Gay Paris (can't escape the gay)

Classes this past week , in general, went well. In one school I taught about Obama as a cultural lesson. I made the mistake in my first class to go a little too in depth into the American governmental system. Ah, the looks on their little faces when I tried to explain what congress was…

The kids still get really excited whenever I show up and they LOVE running up to me during recess to say “hello!” and then run away. Or sometimes they linger and talk to me about something they find fascinating like a leaf or something. One student came up to me after class one day and gave me a sign that she’d made for me with my name on it. In classic little kid fashion she way overestimated the size of the paper so there’s a giant JUL and a teeny weeny little IA squeezed in at the end. I love it.

I started the video conference classes this past week as well. So, when I said above that classes went well in general, I left room for me to rant about how horrible teaching English via skype actually is. Pretty horrible. The camera they were using was pretty bad and out of focus the whole time so I couldn’t see what was going on, and the slight delay made saying things and asking them to repeat it a pain in the arse as well. But, Bertrand from the inspection who had gone to the school to help set up and see how it went (and basically led the classes for me since my web-teaching was totally ineffective) said he thought it went really well. He is insane.

The most exciting part of my week though was definitely my spur-of-the-moment jaunt up to Paris on Saturday to visit my Carleton pal twiggy who was in town with his new Taiwanese beau “Tree” (his name means cypress tree in Chinese). When Tree apologized for having a gay couple as company, I told him the story of my last weekend which he thought was hilarious and suggested I start advertising as a "gay man magnet". That is an idea...

They were staying at a hotel in chinatown which was cool since it’s a part of Paris I’d never been to and since I was with one real Asian and one American who speaks Chinese, I got the insider-experience if you will. We had Japanese noodles for lunch and Chinese (real Chinese, not just the chicken drenched in soy sauce that you’d find in St. Dié) for dinner—when in Rome! (Or I guess in this instance it would be ‘when in little Italy’). Tree was incredibly generous and insisted on paying for everything. He was sneaky about it too—I’d look up from my wallet to realize that everything was already paid for, like magic! Resistance was futile but the boys conceded to let me pay for movie tickets later that night.

We had a great day. Apart from the great food, we walked around a lot, we went to the most beautiful Starbucks I have ever seen (Twiggy called it Versailles Starbucks), AND we went to a store that sells American food products and I bought a super-expensive box of Stovetop stuffing and can of cranberry jelly for the upcoming thanksgiving. It’s probably a good thing we don’t have an oven since I probably would have spend my entire month’s salary on boxed/canned Thanksgiving foodstuffs. I was also eyeing a bag of ever-so-delicious-looking Reeses peanut butter cups (How could the Europeans not know the wonders of peanut butter?) but it was 10euros for a pretty little bag and I just could not do it.

Stay tuned, upcoming events include: a St. Dié Thanksgiving (I even downloaded home alone in French as preparation) AND beer summit/socktoberfest/general merriment in MUNICH!

Random sidenote: Last night I dreamt that I passed Barack Obama eating chocolates in the teacher’s room and all I could think to say to him was “bon appétit!”

Extra footage: Here’s a photo of me and Tree outside of the movie theatre. It was this really cool area called cour St. Emilion in the 14^th arrondisement. Festive!