Impossible Germany

At the Sunday morning market in Lille

TODAY IS MY FIRST MONTH ANNIVERSARY OF LIVING IN FRANCE!!!

To celebrate, my friend Lara and I went to Domino's (the only place serving food within a bazillion mile radius of Faidherbe on a Saturday night) and ordered the Frenchiest pizza on the menu: Four Cheese, including one that was stinky and blue-ish.

I have a sudden and very convincing reason (ask me over a beer) to go to Germany, so... I'm going. That's the beauty of Europe. Tomorrow I will be in the tiny village of Ürzig, and on Monday, if everything goes according to plan and my complete lack of German doesn't trip me up too terribly, I will step off a train and into the streets of Würzburg. Faidherbe is starting a week and a half of holidays and, by george, I'm going to profit from them.

With colleagues from Faidherbe... luckily giggling is a universal language

I've been trying to figure out how to post an mp3 to this blog, but it seems too complicated so instead I'll just embed from YouTube. If you don't already know this song: listen to it. Life is better with Wilco as a soundtrack.

Tiny Cities Made of Awesome

This post risks flailing about in unanchored nostalgia, if I'm not careful. I was in Rouen last weekend and, oh dear, was it ever wonderful. Elements that made it so:

1. Pauline. She and I became friends in those first few terrifying weeks of my student exchange in 2000. I was supposed to have been assigned to my exchange partner's class, but some bureaucratic slip landed me instead in a class of complete strangers. I felt like someone had shoved me into a gladiator arena full of snarling tigers and said, "Go!". I tried to explain this mistake to the school administration, and as I stood near a window that looked over the drizzly school courtyard and waited for my turn in the office, I thought I would get comfort from looking at a photo of my jerkfaced boyfriend at the time (which of course only made me feel worse). That mental snapshot of me is filed into the Most Pathetic Moments drawer of my brain, and will never go away. BUT THEN: Pauline. I hope I didn't cling too desperately to her in those early days. If I did, I know she's graceful enough not to say so now. We kept in touch over the years and even though she and her boyfriend live in Stockholm now, some flash of divinity brought her to Rouen on the very weekend that I proposed to visit. Her family's incredible sense of humour, camaraderie, and damn good cooking felt amazing. I loved it. We ate, we laughed, I talked French, they pretended it was good. If I was a character in a video game with little status bars monitoring my emotional health, then the "family" bar, which was shrinking into the red last week, got replenished in Rouen.

2. Seeing the clock again. Oh, the number of pain-au-chocolats I ate under there with the Norwegian exchange students. Oh, the number of times I stood there with Mark waiting for the rain to slow. The number of postcards I bought from the stand that you can see. The number of people I thought of when I walked below it. The way it looks to me now.


4. The weather. There were sunglasses! And t-shirts! And angry protestors! You can see them in this picture, with their bright green flags.

And this is taken from the top of Pauline's street. The colour of the trees reminded me of the way Ontario must look right now...


3. BIKES FOR RENT. This has to be the greatest tranportational invention of all time. All over the city there are "stations" where you punch a bunch of numbers into an ATM-type machine, and a bike is automatically released from its lock and ready for you to use. IT IS INCREDIBLE. Here are the bikes:

Why don't all cities do this??? The best part: a bike for 24hrs costs ONE EURO. Which is a buck fifty. And if you're like us and you switch to a new bike at every station, IT'S FREE.

Us on our bikes:


4. Seeing my old school. The street that runs alongside it is crazy-narrow so it's hard to get a clear shot, but in this picture you can at least see the walls of the school along the left-hand side. Yes, walls! Just like the gates at Faidherbe! I think some disgruntled foreman's assistant switched the school blueprints with the prison blueprints back in the mystical times when these places were built. Srsly.

And this is The Door To Knowledge. I love how this door is still fighting to look old and distinguished, despite the graffiti and garbage can and forbidding sticker. Go, door!

5. Seeing all those old buildings that look like they're made out of sticks of wood. They are everywhere in Rouen!

6. Carrot Tree!
7. This car. They were everywhere when I used to live in France, but since then they've become kind of vintage. But finally I saw one! In Rouen!!

8. This random marathon that we discovered on our bikes. It gave me a happy little surge of home, thinking of my insane family and how much they like to compete in those things...


Rouen, in a nutshell.

I think I might have figured out how to post a video here. Maybe. With some glitches. Here (I hope) is a video taken from my bike as I wobbled behind Pauline, towards the Church of Joan of Arc; where she was burned at the stake. I wish I could have taken a video on the Carrot Tree street, because it was incredibly beautiful and more typical of Rouen than the one you'll see here, but it was also super narrow and biking while videotaping there probably would have resulted in me landing camera-first in the tiny little stream we were following. BTW, I can't stand to watch this video because of the part where I talk. It sounds awful and I didn't know the word for "stake" in French. But whatever. What's a blog for, but self-humiliation?



Got a little video-happy and decided to post that second one, of Alejandra and I doing a bad job of trying to stay cool in the face of a camera. This was only a day or two after I arrived in Lille, so I was too stunned to speak very well. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Aside: the only unfortunate thing about Rouen is that I left my white shirt there, the one I'm wearing in that video under the purple sweater. Now my teacherly ensemble of sweater-and-white-collar is impossible!

Small post about big appetites!

Oh boy... it's a good thing I don't have a scale at my disposal. Because that scale would meet an unfortunate end in the bushes outside my window! I weighed in at exactly 60kg at the medical appt two weeks ago, and that's the only time I'm going to investigate THAT number, thank you very much. It's really, reeeeeeally hard to eat well here. Or even just well-ish, which is usually my modest goal. In the same way that Montreal get-togethers centered around beer, France shin-digs feature massive amounts of chocolate, bread, cream, and pasta, and oh my sweet toothfairy, I LOVE IT.


But I think I am already starting to feel the consequences. I have tried (really!) to eat at least one veggie-and-protein based meal a day, and I've tried saving Nutella and wine for the weekends, but I just don't think I can do it. It's like visiting a new litter of pug puppies and saying, "I'm only going to look." UNPOSSIBLE!

This Is Your Brain On France

Real post coming tomorrow. As soon as I have my neurons back.

Even the cats say "Le Meow"

That's Maurice, second most handsome cat in the world.  He belongs to the sister of Jean-Paul, who works for the Lycée and attends to every material need of the foreign language assistants (and sometimes takes us on road trips to visit cats).  In this photo Maurice is giving Tycho props by unhinging his jaw and yowling vaguely towards the Atlantic.  I told him that Canada is a bit far and T might not hear him to which he replied (in French, roughly translated), "My dear human anglophone, how charmingly naive you are about kitty-to-kitty transcontintental exchange."  So somewhere in Waterloo last weekend Tycho twitched his feline antennae and a new alliance was formed. 

Right now: Friday October 10th.  This time two weeks ago I arrived at my dorm in Lille and crumpled gratefully onto the bed for the most satisfying jet-lagged fourteen hour nap ever.  I know that talking about how quickly time passes is number one of the Top 5 Most Uninteresting Blog Discussion Topics of All Time, but I have to say it: HOLY COW.  This week made my head spin.  I went to so many classes, raised my glass with so many people, and struggled through so many French conversations that I feel like I might explode with culture.  Like each cultural experience is about the shape and consistency of a marshmallow and now my belly is bursting with ooey gooey marshmallowy goodness and I am slowly and blissfully descending into a marshmallow coma like an overdosed Care Bear.    

Alejandra, Felipe and I the night that I ate really smelly cheese 

and LIKED IT (totally shocking for me)

I'm going to Rouen for the weekend, which is the city where I lived during my student exchange 8 years ago, and where I first fell hard for France in a shloopy sixteen-year-old kind of way.  You might already know this if you've ever been around me for longer than five seconds, but one of my favourite things to do is to torture myself with "memory lane" pilgrimages and long, self-absorbed bouts of drippy nostalgia.  In some ways I can't wait to become an old grandmotherly type, because I'll be reeeeeally good at those "I remember when" show-downs with other grandmotherly types.

As if the old, familiar city itself wasn't enough to fill me with expectation, check out the Sat/Sun forecast for Rouen:

Friday	Saturday	Sunday	Monday	Tuesday
66° F | 48° F  19° C | 9° C	68° F | 51° F  20° C | 11° C	69° F | 53° F  21° C | 12° C	66° F | 51° F  19° C | 11° C	62° F | 55° F  17° C | 13° C
Scattered Clouds	Clear	Clear	Scattered Clouds	Scattered Clouds

Oh my goodness!  Is that SUNSHINE?  Like, that warm stuff that comes out of the sky??  I didn't know that existed anymore.  It seems so last month.  Speaking of sunshine, today I had to explain the term "redneck" to a bunch of fourteen year olds.  I realized as I dropped the word into a sentence that someone in the room would ask me to explain, but by then it was too late.  So I tried to describe the "rural, poorly-educated farmer" stereotype while the PC patrol in my brain signed its resignation papers.  Is it true that "redneck" refers to the sunburnt necks of field labourers, or was that the teacher's brilliant on-the-spot invention?  Either way, I'm in awe of her.  It never even occurred to me to me that red and neck was a somewhat logical pairing.  Further adventures in ESL vocabulary...

Still Breathing

Those are my lungs.  Full of French air.  Do they look okay, Jen?  Yesterday we (the foreign assistants) endured the last of the many small humiliations necessary on our way towards the coveted long-term stay permit: the medical assessment.  Thankfully the doctor decided that I can see well enough, push blood through my veins quickly enough, and am free enough of terminal or transmittable Canadian illnesses to be allowed to stay in France.  On the way home I nearly left my lungs (above) at a metro station.  What kind of foreboding symbol would that have been??

My good friend Elise, who has a lot of experience with solo travel and overseas adventures, told me once that it takes about ten days to get used to a new gang/job/country cocktail like this one, to get past the initial panic and disorientation and fretful sleeps and move into the domain of self-assurance and familiarity.  And oh my goodness, was she ever right.  It is now day eleven and I am 300% more capable of handling everything than I was when I arrived.  That first weekend in Lille, back in the middle ages of ten days ago, that no-man's-land at night between turning out the light and falling asleep (not always a relief, depending on the mischievous leanings of your subconscious) was crippling, because I was constantly calculating the time difference between France and Canada, picturing everyone I knew at home making dinner plans and being merry, while I coiled up alone in the dark without even a phone or internet to give me the illusion of contact.  Worse, I knew that each "tomorrow" would bring with it its own complications, demands on that badly kept machine in my head that is meant to produce French words, confusions that would compound themselves into embarrassment.  Who would ever want to go to bed with that kind of perspective?  Who would ever want to hurry towards the next day by falling asleep?  

But, now!  Now I have friends here!  And both familiar and exciting things to do every day!  People to make dinner plans and be merry with!  To be honest, I still fold in half with homesickness and self-doubt sometimes during the night, but here's the thing: a 3 am crisis in Lille is only a 9 pm crisis in Waterloo, which isn't nearly as bad as far as crises go!

That's me being a SuperTourist last weekend when a friend at the Lycée drove me out to the old mining ground outside of Lille, where giant mountains of whatever it is they hauled out of the mine but didn't want to keep are now hike-able, rain be damned.  It's a miracle I didn't get washed away into the man-made lake at the bottom.  

For some reason nobody felt like using the paddle boats that day......

Speaking of getting used to things, I participated in a formative cultural experience today: a teacher's strike.  Deb warned me that strikes are not all that uncommon in Lille, but I had no idea that ten days after arriving I would be walking the picket line.  Observe us in our fluorescent finery:

L-R: Fabienne, Céline, Canadian ex-pat chick, Dominique 1, Alix, Dominique 2 (first person I met in Lille!  Owns an incredibly fantastic dog! Possibly the best dog this side of the ocean!)

The striking teachers were protesting all kinds of new Sarkozy propositions, like the classic fewer-teachers-more-students scenario.  There were many chants that rhymed "Sark" with unfortunate adjectives as we paraded all the way through the Old City.  And because we made such a formidable group (I can only assume), there were also whole fleets of policemen lining our route:

In my limited experience of teacher strikes, though, this was relatively small potatoes.  Everyone is going back to work tomorrow and there didn't even seem to be many media crews around.  But I feel like I've been initiated into something!  A small supporter with an even smaller vocabulary!  And the more time I spend with those women, the more I like them.  Three of them are leaving this month to take a pack of students on a trip to Pennsylvania, and I'm going to miss them!!

Why I'm glad I went to school in Flesherton, not Lille

Like everything else in France, the school system here is ridiculously and unnecessarily complicated. A colleague of mine (I have colleagues! I feel so.... grown up) tried to explain how high school works by drawing a road map of the whole process, and the result was this:

So all I really know is that a high school is called a Lycée, the students work harder than I ever did when I was sixteen, and it's a good thing I'm not in charge of arranging my own work schedule. For the first couple of weeks I am simply "observing," which means I supposedly get to know how the school day works (uh, riiiiight... see chart, above) and how best to work with the kids. Er, students. In one class the students had prepared questions to ask me using the cutest English vocabulary ever, and one of them asked what my favourite food is in France. The word "pizza" was flashing neon lights in my brain, but that seemed like a very un-French thing to like and I didn't think "wine" counted as a food, so I panicked and said Nutella. Which isn't too far from the truth, except that it really has nothing to do with France since I ate it by the crateload in Montreal.

I think a small tour of my school is in order now! I actually live here, on the high school campus, in a university-like residence. My school, Faidherbe, boards about 500 teenagers (total student body is about 2000 large), and there's a little corner of the residence saved for the foreign teachers. I have a giant bedroom with another giant room attached, which makes for a lot of empty space when you've only got a 23kg suitcase worth of stuff to work with. So pictures of my "home" will have to wait until I've finished redecorating!

For now, though, here's the outside of my building. My window is the big one right above the bushes in the second photo. I face a basketball court where kids play fierce games of ball before classes start each day, so the first thing I hear every morning is a colourful string of French swear words. I'm trying to think of it as a cultural experience.


The school is surrounded by an imposing network of giant iron fences, which gives it a prison atmosphere, especially on weekends when no one else is around. All of the boarding students have to leave the residence before 1pm on Saturdays and they can't come back until after 7pm Sunday evenings, so the place gets pretty quiet. I have this heavy set of keys to open all of the gates on my way out to the civilian world, and I usually pretend I'm either a jailer on patrol or an escaping convict, depending on my mood.

Alejandra the Escaping Convict makes her move:

One thing I really like about Faidherbe is that it feels kind of university campus-ish, which is comforting because that's a world I actually know. There's a science building, a building for the younger students, and a building for the mega-intense "prépa" students who are studying their brains out for some kind of massive finishing exam that every student in France dreads. The buildings are connected by outdoor corridors to create the illusion of shelter from the rain that falls 90% of the time here (don't let the sunny pictures fool you):



All of the different buildings have these 80s-style giant letter boxes to designate them. Seems so undistinguished compared to the rest of the school's presentation!


The next picture is of the cantine, where student and teachers alike all collect to eat a big, giant meal at noon. There is a lot to say about the plolitics and available beverages of this meal, but that is for another entry at another time (and needs some covert photo-snapping first).

I am going to be dividing my time largely between buildings A and B, either with students who are terrified because they're just starting high school (building A) or students who are terrified because they're facing that big life-altering exam soon whose purpose still kind of mystifies me (building B). I think I am going to have a difficult time maintaing those blogging boundaries that everyone knows about, like Thou Shalt Not Write About Thine Employment On Thee Internets. There will surely be many funny stories over the next few weeks as I begin to work with actual students. But I guess those will have to be told on an individual level! Buy me a beer and I will regale you with tales of ESL shenanigans!

I particularly like building A, because it seems to be under construction without any actual sign of construction workers anywhere. There are bit muddy tire tracks in the lawn outside and DANGER signs all over the inside, but no machinary or actual danger to be found.

This week I face the mandatory immigration medical exam in order to get my long-term stay permit. I am very unclear about the invasiveness of this exam; will it be stirrups and a paper gown? I am having nightmares.

L is for Don't Lose Your Umbrella

I think I used up all my good luck for the year by arriving at the beginning of a warm, sunny weekend in Lille. Now I know that "warm and sunny" are not adjectives I will regularly use when talking about this city; in fact, my weather-related vocab will generally veer more in the "windy, rainy, damn cold" direction. So far I don't really mind, though; when the rain is lashing outside and I am crushed into our tiny kitchen with my two dorm-mates, heating a pot of soup over one of our two hot plates, there's a bit of a wartime-bonding atmosphere that I enjoy. Together through hardship! And weather in the North of France!

Those first few days, though - WOW.

The pair above are Felipe, a Chilean doing doctoral work in Lille, and his girlfriend Claire, a native Lille-ian. Thanks to CouchSurfing.com (quickly becoming my new favourite website), the Spanish assistant at Faidherbe and I spent last weekend tagging along in awe as they treated us to an incredible walking tour of the city, which culmintated in an incredible drink whose name I forget and thus will be immortalized as the Neon Stomach Don't Vomit cocktail!


Lille Town Hall, on an angle to fit in the giant bell tower:

Below is the oldest fish shop in Lille, which says a lot in a city that's over a thousand years old! Too bad I don't really like fish. Especially thousand-year-old fish.

Picture of rooftops! Can you see the escaped balloon floating away in the sky?


And, of course, no ramble through a French city would be complete without one of these:

The greenness of this city reassured me when I arrived. There are some Montreal-esque public spaces where, on that first day of exploration, I began to imagine myself spending a lot of time reading French novels. 

Now I know that I would have to wear a wet suit and goggles to spend any more than a few minutes without overhead shelter, but it was a nice dream while it lasted.


Next photo: very significant because it is taken from a bridge that is THE BRIDGE TO THE ZOO!!!!!!
I knew I had moved to the right place when I found out I'd be sharing a city with this guy:

And these guys:

(Monorail lemur causes traffic jam)

That last guy cracked me up. He was very fussy about takin' care of business and wouldn't do it if any of this animal buddies were around. Apparently he didn't care about all those sniggering humans, though!

Hundred-year-old turtle:

Hmmmmm... large animal in a vegetative state under the nearest lightsource... remind you of anyone?