Chapter 13: Bad Decisions
Today is one of those days where I just keep making Bad Decisions. The first was to re-set my alarm for a little bit of snooze time, since I figured my hair was "basically clean" and could do without being washed. I then got distracted by my eyebrows and spent a hugely disproportionate amount of time working the tweezers and daydreaming that I was a contestant on the gameshow I saw last night (and obviously that I blew everybody away.) The snoozing and dawdling led to my missing my bus and to my next Bad Decision: instead of waiting for the next one, I experimented and took a bus that goes in the same general direction, only to find myself on an epic detour route and stuck in a traffic jam. Definitely late for school.
Today's choice of clothing was another Bad Decision. Somewhere among the dawdling and obsessive tweezing, I realized I had to throw on some clothes and get on my way. I chose a red plaid-ish corduroy shirt because it's very comfortable and Franck says that it's cute -- when worn at home with track pants for sitting on the couch and other such activities. My big mistake was my choice to pair it with jeans, particularly a pair that looks too short with running shoes, so I wear them with my boots, which are like construction boots. The result is that I am wearing a plaid shirt with jeans and work boots, which is really not school appropriate. And which makes me look like a lumber jack, as several of my students pointed out.
My final and most flagrant Bad Decision was in joining my grade nine class in the library for a guest speaker. I could only stay for one of the two hours before I had my grade seven class to teach; considering my recent emotional instability -- and my personality in general -- I should have known better than to attend a presentation by an Auschwitz survivor. On the one hand, I was glad to see the students, usually blasé and badly-behaved, become riveted and thoughtful; they were respectful and showed a deeper intelligence than I have seen from them in class. On the other hand, a big, heavy other hand, I couldn't pull myself together. I took a few minutes and tried to compose myself in the bathroom, but when I got to class and Stéphanie saw my red eyes and asked if I was okay, I started weeping in front of my terrified little twelve-year-olds. We went to my classroom and one of the girls offered me a kleenex, a kind gesture that just set me off again; we ended up doing a big multi-category bingo so that I could settle down while they drew their boards. Note to self: no more emotionally-charged activities during school hours. (I'm on my lunch break and am still a bit shaky -- have you ever seen a Holocaust survivor speak? Can you even imagine his courage to spend his life going over and over the details so that young people will understand? As if any of us can ever really understand.)
As for the arty French play, we had our rehearsal. It's hard to find a place among actors in the middle of a play, their intimacy and routines and so on, but they went out of their way to be welcoming and inclusive, which was nice of them. I tried to take this into account when I saw their excessive warm-ups, jumping around and twisting into balls on the floor. I was unreasonably irritated and tried to remember that it feels good to be in your own little warm-up; it's just so dorky to watch! The director talking to one of the actors, giving some kind of note from last rehearsal, and the guy won't stop jumping up and down and swinging his arms. You can't wait two minutes? Can you please stop jumping and just have your conversation? He was the most hard-core in his warm-up and was in the play a total of six minutes, mostly without moving. Go figure.
As for the play, which I saw in its entirety, it couldn't be any more irritating. Maybe if they blasted a siren through the whole thing, maybe then. Otherwise, from the first cryptic line to the awful sound effects, from the non-story to the barking voices, it is the biggest piece of crap I have ever seen -- and I've seen lots of crap, believe you me. The actors are embarrassed to be part of this "experiment," they won't invite their friends... I can't even describe it. You wouldn't believe me if I did. I convinced Nicolas that the piano had no place in this play; the music is fine as it is, I don't think I have anything to add to what Duke Ellington
already came up with. He's a pretty good pianist, you know? The sound clashes, as well, the fuzzy '30s jazz and the bright piano, and my entrances and exits are just confusing to an already-baffled audience. So it seems like I'm off the hook, and all I can do is send sympathetic thoughts towards the humiliated actors.
Phew.
Kathryn
ribbit ribbit
Thursday, February 9, 2006
Sunday, February 5, 2006
Kathryn vs. Lyon, Round Two: Chapter 12
Chapter 12: Afrique C'est Chic
Franck and I were on our way to an appointment when a lady passed by with very heavy bags. Franck offered to help her carry them and she got all excited about us and told us her dream for a new world where everybody is mixed and the children are all born from love. Initially, she seemed like a nut, not least because she kept calling Franck "Afrique C'est Chic," as in "I have a neighbour who's Afrique-c'est-chic like you" or "your child will be of the new world, half white and half Afrique-c'est-chic."
You might think she was speaking generally, as of the child I will some day carry, but you are wrong. As she patted my stomach and predicted it would be a girl, we realized that she thought I was pregnant. (I was wearing a coat that I have been TOLD is flattering and spent the rest of the afternoon catching desperate glimpses of myself in every car or store window I passed, and I did not look like I was in the family way. I swear.)
I couldn't be mad at her for smashing my self-confidence to bits, though, because I found her idealism touching. Her vision of the world and unconditional love of humanity were just so much nicer than my own cynicism and my bitching tendencies. To wit: she was Algerian and yet she quoted two Jewish proverbs and said if there's a people with goodness and joy in their hearts, it's the Jews. (From an Algerian Muslim in anti-Semitic France, this is a mind-blowing statement.)
Then she was so grateful to us for "listening to an old lady's rambling" and for "carrying love into the new world" (presumably referring to the upcoming birth of our rainbow child) that she gave us money to have a coffee on her. We obviously said that we couldn't accept her money and she told us she has no one, no family, no one to take care of but the stray cats in the neighbourhood. Please don't insult me by refusing this gift, after you have been so generous with me.
And so, yes, we took three euros from a bag lady. She said "may God bless you, whoever or whatever God is to you." How's that for a lesson in progressive thinking and true generosity and kindness. Afrique C'est Chic and I were quite moved.
I've been inexplicably emotional these days (possibly depression from the lack of sunshine?) and sent poor Franck into a panic by sobbing uncontrollably through the end of French-dubbed, Saturday afternoon tv movie "A League of Their Own." (When Dotty's husband came home from the war I started fighting tears; by Kit's slide into home base I was a mess. I had to leave the room for the forty-years-later reunion.)
Considering I'd seen this movie no fewer than eight times and still managed to be torn apart, I knew that I would have a hard time with "Brokeback Mountain," which I saw on Wednesday. I was the only person under sixty-five in the theatre, which I don't think reflects the film's target demographic so much as the reality of a Wednesday matinee. I was obviously weepy through most of the movie and had a particularly hard time dealing with the transition from the sweeping vistas of Wyoming (actually, Alberta) to the wet, grey pollution of the city. I think I had gotten lost in the mountains and trees; my first breath of outside "air" got lodged in my throat. And broke my heart.
It was strange, also, as the credits rolled and Willie Nelson sang "He Was a Friend Of Mine," to suddenly hear the clipped Lyonnais French of the women around me, putting on coats and not talking about the movie. I was wrenched from the Heart of Amurka into the Shopping Lists of Lyon, as the sales are on for one more week and they wanted to get that new iron before it's too late. Did you sleep through the movie? Were you not paying attention? Impossible love, grief, bigotry, injustice -- how can you SHOP at a time like this?!
Here's something to make fun of: the top new fashion is knee-length shorts with tights. Ha! I thought it was terrible that pointy-like-a-witch shoes had come back. Then it was shaggy boots, yeti-style. Now it's the shorts with dark nylons and shoes or boots -- pointy, furry, cowboy, what-have-you. What's going on here? How could I ever have felt inferior to these people? Never again will I feel bad about not looking "French" enough, now that "French" is Glenn Close, circa 1983.
I got a call last week-end from someone who'd gotten my name from a friend. The message wasn't clear but I understood something about a rehearsal pianist and got all excited: if there's one thing I miss, it's playing show tunes on the piano. I went and met the director, Nicolas, who gave me a Duke Ellington cd and explained that I was to play along with song #14, "Chloe," on stage. The play is an adaptation of a Boris Vian novel ("L'Ecume des jours," for those of you to whom that means something) and Nicolas is going for the minimalist look and wants a clear stage. As there's a grand piano on the stage that can't be moved, he figures they should just have a pianist. I will play along with the song at the beginning of the play and at the end, as Chloe has a breakdown and her song becomes fractured and dissonant.
It seemed like a fun idea, meet a new group of people, do something unlike the other things I've been doing in Lyon (read: doing something), and even though it sounded like exactly the kind of play I don't like -- he kept using the words "symbolic," "existential" and "absurdist" and I was increasingly filled with dread -- I thought, why not.
Well, here's why not. The recording is from somewhere in the '30s or '40s and you can't actually hear anything. You know that warm, fuzzy old jazz? Try playing along with it! It's hard to figure out jazz chords at the best of times, but this thing isn't even in an actual key: possibly due to the age of the recording, it has warped either flat or sharp and is now in-between the semi-tones of Franck's keyboard. I literally can not play the notes I am hearing. And the kicker: there are no lyrics! No one will know that it has anything to do with Chloe, so it's just a fun little wink between Nicolas and his actors. This is the worst idea ever!
I should have known when he said the words "now, I don't know anything about music but I think it will be easy," but his enthusiasm was fun and I didn't have the heart to tell him that I had just remembered I don't actually like the theatre world very much and the last thing I want to do is hang out with a bunch of ACTORS and talk about the SYMBOLISM in a minimalist French play. What a drag. I'll go to their rehearsal on Wednesday and see how it works; hopefully he'll decide that it was a bad idea and we'll part as friends.
Meanwhile, a girl Franck met this past summer in Guadeloupe is back in France, about half an hour from Lyon, and tracked him down through mutual friends. She started calling him daily and talking for way longer than he deemed necessary and he wondered what was going on, especially as he had been friends more with her boyfriend than with her. Then one evening she showed up at our door. Hello Audrey! She explained that she was on her way home from Strasbourg and just dropped in while she waits for her connection train, though she avoided Franck's question of how she found his address. She was also kind of freaked out by my presence and didn't know how to handle the situation, which was obviously that she had come to Franck's on some kind of romantic journey and had forgotten all about the Kathryn he lives with. It was: awkward. Once she had claimed to be waiting for a train, she had to go through with it, so she looked up the train schedule and there was one last one that evening. All she had time for was a cup of tea, some polite conversation and a tearful goodbye. (I am certainly in no position to criticize anyone for inappropriate tears, but someone needs to explain to her about -- well, everything. This girl has gone about everything the wrong way.) So that was fun.
Tonight we are invited to dine with my Scottish colleague, who invited her basically-my-age children and other young people (god-daughter, niece and such) and it sounds like it's turned into a big bash. We are bringing white wine.
Kathryn
ribbit ribbit
Franck and I were on our way to an appointment when a lady passed by with very heavy bags. Franck offered to help her carry them and she got all excited about us and told us her dream for a new world where everybody is mixed and the children are all born from love. Initially, she seemed like a nut, not least because she kept calling Franck "Afrique C'est Chic," as in "I have a neighbour who's Afrique-c'est-chic like you" or "your child will be of the new world, half white and half Afrique-c'est-chic."
You might think she was speaking generally, as of the child I will some day carry, but you are wrong. As she patted my stomach and predicted it would be a girl, we realized that she thought I was pregnant. (I was wearing a coat that I have been TOLD is flattering and spent the rest of the afternoon catching desperate glimpses of myself in every car or store window I passed, and I did not look like I was in the family way. I swear.)
I couldn't be mad at her for smashing my self-confidence to bits, though, because I found her idealism touching. Her vision of the world and unconditional love of humanity were just so much nicer than my own cynicism and my bitching tendencies. To wit: she was Algerian and yet she quoted two Jewish proverbs and said if there's a people with goodness and joy in their hearts, it's the Jews. (From an Algerian Muslim in anti-Semitic France, this is a mind-blowing statement.)
Then she was so grateful to us for "listening to an old lady's rambling" and for "carrying love into the new world" (presumably referring to the upcoming birth of our rainbow child) that she gave us money to have a coffee on her. We obviously said that we couldn't accept her money and she told us she has no one, no family, no one to take care of but the stray cats in the neighbourhood. Please don't insult me by refusing this gift, after you have been so generous with me.
And so, yes, we took three euros from a bag lady. She said "may God bless you, whoever or whatever God is to you." How's that for a lesson in progressive thinking and true generosity and kindness. Afrique C'est Chic and I were quite moved.
I've been inexplicably emotional these days (possibly depression from the lack of sunshine?) and sent poor Franck into a panic by sobbing uncontrollably through the end of French-dubbed, Saturday afternoon tv movie "A League of Their Own." (When Dotty's husband came home from the war I started fighting tears; by Kit's slide into home base I was a mess. I had to leave the room for the forty-years-later reunion.)
Considering I'd seen this movie no fewer than eight times and still managed to be torn apart, I knew that I would have a hard time with "Brokeback Mountain," which I saw on Wednesday. I was the only person under sixty-five in the theatre, which I don't think reflects the film's target demographic so much as the reality of a Wednesday matinee. I was obviously weepy through most of the movie and had a particularly hard time dealing with the transition from the sweeping vistas of Wyoming (actually, Alberta) to the wet, grey pollution of the city. I think I had gotten lost in the mountains and trees; my first breath of outside "air" got lodged in my throat. And broke my heart.
It was strange, also, as the credits rolled and Willie Nelson sang "He Was a Friend Of Mine," to suddenly hear the clipped Lyonnais French of the women around me, putting on coats and not talking about the movie. I was wrenched from the Heart of Amurka into the Shopping Lists of Lyon, as the sales are on for one more week and they wanted to get that new iron before it's too late. Did you sleep through the movie? Were you not paying attention? Impossible love, grief, bigotry, injustice -- how can you SHOP at a time like this?!
Here's something to make fun of: the top new fashion is knee-length shorts with tights. Ha! I thought it was terrible that pointy-like-a-witch shoes had come back. Then it was shaggy boots, yeti-style. Now it's the shorts with dark nylons and shoes or boots -- pointy, furry, cowboy, what-have-you. What's going on here? How could I ever have felt inferior to these people? Never again will I feel bad about not looking "French" enough, now that "French" is Glenn Close, circa 1983.
I got a call last week-end from someone who'd gotten my name from a friend. The message wasn't clear but I understood something about a rehearsal pianist and got all excited: if there's one thing I miss, it's playing show tunes on the piano. I went and met the director, Nicolas, who gave me a Duke Ellington cd and explained that I was to play along with song #14, "Chloe," on stage. The play is an adaptation of a Boris Vian novel ("L'Ecume des jours," for those of you to whom that means something) and Nicolas is going for the minimalist look and wants a clear stage. As there's a grand piano on the stage that can't be moved, he figures they should just have a pianist. I will play along with the song at the beginning of the play and at the end, as Chloe has a breakdown and her song becomes fractured and dissonant.
It seemed like a fun idea, meet a new group of people, do something unlike the other things I've been doing in Lyon (read: doing something), and even though it sounded like exactly the kind of play I don't like -- he kept using the words "symbolic," "existential" and "absurdist" and I was increasingly filled with dread -- I thought, why not.
Well, here's why not. The recording is from somewhere in the '30s or '40s and you can't actually hear anything. You know that warm, fuzzy old jazz? Try playing along with it! It's hard to figure out jazz chords at the best of times, but this thing isn't even in an actual key: possibly due to the age of the recording, it has warped either flat or sharp and is now in-between the semi-tones of Franck's keyboard. I literally can not play the notes I am hearing. And the kicker: there are no lyrics! No one will know that it has anything to do with Chloe, so it's just a fun little wink between Nicolas and his actors. This is the worst idea ever!
I should have known when he said the words "now, I don't know anything about music but I think it will be easy," but his enthusiasm was fun and I didn't have the heart to tell him that I had just remembered I don't actually like the theatre world very much and the last thing I want to do is hang out with a bunch of ACTORS and talk about the SYMBOLISM in a minimalist French play. What a drag. I'll go to their rehearsal on Wednesday and see how it works; hopefully he'll decide that it was a bad idea and we'll part as friends.
Meanwhile, a girl Franck met this past summer in Guadeloupe is back in France, about half an hour from Lyon, and tracked him down through mutual friends. She started calling him daily and talking for way longer than he deemed necessary and he wondered what was going on, especially as he had been friends more with her boyfriend than with her. Then one evening she showed up at our door. Hello Audrey! She explained that she was on her way home from Strasbourg and just dropped in while she waits for her connection train, though she avoided Franck's question of how she found his address. She was also kind of freaked out by my presence and didn't know how to handle the situation, which was obviously that she had come to Franck's on some kind of romantic journey and had forgotten all about the Kathryn he lives with. It was: awkward. Once she had claimed to be waiting for a train, she had to go through with it, so she looked up the train schedule and there was one last one that evening. All she had time for was a cup of tea, some polite conversation and a tearful goodbye. (I am certainly in no position to criticize anyone for inappropriate tears, but someone needs to explain to her about -- well, everything. This girl has gone about everything the wrong way.) So that was fun.
Tonight we are invited to dine with my Scottish colleague, who invited her basically-my-age children and other young people (god-daughter, niece and such) and it sounds like it's turned into a big bash. We are bringing white wine.
Kathryn
ribbit ribbit
Saturday, January 21, 2006
Kathryn vs. Lyon, Round Two: Chapter 11
Chapter 11: still a grump
I have these pants that are pretty much hideous, a highly unflattering pair of khakis. Once, with sandals and a summer top and in a certain mirror, they looked cute and fun, so I keep wearing them in the hope that they will magically become the pants I so want them to be. Then they ride up, they're too baggy, too short, a bad colour. Wearing them puts me in a bad mood and makes me uncomfortable all day. I basically hate them – and yet I persevere. Maybe the problem is that they're really not for winter? Maybe without heavy shoes and a long coat they will be okay again? Another good reason to hurry up with the good weather, Lyon; help a girl out here.
For those of you who are starting to believe all this feminism hype, are getting too comfortable in your bodies and need to be knocked down a peg or two, I recommend the European ice skating championships. Have you seen these girls? Flipping around in the air like that, their partners holding them up with one hand? WHILE skating? On the other hand, one pair missed a lift and he dropped her on her face. It was terrifying, obviously very painful, nearly a broken neck. Is it worth being all cute and flippy just to be dropped on your face on the ice in front of thousands of people? Certainly not! Back to the cookie drawer!
One of my schools is completely disorganized: I never know if there will be a classroom available, if I even have a class, if I'll have to babysit the kids through a presentation of future job possibilities or if the teacher will have a whole folder of activities that I am expected to make happen. For this reason, I keep a little stash in my locker which I call "For When I Am Desperate," mostly a collection of crosswords and fill-in-the-blanks songs.
Last week a teacher was absent and the kids who showed up were unsure of whether or not they had to be there. I assured them that the skippers would be punished and so they were relieved to have made the right decision and looked forward to a fun, unstructured class. They were almost deliriously happy when they saw me prepare the tape player and got their pens out, all excited and ready to hear something cool, possibly by Snoop Dogg. Why did they think I would suddenly be hip? Did they imagine I had undergone some kind of transformation over the holidays? The last song we did together was Joni Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi" and I had to play it once through just to let them get their giggles out before even handing out the lyric sheets. (In a shameful attempt at redeeming myself in their eyes – their cruel, judgemental, junior high eyes – I casually mentioned that the song had been sampled by the likes of Janet Jackson, among others. They were slightly impressed but still thought my beloved Joni was dorky.)
You want to know how to have a good laugh? Let your students believe that they're about to hear cool, young, American music, that you've even given them the lyrics, that they will spend your hour together talking about booty and bling-bling, and then play Donovan's "Universal Soldier" and watch their faces crash in disappointment and horror. What is this folk guitar? Why is he singing like this? Why is it so slow? Why are you doing this to us? It's even better when you've filled in the missing words and get to talk about the meaning behind Donovan's ballad. Tell me, my sweet students, what do you think of war? Is the soldier truly noble? Or is he the problem? Discuss.
A funny translation moment: after the holidays I met yet another class for the first time, so I introduced myself and they had to ask as many questions as they could properly form. (By properly, of course, I mean "even slightly in the right direction with hopefully at least two English words included.") As per usual, they asked my age ("do you old?") and my background ("what do -- comment est-ce qu'on dit 'pays'? -- What do you 'pays'?") Then one boy asked if I had a boyfriend, which is "un petit ami" in French. How cute is this: "you 'ave a little friend?"
That same class has a new boy in it, Alexander, the talk of the town. He's from St. Martin and is nearly impossible to understand in both French and English. (I don't know why this is; the St. Martiners I met all spoke an easy and musical English and their French was the same as the Guadeloupans; I guess this Alexander is just a mumbler.) He was very excited to meet me, hoping to finally have someone to communicate with, but alas, it is not to be. I have to lip-read and guess and I usually still answer something that has nothing to do with what he said; he's a puzzled as I am and our conversation is limited at best. I name-dropped Guadeloupe in some effort to seem like a comrade in arms, I guess, but that made it even worse because he has family there and wanted to talk about it and I had NO IDEA what was going on. I was too shy to whip out my limited Creole but I have a plan: I have been practicing with Franck and have developed a whole repertoire of friendly Creole dialogue; next time I see Alexander I'm going to impress him with how hard-core I am. Ca caille, 'ti-mal? Yes-I.
And then I realized that I truly am difficult to please and just generally crotchety. I run a lunchtime club for eager-beaver kids who want to play games and do activities in English. It's really not a lot of fun and I don't understand why they keep coming back, as we have to have a "written trace" to impress the parents and so it's mostly writing and homework and that's just not anyone's party. Plus, they're generally hyper and in recess-mode, having just gobbled up their lunches in fifteen minutes to be able to come to the club, so for me it's The Discipline Hour and I can't wait for it to end.
Last week there was a winter camp and I only had four kids out of eighteen, all girls. We played some Simon Says and other such things, and then they got hold of the coloured chalk and went to town on the blackboard. They drew flowers, hearts, princesses -- the usual -- and then they started writing all these nice things about me: "We love you Kathryn," "Katreen, you're the best," "don't ever leave," "you have nice hair," and so on and so forth. Was I flattered? Sure, a little. Was I touched? I guess so, out of obligation. Mostly, I was just grossed out: stop being so girly! Stop drawing hearts! Your flowers make me sick!
I don't know when I went from being a girly-girl -- ballet, pink wallpaper, hearts dotting my "i"s and crushes on every boy who wasn't a blood relative -- to hating them, but that seems to be what has happened. You don't love me, you won't miss me, you're just girly and want to write pretty things on the board and suck up to the first available older girl, which happens to be me this year. And I think it's gross. Bring the boys back! Get some testosterone in this classroom! God help any daughter of mine who becomes a girly-girl, you mark my words.
Elise, my nine-year-old tutoree, decided last week that we should start doing plays, rather than the workbooks her mother got for her. I saw a puppet show stage set up and thought she meant that we would be writing stories, then practicing and performing them, which I agreed was an excellent way to speak English together. It turned out, however, that the puppet house was incidental and the real play was the two of us in this elaborate make-believe session she had dreamt up. The basic scenario was that I was a beggar, poor and cold, and she passed by me on her way home from a manicure. She recognized me from her grade one class and took pity on me, invited me for tea and cake and decided to change my life. She created a mansion for me and a baby and chose me a wonderful husband, the perfect life; however, it was all dependent on my wearing the magic dress she had given me. Without it, I would return, Cinderella-like, to the street, never to taste happiness again.
She selected a few dresses from her closet and told me to choose one, not quite grasping the fact that she is a small nine-year-old girl and most of her dresses would not fit on my left thigh. She insisted, though, and we found this pink dressing gown that I could wear if I took off my sweater and abandoned all pride. She put make-up on me and did my hair -- in an extravagant twist that she claimed she had seen on a runway model -- gave me a fancy purse and sunglasses to wear on my head, and then said "now you're starting to get pretty." Zing! The play went well enough, my lowest moment being when her mom looked in to see how we were doing. Elise, like most nine-year-old girls, is curious about bodies and chests and things; she was very pleased with my new look, stuffed as I was into my magical dressing gown. Her mother, however, was less impressed. I felt hideous. Hideous Chesty McGee.
The play suddenly took a strange turn and Elise was trying to kill me, something about poison and a sword. Only she would never let me come up with my own lines. "No, Kathryn. You say: 'Elise, you're so beautiful! I wish I could be just like you! I'm so jealous of you!'" I told her she was unrealistic -- why would I be jealous of her when I was the one with the mansion, the perfect husband and the fantastic hair? -- and she said the play was her idea so she could decide how it went. I told her she was bossy and I took my bag and went home.
Yesterday's play started as a restaurant scene and then morphed into her dancing to the new Madonna cd and "teaching me the steps." There was obviously little English involved and I had to put my foot down, afraid her mom would come in and ask me what exactly she was paying me for. The dance session was ultimately abandoned as an "unsuccessful tutoring activity," though she had this one really happening move, up on her toes and kind of twisting, that I plan to use next time I go dancing. Tutoring's the best.
More up my alley was the morning I spent babysitting the nine-month-old daughter of a colleague: I don't imagine any of you want to hear me go on and on about the bajillion amazing and delightful things a baby can come up with in the course of four hours, so suffice it to say that it set my personal little clock ticking even harder and faster than before. For the last time, girls, could somebody please have a baby already? What are you all waiting for?
Finally, you can all rest assured that I am in perfectly good health. I've had this bump under my jaw since last summer and since I tend to be overly unconcerned with suspicious bodily activity, I didn't worry about it and trusted that everything would work itself out and the bump would disappear. (Interestingly, I have little to no general medical knowledge; one might wonder on what I was basing such trust?) Recently, however, I got to thinking: it hasn't disappeared yet and in fact is a little tender to the touch... Panic ensued. I booked an appointment at a medical clinic and started planning the letter I would have to write to my schools, explaining that I had to go home for emergency treatment and possibly have my jaw removed. The clinic is ten minutes from my house but I left a full hour before my appointment in case they could fit me in sooner. I sat in the waiting room, whimpering, until the doctor finally opened the door and invited me in. He jotted down some basic information, checked blood pressure and heart, and then felt around my jaw for five seconds and said "oh, these are 'ganglions.' Everyone has them. Here, feel mine." I think they're nodes? Is that right? Is that what lymph nodes are? Near the jaw and mobile, like mine, is exactly right; you worry if they're lower down and hard. They're tender because you must have a cold coming on, they're pretty much forever and you don't need to worry about them. And that was that.
Meanwhile, I don't like going to male doctors and wondered if I should hold out for the next available woman, but this turned out to be the single nicest man on the planet and all I can do is hope to get sick before the end of the year so that I have a reason to go see him. So friendly! So cute and enthusiastic, trying out his English. His name is John! Not Jean or Jacques, but John! I would like him to be my neighbour or possibly my cousin. I'm considering inviting him for dinner -- would that be weird? God, I love that John. He's the best.
We've had some sunny days and they make everything just so much better. But then tonight there's a concert that a colleague of mine organized and enthusiastically invited me to and I feel bad not going. The flyer features names such as "DJ Flytrap" and I'm dreading the whole evening, but Franck's into it and we can at least make an appearance and then go for a ride on the big ferris wheel they've set up downtown: now that's what I call a good time.
Kathryn
ribbit ribbit
I have these pants that are pretty much hideous, a highly unflattering pair of khakis. Once, with sandals and a summer top and in a certain mirror, they looked cute and fun, so I keep wearing them in the hope that they will magically become the pants I so want them to be. Then they ride up, they're too baggy, too short, a bad colour. Wearing them puts me in a bad mood and makes me uncomfortable all day. I basically hate them – and yet I persevere. Maybe the problem is that they're really not for winter? Maybe without heavy shoes and a long coat they will be okay again? Another good reason to hurry up with the good weather, Lyon; help a girl out here.
For those of you who are starting to believe all this feminism hype, are getting too comfortable in your bodies and need to be knocked down a peg or two, I recommend the European ice skating championships. Have you seen these girls? Flipping around in the air like that, their partners holding them up with one hand? WHILE skating? On the other hand, one pair missed a lift and he dropped her on her face. It was terrifying, obviously very painful, nearly a broken neck. Is it worth being all cute and flippy just to be dropped on your face on the ice in front of thousands of people? Certainly not! Back to the cookie drawer!
One of my schools is completely disorganized: I never know if there will be a classroom available, if I even have a class, if I'll have to babysit the kids through a presentation of future job possibilities or if the teacher will have a whole folder of activities that I am expected to make happen. For this reason, I keep a little stash in my locker which I call "For When I Am Desperate," mostly a collection of crosswords and fill-in-the-blanks songs.
Last week a teacher was absent and the kids who showed up were unsure of whether or not they had to be there. I assured them that the skippers would be punished and so they were relieved to have made the right decision and looked forward to a fun, unstructured class. They were almost deliriously happy when they saw me prepare the tape player and got their pens out, all excited and ready to hear something cool, possibly by Snoop Dogg. Why did they think I would suddenly be hip? Did they imagine I had undergone some kind of transformation over the holidays? The last song we did together was Joni Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi" and I had to play it once through just to let them get their giggles out before even handing out the lyric sheets. (In a shameful attempt at redeeming myself in their eyes – their cruel, judgemental, junior high eyes – I casually mentioned that the song had been sampled by the likes of Janet Jackson, among others. They were slightly impressed but still thought my beloved Joni was dorky.)
You want to know how to have a good laugh? Let your students believe that they're about to hear cool, young, American music, that you've even given them the lyrics, that they will spend your hour together talking about booty and bling-bling, and then play Donovan's "Universal Soldier" and watch their faces crash in disappointment and horror. What is this folk guitar? Why is he singing like this? Why is it so slow? Why are you doing this to us? It's even better when you've filled in the missing words and get to talk about the meaning behind Donovan's ballad. Tell me, my sweet students, what do you think of war? Is the soldier truly noble? Or is he the problem? Discuss.
A funny translation moment: after the holidays I met yet another class for the first time, so I introduced myself and they had to ask as many questions as they could properly form. (By properly, of course, I mean "even slightly in the right direction with hopefully at least two English words included.") As per usual, they asked my age ("do you old?") and my background ("what do -- comment est-ce qu'on dit 'pays'? -- What do you 'pays'?") Then one boy asked if I had a boyfriend, which is "un petit ami" in French. How cute is this: "you 'ave a little friend?"
That same class has a new boy in it, Alexander, the talk of the town. He's from St. Martin and is nearly impossible to understand in both French and English. (I don't know why this is; the St. Martiners I met all spoke an easy and musical English and their French was the same as the Guadeloupans; I guess this Alexander is just a mumbler.) He was very excited to meet me, hoping to finally have someone to communicate with, but alas, it is not to be. I have to lip-read and guess and I usually still answer something that has nothing to do with what he said; he's a puzzled as I am and our conversation is limited at best. I name-dropped Guadeloupe in some effort to seem like a comrade in arms, I guess, but that made it even worse because he has family there and wanted to talk about it and I had NO IDEA what was going on. I was too shy to whip out my limited Creole but I have a plan: I have been practicing with Franck and have developed a whole repertoire of friendly Creole dialogue; next time I see Alexander I'm going to impress him with how hard-core I am. Ca caille, 'ti-mal? Yes-I.
And then I realized that I truly am difficult to please and just generally crotchety. I run a lunchtime club for eager-beaver kids who want to play games and do activities in English. It's really not a lot of fun and I don't understand why they keep coming back, as we have to have a "written trace" to impress the parents and so it's mostly writing and homework and that's just not anyone's party. Plus, they're generally hyper and in recess-mode, having just gobbled up their lunches in fifteen minutes to be able to come to the club, so for me it's The Discipline Hour and I can't wait for it to end.
Last week there was a winter camp and I only had four kids out of eighteen, all girls. We played some Simon Says and other such things, and then they got hold of the coloured chalk and went to town on the blackboard. They drew flowers, hearts, princesses -- the usual -- and then they started writing all these nice things about me: "We love you Kathryn," "Katreen, you're the best," "don't ever leave," "you have nice hair," and so on and so forth. Was I flattered? Sure, a little. Was I touched? I guess so, out of obligation. Mostly, I was just grossed out: stop being so girly! Stop drawing hearts! Your flowers make me sick!
I don't know when I went from being a girly-girl -- ballet, pink wallpaper, hearts dotting my "i"s and crushes on every boy who wasn't a blood relative -- to hating them, but that seems to be what has happened. You don't love me, you won't miss me, you're just girly and want to write pretty things on the board and suck up to the first available older girl, which happens to be me this year. And I think it's gross. Bring the boys back! Get some testosterone in this classroom! God help any daughter of mine who becomes a girly-girl, you mark my words.
Elise, my nine-year-old tutoree, decided last week that we should start doing plays, rather than the workbooks her mother got for her. I saw a puppet show stage set up and thought she meant that we would be writing stories, then practicing and performing them, which I agreed was an excellent way to speak English together. It turned out, however, that the puppet house was incidental and the real play was the two of us in this elaborate make-believe session she had dreamt up. The basic scenario was that I was a beggar, poor and cold, and she passed by me on her way home from a manicure. She recognized me from her grade one class and took pity on me, invited me for tea and cake and decided to change my life. She created a mansion for me and a baby and chose me a wonderful husband, the perfect life; however, it was all dependent on my wearing the magic dress she had given me. Without it, I would return, Cinderella-like, to the street, never to taste happiness again.
She selected a few dresses from her closet and told me to choose one, not quite grasping the fact that she is a small nine-year-old girl and most of her dresses would not fit on my left thigh. She insisted, though, and we found this pink dressing gown that I could wear if I took off my sweater and abandoned all pride. She put make-up on me and did my hair -- in an extravagant twist that she claimed she had seen on a runway model -- gave me a fancy purse and sunglasses to wear on my head, and then said "now you're starting to get pretty." Zing! The play went well enough, my lowest moment being when her mom looked in to see how we were doing. Elise, like most nine-year-old girls, is curious about bodies and chests and things; she was very pleased with my new look, stuffed as I was into my magical dressing gown. Her mother, however, was less impressed. I felt hideous. Hideous Chesty McGee.
The play suddenly took a strange turn and Elise was trying to kill me, something about poison and a sword. Only she would never let me come up with my own lines. "No, Kathryn. You say: 'Elise, you're so beautiful! I wish I could be just like you! I'm so jealous of you!'" I told her she was unrealistic -- why would I be jealous of her when I was the one with the mansion, the perfect husband and the fantastic hair? -- and she said the play was her idea so she could decide how it went. I told her she was bossy and I took my bag and went home.
Yesterday's play started as a restaurant scene and then morphed into her dancing to the new Madonna cd and "teaching me the steps." There was obviously little English involved and I had to put my foot down, afraid her mom would come in and ask me what exactly she was paying me for. The dance session was ultimately abandoned as an "unsuccessful tutoring activity," though she had this one really happening move, up on her toes and kind of twisting, that I plan to use next time I go dancing. Tutoring's the best.
More up my alley was the morning I spent babysitting the nine-month-old daughter of a colleague: I don't imagine any of you want to hear me go on and on about the bajillion amazing and delightful things a baby can come up with in the course of four hours, so suffice it to say that it set my personal little clock ticking even harder and faster than before. For the last time, girls, could somebody please have a baby already? What are you all waiting for?
Finally, you can all rest assured that I am in perfectly good health. I've had this bump under my jaw since last summer and since I tend to be overly unconcerned with suspicious bodily activity, I didn't worry about it and trusted that everything would work itself out and the bump would disappear. (Interestingly, I have little to no general medical knowledge; one might wonder on what I was basing such trust?) Recently, however, I got to thinking: it hasn't disappeared yet and in fact is a little tender to the touch... Panic ensued. I booked an appointment at a medical clinic and started planning the letter I would have to write to my schools, explaining that I had to go home for emergency treatment and possibly have my jaw removed. The clinic is ten minutes from my house but I left a full hour before my appointment in case they could fit me in sooner. I sat in the waiting room, whimpering, until the doctor finally opened the door and invited me in. He jotted down some basic information, checked blood pressure and heart, and then felt around my jaw for five seconds and said "oh, these are 'ganglions.' Everyone has them. Here, feel mine." I think they're nodes? Is that right? Is that what lymph nodes are? Near the jaw and mobile, like mine, is exactly right; you worry if they're lower down and hard. They're tender because you must have a cold coming on, they're pretty much forever and you don't need to worry about them. And that was that.
Meanwhile, I don't like going to male doctors and wondered if I should hold out for the next available woman, but this turned out to be the single nicest man on the planet and all I can do is hope to get sick before the end of the year so that I have a reason to go see him. So friendly! So cute and enthusiastic, trying out his English. His name is John! Not Jean or Jacques, but John! I would like him to be my neighbour or possibly my cousin. I'm considering inviting him for dinner -- would that be weird? God, I love that John. He's the best.
We've had some sunny days and they make everything just so much better. But then tonight there's a concert that a colleague of mine organized and enthusiastically invited me to and I feel bad not going. The flyer features names such as "DJ Flytrap" and I'm dreading the whole evening, but Franck's into it and we can at least make an appearance and then go for a ride on the big ferris wheel they've set up downtown: now that's what I call a good time.
Kathryn
ribbit ribbit
Sunday, January 8, 2006
Kathryn vs. Lyon, Round Two: Chapter 10
Chapter 10: Holiday cheer, continued.
Did you know that Santa has a friend? We were at an outdoor German sing-along and the man in red appeared on the scene to make the kids happy (and to temporarily distract them from whipping icy snow balls at each other, three metres from where the brass band was playing.) His beard wasn’t too convincing and his Nana Mouskouri glasses a bit too stylish, but he was jolly and wearing a red Santa outfit, so it worked for me. But then I noticed this other guy carrying the sack: he was dressed in a long brown robe, monk-style, and a cap was pushing his bushy brown wig low over his eyes. “Who is this jerk?” I asked Gela, with possibly unwarranted hostility. It turns out he’s Black Peter – also St. Peter? – and I’m not clear on whether he’s a bad guy or not, because in France there’s something about whipping associated with him. But then again it might be wishing, not whipping, and he seemed really friendly holding that sack. Black Peter. Who knew?
On the 24th, Gela went to hang out with her family, so Mom and I were left to our own devices, which ended up being a pseudo-children’s show on French TV. We always laugh at their misguided attempts at reproducing American culture, and it turns out that their take on children’s entertainment is among the worst of the bunch. To wit:
The hostess is dressed in a skimpy cocktail dress, the between-song interview segments are self-conscious and dry and the songs themselves are confusing, wordy, tuneless, breathy, rambling, pointless and non-participatory. Sticking on a chicken or a spider costume does not children’s programming make, my friends. How about songs with harmonies and rhythms? with sing-along parts? with morals? with something – anything – that speaks to children?
The little ones in question were stuck around the audience in exciting hair and make-up, staring stunned at the jittery cameras and never once laughing. The adults, while singing badly and doing awkward movements, were self-congratulatory and schmoozing as they talked about this amazing show they were putting on. As far as I know, the subject matter was a lonely snail. Needless to say, we didn’t watch all the way through.
On Christmas we went for a walk in the Black Forest, up out of the valley, and realized that it had been grey and sad only because we were living directly under clouds. It was nice to breathe such clean air and to see this amazing light over everything, including the snow-laden fir trees, all bent out of shape and looking like a Dr. Seuss illustration.
When we got a little hungry we had bread and sausage – we were in Germany, did I mention? – so maybe it isn’t so surprising that halfway through our delicious Christmas dinner I hit the wall and couldn’t swallow another bite. This gave me left-overs for the next day, when I watched “Moulin Rouge” – which is just as effective in German, you can take my word for it – and went into town to buy ingredients for the crêpes I had promised to make. Everything was closed, unfortunately, and of course I couldn’t ask anyone where to find a grocery store. (See “I still don’t speak German,” Chapter 9.) I could say “milk” and possibly “vanilla,” but didn’t feel that this would jump-start a successful dialogue in Freudenstadt. I went home
empty-handed.
That evening we went to a beautiful church to hear a Bach Oratorio. We were way in the back and couldn’t see the stage, which turned out to be a blessing; there were ten women dressed all in white who did interpretive movement throughout the concert and if I had seen their whole performance I wouldn’t have been able to keep from screaming with laughter, which might be considered rude. As it was, from my little nest in the back corner of the church, I saw them move up and down the aisles and then stand there, maybe with their arms above their heads or down at their sides, palms forward. Never smiling. Sometimes they would slowly turn in a circle. Or hold up their hands like castanette players. Or sit down with blankets on their laps and stare straight ahead.
One time, as they were making their way up the centre aisle and splitting off down the sides, they suddenly added a little hop to their walk – step, step, step, *hop* -- and Mom and I almost fell off our chairs laughing. Near the end of the concert, I walked to the back for a view of the orchestra and discovered that all the times the “dancers”’ disappeared from my view, they were up front skipping around the Christmas tree or standing in an outward-facing circle, swaying. At one point they all rushed forward and dropped to their knees, then came up one at a time like a chorus line. It was horrifying. I was glad that I had been at the back and behind a pole, so that at least half of the time I couldn’t see them and could actually – oh, I don’t know, listen to the music? Interestingly, the word “choreography” appeared four times in the two-paragraph liner notes, so it was evidently a big deal. And I forgot all about the off-pitch alto whenever the skip-and-hoppers appeared on the scene, so maybe there was something in it.
What intrigues me the most is how solemn they were, performing ridiculous choreography with such grave self-importance. I’m sorry, ladies, but skipping? Are you kidding me with this? Fascinating, that they could find ten women, young and old, with absolutely no sense of irony. Gela translated the notes for us and explained that the women were “interpreting the space,” then suggested that this was a new way to live. “Why don’t we go home and interpret my apartment? Honey, you take the kitchen, Katy will take the living room, and I’ll go up and down the hallway.”
We spent my last day in Germany at a chocolate museum, predictably enough. Ritter Sport makes a huge and delicious variety of square chocolate bars, so we first visited their square-themed art gallery. There were some really nice pieces but a lot of them were optical illusion-ish and made my eyes swimmy. By the time I got to a neon zig-zag square I felt world-weary and couldn’t go on. Possibly from the gallery’s lack of air? Or from my impatience to get to the chocolate; art, shmart – hook me up with some sweet Ritter magic.
We skimmed through some displays about the history of chocolate – the Aztecs, blah blah blah – and the Ritter empire (they get all of their peanuts from Oregon; who knew?) and finally arrived at my personal Mecca, the Ritter store. Just the smell was enough to make you lose your mind. Indeed, by the end I couldn’t stand it anymore – I was getting delirious and needed to get out before I passed out in the Cappucino and Almond aisle.
And so, suitcase laden with many a flavour of chocolate (Cacao Creme and Nugat are the best; you should get on it), I took an eleven-hour train from Strasbourg to Mont de Marsan, near which Julie’s parents live. Why so long? Well, first, because it wasn’t the TGV and so it went slowly and stopped a lot. Second, because I had to transfer in Paris, which means getting on a subway and changing train stations.
Now here’s the thing. Paris is a big city, isn’t it? Fairly important on an international scale, from what I understand? So why don’t they have escalators in their train stations? Hm? Why?
The subway, I almost understand. Oh, it’s a hassle, bumping your suitcase up and down the bajillion stairways along the hallways that connect the stations, but then you don’t usually have big, heavy bags with you and you should probably take a taxi if you’re not up for it. In a train station, however, most people are going to have luggage. That’s kind of the deal. You’re not going to work or to a party, you’re getting on a “grande ligne” and changing cities, and goddammit you need help getting to your departure quay on the fourth floor.
Sometimes there are escalators, which is nice, but then it’s even more frustrating when there aren’t. You go up the first one, following the sign towards “departures,” and it takes you to a snack bar. Then the arrows keep pointing upwards, but you’re on your own; three flights of stairs and a whole lotta sweating are in store for you, my weary traveller. Oh, you think you can take the elevator, you poor fool? Go ahead, then. Haul your suitcase across to the one marked “departures” and “washroom.” You might wonder at the frustrated faces coming out, but not for long; inside, you’ll discover the elaborate grid on the wall with many buttons, none of them labelled, and you’ll spend twenty minutes going up and down between floors, none of them with washrooms or departures as promised. You will finally emerge, haggard and old, on the floor where you started, and you’ll carry your bag up those stairs you tried so hard to avoid. By the time you actually get to your train, your head will be spinning from the hot box known as a train station, as there is still no such thing as “no smoking” in France. Some punk will be sitting in your seat but one look at the rage on your face will send him scurrying. Bon voyage.
It turns out that Julie’s family lives way out in the country, where the only signs of human activity are the gunshots ringing out across the fields. We mostly played cards and Scrabble (Julie kicked my ass in both, consistently), went for walks and ate. New Year’s dinner was a succession of delicious courses, the kind of meal that makes you swear you’re too full to ever eat again. Julie's mom made a filo pastry salmon and became my new hero. Unfortunately, I was suffering from cat allergies (I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: every party has a pooper…) and had to take a pill, though the question remains: is it worse to sneeze through dinner and make everyone uncomfortable or to take medication and slowly fall asleep into your plate? Tricky. Very tricky. I held on until a little past midnight but then had to go to bed, where my Drixoral-induced anxiety slowly subsided into the night.
The next day was exciting because we walked up the lane to visit with Michel and Jeanine, the neighbours who had come over for New Year’s. Michel and his friend Maxime have this hunting fort, you see, and we got to explore. It’s called a “palombière” (the birds they’re going for are called “palombes”) and is a series of tunnels through the forest. There’s a camouflaged lookout tower, kind of like a tree house, and then when they spot a palombe they hustle through the tunnels until they have a good shot and they take ‘er down. There is whistling involved, as they must communicate with their fellow snipers to shoot at the same time and not scare away the birds, and there are strings and levers and other fun gadgets.
There are also decoy pigeons. They keep a whole little pigeon house and train them in a kind of boot camp, some of them learning to go up and down in the trees and others to go back and forth along a wire. I didn't understand the wire thing, but if you have any questions I'm sure I can find out for you. For the up and down ones, they tie their little pigeon-legs to a platform and then raise them into the trees. The palombes, which are said to be pigeon-like, see these birds hanging around and figure it’s a good place to be, so they come in and settle in the branches as well. And then they are shot.
I’m not so big on killing palombes, let's tell it like it is, but it was interesting – if slightly unnerving – to step into this world. Any anthropologist looking for textbook male behaviour, maybe writing an essay called “boys and their toys,” need look no further than Michel and Maxime. The tunnels, the signals, the secret passageways, the pigeon training centre… amazing. Thomas made a joke about cowboys and Indians that was almost funny but wasn’t; maybe it hit just a little too close to home? Then they fired a gun at a board to show us how the bullet spreads out (kind of cheating, isn’t it? What chance does the bird have?) and I jumped so much that I hurt my neck. And almost peed. I don’t think that palombing is for me.
My ride home was epic (twelve hours! without stopping in Paris!) and involved a lot of crying babies and generally irritating people, though my mood might be largely to blame. (See “twelve hours,” above.) School is the same as always and I fear that life will return to its non-eventful rhythm sooner than I had hoped, though today was “la fête des Rois,” where you eat a delicious almond-y cake in the name of the Three Kings (or something) and whoever finds the little figurine inside gets to wear the crown. Would you like to guess who found it? I’ll give you a hint: it’s between Franck and me.
It was me! Hooray! I’m the king! I wore it all day but took it off to come and do e-mail because there are hoodlums who hang around the internet centre and I didn’t want to call attention to myself. It’s waiting for me at home, though, so I think it’s time for me to go. If there’s one thing I love, it’s wearing a crown.
Happy New Year and best wishes to you all.
Kathryn
ribbit ribbit
Did you know that Santa has a friend? We were at an outdoor German sing-along and the man in red appeared on the scene to make the kids happy (and to temporarily distract them from whipping icy snow balls at each other, three metres from where the brass band was playing.) His beard wasn’t too convincing and his Nana Mouskouri glasses a bit too stylish, but he was jolly and wearing a red Santa outfit, so it worked for me. But then I noticed this other guy carrying the sack: he was dressed in a long brown robe, monk-style, and a cap was pushing his bushy brown wig low over his eyes. “Who is this jerk?” I asked Gela, with possibly unwarranted hostility. It turns out he’s Black Peter – also St. Peter? – and I’m not clear on whether he’s a bad guy or not, because in France there’s something about whipping associated with him. But then again it might be wishing, not whipping, and he seemed really friendly holding that sack. Black Peter. Who knew?
On the 24th, Gela went to hang out with her family, so Mom and I were left to our own devices, which ended up being a pseudo-children’s show on French TV. We always laugh at their misguided attempts at reproducing American culture, and it turns out that their take on children’s entertainment is among the worst of the bunch. To wit:
The hostess is dressed in a skimpy cocktail dress, the between-song interview segments are self-conscious and dry and the songs themselves are confusing, wordy, tuneless, breathy, rambling, pointless and non-participatory. Sticking on a chicken or a spider costume does not children’s programming make, my friends. How about songs with harmonies and rhythms? with sing-along parts? with morals? with something – anything – that speaks to children?
The little ones in question were stuck around the audience in exciting hair and make-up, staring stunned at the jittery cameras and never once laughing. The adults, while singing badly and doing awkward movements, were self-congratulatory and schmoozing as they talked about this amazing show they were putting on. As far as I know, the subject matter was a lonely snail. Needless to say, we didn’t watch all the way through.
On Christmas we went for a walk in the Black Forest, up out of the valley, and realized that it had been grey and sad only because we were living directly under clouds. It was nice to breathe such clean air and to see this amazing light over everything, including the snow-laden fir trees, all bent out of shape and looking like a Dr. Seuss illustration.
When we got a little hungry we had bread and sausage – we were in Germany, did I mention? – so maybe it isn’t so surprising that halfway through our delicious Christmas dinner I hit the wall and couldn’t swallow another bite. This gave me left-overs for the next day, when I watched “Moulin Rouge” – which is just as effective in German, you can take my word for it – and went into town to buy ingredients for the crêpes I had promised to make. Everything was closed, unfortunately, and of course I couldn’t ask anyone where to find a grocery store. (See “I still don’t speak German,” Chapter 9.) I could say “milk” and possibly “vanilla,” but didn’t feel that this would jump-start a successful dialogue in Freudenstadt. I went home
empty-handed.
That evening we went to a beautiful church to hear a Bach Oratorio. We were way in the back and couldn’t see the stage, which turned out to be a blessing; there were ten women dressed all in white who did interpretive movement throughout the concert and if I had seen their whole performance I wouldn’t have been able to keep from screaming with laughter, which might be considered rude. As it was, from my little nest in the back corner of the church, I saw them move up and down the aisles and then stand there, maybe with their arms above their heads or down at their sides, palms forward. Never smiling. Sometimes they would slowly turn in a circle. Or hold up their hands like castanette players. Or sit down with blankets on their laps and stare straight ahead.
One time, as they were making their way up the centre aisle and splitting off down the sides, they suddenly added a little hop to their walk – step, step, step, *hop* -- and Mom and I almost fell off our chairs laughing. Near the end of the concert, I walked to the back for a view of the orchestra and discovered that all the times the “dancers”’ disappeared from my view, they were up front skipping around the Christmas tree or standing in an outward-facing circle, swaying. At one point they all rushed forward and dropped to their knees, then came up one at a time like a chorus line. It was horrifying. I was glad that I had been at the back and behind a pole, so that at least half of the time I couldn’t see them and could actually – oh, I don’t know, listen to the music? Interestingly, the word “choreography” appeared four times in the two-paragraph liner notes, so it was evidently a big deal. And I forgot all about the off-pitch alto whenever the skip-and-hoppers appeared on the scene, so maybe there was something in it.
What intrigues me the most is how solemn they were, performing ridiculous choreography with such grave self-importance. I’m sorry, ladies, but skipping? Are you kidding me with this? Fascinating, that they could find ten women, young and old, with absolutely no sense of irony. Gela translated the notes for us and explained that the women were “interpreting the space,” then suggested that this was a new way to live. “Why don’t we go home and interpret my apartment? Honey, you take the kitchen, Katy will take the living room, and I’ll go up and down the hallway.”
We spent my last day in Germany at a chocolate museum, predictably enough. Ritter Sport makes a huge and delicious variety of square chocolate bars, so we first visited their square-themed art gallery. There were some really nice pieces but a lot of them were optical illusion-ish and made my eyes swimmy. By the time I got to a neon zig-zag square I felt world-weary and couldn’t go on. Possibly from the gallery’s lack of air? Or from my impatience to get to the chocolate; art, shmart – hook me up with some sweet Ritter magic.
We skimmed through some displays about the history of chocolate – the Aztecs, blah blah blah – and the Ritter empire (they get all of their peanuts from Oregon; who knew?) and finally arrived at my personal Mecca, the Ritter store. Just the smell was enough to make you lose your mind. Indeed, by the end I couldn’t stand it anymore – I was getting delirious and needed to get out before I passed out in the Cappucino and Almond aisle.
And so, suitcase laden with many a flavour of chocolate (Cacao Creme and Nugat are the best; you should get on it), I took an eleven-hour train from Strasbourg to Mont de Marsan, near which Julie’s parents live. Why so long? Well, first, because it wasn’t the TGV and so it went slowly and stopped a lot. Second, because I had to transfer in Paris, which means getting on a subway and changing train stations.
Now here’s the thing. Paris is a big city, isn’t it? Fairly important on an international scale, from what I understand? So why don’t they have escalators in their train stations? Hm? Why?
The subway, I almost understand. Oh, it’s a hassle, bumping your suitcase up and down the bajillion stairways along the hallways that connect the stations, but then you don’t usually have big, heavy bags with you and you should probably take a taxi if you’re not up for it. In a train station, however, most people are going to have luggage. That’s kind of the deal. You’re not going to work or to a party, you’re getting on a “grande ligne” and changing cities, and goddammit you need help getting to your departure quay on the fourth floor.
Sometimes there are escalators, which is nice, but then it’s even more frustrating when there aren’t. You go up the first one, following the sign towards “departures,” and it takes you to a snack bar. Then the arrows keep pointing upwards, but you’re on your own; three flights of stairs and a whole lotta sweating are in store for you, my weary traveller. Oh, you think you can take the elevator, you poor fool? Go ahead, then. Haul your suitcase across to the one marked “departures” and “washroom.” You might wonder at the frustrated faces coming out, but not for long; inside, you’ll discover the elaborate grid on the wall with many buttons, none of them labelled, and you’ll spend twenty minutes going up and down between floors, none of them with washrooms or departures as promised. You will finally emerge, haggard and old, on the floor where you started, and you’ll carry your bag up those stairs you tried so hard to avoid. By the time you actually get to your train, your head will be spinning from the hot box known as a train station, as there is still no such thing as “no smoking” in France. Some punk will be sitting in your seat but one look at the rage on your face will send him scurrying. Bon voyage.
It turns out that Julie’s family lives way out in the country, where the only signs of human activity are the gunshots ringing out across the fields. We mostly played cards and Scrabble (Julie kicked my ass in both, consistently), went for walks and ate. New Year’s dinner was a succession of delicious courses, the kind of meal that makes you swear you’re too full to ever eat again. Julie's mom made a filo pastry salmon and became my new hero. Unfortunately, I was suffering from cat allergies (I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: every party has a pooper…) and had to take a pill, though the question remains: is it worse to sneeze through dinner and make everyone uncomfortable or to take medication and slowly fall asleep into your plate? Tricky. Very tricky. I held on until a little past midnight but then had to go to bed, where my Drixoral-induced anxiety slowly subsided into the night.
The next day was exciting because we walked up the lane to visit with Michel and Jeanine, the neighbours who had come over for New Year’s. Michel and his friend Maxime have this hunting fort, you see, and we got to explore. It’s called a “palombière” (the birds they’re going for are called “palombes”) and is a series of tunnels through the forest. There’s a camouflaged lookout tower, kind of like a tree house, and then when they spot a palombe they hustle through the tunnels until they have a good shot and they take ‘er down. There is whistling involved, as they must communicate with their fellow snipers to shoot at the same time and not scare away the birds, and there are strings and levers and other fun gadgets.
There are also decoy pigeons. They keep a whole little pigeon house and train them in a kind of boot camp, some of them learning to go up and down in the trees and others to go back and forth along a wire. I didn't understand the wire thing, but if you have any questions I'm sure I can find out for you. For the up and down ones, they tie their little pigeon-legs to a platform and then raise them into the trees. The palombes, which are said to be pigeon-like, see these birds hanging around and figure it’s a good place to be, so they come in and settle in the branches as well. And then they are shot.
I’m not so big on killing palombes, let's tell it like it is, but it was interesting – if slightly unnerving – to step into this world. Any anthropologist looking for textbook male behaviour, maybe writing an essay called “boys and their toys,” need look no further than Michel and Maxime. The tunnels, the signals, the secret passageways, the pigeon training centre… amazing. Thomas made a joke about cowboys and Indians that was almost funny but wasn’t; maybe it hit just a little too close to home? Then they fired a gun at a board to show us how the bullet spreads out (kind of cheating, isn’t it? What chance does the bird have?) and I jumped so much that I hurt my neck. And almost peed. I don’t think that palombing is for me.
My ride home was epic (twelve hours! without stopping in Paris!) and involved a lot of crying babies and generally irritating people, though my mood might be largely to blame. (See “twelve hours,” above.) School is the same as always and I fear that life will return to its non-eventful rhythm sooner than I had hoped, though today was “la fête des Rois,” where you eat a delicious almond-y cake in the name of the Three Kings (or something) and whoever finds the little figurine inside gets to wear the crown. Would you like to guess who found it? I’ll give you a hint: it’s between Franck and me.
It was me! Hooray! I’m the king! I wore it all day but took it off to come and do e-mail because there are hoodlums who hang around the internet centre and I didn’t want to call attention to myself. It’s waiting for me at home, though, so I think it’s time for me to go. If there’s one thing I love, it’s wearing a crown.
Happy New Year and best wishes to you all.
Kathryn
ribbit ribbit
Friday, December 23, 2005
Kathryn vs. Lyon, Round Two: Chapter 9
Chapter 9: Christmas in Deutschland
This one's pretty long – and on a German keyboard! – and I was going to send it in two parts but then I figured that was more mess in your inbox. So read as much or as little as you want; I've taken the liberty of suggesting a good point for a break.
So there's this cd that I really wanted, and it's been so long since I had a new cd – at one time in my life a weekly staple at the least – so I decided I should make myself a Christmas present. That's what credit cards are for.
I went to FNAC, the only store for new cds, and discovered that shopping is the best way to make you hate humanity, particularly salespeople. Their little computer booths are squished among overflowing cd bunks, so I had to perch on the greatest hits of Johnny Hallyday and Francoise Hardy just to talk to some guy, which only happened when he was good and ready. First, you see, he had to finish his conversation with his buddy from computers, a bragging session about each of their super top scores on a video game intriguingly called "Wild Onions." He only tore himself away from this inspiring dialogue when his phone was paged and he started to flirt with whatever cute thing was on the other end, continuing to act as if I wasn't standing in front of him with my hands resting on his booth.
I finally leaned in close and said "I'm so sorry to interrupt, but could you spare a second to help me find a cd?" He said "hang on a second" into the phone, covered the mouthpiece with his hand and looked at me: "what?" When I repeated what I consider to be a reasonable request – help finding a cd from an employee in a cd store – he said "ask at information." I looked up at the sign hanging over his booth, which reads "information", and waited for some kind of further instructions. They were: "I'm just covering for someone. Go ask Philippe."
I followed the direction of his vague nod to find someone Philippe-ish and found three staff members sitting at a booth, laughing at the story that a fourth was telling them. They uniformally refused to look at me, but kept right along with this obviously hilarious anecdote about making fun of an ugly lady on a train by pretending to flirt with her. (Like I said: hilarious.) I interrupted – twice, because they ignored me the first time – and one guy turned his head towards me, sighed and said "yes?" without actually looking at me. (He looked past me into the store for the whole conversation.)
I'd been pronouncing the name "ho-se," as I understand to be the system with Spanish "j" words, but apparently things don't work that way here in Lyon, where you use the soft “j” (from “jaune”) and treat everyone who doesn’t like an idiot. I spelled the name out for him and he corrects me, “you mean jo-se,” as if it made a difference in the last name, which is how it’s listed.
The cd was on order so I had to try again the next week, when the snotty girl at the computer could only find Ruben Gonzalez and told me I was wrong. I said no, I believe it is you who are wrong. While I enjoy Ruben Gonzalez, and Cuban piano music in general (she was none too happy that I knew what I was talking about) I am looking for Jose Gonzalez, who very much exists and is in your system, as one of your equally charming colleagues found him for me last week. I spelled out the album name for her and she grudgingly told me where he was bunked.
Now. One jerky staff member can happen. Two on a bad day, to be fair. But all of them? How can everyone be so highly inconvenienced by the presence of a customer in their store? What exactly do they think a store is for? They make fun of us for over-the-top friendly customer service, but I think North America may be onto something.
My classes finished in a mad pre-holiday frenzy, with the kids even more hideously over-excited than usual. We sort of talked about Christmas traditions but mostly stared maniacally at the clock with our bags packed and our coats on, and I avoided the hallway like the plague. There was so much pushing and shoving and screeching in the school that my nerves were shot by second period and I was sure the kids would feel my loathing and use it to their advantage. Never show them your weakness, any more than you would to a pack of wolves. Or monsters. Ah, junior high.
Franck’s been gone since the 9th, in Bretagne with his brothers. I thought it would be nice to have some quiet time before the holidays, but it turns out that I’m quite fond of ol’ Franckster – like Henry Higgins, I’ve grown accustomed to his face – and I just get sad and mopey when he’s gone. So I was happy when the week-end came along and my mom came to Lyon – I even baked a pie, copying Franck’s recipe-less recipe, and it was tasty (if a bit undercooked) – and we lugged our equally over-packed suitcases to the train station to set off for Germany, where we’re spending Christmas with Gela, a friend of my mom’s who lives in the Black Forest region.
We haven’t been here long but I’ve already discovered a major character flaw in myself, one that I had suspected but desperately avoided facing until now: I do not rise to a challenge. I knew that I didn’t speak German – unless you consider counting to forty and being able to say "parrot," “snowflake” and “no thanks” to be a firm grasp of the language – but I somehow expected to understand most of what was going on, as I believed what I had been told of the similarities between English and German.
Granted, when you read a sign that says “Postbank,” you can feel proud of your immediate control of the situation. “This is at once a post office and a bank,” you will say, beaming. When you glance at a bottle of mineral water, you will be satisfied to find the words “mineral wasser” on the label, and you might say “I agree with this statement” or “yes, this is as I had expected” or something to that effect. But that’s about it. All I hear is a lot of sounds, and I get kind of panicky when I bump into someone and can’t even say “excuse me.” I’ll suddenly remember “guten tag” but no one else is saying it so I keep it to myself. I can’t be polite, I can’t ask for a stamp, I don’t know where you buy a phone card or what a mailbox looks like, and it all makes me feel helpless.
It’s just bizarre, that this whole world is going on around me – people getting on and off trains, greeting friends, buying apples, making jokes – and I have absolutely no idea what they’re talking about. Imagine! A whole country speaking German! The idea of travel sometimes blows my mind.
It’s very snowy here in Freudenstadt, something about the altitude, so it looks like a postcard of winter in Germany. Beautiful fir trees everwhere, tall and bushy, up and down hills with little villages in every nook or cranny, and everything snowy and dreamy. The houses in this region are often barn-sized, with dark wood criss-crossed everywhere, exactly out of the picture book of Hansel and Gretel we’ve all seen at some point. It’s pretty as can be.
**This could be a good place for a break, since the rest is details of our trip so far. Maybe have some hot chocolate or some fruit or something?
Our first full day here we went to a Christmas market in another town. These markets can’t be described without getting all sugary and quaint, so just picture cozy cobblestone streets with giant wooden gingerbread houses for homes and little vendors’ cabins full of crafts and food and other nice things. There are children busking every 500 metres – hopefully to raise money for a trip and not just because their parents are exploiting them – and so recorder music and folk guitar chaos fill the air.
Imagine the bright orange gloves that we find for one euro, since I lost a mitten in Lyon and my hands are freezing: brand new, these are the brightest, most exciting gloves I have ever worn and I briefly consider a career in traffic direction but remember just in time that you only need gloves in the winter and so more than half the year is wasted.
Picture the high school kids selling fundraiser waffles who are out of batter but scrape out all the bowls and lids to make one triumphant waffle for us, their English-speaking customers. And oh, imagine the smell of that waffle spreading through this fairy tale street, mingling with the smells of pralines, candy apples, gingerbread chocolates and warm, sweet wine. This is Christmas in Deutschland.
We went to see The Nutcracker that night, performed by a Romanian dance school on a very small community centre stage. Some of the dancers were really just little kids, and some were clearly the teachers, as it was the first time I’ve seen pot-bellied, saggy-bummed men in ballet tights. One of them looked like Wormtail from the Harry Potter movies – which is as unfortunate as you’re imagining – and another, part of the Arabian duo, looked like Nathan Lane in “The Birdcage”; Rex Harrington they were not.
There were some young and typically beautiful men as well, though. The prince looked like a diagram from an anatomy textbook called “the male body,” only in white tights. The girls had those long legs and pretty wrists that ballerinas tend to have and watching them made me think that maybe I should have kept up with dancing, as I could have ended up being graceful and beautiful in a snowflake fairy costume. Then, remembering how those dance get-ups always made me look like a sausage stuffed into a leotard, and imagining myself prancing around in one now, I realized that I had once again narrowly escaped a terrible fate and thank God I got out before I had invested myself and my dreams any further.
The lobby was full of little girls in pink dresses, including one who kept stopping on her way down the stairs and pointing a toe out to the side, probably thinking she looked like a ballerina. I figured she would learn, as I did, that she just doesn’t have what it takes, and I let her continue in her fantasy world. It will crash and burn on its own, and anyway I don’t speak German. All in good time, little ballerina, all in good time.
We went to the afternoon show of the school where Gela is vice principal: one of the MCs seemed really funny and confident and popular with his peers, and as I watched him act out stories and make jokes with funny faces and voices and all sorts of wild expressions, the whole thing became increasingly surreal. It turns out that German sounds a lot like Swedish, at least to my ears, which makes it automatically funny. Such a bouncy, rhyming language, when I don’t have any idea what’s going on – like the Swedish chef doing stand-up. The kids around us were laughing because they understood the jokes he was telling, but I think it must have been much, much funnier for us.
After a choir, whose English pronunciation was so good that we understood all the words to each song, this funny little rock band came on to set up. The guitarists looked kind of punkish and indifferent (the way I think rockers are supposed to look, no?) but the bassist was a little round boy in a bright and friendly orange t-shirt, and the singer looked like a combination of Harry Potter and Bastian from The Neverending Story. How strange, we thought, when this clean-cut young lad in glasses and a neat side part started to mumble into the microphone: “I hate you ‘cause my hate is big… ‘cause I’m strong.” The drummer was godawful and the whole thing fell to pieces, and that was even before the next song – “I walk alone until my shadows find me” – when the guitarist yelled “fuck you fuck you” before every chorus and the audience was all shocked and excited at what would surely be the talk of the school for weeks. It was power chord hell and such a mess, the drummer clearly unaware that he was playing with a band and not just alone in his basement, so I think my favourite moment was when one of them missed a chord at the end and they all shook their heads and were disappointed that it had gone wrong. Yeah, too bad, I thought. Up until then you were right on.
There was a grade five band that played their instruments remarkably well after only a few months, and I enjoyed that every single person was in solid red except for one kid who didn’t get the memo and was wearing a black-and-white striped top. They were followed by a group of boys doing a play in which they came into a restaurant and had a grumpy conversation while the waiters brought them giant paper mache hams, chicken wings and strawberries. The audience wasn’t laughing at all, so I thought it was weird to do a completely non-comic sketch. Gela said it was a post-World War Two discussion. Woo-hoo!
We went to a colleague’s house for a warm and delicious staff lunch, where almost everybody spoke very good English and I felt bad that they had to be the ones to make the effort. Then we stopped in at a museum with all sorts of old dolls and trains and other toys. It’s actually quite creepy, walking around looking at dolls, because they stare out at you with those glassy eyes and they never smile; I felt closed in and judged from all over. I looked for a red-haired Mrs. Costanza doll because I thought that would make it all worthwhile, but I didn’t find her.
There are hot springs all over the Black Forest (Schwarzwald) region and bath houses – or thermal palaces – have been built up around them. We went to one that is Arabian themed and has little two- or three-person basins as well as bigger ones with massage sprays. People tend to walk around naked, which is fun, if distracting; when an elderly German man leans around the corner to see if your basin is taken, it takes a whole lot of focus and self-discipline to look in his eyes and smile.
Predictably, since I am, after all, Kathryn, I started to feel kind of claustrophobic. The water is so hot and the air so steamy that I found it hard to breathe and got increasingly panicky. (How irritating can you be, that you can’t even handle a mineral spa? I think I must be the worst person to travel with.) The bigger basins were better, with high ceilings and cooler water, but the small ones were just so hot and intense that I was afraid I would pass out. The sauna was out of the question and while my limbs felt relaxed and my pores open and clear, I was happy to step back into the cold air outside where I could fill my lungs comfortably and completely.
Obviously this cold-loving phase didn’t last long and I shivered through our otherwise lovely evening in nearby Gengenbacher. The town hall is turned into a giant advent calendar, as it has twenty-four windows and each one is a Chagall painting. Each night they have a concert (a local choir, for example) and then this kind of weird circus play, and they uncover the next window. The town is beautiful, as per usual, the market charming, the calendar windows dreamy and sad. (And they had non-alcoholic hot wine! Essentially grape juice and entirely delicious. I’m going to write Lyon a letter and suggest they do the same, especially now that they’ve discovered the designated driver.) We each ate a German sausage – no veggie or chicken options here, my friends – and then took the train home and I soaked my feet in hot water and agreed that when your boots aren’t insulated, wool socks are the way to go. I thought I was Canadian, but apparently I don’t know much about winter. Idiot.
At some point in the near future is our tour of the Ritter chocolate museum, so it looks like we're on the up and up. I hope your holidays are going well.
Kathryn
ribbit ribbit
This one's pretty long – and on a German keyboard! – and I was going to send it in two parts but then I figured that was more mess in your inbox. So read as much or as little as you want; I've taken the liberty of suggesting a good point for a break.
So there's this cd that I really wanted, and it's been so long since I had a new cd – at one time in my life a weekly staple at the least – so I decided I should make myself a Christmas present. That's what credit cards are for.
I went to FNAC, the only store for new cds, and discovered that shopping is the best way to make you hate humanity, particularly salespeople. Their little computer booths are squished among overflowing cd bunks, so I had to perch on the greatest hits of Johnny Hallyday and Francoise Hardy just to talk to some guy, which only happened when he was good and ready. First, you see, he had to finish his conversation with his buddy from computers, a bragging session about each of their super top scores on a video game intriguingly called "Wild Onions." He only tore himself away from this inspiring dialogue when his phone was paged and he started to flirt with whatever cute thing was on the other end, continuing to act as if I wasn't standing in front of him with my hands resting on his booth.
I finally leaned in close and said "I'm so sorry to interrupt, but could you spare a second to help me find a cd?" He said "hang on a second" into the phone, covered the mouthpiece with his hand and looked at me: "what?" When I repeated what I consider to be a reasonable request – help finding a cd from an employee in a cd store – he said "ask at information." I looked up at the sign hanging over his booth, which reads "information", and waited for some kind of further instructions. They were: "I'm just covering for someone. Go ask Philippe."
I followed the direction of his vague nod to find someone Philippe-ish and found three staff members sitting at a booth, laughing at the story that a fourth was telling them. They uniformally refused to look at me, but kept right along with this obviously hilarious anecdote about making fun of an ugly lady on a train by pretending to flirt with her. (Like I said: hilarious.) I interrupted – twice, because they ignored me the first time – and one guy turned his head towards me, sighed and said "yes?" without actually looking at me. (He looked past me into the store for the whole conversation.)
I'd been pronouncing the name "ho-se," as I understand to be the system with Spanish "j" words, but apparently things don't work that way here in Lyon, where you use the soft “j” (from “jaune”) and treat everyone who doesn’t like an idiot. I spelled the name out for him and he corrects me, “you mean jo-se,” as if it made a difference in the last name, which is how it’s listed.
The cd was on order so I had to try again the next week, when the snotty girl at the computer could only find Ruben Gonzalez and told me I was wrong. I said no, I believe it is you who are wrong. While I enjoy Ruben Gonzalez, and Cuban piano music in general (she was none too happy that I knew what I was talking about) I am looking for Jose Gonzalez, who very much exists and is in your system, as one of your equally charming colleagues found him for me last week. I spelled out the album name for her and she grudgingly told me where he was bunked.
Now. One jerky staff member can happen. Two on a bad day, to be fair. But all of them? How can everyone be so highly inconvenienced by the presence of a customer in their store? What exactly do they think a store is for? They make fun of us for over-the-top friendly customer service, but I think North America may be onto something.
My classes finished in a mad pre-holiday frenzy, with the kids even more hideously over-excited than usual. We sort of talked about Christmas traditions but mostly stared maniacally at the clock with our bags packed and our coats on, and I avoided the hallway like the plague. There was so much pushing and shoving and screeching in the school that my nerves were shot by second period and I was sure the kids would feel my loathing and use it to their advantage. Never show them your weakness, any more than you would to a pack of wolves. Or monsters. Ah, junior high.
Franck’s been gone since the 9th, in Bretagne with his brothers. I thought it would be nice to have some quiet time before the holidays, but it turns out that I’m quite fond of ol’ Franckster – like Henry Higgins, I’ve grown accustomed to his face – and I just get sad and mopey when he’s gone. So I was happy when the week-end came along and my mom came to Lyon – I even baked a pie, copying Franck’s recipe-less recipe, and it was tasty (if a bit undercooked) – and we lugged our equally over-packed suitcases to the train station to set off for Germany, where we’re spending Christmas with Gela, a friend of my mom’s who lives in the Black Forest region.
We haven’t been here long but I’ve already discovered a major character flaw in myself, one that I had suspected but desperately avoided facing until now: I do not rise to a challenge. I knew that I didn’t speak German – unless you consider counting to forty and being able to say "parrot," “snowflake” and “no thanks” to be a firm grasp of the language – but I somehow expected to understand most of what was going on, as I believed what I had been told of the similarities between English and German.
Granted, when you read a sign that says “Postbank,” you can feel proud of your immediate control of the situation. “This is at once a post office and a bank,” you will say, beaming. When you glance at a bottle of mineral water, you will be satisfied to find the words “mineral wasser” on the label, and you might say “I agree with this statement” or “yes, this is as I had expected” or something to that effect. But that’s about it. All I hear is a lot of sounds, and I get kind of panicky when I bump into someone and can’t even say “excuse me.” I’ll suddenly remember “guten tag” but no one else is saying it so I keep it to myself. I can’t be polite, I can’t ask for a stamp, I don’t know where you buy a phone card or what a mailbox looks like, and it all makes me feel helpless.
It’s just bizarre, that this whole world is going on around me – people getting on and off trains, greeting friends, buying apples, making jokes – and I have absolutely no idea what they’re talking about. Imagine! A whole country speaking German! The idea of travel sometimes blows my mind.
It’s very snowy here in Freudenstadt, something about the altitude, so it looks like a postcard of winter in Germany. Beautiful fir trees everwhere, tall and bushy, up and down hills with little villages in every nook or cranny, and everything snowy and dreamy. The houses in this region are often barn-sized, with dark wood criss-crossed everywhere, exactly out of the picture book of Hansel and Gretel we’ve all seen at some point. It’s pretty as can be.
**This could be a good place for a break, since the rest is details of our trip so far. Maybe have some hot chocolate or some fruit or something?
Our first full day here we went to a Christmas market in another town. These markets can’t be described without getting all sugary and quaint, so just picture cozy cobblestone streets with giant wooden gingerbread houses for homes and little vendors’ cabins full of crafts and food and other nice things. There are children busking every 500 metres – hopefully to raise money for a trip and not just because their parents are exploiting them – and so recorder music and folk guitar chaos fill the air.
Imagine the bright orange gloves that we find for one euro, since I lost a mitten in Lyon and my hands are freezing: brand new, these are the brightest, most exciting gloves I have ever worn and I briefly consider a career in traffic direction but remember just in time that you only need gloves in the winter and so more than half the year is wasted.
Picture the high school kids selling fundraiser waffles who are out of batter but scrape out all the bowls and lids to make one triumphant waffle for us, their English-speaking customers. And oh, imagine the smell of that waffle spreading through this fairy tale street, mingling with the smells of pralines, candy apples, gingerbread chocolates and warm, sweet wine. This is Christmas in Deutschland.
We went to see The Nutcracker that night, performed by a Romanian dance school on a very small community centre stage. Some of the dancers were really just little kids, and some were clearly the teachers, as it was the first time I’ve seen pot-bellied, saggy-bummed men in ballet tights. One of them looked like Wormtail from the Harry Potter movies – which is as unfortunate as you’re imagining – and another, part of the Arabian duo, looked like Nathan Lane in “The Birdcage”; Rex Harrington they were not.
There were some young and typically beautiful men as well, though. The prince looked like a diagram from an anatomy textbook called “the male body,” only in white tights. The girls had those long legs and pretty wrists that ballerinas tend to have and watching them made me think that maybe I should have kept up with dancing, as I could have ended up being graceful and beautiful in a snowflake fairy costume. Then, remembering how those dance get-ups always made me look like a sausage stuffed into a leotard, and imagining myself prancing around in one now, I realized that I had once again narrowly escaped a terrible fate and thank God I got out before I had invested myself and my dreams any further.
The lobby was full of little girls in pink dresses, including one who kept stopping on her way down the stairs and pointing a toe out to the side, probably thinking she looked like a ballerina. I figured she would learn, as I did, that she just doesn’t have what it takes, and I let her continue in her fantasy world. It will crash and burn on its own, and anyway I don’t speak German. All in good time, little ballerina, all in good time.
We went to the afternoon show of the school where Gela is vice principal: one of the MCs seemed really funny and confident and popular with his peers, and as I watched him act out stories and make jokes with funny faces and voices and all sorts of wild expressions, the whole thing became increasingly surreal. It turns out that German sounds a lot like Swedish, at least to my ears, which makes it automatically funny. Such a bouncy, rhyming language, when I don’t have any idea what’s going on – like the Swedish chef doing stand-up. The kids around us were laughing because they understood the jokes he was telling, but I think it must have been much, much funnier for us.
After a choir, whose English pronunciation was so good that we understood all the words to each song, this funny little rock band came on to set up. The guitarists looked kind of punkish and indifferent (the way I think rockers are supposed to look, no?) but the bassist was a little round boy in a bright and friendly orange t-shirt, and the singer looked like a combination of Harry Potter and Bastian from The Neverending Story. How strange, we thought, when this clean-cut young lad in glasses and a neat side part started to mumble into the microphone: “I hate you ‘cause my hate is big… ‘cause I’m strong.” The drummer was godawful and the whole thing fell to pieces, and that was even before the next song – “I walk alone until my shadows find me” – when the guitarist yelled “fuck you fuck you” before every chorus and the audience was all shocked and excited at what would surely be the talk of the school for weeks. It was power chord hell and such a mess, the drummer clearly unaware that he was playing with a band and not just alone in his basement, so I think my favourite moment was when one of them missed a chord at the end and they all shook their heads and were disappointed that it had gone wrong. Yeah, too bad, I thought. Up until then you were right on.
There was a grade five band that played their instruments remarkably well after only a few months, and I enjoyed that every single person was in solid red except for one kid who didn’t get the memo and was wearing a black-and-white striped top. They were followed by a group of boys doing a play in which they came into a restaurant and had a grumpy conversation while the waiters brought them giant paper mache hams, chicken wings and strawberries. The audience wasn’t laughing at all, so I thought it was weird to do a completely non-comic sketch. Gela said it was a post-World War Two discussion. Woo-hoo!
We went to a colleague’s house for a warm and delicious staff lunch, where almost everybody spoke very good English and I felt bad that they had to be the ones to make the effort. Then we stopped in at a museum with all sorts of old dolls and trains and other toys. It’s actually quite creepy, walking around looking at dolls, because they stare out at you with those glassy eyes and they never smile; I felt closed in and judged from all over. I looked for a red-haired Mrs. Costanza doll because I thought that would make it all worthwhile, but I didn’t find her.
There are hot springs all over the Black Forest (Schwarzwald) region and bath houses – or thermal palaces – have been built up around them. We went to one that is Arabian themed and has little two- or three-person basins as well as bigger ones with massage sprays. People tend to walk around naked, which is fun, if distracting; when an elderly German man leans around the corner to see if your basin is taken, it takes a whole lot of focus and self-discipline to look in his eyes and smile.
Predictably, since I am, after all, Kathryn, I started to feel kind of claustrophobic. The water is so hot and the air so steamy that I found it hard to breathe and got increasingly panicky. (How irritating can you be, that you can’t even handle a mineral spa? I think I must be the worst person to travel with.) The bigger basins were better, with high ceilings and cooler water, but the small ones were just so hot and intense that I was afraid I would pass out. The sauna was out of the question and while my limbs felt relaxed and my pores open and clear, I was happy to step back into the cold air outside where I could fill my lungs comfortably and completely.
Obviously this cold-loving phase didn’t last long and I shivered through our otherwise lovely evening in nearby Gengenbacher. The town hall is turned into a giant advent calendar, as it has twenty-four windows and each one is a Chagall painting. Each night they have a concert (a local choir, for example) and then this kind of weird circus play, and they uncover the next window. The town is beautiful, as per usual, the market charming, the calendar windows dreamy and sad. (And they had non-alcoholic hot wine! Essentially grape juice and entirely delicious. I’m going to write Lyon a letter and suggest they do the same, especially now that they’ve discovered the designated driver.) We each ate a German sausage – no veggie or chicken options here, my friends – and then took the train home and I soaked my feet in hot water and agreed that when your boots aren’t insulated, wool socks are the way to go. I thought I was Canadian, but apparently I don’t know much about winter. Idiot.
At some point in the near future is our tour of the Ritter chocolate museum, so it looks like we're on the up and up. I hope your holidays are going well.
Kathryn
ribbit ribbit
Sunday, December 11, 2005
Kathryn vs. Lyon, Round Two: Chapter 8
Chapter 8 : Sausage for Santa
I think it’s time to add a Strike of the Week segment to this series, though it’s becoming difficult to keep track. I think the interns are heading into week two, as are the train stations’ shuttle buses, and the tourism offices have been shut down since mid-November. The newest one on the table seems to be the pharmacists’ strike, which is obviously a big hassle and so is being dealt with as quickly as possible, and is also apparently completely unreasonable, as the newspapers scoffingly point out – less than a week after calling off their own strike, of course. I think it’s only a matter of time before France throws in the towel and just goes on national strike. Is that possible, for a country to go on strike? If it is then France is the country to do it.
As for exciting epiphanies in teaching, here’s what I figured out: the way to make it bearable is to play camp games in class. Oh, how I have counted the minutes through that grade nine class; how I have planned complicated excuses to keep me from having to show up… until Thursday, that is, when I said “why don’t we try a game?” and we spent forty glorious minutes chanting “this is the pen. The what? The pen. The what? The pen. Oh, the pen.” (Or, more accurately, “zis is ze pen. Ze what? Ze pen. Ze what? Ze pen. Oh, ze pen!”) It can be difficult for kids anywhere, not to mention for uptight and self-conscious 14-year-olds who have never been asked to be silly in class; their ferocious concentration as they tapped their laps and bobbed their heads, trying frantically to hang on to the rhythm, was endearing to say the
least, and I temporarily liked them again. I think next week we’ll just go and play tag, or maybe ditch school and catch a movie.
A funny moment in class: I had thrown together a Christmas crossword and was explaining some of the vocabulary and North American traditions. (Which is tricky, because I have no idea if other families do the same things that we do, having only Christmased with my own; do you all put a clementine in your stocking? Do you all eat all the chocolate right away and then feel ill throughout the day?) I told them that we leave carrots out for Rudolph and his brethren and asked what we might leave for Santa to eat. They guessed “saucisson” and were disappointed when I explained that no, we tend not to leave big, greasy sausage for our Father Christmas, but rather cookies. And what might he want to drink with those cookies? “Wine?”
And speaking of French alcoholic tendencies, on the news the other night the weather lady talked about road conditions and introduced a new idea that they’re hoping will work its way into parties and other boozy events: it’s called “capitaine de la soirée” and entails choosing someone to be in charge of driving everyone home, a person who will obviously not participate in any of the evening’s boozing. Kind of like – oh, what’s that called, already – right, a DESIGNATED DRIVER. A new concept, hot off the press? This is actually just occurring to them now, the country with the highest accident rate in Europe – are they kidding me with this?
Meanwhile, December 8th in Lyon is the Fête des Lumières, when the city is turned into a big light show, so it was disappointing to wake up to rain. Then at lunch the sun came out and everyone got excited – and then it rained again. By the time it was dark out and the thing was starting, it was kind of drizzly and got progressively wetter throughout the evening. This might have put a damper on people’s spirits if it weren’t for the traditional and plenteous stands of cheap, hot wine (sweet and with cinnamon, their boozy answer to apple cider), which kept most of the crowd in fine cheerful form.
The crowd in question was the entire city of Lyon, plus however many hundreds or thousands of people came in from neighbouring counties. It’s hard to guess how many people there actually were, since the streets are narrow and fill up pretty quickly, but we were in more human traffic jams than the most desperate people person could ask for and I am not, as it happens, a desperate people person.
Our first jam was as we wandered through the Christmas market, which Franck hadn’t yet seen. The little wooden cabins were charming as usual and the bizarre reggae-Christmas music blaring out of giant speakers made our local Guadeloupan feel slightly at home. (If only there had been palm trees, sweet mangoes and the sea sparkling around us… but I digress. I weep and I digress.)
The shuffling pace was driving me crazy, as among my other charming qualities is a “lack of patience” for walking slowly behind people and I tend to become frantic and start full-speed weaving through any openings I can find until I get to a clearing. This system worked well enough until we found ourselves in the middle of a giant throng of people, at a dead stop and being vaguely pushed from behind.
It was okay at first because we were beside the concert platform and its very earnest choir, so I was able to laugh about their dorky actions and Franck, who is not mean-spirited and tends to wish people well – the loser – was able to hum along and smile encouragingly. It was still okay when I got tired of resisting gravity and let my head rest on the back of the man in front of me, since I was being pushed in that direction, and I felt a kind of communal bond via his down jacket. When we realized that we really weren’t going anywhere, though, and my panic reflex started to settle in, it started to feel – how shall I put it? – less okay. I found that if I closed my eyes and just counted slowly, I felt a little less smothered, but that seemed like such an exaggerated reaction that I was torn between my self-mocking and my genuine and growing fear of entrapment.
The crowd eventually shuffled back to life and we worked our way out but the streets were still packed and we both felt edgy. There were some very pretty things to see, namely the windowsills of almost every single apartment, as the tradition is to put candles out and so the whole city kind of shimmers and sparkles against the dark. All the buildings along the quay, layered up against the mountain – it’s really something. The cathedral and surrounding area were also beautiful in a series of colours and special lightings with ethereal movie music blasting out over the river. (Including, at one point, the theme song from “Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story,” which was somehow right on.)
Important churches had interesting and artistic lighting designs – it’s all very difficult to describe, is the thing, and the whole is much more effective than its parts, because you wander around a kind of magical city for a night and around every corner is something new. One church, to give you an example, had bubbles floating up it and then a series of Medieval paintings, and at one point a very dreamy and mystical space thing. Or a school in town had an underwater theme and there were dolphins and whales swimming in and out of its windows. (See? Hard to describe. If it sounds lame, believe me that it isn’t.)
We called it a night after our misadventure at the Place des Terreaux, which was supposed to be the best thing in the city. The crowd was so awful that we got swept in and couldn’t get out, and we stayed there for OVER TWENTY MINUTES! Think about how long twenty minutes can feel when you’re stuffed up against a bunch of strangers, trying not to be pulled apart and unable to see anything in any direction. Franck’s tall enough that he saw some of the show, which apparently involved flames, but I literally saw nothing but coats and hair. It was ass. I remembered that the night’s-end fireworks were like that last time, as a kajillion people crammed themselves along the quays and we all got split up and could only pray that no one in a wheelchair or with a weak heart was stuck in the mob because there was no way to help them. That’s precisely why Franck and I had decided to skip out before the fireworks, but then I guess it happened anyway.
The lucky thing is that we have a clear view of the cathedral and its general area from our window, so we were able to watch the end of the night’s colours from our quiet, crowd-free living room. I went to bed wondering when exactly I became an old lady and hoping that I might have a funny reversal in my life and suddenly be fancy-free and wild in my eighties. For now, though, I will content myself with watching major cultural events on television and toasting the brave souls who live them with such gusto.
I now head into the festive season alone, as Franck left for Bretagne on Friday to spend his birthday and Christmas with his twin, so while I wait for my own German adventure to take flight, I’m back to spending lots of time with Just Kathryn and to eating pre-cooked ravioli. I watched “Calendar Girls,” which was a very nice movie (and a true story, so you can’t criticize the sentimentality) and am reading a terrible Soviet-era murder mystery that I would immediately abandon if I had anything else to replace it. I’m going to get a library card.
Good luck with all your shopping and have an apple cider for me; they don’t have it here. (French “cidre” is alcoholic, surprise!)
Kathryn
ribbit ribbit
I think it’s time to add a Strike of the Week segment to this series, though it’s becoming difficult to keep track. I think the interns are heading into week two, as are the train stations’ shuttle buses, and the tourism offices have been shut down since mid-November. The newest one on the table seems to be the pharmacists’ strike, which is obviously a big hassle and so is being dealt with as quickly as possible, and is also apparently completely unreasonable, as the newspapers scoffingly point out – less than a week after calling off their own strike, of course. I think it’s only a matter of time before France throws in the towel and just goes on national strike. Is that possible, for a country to go on strike? If it is then France is the country to do it.
As for exciting epiphanies in teaching, here’s what I figured out: the way to make it bearable is to play camp games in class. Oh, how I have counted the minutes through that grade nine class; how I have planned complicated excuses to keep me from having to show up… until Thursday, that is, when I said “why don’t we try a game?” and we spent forty glorious minutes chanting “this is the pen. The what? The pen. The what? The pen. Oh, the pen.” (Or, more accurately, “zis is ze pen. Ze what? Ze pen. Ze what? Ze pen. Oh, ze pen!”) It can be difficult for kids anywhere, not to mention for uptight and self-conscious 14-year-olds who have never been asked to be silly in class; their ferocious concentration as they tapped their laps and bobbed their heads, trying frantically to hang on to the rhythm, was endearing to say the
least, and I temporarily liked them again. I think next week we’ll just go and play tag, or maybe ditch school and catch a movie.
A funny moment in class: I had thrown together a Christmas crossword and was explaining some of the vocabulary and North American traditions. (Which is tricky, because I have no idea if other families do the same things that we do, having only Christmased with my own; do you all put a clementine in your stocking? Do you all eat all the chocolate right away and then feel ill throughout the day?) I told them that we leave carrots out for Rudolph and his brethren and asked what we might leave for Santa to eat. They guessed “saucisson” and were disappointed when I explained that no, we tend not to leave big, greasy sausage for our Father Christmas, but rather cookies. And what might he want to drink with those cookies? “Wine?”
And speaking of French alcoholic tendencies, on the news the other night the weather lady talked about road conditions and introduced a new idea that they’re hoping will work its way into parties and other boozy events: it’s called “capitaine de la soirée” and entails choosing someone to be in charge of driving everyone home, a person who will obviously not participate in any of the evening’s boozing. Kind of like – oh, what’s that called, already – right, a DESIGNATED DRIVER. A new concept, hot off the press? This is actually just occurring to them now, the country with the highest accident rate in Europe – are they kidding me with this?
Meanwhile, December 8th in Lyon is the Fête des Lumières, when the city is turned into a big light show, so it was disappointing to wake up to rain. Then at lunch the sun came out and everyone got excited – and then it rained again. By the time it was dark out and the thing was starting, it was kind of drizzly and got progressively wetter throughout the evening. This might have put a damper on people’s spirits if it weren’t for the traditional and plenteous stands of cheap, hot wine (sweet and with cinnamon, their boozy answer to apple cider), which kept most of the crowd in fine cheerful form.
The crowd in question was the entire city of Lyon, plus however many hundreds or thousands of people came in from neighbouring counties. It’s hard to guess how many people there actually were, since the streets are narrow and fill up pretty quickly, but we were in more human traffic jams than the most desperate people person could ask for and I am not, as it happens, a desperate people person.
Our first jam was as we wandered through the Christmas market, which Franck hadn’t yet seen. The little wooden cabins were charming as usual and the bizarre reggae-Christmas music blaring out of giant speakers made our local Guadeloupan feel slightly at home. (If only there had been palm trees, sweet mangoes and the sea sparkling around us… but I digress. I weep and I digress.)
The shuffling pace was driving me crazy, as among my other charming qualities is a “lack of patience” for walking slowly behind people and I tend to become frantic and start full-speed weaving through any openings I can find until I get to a clearing. This system worked well enough until we found ourselves in the middle of a giant throng of people, at a dead stop and being vaguely pushed from behind.
It was okay at first because we were beside the concert platform and its very earnest choir, so I was able to laugh about their dorky actions and Franck, who is not mean-spirited and tends to wish people well – the loser – was able to hum along and smile encouragingly. It was still okay when I got tired of resisting gravity and let my head rest on the back of the man in front of me, since I was being pushed in that direction, and I felt a kind of communal bond via his down jacket. When we realized that we really weren’t going anywhere, though, and my panic reflex started to settle in, it started to feel – how shall I put it? – less okay. I found that if I closed my eyes and just counted slowly, I felt a little less smothered, but that seemed like such an exaggerated reaction that I was torn between my self-mocking and my genuine and growing fear of entrapment.
The crowd eventually shuffled back to life and we worked our way out but the streets were still packed and we both felt edgy. There were some very pretty things to see, namely the windowsills of almost every single apartment, as the tradition is to put candles out and so the whole city kind of shimmers and sparkles against the dark. All the buildings along the quay, layered up against the mountain – it’s really something. The cathedral and surrounding area were also beautiful in a series of colours and special lightings with ethereal movie music blasting out over the river. (Including, at one point, the theme song from “Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story,” which was somehow right on.)
Important churches had interesting and artistic lighting designs – it’s all very difficult to describe, is the thing, and the whole is much more effective than its parts, because you wander around a kind of magical city for a night and around every corner is something new. One church, to give you an example, had bubbles floating up it and then a series of Medieval paintings, and at one point a very dreamy and mystical space thing. Or a school in town had an underwater theme and there were dolphins and whales swimming in and out of its windows. (See? Hard to describe. If it sounds lame, believe me that it isn’t.)
We called it a night after our misadventure at the Place des Terreaux, which was supposed to be the best thing in the city. The crowd was so awful that we got swept in and couldn’t get out, and we stayed there for OVER TWENTY MINUTES! Think about how long twenty minutes can feel when you’re stuffed up against a bunch of strangers, trying not to be pulled apart and unable to see anything in any direction. Franck’s tall enough that he saw some of the show, which apparently involved flames, but I literally saw nothing but coats and hair. It was ass. I remembered that the night’s-end fireworks were like that last time, as a kajillion people crammed themselves along the quays and we all got split up and could only pray that no one in a wheelchair or with a weak heart was stuck in the mob because there was no way to help them. That’s precisely why Franck and I had decided to skip out before the fireworks, but then I guess it happened anyway.
The lucky thing is that we have a clear view of the cathedral and its general area from our window, so we were able to watch the end of the night’s colours from our quiet, crowd-free living room. I went to bed wondering when exactly I became an old lady and hoping that I might have a funny reversal in my life and suddenly be fancy-free and wild in my eighties. For now, though, I will content myself with watching major cultural events on television and toasting the brave souls who live them with such gusto.
I now head into the festive season alone, as Franck left for Bretagne on Friday to spend his birthday and Christmas with his twin, so while I wait for my own German adventure to take flight, I’m back to spending lots of time with Just Kathryn and to eating pre-cooked ravioli. I watched “Calendar Girls,” which was a very nice movie (and a true story, so you can’t criticize the sentimentality) and am reading a terrible Soviet-era murder mystery that I would immediately abandon if I had anything else to replace it. I’m going to get a library card.
Good luck with all your shopping and have an apple cider for me; they don’t have it here. (French “cidre” is alcoholic, surprise!)
Kathryn
ribbit ribbit
Sunday, December 4, 2005
Kathryn vs. Lyon, Round Two: Chapter 7
Chapter 7: Yuletide Incoming
Apparently people are freezing to death in Pakistan from the unprecedented snowstorms, which made me realize that I’m a big complainer and lots of people (most people) have it worse. Anyway, I’m over the initial shock of winter and have settled into the reality of living coldly. By actively getting rid of my bitterness, I’ve been able to remember some of the things I claim to like about winter, like having cold, pink cheeks or the sun shining on a crisp day. Plus, our landlord finally replaced the pane of glass that he knocked out of a door before I moved in, so the bitter Lyon wind (the one that rips your face off if you’re not careful) has stopped coming into the apartment and I can now move around without wearing a sleeping bag and two scarves. I might even start washing my hair again, which was out of the question in the meat freezer known as “the bathroom” until now. Suffice it to say, I’ve been wearing a lot of hats.
We had kind of a fun day last week when Sarah invited us to a modern art exhibition. There were some good pieces, like the very exciting mirror cone – where you stick your head in at one end and it’s reflected as in a honey comb for everyone on the other end – and the huge glued-down patterns of pencil crayon shavings. There were also decidedly crappy pieces, such as a whole series of pastel Easter egg-ish paintings and a large bottle with a blue smudge on it. Oh sure, you’ll tell me it represents wasted youth or Senegalese politics – I don’t want to know. It’s crap.
There were interactive installations that were downright terrifying, namely a roomful of balloons that you have to cross to get to the exit. The thing is, lots of people passed through this installation before us and by the time we pushed our way through this roomful of static, all the balloons were covered in strangers’ hair. (I think the artist forgot to account for that particular inevitable reality.) Whether for your claustrophobia, your germophobia or your fear of popping balloons, this room was designed to destroy you.
Another one was full of green fog and lighting that made it impossible to see anything past the end of your arm, so you had to wander around in a puke green nightmare until you found the exit. Unfortunately for me, Sarah and Franck loved this Room of Hell and thought it was funny to tap me on the shoulder and run off, laughing madly. The tapping, in their mounting frenzy, became smacking me on the back of the head; I was panicky enough to begin with – maybe unreasonably so but let’s leave our judgments at the door, shall we? – and didn’t think it was funny at all. As it happens. The terror eventually won me over and I sat down against the wall, where my whimpering inspired pity in Franck. He spoke in soothing tones and helped me find the exit before heading back in to play with Sarah some more, both of them oblivious to the cold hatred in my heart.
The best part of the exhibit – though my balloon room fear of death-by-smothering is a close second – was the Spencer Tunick wing. (I am very probably spelling his name wrong and I apologize to anyone out there who knows the difference. And I guess to ol’ Spencer himself.) He takes pictures of large groups of naked people in bizarre positions and in front of important monuments, and Sarah had worked her way into the five a.m. crowd for the Lyon series. Looking at all these naked bodies crammed together in a Vieux Lyon stairwell or on a bridge, often with one leg up or something similarly risqué, was like Where’s Waldo? – if Waldo were naked and Sarah. All very exciting.
There was a group of high school kids being taken through the gallery and we considered trying to sell her autograph, but she was suddenly shy about showing them where exactly her bare self was in each picture and so we settled for knowing smiles and self-congratulatory smugness. (I don’t know what Franck and I were smug about, fully-clothed and unphotographed as we were, but it felt right at the time.)
On the travel front: after the newspaper strike and the teacher strike came the train strike, so that it looked like our Annecy week-end was going to fall through. Then they settled just in time (or maybe they didn’t; what do I care? I'll tell you where they can stick their next strike...) and Franck and I left at an ungodly hour the morning after a snowfall and headed out to ever-charming Annecy to visit my mom.
The cold in Lyon had already pushed Franck to buy a proper winter coat and accessories, but he was still in running shoes when we stepped off the train and into the winter wonderland of a mountain town. The snow in Lyon was wet and mushy, you see, so you could survive by just sidestepping puddles, but in Annecy it was unavoidable. We’ve all been there, I’m sure, we all know the misery of icy wet feet, and it was a hard reality for Franck to face after a life lived between balmy Marseille and steaming Guadeloupe. We found him some boots and soaked his feet, the process of his ice block feet suddenly thawing bringing him an unprecedented amount of pain; so much for his theory that he could go the whole winter without socks.
Once he was warmed up and shod in boots over wool socks, we were able to walk around Annecy and marvel at how lovely it still is. Even without the pretty flowers everywhere, it’s impossibly picturesque and romantic. A low point was when mom lost her contact lens in a puddle of water along the canal and we crouched down and looked for it, as if there were any way we’d find a clear, dime-sized piece of plastic on a swampy, mushy sidewalk. It was hard to accept defeat because there were little bubbles everywhere that looked like lenses and we didn’t want to give up on the real one. Needless to say, we gave up, life went on. (Though we did linger in that spot again the next day, squinting like idiots into puddles.)
We all agreed in Annecy that I’d put on some weight in my nether regions since the cold set in this year (see? all my problems are around my butt!) so Franck and I decided to actively cut back on munching in-between meals. The problem is that while I’m happy to have a health coach in theory, having someone looking over my shoulder to remind me of my promise to myself is irritating at best, especially when that someone has the metabolism of a meerkat and couldn’t gain weight if he tried. It looks like my aversion to supervision is trumping any commitment I may have had to this cause, as I’ve twice now hidden chocolate in the apartment and eaten it on the sly, even though I didn’t particularly feel like it. I need to get out more.
Meanwhile, for those of us who have believed what they’ve told us over the years about the French being less consumer-frenzied at Christmas than North Americans: we’ve been duped. There was a sudden two-day promotion in a nearby home and garden store and I bought a thirty-euro dvd player (formerly seventy-five euros! What a bargain!) and had to "just pop into the mall" to pick up an adaptor for our television set. The mall was crowded and hot and awful, as malls are wont to be, but its pushy, angry mood could not possibly prepare me for the frenzy of the main department store.
I crossed the security check into my own personal hell: the entire store was decorated beyond what I thought was the limit, including a front-and-centre collection of garish red-dressed angels hanging down at eye-level so that you had to manoeuvre your way through the maze of their little golden shoes to even get into the store. There was holly, there was tinsel, there were hideous plastic turkeys and jolly Santas – I think they ordered their material from americanchristmas.com – and there were eight billion aggressive people with shopping carts and screaming children. I’ve worked six Christmases in retail and it always felt like a nightmare, but now I realize that it was a walk in the park next to this place.
The guys who work in electronics all had mobs of people around them, shouting out their needs and complaining about the crowds. I obviously couldn’t get to a staff member, so I ended up asking a fellow shopper who looked dvd-savvy and he hooked me up with the adaptor. On my way to the check-out counter I got elbowed in the side of the head by some frantic woman. I then waited thirty-four minutes in line (I am not exaggerating; I figured I’d want to tell the story and I timed it for accuracy), paid for the stupid adaptor and rugby-shoved my way out of the mall. This was on November 30th, and not a week-end. Merry Christmas!
The dvd-related purchases will be my last this year, as I just found out that my salary is 243 euros less than I thought: the amount they claim – already one hundred euros a month less than in Guadeloupe – is before taxes. So let me be completely clear and upfront: none of you is getting anything for Christmas. Once again, I curse this city and its sneaky ways: I’ll see you in hell, Lyon.
Kathryn
ribbit ribbit
Apparently people are freezing to death in Pakistan from the unprecedented snowstorms, which made me realize that I’m a big complainer and lots of people (most people) have it worse. Anyway, I’m over the initial shock of winter and have settled into the reality of living coldly. By actively getting rid of my bitterness, I’ve been able to remember some of the things I claim to like about winter, like having cold, pink cheeks or the sun shining on a crisp day. Plus, our landlord finally replaced the pane of glass that he knocked out of a door before I moved in, so the bitter Lyon wind (the one that rips your face off if you’re not careful) has stopped coming into the apartment and I can now move around without wearing a sleeping bag and two scarves. I might even start washing my hair again, which was out of the question in the meat freezer known as “the bathroom” until now. Suffice it to say, I’ve been wearing a lot of hats.
We had kind of a fun day last week when Sarah invited us to a modern art exhibition. There were some good pieces, like the very exciting mirror cone – where you stick your head in at one end and it’s reflected as in a honey comb for everyone on the other end – and the huge glued-down patterns of pencil crayon shavings. There were also decidedly crappy pieces, such as a whole series of pastel Easter egg-ish paintings and a large bottle with a blue smudge on it. Oh sure, you’ll tell me it represents wasted youth or Senegalese politics – I don’t want to know. It’s crap.
There were interactive installations that were downright terrifying, namely a roomful of balloons that you have to cross to get to the exit. The thing is, lots of people passed through this installation before us and by the time we pushed our way through this roomful of static, all the balloons were covered in strangers’ hair. (I think the artist forgot to account for that particular inevitable reality.) Whether for your claustrophobia, your germophobia or your fear of popping balloons, this room was designed to destroy you.
Another one was full of green fog and lighting that made it impossible to see anything past the end of your arm, so you had to wander around in a puke green nightmare until you found the exit. Unfortunately for me, Sarah and Franck loved this Room of Hell and thought it was funny to tap me on the shoulder and run off, laughing madly. The tapping, in their mounting frenzy, became smacking me on the back of the head; I was panicky enough to begin with – maybe unreasonably so but let’s leave our judgments at the door, shall we? – and didn’t think it was funny at all. As it happens. The terror eventually won me over and I sat down against the wall, where my whimpering inspired pity in Franck. He spoke in soothing tones and helped me find the exit before heading back in to play with Sarah some more, both of them oblivious to the cold hatred in my heart.
The best part of the exhibit – though my balloon room fear of death-by-smothering is a close second – was the Spencer Tunick wing. (I am very probably spelling his name wrong and I apologize to anyone out there who knows the difference. And I guess to ol’ Spencer himself.) He takes pictures of large groups of naked people in bizarre positions and in front of important monuments, and Sarah had worked her way into the five a.m. crowd for the Lyon series. Looking at all these naked bodies crammed together in a Vieux Lyon stairwell or on a bridge, often with one leg up or something similarly risqué, was like Where’s Waldo? – if Waldo were naked and Sarah. All very exciting.
There was a group of high school kids being taken through the gallery and we considered trying to sell her autograph, but she was suddenly shy about showing them where exactly her bare self was in each picture and so we settled for knowing smiles and self-congratulatory smugness. (I don’t know what Franck and I were smug about, fully-clothed and unphotographed as we were, but it felt right at the time.)
On the travel front: after the newspaper strike and the teacher strike came the train strike, so that it looked like our Annecy week-end was going to fall through. Then they settled just in time (or maybe they didn’t; what do I care? I'll tell you where they can stick their next strike...) and Franck and I left at an ungodly hour the morning after a snowfall and headed out to ever-charming Annecy to visit my mom.
The cold in Lyon had already pushed Franck to buy a proper winter coat and accessories, but he was still in running shoes when we stepped off the train and into the winter wonderland of a mountain town. The snow in Lyon was wet and mushy, you see, so you could survive by just sidestepping puddles, but in Annecy it was unavoidable. We’ve all been there, I’m sure, we all know the misery of icy wet feet, and it was a hard reality for Franck to face after a life lived between balmy Marseille and steaming Guadeloupe. We found him some boots and soaked his feet, the process of his ice block feet suddenly thawing bringing him an unprecedented amount of pain; so much for his theory that he could go the whole winter without socks.
Once he was warmed up and shod in boots over wool socks, we were able to walk around Annecy and marvel at how lovely it still is. Even without the pretty flowers everywhere, it’s impossibly picturesque and romantic. A low point was when mom lost her contact lens in a puddle of water along the canal and we crouched down and looked for it, as if there were any way we’d find a clear, dime-sized piece of plastic on a swampy, mushy sidewalk. It was hard to accept defeat because there were little bubbles everywhere that looked like lenses and we didn’t want to give up on the real one. Needless to say, we gave up, life went on. (Though we did linger in that spot again the next day, squinting like idiots into puddles.)
We all agreed in Annecy that I’d put on some weight in my nether regions since the cold set in this year (see? all my problems are around my butt!) so Franck and I decided to actively cut back on munching in-between meals. The problem is that while I’m happy to have a health coach in theory, having someone looking over my shoulder to remind me of my promise to myself is irritating at best, especially when that someone has the metabolism of a meerkat and couldn’t gain weight if he tried. It looks like my aversion to supervision is trumping any commitment I may have had to this cause, as I’ve twice now hidden chocolate in the apartment and eaten it on the sly, even though I didn’t particularly feel like it. I need to get out more.
Meanwhile, for those of us who have believed what they’ve told us over the years about the French being less consumer-frenzied at Christmas than North Americans: we’ve been duped. There was a sudden two-day promotion in a nearby home and garden store and I bought a thirty-euro dvd player (formerly seventy-five euros! What a bargain!) and had to "just pop into the mall" to pick up an adaptor for our television set. The mall was crowded and hot and awful, as malls are wont to be, but its pushy, angry mood could not possibly prepare me for the frenzy of the main department store.
I crossed the security check into my own personal hell: the entire store was decorated beyond what I thought was the limit, including a front-and-centre collection of garish red-dressed angels hanging down at eye-level so that you had to manoeuvre your way through the maze of their little golden shoes to even get into the store. There was holly, there was tinsel, there were hideous plastic turkeys and jolly Santas – I think they ordered their material from americanchristmas.com – and there were eight billion aggressive people with shopping carts and screaming children. I’ve worked six Christmases in retail and it always felt like a nightmare, but now I realize that it was a walk in the park next to this place.
The guys who work in electronics all had mobs of people around them, shouting out their needs and complaining about the crowds. I obviously couldn’t get to a staff member, so I ended up asking a fellow shopper who looked dvd-savvy and he hooked me up with the adaptor. On my way to the check-out counter I got elbowed in the side of the head by some frantic woman. I then waited thirty-four minutes in line (I am not exaggerating; I figured I’d want to tell the story and I timed it for accuracy), paid for the stupid adaptor and rugby-shoved my way out of the mall. This was on November 30th, and not a week-end. Merry Christmas!
The dvd-related purchases will be my last this year, as I just found out that my salary is 243 euros less than I thought: the amount they claim – already one hundred euros a month less than in Guadeloupe – is before taxes. So let me be completely clear and upfront: none of you is getting anything for Christmas. Once again, I curse this city and its sneaky ways: I’ll see you in hell, Lyon.
Kathryn
ribbit ribbit
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