Kathryn Goes Republican, Chapter Three

Last time I wrote I was in Higuey, the somewhat nearby town where I can do internet for 20 pesos an hour, I can wear whatever I want and I don't have to greet everyone I pass – though I still do; the brainwashing seems to be working.

Local friends of mine had told me how to find a cheap internet place, but of course it was much more confusing when I got there and tried to work my way through all the winding streets, so I asked a young guy to confirm that it was, in fact, ahead on the left. He said "come, I'll show you" and walked with me the thirty steps to the Spider Cyber Cafe, introduced me to his friend who works there and sat down to wait. I thought he was just hanging around with his buddy, or maybe waiting for me to be seduced by this loud, slurpy kissing thing he kept doing while winking suggestively. It turned out he was being my unsolicited tour guide – a guy in a souvenir shop (where Yoel took me after I was done internet) explained to me that this is the system and I'd have to come up with some kind of tip.

Frankly, it was worth it; this Yoel was so much fun to hang around with! I was looking for black clothes so that I wouldn't keep wearing the same outfit every Friday (dress code: black elegant) and it was impossible to find anything that wasn't thick polyester and heavily sequined. (Any entrepreneurs who want to make a fortune should look into selling the BeDazzler in the Caribbean; these folks LOVES a good sparkle.)

But rather than becoming a long and frustrating marketplace search, it turned into an extended fashion show, with me trying things on and Yoel giving me the thumbs up or down. He doesn't like me in yellow, it turns out, but is ready to marry me in anything red. I found a sexy halter-style polka-dot dress for Sunday (dress code: black and white) and knew it was a keeper when Yoel yelled "¡Dios mio!," fell on the floor and convulsed, Dominican voodoo style. I also enjoyed his signature Bollywood move of putting his hands under his shirt and miming a beating heart, as well as his habit of putting his arm around me, hitching his thumb into imaginary suspenders and calling out "how do you like my girlfriend?" whenever we passed someone he knew. I couldn't get enough of it.

Yoel's biggest challenge was finding me a public toilet on Easter week-end (everything closes for Jesus, it would seem), but he eventually led me to the bus station and to the "clean, safe toilets" to be found there. Do I even need to tell you what "clean" and "safe" mean to Yoel? I'm sure you can imagine the stopped-up toilet, the suspicious brown water all over the floor and the complete lack of toilet paper or a sink without my going into detail. But here's the tricky part: there's no door. No curtain, no piece of plastic, no shifty piece of fabric – nothing to hide my squatting self from the men sitting on the bench at the bus station. Nothing, that is, except for Yoel. My brave soldier stood (with his back to me, of course), gallantly shielding me from the men's view and even singing so he wouldn't hear me pee. AND, when he saw that I was using my bottle of water to wash my hands, he mysteriously and gleefully pulled a bar of soap out of his pocket. I'm telling you, this guy should run for president.

Incidentally, next time I attempt a day in town, the plan is to not ingest anything even remotely liquid so that I can save my desperate pee break for my own toilet. What would I have done without Yoel?

Every night there's a children's show at 8:15 and then an everybody show at 9:30. Two of these later ones are circus shows, one in the theatre and one outside on the flying trapeze, and they're fantastic. I'm borderline in love with Mona, the Swiss wonder whose acts I refuse to describe, as no words can do them justice. They have a Cirque du Soleil vibe, if that gives you an idea, and include things like satin curtains (for climbing and wrapping herself around in) and Chinese rugs for juggling with her hands and feet. Then there are juggling numbers and acrobatics – and an exciting three-man trapeze thing where we get to watch three beautiful and perfectly-sculpted bodies in hot red tights using all their muscles to strike and hold impossible three-man-trapeze positions. Everything draws oohs and aahs from the audience – Mona and Kevin together on the trapeze draw gasps – and is professional and beautiful.

And then there are the other shows.

It's obviously a huge disadvantage to be compared with the circus team, but these shows are nothing to write home about. (Though that's exactly what I'm doing, which I guess says more about me than about our series of cabarets...) There's a terrible sound and lighting crew, first of all (which causes problems for the circus show as well), as well as a bizarre insistence on using the fog machine as often as possible, though it smells bad, makes a stupid noise, makes it impossible to see what's happening on stage and has caused several accidents.

The shows are a series of dance numbers, though it's less "dancing" and more "putting on costumes and kind of walking around." For example: one show opens with "It's Raining Men," which I would think should be lots of men doing fun and flirty dance moves for the audience. Instead, it's about ten girls in tight and busty costumes who walk in in two lines, cross the stage so their lines move through each other, then walk back out. They do this again and again, sometimes with a little turn. And about three times, a few men in suits and bowties come and walk with them. Aaaannnnd – scene.

There's a can-can number and a snake-charmer dance that start out well but then they just do the same 40-second sequence on repeat until the end of the song and I don't think they're fooling anyone. As far as actual dance moves, the best number is "Lady Marmalade," in which the girls wear boustiers and garters and dance seductively around chairs. Isn't that weird? To do a borderline strip-tease at a Hotel Fun family show on Saturday night? (It is a French company...) They're always looking for dancers and they keep trying to talk me into coming to rehearsal; they don't seem to understand that even if rehearsals weren't from 12-2:00 a.m. (the only time everyone is free, since sleep doesn't count here), I would never, EVER put on a hooker costume and go spread-eagle on a chair for the pleasure – or not – of our esteemed guests. And I certainly won't do it when they persist in calling the show "Folise," even though we've all told them it's "Follies." Inappropriate sex is one thing, but poor spelling I will not accept.


Then there's my favourite number, the magic trick that is so unmagical it is hilariously funny. Elie and Raymond come out in tuxedos and shake hands, then Raymond goes over to the dirty curtain on the far edge of the stage (dirty enough that we should not be calling attention to it, quite frankly) and slowly wheels out a big, clunky box. It's awkward and takes forever, with the audience just sitting there watching. Why doesn't someone else wheel it out ahead of time? Or maybe Elie could do something to distract us, rather than standing with his hands together, watching Raymond struggle with the box as he tries to manoeuver it past the speakers and the other props on stage.

He finally gets it to the right spot and he turns it around to show us that there are no trap doors – except that there are small squares painted on three sides, and then this giant, person-sized square on the fourth with paint chipping away from it having opened and closed so many times. I haven't yet heard the audience break out in open laughter, but that may be because the music is too loud. (Music not unlike Job's magic show song in "Arrested Development," which makes it that much funnier.)

He turns the box so the door is facing the back of the stage, then puts handcuffs on Elie (another four minutes of waiting, as the cuffs are cheap and never work right away) who gets in a sack and goes in the box. Raymond goes backstage to look for the big flag that they can't figure out should be left in the wings, ready for action, rather than hidden in the prop room somewhere so that we hear crashing and banging while we wait for him to come back to the actionless stage. The flag is waved around, Elie ends up on the box and Raymond comes out from the audience wearing the handcuffs as a pretty girl steps out of the sack: good idea. But so clunky and embarrassing. The first time I saw it I laughed until there were tears streaming down my face. When he proudly showed us the trap-door side of the box I almost fell off the bench. (None of the other GOs could understand what was so funny – I haven't yet found a real friend here.)

Needless to say, I'm hoping to get involved with some of the children's shows so I don't have to be part of any of the cabarets. We'll see what comes up when our new mini-club chief gets here.

The most important news is that I was finally given my own room, after two months of sharing with Anouk. It's tidy, clean, quiet and all mine. I can close my door and no one else has the key – I’m pretty much naked all the time, just because I can be. No drunk roommate showing up in the middle of the night (or trying in her confusion to pee on my bed, which she did twice), no smoking, no dirty underwear on the floor or wet towels on my bed. And no 5:00 a.m. rooster crowing, since they live in the field by the other room.

What I do have is hot water, which is a godsend after so many cold and miserable showers, and the water doesn't cut out during one out of four showers, so I don't have to panic before shampooing that I will be stuck there, soapy and cold, waiting for the water to come back on. (This has happened too many times to count.) Officially, I should also be finished with tarantulas. My grand total in the other room was four, two of which I killed myself – just for your big fat information.
It's only been two days and I already like my job much, much better.

On the other hand, I had a good taste of how little Hotel Fun cares about its employees on Friday: one of my closest friends here, Rivelino, along with eight other Haitians, found out at about 10:00 that evening that they were leaving the next morning at 9:00 because there aren't enough kids this week and their services are no longer needed. Not even 24 hours' notice. Hotel Fun is booked months in advance and I'm sure they knew exactly how many kids there would be – they couldn't let them know ahead of time so they could say goodbye to people and call ahead to whoever's waiting for them at home? I tried to go and meet the bus to say good-bye but they didn't even get to leave from reception like everyone else, so I couldn't find them and I'll probably never see them again.


And, incidentally, we have over 45 kids in my group of 4- and 5-year-olds – same as last week – and are now even more severely understaffed than before. (We claim a 6-to-1 ratio but are currenly at either 15- or 22-to-1 at any time, which is obviously a lot of fun in the pool and at lunch...) Sebe, our current douche-bag boss, is now scrambling to replace the people he fired by weasling GOs from other services – as if anyone would be stupid enough to leave a cushy job teaching sailing on the beach to come run around with a group of rowdy kids all day.

One person whom I'm kind of glad is leaving is my supposed look-alike, Julie. She's Canadian (from Montreal, like everyone else here) and has basically the same colouring as I do, but that's where the similarities end. And yet everyone always tells me how great I was in the show – including once when I had been standing beside her on stage, she in her princess costume and I in my Kathryn clothes, doing the nightly song and dance with the kids after the show. "Katy, you were so good as the princess!" And Julie's still there in the costume, maybe 10 feet away from us. She's a nice girl but I won't miss having her around, you know?

Next week looks like it's going to be a lot slower than usual because there's a private reservation. Specifically, a 950-person group of lesbians who are bringing their own entertainment and seem to want a minimum of G.O. involvement. This is: Fantastic. No mini-club, no crazy signs, NO EATING WITH GMs! They don't want us at their tables, which means we can actually eat with our friends for a change, or even alone.

There was talk of their not wanting any male GOs present but I hope that's not true, first because it's discrimination and I object on principle. Sleep with whomever floats your boat, but don't rent a staff and then lock them out by gender. Second, it's no fun working without half your team. Boys are fun, you know? And third, why should they keep getting paid to NOT work while the girls do all their jobs?

So I am preparing myself to feel highly indignant. But I'm also preparing myself for a week without mini-club: no snot, no wiping bums, no day-long cheers, no one clinging to my neck and sobbing because maman would rather go tan by the pool than actually, oh, I don't know, spend time with her children in this family resort. No kids who speak only Hebrew or German and are traumatized by the amount of noise and their inability to understand any of it.

However, none of my little angels, either, and no kids all excited to go on the trapeze, and of course no kids who will then go home and send me letters and pictures and tell me how great I am – but it's good to miss some of it. That gives me the strength to pick up again next week.

Have a good end of April, everybody.

Kathryn

Kathryn Goes Republican, Chapter Two

1. On Sailing

A few weeks ago on my day off I decided to give sailing another go. I had the official lesson with the GMs (Gracious Members = guests) and then took the boat out with J.C. and, feeling confident in my ability to interpret the wind speed, almost killed us both with a sudden and unplanned turn that brought the bar whipping towards our skulls at top speed. We didn´t have time to duck our heads under the bar, which is the standard turning procedure, but rather had to lean out backwards over the water.

Now, this is an okay thing to do when you´re balancing against the wind and the boat´s weight, but is obviously not so good when all the weight is already on your side and the boat is just waiting for an excuse to tip over. J.C. jumped out before the thing collapsed on us and I tried to do the same, only my foot was caught in the ironically-named "security strap" and I ended up dangling there, uncomfortably straddling the side of the boat in an unattractive spread-eagle, until J.C. pushed the sail back over, turned us around and hoisted me back in. Not one of my finer moments.

Two of the GMs in the group decided it was too risky an activity and defected, despite J.C.'s assurance that he's never seen that happen before and it is almost impossible to make that kind of mistake. (He didn't quite say "only a complete moron can screw it up that badly," but we all understood the message.)

So then on my second run he sent me out alone, which initially seemed like a bad idea. Then I hit my stride and sailed straight out to the orange buoy, which made me feel like hot shit -- until, trying to come back to shore, I was suddenly and inexplicably unable to find any wind and spent about fifteen minutes sitting pretty much still in the water, slowly drifting in the opposite direction from where I needed to go. It was kind of a panicky situation, albeit in a slow-motion, nothing-really-happening way. They eventually sent a couple of guys out to sail me back – which humiliatingly took about forty seconds – and then suggested that I might want to head over and try a tennis lesson, rather than hang around the water sports the rest of the day.

Despite my evident lack of natural sailing ability, I took my wounded pride over to the windsurfing station, thinking that my cat-like agility would make me an instant pro. In my five-person lesson group, I was the only one who was unable to execute a turn. I think I fell off the board a total of eleven times before the salt in my throat became unbearable and I called it quits, to the evident relief of Flavio, the Brazilian windsurfing G.O. who was running out of encouraging words. He gives me an apologetic little smile every time I see him, though I have noticed that he has not suggested I come back and try again. I'm just saying.

2. On Trapezing

After defecting from all things sailing-related, I went back to the circus to take a second shot at the trapeze. This time I was a lot less scared and made a conscious effort not to take out any panicky feelings on the circus team. (The platform is still unreasonably narrow but I didn't mention it, for example.) I trapezed until all the muscles in my shoudlers felt like they'd been put through a meat strainer, then went on the trampoline, which turns out to be the single most aerobic activity I've ever undertaken. (I don't think it's a coincidence that the infirmary is right behind the circus zone; it's just a matter of time before someone thinks the trampoline is just a big kids' toy and then has a heart attack.) I got as far as doing a full sitting turn, which is not easy. Or so Mona assured me. Next time they'll harness me up and I'll learn flips, supposedly the same day I do my first trapeze catch – though I don't feel any real compulsion to make that happen.

3. On Local Fauna

I am fairly terrified of rats, mice coming in closely behind, and frankly I don't like crossing a city raccoon on a bad day, but otherwise I'm okay with most creatures. There are a lot of snakes around here and they don't faze me in the least. Cockroaches are gross but no big deal, frogs and lizards are my favourite things ever – other than the occasional rat around the beach bar when it's raining, I thought I would be free of sissiness during my stay here.

On Wednesday I had a bunch of airport pick-ups and so had a different schedule than usual and I found myself with two free hours in the afternoon. This being unprecedented, I couldn't decide how to best spend the time so I wouldn't regret it afterward, and I ultimately chose to nap. (Which can only ever be the right decision.) Now, get ready because this is a big one.

I was lying on my side and suddenly woke up and opened my eyes. There, on the wall, about 15 cm from my face, was a tarantula. Huge. Hairy. Possibly about to jump on my face. I somehow didn't panic – I am aware that hysteria never helps a stressful situation – and even heard the words "at least it isn't a rat" in my head.

I very slowly got off the bed and tried to ignore my pounding heart long enough to come up with a plan. I decided that I was a strong, capable woman and would simply deal with the situation myself, and so I got my sneaker and spent about six minutes psyching myself up to actually do the deed. When I finally attempted to smoosh the bastard, I was so freaked out that I only hurt its leg and sent it scurrying under my bed, which is a horrifying, horrifying thing to have done.

And still, I remained calm.

I went out onto the balcony to see if someone was out there who might have a suggestion, maybe give me a number to call, and I found Bazz from the circus. He's tough, he's from Indonesia, he has seen lots of tropical creepy-crawlies in his lifetime and should know exactly what to do. I called down to him and when I heard the panic in my voice, I realized I was fairly close to having an emotional breakdown. He is exceptionally chivalrous and came running up to help, assuring me the whole time that it was just a small animal, more afraid of me than I was of it, nothing to worry about. He was poking a hanger around to make it come out from under the air conditioner, telling me that there are a bajillion spiders in Indonesia and he might even want to keep this one as a pet – when it suddenly came scurrying out where he could see it.

Now, my friends, you have never heard a man scream like Bazz screamed. He leapt off the bed faster than I've ever seen anybody move and we both stood there against the wall, screaming and doing that icky-shivery body thing you do when you've seen something gross (and, usually, when you're a girl). Luckily, my neighbour J.C. heard the commotion and came to see what was going on. He's Dominican and apparently unafraid of big, fat, hairy tarantulas, and he took my room apart, undid all the bedding and the suitcases and moved all the furniture until he found the beast, killed it – possibly with his shoe but I don't know because I was still doing the squirmy dance with Bazz – and took it out to the garbage.

Nobody knows how it got in, nobody has ever seen one in their room, everyone in my building is now terrified to go to sleep at night. I've been turning on the air conditioning and am willing to take the bronchitis that it brings if it means that no rodent-sized spiders want to hang out in my room. I also have a near heart-attack every time I see something move, whatever or wherever it may be. I do a full and thorough area check before going into the shower, I shake out all my shoes at least twice a day and I avoid any clothing that may brush up against my leg and make me scream in public – my life now revolves around arachnid-management. Good times, good times.

4. On Local Life

My friend Alexandre invited me to spend a day in Bayahibe, a nearby village where he has an apartment.

*Incidentally, "nearby" turned out to be about 3 hours of travel time by the time we switched from crappy bus to crappy bus, and "apartment" turned out to be a little tin shack with a bed, a tv, a clothes rack and a bucket to pee in. (I turned down the Dominican pork he picked up, lest a gastro-intestinal crisis should be magnified by having only a bucket and a smile.)

I was psyched to get away from the surreal world of the Hotel Fun site and see what it's really like in the Dominican Republic – well, it's no Hotel Fun, that's for sure. The Punta Cana area is a series of aluminum huts amid piles of garbage. Every third home has an old woman in a rocking chair with a kerchief on her head and a bunch of naked or underwear-clad children playing in the garbage piles beside the hut. In-between the groups of huts is a series of road-side vendors' kiosks, usually featuring a bunch of bananas, some sugar cane and a couple of slabs of hanging meat with plenty of flies and no refrigeration in sight. (Hence the Hotel Fun advice to never eat meat off-site.) Every once in a while is a gorgeous, gated home with a Mercedes or an SUV. I don't really get that.

The buses are as crammed as they were in Guadeloupe, big vans full of sweaty people yelling in Spanish or Creole. (The locals are just as likely to be Haitian as Dominican.) They also boast the same road safety standards as Guadeloupe, which include angrily passing anyone who's driving under 110 km/h, oncoming traffic be damned, and stopping suddenly and frequently to buy orange slices on the side of the road, whatever swerving and general panic it might cause. One thing they don't do is turn away passengers because the van is full, so I spent more than half of the trip sitting on men's laps. You want to be fondled by strangers on public transit, you just make your way to Bayahibe.

5. On Weather

That day was unfortunately the first of intense rain, which made for a crappy tourism day and an even crappier homecoming: the theatre, the restaurants, the mini club, half the GM rooms – flooded. We're talking biblical amounts of rain here, all day and all night, so that any time not spent dashing from shelter to shelter was spent sweeping, mopping, toweling and bucket-ing the water out of those shelters. For three days. This has never happened before, apparently, and certainly not in March, which made for lots of angry GMs who blamed Hotel Fun for not being God enough to stop the rain. Because it was obviously such a great week for us – thanks for adding to the good atmosphere. Our hands were all red and chapped from wringing out so many towels, people had foot infections from wading through water up to their shins that was full of who-knows-what (I know what: rat pee and tarantulas!) – it was awful.

And now it's over.

Thanks for all your well-wishing – I've already explained about the lack of internet time, but it's not for lack of thinking of you. It looks like I might decide to stay (IF they give me my own room), so you can now feel free to send me lots of fantastic letters and care packages. Especially if you can get your hands on some Milka chocolate.

Seriously. Milka. Get on it.

Kathryn

Kathryn Goes Republican, Chapter One

Hello all. This is Kathryn, coming to you straight from the lone computer at what we're going to call Hotel Fun, Punta Cana. (I don't want this blog to come up in someone's search for the hotel and get me in trouble!) For those of you who are thinking, "oh great -- more long-winded updates from Kathryn," you needn't worry, as it is highly unlikely that there will be many e-mails in this series or that they will be particularly long. Because:

1. This one computer serves about 200 GOs ("Gentil Organisateur," my embarrassing title here), several of whom are standing around right now waiting for me to finish. (I gave up my spot three times already today, so they can suck on it.)

2. It is a crappy, crappy computer with a sticky and terrible keyboard and a constant beeping sound; it's highly probable that I'll give up before the end of this e-mail.

3. My day starts at 7:30 am and finishes after midnight, so my one day off a week is for sleeping and doing laundry.

4. I'll probably be fired soon for breaking the rules, either wearing a hat or sunglasses in the village (average daily temperature: 32 degrees celsius), not saying hello when I pass a guest on the path, or eating any meal alone instead of with guests. Or, god forbid, for doing the unspeakable and telling a guest about these rules.

As you can imagine, so far I'm having a really good time here in Paradise.

But let's not dwell on the negative. There isn't time. And it serves me right, since I talked this whole thing up for so long. (Everyone who said "it will be like being on vacation for eight months!" owes me an apology.) I won't dwell on my room, for example. Because then I'd have to explain that I'm sharing a small, single room with another girl, with daily promises of being moved tomorrow. And that the girl inquestion is very, very messy, which makes a cramped room even crampier. Nor will I mention my bed, a last-minute roll-in cot that spontaneously folds up twice a night and whacks my knees into my face. Or the lack of hot water in the shower, which, combined with the freezing air conditioning, is giving me something that feels like bronchitis.

I will, however, mention the interesting fact that I have had no fewer than sixteen men take me for a walk and tell me that I'm the woman of their life. I guess it's the tradition when there's fresh blood in the village, but it certainly makes for a tense work environment. (And some of these guys were Spanish-speaking only; while my Spanish is getting better and better, my conversation is obviously quite limited and their declarations of undying love even more unfounded and absurd than those of the French-speaking men.)

The kids are a lot of fun, which is nice. I have 4- and 5-year-olds but also spend quite a bit of time with the older ones. (See "can never be seen alone," above.) I have also fallen in love with merengue and today went out for my first sailing adventure. The good thing about all these men hovering around me all the time is that I get instant access to any activity that tickles my fancy, and today I chose to whip over the water in a small boat and get lots of salt in my eyes. It was awesome and I can't wait to do it again.

I also went on the trapeze, but I acted like a big baby and now I'm embarrassed to see the circus team again. I'm not scared of heights and I was really pumped to go up there, and of course they've got you attached and safe and there's a nice net underneath, but my body betrayed my logic and when Bazz told me to lean forward over a big empty void, all I could hear was my fear of death pounding in my ears and I think I said the words "Bite me, asshole" -- which may or may not have ended our friendship. I did manage to do the flip and to hang from my knees and the whole bit, though, so I figure it will be better next time. And my neighbour, Kevin, with whom Anouk and I share a bathroom, is the chief of circus and is very comforting, so if he's there to talk me through it I might come out with more dignity.

I can't take the beeping anymore. Or the girl sitting beside me, watching me type. I guess I'll go to an internet cafe on my next day off, as I have to do some shopping and apparently the closest town has a giant Wal-Mart and an internet connection. And then I can give you some details about what our actual job is, though for a start you can just picture running around with kids all day, eating with total strangers and then dancing the Hotel Fun dances all night at the bar, every day.

I don't have any details yet on family discounts, but I think I'm retracting my invitation anyway because I don't really want anyone I know to witness my life here. Though my tan is coming along nicely.

Kathryn

Kathryn vs. Lyon, Round Two: Chapter 20

Chapter 20: Farewell, Sweet Lyon

The last two weeks went pretty quickly, filled with good-bye visits and paperwork. One of the visits was to a colleague’s house in the Beaujolais (wine) region, and was a real treat: driving through pretty little villages and up into the green, green hills where she lives was a welcome change from the grey city life we were used to. Her chubby, gorgeous six-month-old was as soft and nuzzly as a baby can be, her musician boyfriend was funny and easy-going and their two French bulldogs, though snorting, snotting and completely moronic, seemed really happy to see us.

The weak link was their friend Sébastien, our ride from Lyon, who has lived in Canada and is supposedly a huge fan. It turns out that he fell in love with a Canadian girl who was in Lyon and then went back to live with her in – wait for it – Welland, Ontario. They broke up and he moved back to Lyon, but he still goes to visit fairly regularly and so considers himself an expert on Canadian culture and had a great time telling me all about its many deficiencies.

The only two North American cities he would ever consider living in, for example, are Ottawa and San Francisco. Montreal: too big. Vancouver: too slow. Toronto: too business. New York: too pushy. (Of these awful cities that he knows so much about, by the way, he has been to: Montreal.) I said that I was among the least business-y people I had ever met and yet had always been happy in Toronto, a city full of arts and culture and sports and food and all sorts of stuff, including, yes, business. But he kindly explained that I was wrong and that Toronto is actually uptight and lacking in human energy. And I guess he must be right; he did live in Welland, after all, a tiny little armpit town some hours from Toronto, and somebody undoubtedly told him all about our big, bad city and its soulless inhabitants.

He was supremely annoyed that when he told people he was French, they thought he meant French-Canadian. I told him about Lyon’s general refusal to accept that I was an Anglo-Canadian, one of many, and that I really didn’t know if Lara Fabian was planning a fall concert tour or how Roch Voisine’s new album was coming along. The principal of my school wished me – for the eight hundredth time – luck in all my endeavours in Quebec, despite my being the English assistant and wearing a Toronto t-shirt. But that’s different, Sébastien assured me; Canada really is known for its Frenchness in most of the world. (Most of the world being, of course, France.)

Having spent ten days one Christmas at a beach resort in La Réunion, a French island East of Africa, our friend Seb went on to tell Franck all about the cultural differences between this island and Guadeloupe, to which he’d never been but he’d seen travel shows. La Réunion has lots of different varieties of bananas, for example.
- Yes, said Franck, same with Guadeloupe.
- No, not like Guadeloupe, these are cooking bananas.
- Yes, said Franck, ours also including cooking bananas.
- No, it’s different.
Well, Seb, if you say it’s different, you must be right. After all, we may have lived there and eaten the bananas on a regular basis, but you’ve seen shows.

It was rainy and cold that day and I shivered through the afternoon in my skirt and sandals, having trusted the weather channel’s claims that it would be warm and sunny. Then they warned of wild rainstorms and as I lugged my umbrella around with me while sweating in the hot sun, I started to wonder about the legitimacy of the weather channel. I don’t really know how it all works, and I’m not saying that I could accurately predict the weather myself, but then I don’t go around making pronouncements based on wild guesses. Why do we keep trusting them? Planning our week-ends around their confident little diagrams, feigning interest as they blab on about various percentages and special names of Easterly winds, then consistently finding ourselves unprepared for the actual weather conditions?

*Here’s something I learned on my favourite game show, La Cible: as well as the paper anniversary, the silver anniversary and the linen anniversary, there is the uranium anniversary. I can’t express how unsettling I find this information; make of it what you will.

**Meanwhile, reading a Timothy Findley book that wasn’t very good in the first place, he kept saying “in her behalf,” “in their behalf” – are we okay with that? Isn’t it “on her behalf,” without exceptions? It made me crazy.

Sarah came down from Bristol for a long week-end, so Franck and I thought she would add some spice to our lives, as she always knows what’s happening ‘on the scene’ and her enthusiasm is catching. It turns out she’s become as much of a homebody as I am and we spent the evenings drinking tea, chatting and watching Eurovision, the funniest show on earth, to which I can do no justice in writing; you have to see it to believe it.

We did things around town during the day, like buying pretty Thai-ish flip-flops for only four euros that fell apart within two days of wearing them around the house. We also walked up the hill to Fourvière, the beautiful cathedral, only Sarah insisted we take the stairs instead of slowly zig-zagging up the path and Franck and I (a smoker and an out-of-shaper, respectively) almost had twin heart attacks. (Sarah’s step-aerobics class prepared her for the feat, but she was still pretty knocked out by the top and I felt justified in my red face and stinging thigh muscles. No CN Tower fundraiser for me, thanks.)

She was hoping, among other things, to get the last 400 euros from Clément, whom you may remember as the dear friend who was supposed to take her last paycheque and transfer it to her in England, but then decided to spend it instead and was indignant when she accused him of being dishonest. She didn’t actually get the money, but she found a couple of henchmen to put on the pressure, so hopefully it will appear.

My Australian friend Sylvie – from the last time I was in Lyon – arrived around the same time, fresh from traveling around Asia and planning to work in France for a while, and it was nice to have someone to hang around with who thinks somewhat like me and who sees the funny things in Lyon as funny, not just same-old. It was also nice to have someone to confirm my opinion that there is simply too much smoke in Lyon, indoors, outdoors and everywhere; I was starting to feel like a real whiner.

A student of mine invited me to an African dinner-and-music thing by her drumming teacher, Apollos. The ticket said 8:00 and I cut short my visit with Stephanie and her baby Marie (who’s walking now! It’s so exciting!) and hustled to get there on time, only to wait over two hours for the food to be served. The musicians – three of them band mates of Franck’s, funnily – started to wander in some time after 11:00 and the music started after midnight, giving the crowd lots of time to get drunk and sweaty before the show. Apollos’s dance teacher friend, Kiana, had invited her community centre dance class, a bunch of middle-aged women who wore whatever African clothing they could drum up. (None of the African people there wore anything even slightly African.) She got them up to do their routines a few times and it was so cute – I can’t find a non-condescending word but I don’t mean it that way – touching? endearing? – to see them enthusiastically struggling through the moves that Kiana did so naturally and beautifully. It looked a bit like a drunk aerobics class by the end, just with better music.

At the risk of digging myself too deeply into cultural stereotyping, I think it’s fair to say that African and Caribbean men generally – and undoubtedly with many exceptions, my politically-correct friends – are fairly easy with the flirting and are particularly attentive towards smiling white women who are delighted and dizzy with the attention they’re not used to getting. (I’m sure I’ve been one of those women on more than one occasion, truly believing that I’d been a Salma Hayek all along and only now was some guy recognizing my irresistible sex appeal. I’m not judging anyone here.) This particular evening, what with the dance class ladies who had never been to an African party before, there were more delighted-and-dizzy women than you could shake a stick at; the men didn’t know where to start, and mostly just moved through the crowd, getting jiggy with whomever they could grab.

As it happens, the woman who was the most enchanted by all the touching and whispering, and who threw herself whole-heartedly into the arms of every man who offered, looked like a terrifying combination of George Costanza’s mom and my grandma. It was most distressing. I wanted to tell her to pull herself together but she was too far gone for any kind of intervention and all I could do was watch, miserable and highly disturbed, as Grandma-Costanza shook her booty against a series of complete strangers, a look of frantic ecstasy on her face. I considered it a personal favour from God when the power cut out and – while the drumming and dancing continued in the hazy blue light of the cell phones everyone pulled out – I couldn’t see my desperate hoochie-mama anymore and my anxiety could finally begin to dissipate. I had a rough sleep that night, believe you me.

Then we had a good time dancing with Sylvie and our [irritating and needy] neighbour. At first the club we were in (a boat on the river, as it happens) was just depressing to me, all these people half-dancing while they looked around for someone to pick up. You could smell the desperation in the air – attack dogs would have had a field day – and it made me feel kind of gross. But the music, tripped-up funk, was really good and got into my bones, so I had to let it out. It had been so long since I’d gone dancing (letting loose in the kitchen doesn’t count) that once I started, I couldn’t stop. (Turns out I have a hoochie-mama side of my own.) Franck was disappointed that I’d resisted for so long when it turns out that I like it so much. What can I say.

Our landlord made no effort to rent out the apartment – he casually mentioned that we should put some posters up around the university, one week before we left – so we had to pay longer than we lived there, having given the standard three months’ notice a week too late. We managed to sell the furniture, mostly to some neighbours who ripped us off, and to Sylvie who paid way too much. (I tried to stop her.) We gave back the keys and didn’t have the courage to break through the smiley apartment-check and say “we pay more than anyone in the building and you didn’t even try to find us a replacement, you didn’t ever fix the leak in the floor or double-pane the windows, the paint is chipped and the floor's a mess, plus you’re racist, so we shouldn’t have to pay for this incomplete month.” Instead we said: “thanks for everything, take care.”

We had a nice moules-frites dinner in the most touristy part of Lyon and stayed the last night in our neighbour Rémy’s apartment. (Having his place available to us all day had made the move-out much easier to co-ordinate.) Unfortunately, his bed is uncomfortable and his apartment makes weird sounds, so with these distractions and my fragile emotional state, I got no sleep and was all crusty and freaked out in the morning. Nothing a good shower can’t take care of, but there was no hot water in the apartment (there’s a special way to turn it on and we couldn’t figure it out) so a couple of dabs with the washcloth were all I got, unfortunate for a long travel day.

After an obviously difficult good-bye at the airport bus – I like traveling, but these good-bye scenes are becoming too much for me – I had an easy enough flight. There was a huge tour group of Montrealers who all had gum and all chewed it as noisily and revoltingly as possible, but it added to the anguish of the day and I think I secretly enjoyed feeling so hard-done-by. They changed the plan and told us as we were landing in Montreal that the Toronto passengers would have to change planes, so we all shuffled into a shuttle bus, including the tour group, who were apparently on a Europe-and-Toronto adventure. They took pictures of the planes around the bus and I thought it might be their first time flying, but then I heard them talking about the Egypt tour last year and Peru before that, a group of well-seasoned travelers – well then what the hell are you taking pictures of random planes for?

We pulled up to our new plane and shuffled onto it; looking at it up close through the bus window was a bit disconcerting, as it looked like a piece of crap. Some aluminum nailed in here and there, an off-colour strip replacing whatever went wrong before – basically a large piece of tin that is going to fly up into the sky with all of us heavy people in it and try not to crash. The new plane was exactly the same as the last one – they asked to sit in the same seats, even though it was half empty – so I don’t understand why we had to change. A smaller plane for fewer people would have made sense; here it was clear that something was wrong with the last plane and it was just an accident that we had made it to Montreal in one piece. Did they want to mess up a new plane for a one-hour flight? Or maybe they wanted to up the chances of our losing our luggage by adding a last-minute plane change, just to mess with our heads.

I thought it was funny that on a Lyon-Montreal-Toronto flight, the information was all in miles and degrees Fahrenheit, neither of which has anything to do with any of those cities. The you-are-here map was funny, too, as it never once labeled Toronto, the destination. There was Chicoutimi, Boston, Dallas – because the most important thing is to know where exactly I am in relation to Dallas – but never Toronto. Our destination today, ladies and gentlemen, is somewhere between Detroit and Montreal. We’re almost there.

I was pleased with our landing, as we flew straight past Toronto and then turned around over Oakville, coming back low and zig-zaggy over my childhood. The various malls were easy enough, the hideous pink Sussex Centre and the different highways, but then I saw Mom’s house (by counting back from the water tower), Papa’s house (close to the gas station), my various elementary schools, the education buildings on Matheson – it was so exciting. And ugly! It’s not a dream to fly over Mississauga, let’s tell it like it is. Down inside it is okay because there are trees, but all those brown roofs and parking lots…

Miscommunication led to a wasted hour at the airport, my uncle waiting inside for me to come out from customs and me waiting outside for him to pull up and avoid parking. But that’s all over now, I’m home, living with my brother in Mississauga. And it’s a bit weird, as I knew it would be. Young people still do the Canadian up-talking that I hoped to have heard for the last time (“I got, like, a C on my exam? and then? I was like, so angry? And Mr. Cook said he couldn’t do anything?”) and Mississauga Transit drivers still want to chat the whole way to the bus terminal. (“France, eh? Yeah, I never been to France – parlay-voo fran-say? Eh? Heh heh.”) The Streetsville dessert shop is now a Starbucks, I counted six new housing developments during a thirty-minute bus ride, and our neighbour has blasted crappy music as he washed his already-shiny car three days in a row. The fruit is over-sprayed, the subway costs a whopping $2.75 (none of which seems to have gone towards fixing the torn, stained seats or improving the stations) – and I have desperate moments of looking around me and thinking, what have I done? Why didn’t I stay in Lyon with Franck?

But this has happened enough times now for me to learn that the grass really is greener wherever you aren’t, and that the problem is perching on the periphery of a place, not the place itself. Besides, our rickety old subway has its own special place in my heart, there are green, leafy trees out my window, Seinfeld runs regularly and in English on tv and the concept of “smoke-free” is not ground-breaking or mocked. I already miss Lyon’s beauty, the cheap, delicious bread, the breezy view from our balcony, the new-age (and cheap) public transportation and the curving rivers with lit-up bridges that you have to stop and stare at, they’re so pretty, and so much more; but that’s the hard part – and the lucky part – of leaving a piece of yourself somewhere else. I guess the trick is to take the best of each place.

Thanks for reading along this year.

Kathryn

ribbit ribbit

Kathryn vs. Lyon, Round Two: Chapter 19

Chapter 19: Always another holiday

My contract is over, I have taught my last class, I never have to set foot in a school again. Praise the Lord. It was something of a shameful end, though: one of my classes had organized a good-bye party and we went outside to stand under the big pine trees, munching and drinking while the sap dripped unnoticed into our hair. I was standing with Nathalie, whom you may remember as Mathilde's mom or as the colleague who wrapped squishy bacon around squishy prunes and changed my life. (Because it turns out they were prunes, not dates, which further demystifies the intestinal crisis I suffered that night after eating half the tray myself. For those of you who have never been sure if prunes really do what everyone says they do, your wondering days are over -- take my word for it.)

Different candies and cakes kept being brought around and I felt that it was only polite to accept what was offered and let my napkin pile up. And, obviously, to eat what was there so as to make room on the napkin for the next round, since I am a deeply altruistic person and wanted my students to feel good about themselves and their effort. Nathalie, selfish as she is, kept refusing the offered treats, and one of the girls finally said "Madame Roger, why aren't you eating?" She answered, "I'm trying to control myself so that I don't just start pigging out," and everyone suddenly became aware of me, standing in the middle of the group with an overflowing napkin, pulling a melted candy off its wrapper with my teeth. There followed a long, nervous silence while everyone tried to think of how to start on a new topic and while I tried to unblush my cheeks and contain the giggles I could feel rising to the surface. I smiled, intending to communicate my cool confidence, then caught Nathalie’s eye and her signal to wipe the chocolate off my chin. Which I did, with as much dignity as I could muster. Later, they made a speech thanking me for a fun year and blah blah blah, and then presented me with my gift, a beautifully-wrapped box of chocolates from a pish-posh Lyon store [that Franck and I polished off in about eight minutes]. I said thank you, made a little speech of my own, and said "and I certainly do love chocolate;" this was apparently the funniest thing they had ever heard and caused great and raucous laughter until the bell rang and they tried to clean up the styrofoam cups and candy wrappers while wiping the tears from their eyes. Turns out being a slob is hilarious.

Back in April, during the Easter holidays (two weeks in February-March, two weeks in April-May; the French are not afraid to take a holiday), Franck and I went to visit his family in Marseille. His step-father, Roger, came to get us at the train station, and from the moment he stepped out of the car to say hello, it was like being back in Guadeloupe. We were standing in the hot sun, surrounded by palm trees, and there was Roger in stained shorts and a Hawaiian shirt unbuttoned over his bare chest, with flip-flops and wild hair, shouting greetings in Creole. The car was filthy and missing half the back seat and all rearview mirrors, the radio was playing zouk and we stopped five or six times on the way home to say hi to people he had seen on the sidewalk, all of whom seemed thrilled to see Franck and me, two people they had never heard of and would never see again. "We're so glad you came!" they cried, with “bises” all around.

Franck's family is large and boisterous, the meals were huge, the rum was flowing and people had no problem asking me intensely personal questions as casually as if they were asking me whether I liked citrus fruits – just like in Guadeloupe. Marseille's architecture is the same as in Point-a-Pitre and the city is just as dirty; I don’t think I ever went ten minutes without seeing someone throw something on the ground as they walked or bussed by, whether gum wrappers, cigarette stubs, styrofoam trays filled with ketchupy fries or dirty diapers. (I am not exaggerating.) It was also like Guadeloupe in that everybody talked in circles and went off to the kitchen to agree on a plan without telling the rest of the group what had been decided, and so I basically had no what was going on, ever. It made me very nostalgic for my chaotic island.

Everybody was happy to see us and made a big fuss out of meals, which weren’t separate occasions for eating, so much as a constant stream of food that we had to happily ingest if we didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. “Go on, help yourself,” they say when they see you not in the act of bringing food to your mouth, and then you have to beat them to the serving spoon before they heap their interpretation of a portion onto your plate. “Eat, eat! White girls just don’t EAT anything!” (As I polish off my fifth egg roll and the black girls at the table pick at the ten grams of carrot salad they were served.) I once temporarily got off the hook by saying – truthfully – that I had an upset stomach and wanted to lay off the
face-stuffing, but by that evening Franck’s mom had concocted her special Upset Stomach Soup and I didn’t have another excuse ready to go. (The soup, in case you’re curious, involved a lot of beans and spicy things and did nothing very good for my stomach. Part of the expectorant school of healing, I guess.)

The best part was after they’d bullied me into eating enormous quantities of hearty, starchy foods for three days and then they gave me a bunch of dresses and pants that didn’t fit them right but would be perfect on me because my hips are so big. “Your hips will fill this dress out much better than mine.” “Your hips are just so much BIGGER than mine, Kathryn; YOU try it on.” No matter if I liked the clothes, no matter if they were, in fact, much too big for my apparently inhuman, giant hips. “Of course it will fit – look at your BIG HIPS!” I felt like if one more woman held a pair of ugly pants up to my PERFECTLY ACCEPTABLE hips (because these things are relative) and told me that they were just too big for her tiny, narrow little frame, I would punch her in the throat. Then, “have another egg roll, Kathryn, you’re wasting away. Eat! Eat!”

I was in charge of driving because Franck’s sister is hugely pregnant and it helped to have my licensed self there to run errands and take us to touristy places and to visit family. I was terrified at the idea of negotiating the narrow streets of Marseille but was mostly fine once I got the hang of it. After a quick and not entirely successful parking manoeuvre by the beach, some woman yelled at me to “get out of her life,” but when we saw her anger directed at other people (and seagulls) along the way we realized that it was not about me in particular and decided that “get out of my life” was as good a group cheer as we could expect to find. We accidentally kicked our soccer ball into the water and a brave young man swam in to get it for us (if you’re crazy enough to be swimming in the ice cold sea, you might as well get our soccer ball) and then we saw a woman with a bird on a leash, for which I can find no reasonable explanation but which definitely called for a rousing “get out of my life!”

To add to the Gwada vibe, we watched a lot of the African and Caribbean channel, which consists mostly of all sorts of people lip-synching to zouk while dancing and making seductive faces for the camera. You aren’t missing anything if you don’t have this channel. But then one girl looked like an African me and we were all fascinated, so it was worth it.

Also like in Guadeloupe, the showers were shifty and were mostly just a basin in the corner of the living room with a cheap curtain, which means that I obviously got walked in on twice. And people don’t really like their children, but generally consider them a huge hassle. On the bus, in the stores, on the street, people dragging their eight-year-olds by the arm and saying “mais il est CHIANT, celui-là!” to whomever will listen.

There were all sorts of good things about our visit and Marseille is an interesting and vibrant town, but it’s exhausting. Which is why it was striking to go from the hot, stinky streets of Marseille, with burned-out crack spoons littering the parking lots, to clean, pristine, mountainous Annecy, where we hung out with my uncle and his family at my mom’s house. It was nice to see the family again, since when I was in Le Mans in February I was crabby and tired and it wasn’t a raging success. This time was much better, except that the kids, who had been all excited about seeing me again, immediately dumped me for Franck, who is APPARENTLY much cooler than I am. (My little cousins are losers, is what it comes down to.) My favourite was when Timothée, who had latched onto Franck and hadn’t let go, said to me, “I knew I’d like that Franck the moment I saw him.” I think he had already formed a bond based on a picture I showed them in February; Timo and Anahé were adopted from Vietnam, and when Timo saw a picture of also-not-white Franck in February, he said “I didn’t know he was adopted!”

We had a mini family crisis when we lost uncle Patrice, who decided to wait for us on a bench when we went for a walk and then had disappeared when we got back. We didn’t know what to do because it was starting to rain but we didn’t want to leave in case he came back and didn’t know that we’d come and gone. I thought Franck’s theory, that the bench was a porthole to a parallel universe and that one of us had to lie on it and fall through to find Patrice, was worth considering, but then it turned out that Patrice had walked home to get the car and he came to pick us up. Crisis averted.

We went to the concert of Mom’s gospel group (including Julie’s dopple-ganger, to whom I still couldn’t speak) and I went into school with her, as some of her students had requested a singing day. Some of them were cute, some of them were total jerks (in the non-singing classes, to be fair), and I realized that all ages, all schools, all subjects are the same. Teaching is not for me.

Reading the poster on the bathroom door, I was once again amazed to discover (it should be “rediscover” as I forget every time and am amazed all over again with each visit) that not only were Yeats and Beckett Irish, but also Jonathan Swift! Oscar Wilde! George Bernard Shaw! Who knew?!

The train ride home was interesting because there were drug dogs everywhere, on the platform and then on the train, whatever that means. Also because ticket controllers – who stand in groups of three or four, wear conspicuous uniforms and talk loudly at all times -- were on the platform with us, got on the train with us, and still managed to catch two people in my car alone who hadn’t paid. Getting busted because you took your chance and they got on at Chambery is one thing, but what kind of idiot tries to sneak on a train WITH the controllers?

Then home, back to school, finished with school, and now begin the preparations for the grand departure. See you soon.

Kathryn

ribbit ribbit

Kathryn vs. Lyon, Round Two: Chapter 18

Chapter 18: Spring has Sprung

Faith and begora, the sun has come out. The laundry dries in three hours, neighbours smile at one another, the tomatoes and melons are deliciously in season and once I even got a little bit of a farmer's tan.

Franck is learning for the first time what it means to wake up to spring; after years in a place where it's sunny all year long, this is the first time he's actively appreciated the difference a little warmth can make. The Gwada sun is also exhausting and aggressive and you generally try to stay out of it; our April sun in Lyon is warm and loving and invites you to bring a chair outside and bask in its glory. Franck didn't know that this kind of sun exists and can't believe his luck as he walks around outside with outstretched arms and his scalp not burning. He also can't believe how late the sun sets: in Guadeloupe it's between 6:00 and 6:30 every evening, all year long, whereas with the daylight savings jump it's setting at 8:30 here and Franck is freaked out. "We can't eat dinner, it's still day out!" So we eat late and have indigestion throughout the night -- vive le printemps!

The high temperatures seem to have settled in for good now, but it was touch and go for a while: after a couple of 26-degree afternoons, I would dress confidently in skirt and sandals, prepared to greet the sun. The freezing rain would start on my way to the subway and by the time I read the temperature board at the station -- six degrees celsius -- my bare arms would be aching with cold. So I would drag myself home eight hours later, teeth chattering and fingers blue, make soup and wrap myself up in a sleeping bag on the couch. The next day, having learned from my mistakes, I would wear a turtleneck sweater, jeans, a poncho and socks with my shoes, and I'd be sweating in the 25-degree sunshine by 10:00 a.m. while my students said things like "madame, aren't you hot?" and all I could do was squint my eyes at them in distaste.

That's all over now, and all that remains is to tackle the real problem of good weather, which I like to think is shared by many people, with obvious exceptions such as Salma Hayek and the like. You all know how it goes: you've spent months and months covering your skin to protect it from the cold and the harsh winds. You've worn jeans and track pants, sweaters and flannels, winter coats, ponchos, boots and wool socks. You've mostly forgotten what your body looks like, and in the glory of a first warm day, you throw caution to the wind, whip out your favourite wrap-around skirt and tank-top and run out to feel the sun on your skin -- which is when you realize that said skin is white, white, ghastly white -- almost night-bus neon blue -- and flabby. The sun highlights your pasty, sickly flesh and your every flaw without pity until you break down and curse the heavens: Why did I ever leave Guadeloupe? I abandoned tanned, toned and blond to come back to pale and flabby!

Bronwyn once theorized that you don't actually look better at the end of the summer, you're just used to yourself by then -- but seeing pictures of my smiling summer self makes it painfully clear that the sun IS all it's cracked up to be and Kathryn-in-April simply is not at her best. And so, here begins the season of either slowly looking better or just getting used to myself, and I wish myself luck during these bumpy weeks.

The English teachers at one of my schools had a dinner that may or may not have been in my honour. Nathalie invited Franck and me to meet her family, and then all the other teachers were on board and suddenly they were buying me a gift and saying what a jolly good fellow I am. (I noticed they didn't say anything about what a jolly good teacher I am; you can't win 'em all...) None of the other men came, either, which makes me wonder if I had misunderstood the invitation. It was a good thing that Franck had a music gig and couldn't come, or he would have spent the evening among a bunch of women talking about students and super-intendants and ski-trip staff scandals, which, it is safe to say, just isn't his bag.

I spent the afternoon with Nathalie's family, in particular her seven-year-old daughter, Mathilde, who decided I was amazing and hooked onto me like a desperate woman. She showed me her dolls, her clothes, her photo albums, her swing set, the cut on her finger that refuses to heal. (She slammed it in a car door and a month later it's still the size of a cocktail wiener, which is huge next to her tiny seven-year-old fingers and also very gross.) She showed me her turtles, her sisters' rooms, the shower that the girls refuse to use because it is infested with spiders. She admired my braids and my shirt and said I looked like her favourite cartoon character, Sparkle. (I saw her; I don't.) It was the best. It was fun being considered exciting again, afer so long in Lyon where people collectively could not care less about my existence, other than as a degree of connection with either Quebec or Los Angeles, depending on their age bracket.

Mathilde's affection lost some of its charm when I stupidly told her that I, too, prefer short-distance sprinting to long-distance, marathon-type running; she got out her specialty stop watch and was only too pleased to alternate between racing me herself and timing my [frankly unimpressive] sprints, unmoved by the difficulty I faced in running around a sloped backyard in a skirt that holds my knees together. It was like jogging in a kimono and let it be said that it wasn't pretty. After twenty-five minutes of racing, I was saved by a request to play piano duets with the eldest of the three daughters, almost fun but for the unnerving and unwavering gaze of Mathilde, standing behind the piano bench with her face about four inches from the side of my neck. She didn't take her eyes off me the whole time.

She picked flowers for me from the garden, gave me her favourite sparkly bracelet and a little white rock which she claims looks like a polar bear (but which actually looks like a little white rock), drew me two pictures and then put the picture I drew above her bed, covering the poster of her beloved Arthur (the turtle). It was intense. She cried when I left and sent me two more pictures and some very tasty Easter eggs -- god bless the child -- with her mom on Thursday. One of the pictures had the two of us holding hands, surrounded by the bunnies I taught her to draw, the sky filled with hearts. I guess I'm her first crush and I wish her luck to deal with the let-down a first crush inevitably brings.

The dinner itself was okay, pretty low-key -- nowhere near as much fun as hanging out with Mathilde, but I was expected to participate in the grown-ups' conversation and could only play pick-up sticks on the floor for so long -- and featured bacon-wrapped prunes. Have you tried these before? They're fantastic. I ate no fewer than fifteen of the little squishy treats, which may account for the gastro-intestinal crisis I experienced that night.

The ladies offered me a linen scarf, typical French fashion to remind me of my year here. It's a very pretty blue and everyone said it was a good colour for me, but what am I going to do with a French scarf? This is a look that you either can pull of or you can't. I most definitely can't -- it's highly un-slimming, as it were -- and when I wore it for some of the evening I felt suffocated and hostile. As I have to wear it to school at least once to show my appreciation, I've been experimenting with possible looks, the only successful one being an exciting turban style which is not school appropriate and thus not in the running. Maybe I could borrow Stephanie's baby and sling her up in it as a carrier, though there's something fishy about using a one-year-old as a fashion accessory. Tricky.

A lot of you ask about Franck, who is doing lots of music, particularly with an African reggae group that's just as disorganized and loopy as the ones he played with in Guadeloupe, god help us all. As for work, let me tell you about "getting a job in France." There's a government employment agency called the A.N.P.E. and you have to go through them if you want financial help while you're out of work, which everyone obviously does. Franck can't work for more than three months at a time if he's to get financial aid for school next year, so he has to keep his name on their list by signing in every two weeks and they, in turn, are supposed to find him short contracts, presumably in his field (horticulture or sales), as they make such a fuss out of creating an information file on each job-seeker. Here's how it works:

Every two weeks, after two or three hours in the waiting room (I've gone with him and I am not exaggerating), he speaks with someone behind the counter to confirm that he's still here and looking for work. The person then gives him information on a bunch of available jobs and Franck calls them; several are invariably non-existant numbers and the others say that they informed the A.N.P.E. weeks ago that the position had been filled. Twice they sent him to the wrong address and in February he showed up at the grocery store where he'd been officially hired and they'd gone out of business. He can't stop going to them or he'll lose his chance to go to school, so no matter how much they dick him around, he has to keep showing up and waiting for hours in the empty hope that they'll actually do their job.

The latest adventure was for a job stacking bottles in a supermarket, a three-month replacement contract. The only qualification was to be in good shape, which Franck is, and so he got up Monday morning, spruced himself up, packed a lunch and headed to the store for 7:30 a.m., as the A.N.P.E. had told him to do. When the manager showed up and opened at 8:30, he told Franck that the job started in two weeks. "Wow, you're right," said the A.N.P.E. after Franck had waited the two hours to see someone. "I guess you'll have to go back in two weeks." This last Monday, then, off he went at 8:30: "Right," said the manager, "so did you do the training?"

It's not actually that surprising that he should need to take a course and receive a diploma in bottle-stacking for a three-month job; this is France, don't forget, and you can't do anything -- from picking up garbage in the park to stacking bottles, apparently -- without having done "une formation." No, the problem is that the A.N.P.E. didn't bother to give Franck the information package that goes with the job so that he might actually DO the training required, and now he doesn't get the job, despite having assistant-managed a grocery store for two years.

Obviously, this is crappy for us because it's hours and hours of wasted time, which is frustrating and bad for the morale, and less money in the household. More importantly, though, what kind of system is this? People have no choice but to go through the A.N.P.E. and then it plays around with them so they feel like shit and it doesn't ever deliver so they don't find work, they continue to live off of government aid and everyone complains that taxes are too high. Not that there's any incentive for the A.N.P.E. workers to do their job well, since they're in for life unless they set the building on fire or kill someone. You can't fire people in France, remember. Why shouldn't some jerk sit in his cushy job, come back from his two-hour lunch break, not give Franck an information package and then shrug and say "oops" when he asks for an explanation? What difference does it make to him? But that's dirty capitalist talk and I should know better than to think that people should actually earn their money. Down with the CPE! Villepin sucks!

So they sent him on the trail of some horticulture-related jobs which we're vaguely hoping will pan out, but we aren't getting our hopes up. He'll probably have to do a training stint on water jug-filling, since they undoubtedly use different equipment here than in Guadeloupe and his diploma and years of work experience simply aren't compatible with the specialized "formation" offered by the Lyon's A.N.P.E. (And paid for by them as well, thus adding to Useless Government Expenses and further raising taxes -- opa!) We're thinking it's time for him to start selling drugs; he seems to look the part, as he's constantly approached by people looking for a quick fix, so getting customers would be rather effortless. He could cut the stuff with Creole spices that would keep them coming back for more and I could hook him up with the junior high crowd. There are glitches to work out, but we're looking into it.

But enough bitterness. Let me share with you some good thoughts from students of mine: the first is a written response to a car ad, in which a grey and depressed-looking man is standing in front of a fancy house, wearing a classy pin-striped suit and holding an electric guitar, presumably pitching the sleek grey car to men experiencing a mid-life crisis. Here's some funny English:

"In my opinion which is an opinion of me, old people who get into this car will be perhaps well but they won't become again (of) young people. And in my personal opinion I don't like this car."

Another student was surprised that the sun rises in the East in Canada, same as France. I used some students to act out the Earth turning around the sun and showed that pretty much anywhere -- maybe not in the Arctic? are you with me? -- the sun will show up in the East. I threw in a little bit of time zone information and the student said "thanks for the lesson; I guess we'll go to bed a little less stupid tonight." Which, all things considered, is all we can really ask for in this life.

Think of me on May 17th, when Barcelona and Arsenal will compete in the final of the League of Champions. This pitches my two favourite players against each other (Ronaldinho and Henry), much as I had feared, and it will be a stressful game indeed. I've loved Thierry Henry for much longer, but I don't like English teams (sorry, I just don't) and would rather see Barcelona come through. And have you seen our Ronny with a soccer ball? He's amazing, a living legend. Tough decisions. It will be the same situation this summer if their national teams, Brazil and France, end up playing against each other, though my having gone off of France should help. I do love that Thierry Henry, but now that I know the dark side of his country, I'm going to have to find a new favourite team and Brazil is looking pretty good from here. Could someone make soccer happen in Canada so that I could root for our own team for once? The whole world is on it -- what's taking us so long?!

Kathryn

ribbit ribbit

Kathryn vs. Lyon, Round Two: Chapter 17

Chapter 17: Woozy in the Staff Room

It's just after 8:00 and I'm at school, though my first class on Tuesdays is at 10:00, so I have to kill a couple of hours and I thought it might be a good time for a letter. I'm feeling a bit woozy, as the flavoured pipe tobacco coming in from the smoking room is going to my head (you remember, of course, that there are SMOKING ROOMS in both my junior high schools and that each one is the home of the staff microwave and lockers) but I think he's almost finished his break and will have to actually go teach someone.

Why am I two hours early for class? Simply because I didn't know if there would be a bus and I had to get a ride with a colleague who starts at 8:00. (It was a stressful ride: she recently fell and hurt her back, so in the car she cheerfully told me about the frequent and unpredictable arm paralysis she now experiences, like this one time when she was driving and her arm seized up and she couldn't change gears or steer and almost crashed into the bookstore! Ha! Funny story, Claude! Now let me the hell out of the car!)

And if you have to ask why there might not be a bus, you haven't listened to anything I've said about France since September. (By which I mean September 2001.) A strike, of course, you silly geese. Another angry strike and the demonstrations that go with. That damn CPE, you see, that has everybody in a tizzy about the two-year trial period and the fired-without-reason thing, has just been officially signed in by the president, the bastard. Except that -- hang on a second -- he refused to sign it until it had been adjusted so that the trial period is only one year and any firing action must be justified by the employers. Which is... exactly what the angry protesters were demanding. And they got it. And yet they're still protesting. Hmmm... tricky, the French.

(A quotation to sum it all up from Bernard Thibault, the leader of France's largest union and thus one of the chief people in a position to help find a solution to the problem: "The president remains stuck on that invitation for dialogue that has no chance of success." And so he refuses dialogue. And blames the president. See? What can anyone do with that kind of logic?)

My prediction: Villepin's career will be destroyed, no politician will ever dare try a new strategy again, foreign investors will continue to pull out, unemployment will continue to rise, young people will have even less job security than they have now and the protestors will take to the streets again in five years because they're unemployed and angry. Isn't life hard.

But enough about current events: let's talk some more about me! I was going to tell you about my week-end in Annecy, which came about because my mom is involved with some hardcore [French, white and mostly non-religious] gospel singers and wanted me to play the piano during their five-hour workshop. I took the train out on Friday with my Herald Tribune for company -- you know when you're doing a hard crossword and people look over your shoulder at your lack of success and you feel judged? They saw my three or four desperate (and probably wrong) answers in the course of a two-hour train ride and I wanted to explain that the New York Times crossword is famously difficult, increasingly so during the week, and that if I had taken the train on Monday or Tuesday I would have been on fire, but they obviously didn't care. It was a defensive beginning.

Since everybody in Annecy is particularly nice and welcoming, the workshop looked like it was going to be a good time. Then the stand-in-a-circle warm-ups started and I realized that my personality has fundamentally changed since high school. Have you seen the show "Dead Like Me"? There's an episode in which George refuses to participate in her office getaway week-end and explains that she's just not a joiner, which turns out to be exactly my problem. I don't know at which point in my life I went from being a drama club kid to a complete loner, but it's happened and it's too late to go back.

*For example: the lunchtime cafeteria at my Thursday school is back up and running after a long break for renovations. The teachers who pack a lunch go and sit with the cafeteria diners for company and they always invite me to join them. I can't refuse, so I end up sitting in conversations that have nothing to do with me (except when someone has a sudden thought about Quebec and asks me what the temperature is these days or if they use a certain French expression, and I remind them, as I've been doing since October and as I will do until the day I die -- or leave Lyon, whichever comes first -- that I'm the English assistant because I'm from an English-speaking country, and I probably know less about Quebec traditions than they do) and waiting for someone to get up and leave so that I don't look rude for doing the same. I've taken to hiding out in the bathroom until the halls are empty and no one can trap me with their kind intentions so that I can sit in the empty staffroom and eat my almond croissant in peace.

This gospel workshop started with trust-your-partner exercises, continued through walk-through-the-crowd-of-strangers-while-singing-solo and finished with clapping and singing and doing actions along with the words. It was a joiner's paradise. At one point I was sitting in the pews, watching some of the small-group acts, when a girl came to sit beside me and smiled. And not just any girl: she was practically identical to my dear friend Julie and I had been staring at her, fascinated, all day and wanted to talk to her.

Well, I didn't. I just sat there and she sat there and after a while she got up and went back to the group. Went back and "joined" the group, even. I stayed in the pews while the singing started back up and hummed along with "Children Go Where I Send Thee" quietly to myself -- so what's happened to me? When did I stop being artsy-fartsy and become not only cynical and mean, but paralyzed with anti-social tendencies? I can't put my finger on the exact moment it happened, but I've changed. Now I have to decide whether it's a personality defect I need to overcome, or whether I should just accept that I am no longer a joiner and sit out. And if it's the latter, should I get some cool sunglasses or something? Maybe a motorcycle?

The group met up for dinner that evening in a restaurant called Canadian Corner, which Mom and I tried to interpret as being in our honour but they insisted was just because one of the singers had been there before and liked it. Likely story. The best part about the place was that it was run by a couple of Parisians [the one we talked to had never set foot in Canada] and it had pictures of Marilyn Monroe, Betty Boop, Charlie Chaplin and other famous not-Canadians all over the walls. True, there was a Mountie hat, a picture of John Candy -- in the Jamaican-dominated movie cover from "Cool Runnings" -- and a stuffed caribou head, but they were hidden behind Kangaroo Crossing signs and Marlboro Man ads and were probably just there by
total coincidence. Calling the place "Anglophone Culture Corner," while less catchy, would have been closer to the truth. It had a log cabin feel, though, the walls were covered top to bottom with pictures and stuff was hanging on clotheslines all over the place, so it would have been a familiar setting for your average Canadian diner -- Mom likened it to Jack Astor's -- but didn't we get that look from the American restaurant chains that supplanted our own? It's not like they served fiddleheads, Molson beer or poutine (God save us all), so I conclude that the sole purpose of the name "Canadian Corner" is to lure in customers who hope -- as do most people, in my experience -- to meet some real live Canadians. Good thing we were there, Mom and I, to lend the place a little of our star quality. I'm surprised they didn't ask to take our picture; I guess it was a busy night.

The group sang a few songs every ten minutes throughout dinner, which was cute at first but eventually inspired resentment [read: loathing] in the other diners and barely-concealed frustration in our initially very friendly head waiter. My favourite game was to try to figure out the words they were singing; their pronunciation is hit and miss, sometimes perfectly understandable and sometimes near-gibberish. (Interestingly, one of the songs that I thought was in English turned out to be in Spanish, which obviously undermines my own ear and thus my commentary on anyone's linguistic efforts.) The various courses took hours to come out and Mom was having a hard time with the endless Jesus songs. The hand-clapping songs are a good time, but the dreary, saviour-praising ones are hard to stomach when you're tired and someone's hogging all the water jugs at the other end of the giant table. And then we scored a ride home and left, praise the lord and hallelujah. That was two weeks ago and I still can't get "Oh Happy Day" out of my head, just for the record.

Back home and to the French game shows I love -- I'm not being sarcastic; I really do love them and I can't tear myself away, especially "La Cible" (target) which is like a complicated and ruthlessly eliminating version of Scattergories. My new favourite moment in any of the game shows is when someone loses at the end, which is kind of the definition of a game show, and the host says "so what happened? Was it the stress?" and makes the person justify his or her performance. The victory is often by just one or two points and really nothing for the other person to be ashamed of, but I've seen this end-of-game taunting countless times.

A recently hilarious thing on a diner-themed show: there's a segment in which the host sings English songs translated into French and the contestants have to name the singer. On this episode it was going fine, with funny renditions of "Another One Bites the Dust" and "Bad," and then he sang the unmistakeable tune to "Hey Jude" with the words "Eh, Juif..." They buzzed in, identified the Beatles and moved on to the next one, apparently in agreement that the famous lyrics are "Hey Jew." I laughed for days.

Kathryn

ribbit ribbit


p.s. a cute e-mail from a student, the only one to write to me in English:

Hello Kathryn,

Thanks for your answer.
Temperatures are very low (I don't no if I can use this word) in Canada.
To the holidays I stay at Lyon but I see a lot of friends. Today it's a little snowing, it's stranged !!!!

I am happy to speak with you because I can improve my English.
Good end holidays.

Pauline

P.S : I've the paper to the african percussions show, it's an advertise.