Journey #1: LUXembourg

Though getting there and back turned out to be a bit of a hassle due to train strikes (At first I just thought they were kind of ridiculous and funny but after having to actually travel by train, very frustrating. It could be worse though. Alex told me that in England the firemen will be striking on “bonfire night” which just sounds like the world’s worst idea) Luxembourg was great! Hannah was a blast to be with as always and the country was very nice as well.

The landscape of the city was really cool since there was a deep valley that snakes around the whole thing. The pretty effect of hillsides dotted with ancient ruins slightly made up for the fact that our hostel was situated at the bottom of the valley, so in order to get anywhere we had to huff and puff our way up an enormous hill.

The first day we kind of just walked around the city, orienting ourselves and getting a feel for the place. We also came across this really cool chocolatier place which specialized in what they call “Hotchoc spoons” which is just a chocolate lollipop that you stir into a mug of hot milk until it becomes hot chocolate. It was yummy and the place had a very cozy feel. Grade: A+

For the next two days we invested in a Luxembourg Card which gave us free transportation on all buses and trains throughout the country plus free entrance into a whole slew of museums and attractions. On Tuesday we went to the art/history museum which was very nice (despite being very oddly organized) but sadly the part we really wanted to see called “Luxembourg life” was closed for renovation. So it goes. After a kebab lunch, we hopped on a train to a town on the German border where the Luxcard brochure advertised a wine tour. When we got there, the secretary told us to wait 15 minutes for the next tour and after we did that, the secretary just got up and led us (nobody else had shown up) into the caves, and we didn’t really realize that we were on the tour until about 5 minutes into it. We learned all about how to bottle sparkling wine and at the end had a glass each. While we sipped, we chatted with the “bartender” about the language situation in Luxembourg which is pretty funky since they speak kind of a mash-up of French German and Dutch, but everyone seems to speak each of those individual languages as well, and it’s always a toss up of what language you’ll find in a store window.

The next day after a more successful breakfast at the hostel (we got up early enough this time to get Nutella!) we headed northwest to a town called Vianden, famed for it’s chateau. The castle tour was self-guided and Hannah and I were the only ones around so it was a little odd/spooky but cool nonetheless. Then we encountered some other visitors including a bickering American couple who were too wrapped up in their argument to actually look at the castle and an Asian girl who asked us about the intricacies of the Luxembourg royal family and history which we couldn’t really help her with. Here’s Hannah in front of the castle!

Vianden the town turned out to be very cute. We tried to hit up the nearby Victor Hugo museum as well, but it was closed, as was the chairlift ride that we’d seen in our pamphlets that promised great views of the town. I tried to take a photo of a photo of what I presumed was the view from the top, but it didn’t turn out so well, as you can see.

In order to take full advantage of our Luxembourg cards we decided to stop by the military museum in Diekirch (famous for their beer, but sadly there was no brewery tour in the Luxcard itinerary). It actually turned out to be pretty cool and rather informative since neither Hannah or I could remember what exactly the battle of the bulge was, but knew it was a pretty big deal in this neck of the woods. As we were going through the museum, Hannah asked me about my family’s history in the war and I realized I knew remarkably little, so Papa, if you’re reading this: you owe me some stories the next time I see you!

Here’s a picture of me standing in front of my nick-namesake:

Upon our return to the city, we hopped on a bus to the Mudam, the museum of modern art. I had mostly wanted to go just to check out the building which was designed by I.M. Pei and which was, as expected, a very impressive space. Some of the exhibits were pretty interesting as well though—some very strange but some less disturbing like this room of floating geometric shapes.

One thing that someone had warned me about before leaving was that Luxembourg is a very expensive city. And this turned out to be quite true, at least food-wise. Every time we though we’d found a good deal, it turned out the restaurant would charge us an arm and a leg for something or other—like water at an Indian restaurant (where you’d think not having water would be a pretty serious issue, but in fact, I’ve discovered spice tolerance in western Europe seems to be generally pretty low). ANYHOW, we did what we could and comforted ourselves with the fact that we’d gotten such a good deal with the Luxembourg cards.

As usual, I didn’t take as many photos as I should have. To be fair, while Luxembourg was really beautiful, some of the prettiest scenery was from out the window of the bus or train and that doesn’t make for very nice photographs. In any case, here are some more random pix:

A crocodile baguette.

Hannah and I can honestly say that we checked out the Luxembourg art scene

Maybe my favorite statue--Bacchus in wine country

In conclusion, google-imaging Luxembourg would probably be a better bet.

Weetches, Speeders, and Skeleteens (I think the last one should become slang for anorexic highschoolers)

Today marks the third time I’ve stepped in dog poop since I’ve been here. Third time’s the charm? No, third time is just as aggravating as the first and second time. Right in the middle of the sidewalk! Now, I LOVE dogs. A lot. But so far the amount of time I’ve spent with any has been far exceeded by the amount of time I’ve spent scraping poop off of my shoes.

On a happier note, school was a success this week. A bunch of my lessons involved the kids (and almost always me) doing impressions of Halloween things which I think they very much enjoyed. And in one class we were talking about costumes and I got a little carried away and started talking about Lanie and my costumes from when we were kids (ex: mime, Santa Claus, pizza delivery man). I don’t know if the kids were amused at the costumes themselves or how excited I was about them, but either way, they liked it.

Today, I got to one of my classes a little early and the kids were reading aloud from a book. They were getting really into it and reading in different voices and everything. It was so freaking cute.

Home life: The fire alarm kept going off yesterday which was rather annoying. And it wasn’t even Tommy’s veal-hamburgers that was setting it off. A blameless offense is an annoying offense. Also, Estelle is gradually coming out of her shell and becoming a really fun person to hang around with.

The end of the school day today marks the beginning of the first school vacation. They didn’t even give us time to hit our first wall and we’re already on a 10-day break! Hannah over in Autriche has got the same break (and unlike Tricky is not studying up for the physics GREs) so we’ve planned a little adventure together. Come Monday it’s Luxembourg-ho!

Over and Out, but first…

Random note #1 : It’s interesting that at each school, there seems to be a diffent toy/game of choice. The school I’m at on Mondays is the one that hasn’t banned soccer so that’s what they all do. At Tuesday’s school, from a distance it looks like the kiddos have started a little cock-fighting ring during recess, but upon closer inspection, they’re playing with their toupis (=spinning tops on steroids). They have their own little arena platform and they watch and root for one kid’s toupi to knock the other out of the ring. At Thursday’s school, it’s all about the hula-hoop (you know, for kids) but I have yet to see anyone actually hula-hooping as it were. They prefer seeing how many kids they can fit inside one hoop and then try (usually in vain) to move in one direction together. I think that one is my favorite. What’s better than one cute little French kid? A whole mass of them bound together by a hula-hoop!

Random note #2: There comes a point in every American teenager’s life where they realize they have been duped since what our elementary school teachers tell us about cursive (“when you’re older, you’ll need to use it”) never really comes true. EXCEPT if you become a teacher in France. I always print when I write on the board since my cursive is atrocious, and I was recently called out on it—by a nine year old girl. Ouch.

Are You Feeling Fine?

Well, the first week of classes was a hit I’d say. I started out kind of rocky, trying to do a lesson plan about anglophone geography (which in my defense had been in the booklet they gave us) that turned out to be too much for a 45 minute session with a bunch of fidgety 8 year-olds. But little by little I started to get a feel for their attention spans and things got better.

In most classes we worked on introductions. At first it seemed like the kids had it down pat and I worried I was wasting their time. But then I started noticing a lot of dialogues like the following:

Child A: What’s your name?

Child B: I’m fine, thank you

Child B: Where are you from?

Child A: I’m nine

So I think working on it a little more was probably a good idea…

I did another question and answer session in one of my classes and I got some more rather strange questions:

--Do you have electricity in the United States? (a bit of a change from Mali where everyone asked me if all Americans drove around in limousines)

--Do you know about the Titanic

--Are there lots of woodpeckers ?

--There was one kid who was really fascinated by the time difference and kept on asking “if it’s midnight here, what time is it there?” “If it’s ten o’clock here what time is it there?”, etc and then he started just raising his hand and telling stories about other places he’s been or heard about with other time differences.

--My favorite question though: “are you a lady or are you still a kid?” (Hmm, good question. I ended up picking adult, but I’m still not so sure)

In another class, we were learning school objects and since everyone here teaches British English, they were learning “rubber” rather than “eraser” I started off trying to explain that there was a different word for it in American English but it was clear that we could only use one name for classroom learning purposes so: rubber it is. It really is off-putting hearing one 9 year old ask another 9 year old “do you have a rubber?”

School aside, I also had some nice leisurely days off. I did some mom-shipped American crosswords. (Alex and I tried to do a French one the other day, but when Estelle, our resident French person, couldn’t even do it,, we gave up. So Mom if you’re reading this, keep ‘em coming!) I went to the library and checked out the first in a murder mystery trilogy based in Nancy (the second of which is set during the FIG and thus in our very own St. Dié). I also checked out the dvd collection which was fairly sparse. There are some crowd pleasers, some classics (I took out « le Jour se lève » with Jean Gabin since I wanted to open with something classy and French) and some were just very random. We’ll see how desperate I get as the months roll on.

I also took advantage of the extra time to make some more time-consuming meals. I made some chili which turned out surprisingly well. Though the next afternoon when I was eating the last of it, Mr. François popped in and asked me why I wasn’t eating at the cantine and that their food was much better than what I was eating. I was slightly offended but let it slide.

Pretty tame weekend (apart from a fairly heated debate betwixt the roommates about the value of spectator sports. Shockingly, I was pro-sports. Who knew?). The weather has been pretty gross and the nasty cold which has been slowly spreading down the corridor has finally reached me. Blegh.

I’m still going to buck up and be energetic for next week’s classes though because they’re going to be Halloween-themed! Wooooooooo! (that is both excitement and ghost noise)

Fools (&) Russian

So, last Thursday and Friday I went around to the different schools to observe the various classes. The kids all seem super cute but the teachers are much meaner than in the US (the first teacher I observed—who luckily I won’t be working with—actually growled like a pit bull when one of the kids mis-conjugated a verb and then told him very matter-of-factly not to be an idiot.) In a couple of the classes I stood up and did a little introduction which basically consisted of me pointing to Boston on a map. One teacher made me spell “Massachusetts” which I did very nervously. I had just witnessed a child be pretty severely reprimanded for not spelling a word correctly so my knees were ever so slightly quivering as I told the teacher to erase the fourth “s” and add an extra “t”. I looked it up as soon as I got home and let out a huge sigh of relief.

One teacher let her students ask me questions about life in America. Some of the questions I got:

- Do you watch “les experts: Miami” (the French version of CSI)? Answer: no

- Do you write with feather pens? Answer: sadly, no

I finished observing Friday afternoon and then it was time for some FIG-ing.

Naturally, our first stop was the food stand area. Cheeses, sausages, breads, pastries, chocolates and more from all over France. It was awesome (though that hopeful look you get from the vendors as you munch on your free sample is hard for me to take).

The three of us went to a food demonstration with an acclaimed pastry chef and a very odd presenter who for some reason was dressed like a vampire. Now, I don’t think I’m alone in thinking that, for the French, pastry is no laughing matter. That assumption turned out to be pretty wrong in this case however, as the whole thing turned into something like a French farce. The tarte they made sur-scène (as opposed to the pre-made tarts they garnished at the end) was completely ruined and they kind of eff-ed up the oven in the process by coating one of the racks with plastic wrap. The finished product wasn’t anything special—it just looked like a cake with a lot of junk piled on top of it—and I cannot speak to how it tasted since I was rudely nudged out of the taster’s circle by two very large, round men.

The next morning I went to a talk at the library where the author of a book called “A Funny Russian Novel” was speaking. Turns out that the title was rather deceptive since the talk soon evolved into a discussion of what a poor state Russia is currently in. Not funny.

I met up with Alex in the afternoon and we went to a concert in the cloister behind the cathedral. It was a Russian/Martinique-an group which seemed to specialize in beat-boxing and weird didgeridoo-esque vocalizations, but there was some normal stuff thrown in there as well.

Later that night we went to a see a Russian pianist who was very very good. The theater though was a little strange as it slanted upwards rather than downwards (Alex: “I feel like I’m in an airplane that’s just started to take off”) and had a rather odd seat-numbering system that still remains a bit of a mystery.

The concert finally ended after about 30 encore performances (I started to feel bad for the woman, I think she just couldn’t say no. Finally someone turned on the houselights and that was that). After that, we met up with Alex’s teacher friend and her husband and we all went next door for a drink and another concert which turned out to be the same Russian/Martinique-an group that we had seen earlier that day. Besides the lead singer’s wardrobe change from cowboy to Chinese peasant, their performance was pretty much identical but we had fun anyways.

Sunday: After some early morning class preparations, I met up with one of the girls I’d met at orientation and the German assistant that was living with her. We went back to the food market (which was a repeat I was more than happy to do since it involved more free samples) and then watched some dances in the street, and went to a big book fair, and perused the Russian gift stands. After the girls left to catch their train, I headed back to the internat in order to give myself plenty of time to worry about my first day of work tomorrow.

French Toast

just a little note: The French call French Toast 'pain perdu' which literally means lost toast, but refers to day-old bread that's lost that fresh feeling. And now I totally understand why they would invent such a glorious thing:
1-everyone here buys fresh baguettes or loaves everyday. No preservative-loaded supermarket bread allowed. And everyone is pretty thin, so there's no way they eat the whole thing in a day.
2- the french don't make what we know as toast. They buy pre-toasted squares that come in a cardboard box.

and thus french toast is born. yum.

Goldilocks and the Three Beers

Monday and Tuesday of this week, I took the train into Epinal (the biggest city in my département) to attend the two-day orientation for the English assistants in the Vosges. There were 12 of us in total, which was a nice small number and we all got along quite well.

Orientation was run by Edith and another woman Corinne and the two seemed to be pretty friendly and would tease each other pretty often which was super cute. Corinne would especially poke fun at Edith’s English skills, which are to be fair, pretty bad. At one point we were talking about a lesson plan involving fairy-tales and instead of the traditional one we were all familiar with, Edith proposed the title of this post as a possibility which got us laughing for quite some time. (It really would have been a much better story)

The restaurant we went to for lunch was really delicious the first day, and the second we had to eat from a buffet where we had to choose from an assortment of not-so-fresh-looking seafood and lots of salads all of which were drenched in about three tons of mayo. After having caused some serious doubts about French cuisine, however, they redeemed themselves by serving a most delicious crème brûlée for dessert.

We were all a little sad at the end of the two days knowing that we’re all pretty scattered throughout the Vosges, but there was talk about visiting each others’ towns, and staying in contact for future travel. I hope something works out because it honestly was a great group of people.

Other news: Alex and I went to get our library cards today and discovered that the library is a whole lot nicer than we expected. There’s a walled off garden courtyard area that seems like a really lovely spot to sit and read (especially for when I don’t want to shell out the bucks to sit and read in a café)

St. Dié has kicked FIG prep into high gear. (FIG is the festival internationale de Geographie which is apparently a pretty big deal. There is one country and one topic chosen each year as a theme and this year it is Russia and forests.) On my way to check out the pool, I walked through this little fir tree and wooden cabin-lined pathway that was super cute. Though it does seem a little strange that the theme is forest/deforestation and yet St. Dié has probably destroyed about 30 forests in order to construct this little wooded wonderland.

Lastly. This post might not make any sensé at all. I’ve been sniffing paint fumes for the past couple of days since the internat has suddenly decided, three days after we’ve all settled in, that the foyer should be yellow.

Pictures!

The Internat Team: Tommy, me, and Alex

View of St. Dié from above

Sister city to St. Dié= Lowell, MA = super random

And then there were Trois

We have friends! There’s a young high school teacher who lives in the internat with us (though she, like everyone else it seems, goes home to Nancy every weekend) and she and a couple other young teachers invited Alex and I out for drinks. We ended up going to La Cabane au Darou, the “best bar in St. Dié”, a woodland creature-themed pub with a pretty amazing selection of beers. I felt like a hobbit. I really liked it. The teachers were all really fun as well. It only took about 15 minutes for them to start singing Carla Bruni and showing us pictures of themselves in wacky costumes on their phones.

In other exciting news, I now have a chair in my room. Bertrand brought one around yesterday. He apologized profusely for it being super ugly (which it sort of is, but I certainly am not complaining. I just turned the cushion around).

The last big event was the arrival of our new floormate. (There were supposed to be two more but it turns out that the German assistant I guess is a bit older and found her own living accommodations in a neighboring town. We were all a little bummed to hear that, but we figure if she didn’t want to live with us, she probably wouldn’t have been that much fun anyhow. )

New member of the internat team: Tommy VanDenberg from New Jersey. He refers to everyone as some combination of bitch, giirrrrl, diva, or pute and is currently in hot pursuit of the most happening gay bars in St. Dié—gooood luck. We took him food shopping (where he bought about 10 gallons of milk, 2 tons of eggs, 10 lbs of pasta and sauce and then looked at us and said “that should be enough to get me through the weekend, right ?”) and then back to la Cabane au Darou for a night of initiation and delicious Belgian troll beer.

Pictures soon!