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.