In(dian) St. Dié

Not a whole lot to report. The continuing nice weather is making all of St. Dié’s residents jolly and the sidewalks are once again filled with chatting café-goers. The good American girl that I am, the second it gets warm I start craving iced coffee which, since Europeans are scared of ice for some reason, is hard to impossible to come by. Looks like I’ll have to do it myself.

We had a long-awaited game night with Alex and Nicholas and Estelle last week. After a particularly awkward encounter with Nicholas while Erik was here (he passed us on the street, I stopped to do the bises and introduce Erik but he kind of just very quietly said “bonjour”, kept his dead down and kept walking) followed by weeks of no contact, I was afraid that I’d scared him off for good. But he finally came around I guess. It was a good come-back since everyone got a little silly and we all had a really fun time.

Teaching has been running pretty smoothly. On request, I’ve been teaching about native Americans in one of my classes (the lesson should technically only have taken one class but we got side-tracked from talking about the nomadic Sioux to discussing if gypsies are dangerous). I had worked pretty hard making up a lesson plan and activity sheets, but in the end it was all kind of unnecessary since the teacher pretty much took over and for some reason knew a whole hell of a lot about native Americans. Fairly impressive but also kind of annoying since I ended up having such a limited role in the whole thing. But the same teacher did come up to me afterwards with a rather strange assignment for me. He is looking to buy a small totem pole for the school but his search has proved fruitless, so he’s recruiting me as an American to look for one. If anyone has any ideas of where to find a personal-sized totem pole, let me know!

In other news, Pascale took Alex and I out the other day to revel in one of the Vosges’s springtime delights—wild daffodils. There is a big festival in a nearby town that has a big parade with floats made out of daffodils, and I thought she was taking us to see those. Instead, we just went out, found a hillside covered in daffodils and made bouquets. Honestly I think I enjoyed it a lot more than seeing a parade float made from them—I felt Anne of Green gables or something out picking wild flowers. My bouquets were super ugly but the ever-helpful Pascale tidied it up a bit and made it nice. They’re pretty much dead now, but it was very nice to have some natural color in the room for a bit.

The only other real thing of note is that I’ve decided what I’m doing for my last school break. I’ve book a train to Wroclaw, Poland—I’m going to the homeland! I still need to work out the itinerary; Gdansk, Krakow, and the towns where the great-fam lived are all possible stops. Whatever is decided, I’m really excited and think it’s going to be a great trip!