F**k it Dude, let's go bowling

I taught about Martin Luther King Jr. (who most of the kids were CONVINCED was the same person as Nelson Mandela) in a bunch of my classes. It was interesting to see the large spectrum of interest in the topic. In a couple of classes, the kids got really into it and asked questions about his life and segregation, etc. In another class, after the teacher had gone on a bit of a tangent about a movie she’d seen about a black kid growing up in a poor neighborhood and beating the odds to become the first person ever to separate conjoined twins. When it came time to answer questions, they were ALL about conjoined twins. Oh well, I tried.

This past week, in a couple of my classes, we were learning members of the family. And one teacher asked me to do talk a little bit about the “American family”. I was perplexed about how to go about representing this rather vague idea. What did I come up with in the end? The Simpons! I knew already that all of the kids knew the show since in previous classes they’d reference it (in one class a kid said he knew we celebrated New Years in America because it was in a Simpsons episode). The lessons went well as I cleverly tricked the kids into learning English while they talked about one of their favorite subjects.

There’s a café I go to every Wednesday to do my designated GRE studying for the week, and one of the ladies who works there has taken an interest in me. That is to say, she feels bad that I don’t really know anybody in town. So one day she came over to me as I was (as usual) on the brink of tears over basic algebra and told me about her woman’s group. They do something (usually a dinner with some discussion theme) once a month but this month it was a tour of a chocolatier and she invited me to come along. I was thrilled at the prospect of a) having something to do and b) going to a chocolatier so I instantly accepted the invitation. We went the next week. She had warned me that it would be a bunch of 50-65 year old women—and so it was. I kid you not, once there were two of them in the car the conversation turned immediately to…suppositories! Nonetheless, it was a fun night and for the most part the women were welcoming (several very skeptical of my youthful presence). The tour itself was super cool and very mouth-watering. That being said, I think nothing like an inside look at the goings on of a artisanal chocolatier would discourage one more from actually becoming an artisanal chocolatier. Filling in each little mold by hand, rolling each little Chardon (a ball of sugar/chocolate around a dose of incredibly strong alcohol—a local fav) to give it texture. These guys must all get carpal tunnel in a matter of weeks!

Over the weekend, I went over to a town called Contrexville, also in the Vosges and known for their bottled water (which apparently makes you pee every five minutes), for a potluck and bowling night with some other assistants. We drank a lot of wine, ate a lot of food, and had a lot of fun. (I still managed to enjoy myself despite having bowled a pathetic 36 points)

This upcoming weekend there is a film festival going on in a nearby town. It’s all fantasy and horror movies which generally aren’t really my thing, but people all seem to be raving about it. Chances are I’ll end up missing it, but I don’t give a flying seal because… ERIK’S COMING!!!! Having finally been given the go-ahead to book flights, we worked it out over Skype on Friday night and he’ll be here this Sunday! I’ve promised him that I will put my new years’ diet on hold so we can revel in baguettes and cheese together.

Still no internet to be heard of. Sigh….

Rugby Players Don't Wear Protection

Things have returned to normal pretty painlessly. Classes are running fairly smoothly, the one exception being the video-conferences which have exceeded their original capacity to frustrate me since now the internet connection at the school (and, as has been the case the last two weeks, at the internat) has been poor to non-existent. So I had to go the Inspection (the administrative building in St. Dié) to do them. Last week they had to move me from the copy room where I was being too distracting to the neighboring office to a room with no heating. And after about 30 minutes of trying to teach a class with my image freezing every two minutes, we gave up. When I went again this Tuesday, we had the same problem but the teacher decided I should do it anyways. With the screen frozen on the flashcard from 5 minutes before and me, unawares, rambling off vocabulary, I fear I may have done more harm than good. On the bright side, compared to the ordeal that is skype-teaching, snags in other classes don’t seem nearly as bad.

This week happened to be pretty eventful actually. Here are some highlights:

1) Despite my birthday, and Chanukah/Christmas being far in the past, I received the bulk of my tangible presents this week, including a mouth watering French-Jewish cookbook from Nani and Papa and (an equally mouth-watering) box of non-existant-in-france reeses peanut butter cups from Erik. (If you didn’t know this already, you can probably guess the best way to my heart: FOOD)

2) Since Estelle, Alex and I all had birthdays during/around the break we decided to go out to dinner to celebrate. It was six of us in total: the three birthday celebrants, Tommy (whom was included in the toast due to his recent engagement), Aline and a friend of hers named Barbara who works at the high school and who we’ve hung out with a couple times before. We ate at a place called the St. Martin which alleges to be a typical Alsatian brasserie and seems like it from the outside with that very recognizable Alsatian architecture, but inside was shockingly modern with trendy African-inspired art on the walls. The menu was fairly eclectic featuring, among other things, pizzas, Alsatian specialties, and kangaroo.

It was definitely a fun night. A certain scene from “Quand Harry rencontre Sally…” may or may not have been acted out (not by me) and at another point someone made a joke about seals and started yelling the word for seal in French which happens to be “foque”. At the end of the night, Tommy and I were the only ones to get “doggybags”. I didn’t realize that was an American thing. It definitely made us stand out as outsiders but really, who in their right mind would let half of a delicious pizza go to waste?

3) Thursday was an especially busy day. Instead of going to work, I had another training day in Epinal with the other Vosges assistants. I can’t say we accomplished that much, but whenever the group gets together it’s generally a good time. Plus, we spent a loooong time talking about problems we were having in classes and it was fairly reassuring learning that others were having similar difficulties (especially with the video-conferences). After the stage we went out for drinks and made tentative get-together plans for the future which I sincerely hope come to fruition. On the train back to Saint Dié another assistant and I shared a car with what I found out later was a group of students from a “troubled youth” high school. This made a lot of sense since the whole time they were tearing off pieces of the chairs/curtains and throwing them out the window of the moving train. Right after an armrest had been chucked out, one of them sat in the seat in front of us, asked us what we’d been doing in Epinal and then said very politely “Welcome to our train”. At least they were friendly…

4) Lamia (Pascale’s daughter) and Alex were waiting for me at the train station and together we went straight to Pascale’s for a delicious raclette dinner. (Raclette = slabs of cheese that you melt with various charcouterie and eat with bread or potatoes. It’s DELISH). Afterwards we went with Pascale and Lamia for a drink at the Darou. It was a lot of fun.

5) On Friday I took advantage of my day off of work to accompany Alex to work at the high school. The classes are doing lessons on the difference between English and American English/culture, so the idea was for me to answer questions about life in America (and also a chance for me to see what the his students were like). I ended up doing a pretty horrible job answering most of the questions which were all pretty vague like “which do you like better, France or America” but we definitely had some fun with it. The title of this blog is something Alex said when we were trying to explain American football (and which I thought was pretty funny). Also, when we were discussing some of Obama’s policies, “pro and con” was introduced. But “con” happens to be a very common word in French teenage vocabulary and if you ask someone with a French accent if he is pro or con, you are asking “are you a pro or a dickhead?”

non-highlight: the IT guy has no idea why my/Tommy’s internet isn’t working and I have suspicions that he is flat-out avoiding us. I fear I may not have internet in my room for a loooooong time.

In other news: a bum may or may not have walked into our living space. Well, he did definitely walk in/ tap at my window, but he may or may not have been a bum. Alex is convinced that he was but I think he might have been a worker doing some job in another part of the internat. Afterall, he was asking to use a phone, not for money, and that seems like strange behavior for your average bum. Unsolved mystery.

An American Christmas in Alsace/Belgium/Holland

I’ll try to keep this one short (and as I re-read it, fairly uninteresting)

The Weisman family adventure was great. Plenty of ups and downs (downs of note: cancelled and delayed flights/trains, lost luggage, stolen purse, etc) and it was strange being so far from home/the clausens for Christmas, but all in all a good time.

Our Itinerary:

Day one: Met up in Basel, Switzerland. Despite Europe transportation going haywire, the fam still arrived in time for delicious swiss fondue dinner.

Day two: Colmar, France

Day Three: Strasbourg, France --The Capital of Christmas!

Day four: Strasbourg-Brussels (Though Brussels doesn’t really count since we got there pretty late due to train detours and once we arrived the city was shut down because of snow/christmas)

Day five: Arrive in Bruges. Lanie and Julia surprise mom and dad with a Christmas Eve feast (and Ned splashes wine all over himself in his attempts to open the bottle).

Day Six: Christmas in Bruges (with waffles for breakfast naturally)

Day seven: Head to Amsterdam where we spent a lot of the day in the police station reporting mom’s stolen purse (but they were nice and gave us dutch Christmas bread)

Day eight: Strolling, museums and good food in Amsteram

(we aresterdam?)

Day nine: More strolling, more museums (including the rather strange "Heinekin Experience" pictured below) and more good food in Amsterdam

Day ten: Head back to Brussels. Cool light show in the main square, Magritte Museum

Day eleven: I get up early to catch my train home. Make friends with the conductor on the train to St. Dié. Settle back in at the internat only to find...no internet! arg. (That's also why I'm posting this a week late)

Other main components/ kewords of the trip:

Beer:

Mulled wine (vin chaud, gluwein, whatever) :

train:

and now back to the grind!