Sea Change

Last night in Lille, feeling weepy and generous

2009-06-03T11:15:00.000-07:00

I just said goodbye to Theo and Ivan! FOREVER!

Or maybe just until Christmas. Or maybe FOREVER! Up there, in the picture, Theo and I are looking out over Lille from another friend's 20th-floor apartment. That was Saturday, after we had spent all afternoon baking at the seaside. If you look closely, you can just make out Theo's farmer's tan.

In France you don't say "at the beach." It sounds too close to "at the bitch," especially when French people say it. Instead you use the highly refined, 19thC-toddler-in-a-sailor-suit term "at the seaside."

OMG WHAT WILL I DO WITHOUT FRANCE?

I leave in the morning. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that part of my heart is breaking a little. Luckily another part of my heart is cracking the champagne and blowing noisemakers to celebrate the pending homecoming. Balance! I learned that from Gandhi!

At the seaside, we fly kites.

And accept licks from cute random dogs. And boys!

Just kidding! Boys have to reverentially recreate my image in a flattering sand sculpture first. So far, no boy has succeeded.

OH NO

2009-06-01T08:44:00.000-07:00

I should never have read this.

Come & Dance With Me

2009-05-19T12:44:00.000-07:00

So I'm going to start this one off with a little story which doesn't involve pirates or cowboys, like most good stories should. But it does have an epiphany at the end, even if that epiphany is about as large and as consequential as a grain of rice. BUT: it's a true story, and it explains these dance pictures, in a very roundabout way. That's my hook.

One of the first times that I can remember spending a whole night away from home (not counting summer holidays with my grandparents, and that time I went camping with my aunt and almost hyperventilated from crying so hard because of homesickness ... to the point where the guy in the next tent yelled at us to keep it down) was a night I spent at my friend H's house. It turned out to be a big night for me, though I didn't realize until much later.

H lived out in the country, like me, and we went to the same little public school, and we must have started sharing our morning snacks or whatever it is 8-year-olds do to bond, because one day towards the end of June I was invited to take the school bus home with H and spend the WHOLE NIGHT at his house. Our parents encouraged it. They called each other and wrote our names together on their fridge calendars. Oh! The anticipation!

Riding on a school bus other than my own was a rare and savory experience. I remember studying my classmates with pity that day, because all of THEM had to take their OWN bus home. And then, as if the school bus ride wasn't excitement enough, when we got to H's stop I spotted an incredible multi-story turreted tree-fort in the field across from his house. I wondered if Rural Route 20 had led us straight to Heaven.

We got off the bus and went right to the tree-fort where we played a complicated action game that somehow incorporated both Darkwing Duck and Treasure Island (hey, there are pirates in this story after all!). But before I had even perfected my ARGHH! he shouted from the ground that it was time to go to his house. I was lured away only after promises that we'd come back after dinner. How naive we are in youth!

We went inside and he took me to his room so I could put my overnight bag down (guess we were still too young for gender segregation). First unpleasant shock of the visit: in his room hung the unmistakable yellowy smell of pee. The mattress made a pfffffft noise when I set my bag on it. With all the polite subtleness of childhood, I flung back his blanket and saw the proof: plastic sheets. I hope I didn't make things worse for him by actually asking out loud if he wet the bed. He saw that I saw, and we were both embarrassed. He left the room. I paused a moment to consider what the night might be like, breathing in the pee-air. Then I carefully picked up my bag again and put it on the floor.

Second unpleasant shock: dinner was preceded by pre-dinner chores, which I understood only after a lot of explaining and gesturing. In the Findlay family, chores were done on Saturday mornings. Saturday was a day for chores. Not before dinner on a weeknight! I watched dubiously as H began to clean the bathroom. Was he SURE this was what his mom wanted? Did he have to clean the bathroom EVERY weeknight? What's more, I never had to clean the bathroom at home. It belonged in a category of chores that I was thankfully considered too young to do properly, like folding underwear.

But clean the bathroom he did. And then we were allowed to eat dinner, which apparently wasn't as momentous as cleaning the bathroom, because I don't remember it at all.

Then things got a little hairy.

After dinner, I waited eagerly by the door to go back to the tree-fort. But H didn't want to go to the tree-fort. He wanted to play Battletoads on his Nintendo ES. Which I remember because I thought it was the most repulsive-sounding Nintendo game in the history of everything, which I told him. And then he told me that Darkwing Duck was the dumbest cartoon in the history of everything PLUS INFINITY. Which was cutting pretty deep. I felt my last hope playing in the tree-fort slip away from me, but I couldn't let the Darkwing comment go unchallenged. Before we knew it, the tension had escalated so steeply that we were banished from each other's company for a cool-down period.

My holding cell was the kitchen. I sat on the floor beside an open cupboard that held a box of Froot Loops, which gave me hope for breakfast. After a while H's mom came in and gave me a drink of Coke in a plastic Canada's Wonderland cup. Normally I was only allowed Coke on Saturdays (a big day in our family, apparently), so this gesture put me in a generous, forgiving mood. H's mom sat down on the floor across from me. A fat beagle with miasmic farts wandered over and licked her legs from ankle to shorts' hem. I remember the spoosh sound of that dog's long tongue as she told me that H couldn't go play outside again because he had something called asthma, which gets bad in the evenings, especially when it's hot outside like it was then. Asthma was a foreign concept to me and for a long time afterwards, years even, I thought it had something to do with bedwetting.

Plied by Coke and the threat of a phone call to my parents, I finally conceded to playing Battletoads. Which wasn't as repulsive as I thought, and about five hundred years later, when my parents FINALLY gave me a Nintendo (which they bought used from my friend Amy, because like every other kid in the universe she had upgraded to Super Nintendo by then), I had that game.

Here's the epiphany: that night at H's house was the night when I really started to understand certain irrefutable facts about the universe, such as:

1. Some kids' parents let them drink Coke in the middle of the week and eat Froot Loops even when it's nobody's birthday...

2. ...on the other hand, some kids' parents ALSO made them do chores in the middle of the week.

3. Some kids' parents had already taken them to that far-off magical place called Canada's Wonderland.

And, most importantly:

4. Some people have invisible problems, like bed-wedding/asthma. Problems that the other kids at school would never know about, unless they were invited for a sleep-over. And even then only maybe.

I looked at H after that day and wondered what other invisible problems he might have. And then I started to look at all the other kids in our class and wondered about their invisible problems. And then I began wondering about all of the adults I knew, like my bus driver, or the town librarian, or the guy selling candy in Stedman's. Did they all have invisible problems that nobody knew about, except the people who slept at their houses? My wondering went on and on and on into forever. Forever PLUS INFINITY.

That little moment of awakening on the floor of my friend's kitchen happened about 17 years ago. And I still feel just as baffled by the concept of invisible problems going on in other people's lives. The million private little battles being waged by everyone every day, from perpetually wetting the bed to worrying about an illness to rethinking a romance. It could be anything, at any time, taking place where no one else can see it.

It was probably a big deal for H to invite me over, since that would mean showing me his invisible problem. Since then, I've been invited into the private worlds of many other people, and it's a fantastic kind of intimacy with a very brave message attached: I trust you with this.

Okay.

I am now going to stretch this epiphany wayyyyy out to unreasonable limits by turning it into a metaphor, thus justifying these photos taken during a brief but wholehearted dance party with my friends Ivan and Theo yesterday. Negotiating your own invisible problems, and then taking into account those of the people you love and want to protect, is a dance so complex that even "So You Think You Can Dance" champions must often fumble their moves, despite the best of intentions.

I am going to take swing lessons. I've wanted to take them forever but there's always been something more important to pay for, you know? But I will take them. If I learn to swing dance, I will be even happier than I am now. I will be able to handle stress with grace and proaction. I will be a better cook, gardener, pet owner, writer, friend, and, eventually, girlfriend. All I need are swing lessons!

I'm thinking about all of this because in two weeks I'll be back in Canada, which makes me nervous, because it means facing all kinds of challenges. And whenever I think about it all, I find myself applying a very unreasonable kind of logic. For example: the first thing I need to do is find an apartment in Ottawa. Which has ballooned to the point where I believe that if I can just find the perfect apartment, I will be fantastic in my new job, I will be mature and farsighted in love, I will be successful in writing, etc. All I need to do is find the right apartment! Easy!

But I know that's not how it works. One final, tiny story: down the road from our farm was a family with a beautiful old collie named Lady, who clearly suffered from the heat of her thick coat every summer. So to solve that problem, the family shaved her coat right off. Refreshed, happy dog, right? Except that Lady got so sunburned that she nearly died. It's easy to find one solution to a problem and believe that it will fix everything. BUT, that makes it easy to be shortsighted and naive, which leads to even more challenges.

Finding an apartment in Ottawa will only solve the problem of not having an apartment in Ottawa. Which is sort of disappointing.

On the other hand, coming home will mean seeing people that I am really, REALLY excited to see. (People... and cats.) Which makes all of the invisible problems so totally worthwhile.

Last words: even if taking swing lessons leads to nothing more than knowing how to swing dance - well, that will be COOL PLUS INFINITY.

It's not easy becoming your future.

2009-05-12T12:29:00.000-07:00

So my good friend Jen used to participate in a regular research expedition that involved strapping herself into an experimental airplane and launching herself into outer space. Or almost, at least. She even blogged about it once. There was a lot of throwing up involved. Throwing up, and swearing on several graves never to do anything so irrational and uncomfortable again, all equalized (I think she'd agree) by a rush of euphoria. The kind of euphoria that only comes from tottering around on unsteady legs, gloriously in tact despite having volunteered, completely unnecessarily, to sacrifice solid ground for the sake of experimentation.

This is roughly what my year in France has felt like.

Somewhere in Holland, trying to watch the road and not the tulips

(occasionally failing)

I've got a map and a yellow hi-lighter and when I trace out all the adventures I've had since I arrived last September it looks like a glow-worm had quadruplets and then the quadruplets each had quadruplets.

I just got back from spending a week in the Alps near Italy with "family" who first gave me a home in France ten years ago. I need to write about in on paper before I can blog about it on a screen, but to sum it up in six words or less: Thibault grew up, but not too much.

I fly back to Canada in less than a month. It's hard to get a grip on that statement. Back! To Canada! In less than a month! You know how sometimes when you repeat a word over and over and over it starts to sound like nonsense? Same goes for whole sentences.

Back. To Canada.

Less than a month.

Thinking Man, you never looked so handsome.

2009-04-29T11:35:00.000-07:00

On a blogging and email hiatus for a bit while I show my ma around the best cities in the whole world. And YES, I am allowed to make such definitive statements despite having seen only about O.O1% of the world's cities. Why? Because this is a blogtatorship!

And also, how could these cities NOT be some of the best? Consider the evidence:

Cats in Paris! And some nice buildings and sights and food. And cats!!! Handsome French ones with a vague resemblance to a certain phenomenal cat I know in Canada.

Climbed up Sacré Coeur in Montmartre with mom, which I've done a few times before with various combinations of important people, though never with someone quite so important as my mom, nor quite so willing to climb that brutal winding staircase for a thousand breathless minutes to get up there (after jumping the turnstile at the bottom - God will smote us!). The view is fantastic, and the graffiti is almost as rewarding. Thousands of declarations of love painted on with white-out, and several hundred prayers scrawled over the stone, mostly begging the Lord to spare innocent souls from the brutality of the French finishing exams at the end of high school.

Another point of evidence: endless liquid dinners in Lille with two of my most favouritest men in the world. Okay, maybe Lille wouldn't make an objective list of the World's Best Cities, but to me, personally? It's a tie for Montreal.

Baby ducklings in Bruges! (Yes, it's Belgium, but my love for France is so huge that it dribbled a little over the borders...)

The photo below is taken from inside the Close at Bruges, where we were shushed several times by earnest-looking nuns. Just as we were leaving, we noticed a joyful and well-hydrated wedding party push their way in. The things nuns have to deal with these days!

All of this is just a TINY taste. So far we've done Paris, Bruges, Bologne-sur-Mer (northern beaches, with England like a hazy rope of licorice on the horizon), and Lille. Tomorrow I'm taking her to ground zero of this whole love affair: ROUEN. Tingly fingers just thinking of it.

Not easy!

2009-04-13T04:43:00.000-07:00

Tearjerker alert: Lara left yesterday morning to go back to the U.S.

After Annabelle and I dropped her off at the train station, I allowed myself the whole morning for moping and taking everything far too seriously. And then I got out of bed, went "running", took care of basic personal grooming needs, and got down to the business of planning for my last few classes. If I sound self-congratulatory it's because initiating all of that activity took super-human strength, given the weight of knowing that Lille is now without its Lara.

What we'd look like as a pair of Dutch farmers:

Over the weekend Lara, Annabelle and I drove to the Netherlands to see some tulips, which were so numerous and colourful that I doubt my overwhelmed retinas will ever recover. I'm having trouble uploading photos so I will have to post all about that in a few days. For now, here is one shot taken from inside Keukenhof, the fantastically enormous flower gardens in South Holland:

You know how sometimes when you spend a LOT of time with the same couple of people, even the best among us can't help feeling a little tense? Well, with L & A, I never felt like that. The more time we spent together, the goofier we got, and the more roving and unintelligible became our jokes. It was heaven to meet these two goof-balls and go roaming across the continent with them, and it's annoying how we all have to split up now. Thank goodness for Skype and for the fifty thousand emails we've already sent each other, even though it's only been two days!

See you in September, BG!

It's been evening all day long

2009-04-04T14:04:00.001-07:00

I slept like a bear through much of the day, and then got up and went to a comedy show tonight so hilarious & insane that the actors themselves could hardly keep straight faces, and in the midst off all that tearful laughter I looked at my friends and realized that I have to say goodbye to France exactly two months from today.

An impossible (and somewhat inconvenient) truth.

This trailer has a hold on me.

2009-03-31T07:07:00.000-07:00

Just when I thought Lille couldn't handle any more awesomeness...

2009-03-28T11:58:00.000-07:00

... my aunt & uncle & three tiny cousins came to visit! Which made me remember what I always forget: BABIES DON'T STAY BABIES. In the same way that slim orange kittens become fat, glorious orange cats, tiny dudes become BIGGER tiny dudes!

Milan & Rishi a few years ago, capable only of sitting around looking fatally adorable:

Milan & Rishi now, capable of creating mass chaos while STILL looking fatally adorable:

Not to mention their baby sister, conveniently known as Baby, exhausted after hours of holding her own in the midst of her big brothers' Tasmanian Devil-like energy:

Oh man. Doesn't it kind of HURT a little bit to look at them?

Speaking of hurting a little:

I hope that they will always be able to laugh that hard.

There we were, a chaotic little flock of Ontarian ex-farmers (and my Aunt Padma, who is from India, but is also Ontarian and ex-farmer by association), parading through the streets of this big France town, among demon babies and boulangeries and beer parlors.

Demon babies, you say?!

For very mysterious reasons they just sort of appeared one night, and haven't left. Lille people act like this is completely normal so I'm trying to do the same... but they give me the creeps nonetheless.

So. Other news.

I reached the point last week where I could no longer ignore the fact that I really needed a haircut. And I got one, and it's a good cut, but it's SHORT. Shorter than I'm used to. I think it still classifies as "long hair" because it's not like you can see my ears or anything, but it's definitely something new. I'm hoping that it's short & sexy, short & sophisticated, even short & cute, but it might be just short & short. Too short to tie up when I go jogging, so it just kind of flies around everywhere, Medusa-like, which at least clears the sidewalk of people as I approach.

(that was my coy way of bragging that I am a jogger now! No longer the black sheep of my marathoning family! Except that I can barely wheeze through five consecutive songs on my playlist... but you have to start somewhere. Also they are long songs.)

The jogging, while somewhat motivated by the memory of all that chocolate and wine that fuelled my first, let's say, five or so months of living in France, is mostly a clever avoidance technique. As long as I'm concentrating on not hyperventilating or throwing up, my brain doesn't have time to dwell on the various uncomfortable questions it has recently been volleying around, like what it will feel like to leave France and come home, and what I should do when I get there, and where I should do it.

Answering the first question is easy: it will feel fantastic, because I will finally see people I've gone far too long without seeing, and because I'm flying straight to Montreal where an extremely fun itinerary with the girls and guys I've missed so much has already been suggested.

And it will also feel wrenching, because I will have to say goodbye to a life I've lived for the last eight months, and the people I've come to love, and all of that delicious, inexpensive wine & chocolate. And I will have to answer the next two questions.

And I KNOW that this is irrational and silly, but since this is my blog I can air out whatever irrational and silly worries occur to me: what if I am peaking right now? What if going to France to teach is the coolest thing I'll ever do, and after this I will get an acceptable job and start saving acceptable amounts of money and eating acceptable amounts of acceptable food, and accepting an adventureless life?

I can't imagine that ever happening, because I can't seem to keep drama and adventure out of my life for longer than five seconds even when I try, but that's still a bleak question that creeps into my mind now and then.

The answer, I think, will come to some extent from writing. While I write I usually have this flickering movie reel in my head showing all of my friends in suits and cocktail dresses, helping me celebrate my first book launch. Someday soon. Someday in my twenties. I am confident enough in this that I even know which dress I will wear (it is pink and if you've ever gone anywhere formal with me then chances are you know the one I mean!).

This dress, which Pauline leant me for a party in Stockholm, might not make it to the future book-launch party... but that apple crisp definitely will, in some kind of delicious reincarnation

In the meantime, there's the mangled mess of everything else in my brain to be sorted through, and it looks something like this:

Two nights ago I had a dream where I found a job in a cavernous warehouse containing millions of Oprah-like self-help books, which would be a bleak prospect except that THIS warehouse offered free back rubs to its employees before and after every shift. There was a whole room full of massage tables, with tabletop stone waterfalls artfully arranged around the perimeter and an Enya CD on endless repeat, and professional masseurs who would gently press you back onto the table if you tried to get up too early to start working. MOST RELAXING WORKPLACE EVER. I'm afraid the whole experience of that dream has set a new & impossible standard in my job search, as if the whole thing wasn't impossible enough alre ady.

For reasons big and small, it looks like I may live in Waterloo, at least for the summer and start of fall. For a long time, right up until two weeks ago actually, I thought vaguely that I would go back to Montreal, find a French-speaking job to keep myself polished, and live among that famously loveable crowd, but the advantages of living in Waterloo, at least at first, are growing & growing. A big one is the prospect of living close to family again, after three years of being at least eight hours away from them, first by train and then by plane.

And, of course, there's always the ten-dollar Coach Canada bus between Toronto & Montreal!

But... wow. Sometimes I wish I could pay someone to quickly and expertly figure this all out for me. Barring that possibility, I just keep telling myself that it doesn't have to be all figured out TODAY.

Soon.

2009-03-17T15:50:00.000-07:00

I am still here. Or rather... I am here, for the first time in a while. I'm back from Stockholm, Paris, and Amsterdam, and also from successfully herding 25 teenagers around London for two days, and it's been exhausting. And I don't just mean the traveling and the extreme-UV-ray exposure to unchecked adolescence. The last few weeks have been a scrambled mess of tough choices, baffling conversations, and an extreme, knock-you-down-and-steal-your-lunch-money kind of exhilaration, and not for the reasons that might first leap to mind. That kind of frantic living takes the stuffing out of a girl, after a while.

But please don't give up! I'm here and I have pictures and stories to share! I just need to catch up on three weeks worth of skipping sleep and them I'm all yours. And I promise to stop being so cryptic for no apparent reason.

An ice experience impossible to forget!

2009-03-02T06:09:00.000-08:00

I don't know what I was thinking when I packed for Sweden, but it was somewhere along the lines of, "hmmm, this is Scandinavia we're talking about, and it is February after all.... oh whatever, I'll just take this light jacket and hope for the best." Of the many Stockholm/Canada similarities, snow is the coldest, and the easiest to underestimate. But it has its good sides! Living in a French city perpetually overhung by Eyeore-like rainclouds made me forget the pleasures of walking through a snowy city, full of tiny snowmen and kids on toboggans....

After the first few enchanting hours, though, the reality of snow begain to creep in the seams of my Pumas: SNOW IS COLD. And despite popular belief, being Canadian doesn't make me impervious to freezing temperatures! Result = several dozen hot chocolates, creative scarf arrangements, and all of us huddling in the bathroom when we got home, thawing out on the only heated floor in the apartment.

Rough translation: BEWARE! OUTRAGEOUSLY CUTE PUPPIES AT LARGE!!

Unexpected food fact about Swedes: they like their nutrients packaged in toothpaste tubes, be it bacon, cheese, or.... fish eggs.

I tried to be brave. I did! I ate stuff I have never eaten before! But despite the sexy Tilda Swinton scene in Benjamin Button, I couldn't bring myself to indulge in the fish-eggs-from-a-tube (unlike Mattias, my enthuasiastic host and friend, who generously offered to eat my share).

I did, though, eat raw herring, which is served everywhere in Sweden (along with potatoes - oh my goodness, the Swedes LOVE their potatoes). And not only did I eat the raw herring, but I actually kinda sorta didn't mind it, which is a big step for me, a girl who has resisted the sushi trend and every other seafood movement her whole life.

Very typical Swedish lunch, with herring, potatoes, a creamy fish sauce, and green onion:

I hadn't seen anything, though, until I went to Sweden's national culture museum, and saw examples of Swedish meals from past centuries. Amidst the million variations of herring, there was a roasted swan! With head and wings still in tact!!! And a diamond danginling from its beak, as though in some kind of grotesque gesture of forgiveness for all the butchery and roasting...

I guess I don't have to tell you that this isn't MY plate:

Traveling to another country can be as much of a gastronomical adventure as a sightseeing one, and sometimes, after several such "adventures," there's nothing better in the entire world than to eat something familiar and comforting and full of delicious calories that have nothing to do with seafood. Which is why the blueberry pancakes I had on Sunday morning were the best pancakes I have ever had in my life!

Let's just pause here for a minute in memory of the perfectness of those pancakes.....

Sigh.

Back to the sightseeing part of this adventure: since Stockholm is a city built on several islands, there is water everywhere, and wherever there is water there are boats, waiting for tourists to come and take their pictures.

In the distance of this picture is Nordiska, the Swedish cultural museum, mentioned above:

Another view of Stockholm:

Two things that I need to handle better when preparing for winter conditions: (1) find out some way of taming my hair, which buckles and frizzes like an old wool mitten the second snow is near and makes me all self-conscious, and (2) stop wearing jeans that are so long they drag in the snow and soak water up to knee height and freeze my legs, which is, you know, mildly unpleasant.

But I hope none of that sounds like complaining, because I LOVE being in this city and indulging in my very favourite part of travel: getting entirely lost in an unfamiliar city (but always only a phone call away from being found again). This is Stockholm's City Hall, where the annual banquet for Nobel Prize winners is held every year (mysteriously named "the Blue Room") (Also where my friend Mattias formally received his MA degree):

A view of City Hall from the other side of the river:

Of the bazilion other touristy/museumy things worth seeing in Stockholm, my second favourite was the Vasa Museum. That place is a dream come true for those who, like me, once went through a very intense obsession with Lego pirate ships and their tiny canons.

The story, as far as I could gather, is that halfway through the 17th century the King of Sweden ordered that the biggest possible ship be built to intimidate Poland. It turned into one of those "bigger, faster, stronger" stories, where what mattered most was a country's ego, at the expense of everything else.

In the end the ship was so enormous and wobbly that it immediately sank five seconds after it was launched, before it had even cleared the harbour. Imagine how embarrassing that would be!! The kicker is that the shipbuilders suspected that their ship wasn't seaworthy, so once they got it floating they had several dozen sailors sprint from one side of the deck to the other to test it out. They had to cancel the test after only a few sprints, because the ship was keeling so steeply that it might have turned right over. But of course the king ignored the results of this experiment and told them to hurry the heck up and launch the thing.

(Listen to me! "Keeling"! Like I know anything about ships!!!)

333 years later, in 1961, the ship was finally hauled up from the bottom of the Stockholm harbour, and evenutally the Swedes built a musuem around it.

Isn't that cool?? A 300-year old ship! And you can go and see it!! And touch it! And they even fished up the skeletons of all the people who didn't make it off the ship before it sank, and you can visit those too, which inspires a delicious mixture of creepiness and insatiable curiosity.

It was impossible for me to take a decent picture of the ship, which was truly massive, so instead I just stole this one from Wikipedia:

On the right you can see part of the ship, and on the left, a little model of it with its original colours, which I did manage to snap:

I wish I could be ten years old again, with this model to play with. I could feel that part of myself, the ten-years-old part, leaping with excitement.

ABRUPT CHANGE OF SUJECT:

On an entirely different outing, I joined some friends for the most unusual cocktail I've ever had. Actually, the cocktail itself was pretty standard Megan fare (raspberry vodka), but the location was entirely unusual!!

Actually, that could be the slogan for my entire holiday in Stockholm, not just the part where I got tipsy in a giant igloo...

Cocktail glasses made out of ice! Bar made out of ice! Walls made out of ice!

I sort of wanted to leave with one of those furry coats, but the staff had obviously anticipated that possibility and were super-diligent about making sure you de-robed before checking out. Regardless, the twenty minutes spent there represent the most fun I've ever had while sitting on an ice cube.

My totally favourite place to visit in Stockholm, though, turned out to be one of the last things I did, with our entire gang: we went to Skansen, which is a big "outdoor musuem" on one of the islands, meant to recreate old Scandinavian farms and stores and lifestyle. It had kind of a pioneer village-y feel, with guides dressed in period clothing, old toys and sports equipment to try out, and dozens of tiny, beautiful roads to wander....

And it also had animals! Like this very fat, very self-satisfied hog.

A pack of wolves and their noon meal:

Tycho's distant cousin:

Santa's reindeer in the off-season:

(side note: Swedish people have no idea who Rudolph is! And Sweden in the reindeer capital of the world!! Shocking.)

Mooses:

Pauline tries an old pair of skiis:

Hippie sheep:

The entire week was pretty amazing, and to give it a movie finish we left Skansen and walked bravely out onto the frozen Baltic Sea and wrote our names in the snow (and some of us did strange turtle dances):

That's it from Stockholm. In the morning I'm flying to Paris for a second, and entirely different, chapter of this holiday adventure, which will involve a VIP visitor from Canada, some shenanigans in Amsterdam, and probably a lot of champagne. I will splash it all across this blog (the pictures, not the champagne) once I get back to Lille and life goes back to some kind of normal rhythm, somewhere in the very distant future (ie. in two weeks).

Au revoir for now!

Insert big wiener/tight buns joke here

2009-02-25T07:47:00.000-08:00

Full Stockholm update coming very very soon!

London: not just in Ontario anymore

2009-02-20T03:13:00.000-08:00

Finally able to post again! Hip hip! Cheerio! Bloke!

I am two weeks behind in blog posts, which is like ancient history given current circumstances. I kind of forget where I live sometimes because the last few weeks have been so full of travel and seedy hotels and fancy apartments and OH MY GOODNESS so much food. And there's no en in sight: tomorrow I leave for Stockholm, and then Paris, and then Amsterdam, for possibly the best holiday ever.... but I'm trying to keep my enthusiasm under control, since too much enthusiasm makes me forget certain important details, like where I put my keys and whether or not I've eaten breakfast already.

I have to start somewhere, so I'll start IN LONDON! I was there for a weekend recently, and the weather was beautiful and the beer was cheap and I got to pretend I was in a novel for a little while.

So excited to ride on the "tube" that I got all blurry:

I arrived in London late Friday afternoon and had a couple of hours to kill before Sam, my friend & generous host for the weekend, was off from work. I wandered towards the river and suddenly found myself at the foot of this giant clock tower, thinking I was completely lost and hopeless and wondering if this what one of those situations where I should just stay in one place and wait to be found... then I realized! This was no run-of-the-mill, dime-a-dozen, small potatoes clock tower!!!

It seems so incredible to me that you can just walk up and touch something like Big Ben, something that you've heard about for ages and ages, something so culturally iconic and endlessly eulogized and photographed and recreated in miniature. You don't need a magic school bus or a VIP invitation or a secret password or a cousin's friend's sister-in-law who knows the guy in charge. It's just there, doing normal clocky things, not giving a damn about the writers and painters and filmmakers and millions of tourists. (I feel the same way about celebrities: it's amazing to imagine that Clive Owen is not a superhuman clone locked in a top-secret building, but is an ordinary dude who lives somewhere, who has a house and a grocery list and cavities and bellybutton fluff, and that if you go to the right place you could see him walking down the street, doing Clive Oweny things.)

Go to the right place and you can see double-decker buses and charming British stereotypes and all those historical places that you thought only existed in Woolf novels!

I spent all of Saturday wandering the city with my trusty tour guide Sam. See that Ferris Wheel in the distance?
We went on that!

The thing is so massive that you don't just sit in a dinky little carriage with your feet hanging down! No way! Londoners take their midway attractions seriously. You have to get into one of these futuristic glass pods, and it's a good thing too, because that thing goes VERY VERY RIDICULOUSLY HIGH.

It surprised me that everything I absolutely wanted to see in London was all clustered together in the same general area. It's almost as though they planned it so that all of us lazy North American tourists could see the city's top five attractions in an easy afternoon. Almost.

The abbey, which is two and a half steps away from Big Ben:

And St. James' Park, only a ten minutes' walk further:

Swan blanacing in the ice that still coated the river in St. James Park. I have no idea why this picture came out all pukey-coloured, but I actually kind of like it! It looks artistic. Or something.

View of a very gnarled old tree and, in the distance, Buckingham Palace:

Unfortunately the Queen wasn't at home so I couldn't give her a what's up from Canada. Didn't get William's number either. Unfulfilled quests are bad for the ego!!

Guard with a fuzzy hat!

Copper on a horse!

Next two pictures by special request for a certain ginger-coloured beast:

These helpful warnings on the pavement saved my life about a hundred times over the course of the weekend:

Camden Market, aka Punksville:

There are two things that slayed me while I was in London: hearing little tiny kids saying "mummy!" in little tiny British accents, and seeing how London bookstores categorized their particularly melodramatic fiction:

And finally, three Chileans and an Ecuadorian, with the best South American meal to ever fill this belly:

Interim Post

2009-02-06T05:11:00.000-08:00

I've been meaning to post all week, but there always seems to be just one more email to answer, or one more dinner to attend, or one more sugar coma to sleep off. I'm five seconds away from going to get the train for London, and will write more after I get back in a few days.

The above shot is from Charleville. We went, we swam and ate and talked a lot of French, and we left. It was a great weekend and I'll post more pictures next week!

Almost forgot what sunshine felt like

2009-01-31T00:13:00.000-08:00

Hey, Canada: I don't want to rub in or anything, but... it's beautiful here right now. Even kind of spring-like if you stand in unfiltered sunlight. Claire took this picture yesterday, just outside my room at Faidherbe (I concede that I went a teeny bit overboard with the sleeveless shirt... but everyone here already insists that since I'm Canadian I must think that anything above zero is beach weather, and who am I to unravel their charming misconceptions?).

Going to Charleville for the weekend with my fellow musketeers, Theo and Claire. Charleville is Theo's hometown, and every time I talk to him I get a different report about what we're going to do there, from sweating out half of our body weight in a hamam to indulging in Claire's crush on Rimbaud to wandering the town centre, looking for marionettes (apparently Charleville is the marionette capital of the world...?).

Whatever we end up doing, it's going to be hilarious and memorable, because when we are together we are three giant goofballs with none of that annoying self-awareness that most people maintain in mixed company.

Behold Theo, in his blogosphere film debut (this is what we're doing when we're not at school):

Dear Mom: please ship Tycho "priority post"

2009-01-27T23:43:00.001-08:00

Let's do it again next year!

2009-01-24T06:58:00.000-08:00

So when I first landed back in France, the idea of blogging left me feeling a bit like this:

But NOW! I feel like THIS:

Not to be too draconian about it, but my head is all mixed up in about ninety million different ways right now, and the next few months will have to involve some serious reflection. But as tempting as it is to lie around reflecting like crazy all day, there's a whole continent out there to cruise! And whole drinks to be drunk! And entire lists of decisions to be perpetually avoided!! I'm exhausted just thinking about it all. Or maybe that's just because I've been wearing pajamas for the last eighteen hours.

I'm tempted to start rambling straight out of the gate, but instead I will devote this post to raving about the holidays. Because they were exceedingly cool! And now that I have my camera back (tiny miracle), I have proof.

Behold, a list of the Top Six (PG) Moments of the 2008/9 Holidays!

6. Christmas Day, with all of the food and cocktails and gifts and affectionate teasing we could handle.

Below: the only word for this is MMMMMMMMMMMM.

That picture illustrates what Christmas is about: wrapping paper, stockings, and pine needles scattered everywhere, and us in the middle, savoring it all. Calm in the midst of chaos. And a cat to make sure everything is torn into small enough pieces.

And, of course, pugs.

5. New Years' Eve party with a handful of nutty aunts and cousins and one nutty uncle!

Instructions: (1) wear as many insane clothes and as much makeup as possible. (2) Dance like a fiend in the living room, especially whenever ABBA is played (ignore self-conscious warnings left over from high school that warn against dancing of any kind, especially to ABBA).

4. Uncle Jim's world-famous (or at least Hancock-famous) waffles.

If there's one picture in the world right now that I could somehow instantly upload into reality, it would be this one! Or maybe it would be that picture of Clive Owen on the cover of Details...

Um. I'll be right back. After a cold shower.

3. Makeover by my favourite person under five feet tall:

2. More puppies, kitties and babies than I could handle!

The prince among them all:

In France, I spend all of my time among the adolescent and 20-something crowd, not a baby for miles. And the closest I ever get to a pet is when I walk that stretch of sidewalk down by the grocery store, where some kind of massive canine creature leaves equally massive piles of slippery, pea-coloured excrement. I think a vet might be needed. A vet, and an factory-strength sandblaster to clean a path from my dorm to my food supply.

Jen's cat Annie, who doesn't let being entirely toothless slow her down:

Oh my gosh! A baby and a dog together in the same place! I'm amazed I managed to look at the camera long enough for that picture to be taken.

Lucky for me, two of my fellow bridesmaids in Jen & Mark's wedding were toting around little tiny people the whole weekend, which meant lots of cuddle time for the rest of us. Above is Seema's baby girl Maya, and below is Sharon's lil' dude Wyatt, who partied harder and looked better than any of us ever did.

1. WEDDING OF THE MILLENIUM, OR POSSIBLY EVEN THE BILLENNIUM (I looked it up)

Facebook is groaning under the weight of about a zillion different Jen & Mark wedding albums, which doesn't even include the professional shots, still on their way. What you see here is just a tiny random sample of my favourites....

Above picture: I am trying to peel away one of the kleenexes I strategically hid beneath the bouquet. I think God invented waterproof mascara in anticipation of J&M's wedding.

Below, the bridesmaids' contribution to the reception speeches: selections from one of the most authoritative, respected textbooks of its kind.

Above: Basia and I trying to look sassy. Her performance during Jen & Mark's ceremony would have reduced the most stone-hearted existentialist to a pile of weeping goo on the church floor. Jen came down the aisle to Basia playing the Velvet Underground's "I Found A Reason," and even just typing that gives me shivers.

Dawson! And Megan! On a limo bus without a washroom, trying to hold all that pee inside after spending hours at the open bar. Can you see the strained look behind our smiles?

Despite the pee scenario, that limo bus was hella fun. It felt like we were in an alternate universe, where the music was loud and the dancing kind of insane, instead of somewhere on the highway between Whitby and Toronto.

It was perfect.

A picture worth a thousand hours of sound sleep

2009-01-14T08:47:00.000-08:00

Culinary Adventure #42: Black Vodka, not so good actually

2009-01-12T02:24:00.000-08:00

But at least we have clean teeth.

2009-01-11T11:52:00.000-08:00

Thanks, Air Canada! Thanks for that complementary soft-bristle toothbrush you gave me! It totally makes up how you misplaced my giant duffel bag full of stuff. I know, I know, you've been vigorously scratching your head and saying "hmmm, looks like it's still missing" whenever I ask, even if I have that annoying habit of asking every 15 minutes. Thank you. Your complete lack of sincere concern is calming, and your talents are prize-worthy. There should be an entire Internet niche of amateurs on video trying to recreate that magical way you can make entire suitcases vanish - YouTube imitation, the ultimate flattery. If you ever find the bag with my camera inside, I'll be the first to post.

Oh, sigh. Not a very happy blog post I'm afraid. It's been a looooooong week, but the week is over, and that means I am already feeling 5000% better. I just wish I could hire someone to plan all my lessons for me, and also someone to hassle Air Canada so I can take a break. I would give those people nicknames: Will-You-Marry-Me would be the lesson planner, and Ultra-The-Best would be the Air Canada hassler. Applications now being accepted.

Back in France!

2009-01-08T01:17:00.000-08:00

But that exclamation mark doesn't quite represent my feelings about returning. When I first boarded the plane to come back here early this week, I was aiming for stoic acceptance - holidays over, job resumed, but hey, at least my commute is to France, which adds a bit of glamour to the usual slug of back-to-reality blues.

But then Air Canada lost all of my luggage. Wearing the same travel clothes for the last three days, without hair dryer or tweezers or razor or the usual necessities of a well-groomed life, while airport authorities shrugged their shoulders and gave me the run-around, has wrung every bit of glam out of this adventure. I'm hoping that publicly complaining about it here will mean that all of my stuff will turn up again, and I will soon be writing a sheepish post about how I complained about nothing, about how all the meltdowns that I've only barely managed to curb over the last 48 hours were in fact disproportionate to the problem. I can't wait to write a post from that vague, happy future. Please please pleeeeeeeease let it come.

I promise never to complain about our awful kitchen again if my luggage is returned to me. You heard me, Airport God. I offer you sacrifice.

"I just met a wonderful new man. He's fictional, but you can't have everything."

2008-12-16T00:44:00.000-08:00

1. Just saw Woody Allen's "The Purple Rose of Cairo," which was hilarious and weird and unexpected, in all the right ways. Probably most people are much more enlightened than I am and saw this movie ages ago, but if not, DO IT.

1b. So, about the last post's picture: I am under the table because of FRANCE! There is a tradition here of eating a certain kind of cake, called the "Galette de Roi," in which is hidden a tiny little figurine. Whoever gets the piece of cake with the figurine hidden inside is the king/queen of the feast. BUT if the cutter of the cake hits the figurine with his knife, and thus discovers where it is hidden, then someone has to get out of sight under the table and randomly assign pieces of cake to everyone in the room. Does that sound crazy? It's not crazy. It's French. But the line is not always distinct....

Two details that we willfully ignored: ONE! this is usually a tradition that happens on the first Sunday in January to correspond with Epiphany, which is also called Feast of the Kings, and that's about all I can tell you about its origins. The Wise Men arrive, they give Jesus some loot, and 2,000 years later we eat cake. We jumped the gun by eating it before Christmas holidays had even begun, but we had the excuse that I would still be in Canada on the proper day. Plus the excuse that the cakes were on sale at the super-discounted-end-of-the-line little grocery store down the street and we had empty stomachs when we came upon the display!

TWO! it is actually supposed to be the YOUNGEST who squeezes under the table for the assignment of cake slices, but somehow it ended up being me, the eldest. This is what happens when you are the clueless foreigner among a group of mischievous natives. But at least while I was down there I found my Batman Spinner that I had gotten in a box of Cocoa Puffs two weeks ago and then lost.

2. Students are striking today! Students! Striking!! It's like being in a modern "Les Mis," or maybe the 60s, complete with a precarious, touchingly authentic barrier made from garbage cans and wooden pallets.

The staff room is full of rage and amusement; rage that students will strike the minute they hear the word "reform" without turning over the rock to see what's beneath it, and amusement because classes are mostly cancelled and the coffee machine is on over-time duty.

I just hope that Strike Fever doesn't spread to the train system, which has been having teeny little regional strikes lately, though so far nothing that would keep me from getting to the airport on Thursday. But will I ever feel good when I am properly settled into a jumbo-jet economy seat for nine hours alone with my thoughts and an iPod full of christmas tunes.

3. Lara and Annabelle and I had a jolly little Christmas party last week at Annabelle's apartment, which has an OVEN, which means I made COOKIES and it was glorious. Unfortunately I added baking soda instead of baking powder, so they looked sort of plastic at the end, but whatever, they were cookies so we ate them anyway.

I really need to stop drinking and carrying on several conversations while attempting to follow a recipe...

Annabelle made Foie Gras, which, like the snails, surprised me with its greatness. Snails? Duck liver? What am I becoming!? It's almost like I'm developing tastes beyond pizza and brownies! Weird!!

Final food update: I made pancakes with the Little Dudes, and it was fantastic. It was also the first time I ever drank wine while eating pancakes and I LIKED IT.

Working with the LDs is a, uh, interesting challenge for me. It's hard to find the right balance between making sure they are interested and engaged, and making sure they are learning English. They are too young for drills and too old for classic fun & games. But I've got a new arsenal of teaching material to try out on them in the new year and hopefully they will progress, bit by hilarious bit, towards being confident speakers... at least now they know how to say "Pass me the Nutella"!

There is a perfectly reasonable explanation for this photo.

2008-12-14T11:32:00.000-08:00

Well, some kind of explanation, anyway.

And as soon as I have slept off the effects of yesterday's farewell party for Claire and Felipe, I will divulge.

EXPLOSIVE CHRISTMASSY FEELINGS IN MY BELLY!!! (or maybe that's just the rum)

Could tomorrow please be Christmas?

2008-12-09T12:56:00.000-08:00

Okay, I don't really need to write ANYTHING about how great the Christmas vibe is in Lille, because this picture pretty much says it all:

Spicy mulled wine and a FERRIS WHEEL. I felt like a grown-up 25-year-old and a giddy 10-year-old all at the same time, and it was AWESOME. (warning: this post may require the use of LOTS AND LOTS OF CAPITAL LETTERS AND !!!! POINTS)

Lara and I started the madness at an afternoon art market, which was Overdose Number One. So many fantastic bags and buttons! So much handmade jewelery! Display after display of teeny, tiny clothing for tiny, tiny hipsters who haven't learned to walk yet! I died and woke up again in a child-rearing fantasy about thirty times (because kids aren't any work, right? you just get to dress them in miniature corduroy jackets and show them around at parties, right??).

The art market (took this shot for you, Jen... you would have LOVED it):

The art market was in Roubaix, which is a smaller town glued onto the edge of Lille like a piece of elbow macaroni. When we finally got to downtown Lille to check out the Christmas action, it was evening. Saturday evening. Which meant fifty thousand people, most of them tourists, squashed into the tiny Lille streets. MY tiny Lille streets. Seeing all those people, most of whom were tourists from Britain by the sounds of their accents, made me feel a surge of patriotism, or at least possessiveness, for my city.

Hey! Hoards of people! What do you think you're doing? Stop blocking my access to the mulled wine! I got here TWO MONTHS AGO! I earned this city!

The good news is that most of these tourists were nervous types and walked a wide circle around the Ferris wheel. Which meant we only had to wait twenty minutes to get the most terrifying/beautiful view of the city I'll ever have!

Lille, from above (way, way, stomach-turningly above):

I kept getting these little electric jolts in my soft tissue, and the thought kept crashing through my mind that THIS IS UNNATURAL. Human beings aren't meant to be sitting dozens of stories above the ground in a little metal bowl. And that's why, when we are foolish enough to do it anyway, our brain starts tipping all kinds of little panicky chemicals into the bloodstream to try and STOP THE MADNESS. But I had paid four euros and darn it if I wasn't going to ride in that metal bowl and take all the madness I could get!

This video is kind of lame, mostly because my camera does this weird focus-unfocus thing whenever I try to shoot film, but I think I captured one complete revolution on the wheel without dropping the camera into the crowd below and that deserves a showcase:

I am trying to make the Christmassy-ness last right through until next week, when I get into another very unnatural human contraption and cross the Atlantic yet again for a brief visit with the homefolks. My students are being very good sports about playing Christmas Jeopardy with me, and singing along to round after round of "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus."

Fishing for possibilities

2008-12-08T13:05:00.000-08:00

In the ten minutes it took me to find my camera among the fifty million things I felt obliged to bring along on a walk (notebook, wallet, two pens in case one dries out, map, phone, spare batteries, compact, and deodorant, because you never know when you will need armpits that smell like lavender) the fisherman in the foreground caught three tiny, writhing fish. Each time he snagged one, he had to haul in that giant fishing rod, fist over fist, which took ages and impaled several pedestrians on the sidewalk behind him. Once he was within reaching distance of the fish, he slipped a knife out from behind his ear and sliced it free, then tossed it, flopping and flinging, into the cylindrical net in front of him. It was all done with such a businesslike detachment that I felt I couldn't look away.

I've got a blog post stewing about how fantastically over-the-top the Lille Christmas celebrations are (completely suited to Megan tastes), but just haven't had the time I need to post it. Meanwhile, some berries, which grow around the perimeter of Faidherbe and give me a little Christmassy shot to the arm every time I pass them by (even if I'm late for twenty appointments, forgot to wipe the stray smear of toothpaste from my chin, have non-lavender-smelling armpits, and can't seem to get my iPod working):

Progress, of sorts

2008-12-07T12:16:00.000-08:00

The Citadel, two days after I arrived in September:

The same Citadel, seven days into December:

Three reasons why I love France

2008-12-06T14:08:00.000-08:00

ONE.

TWO.

THREE!

Some things you do for money, and some you do for love (also to win points with your girlfriend's family)

2008-11-29T15:49:00.000-08:00

Okay, so imagine your name is Lara, and you are supremely courageous because EVEN THOUGH you were living the good life in the US of A, you decided to come to France for a year to teach high school kids how to say "Obama is king" with a perfect accent. Coming to France meant saying goodbye to your long-time beau, Lucas, and EVEN THOUGH you and Lucas decided you'd get married once you're back from your temporary insanity, you find it pretty hard to endure the separation. France can be a lonely place sometimes (except for your super-awesome friend Megan!!).

but THEN!

on a dreary WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON!

there is a KNOCK on your DOOR!!! Who could it be?!

IT'S LUCAS!!!

Oh my goodness, I was SOOO glad he finally arrived, because that meant I could stop jabbing myself with a pen to make sure I didn't give away the surprise every time Lara was around. I think they had a good time together, and I EVEN think that she has fogiven me for lying to her about twenty million times in order to keep her unoccupied and in Lille for the week of his arrival. And he turned out to be super-cool, too. Not that I ever doubted he would be. We ate lots of pizza and drank lots of beer, which is my official bonding ritual with new people. In fact, the first time I ever hung out with Lara, we ate lots of pizza and drank lots of beer. Points for consistency!

Meanwhile, as the Ls were enjoying their brief respite from missing each other, I went to the Emergency Room.

But don't worry, it wasn't for an emergency! I was just having my brain examined by aliens. Aliens, and Felipe.

He's doing doctoral research and needs some subjects, which means putting your head in this thing:

and clicking a lot of buttons. It's definitely an easier way to make money than teaching!! Plus, we had a picnic, and I got to take a lot of pictures of everything, until Felipe confiscated my camera.

(Re. comments on the last post: Andrew, you ask some interesting Qs, and I will respond sometime soon!)

To the extent that it's absurd

2008-11-28T14:40:00.001-08:00

I was doing this:

But soon I will be doing THIS!

and it will be AMAZING because I feel like I've only slept for a total of five seconds this whole week!

Change of subject: BEST PUMPKIN PIE EVER. Made by Lara.

Every time I write "pumpkin" I type "pumpking." What's that?? A verb? I am pumpking? What does it mean, to pumpk? Or maybe it's vegetable royalty. Long Live the Pump King! King of Pumps!

Less than a month until Christmas, and I'm waking up in the morning with "All I Want For Christmas is You" stuck in my head. Looking for any reason to be festive. Like making Christmas stir fry!!

Also, I think it should be IMMEDIATELY NOTED (in red ink, with plenty of exclamation marks) that tonight, thanks to Claire, I ATE SNAILS. Um, I mean .... ESCARGOTS. I tried to feel all French and sophisticated and not at all nauseous, but there were two problems: (1) we ate them while standing around the Faidherbe kitchen, which lacks something in both Frenchness and sophistication, but is more than abundant in nausea... and (2) all I could think about the whole time was the slime trail left behind a traveling snail.

But I ate THREE of them and didn't die, so I guess they aren't so bad. In fact... they might have even been a little bit good.

The snails, tactfully hidden beneath a layer of pesto and inside a pillow of pastry (which I think says something about how weird it is to eat a snail):

Eating snails for the first time in my life:

Hmmmm... not dead yet....

Lara is also still alive! That's all the proof I need. Snails are safe.

Verdict: I could hold my own at a Parisian wine & hors d'oeuvres, but I'd take a giant, greasy plate of poutine over a snail if given the choice. Canadian to the very end!

Jen + Poutine = why can't I have poutine in front of me this very second? And while I'm at it, why can't Jen be here, too?

If you want to read more about snails (who wouldn't?), I highly recommend Sharon's post about her husband, Rafa, and his unorthodox culinary tastes! And while you're there, you might as well read about his unorthodox (and thusly hilarious) storytelling techniques, all in one convenient post.

As a final note for the night: I MISS MY CAT. Sometimes, when I look at pictures of him (which is kind of often), it physically hurts.

Ouch!

Change is hard.

Not so far from Canada after all

2008-11-23T02:36:00.000-08:00

It SNOWED! In LILLE! Land of eternal rain!!!!

It started coming down last night in damp, uncommitted flakes while I was at my friend Claire's house.

Attempt at an artistic snow shot under the glass ceiling:

After I took this picture I ran into the rest of our motley Faidherbe crew on the last metro home, and we frolicked like mad, thinking that by morning the snow would have disappeared.

Swarming around the streetlights at midnight:

But then! This morning!!

My groggy early-morning lope to the toilet became a meandering stroll outside, after I realized the dusting had survived the night...

Completely deserted campus.

Sigur Rós on the iPod.

Uh, bliss? You bet.

The only thing missing was the company of my favourite pooch for some romping and snow-flinging.

Hopefully all of that sub-zero air has jolted awake all the right neurons in my brain. Lots to get done today to ease the Mondayness of Monday!

Writing on a blackboard is HARD.

2008-11-21T08:57:00.000-08:00

I don't know about fancy science, but evidence suggests that writing on a blackboard dramatically decreases one's capacity for being any kind of smart. Spelling, simple math, grammar... it's all twenty times harder when it's done on a giant vertical surface in front of a gaggle of bored teenagers. Potato? Or potatoe? Alligator or aligator? ....Vicadin or Vicodin? (If you've seen House then you know where I got the inspiration for my haphazard conversation class about abusing pharmaceuticals.)

Also related to blackboards: DROPPING THE CHALK. Even before France, I think I already spent about 70% of my day picking up things that I dropped. Keys, cutlery, keys, my iPod, keys. And now I have to add chalk to the mix. The problem is that when the students are talking and good things are happening, I kind of start to toss the chalk up and down in my palm, you know, to encourage them to keep the momentum up, and for the love of god to KEEP TALKING because I have no idea how I'm going to fill the WHOLE HOUR... and then I inevitably give a little too much enthusiasm to my tossing, and the chalk goes flying and I have to go get it and my Teacher's Authority Rating dives to about zero.

I think I am going to stop writing on the blackboard altogether and start using that sneaky teacher trick that I learned in university: "That's a good question, Jimmy. Can anyone tell Jimmy how to spell Connecticut [please please please please]?"

Part Two of this blog is entirely unrelated to Part One, and so I will give it a new title:

"Why I Love Cheese Now (Alternative Title: Christina Was Right All Along - see comments on the last blog post)"

Before I start: let me just say that while yes, it's true, I've begun to actually LIKE cheese that isn't mozzerella or cheddar, I stand firm on my belief that some cheese is beyond even the remotest contemplation of consumption. Example: my roommate Nate has this wheel of cheese that smells like a Victorian sewer and clears the kitchen every time he unwraps it. Well... to be fair, it only clears ME from the kitchen. I run to my room and inhale a noseful of shampoo to get my balance back. If cheese violently assaults every available sense like that, it can't really be all that good for your insides, can it? I think I've figured out the essential problem, though. I like a nice, tender side of denial with all of my meals. I like my chicken to look nothing like a chicken, and my shrimp to taste nothing like seafood, and my cheese to smell nothing like what it is: curdled milk with a film of mould.

BUT!

I am now 25 years old. By some accounts, a capital-A Adult. So it's time that I put aside my old cheese prejudice and give some (SOME!) of it a try. And thus I found myself at a dinner party the featured cheese! Melted cheese! Delicious, gooey, hot, stinky CHEESE! And I liked it!! The meal was Raclette, the mood was merry, the conversation went far and wide.

What I learned about enjoying Raclette, a step-by-step guide:

1. Pet the dog.

2. Open the champagne.

3. Pet the dog again (she's a big dog, lots of surface area to cover)

4. Get some cheese!!!

5. You need a little oven that sits in the middle of the table. You get a tiny frying pan to put inside the little oven to melt the cheese of your choice, or fry an egg if that's your thing.

That little oven works really hard! Not only does it melt the cheese and cook the eggs, it also keeps the Mr. Potato Heads warm on top!

6. The eggs! I didn't actually manage to find out what kind they were, but I do know that the bird looks like the egg. A small bird? With brown speckles? And lots of deliciousness inside?

7. Pour the hot gooey cheese/egg all over the potatoes and moosh it all up together! Add some smoked meat! And some white wine!!

8. Add a GIANT PIECE OF CAKE! (because if there's one thing I learned when I turned 25, it's that desserts should always come in MASSIVE PORTIONS. Go big or go eat a vegetable.)

Oh boy I am getting hungry just by typing this....

btw, I fixed the problem that was preventing non-registered users from commenting on this blog. The last couple of posts have had mega comments (ha, MEGAN comments)!! That makes me feel all bright and sunny inside!

Aside: I just saw a fantastic student play at Faidherbe that involved ABBA and a lot of spandex. Got me thinking: how did I go from living at the Zoo in London to teaching undergrads in Montreal to listening to ABBA in Lille? Life is weird.

And on the seventh day, my stomach rested.

2008-11-17T13:18:00.000-08:00

Oh my gosh, what a weekend. I totally loved turning 25. Can I do it again NEXT weekend? 25 and 1/52nd?

I got some pretty incredible bone-crushing hugs over the last few days, both in person and in written/emailed form, and it has completely blown me away. I am composing this blog entry by flailing a long stick towards the keyboard, because the G-force of all of those birthday wishes has plastered me against the far wall of my bedroom. Once I get my feet back on the ground I will answer each and every one of you with the love and sincerity that you deserve. Thanks for the totally great blog comments, the colossal number of facebook shout-outs, and - from my homeboys(and girls) in Montreal - for the construction-paper-and-stickers Book of Love and Tipsiness whose hilarity made me shoot Fanta out my nose.

This post has been a long time coming because of technical difficulties (in my brain). For now, a brief photo essay to sum up the main activities of the weekend:

1. Massive Amounts of Feasting, The First: chicken fajitas at "home" with my "peeps" (am I still allowed to say that now that I'm 25? Was I EVER allowed to say that?)

3. Massive Amounts of Feasting, The Second: Raclette with "work peeps" (the type of peep is important; note the difference in, uh, "table settings" from the first feast...)

3. Massive amounts of ice cream, which cancelled out any kind of vegetable consumption during feasts One and Two.

4. Ditto re. cake.

4. BEER + THE PARTY TABLE.

Can you see a theme beginning to develop? Things I Put In My Belly When I Turned 25. There is also the more general theme of Things That Are Massive: amounts of food, ice cream, and beer... as well as the size of this dog? Who was there during Feast the Second? I guess that's a workable tie-in. Basically I just wanted to post a picture of this dog because she is SO FANTASTIC.

_____

I actually wrote the above text a few days ago, but couldn't be arsed to upload the photos until right now. (Is saying "arse" okay in this situation? Do I need to be Irish or something? I'm not sure how the cultural ownership of slang works. I'm also not really clear on where "arsed" falls on the scale of rudeness, but for your reference I place it somewhere above "bothered" but below just about every other subsitution.) It feels like there are about fifty million different things happened right now, even though I could probably only list five, if pressed. The point is: Time, She is Flying. More blog posts are coming, I am saving them up by writing relevant subject lines in the "drafts" section of Blogger, like "Hazards of Fake Snow: a Study" and "Santa on a Ferris Wheel." Stay tuned.

GLORIOUS 25!!!

2008-11-13T23:36:00.000-08:00

Most Appropriate Remembrance Day Ever

2008-11-12T12:32:00.001-08:00

So I tutor a couple of little dudes who are just beginning to learn English at school, and I've become a giant fan of their whole family. I might even start parading outside of their house with a big foam finger and a placard that says "Lille's Most Awesome Bunch Of Folks Inside." Yesterday, for example, they fed me a massive, soul-boosting meal and took me on a road trip to the Canadian Memorial at Vimy Ridge.

On the road leading to the memorial:

And me with my Little Dudes!

Patronizing Little History Lesson: Vimy Ridge was the site of a WWI battle in which Canadian troops spent three days facing down the German army and, astonishingly (because other Allies had tried and failed), capturing an important stretch of land. As we drove towards the ridge, we could see, high up and in the far distance, the outline of the gigantic stone pillars that form the official monument, designed by a Canadian in 1936. It's the largest of Canada's war monuments and, well, it's impressive.

I tried to capture it in the above picture and failed, but try to imagine a rainbow reaching across the sky and seeming to end right at the foot of the monument. I mean, uh, wow.

The monument was breathtaking, of course, but what really knocked on my skull and said "Hello? There was a WORLD WAR HERE" was the actual landscape.

Which is full of massive craters.

I noticed Anne, the mother in this family, giving the Little Dudes an extra-long hug as we all stood at the edge and stared down, trying to contort our brains around the statistics.

More than 3,500 dead and that, of course, is only the beginning. It's incredible how benign it all seems now.

Of course, that sense of the benign can't last long in a place like Vimy. This sign, for example, tells people to keep back because of undetonated explosives buried in the ground.

Interesting aside: in the picture below you can see two small peaks in the distance, which are in fact huge piles of residue left over from the days when Lille was a mining town.

They are everywhere outside the city, and the ones that have been sitting abandoned for ages have been almost completely reclaimed by trees and wildlife. Anne told me that you can even find apple trees growing from some of them, which is odd for this area, apparently. The story is that miners would toss their apple cores onto the ground before their descent, and eventually all those cores produced trees.

Totally unrelated conclusion: TWO MORE SLEEPS UNTIL 50 POUNDS OF GUILT-FREE ICE CREAM AND OTHER BIRTHDAY SHENANIGANS!!!

Lifted.

2008-11-09T22:47:00.000-08:00

Every now and then the universe gives you what you need, and last night it gave me the last 100 pages of Ian McEwan's Saturday. Like a singer holding an exquisitely perfect note for longer than you think possible.

If you're wondering what fiction to ask for from Santa this year and you haven't yet read McEwan, do yourself this favour.

I live here!

2008-11-07T10:30:00.000-08:00

I have no idea why this teensy little space has two sinks. I mean, of all the luxuries that might have been doubled (like, oh, the size of the bed, which barely fits me and a pizza box at the same time, my standard of decency) why the sink? And in fact my drawing isn't totally accurate (fooled you!) because Sink No. 2 is actually two sinks, side by side, in case I ever feel like setting up an elaborate wash-rinse-dry cycle in my bedroom. Which MAYBE I would want to do, if we had any dishes to wash. You have to be creative around here. Wine out of a coffee mug. Pasta eaten right from the strainer. Cereal out of the bowl of the kitchen scale (why do we even have a kitchen scale?).

Another, uh, winning aspect of this place is the very unlikely colour scheme, which consists of nicotine-white and scrubs-green:

Everything here follows this scheme, from the toilet-rooms (they do not qualify as "bathrooms" because they contain no suggestion of cleanliness or sanitation, not even a sink, which maybe explains why I have two) to the wood stain on the desk to the bedside lamp. I wonder about the private relish of the person who chose these colours, knowing they would scald the retinas of hundreds of future teaching assistants with their unnatural hospital-bright glare. But I think that even the hired painter grew weary of the green, because he didn't bother to paint all the way to the bottom of my closet door. A few halfhearted strokes towards the floor and he called it a day. But I sort of like it. Reminds me of the wavery, single-layer coat of jet-black paint which circled the ceiling of my Woodward room and which no one could ever explain.

Non-sequitor: I've been thinking about my birthday. I know there are some people who are so charmingly self-restrained that they don't tell a soul when their birthday is approaching, and maybe they have the world's tiniest celebration with their cat and dog and possibly a couple of humans, and that's plenty. But me? I might as well order t-shirts that say "AVAILABLE FOR BIRTHDAY FUNNESS THIS FRIDAY, SUGGESTIONS WELCOME, APPLY ABOVE." I started getting excited about it, oh, two months ago. Once September hits I'm all birthday excitement, all the time. Admittedly, this year's whole Move To France fiasco bulldozed all other excitement out of the way, but it's back now. Seven days to go and I will be A QUARTER OF A CENTURY old. I know I will miss the giant Scorpio party of 2007 and all the VIPs who celebrated along with me, but I do have a few ideas floating around about how to make this year a particularly awesome one. One thing is for sure... I am definitely going HERE:

An entire restaurant for ice cream.

Uh.... YES PLEASE.

Next Friday I'm going to knock down their door and order everything on the menu. And then I'm going to ask Lara to roll me out of there like a barrel and tip me towards home, where I will incubate in my ice-cream birthday coma until I turn 26.

I think I would be okay with not having an oven if I could eat ice cream 24/7. Yeah, that seems reasonable. I suppose nutrition might be a problem, but nothing to lose sleep over. However, the need to eat AS MUCH ICE CREAM AS POSSIBLE is definitely a reason to lose sleep, because you know that Aerosmith song about how loverboy dreads drifting off to dreamland because he doesn't want to miss a thing? I don't want to fall asleep because I don't want to miss a second of White Chocolate Raspberry Truffle dipped in Sticky Toffee Gourmet Fondue. My life has new priorities....

OOOOOOOOOOH baby.

Had an internet date (much more innocent than it sounds) with one of my Montreal friends last night, except that his microphone wasn't working so basically our "conversation" was me delivering a two-hour monologue while he weighed in with a chat window. It was surprisingly easy for me to talk that long without anyone talking back (or maybe not so surprising?), but he did his best, and the archived transcript from his typed half is so VERY hilarious. In fact when I wasn't ranting and gesturing (and possibly knocking over another glass, plastic this time) I was falling out of my chair in laughter. Plus the advantage of being the only one able to speak meant that I could curse him out much more effectively when necessary, though he held his own using the vilest combinations of punctuation:

Jean-Marc: hey!
Jean-Marc: listen woman!
Jean-Marc: /////
Jean-Marc: take that!
Jean-Marc: +3pu y0-j5*9/
Jean-Marc: delayed reaction
Jean-Marc: i'm sternly not laughing back here

Advantage: I could just minimize his chat window and keep on ranting. Uh, not that I did that, JM.

The internet is a marvellous thing.

Jiggity-M and I in Montreal, way back in the golden days of '07

Cracking Up

2008-11-04T04:40:00.000-08:00

Oh no! This cup!!! It was one of the few non-broken, decently-sized cups we had in our kitchen, and then I broke it. No one knows yet. It's still sitting accusingly on the edge of my sink, maybe waiting for me to drop it one more time and finish the job properly. It happened so fast, officer... I don't really know... one minute I was rinsing out wine dregs (actually can you strike that from the record?) and the next thing I knew the cup was history. You can't blame me entirely... it was a musical emergency, and we've all had those. I had to act fast to change the song that was just beginning from a gut-wrencher to a mindless head-bopper; otherwise the entire fragile mood of buoyancy and giddiness that I had worked hard to cultivate would have been shattered. And when it comes to my cup or my emotional state, I'm afraid the cup gets the short straw. But if I keep this up, pretty soon we'll be drinking out of jam jars and tupperware containers.

Other terrible kitchen-related news: our two feeble hot plates have finally quit working altogether, so now 100% of our cooking has to be done WITH A MICROWAVE. ugh. I've been eating a lot of cereal and clementines. At least that covers two food groups, but LORDY, my kingdom for an oven.

Unrelated paragraph: people have asked me recently if it's okay for them to share this blog address with others (don't you love how the anonymity of the word "people" implies that I have legions of readers bursting to tell their friends about this?). Answer: DO IT!! I don't write things on the internet because I want them to be secret! And the only way I'm ever going to make $40,000/month and convince my unknown future husband to quit his job and manage my writing career is if I keep writing, and people keep reading. And pretty please, say hello in the comments once in a while... it gets lonely on the internets sometimes.

Blog posts for everyone!!!

Early-morning view of Faidherbe from my bedroom window

Here Nor There

2008-11-03T10:20:00.000-08:00

So, wasn't somebody in Germany recently? That's what I heard.

First stop in Ürzig, tiny vineyardy village in the central-westish part of Germany (I cringe because my geography might be somewhat haphazard... I tried to copy/paste a wormtrail representation of my voyage across Germany from googlemaps, but damned if I can figure out how to do it). I got a ride from Lille to Ürzig with a cook from the cantine at Faidherbe, who owns a house and a few grape vines there. We arrived on Sunday evening, the 26th, and on Monday morning (after sleeping off my German wine buzz) he gave me a driving tour of the vineyards in the area:

Can you believe that? It's like preschool for wine. Aiming vaguely for maturity, one day, if all the different stages of growth are survived. It's tragic. All the grapes that fall and are squashed before harvest! All the wine that is lost under the boots of cultivators!!

Most of the vineyards I saw were on steep slopes slanting towards all the villages below. I asked if this meant that all you had to do for a "table wine" was hold your wine glass out the window. He said, "Uh, no."

Apparently making wine takes a lot of work.

From Ürzig I took the train to Würzburg, and the journey took me through a few rail hubs, including a changeover in Frankfurt. I only had about twenty minutes to get from one train to another, just enough time to run outside and take a picture of the first building I saw, which was probably the most un-German place in the whole of the city: an Irish pub underneath a Halloween banner.

At least I got this photo of the inside of the Frankfurt train station, to prove that I'm not just recycling photos from Dublin...

Würzburg was pretty great; we stayed in an acceptable (if dwarfish) hotel and ate the BEST EVER breakfast buffet on the one day that we managed to rise before noon. Würzburg is home to a some pretty fantastic castles (as far as castles go), and I have about fifty million photos from all of them, which makes selective blogging kind of a tricky business. So I'm just gonna post one shot from a castle, of a painting on the ceiling above the Grand Staircase of the "Würzburg Residence." We managed to stick ourselves onto the tail-end of a guided tour, and learned that the elephant in this picture looks kind of odd because the painter had never actually seen an elephant, but had only heard stories about the beast. Somehow, I find this incredible.

A lesson in similarities: Chocolate Pig!

Statue Pig!
We drove from Würzburg to Füssen, where we climbed (uh, took a bus, actually) all the way up a modestly large mountain to Castle Neuschwanstein, or "New Swan Stone" Castle, built by a [supposedly] eccentric Bavarian king in the 19th C, who defied tradition by hiring a painter instead of an architect to design his abode. It was INCREDIBLE. It was also used as a model for the Disneyland castle. On the day that we ended up on Neuschwanstein's doorstep, the weather was cold and misty, and it felt like we were ascending straight into the sky. Totally amazing.

THIS WAY TO CASTLES!

This is what the scenery looked like from up there, on our Supremely Misty Day. Apparently there's a mountain and a famous lake out there somewhere. Who knew?!

The castle itself:

And a professional shot, to give you the whole idea:

I mean... HOLY COW.

I took about fifty bazillion pictures of the place, including this one, which also shows the totally mind-boggling 260km/hr car. Apparently this car is featured in some Playstation game, so everywhere we went 10-year-old boys unhinged their jaws and released their headlocks on each other. It was a lot fun, but also seemed kind of anachronistic against a backdrop of Bavarian castles... I guess that's just a burden of the 21st Century. How do you travel to these places without seeming completely out of touch? There were horses and buggies to get up the mountain, but they were only for the rich & idle.

Afterwards, had some true Bavarian food... white sausages with sugary mustard and such good beer...

In Füssen, it snowed!!!

And saints slayed dragons!!

We also drove to the city of Ulm, where Einstein was born! Which we didn't know, until the hotel's single public computer (with a very messed-up German keyboard) told us, thanks to Wikipedia.

I spent my last German day alone, exploring Ulm and waiting for my train out of the country. To be honest, I was a bit freaked out about where I'd sleep that night, but then I found this guy. He stalked up to me with this where-have-you-been, I've-been waiting-forever kind of impatience, and his massive purring offered much reassurance.

BUDDY!!!
While wandering Ulm with Mr. German-Cat at my heels, I found some decently photograph-able paths next to the river:

I ended up taking a train to Paris that night, and meant to catch the connecting train to Lille immediately after arriving. OF COURSE, the train from Germany was late, and I missed my train to Lille by about 500 miles. I stood in the middle of the Gare du Nord at 11pm and thought, this would be an appropriate moment to freak out, and start crying for people at home, and their protection and support... instead, I staggered with my luggage over to the single human being still standing around at that time of night in the train station, and one thing lead to another until, finally, I was safe and sound in a hotel room paid for by the train agents. If I sound self-congratulatory, it's only because I know how narrowly I missed a full dissolution into panic and homesickness. And yes, as a relatively inexperienced international traveler, I congratulate myself on that.

Paris hotel room, where, after an unpleasant experience with a fellow elevator passenger, I triple-locked my door and had an uncomfortable sleep.... but really, by the time I got here, this room felt like an oasis. I think its lay-out has been branded in my brain under the heading VARIOUS SANCTUARIES IN THE LIFE OF MEGAN with triple exclamation marks.

I finally made it home (to Lille) in the tiny hours of Saturday morning, and I've never been more happy and proud to collapse unto a 2ft x 4ft bed and call it my own.

OH MY GOSH it's exhausting uploading photos! I took about twenty different breaks while waiting for this post to be ready. I used my breaks to have political debates with our resident American, which weren't so much debates as each of us falling all over ourselves to proclaim our love for Obama. I fall into the crush on Obama camp while he is in the less shallow, much more responsible good-policies pool. Let's all cross our fingers for Tuesday.

Just another day on the Autobahn

2008-11-01T03:28:00.001-07:00

I'm back from four incredible days in Germany, with all the touristy receptors in my body completely and wonderfully depleted. I'll post about it all as soon as I have risen from the world's longest nap.

(btw: happy first of november! now begins a great line-up of events, starting with a certain couple of birthdays in the middle of the month, all the way through Christmas and New Years, and - as a special guest appearance this year - Jen & Mark's wedding! This two-month stretch,
from Nov 1st to Jan 4th-ish, when things get cozy and festive and full of blissful reunions, is my very favourite time of year, hands down. I get all shiver-happy just thinking about it.)

Nap commencing in 3... 2....

Impossible Germany

2008-10-25T15:03:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-23T13:35:00.000-07:00

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!

2008-10-19T05:36:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-15T15:37:00.000-07:00

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

Even the cats say "Le Meow"

2008-10-10T08:56:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-07T08:04:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-06T10:09:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-06T08:50:00.001-07:00

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?

And So Begins My Odyssey

2008-10-03T06:41:00.000-07:00

Jardin Vaubin (I think), near the Citadel in Lille

I've been in France for a week now, which is kind of mind-bending to me. If I squint backwards and lean over the right way, I can just barely make out that day one week ago when I was jiggling my knees on Bronwyn's porch, waiting for the airport taxi to arrive and take me to Toronto. So much happened between then and now that steam comes out of my ears just thinking about it. The airport taxi itself finally did arrive, and I got inside it, and I let the adventure begin. It was a bit of an anti-climatic beginning; I mean, I remember Mom saying recently that when you have a baby and you're spending those first few blurry hours in the hospital with this new little stack of wiggles, you just can't believe that the whole world doesn't stop to marvel at your great feat of pushing a new human into their midst (is that true, sharon?). Anyway, starting the adventure felt kind of like that. I have been thinking France, dreaming France, tasting France for so long that when I actually got in the taxi and starting on my way to France, I couldn't believe there weren't more whistles and t-shirts. There was a woman on her way home to Winnipeg after training as a kitchen cabinet maker in Waterloo, and there was a battered-looking driver shaking crumbs of dill pickle chips into his mouth, but there was no fanfare. He dropped me off at my terminal, bid me good luck with a flap of his tie, and that's how the adventure started: my giant duffel bag, my e-ticket, and the faint scent of dill.

I wrote the first few blog posts in the dark ages of last week before I had internet set up France, so I'll avoid too much throat-clearing and just get on with posting them here. I'm so glad I have the internets! France is incredible and absorbing and invigorating, but it's also kind of far away, and without my blog or my email inbox I felt that distance acutely. I miss everyone!