the ocean and climbed up the wall and into the tower and then walked up to the top where we could see the coast for miles and miles.



We’ve also had a ton of dinner nights here at Julie’s with her colleague Anne-Sophie, one being a raclette dinner in which we just stuffed ourselves with melted cheese on potatoes, ham, prosciutto, bread and wine. Speaking of which, Anne-Sophie has become my new French best friend. We go off on tirades talking about movies, TV and books (mostly about Dune, a book I’m reading at the moment and she’s a huge fan of the series) and I was sad that we got to spend so little time together. Oh well, there’s always Facebook. Ha?



The rest of our spare time was spent chilling out max and watching episodes of “In Treatment” and reading and hiking around the different small villages surrounding Bastia. We didn’t stray very far and we didn’t have an itinerary of places and things to do or see. We just existed as normal people for a week, as the good friends we are and what more could you ask for out of a vacation?

Not much at all.

Mommy Dearest

I’m sitting in my room getting ready to leave on vacation, but I felt like getting a quick word in. Last weekend my mom came to town for a 3 day visit which was very relaxed and fun. My mother's a wonderful, self-less and caring woman and I am lucky to have been raised by such a fantastic human being. During her visit, we walked around town and I showed her the sights, she went to the musée des beaux arts with my roommates when I had to go to work, I ate an entire bag of homemade chocolate chip cookies she brought, watched Avatar in 3D (and just for the record, I thought I was going to hate it, but it turned out that what it lacked in subtlety and depth made up in sheer entertainment), watched episodes of The Office and ate, ate, ATE. Our stomach linings were about to burst we ate so much. Oh and I finally got my favorite hoodie back after leaving it in a bar in Madison last August. (Thank you Jeff and Daron!)

However, the funniest part of the trip was us going to the supermarket and buying so much food, we couldn’t carry all of the bags with us by hand, so my Mom just up and said, “Come on, we’re pushing the shopping cart home.” We pushed the cart down the street like a couple of hobos, brought it up the elevator and into my apartment to unload. We were laughing so hard, as perhaps you can see in this photo:



All in all, we had a wonderful time and I can’t wait to see her again in April.

Anyway, I need to head out to the airport now. I am finally getting out of the Lyon for the first time since October and I’m headed to Corsica which is a wee bit warmer than Lyon - however I just found out that it’s snowing there as we speak. Blah.

PS: Wow...minutes after posting this blog I almost had a heart attack when I found out that the deadline to renew my contract was during vacation and I needed a woman's signature before sending it in...who is leaving in a half hour on vacation. I managed to print out the paper, sign it and scan it and email it to her in time. Phew. All good.

Busy little Beaver.

Wow, January has pretty much flown by. This whole year seems to just be picking up more and more speed. It’s making me worry about the future and what the hell I am going to do afterwards.... But let’s not get ourselves too down here. The season premiere of Lost is downloading so in the meantime let’s get cracking on these past couple weeks.

If I had to describe January, I think it’s the month where I finally found a group of regular friends I like and with whom we spend most of our time together - and even managed to start a few traditions. For example, every Tuesday we get together for various happy hours around town. We start at 6pm at Les Berthom for their €2.50 pints and then we pack up and head up to the Cosmopolitan at 8 for their €1 half-pints. Last happy hour call is at 10pm but by then we’re all pretty drunk and dancing and just going crazy. That is... until midnight when everyone scrambles to catch the last metro train. Another tradition we came up with is the Time Capsule. It started after a holiday party in December at Emily’s place when people who were too drunk stayed over and just holed themselves inside for Saturday AND Sunday watching movies and eating. I wasn’t there for the first one, but the second one they held the second weekend of January was really a memorable time. We closed the curtains and just veg’ed around for 3 days straight. Everyone took turns cooking and cleaning and everyone fought over what movies to watch. I would usually just quietly go up to the computer and start one without permission. By doing this I was able to introduce them to cinematic masterpieces like They Live and Roadhouse. Classics I tell you.

Apart from that, most of my free time has been spent knitting. Last year I asked a bunch of people on facebook if they’d like me to knit them a hat or scarf since I was needing to work on my knitting skills and didn’t have any projects at the time. It was a big success so I decided to make it into a yearly tradition, and a couple weeks ago I asked people on facebook again if they wanted me to knit them something. Since then I’ve just been pumping out the orders. So far I’ve made 3 hats and 2 scarves:

These two scarves are for my cousin's wife and their 3 year old son.

This hat's for Jenn Harvey. Old, old friend.

This is for my colleague Emily who has to get her gall bladder removed today.

This was for Javier who I met at Christmas.

I still have one more scarf and one more hat to make before my initial orders are complete - but there are still some people who didn’t get an order in and are begging me to make them something. Sigh. Winter might be over by the time I finish!

Oh and yarn is ferkin’ expensive here. Never thought I’d live to see the day when I say I miss JoAnn Fabrics and/or Hobby Lobby.

I also threw a party last weekend which was kind of a bad idea.... The weekend started as a rather chill time. Loads of people were leaving town and I just thought I’d stay inside and finish my knitting. However, bad weather forced a group of friends headed to the Alps to turn around and come back to Lyon. My roommate had left to visit family in Auvergne so I was just like, “Hey! Come on over to my place!” What I was hoping would be a nice, chill relaxed evening turned into a monster with people bringing friends who in turn brought their friends, etc. Everything was alright until around 10:30pm when alcohol was running out. So Patrick and I took a collection and walked to an convenience store and managed to make it as they were closing and bought €50 worth of booze. That was a bad idea. Here’s what ended up happening:

- First my roommate’s desk was broken and the damage left two huge holes in the wall.
- Someone puked somewhere and used my bath-towel to clean it up.
- Red wine kept spilling everywhere. Some even on the white couch.
- People kept taking food without asking (some of it being my roommate’s)
- The neighbor knocked at 2 in the morning to complain about noise and even though I turned the music off people were still yelling and talking loud.
- One person was off his rocker and started pushing and punching people.
- Someone puked in my building’s lobby right in front of the elevator (I had to clean that one up...fun)
- No one left until 5am

Needless to say I hated people - nay, the world - the following Sunday. I’m just lucky I have a really chill and cool roommate who understood, but it doesn’t matter. No more parties at my place.

Now how do you say “spackle” in French?

New Year, New Beginnings.

I haven’t updated the blog in a while for the sole reason that nothing has really happened. My Christmas break came and went and I spent those two weeks holed up in my apartment thinking about all the money I’ll be saving for future trips. Hmm. I’m still wondering whether it was even worth it. Apart from a Christmas dinner with other colleagues stuck in Lyon and a New Years that started out boring but got really bizarre after midnight (a sign of things to come?), I pretty much sat in my room and watched episodes of 24, 30 Rock and played - and finished - Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask. But I made it through alive and bought my ticket to Corsica for the third week of February to visit my friend Julie and now I have to decide whether I should spend my second week in Madrid with one of my best friends, Michael, or follow Julie to Andalusia.

Life is really hard.

But school is back in full swing and the kids are calmer and I’m enjoying them more and more with every passing week. For some reason the passing of the old year to the new has felt particularly acute this time. A few doors have closed, a few have opened and a few others could use a new coat of paint. I have a list of things in my head I would like to do this year (work on my Spanish again, learn and memorize more songs on the guitar, work out more, actually finish a screenplay for once, etc etc) and I would really love to actually stick to a regiment for once. I mean, I’m only working 15 hours a week (if that sometimes) - I think I can fit in time to be more creative and step away from the computer.

But that first step is always the trickiest.

That is all the updates I really have to offer now. I’ll leave you with a few photos of my Christmas Eve I spent with my roommate Aurélie, her boyfriend Andy and her daughter, Alicia.

Facepalm

There are many things in this country, just little things mind you, that really make no sense whatsoever. Here I am trying to exit from the C line at the Hôtel de Ville stop here in Lyon:

I would like to meet the designer/architect of this particular stop and ask: you couldn't possibly think of or find a better way of placing those supports? Really?

Just to update everyone really quickly: I'm officially on Christmas break for the next two weeks but I have no big plans. I'm trying to save up some money for my winter break in February. I'm thinking visiting both Corsica and Madrid, but we'll see. Other than that, it's snowing here which is really pretty and nice - I was honestly expecting just rain this season. A pleasant surprise to be sure! It's too bad I woke up this morning with a sore throat and a small fever. Oh well. It's more of an excuse to just stay in and do nothing :) Oh and I bought myself a cheap guitar the other day. It's not a great guitar by any means, but I'd been missing playing it these past few weeks.