tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-45200176286669894752024-03-08T03:31:20.100-05:00Seeking El DoradoEricahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12042385757154431516noreply@blogger.comBlogger107125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4520017628666989475.post-12456529972636961562012-11-10T22:23:00.003-05:002012-11-12T17:56:46.685-05:00Homesickness, Farsickness, and The Odyssey In BetweenI realize I have utterly failed at
writing the rest of my travel tales. For what it's worth, be it
better or worse, I have also failed in my ongoing efforts on other
writing projects. At this point, I am not even going to pretend to
promise that those travel tales will ever materialize, but we'll see.
I'd like them to, but perhaps it's too late now anyway.
<br />
<br />
In any case, lately I have been reading
two poems about Ithaka over and over again. (<a href="http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/ithaca/">This one</a> and <a href="http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/ithaka-2/">this one</a>.) Ithaka was the home of
Odysseus, the destination of his ten-year journey described in the
<i>Odyssey</i>. Both of those poems end on the idea of needing the journey
in order to fully appreciate the destination. They suggest that the
journey, not the end goal, is the real purpose, that achieving the
destination would be meaningless without everything that happened
along the way.
<br />
<br />
My Ithaka is symbolic. My Ithaka and my
El Dorado are one and the same—“home” is a mysterious place of
wealth and wonder, one I'm setting my course for without really
knowing where to find it, or if it even truly exists.<br />
<br />
It's something of a trope that the
Germans have a word for everything, but it's also kind of true.
“Wanderlust” is originally a German word, and it's a fabulous
one. Another fabulous German word, which I learned while I was in
France last year, is “Fernweh.” As I understand it, it means
something like, “a yearning to be somewhere else,” and what makes
it so fabulous is that that somewhere else can be anywhere. It's not
the same thing as homesickness (I've seen it translated as "farsickness," sort of the opposite), nor is it quite the same thing as
Wanderlust, which I think of as being a kind of restlessness. Wanderlust is a
longing to move, to travel, rather than a longing to be somewhere in
particular.
<br />
<br />
The concept of Fernweh was a small
revolution for me. After wondering for so long if it's possible to
feel homesick for a place that isn't home, strictly speaking, to find
this other word for something that's the same but different made
everything make sense. It's like a sick person receiving a
diagnosis—you feel a special kind of relief just knowing what to
call it, just knowing that enough other people have experienced what
you're experiencing that it has a name.
<br />
<br />
I told you all that to tell you this: I
miss Ireland. A little less intensely than I missed it while I was in
France, which either a) supports my suspicion that having something
in proximity but not in reach
intensified my pain last year or b) is a sign that I've slowly and
involuntarily accepted the fact that it would be incredibly difficult
for me to ever find my way back as anything more than a tourist. But
I miss it a lot. I also miss Belize. Once in a while I miss France,
too, though I think what I miss is the friend-family I had found
there, more than anything. I also miss my hometown, and I miss the
town where I lived last summer before moving to France. Which one is
on my mind the most changes from day to day, but at least one is
always there. They all cause me Fernweh.<br />
<br />
And that brings me to this: My own
journey stalled a bit after I got back from France. (Which is a
little ironic considering that part of the reason it stalled is that
I got a job, which was originally supposed to be temporary but has
stretched into the present, that has me traveling back and forth and
all over the state every week, working in several different places
and going home [or to visit friends] on the weekends.) But I am
currently in the process of trying to make some very big decisions
about both the near future and the big-picture plan for the next
couple of years. And first on the agenda is finding a place to live
for the next while.
<br />
<br />
The biggest decision facing me, assuming nothing else presents itself in the meantime, is
whether to move back to my hometown or back to where I was last
summer (for two of the happiest months of my life). That decision may
come down to employment opportunities—or it may not. I'm not sure.
But meanwhile, I am also applying for a teaching job in Guatemala
that would start in January and put off plans to move to either of
the above places. And I need to make a decision very soon about
whether to reapply to TAPIF in hopes of being re-accepted for a
second year under the <i>tricolore</i> and hopefully assigned to
Guyane (or another overseas department; Guyane was the dream, but I
don't think I'd quibble).
<br />
<br />
All of these possibilities feel a bit
like mutually exclusive yes-or-no questions, and yet they're all
interconnected and rely on so many other questions, like what I
really want to do with my life and when and where (and if) I want to
go back to school. And a big part of what it comes down to is the
question of what's most important, because the issue of <i>where</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
is all tangled up with issues of jobs and hobbies and friends and
romantic prospects. I'm pulled in so many different directions
geographically and in terms of a career path, but also in terms of
reconciling my ongoing wanderlust with my desire for community and
stability. I don't know how to choose there, either. And then, should
I make my decision based on where I can get the coolest job? Should I
let people determine the direction I
take, and go where I can be sure of being near loved ones? Should I just pick somewhere I like and go and work it out from
there, hoping for the best? I think there's an argument to be made for each. I think I've
tried each in the past, and not found any one approach to life to be
“right,” at least not yet. So I don't know. And it may be that I
will have to just see where the wind takes me, and trust that the
gods do, indeed, know what they're doing.<br /><br />This I
do know: All of these places that give me Fernweh, both the places
I've lived and loved and the places I haven't been to yet, matter.
Perhaps one of them will turn out to be my El Dorado, my Ithaka, and
I won't know it until I've traveled far and come back to it again. Or
perhaps they are all my equivalent of the many islands Odysseus found
before finding his way home, each with its own trials and temptations
to be overcome before the end of the journey is finally in sight.
Either way, it's the journey that makes us who we are. And I just try
to remember, each time I look out over the months or years of
uncertainty ahead and wish for “home” (Can you be homesick for a home you don't have yet?), that it's the adventures
along the way that make it all worth it, and that give us our stories
to tell when we finally end up where we're going.
<br /><br />
<i>"Ride, boldly ride,"/ The Shade
replied--/ "If you seek for Eldorado!</i>"
</span>Ericahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12042385757154431516noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4520017628666989475.post-29790495250914185092012-07-31T22:20:00.001-04:002012-07-31T22:20:51.152-04:00Re-AmericanizingSo here's the thing. I've now been back in the USA for more than two months, and have just completely and utterly failed at writing absolutely any of my backlog of blog posts. (Side note: "backlog of blog" is kind of hard to say.) I could blame a lot of things for this (readjustment period, zillions of job applications, getting stuff done at my parents' soon-to-be-sold house, not wanting to think about France and travelling once I was stuck back at my parents' house cleaning and applying for jobs, simple laziness...), but rather than getting into all that, I'm just going to get right to the blogging.<br />
<br />
But before I start trying to go back and remember all the things I had to say while I was abroad, here are some things about coming back:<br />
<br />
1. The jet-lag was murder. My goodness. I've always said that it's worse when flying west than when flying east, but now I'm starting to wonder if there's also some kind of correlation between the severity of jet-lag and the length of time you were somewhere else. Because my trips to Europe have lengthened over time, and my jet-lag has gotten exponentially worse right along with them. Maybe I'm just getting old, I don't know. But I don't remember my short trips in high school creating much of a time zone problem. Then when I came home back from Ireland, there were several days where I was kind of dragging myself around and never quite sure what time it was. Then there was coming back from France this year. I got home late on a Wednesday night (or, according to my body at the time, in the wee hours of Thursday morning), and it took until Sunday for me to feel like I was operating by the right clock again. And in between, I bordered on being non-functional at times. It wasn't just that I was hungry at the wrong times, or sleepy at the wrong times, or NOT sleepy at the wrong times; it was that plus wandering around in a haze, constantly tired, never really knowing even what time I thought it was, let alone what time it actually was, and unable to think straight half the time.<br />
<br />
The morning after getting back, after going to bed around 11 pm EDT (5 am France time), I slept until 11 am, was dragging all day, and somehow managed to stay up until something like 10 or 11 that night, only to wake up again in the wee hours of the morning, unable to go back to sleep until I finally gave up around 5 am and started my day. That evening I went out with friends and was half asleep at the table by 8 or 9 pm. I then had to be woken up at 10 the next morning lest I sleep half the day away, and continued to be slow and sleepy all that day, too. At some point in all that it's like I stopped being on France time without being back on Eastern time and there just wasn't anything consistent about it. It was ridiculous. <br />
<br />
2. Speaking of ridiculous, I totally forgot how to use my American phone (which, by the way, is a basic old, super-simple flip phone like nobody cool uses anymore). I was pushing wrong buttons and not knowing where to find things for a good week after I came back.<br />
<br />
3. It was super weird not to need plug adaptors for any of my electronics. I kept picking up something to plug in and looking around for the nearest adaptor before realizing I didn't have one handy, and didn't need to. Derp. Everything just fits, and it's beautiful.<br />
<br />
4. Driving was interesting. Not that I'd forgotten how, exactly, but I definitely had to get used to it again. And I dove right in, too, taking off to visit friends in Oberlin less than 48 hours after getting back. I felt super awkward backing out of the garage and was weirdly nervous and uncertain once I got on the road. I kept being afraid I was going to mess something up or forget something important. By the time I made it to the interstate, I was feeling more comfortable about it, but then I had to re-learn how to use the cruise control and the air conditioner settings, and I stayed more or less worried about my driving ability for the next couple of days. I've done a lot of driving since, because my current lifestyle is one I've been calling migratory, but I admit I'm still working on getting my parallel parking skills back, because I haven't been called upon to do that all that often in the last couple of months. <br />
<br />
5. Where are all of the bakeries? And sandwicheries? And crêpes? We need those things here. Desperately. Also, America apparently doesn't know what quality bread is supposed to be like. However, pizza and Dr. Pepper and donuts and pie and peanut butter and American breakfast foods and iced coffee/assorted elaborate coffee-based drinks and most especially any and all Mexican/Mexican-influenced food are all amazing and I cannot stop being in love with them. Especially the last two. In short: There are food things I miss every day and there are also food things I can't believe I went eight months without, or almost without. I want there to be a magical place where I can have it all, all the time.<br />
<br />
6. On a related note, my first trip to an average American grocery store* was kind of overwhelming. First of all, they are typically bigger and with more variety than the average French grocery store. Second of all, they're just so different. All the different kinds of things that are available here and not there or vice versa, or that are available in assorted varieties here and not there or vice versa. The way things are grouped and packaged is different, too, in addition to the products themselves. And of course my shopping lists are dramatically different because of the way food is different. I can't even really articulate it all properly. It's just such a different experience. And don't even get me started on places like Target...<br />
<br />
7. Alcohol is so outrageously expensive here. Like, the first time I went to buy a bottle of wine from an American grocery store, I couldn't believe my eyes. I was also taken aback when the cashier asked me for an I.D. What? You mean everyone doesn't drink? And that's enforced?** Anyway, I think I spent more on alcohol my first weekend back in the States than I did in some entire months while I was abroad. And I didn't even do that much drinking that weekend, honest! (See previous comments about jet-lag if you don't believe me!) Especially not comparatively.<br />
<br />
8. I was pretty excited about having access to all of my stuff again, and particularly to all of my clothes, because you can bet that after eight months I was pretty tired of the things I had with me. But it turns out the simpler you keep your life--the less stuff you're used to having or needing or wanting--the weirder it is to be faced with more stuff. I got to my parents' new house the day after returning to the States, and I opened the door to the closet where I'd left all my clothes... and I just stood there and stared for a minute before closing it and putting on something I'd brought home with me. I didn't know where to start. I had no idea how much stuff I owned, or why I had it. I still don't, I guess; I've just gotten used to it again. I've never been all that inclined to acquire a lot of stuff I don't need, but living and traveling abroad has wittled that lack of interest down even further, and I came back with a lot of perspective about what is and isn't "necessary", to boot. I've gotten rid of a lot since coming back, and I have a lot more to go through. And I still have too much, but it's getting better.<br />
<br />
9. Everything is just different. I'm not going to dwell on this, because I can't explain it any better than I could the supermarket thing, but it's like... The vegetation is different. The animals are different. The buildings and houses are different. The cars are different. The way towns are laid out is different. The people and their clothes are different. The street signs and road signs and highway signs and license plates and billboards are different. It's all very subtle, but it's all very real, and taken all together it packs kind of a punch when you've been gone a long time.<br />
<br />
So that's that, for now. I'm sure I will think of some more things to add later, and I'm probably not entirely done discovering things that are weird or surprising about my re-American life, even though I'm pretty well readjusted at this point. In any case, my homecoming was bittersweet, as I guess they usually are. I was, as I told many people at the time, ready to come home but not ready to leave Europe. I don't think the transition is ever simple, emotion-wise. But here I am, and hopefully in the coming weeks I will find the time and motivation to write some more about my adventures abroad and thoughts on France and expats and culture and so forth. Until then.<br />
<br />
<br />
* My actual first trip to an American grocery store was to Trader Joe's, which was weird and exotic but not on quite the same level as subsequent trips to Giant and Weis.<br />
** Increasingly not well, though, judging by the proportion of times I've gotten carded subsequently.Ericahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12042385757154431516noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4520017628666989475.post-46574885524217845982012-04-24T10:18:00.001-04:002012-04-24T10:18:49.466-04:00The Weather Is Probably Not An Exciting Blog TopicIt's been quite a while since I posted, and I now have a ridiculous backlog again (as opposed to the relatively manageable backlog I had before this most recent vacation and trip). I'm really not very good at this. On a travel level, my parents were in France for a short visit earlier this month, so that story to come, and after that I went to Denmark to visit a good friend who's spending the year in Copenhagen, so that story also to come. On a personal level, my free time continues to be mostly taken up with an increasingly stressful job search, not to mention my assorted existential crises, and it is increasingly looking like I'm going to be either going home or moving someplace random and taking a menial job for a while. (Not that some people wouldn't argue that being an archaeological field tech is something of a menial job itself.) There's even a part of me that's okay with that, especially since I'm not really in the market for something permanent right now, and doing something that won't consume my life would maybe give me some time to write, since I haven't done as much of that as I expected this year. But I'm still applying for other stuff, and I'm reluctantly reevaluating my claim that I don't want to live in France anymore, because <a href="http://www.faccnyc.org/icdp-j-1-visas/american-trainees-in-france.html" target="_blank">this</a> makes it seem like France might well be the easiest place in western Europe for me to get permission live at the moment. I'm also considering volunteering to teach at one of several interesting schools in Central America for a while. I'm ALMOST done (finally) with my TESOL certification course; I have to write an essay for the last unit (blergh) and then I'm free. I guess that probably would have been a good way to spend the last few days of the holiday, but, well, Pottermore finally opened up to the public while I was away...<br> <br>Anyway, here's what's to come: Not counting today, I have three days left at my job, which is crazy (and means that a lot of my unfinished posts on my observations about school-related things are going to be up after the fact). On the one hand, I'm kind of ready to move on to something else, but on the other hand, I can't believe how fast seven months have gone. The day after my contract ends, I'm flying to Marseilles with some friends and we've rented a house in the coastal town of Cassis for the week. That means I have just a week to get a lot of stuff done, including buying souvenirs, shipping some books home, finding out how to deal with closing my bank account, cleaning my room, and finding some way to pack all of my things and get them out of here. Should be interesting. After Cassis, I'm heading back to Paris, from where I'm flying to Dakar with another friend to visit our friend in the Peace Corps in northeastern Senegal. I'm super excited about that! Then once we get back, I have just a week left in France before my flight back to the U.S. I haven't decided yet how I'm going to spend it. I know all of this is going to go by so fast.<br> <br>The last couple of days we've had some pretty classic Brittany weather. That means it changes at least every ten minutes, and going through three or four seasons in the span of half a day is par for the course. This experience pretty much sums it up: I got up today and it was what I'd call partly sunny and cold. I walked to the supermarket between classes this morning and when I walked outside again, there was a perfect rainbow hanging over the street I was about to walk down. By the time I reached the corner, not a minute later, it was pissing rain, as the Brits say, and that good old Brest wind (which last night attempted to physically prevent us from walking home from downtown) was driving it all right into my face. By the time I reached the steps down to the school, which probably takes all of five minutes, the rain had backed off to barely a drizzle and the sun was peeking out again. <div><br></div><div>I've actually kind of grown to love the atmospheric mood swings, howling wind and all, thought I certainly prefer it when it's not cold. My favorite weather is probably light rain that falls while the sun is shining, and I've seen that more in my seven months in Brittany than ever before in my life.</div> <div><br></div><div>There's a saying here that "En Bretagne, il ne pleut que sur les cons," which can basically be translated as "In Brittany, it only rains on idiots."* It basically means if you hate it enough to complain, go somewhere else.</div> <div><br></div><div>It hasn't quite sunk in yet that I AM going somewhere else very soon. I don't know if I will miss Brest, exactly, but I will miss Brittany. I talked to some students yesterday about stereotypes; what they had to say about les Bretons made me preemptively nostalgic (and all of us hungry!). </div> <div><br></div><div>My other random thought for the day is my favorite thing about market day. Is it the delicious food? The beautiful produce? The cheap clothes? The stacks of used books? The concentration of adorable dogs? </div> <div><br></div><div>Nope. It's the sight of cute toddlers shuffling along gnawing on baguettes as tall as themselves. Never gets old, that.</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>* Or "on assholes", if you prefer a more hostile interpretation</div> Ericahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12042385757154431516noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4520017628666989475.post-52375246200566033852012-04-03T17:06:00.001-04:002012-04-03T17:06:14.213-04:00Language Teachers (Language "Teachers"? "Language" Teachers?)A few weeks ago, on a single Friday afternoon, I had not one, but two rather unsettling experiences.<br><br>I'll tell the second story first, because it's less involved. I was asked the question (this is verbatim), "How do you call the person who learns you how to driving?"*<br> <br>What was so unsettling about this? The question was asked by a teacher. An English teacher.<br><br>I may or may not have mentioned before that language teachers seem to vary widely in terms of their competency in the language they are supposed to teach. And I certainly don't mean to imply that this is an issue restricted to France; I'm sure there are similar situations in many places, but this is the only one I can attest to from firsthand experience. What I know is that working with seven teachers gives me an interesting window on just how varied the language skills of foreign language teachers can be. There are those with heavy French accents and lots of mispronunciation, and those with strange accents that aren't really French but certainly aren't neutral, and those with almost-perfect British accents. There are those who speak very clearly and precisely, trying to make a point of getting things right even if they mispronounce some words or use some odd grammatical constructs, and there are those who toss off their sentences quickly and casually whether they're right or wrong. There are those who are hesitant when they run into something they're not sure how to say when talking to me, and those who just make something up.<br> <br>There are those who are essentially fluent--and those whose level is hardly above that of some of their students.<br><br>It's depressing sometimes, especially because the teachers for whom this is true aren't necessarily bad teachers in other respects. Indeed, this particular woman is probably an excellent teacher in terms of actual teaching skills. I've seen her managing students, I've seen her lesson materials, I know from my own experience that she is incredibly kind and patient. When I work with her classes, she and I often collaborate on lesson plans that tie in to what she's been teaching, which is a win for everyone--she's still off the hook for an hour or two a week, but I'm also getting input and feedback from an experienced teacher and her students are getting the benefit of more organization and consistency than those of teachers who give me free rein and little info. I like her a lot, and I respect her a lot, and I cringe a little bit every time I think about the fact that she probably speaks French to me (even in front of the students, which hardly any teachers usually do) as much because her English is bad as because I'm supposed to be learning French.<br> <br>It also just mystifies me a bit. What does one have to do to become a foreign-language teacher? Surely there are language-specific qualifications. Surely there's an exam of some sort, and surely it involves speaking. How does one convince the powers that be to let him or her teach something he or she isn't even very good at? Again, I'm sure this doesn't only happen in France, but I still don't understand it. The idea that anyone would allow me, at my current level, to teach French is almost laughable to me. I've thought about it, and I don't think I would allow <i>myself</i> to teach French at this stage. If nothing else, I'm horrified by the prospect of passing on my terrible pronunciation. And yet if this woman makes her living as an English teacher, then it would appear that I might, by someone's standards, be qualified to teach at least beginning French. Even though there are still days when I can barely string a sentence together. <br> <br>Mind-boggling.<br><br><br>* Throw in a thick French accent and poor pronunciation skills and I actually mistakenly heard "drawing" the first time and answered, "an art teacher," leading to further confusion. Ericahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12042385757154431516noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4520017628666989475.post-45191740962950841432012-04-03T16:33:00.001-04:002012-04-03T16:33:36.840-04:00Planning Things, Visa Woes Revisited, and How I Still Can't Decide What To Do With My LifeSorry to keep boring you with blog statistics, but "Things That Suck<br>About Brest" is getting way more hits than the less dismal Brest post<br>that came after it. That's kind of depressing, folks.<p>Here where the difference in length of day between summer and winter<br>is so much more dramatic than I'm used to, I am really amazed at how<br>quickly the changes seem to happen. I remember seeing the winter<br>darkness set in while I was in Ireland; this year I didn't notice<br>quite as much, I guess because I was more prepared for it. But now<br>that spring is here, it's hard to believe that less than two months<br>ago I was going to work in the dark in the morning and coming home in<br>the dark in the evening. One morning not long ago, I woke up at 6:40<br>and the sky was orange, and now when the school day finishes at 5:20,<br>it's still as bright as mid-afternoon. We set the clocks ahead two<br>weekends ago (so now it's not sunrise quite so early as it was last<br>week, but we'll get there), and now it's still a little light out at 9<br>pm. I lose track of time late in the day because it doesn't seem<br>possible for it to be as late as it is. It's like I blinked at some<br>point and suddenly we had three or four extra hours of daylight!<p>Of course, I'm still amazed at how quickly time is moving in general.<br>March went by just as fast as February, and I'm now in my second to<br>last week of teaching. As of last week, I have lived in France for six<br>months. It's not that much more than five months, really--and it<br>certainly doesn't feel like it--but it seems like a huge milestone.<p>Even as I've been revelling in the long days and the beautiful weather<br>we've been having, I've been going crazy over here trying to plan my<br>parents' visit. They're arriving at the end of this week! They've<br>never been to France before, and we only have six days, one of which I<br>won't even be with them because they're arriving the morning of my<br>last day of work before the holiday. My goal has been to maximize the<br>number of things we can do and see while minimizing the time we spend<br>traveling and the number of times we have to move our luggage. It is<br>not an easy feat, and it's complicated further by the fact that my dad<br>is super busy and my mom doesn't use the internet (or computers at<br>all, for that matter), so A) they hadn't done a whole lot of research<br>themselves about what they wanted to do, and B) it's hard to all be on<br>the same page at the same time. By two weeks ago, I felt like we were<br>down to the wire and was starting to get pretty stressed out about the<br>lack of concrete decisions that had been made. I realize I'm not<br>exactly the poster child for advance travel arrangements, but I'm<br>usually making arrangements for things I'm already relatively close<br>to. This is a big trip for them and I want to make sure it, well,<br>works.<p>By a week ago, we'd figured out what we're doing and when, but were by<br>then two weeks away from needing a hotel room in Paris. During<br>everyone's spring break, French and American and probably other places<br>too. Right. So that was tons of fun trying to pin down... but it's all<br>done now, finally.<p>And as for planning ahead, I have also (finally) sorted out a way to<br>get back to the U.S. Speaking of logistical nightmares. I really don't<br>even want to get into why this is complicated, because it totally<br>shouldn't be. The point is, it took me days and lots of stress to<br>achieve, had me in tears on at least one occasion, and is still not<br>entirely satisfying in the end. But it's done.<p>Which means... I'm returning to the U.S. near the end of May. It's not<br>a decision I made lightly, and I'm still not sure I'm not making a<br>mistake.<p>My current plan is find a job in my [original] field (archaeology) for<br>the summer. If it's a seasonal job, then I'm not sure yet what I'm<br>going to do after August--look for another job teaching abroad, do<br>something in education in the U.S., keep looking for archaeology work.<br>Too many choices. All I know is I'm still not ready for grad school<br>(somehow, a lot fewer questions got answered this year than I was<br>hoping), and anything I do right now is temporary because in the fall<br>I'm going to be re-applying to TAPIF for the 2013-2014 school year.<p>My reasoning for waiting a year to do my second stint is that if I<br>apply to renew my current contract, I theoretically would have to stay<br>in Bretagne, if not in the city of Brest. And as much as I love<br>Brittany, I want to experience other places. My dream (at the moment)<br>is to reapply to TAPIF and be accepted to teach in a DOM (département<br>d'outre mer/overseas department--places that are part of France but<br>aren't in France proper). Most of them are tropical, many are islands.<br>I'm actually most interested in going to Guyane (French Guiana). For<br>those of you who are geographically challenged, it's on the northeast<br>coast of South America, sort of in between Brazil and Venezuela, on<br>the edge of the Amazon rainforest.<p>I've noticed that my motivation to work on my TESOL course dropped off<br>sharply right around the time I started seriously looking for jobs<br>back in the U.S., which is somewhat unfortunate. I had originally<br>thought to be finished before now. My new goal, once I realized I<br>hadn't submitted a lesson in a month, was to finish before the April<br>holiday. I'm not sure that's going to happen either. I've reached the<br>final unit, but it requires me to write an essay, and I don't think I<br>have time for that this week. Sigh.<p>Finishing it will, at least in theory, open the door to a lot of other<br>opportunities overseas. However, 90% of them, as far as I can tell,<br>are in East and Central Asia (you'd be amazed how much demand there is<br>for English teachers in Mongolia) or the Middle East, which are the<br>parts of the world in which I'm least interested in living. (I don't<br>have any particular reason for that, it just is what it is.) I have<br>seen a few tempting possibilities in Latin America, but I'm not sure I<br>feel ready. I want to learn some more Spanish first. And as for<br>Western and Central Europe, France is probably my best bet, but I'm<br>just not that interested in staying. (Again, no particular reason I<br>can articulate.*) Unfortunately, it's likely to be next to impossible<br>to get a job anywhere else, because the EU is set up in such a way<br>that EU citizens are supposed to always have priority in hiring. And<br>obviously there are enough native English speakers in the EU that few<br>schools and companies are willing to go through the rigmarole involved<br>in hiring someone who needs a visa.<p>Speaking of which... what I really wanted to do was go back to<br>Ireland. I mean really go back. Not on a trip, not to visit, but to<br>live. I miss it. I did not realize how much I missed it until I was<br>here, but once I was here it took me about a month to decide that what<br>I wanted to do next was spend the next year working somewhere in<br>Ireland.<p>Obviously, the ability to teach ESL is not going to get me very far<br>there. Unfortunately, I don't really have any other highly marketable<br>skills, either. And like most places in western Europe, Irish<br>immigration policy poses a catch-22: You can't get a work permit<br>without a job offer, but no one is likely to offer you a job unless<br>you already have the right to work there. Especially when the economy<br>sucks and there aren't even enough jobs to go around for Irish<br>citizens.<p>My best bet appears to be to do my Master's in Ireland, after which<br>graduates have a period of time in which they're allowed to stay in<br>the country to look for work.<p>But that would require me to be able to afford to do a Master's in<br>Ireland, which is both very expensive for international students and<br>unlikely to come with any kind of funding for international students.<p>So at that point, I might as well just aim for the ultimate fantasy,<br>which is to become independently wealthy and apply for residency under<br>the elusive "self-sufficiency" category. That's basically my plan<br>right now: publish novels, become highly successful, amass whatever<br>mysterious minimum sum is necessary to convince the government I won't<br>become a sponge, and then go back.<p>Unless I meet some lovely Irish citizen living abroad and wind up<br>getting married, which I guess might actually be easier.<p>I'm being pretty light about all this right now, but a couple of<br>months ago when I was really realizing that my odds of actually<br>finding and landing a job in Ireland anytime soon are slim to none, I<br>was devastated.<p>When I had to write an essay--nearly a year and a half ago now--about<br>why I was applying to TAPIF, I rambled on and on about the importance<br>of language education and how earnestly I believed that learning a<br>second language and learning it well could really open up the world to<br>a person.<p>Bull. Language barriers can be overcome as needed. EU citizenship<br>opens doors. If my British and Irish friends want to stay in France,<br>they can stay. There's no overstaying their visa, no making sure their<br>next employer will help them get a new one. If they want to move to a<br>different country in Europe, they can, same deal. No questions asked.<br>No extra bureaucratic formalities. No threat of getting deported or<br>blacklisted because of paperwork gone awry.<p>I realize it goes both ways. It would be just as hard for them to move<br>to the U.S. as it is for me to move to Europe. But all that really<br>means is it's equal-opportunity suckage.**<p>All of you out there with dual American/European nationality? Screw<br>you. I hope you realize just how lucky you are, and just how much<br>possibility is at your fingertips. And I hope you take advantage of<br>it. My ex-boyfriend told me when we were in high school that he could<br>potentially claim Swiss citizenship via his grandmother***; I don't<br>know whether he ever followed through on that, but I'm tempted to get<br>in touch with him for the sole purpose of telling him he's a fool if<br>he didn't.<p>In any case, the bottom line is that I now know way more than I will<br>probably ever need to about Irish immigration policy. I'm going back<br>to America at the end of May, and hopefully getting back into<br>archaeology for the time being, and we'll just have to see where<br>things go from there.<p>But first, my parents are coming to France, and I'm going to Denmark<br>(this month) and Senegal (next month)! Bring on the travel adventures.<p><br>* Although the fact that I don't want to have to write a French CV<br>might be a contributing factor.<br>** On the other hand, there are lots and lots of countries to choose<br>from in the EU. The U.S. is arguably just as varied as if it were<br>several different countries, but it's not actually.<br>*** Ireland also has a so-called grandfather clause, which basically<br>says you're eligible for citizenship if at least one of your<br>grandparents was a citizen, even if you personally have never lived in<br>Ireland before. I don't know if that's quite how the Swiss one works,<br>and I don't know how common such things are. It's moot for me anyway,<br>because I am many generations removed from anywhere in Europe on every<br>branch of the family tree I can reliably trace.Ericahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12042385757154431516noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4520017628666989475.post-72749936423908464682012-03-21T13:28:00.001-04:002012-03-21T13:28:58.023-04:00My Glamorous Job As A Language AssistantThis seems like something I should maybe have written more about before now, especially since I know for a fact there are at least a couple of TAPIF applicants out there who have looked at this blog.<br><br>First things first. I and everyone else have already said it many times, but it bears remembering: There is no such thing as consistency in France. And so, as with anything else, my experience as a language assistant is totally unique. The job, not to mention the overall experience, varies widely depending on where you are, what type of school you're in, what specific school you're in, what age group you work with, what teachers you work with, whether the administration likes you, what language you teach, what course of study your students are in, what time of year it is... do I need to go on?<br> <br>In other words, it's a crapshoot based entirely on circumstances. In some ways, I have been very lucky. In others, not so much.<br><br>One way I am lucky is that I only have to deal with one school. It's very common for assistants of all languages to have their hours split between two or even three schools. (One of my friends here even has FOUR different schools, even though that's supposed to be illegal.) It all depends on where the <i>académie</i> (regional school district) thinks you're needed, which presumably has something to do with the number of language teachers and the number of students, but (of course) isn't necessarily consistent or determined by consistent criteria. In any case, I work in the same school all the time, and I'm the only full-time language assistant at my school.* Miguel works there half the time, and at the neighboring school the other half. So our school has one and a half language assistants, while the school he splits into has [I think] two and two halves. (That <u>does</u> make sense; think about it.) It's most common to have English and Spanish assistants. Some schools also have a German assistant. Other languages are less common, though some schools do offer them and there are a scattering of Italian, Russian, Chinese, Arabic, etc. assistants around the country. Some schools have only an English assistant, or even only a part-time English assistant. Some schools probably have none, though I guess I wouldn't know about them.<br> <br>I've also been lucky in terms of the school itself. There are three main types of high schools in France: general (basically the equivalent of a traditional American high school), technical, and professional (what we in America would probably call vocational). Mine is a technical school, and seems to be neither the best nor the worst school in Brest. I am under the impression that it has quite a good reputation among tech schools, particularly for certain programs--some of my BTS** students are here from as far away as the Mediterranean, so the school must have something to offer. My students range quite a bit in terms of language ability, not to mention interest in learning a foreign language at all, but they are all fairly respectful and mostly well-behaved. The worst discipline problem I usually have to deal with is getting them to stop chatting amongst themselves and listen, which is nothing compared to what some assistants experience! Several of my friends routinely kick students out of class, and a few have had to break up fights. Compared to that, I'm pretty content with saying "Shhhh!" ten times in one class, giving some dirty looks, and calling out kids who aren't paying attention (most of whom at least have the decency to be sheepish, even if they don't stop talking afterwards). Meanwhile, many of the non-English teachers are friendly to me, the other staff are consistently helpful when I need something and patient with my French, and my few encounters with the administration have been nothing but positive. I've heard many assistants complain about conflicts with their school(s). I have none.<br> <br>A way in which being entirely at this one school is less lucky is that I am entirely at this one school because it has a huge English department. I work with seven different teachers, at least five of whom teach here full-time.*** (One of the others is definitely part-time, and the seventh I'm not sure about. I know she also teaches some classes at the university, but I think in theory it would be possible for her to do that and still carry a full schedule here at the <i>lycée</i>, so I'm not a hundred percent sure what her deal is.) This means two things. One, that there is not enough of me to go around, and I am now on my third schedule change this year as they try to make sure as many students as possible have some time with me. (This, in turn, means that I rarely get to know all my students names, let alone anything personal about them.) And two, that I have to meet at least seven different sets of expectations every week, and sometimes more than that if I have two or three classes with the same teacher but they're all at different levels or studying different things.<br> <br>One of the most frustrating things to me about this year has been the amount of work I put into my job outside of class time compared to some of my friends. Other <i>lycée</i> assistants, especially those others who also work all their hours at one school, typically plan no more than one or two lessons per week, do the same thing with all of their classes (perhaps with slight modifications for students at different grade levels), and that's the end of it. Some don't even have to do that much, either because their teachers give them things to do or because they have alternating schedules where they see each group of students every other week, and thus only have to plan biweekly lessons. I, on the other hand, plan most lessons individually, which normally means planning four or five or six new lessons each week, or even more. For the rest, I do sometimes re-use lessons with different classes, but rarely all in the same week. (This does mean, however, that the burden of lesson planning has gotten slightly less over the course of the year, as I amass more of a collection and also keep changing classes.) I keep a running spreadsheet on my computer with all of the classes I've had over the the year and what I've done with each of them each time I've seen them, so that I can easily find out what classes haven't yet done which easy-for-me thing I have already prepared. Meanwhile, some of the lessons I've put the most work into planning have been very class-specific and can't easily be re-used. And sometimes a teacher will pull me aside the day before a lesson, or even text me after school the night before, and ask me to prepare something on a particular topic, thereby throwing out anything I might have already planned.<br> <br>On the plus side, I can honestly say that every day is different, and I wonder sometimes if part of the reason I seem less unhappy with my job than some of the other assistants is that I'm not doing the same thing over and over all week and getting bored. Also, sometimes I'm learning along with my students, either because I need to research a topic or just because I need to find the French equivalents for vocabulary words.<br> <br>An unrelated plus side is that I almost never actually work all of my assigned hours in a given week. (Last week I did, plus an extra even, and it was bizarre.) There's always at least one teacher who's sick, or one class that's taking a test or going on a field trip. Of course, I might find out I don't have to teach a given lesson anywhere from the week before to first thing that morning to ten minutes into the class time when I'm standing outside the classroom with the students and we determine that the teacher isn't coming, so I may or may not have already done my planning. In any case, this is another way in which I'm pretty lucky; although there are some assistants who routinely work even less than I do because their schools just aren't organized enough to give them hours, there are others whose classes are almost never cancelled and who are expected to continue with their lessons even if the regular teacher is absent. (Whether that's legal or not seems to be kind of a grey area.) Maybe it would be worth working as much as I'm supposed to in exchange for a lighter workload in terms of prep time, but at the same time, the unexpected gift of a free hour or two is just as exciting for me now as it was when I was a student.<br> <br>I guess, now that I'm thinking about it, my job as an assistant is pretty middle-of-the-road in a lot of ways. What it's not, however, is typical.**** Not just because of the workload and the schedule changes and the simple fact of being in a tech school, but because of the students. I think I've mentioned before that I work mainly with the students in BTS, which in effect means that I work mainly with adults. Almost all of the BTS students are over 18; some are my age, or at least close to it. (I stopped asking after I found one or two who were a year older than me!) When it comes to the regular high school students, there is a <i>terminale</i> (last year of high school, 17-18 year olds) class I've taught a few lessons to, and I'm currently working with one <i>première </i>(the middle year, 16-17 year olds) class, and other than that I've been used primarily for the <i>secondes </i>(first year of high school, 15-16 year olds). I've had a group of kids in <i>seconde </i>in each of my three schedules, and I tend to like them even when they're brats, but it's still very weird to work almost exclusively with the youngest and the oldest students and almost none in between. I'll have more to say about this in some upcoming posts focused on students and lessons, but for now I'll say that this is definitely not typical--I'd say the majority of <i>lycée</i> assistants spend a majority of their time with students who are in <i>première</i> and <i>terminale</i>, helping them prepare for their <i>baccalauréat</i> and other exams. But I haven't even met most of the <i>premières</i> and <i>terminales</i> at my school. <br> <br>Also, at all levels, I teach mostly boys. There are a lot of girls in the applied arts and product design programs, but most of the more technology-oriented programs are almost entirely male. Some of those classes have one or two girls; others have none. I don't think it's a coincidence that the more girls there are, the better the class tends to be, although whether that's because the programs that draw girls actually draw students of all genders who happen to be interested in languages, or just because of the presence of girls in the class, is anybody's guess. Since I see boys trying hard to learn even in the worst classes and the classes that drive me up the wall the most, I'm inclined to think it's actually the latter. I mentioned this to my <i>responsable</i> once, and her opinion was also that having at least one girl around makes the boys more inclined to settle down and behave themselves. Gender roles are a big deal in France in many ways, so I guess maybe here's one positive thing about that?<br> <br>Anyway, I'm not teaching high school in a very traditional sense over here. But I think I've got it pretty good.<br><br><br>* And by "full-time", I mean that all of my hours are there rather than being split with another school. No language assistant anywhere actually works full-time. There wouldn't be nearly as many of us if we did. (It's more like one third of full time, to be precise.) So for blogging purposes we are just going to assume that the standard number of hours for an assistant is considered full-time for an assistant. Does that make sense?<br> ** <i>Brevet du technicien supérieur</i>. Or something close to that. It's two-year diploma program students can do after finishing high school, in fields like product design (my best students), electrical engineering, and building internal combustion engines, among others.<br> *** Now I mean full-time in the conventional sense.<br>**** Though I admit that sentence assumes there is such a thing as a "typical" assistant job, which may not actually be the case--refer back to the beginning of this post.<br> Ericahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12042385757154431516noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4520017628666989475.post-89561905368329681782012-03-19T16:15:00.001-04:002012-03-19T16:15:40.615-04:00Quimper ("No, dad, it's not pronounced 'KWIM-per'.")Quimper is the capital of the department of Finistère, and it's in the middle of Cornouaille, the area that includes the third peninsula south of the one Brest is on. I think I have that right. In any case, it's significantly smaller than Brest despite being the capital, but it's also significantly prettier. Allegedly, it's one of the cities in Brittany (along with Rennes) where the medieval architecture is best preserved. There are pretty significant sections of the old city walls still intact, including a tower, and inside them much of the city centre is twisty narrow streets, many of them cobblestoned and pedestrian-only, lined with half-timbered houses of all sizes and colors and degrees of decoration. The cathedral looms over everything, and is surrounded by a wide plaza that just accentuates its bulk.<br> <br> One of my favorite things in Quimper is the monastery-turned-public-library. (One of my other favorite things, less historical, is the guy who hangs out near the cathedral with two tiny fuzzy horses and charges a few euros for pony rides. In the middle of the downtown.)<br> <br>There are less-old things also worth looking at: the nineteenth-century theatre is a beautiful building, as are some of the various government buildings, and all of the above are along a small canal criss-crossed by little bridges every few yards. There are also some lovely gardens, including one sort of hidden away behind the theatre and one next to the wall with the tower that dates originally from the Middle Ages. Part of it still has its original layout, but more interestingly, it's full of subtropical and Mediterranean plants. Something about the climate of Brittany means that there are places where you can grow things that by all rights should not thrive in northwestern Europe, and from what I've seen Brittany is extremely proud of this fact. There are palm trees in all sorts of unexpected places, and gardens like this one devoted to hot-climate plants just because they can be. It's a little weird, but I guess it's also pretty cool.<br> <br>I had been through Quimper a couple of times earlier this year to make bus or train connections, but I hadn't gotten around to really visiting it until the holiday last month, when I went twice.* Twice because there are two museums in Quimper: an art museum with a very good reputation and the departmental museum for Finistère. I did the latter first. It's right next to the cathedral, and it would be awesome even without being a museum. The building used to be the bishops' residence, and it's in three parts, a sort of tower house dating from the 15th or 16th century (I forget), the 16th or 17th century (depending on which the first one is) wing that attaches the oldest part to the cathedral, and the 18th century section that runs along the canal perpendicular to the rest of the building. Since it's L-shaped, and the cathedral is on the side opposite the canal, there's a nice courtyard, partly paved and partly a garden, with the remaining open sides closed in by walls. The entrance to the museum is inside the courtyard, and there are an assortment of sculptures scattered around the courtyard including a megalith, a row of grave markers, and a large cross, among others, that were all rescued from other places in Finistère. <br> <br>The museum itself is mostly about the history of the area, specifically of Cornouaille but also the rest of Finistère. It begins with prehistoric and Roman-period artifacts, then moves on to medieval art, including a couple of awesome effigy tombs salvaged from ruined churches. <br> <br>Upstairs are exhibits about the culture of the region in the last few centuries, which is where the focus really narrows to Cornouaille and other parts of southern Finistère more so than the area around Brest and the northern coast. This is particularly true of the costume exhibit, which was fascinating nonetheless. There is also furniture and pottery (for which Quimper is famous; you can also visit an important pottery factory/workshop elsewhere in the city). I continue to be amazed both by the distinctiveness of Breton material culture and by its consistency. Though there are a lot of subdivisions within Brittany that are accompanied by slight variations in, for example, traditional dress, which seems almost to have been different in every village, the broad similarities are always there.<br> <br>I liked the Musée des Beaux Arts, too. It's quite big for a small city, and although it doesn't have a lot that's hugely famous, it does have a lot, and some of it is by very famous artists even if the piece itself isn't well-known. In particular, the museum has a big collection of paintings that are of places and people in Brittany, or by Breton painters, or both. They have a lot of stuff from the Pont-Aven school and after, but also a lot of works in more realistic styles and even some more modern art related to Brittany. One of the highlights, as well as one of the most famous pieces (at least within Brittany) is a painting of the king of Ys and some saint escaping the flood.** Anyway, it's really cool to walk through a gallery and recognize places in the paintings! It's happened to me before, but not usually so many at once. The day I was there, in fact, I had just been hiking the day before in the vicinity of a place that was featured in several paintings in that wing, and I was really pleased that I did things in that order so I knew firsthand what I was looking at. It's also really interesting just to see how much the region has changed over the course of the last century, in terms of culture as well as landscape.<br> <br>Anyway, they also have other French art, including a Rodin sculpture, and also some Spanish and Italian and Dutch art. Lots of nice things. Also some less nice things, like some weird nature paintings of creepy-crawly things and a painting of Adam and Eve in which it was not immediately clear to me which figure was meant to be Eve. One of my personal favorites was the Italian painting of a half-naked woman grabbing her own [ample] breasts, titled "Abundance". I laughed out loud. (Because I'm a mature adult.) <br> <br>Supposedly, it's allegorical.<br><br>Boobs aside, it's a good museum. I like Quimper a lot in general. I've sometimes wished we were there instead of Brest, because its prettier and also because it's slightly better positioned in terms of getting to other places. But it's also a lot smaller, and possibly less interesting for it. It's also not right on the coast.<br> <br>It's a really, really nice place, though. Like a miniature, Western Rennes. Charming.<br> <br><br>* The bus schedule, in combination with the museum hours, is too stupid for me to have done everything I wanted to in one day, and even if I'd had access to all my money at the time, I'd still have refused to pay five times as much to take the train.<br> ** Ys is a mythological city that was swallowed up by the sea because of the Devil and a willful woman. It's basically the Breton Atlantis, with a healthy dose of Christianity and sexism and violence (like all good Celtic myths). <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ys">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ys</a><br> Ericahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12042385757154431516noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4520017628666989475.post-48990825110386057322012-03-12T16:52:00.001-04:002012-03-12T16:52:55.499-04:00Brest And Its EnvironsI totally just realized that the word "environs" clearly comes straight from French. ("Environ" means "about" or "around".) I'm observant.<br><br>Now for some nice things about Brest.<br> <br>For one thing, Brest has an interesting atmosphere in that it's a big city that sometimes feels like a small town. I'm actually not a hundred percent sure just how big Brest is, because I have heard several conflicting population estimates, but I know that in Brittany, it's second only to Rennes, which definitely qualifies as a major French city. I also know that geographically speaking, it's a pretty big place. I've never literally walked from one side to the other, but I live near the middle and I know that it takes me a solid hour or more to get out if I try to head for the coast in either direction. I'm always a little surprised when I arrive from somewhere else on a bus, because we cross the city limits and I think, "Oh, we're back," and then it actually takes another fifteen or twenty or thirty minutes (depending on the route) to actually reach the city center. And yet, it's very concentrated. It's divided up into official neighborhoods with their own names and and markets and parish churches and <i>mairies</i>*, but the heart and the life of the city are very much in the city centre, along the two main streets stretching away from the Place de la Liberté and in the surrounding neighborhoods. Running into people you know, and into the same people over and over again (including our students, some of whom don't even live in Brest full-time), is incredibly common. Finding out that people you met in different settings already know each other from somewhere else or discovering half a dozen mutual acquaintances with someone you've never spoken to before is also common. (Being an expat no doubt exacerbates the frequency of this phenomenon, but I assure you it also happens with locals!) When one of the other assistants left her camera behind at a bar a few weeks ago, it was returned to her by the bouncer in a chance encounter at the Sunday market the very next day. So we laugh about how small Brest is, when in fact, it's actually not that small, objectively speaking. <br> <br>Brest is, for a port city and for any city that tends to feel so much smaller than it is, very cultured. I don't mean that in a snobby way, just that it doesn't seem big enough to support a thriving arts scene while also being built primarily on commerce and industry and the military. But it has, to begin, a surprising number of cinemas, playing French films and American films (sometimes dubbed, sometimes just subtitled) and other foreign films, lowbrow comedies and award-winning dramas and documentaries. Several of them play operas and ballets as well as traditional films, and there are film festivals, including the big short film festival I went to last fall. At least one of the cinemas doubles as a theatre, and I don't know much about the theatre scene here but at least there is one. There are also several local choirs, and probably some instrumental ensembles, too. There are concerts--big well, publicized acts and also smaller performances by local and/or lesser known groups that take place in various bars on practically a nightly basis. I've already mentioned the extensive library system (which is vastly superior to the public libraries where I come from, and I often compare Brest to the Allentown/Bethlehem area), which is excellent and well-used. Bulletin boards in the libraries advertise assorted opportunities for music lessons and language classes. All of this is, again, nothing out of the ordinary, but more than I might have expected for a city this size and especially a city that doesn't even feel as big as it is sometimes.<br> <br>Sports, especially football/soccer and rugby and assorted water sports (obviously), are also big, and I can see the lights of the football stadium from my room at night. And of course, there are lots and lots of bars and cafés. All kinds of bars and cafés. Also a couple of crummy nightclubs, and at least one nightclub I rather like.<br> <br>Brest has several suburbs, which I'm just now beginning to really explore. I've been to Guipavas, which is to the northeast and is the one closest to where I live, several times, but to the really suburby area between its downtown and Brest, never to the center of the town yet. I've skirted Le Relecq-Kerhuon (just east of Brest) along the coast, but haven't really seen its center yet, either. I have been to Plougastel-Daoulas (southeast of Brest, on the next peninsula down) a few times; it's the home of the Musée de la fraise et de la patrimoine (the Strawberry and Patrimony Museum), which was more interesting than it sounds. The Plougastel peninsula is well-known for its strawberries, and the museum included the history of strawberry production in the area but was also about its customs and material culture and fishing/maritime traditions, etc. And just last week I spent a few hours in the area of Bohars, which is north of Brest and is the home of a sixteenth century chapel and fountain, several still-functioning watermills, and my personal favorite [thing ever], the remains of a MEDIEVAL MOTTE. I'm not sure it had ever even occurred to me that there were surviving mottes in France, but there ARE, and I've been half an hour away from one for the last six months without even knowing it! <br> <br>There are beaches just outside of Brest in either direction. <br><br>As far as Things To See In Brest, there's not that much. I think that's partly because it was bombed and partly just because its importance has always been as a port city, and there just isn't much here for the tourist industry.** There is Oceanopolis, a huge aquarium near the port that I haven't yet been to. Then there's the castle, located right where the river flows into the harbor, which mostly survived the war and has parts from pretty much all periods of Brest's history dating back to the Roman Empire. It's now a national museum about naval and maritime history. Around the castle and extending along harbor in both directions, as well as some distance up the river, are some surviving seventeenth and eighteenth century fortification walls. (At least I think they're surviving, and not rebuilt.) Just across the river from the castle is the Tour Tanguy, a three or four story round tower, which is medieval and older than most of the remaining parts of the castle. Once a prison, it's now a museum about the history of Brest, mostly full of dioramas depicting the city at various times. It's actually pretty neat if you're into that kind of thing (which I admit I am). <br> <br>The main street leading down to the castle is the pedestrians-only Rue de Siam, which is lined with expensive shops and has a cluster of bars and restaurants at its base, near the harbor. It connects to the other main street, Rue Jean Jaurès, at the Place de la Liberté, which is for all intents and purposes the center of Brest. It's a big plaza, mostly below street level, running downhill from the <i>mairie</i>. There's a very modern-style fountain just in front of the <i>mairie</i>, and futher down the plaza goes under an overpass, beyond which is another big phallic monument to various war dead, with small gardens on either side. <br> <br>Brest has many bridges. My favorite is the Pont d'Iroise, which crosses the eastern end of the harbor from the outskirts of Brest/Le Relecq-Kerhuon to Plougastel. The main one across the river, and the one on most postcards, is the Pont de Recouvrance, which I think is the kind that raises up to allow ships to pass under it. (Not a drawbridge that splits in the middle, but the kind where the whole thing moves up.) It goes from the end of the Rue de Siam to somewhere just uphill from the Tour Tanguy. Further north but still pretty much in the city centre is the Pont de l'Harteloire, which is absurdly long, less because the river gets really wide and more because the bridge itself is really high up and has to start pretty far back on the bluffs. I think I've mentioned the dramatic landscape around Brest before. Steep hills everywhere, and basically a cliff from the main city to the port. There are lots of stairs in Brest, and lots of places where the front entrances to buildings are on a different level than the back or the side entrances. <br><br>I've mentioned the American Monument, which is along the fortification walls overlooking the Port de Commerce. It and the castle, which is nearby, are surrounded by little gardens and walking paths. There are some other parks in the city, too, including a big one along the banks of the river with assorted walking paths and little footbridges. There's also one, the Jardin des Explorateurs, next to the walls opposite the castle. There's a raised walkway along part of the wall and then a formal garden tucked behind it. It's a really nice place to sit (I wrote postcards there once during the February holiday), or to stand on the wall looking out to sea. <br> <br>Near the Jardin des Explorateurs is the Maison de le Fontaine, which I've mentioned before, and an eighteenth century church. A little bit north of there, close to the river, is the little Rue St. Malo, home to the one and only section of an old street to have survived the bombings. It's a short section, right at the river end of the street, but it's there. I went to find it two weekends ago. There are about ten or twelve stone houses in varying states of decay, all joined in a row and mostly without roofs or floors. (Some of them have been modified to hold, for example, restrooms and an office for the organization devoted to protecting what's left of the historic section of the street.) Most of them would have had two or three stories in their day. They face the high wall of what was once a convent across a narrow cobblestone street. There's a little fountain set into the wall that's still bubbling water. One of the bigger houses near the middle of the row has been turned into an enclosed garden, and inside it and some of the others that you can still peek into (some of them are locked tight and hung with signs proclaiming them dangerous to enter) you can still see the fireplaces and vestiges of steps or doorways. When I was there, on a drizzly weekend afternoon, it was utterly deserted except for me, and aside from being awesome, it was quiet and haunting. It's kind of a sad place, because it really is falling to pieces practically before your eyes, but it's also really amazing to find this secret little piece of the old city tucked away. I can just imagine it in 1944, a perfect little seventeenth and eighteenth century street, just standing there defiantly in the midst of destruction and chaos. It kind of surprises me that it is one of Brest's best-kept secrets, because it seems like it could be such a symbol of resilience. <br> <br> <br><br>* I actually can't think of how best to translate this right now. It basically means a town hall, but as I just said, there's more than one. There's the central town hall for the city, and then there are several others that serve specific parts of the city. I don't know what to call that in English. Somebody help me out.<br> ** On a related note, I have absolutely no idea what to do about bringing my friends souvenirs... because there are none in the conventional sense.<br> Ericahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12042385757154431516noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4520017628666989475.post-83822615927731432552012-03-12T16:18:00.001-04:002012-03-12T16:18:44.010-04:00Things That Suck About BrestThe other kind of gloomy thing about Brest is that it's just not a very nice city in a lot of ways.<br><br>For the most part, people are nice and friendly and generally helpful. Which is awesome, and kind of makes some of the rest of it hard for me to understand.<br> <br>First of all, as if Brest is not little enough to look at already, people do not seem very interested in keeping it as pretty as possible. I've already mentioned that graffiti is everywhere and on everything. Walls, fences, sidewalks, mailboxes, utility poles, street signs--nothing is immune. And as far as I can tell, it rarely or never gets cleaned up or painted over. It's almost like someone once gave the entire teenage population free rein for the night and then the next day the city just shrugged and went on about its business.<br> <br>But the vandalism doesn't stop there: Windows are frequently broken (one at the front of the laundromat I go to has had big spiderweb cracks since before Christmas and looks like it was kicked), and I have on several occasions waited at bus shelters that had been literally smashed to bits. I've never seen any of this happening, but somebody's doing it, and it's not just a once-in-a-while problem.<br> <br>Second of all, Brest is gross. All big cities are dirty to some extent, but some make more of an effort to clean up than others. Here, the sidewalks are carpeted in cigarette butts and crushed cigarette packs and empty candy and snack wrappers. Also with dog poop, although that seems to be France in general and not specifically Brest. People just don't seem to feel the need to clean up after their pets. Then again, men openly peeing in public is also not seen as a social problem, so it's hard to expect that dog poop would be.<br> <br>Broken bottles and squashed beer cans also abound, which brings us to the next point (and may also be related to all the vandalism): There is so much alcohol.<br><br>There are some folks in America right now rolling their eyes and saying, "Yeah, it's Europe." But you don't understand. Most of continental Europe, despite its casualness about alcohol, has a very different attitude towards drinking from that found in Anglophone countries. It's geared more towards enjoyment (of the drink, that is, not the drunkenness) than abuse. That's not to say that people from anywhere alcohol is consumed won't go on a binge now and then, just that that's not necessarily alcohol's only or primary social function. My German/Austrian/Belgian/Spanish/Italian/whatever else friends all certainly know how to party when called upon, but Americans and Brits and Irish and Australians are more likely to habitually drink for the drinking rather than for the drinks, if you get what I mean. There's more of an attitude that drinking is a means to an end, whereas in continental Europe that's sometimes true but not inherently. Have a beer at eleven a.m. is acceptable because there's no assumption that one drink will lead to another, and therefore no assumption that day-drinking indicates a problem. <br> <br>Brittany, however, forms a crossroads where the idea of drinking to get drunk (a lot, and often) meets the very French/European idea of having alcohol be incredibly cheap and prevalent to the point of ubiquity. It's asking for trouble. It's like American college kids with Keystone, only here the alcohol is better and stronger and no one cares if you have an ID.<br> <br>I think I've described Brest before as "a city with a drinking problem"; it's true, and I don't think it's just Brest, I think it's the whole region. <br><br>So drunk people are a common sight. Drunk men in particular: Brest obviously has many sailors, and seems to have a higher than normal concentration of young men in general, I suppose because of the higher education options available here and what's left of the industrial jobs. (Or maybe the women just don't go out as much or travel in packs as often, and my perception is not totally in sync with reality.) <br> <br>Also, the drunks in Brest do not merely haunt dark alleys and deserted midnight streets. They can be found anywhere at any hour of the day or night. I have more than once encountered drunk guys (or crazy guys, or both) hanging around bus stops in the middle of the afternoon. <br> <br> My older students answer every "What did you do over the holiday?" type question with "drink" or "go out" or "make a party". They think it's okay to drive drunk.<br><br>Bar fights happen. Soccer brawls happen. I've seen at least two big fights on the street here, one of which we were actually present at, right outside a bar as it was closing. It was a few months ago now, but I remember lots of shouting and big plastic traffic barriers being thrown around and the bartender running outside to intervene, and apparently somebody got stabby with a broken bottle, although I somehow missed that part. <br><br>On New Year's Eve, while I was waiting at the bus stop with Jimena and Neala on our way downtown, a car pulled up beside us and someone inside chucked a lit firecracker at us--yes, AT us--before driving off again. It rolled off to the side, and I realized what it was and turned around and kind of shooed the other two a few steps away before it went off, and nobody got hurt. But what the hell.*<br> <br>It's not often that I've actually felt unsafe walking around Brest, even by myself and even at night. But there are places I avoid, and especially avoid loitering. (I've gotten unwanted attention from men in the Place de la Liberté on two occasions, one of which was before it even got dark.) And it's also not often that I see other women walking around by themselves after dark. In fact, I don't even see women walking in groups without any men nearly as often as I see the opposite. Maybe that's just a French thing because of the gendered culture and maybe it's a Brest-specific thing because of the seemingly skewed sex ratio, I don't know, but it is what it is. <br> <br>In any case, one last thing is the construction. Maybe this is nitpicky, because it doesn't actually say anything about the atmosphere in Brest, but it's had a big impact on my time here nonetheless. Brest is filled with construction work. They are putting in a new tram line across the city (to be operational more or less right after I leave), and so half the main streets have been blocked off and torn up and full of gravel and cement and barriers and construction vehicles at any given time since before I arrived. It's ugly and noisy and dusty and, quite frankly, a safety hazard a lot of the time. I'm amazed I haven't seen anyone fall into a hole yet. The whole future tram line is one giant death trap.<br> <br>In addition to the tram, there are also always minor construction projects happening all over the place, with holes in the middle of streets or sidewalks torn up and barricaded, or blocked by scaffolding. Obviously, that could be anywhere, not just Brest, but it doesn't exactly earn Brest any extra attractiveness or liveability points. Meanwhile, much of the port area is rundown or abandoned or totally demolished, and also littered with construction equipment. It looks ugly even from above, and seriously sketchy when you're walking through it.<br> <br>So that's where I live. (I swear I'm safe here, Mom.) I do have to say I'm somewhat glad to have grown up where I did instead of in the suburbs or some cute little town, because despite everything I just said, I don't dislike Brest and its rougher side doesn't really faze me. So now that I've spent this entire post more or less hating on Brest for no real reason, I promise a more positive update next. <br> <br><br>* I know a few people who got egged in Cork, which is definitely mean, but at least the risk of serious injury is pretty minimal compared to freaking explosives.<br> Ericahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12042385757154431516noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4520017628666989475.post-85281503038912203262012-03-04T10:32:00.001-05:002012-03-04T10:32:55.546-05:00Strategically Important Port CityI wrote the first take on this a few days ago, and it got swallowed up<br>by a computer malfunction. (You're probably seeing a pattern by now.<br>My computer actually doesn't crash as often as it might seem, but when<br>it does, it pretty much always takes something unsaved down with it.)<br>Take two.<p>I've written before about how for me, and I think for many, if not<br>most, Americans, one of the big things about Europe is the constant<br>proximity to the past.<p>I've actually had to try to explain to students before that just<br>because American history is shorter doesn't mean it's somehow<br>inherently less interesting, but that's beside the point.*<p>The point is, the depth of history here is something it's actually<br>possible to lose sight of in Brest. I'm always thinking about how<br>almost everything around me is so very recent, but I don't always<br>really THINK about it. If that makes sense. What I'm trying to say is<br>that if I'm not actively thinking about it, I don't notice. It doesn't<br>strike me as odd. I walk downtown to marvel at the castle, the old<br>fortification walls, the Maison de la Fontaine, the eighteenth-century<br>church across the river, but it doesn't always register that those<br>things should not seem so unique and exciting at this point in my<br>stay. A glimpse of old stone walls or crooked doorframes should not be<br>enough to draw me out of my path, but it is. And I suppose, coming<br>from where I do, that's not that surprising, but now that I live in<br>France, it is. There should be more than a handful of<br>things-that-might-be-old scattered throughout this city. I should be<br>surrounded by them. Buildings older than my entire country should be<br>commonplace.<p>So anytime I leave Brest, I'm suddenly reminded of what everywhere<br>else in France looks like. And I become that awkward girl with the<br>camera taking dozens of pictures of everything in sight, even things<br>that must be totally mundane to people who live there, because they're<br>still super exciting to me.<p>When you tell people outside of Brest that you live in Brest, they<br>become sympathetic, even pitying. "Oh, well," they say apologetically.<br>"It was destroyed in the war, you know."<p>Yes, we know. It's the first thing most of us learned about Brest. It<br>had the crap bombed out of it--something like 80% of the city was<br>flattened. Tons of civilians died, and most of the rest were<br>presumably made homeless. It was the Allies that did it.<p>And that's why we don't have nice things.<p>And that brings me to another place where I think being American skews<br>my perspective.<p>With the notable exception of Hawaii, the United States has for the<br>most part been comfortably far removed from modern war. We ship our<br>soldiers elsewhere to do the fighting. Nowadays, most of the country<br>goes about its daily business while barely noticing what's happening<br>in Iraq and Afghanistan. I think it was different in the World Wars; I<br>don't believe things were so easy on the homefront then. But it also<br>wasn't Europe. We have landscapes dotted with battlefields, and we<br>have our fair share of historic monuments that no longer stand because<br>they were burned or otherwise destroyed by war--but these things<br>happened many, many years ago, long out of living memory.<br>Twentieth-century wars happened far away, too far away to pose an<br>immediate threat to Americans at home, and life in the U.S. could<br>return to normal relatively quickly after the treaties were signed. We<br>are not surrounded by physical reminders, and I think we do not always<br>realize that other places were not so lucky.<p>Here? It's inescapable. I live now in a city that is not only marked<br>by war, but totally altered. Hardly anything is left from before<br>besides those things I've mentioned. One of the few pre-WWII houses<br>still standing is near my neighborhood, and is marked by a plaque<br>claiming it as the home of a member of the French Resistance. The<br>"American Monument" overlooking the port, a memorial to the American<br>and French forces of WWI, bears a plaque explaining that it is a<br>reproduction of the original monument destroyed in the Battle for<br>Brest in WWII. Meanwhile, I walk every day down streets that less than<br>seventy years ago were nothing but rubble and blood. Streets where at<br>least one of my great-uncles once walked in uniform and robbed the<br>corpse of a dead German soldier or two.<p>Even outside of Brest, it's inescapable. The coast, to the west and<br>the south, is lined with fortifications protecting the harbor. Some of<br>them date to the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries and were later<br>altered and used by the Nazis. But these are outnumbered by the<br>crumbling remains of twentieth century bunkers, piles of broken<br>concrete and twisted metal and man-made burrows now littered with<br>empty bottles and covered in graffiti. They are everywhere, and they<br>are unmistakable. They are as unavoidable and as ugly as war itself.<p>It's very sad, to see the landscape marred like this and to think<br>about why. And it's very strange to me, having never had to think<br>about what it must be like to live always in the shadow of WWII. It's<br>easy to see why it's still such a sensitive subject for so many in<br>Europe. Even if you were to ignore the changes in government policies<br>and social attitudes that still linger today, the physical traces of<br>war are still everywhere. "Out of sight, out of mind" is something of<br>a luxury, if you think about it.<p>Brest doesn't look damaged today. That much is out of sight. It just<br>looks new. But when you remember WHY it's new--then it becomes tragic.<p><br>* I am of course referring here just to the history of Europeans in<br>America, i.e. written history.Ericahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12042385757154431516noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4520017628666989475.post-37911679546122736272012-03-02T04:36:00.001-05:002012-03-02T04:40:04.862-05:00Whoa, March?!I'm still behind on blogging, but I'm no longer so far behind that I feel like I can't keep up with my life, so that's nice. I'm also back at work, and this has been a pretty easy week so far. It's really hard to believe I have just a few weeks left before my contract is up. One thing about the French school calendar is that all the breaks really make the time fly.<br />
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The biggest development this week is that I FINALLY have a working bank card again, after an entire month and one final setback in which it turned out my card was still blocked from the ATM incident in<br />Quimper and I had to go to the bank and say "My card doesn't work and I don't understand why because it's brand new" and wait for the woman there for figure out the problem and give me a lecture while she fixed<br />it.<br />
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In other news, we've had some gorgeous weather lately. Yesterday was a bit like the foggy, gloomy last week of vacation, but Wednesday was like summer. In February. It was amazing. I walked around without a<br />jacket, and my friends and I had an afternoon drink outside on the terrace of a café near the castle. It's funny how this strangely nonwintery winter has kept me from even realizing how much I missed spring!<br />
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Also on Wednesday, I finally spent some quality time with that keyboard in the music library. It was a little terrible, since I hadn't touched a piano in months and have never exactly been a virtuoso, but it felt so good. I've been missing music a lot for the last couple of years, especially since I left college, and I'm looking<br />forward to getting back in the game once I'm settled somewhere else for a while. (I actually briefly looked into the possibility of joining a choir in Brest, but by the time I did so it was a little late in the year.)<br />
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On that note, most of my spare energy in the last week or so has been taken up with job hunting. I've found at least two and possibly three positions that I'm applying for for now, but they're all just for the summer. I'm still not sure what's going to happen in after August even if one of these works out, but we'll see. I do know that at this point, it looks like it's likely to be back in the U.S. I have mixed feelings about that, but the EU does not seem to have terribly mixed feelings about [not] hiring Americans for not-super-skilled jobs.<br />
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In any case, I just want to take a moment to give a shout-out to the internet. I can't imagine living abroad without it. (I can't imagine a lot of things without it, but that's the magic of the moment.) Thanks to email and instant messaging, I correspond not just with my family and close friends back home, but with a lifetime's worth of friends and acquaintances all over the world, including some in developing countries. I sometimes lament my failure to send more letters and postcards, but the truth is I'm just as in touch with friends via email. (Or at least, I could be. I also lament my failure to send emails with any regularity...) Facebook lets me stay at least nominally in touch with people I'd have lost contact with years ago even without leaving the country if it weren't for Facebook--I'm better connected to my friends there than I would be being pen pals<br />the old-fashioned way. Meanwhile, I call each of my parents about once a week, give or take, and my sister only slightly less often. And that's because I'm busy; if I want to talk to them more often, there's absolutely nothing stopping me, because do you know how much those calls cost? $0.01 per minute if I use Google Voice. Something like $0.02 or $0.03 per minute if I use Skype. (Compare to upwards of a dollar a minute on either my French phone or my international phone.) And of course, if we plan ahead, we can voice or even video chat using either of those mediums completely for free. It's an amazing world we live in.<br />
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Not that we can't still imagine more amazing worlds: My friends and I watched Midnight In Paris the other night (which means I've now seen all of about three of this year's Oscar nominees), and it's now<br />officially one of my favorite films.<br />
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It does make walking around Brest at night even more sad by comparison, though.Ericahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12042385757154431516noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4520017628666989475.post-72829568573191054712012-02-23T14:11:00.001-05:002012-02-23T14:11:25.167-05:00Living in BrittanyBackground: France is divided into a bunch of administrative regions, of which Brittany (Bretagne in French) is one*. Each region is subdivided into departments. Brittany has four departments: Ille-et-Vilaine in the east, Côtes d'Armor in the north, Morbihan in the south, and Finistère, where Brest is located, in the west. (And let's not even get into the various unofficial cultural regions, which I'm only beginning to figure out. Just look how confusing it is: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bretagne_historic_location_map.svg">MAP</a>.) <br> <br>The Breton name for Finistère is Penn-ar-Bed, which means "the end of the earth". I don't know for sure, but that seems like a legitimate origin for the French name, too; in modern French the translation would be something like "Fin de la Terre", which is pretty similar. It actually sounds like it might even be a Frenchification** of the Latin.<br> <br>In any case, in theory, Finistère (along with the western part of Côtes d'Armor) is where one is most likely to hear Breton spoken. I suppose it's a similar phenomenon to that in Ireland; the original Celtic language survived mainly in the westernmost regions because they were the ones furthest from the encroaching influence of what was to become the dominant language. That said, Breton is an endangered language, spoken by only a fraction of the population, most of whom are old. (The immersion and bilingual schools scattered throughout Brittany are not funded by the state, because French historically does not play well with other languages, and so they only reach a tiny percentage of children.) So in practice, I have never actually heard it used. I'm sure that's partly because I live in the city, where it's less likely than in rural areas, but I've never encountered it in my short forays into smaller towns, either. The exceptions, of course, are Breton words that have been adopted into French (names of traditional foods being the most obvious example) and Breton words used in the names of businesses and products. Place names are also commonly Breton, or at least Frenchified Breton, which makes them exceptionally difficult for me to figure out how to pronounce. <br> <br>Sometimes in classes where I'm lucky enough to have the class roster in front of me, I study it while I'm waiting for students to complete some individual or group task without my interference. Sometimes I'm just trying to figure out who's who, but other times I'm studying the names themselves and trying to guess which are French and which are Breton. Classically French names are common: All of the Marions and Laurines and Elodies, the Valentins and Lucs and Cléments, leave no doubt. And sometimes the Breton names--Riwan, Aziliz, Killian, Nolwenn--are just as obvious. Others I'm less sure about. They sound like they could go either way. Last names can be especially difficult, but there are plenty of first names I still can't identify.<br> <br>Then I start to wonder about the students with the Breton names. Do their siblings also have Breton names? Do their parents speak Breton, or did they just like the name? Do they themselves speak Breton? It's not likely. But... are they among those who still identify as Breton more than, or even instead of, French? That's more common than you might think. The people of Brittany are extremely proud of their heritage and their traditions (the Breton flag is everywhere), but more than that, there are people who claim Brittany is not France and aren't speaking figuratively or trying to make a point. "I've never been to France," they'll say. The "BZH LIBRE" graffiti I sometimes see would even suggest there is still a movement (how big, and how politically serious, I wouldn't know) for Breton independence.<br> <br>When I think about it, that makes it seem a little strange that I don't have more of a sense of there being a culture clash here. The fact that I don't know which names are Breton and which are French, that I don't think twice about Brittany-specific targeted advertising, that a <u>lack</u> of bilingual signage strikes me as odd... it's just funny how normal things like that seem. I've spent very little time outside of Brittany, comparatively, and it occurs to me now that I don't really know what life in the rest of France is like. The differences must be so much more than drinking wine instead of cider and beer and eating white-flour crêpes instead of buckwheat. It must be more, even, then being away from the megaliths and the pervasiveness of fishing and sailing culture. They say, for example, that Brittany is by far the most Catholic part of France, and while I haven't seen much evidence that people are especially religious today, there are churches and abbeys and religious sculptures around every bend. Everything is named after St. Anne and St. Yves. Meanwhile, the region is full of festivals, festivals of all kinds, but especially ones celebrating traditional music and dance and storytelling, not to mention maritime traditions. Some of my students have told me they play traditional instruments, and often some of the street musicians at the Sunday market are playing Breton music. The market itself is a smorgasbord of local foods I take for granted that I imagine my friends elsewhere in France may have never seen. The libraries and bookstores have huge sections on Breton tales and proverbs and history. Every other car I see has a triskell sticker or one of a little cartoon person in Breton dress. Women carry shopping bags and men wear scarves that have the Breton flag on them--and here I thought putting your flag on everything was an American thing. Most people may not speak Breton, but it's printed everywhere.<br> <br>I realize that no country's culture is uniform and that what it means to be French varies from region to region elsewhere. There are probably traditions everywhere that are region-specific. (They say the middle of the country, away from the influence of bordering nations, is the most "French".) But here, where some people still insist they are not French at all, where most of the population was bilingual until fifty years ago and many still wore traditional costumes up until WWII, there's truly a dual culture. Brittany remained very distinct from the rest of France until astonishingly recently, and it still shows. It shows in ways I think I must not even realize, since I have nothing to which to compare what I see here. And that's just really interesting to me. <br> <br>I wonder what other ways my experience of France hasn't been typical...<br><br>* Not to be confused with the cultural region of Brittany or the historical duchy of Brittany, of which the modern administrative region only contains about 80%.<br> ** That's a real word, I swear.<br> Ericahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12042385757154431516noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4520017628666989475.post-194443328881255222012-02-22T09:31:00.001-05:002012-02-22T09:31:09.680-05:00The Saga of the Wallet, ContinuedSo, I wrote about how my wallet got stolen, and about the trauma I went through over the next couple of days trying to get everything sorted out, and about how my wallet was eventually returned to me, sans cash but otherwise intact.<br> <br>Last Tuesday, I picked up my new bank card (for which I was charged a five euro replacement fee, by the way), and thought that was more or less the end of the saga, other than figuring out when and how to get my new American cards, which are currently in my parents' possession. <br> <br>Then last Wednesday, I took a day trip to Quimper to visit the museums there. The first thing I did upon getting off the bus was walk across the street to an ATM to get some cash.<br><br>CODE INCORRECT. (Or whatever it says when that happens.)<br> <br>I looked at it for a minute in astonishment. I was pretty darn sure I hadn't screwed it up. I tried again.<br><br>CODE INCORRECT.<br><br>At that point I started to panic, realizing that my new card must also have a new PIN, even though no one at the bank had bothered to mention this to me. I hit "cancel" and got the card back. For a second I freaked out about the fact that I was no an hour from home with no access to money, before I remembered the bus home costs three euros and I definitely had at least that much on me.<br> <br>Then I thought, "Wait a second, this is ridiculous." I put the card back in the machine and tried again.<br><br>I think I was hoping that the three strikes and out rule did not apply if you started over entirely, but obviously modern technology is too smart for that, and, predictably, the machine ate my card.<br> <br>At that point I was seriously pissed off. I went inside the bank (which fortunately was a branch of the one that holds my account). I explained to the woman that the machine outside had taken my card, which was confusing to me because I had thought I was using the correct code. "That's strange," she said. No kidding. I gave her my passport so she could look up my account, and then explained that I had just gotten a replacement card, but that since no one had said anything to me about a new code, I had assumed it was still the same. (I left out the part about how they had specifically asked me the week before about whether the code had been lost along with the card, a question whose purpose I do not understand if they were going to change the code regardless of the answer.) She then explained that the new code would have been sent to me by mail, at which point I must have looked horrorstruck, because she said something like, "Does that not sound familiar?" I explained that I live at the school where I work and it's closed for the holiday. No mail. I think I then tried to reiterate the fact that NOBODY FREAKING TOLD ME I was going to have a new code in the first place. <br> <br>She said she would go try to get my card out of the ATM, and then she could withdraw some cash for me if I wanted.<br><br>"There's no other way to get the code?"<br><br>"No. It can only be sent to your home address. It's for your security."<br> <br>Seriously? I'm standing right in front of you in person, passport in hand (a passport which contains not just one, but two photos of me, I might add). What's more secure than that? Send me back to my own branch if you must, but surely that would at least be enough for them? I even understand if bank employees aren't allowed to access PINs, but the original letter was generated somehow and handled by some person, so there's got to be a way to print a new one and hand it to me.<br> <br>Needless to say, that little discovery blighted my whole day. But more than that, I had plans for my vacation: At the very least, I was going to spend a couple more days in Paris, I was going to check out Saint Malo, and, most importantly, I was going to spend four days in Barcelona with my friends. I had put off buying tickets until I had my trip to Senegal sorted out, and then until I got my new bank card, but I had intended to go home from Quimper that very day and book my trains and flights and hostel. But try as I might, I couldn't think of any way to do any of that without using my bank card at all. Even if I went back to the bank and withdraw a huge sum of cash, that would still be all I had. If something happened to it, or I ran out, in a place where my bank doesn't exist, I'd be screwed. If I somehow found myself in a situation where I couldn't use cash, I'd be screwed. There is no way to use a French bank card without the code (except online, which would get me my plane tickets and maybe my hostel, if I was lucky--some hostels prefer cash--but nothing else). And of course, I didn't even have my American cards, which are a pain to use anyway, to back me up, so I couldn't even pay for my whole trip with a credit card to be paid off when I got back.<br> <br>So, wallet thief, I hope that twelve euros + however much Czech kroner was really worth it, because you ruined the next three weeks of my life. I may not get another chance to go to Barcelona, which we'd been planning since last fall, and I certainly won't get another chance to go with these people.<br> <br>It's not really so bad, in the end. I think I needed some time at home to work on stuff like powering through my TESOL course and looking for jobs for the summer and next year. I'm getting some reading done. I'm working on blog posts. I'm getting some hiking in (though transportation continues to be an issue), because what better time to explore my immediate surroundings than when I'm stuck here anyway, especially since I've so far proved to be insufficiently motivated to go out and do such things during my free time when I'm not on vacation. And of course, I'm saving a lot of money; there's nothing better than lack of easy access to money to keep one from spending it. But it still sucks, because the things I WOULD have done were things I won't have time to do otherwise. I'm not looking forward to hearing about what I missed in Barcelona, and I'm not looking forward to the inevitable questions about what I did during the holidays when I go back to work. (Some of the teachers already knew about Barcelona, which will make for especially awkward conversations.) I'm trying to be as productive as possible so I can feel like the time off wasn't wasted, but I'm not sure how well that's going to work for someone like me.<br> <br>Especially since there are now only a little over two months left before this is over...<br> Ericahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12042385757154431516noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4520017628666989475.post-35286748074107775532012-02-22T09:30:00.001-05:002012-02-22T09:30:57.799-05:00Holiday Travels, Part 9: The Empire Of The Dead"Remembering you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose." – Steve Jobs<br><br><br>The entrance to the Paris Catacombs is right next to a busy intersection in the heart of the Montparnasse neighborhood. It's nothing, really--a sort of shack next to a small garden. Signs listing the entrance fees (in English as well as French) also warn of the number of steps to be climbed, and that the catacombs are not a place for children or the overly sensitive.<br> <br>The lines are long, and people are ushered in in groups, with long pauses between. (As a nominal preservation measure, there are strict limits on the number of people allowed inside the catacombs at any one time.) When you finally enter the shack, signs on the wall describe the geology underlying Paris, and show you a diagram of the location of the catacombs relative to various other layers. There is a ticket booth at which to pay the entrance fee and retrieve a pamphlet (in an assortment of languages). Just to the right, so close to the counter it seems ridiculous to have a second employee checking tickets, is a narrow, winding staircase that leads down, down, down into the depths. The noise of the city vanishes almost at once. When you reach the bottom, you are deeper inside the earth than even the Métro. <br> <br>The first spaces are relatively open and brightly lit, hung with photographs and diagrams and various texts describing the history of the catacombs. They were dug first as quarries, and were the source of the stones used to build some of the most famous buildings in Paris. Later they were hideouts, for outlaws and refugees alike. In the late eighteenth century, a section of them was modified and consecrated and became the final resting place of hundreds of thousands of dead Parisians, some of them already centuries old, who were systematically exhumed from various cemeteries and churchyards over the course of the next hundred years.<br> <br>You must walk through some distance of empty catacombs before reaching the crypt. They are narrow limestone tunnels, dark and damp. The walls are rough, carved or painted or hung with small plaques here and there, left from the quarry and construction days or commemorating something about them. The floors are uneven, but in places without gravel they are worn smooth. Today the passages are dimly lit with small bulbs every few meters, which provide enough light to see the black stripe painted down the middle of the ceiling, left from the days of candlelit tourism when visitors needed some way to make sure they were on the right path. Nowadays the path is unmistakable--locked iron gates stand in the way of any possible wrong turn. They detract from the feel of the place a bit, but if you're careful and can manage to be alone in a stretch of tunnel for a moment, you can feel the silence and isolation almost as surely as if you really were alone--remarkable when you remember that just meters above your head, cars are whizzing down a street lined with high-rises and crowds of pedestrians.<br> <br>There are a few interesting sights along the route. The marks of quarrying tools. A deep well, far below the path. Some ornate 3D carvings, reminiscent of sand castles, worked by a prisoner, that seem completely surreal and out of place. But the highlight of the visit is the ossuary. Past the silent human guards and several signs warning visitors to be respectful (this section of the catacombs is not merely a repository; it is hallowed ground), a monumental doorway guards the entrance to the crypt, and its inscription reads: "Stop! It is here the empire of the dead."<br> <br>Before I go any further, a quick tangent is necessary. I remember writing something while I was in Ireland about how—as ridiculous as it sounded and as pompous and douchebaggy as it made me feel—I feared I might actually be getting bored of castles. Not, of course, that I think anyone could ever <u>actually</u> be bored of castles, because some things never get old (so to speak), just that they didn't seem to have quite as much impact as they did at first. One of the pitfalls of travel is that sometimes, the more impressive things one sees, the more it takes to seem impressive. I have seen a lot of amazing and beautiful things, and I haven't even come close to ceasing to appreciate them, but they don't always strike quite as hard as they used to. The tenth castle, the twentieth medieval church, just can't make a heart race quite as easily as the first unless there's something else that's special about it--a special personal connection, perhaps. It's sad, but it's true. I still love seeing new things, and I still marvel at beauty and history, but I'm a little jaded, all the same. <br> <br>I told you all of that not to make myself sound like an asshole (although I'm aware that that's a side effect), but in order to tell you this and have it carry the appropriate weight: When I stepped through the doorway into the ossuary, what I saw stopped me in my tracks. I mean actually. There was a pause to allow my eyes to adjust, and as I realized what I was looking at, I changed at once from paused to simply frozen.<br> <br>Perhaps I should also point out here that I am not squeamish about bones (quite the opposite, in fact), nor are they exotic to me. Not only have I seen plenty of them in exhibit contexts, I've handled them and studied them in excavation and laboratory contexts. In fact, if and when I go back to school for my Master's in archaeology, there is a pretty good chance that I may decide to specialize in the study of human remains. So it wasn't just the presence of the bones, or the fact of being in a burial place, that did it. It was something else.<br> <br>I think it was the scale. Imagine several million people all in one place. More than in all but the biggest U.S. cities. Now imagine that all you have of them are their bones, stacked neatly along either side of a narrow path in piles taller than a man and several yards deep, stretching farther than the eye can see away into the darkness.<br> <br>I'd heard the numbers--roughly this many people, in a space covering roughly six or seven city blocks--but I was completely unprepared for the sight of that many bones. It defies imagination, let alone comprehension.<br> <br>But you do imagine. I did, at least. Every single one of those bones once belonged to a person, to someone who walked and talked and worked and laughed. Someone who, at some point in the past, had a home, and a family. Someone who ate, and cried, and loved and was loved by someone. Now all of them are anonymous, lying in pieces and stacked up with their neighbors like firewood somewhere in the bowels of one of the world's greatest cities.<br> <br>Most of the bones that are visible are long bones and skulls. Sometimes ribs, here and there. The lack of pelvises puzzled me a bit, but everything else I assume has fallen down among the cracks or is lying in heaps somewhere out of sight behind the walls of arms and legs, if it hasn't already rotted away. Everything is very neat*, but no one is intact. It would be impossible ever to try to match up what pieces go together.<br> <br>Sometimes they are arranged into shapes. A bulging column is set apart from the stacks lining the walls. The stacks are decorated with a cross made of tibiae here, a heart-shaped ring of skulls there. <br><br>And they just go on and on. If the catacombs seemed endless before you reached the ossuary, that's nothing compared to being with the bones. You can only see a short distance at a time, between the dim lights and the twists and turns of the passages, and always the space that you can see is entirely lined with bones, sometimes with more piles of bones stacked up in columns in the middle of wider areas. It's cold and damp and dark, and silent except for the voices and muffled footsteps of fellow tourists, and the water dripping from above. You keep moving forward, and the stacks of bones keep extending out of sight, and you pass a gate and see more bones beyond it, and you round a corner and the stacks of bones continue ahead of you just as they did behind. Ad infinitum. You're surrounded, constantly. Everywhere, there are more skulls staring at you. You have no choice but to look death in the face. You have nowhere to go but past more former people. You have no idea when it's going to end. You don't know how far you've walked. You forget how long you've been walking. Time is irrelevant here. <br> <br>Some people apparently think it's scary. Adults whisper, and even college-age men speak in hushed tones. Girls of ten or twelve complain loudly and theatrically about being creeped out. Teenagers laugh and joke--disrespect, or just discomfort? <br> <br>Those of us walking alone snap pictures, many more pictures than people traveling in groups, even though groups are more likely to have a flashlight or two to aid the process. Partly it's the same morbid curiosity that drew us there in the first place, but also, even the underworld is smaller through a camera lens. <br> <br>And it is the underworld literally as well as figuratively--above, the City of Light bustles with life, and in the catacombs, the people who were once that life themselves languish in the dark and the stillness.<br> <br>Counterpoint. Yin and yang. The circle of life. <br><br>An article about the catacombs by Ted Gup that appeared in Smithsonian magazine years ago (I believe it was sometime in the late '90s, I found it when sorting through stacks of old magazines before my parents moved last summer) ends with this paragraph: "There is a strange irony about the catacombs. The stones that were removed from the early quarries went to make the great buildings of Paris—the Louvre and Notre Dame... But those who built and created the majesty of modern Paris—generations of architects, laborers, shopkeepers, soldiers and peasants—were destined to lose their individual identities, reduced to a kind of human landfill. They would occupy the same dark cavities from which the stones of Paris had been removed. They and the stones had traded places... The city of Paris, City of Light, city of gourmands and lovers, of Notre Dame and the Louvre—this is their legacy and the grand monument that is their due."<br><br>I didn't think it was scary. Eerie, perhaps. Intense. Powerful. But not frightening. <br><br>I did find it profoundly sad--and also weirdly inspirational. Someday, sooner or later, we will all be no more than they, and we may be just as anonymous, just as forgotten. Who was it who called death the great equalizer? It's true. Not just because we all come to the same thing, but because it becomes very clear in a place like Paris's catacombs that we are all just parts of the same whole. There is no one thing that everyone in the catacombs has in common except for where they ended up--and the fact that they no longer have any other identity. But together, they become the past, the fabric of a city. They are us, or we are them, or it doesn't matter, in the end, who any of us is. It matters what we do, all of us together, to lead to the next phase of history, and the next. It matters what we contribute to what will be left behind when everyone living now is nameless and faceless.<br> <br>There is no greater motivator than mortality.<br><br>And mortality is inescapable in the catacombs. If the bones themselves are not reminder enough, or if you possess either the ability to block them out or the inability to think of them as people, there are also written reminders. Before each new section of stacked remains is a sign bearing the name of their original burial place and the date that they were moved to the catacombs. Also, scattered throughout the ossuary are dozens and dozens of signs bearing quotes. There are too many to read them all, and some are in shadow anyway, unreadable without a flashlight or candle. Most are about death, some about life. Some are in French, some in Latin, some are religious and some secular, and they draw on everything from Bible passages to lines from Homer and Virgil to Enlightenment philosophers. They are perhaps a strange tribute given that the population of the catacombs was probably largely illiterate in life, but they certainly set the mood for today's visitors.<br> <br>"God is not the author of death."<br>"Believe that each day is for you the last."<br>"Come people of the world, come into these silent abodes and your soul so calm with be struck by the voice that rises from their interior. It is here that the greatest of masters, the Tomb, has his school of truth."<br> "Happy is he who has always before his eyes the hour of his death, and who readies himself all his days to die."<br>"Fool that you are, why do you promise to live a long time, you who cannot count on a single day."<br> <br>[Forgive my terrible translations.]<br><br>When you finally emerge, back up another long, winding set of stairs, daylight feels strange and you feel out of place on the street among the living. The careless bustle of the city just doesn't look the same as it did before. Maybe it won't. And maybe that's not such a bad thing.<br> <br><br>* In the parts that tourists see. In some of the off-limits parts of the catacombs, there really are just heaps of bones lying willy-nilly.<br> Ericahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12042385757154431516noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4520017628666989475.post-60573665005896560572012-02-16T12:28:00.001-05:002012-02-16T12:28:59.050-05:00Holiday Travels, Part 8: Paris, Round 2My scenic train ride from Prague to Berlin cheered me up a little after the disappointment of that morning. It really was very beautiful, though it got dark before we reached Berlin, so I hope the last part wasn't supposed to be the prettiest. Berlin has an epic, multi-level central train station, and although it still wasn't super exciting, it was a vast improvement over Wuppertal. My trip on the night train was also a vast improvement--there was only one other person in my compartment when I got on (for the record, it was a middle-aged man reading Twilight...), and it never did get full. I don't remember whether I slept or not, but either way it was a far less crappy night than the trip to Prague. I arrived back in Paris on the morning of the 28th, bought an enormous pain au chocolat, and went to meet my friend Thalia, who promptly whisked me off on the RER to the town where she lives on the outer rim of Paris's suburbs.<br> <br>Étampe is cute, if small. The center has a small-village feel to it, and it has a charming little canal. The major downside to staying there was the fact that the town center is at the bottom of a monstrous hill, while the newer neighborhoods, including the one where Thalia's school is, are at the top. This proved especially challenging on the morning of the second day I was there, when I went out to find patches of ice everywhere. On the positive side, Étampe actually has old buildings, which continues to be a novelty for me. The highlights include several old churches, a half-timbered tavern building, a really interesting old stuccoed building with a courtyard that's now the public library, and, up on the hill overlooking the center, the remains of a rather oddly-shaped castle. It's almost clover-shaped, four round towers stuck together around a central point. I've never seen anything like it. Unfortunately, in December when I was there, it was "decorated" with "holiday" lights, and not even a little bit tastefully. (Among other issues, it was continually changing colors.)<br> <br>After Thalia showed me around Étampe a bit, we headed back into the city to meet a friend of hers for dinner at what may well be the only taqueria in Paris, followed by drinks at a surprisingly inexpensive (read: prices comparable to anywhere outside of Paris) café, and then a wander that eventually took us to Notre Dame. I think that was the first time I'd seen the cathedral at night, and it's every bit as amazing as it is in photos. But then, I just never get tired of hanging around Notre Dame.<br> <br>The next morning I got up early and went back into Paris by myself to go to the Musée National du Moyen Âge (formerly known as the Musée du Cluny). It was my first stop because I was super excited about it; it was one of the places I'd been dreaming of going since last summer when I first started seriously thinking about the fact that I was about to spend eight months of my life in France. Sadly, it turned out to be somewhat disappointing. Not that there weren't some really cool things there. The special exhibit at the time had a lot of illuminated manuscripts, for one thing. There was a scattering of nice tapestries and decorative art pieces. You can go into part of the ruined Roman baths below the museum, which was awesome, and some parts of the mansion the museum is housed in are more or less original. And of course, I got to see the famous <i>Dame à la licorne</i> tapestry series, which was probably the highlight of that day. They're hanging by themselves in a specially lit room, and I just sat there for a long time studying them. But everything else in the museum, which was a lot, was a bit of a letdown after all my excitement. It's a lot, a LOT of religious art and paraphernalia, and I'd really been expecting/hoping for more secular, everyday sorts of things. That's what I get for being an archaeologist instead of an art historian, I guess. But even so, the Art Museum of Philadelphia (yes, Philadelphia! on the other side of the Atlantic!) has a better collection of arms and armor. Just saying.<br> <br>Thalia arrived around the time I was finishing up, and we got crêpes and then went to the Crypte Archéologique de Notre Dame. Don't be fooled by the name--it's not like a tomb. No bodies or bones. What it is is a jumble of ruins, with bits and pieces visible of all the layers that make up the heart of the city, from Roman walls to medieval streets to baroque gardens to a nineteenth-century orphanage. It's confusing, of course, and you can only walk around the excavated area, not through it or over it, so much of it is hard to see. There are models and diagrams every few feet to help you try to sort it out, and I still had to puzzle over some of it for a while. But it's fascinating, and it's all surrounded by too much historical exposition to read it all without spending hours there below Notre Dame. (I made it about halfway and then skimmed the rest. Thalia gave up before I did, or was spending less time than I was on trying to figure out the ruins; either way, she was waiting near the exit before I was done.) It was awesome. <br> <br>Afterwards, we went to get in line to see the famous stained glass window at Saint-Chapelle. However, the line was absurd and I decided there were better things to do. Thalia and I split up, and I headed for Montparnasse and the entrance to the catacombs... but no dice. It was late afternoon by then, and I got there just fifteen minutes before the last entry of the day. The line was short, so I waited hopefully, but didn't make the cut. I retreated one metro stop to regroup with Thalia (at a chocolate shop) and we took a leisurely walk in the direction of the Musée d'Orsay, which stays open late on Thursday evenings. Thalia's route took us past Saint-Sulpice, which I hadn't seen before, so we stopped in for a look. Since it was getting close to dusk, it was quite dark inside, too dark to really appreciate some of the decoration, but it's still a neat church. And it has a plaque on the wall reminding visitors, in multiple languages, that<i> The Da Vinci Code</i> is a work of fiction and much of what it says about Saint-Sulpice is pure speculation, if not just blatantly untrue. I'll admit that at this point it's been so long since I read <i>The Da Vinci Code</i> that I don't really remember the significance of Saint-Sulpice to the plot, but I still got a kick out of that. <br> <br>Meanwhile, it seemed that many people had shared our plan to take advantage of Orsay's extended hours, and the line was exceptionally long. We decided to wait it out (there wasn't really anything better to do at that point in the evening) and got sandwiches to eat in line. I don't fully remember now, but I think it took us somewhere between an hour and an hour and a half to get in, which still left us a respectable amount of time*, long enough for both a thorough look at a special exhibit about English Romanticism during the time of Oscar Wilde and a quick pass through the crowded Impressionist gallery. <br> <br>The special exhibit was great. I mean, it was art (and really interesting, sexy art, to boot) in historical and social context, and I think I've already said more than was necessary about my feelings on that particular subject. Part of what was so great, though, was that it wasn't just paintings, or even paintings and sculpture; there were also decorative arts and some photographs and even a fashion display, much to my delight. And there were Oscar Wilde quotes painted everywhere. I don't even remember now what I wanted to say about why I thought it was so well-done, but I really enjoyed it.<br> <br>I also really enjoyed the Impressionist wing, though I'd like to go back another time, maybe early in the day when it's less crowded, and take more time with it. And of course, there are tons of other things in Orsay that I didn't get to see at all. For example, one of my very favorite paintings is <i>Starry Night</i> by Van Gogh. This is not the famous swirly <i>Starry Night</i>, but a darker, slightly more realistic-looking river scene--it's also called <i>Starry Night Over The Rhone</i>, to distinguish it from the other <i>Starry Night</i>. Anyway, after not seeing it at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, I had looked it up and discovered it was in the possession of the Musée d'Orsay, at which point I got really excited about the prospect of seeing it in person the following week. And when Thalia and I finished the Oscar Wilde exhibit and didn't have much time before closing, I decided that what I wanted to do was make a pass through the Impressionist gallery and then come back the following day to look for the Van Gogh.<br> <br>So here's why that didn't work.<br><br>I think my first mistake, other than getting worked up about it to the point of making a special trip to a museum to see one specific work of art (not really my style), was buying a postcard. I started my art postcard collection while I was in Ireland and have made a point of buying postcards only of works of art I have actually seen, with my own eyes, in person. (It really frustrates me when museum gift shops have postcards for sale of paintings that are not currently on display, or that passed through for a special exhibit at some point but are not actually in the museum's possession. I see them and think, Oh, I really like that! but can't buy the card because I can't actually see the piece in question.) My choices are otherwise kind of arbitrary, but that's the one thing they all have in common. And I bought a stack of postcards from the Musée d'Orsay that first night that included <i>Starry Night</i> preemptively, since I was determined to go back the following day to see it. <br> <br>The next morning Thalia and I journeyed into Paris together a bit later than I had the day before, because that morning is when she took me to see the castle up close. Once in the city, we got crêpes for brunch and tried Saint-Chapelle again, but the line was even worse than the day before, so we went straight to Orsay, only to find that that line was also even worse than before. After a moment of "Well, what the hell do we do now?" I decided that I would go to the catacombs first, since I'd also planned to try that again that day, and come back to the museum later. A) It was open later, so hopefully I'd have a better shot at doing both in that order, and B) Maybe, if we were super lucky, there would be fewer people later. So I went back to Montparnasse, and waited for something like two hours in a line that circled almost all the way around the block, and I saw the catacombs. They will get their own post after this. <br> <br>Late in the afternoon, I returned to the museum and got in line--a line every bit as absurd as it had been the night before. I was actually one of the last people to join said line, because even though the museum wasn't going to close for some time, it was apparently overcrowded and they stopped letting people line up right after I got there because they weren't intending to allow anyone else in. (There was actually a moment once Thalia got there when it seemed like they weren't going to let her join me, but then the same guy who initially yelled at her for ducking under the rope to cut in came back less than five minutes later and let her in without a word. Ah, France.) I don't think we waited any longer than we had the night before, but it was for even less time--only about half an hour from the time we made it past security until the time they were going to kick everyone out. We headed straight for the Post-Impressionist gallery and moved quickly past all of the other Van Goghs and Gauguins and Seurats. We circled the rooms twice. <i>Starry NIght</i> wasn't there. We tried a couple of other galleries nearby. It still wasn't there. We looked at the museum plan. There was no other logical place for it to be.<br> <br>We looked at some other things, including a small exhibit about the Paris Opera, complete with a fantastic model of the building and a series of models of various sets, but I was feeling pretty resentful. I was afraid maybe I'd misread whatever had led me to believe it was in Paris in the first place, but there was the postcard and all the books and bags and other stuff in the gift shop with that painting on them. I was afraid maybe it was lurking somewhere else in the museum and we'd somehow missed it, but I couldn't imagine where else it might be. Thalia suggested that perhaps it was undergoing conservation work, but I didn't believe we wouldn't have seen something about that somewhere.<br> <br>We split up right before leaving, because I wanted to at least go back and take one more look at the Van Goghs that were on display, since we'd rushed through before. On my way out again, I approached the guard to finally ask about <i>Starry Night, </i>because I couldn't stand leaving without at least knowing if it was indeed at least <u>supposed</u> to be there. I hadn't even finished the question before he said, "Yeah, it's in Hong Kong."<br> <br>"It's in Hong Kong?!"<br><br>"Yes."<br><br>"Interesting..."<br><br>So, yes, the one time in my life I make a point of spending a considerable amount of time and energy on a quest to see one specific painting... that painting is, unbeknownst to me, on the other side of the planet. I waited in line not once, but twice, to see something that wasn't even there. And, though I didn't ask, I suspect it won't be back before I leave France. <br> <br>So now my postcard is a lie...<br><br><br>* Considering the fact that we get in for free thanks to being legal residents under the age of 25. Paying full price, it might not have been worth it.<br> Ericahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12042385757154431516noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4520017628666989475.post-53116181735878717872012-02-13T15:13:00.001-05:002012-02-13T15:13:30.049-05:00Holiday Travels, Part 7: Churches and BonesSomething I somehow completely forgot to mention in my first post about Prague: I went to a Christmas mass at St. Nicholas Church.<br><br>The reason I'm stunned that I forgot to mention this is that religion was one of my primary motivations for spending Christmas in Prague in the first place. Granted, the trip didn't really quite turn out the way I expected in that regard (I'll get to that in a second), but still. I went for the churches, and I went to a church service, and then I didn't write about it. Derp.<br> <br>I'm not going to use this blog to expound my personal beliefs about God or my relationship with religion in general; that's complicated and personal and I'm just not going to get into it here. What you need to know is that I grew up going to church, that I was very involved in my church as a teenager, before I went away to college, and that I consider my church to be a big part of my life. That church is a Moravian church. Never heard of Moravians as a religion? That's okay; no one from the U.S. has unless they're from my hometown or a handful of other enclaves, and there are no Moravians in France or Ireland that I'm aware of, and very few in Britain. We're a mainstream Protestant denomination that have a lot in common with Lutherans. The modern church was essentially born in southern Germany in the eighteenth century, but is descended from the followers of Jan Hus, an early [read: before Martin Luther] reformer in the Czech Republic. There's a giant statue of Hus in Old Town Square in Prague, and many of the old churches are places where he preached or that are otherwise somehow associated with him or his followers. (He was burned at the stake, and early Czech protestants were persecuted and forced underground, in case you were wondering.)<br> <br>So, my interest in the Moravian church combined with my interest in history in general was a big part of what made me so determined to visit Prague. And it was specifically part of my determination to go at Christmastime. It was going to be the first time in ten years that I hadn't spent Christmas Eve at my church in my hometown, and I though I would be less homesick if I was at some Moravian church somewhere--and where better than the city where it all started six hundred years ago?<br> <br>Well, that didn't quite work. Despite a concerted effort that started well in advance, I had an extremely difficult time finding any information about modern Moravian congregations in Prague. The one I did manage to locate (which even had an English-language website!) was located well outside the city centre and I didn't really have time to go hunting for it. So that's how I wound up at Christmas-morning mass at St. Nicholas, which is one of the elaborate historic churches around Old Town Square. So that was cool, even if it wasn't quite as familiar as I'd been hoping for.<br> <br>St. Nicholas has been many things over the years; today, it's a Hussite church. I assumed that a Hussite service would be somewhat similar to a Moravian service, since they both stem from the same origins. <br><br> False.<br><br>Obviously, I didn't understand much of anything being said, so I can't speak for the content of the mass (although the fact that it was called a mass was, in itself, a big difference). Things that stood out to me were the lack of a choir (though I'm not ruling out the possibility that that was because it was Christmas) and the fact that the person leading the service (pastor? priest? Since I don't speak Czech, I have no idea what the correct term is) actually did a lot of singing. Not just leading hymns, but actually singing the service, like a Jewish cantor. It was interesting. I can't remember ever encountering that at a Christian church before. I was also struck by the interior of the church itself; Moravians, historically, are very keen on having everything be plain and simple. St. Nicholas's Church is neither of those things. Its centerpiece is a massive, ornate glass chandelier hanging in the middle of the sanctuary. Everything else about it is equally ornate, from the moldings and stained glass windows, to the showy organ ornamented in gold to the giant paintings and even a crucifix (something you NEVER see in Protestant churches) hanging on the walls. I can only assume that most of that stuff is from St. Nicholas's days as a Catholic church.<br> <br>Anyway, that was the real start to my surreal Christmas in Prague, and I enjoyed it, though it was strange and I felt out of place. I did, however, get extremely annoyed with all of the tourists coming in and out during the service. Some of them even had the nerve to take pictures, and others would go sit in a pew for a few minutes and then get up and leave again. It was disruptive and disrespectful, and I have no idea why it was permitted, not to mention how so many people could be that uncouth in the first place. <br> <br>I was actually really stunned at the sheer number of tourists in Prague in the first place. My hostel wasn't full, but it was busy, and Old Town Square and other tourist attractions were packed every day with people speaking English and French and Spanish and German and Chinese. The tours I went on, even the one we did on Christmas Day, were all big groups and all ran into other tours with similar itineraries and similarly big groups. While I did encounter some students and some other young people who were conceivably in situations like my friends and me, working temporary jobs overseas, far from home, there were way more groups of young people around than I thought could possibly be accounted for by those two things, and also tons of couples and even families. I was just really surprised by how many people, especially roughly college-age people and people with young kids, apparently wanted to be away from home for Christmas. <br> <br>The day after Christmas, Ali and Shayna and I all went on a day trip (well, afternoon trip) to Kutna Hora, a village in Moravia an hour or so away from Prague. Some of you already know where this is going, I bet. The big tourist attraction around Kutna Hora, and the first stop on the tour, is the Sedlec Ossuary, a small Gothic(?) chapel filled with bones. And when I say bones, I mean thousands of them. And when I say filled, I don't just mean in big piles, although there are several of those. I mean that after the chapel had been in use as a disorganized charnel house for many many years, somebody came along and said, "You know what would make this better? If I made decorations out of all these bones!" And he did. He made a chandelier, and a giant coat of arms, and some columns, and assorted other hanging arrangements for the walls, including his own initials. All out of human bones. It's strange and morbid and fascinating. Special display cases set aside from the bone decorations and the neat stacks of unused bones hold some bones, mostly skulls and mostly with very visible injuries, from people who fought in the Hussite Wars. <br> <br>On the second floor of the chapel is a second chapel, this one totally normal, looking bright and modern and ready for worship. What.<br><br>Elsewhere in Kutna Hora, which is a cheerful little town full of brightly colored buildings lining winding cobblestone streets, is another impressive cathedral, recently restored, with more of those delightful Czech stained glass windows and wall paintings. There was a choir rehearsal in progress while we were there, and I wanted nothing more than to just stay and listen and look at all that art. There is also another big, old church in the center of Kutna Hora, but we weren't able to visit it because it's undergoing restoration work right now. Outside the cathedral, lining the walk down to the center of the village, are replicas of all of the sculptures on Charles Bridge in Prague. After you've passed them all, you reach the old silver mine, apparently much beloved by archaeologists, but sadly off limits to the public. In the center, in an ornate orange building called the Italian Court because of its architecture, is the old mint, now a museum. We went on a short tour, but I wasn't especially interested and don't remember very much about it now. (In the first room we were in, while the guide was telling us about the history of coin production in Kutna Hora, I was looking at a series of portraits of former heads of the mint and studying the changes in clothing and facial hair styles over the centuries, if that tells you anything about how much attention I was paying to the tour.) I do remember that there was a ridiculously tacky chapel somewhere in the mint, and I wish I could remember why.<br> <br>Back in Prague that evening, Ali and Shayna and I hung around the market for a bit and then they took me across the river to show me the Lennon Wall, which is definitely one of my favorite things in Prague. It's just a wall near the river that's covered in ever-changing John Lennon-related graffiti. It was used as a method of anonymous resistance under the communist regime, which led to a lot of tension between authorities and students. People are still writing and drawing on it today, leaving all kinds of messages about love and peace (and grief for Lennon), many of them involving song lyrics. The night I was there, it had changed even in the two days since Ali and Shayna had first seen it. It's just really cool. What it stands for, and its place in political history, but also just as a way of bringing together so many people from so many different places who all share the same ideals. I think it's really similar to the peace wall in Belfast in that way. It reinforces the idea that there is something fundamentally good about humanity, something that's shared across cultures and languages and religions, and it gives me some small hope for the future.<br> <br>We had dinner (I had Czech goulash, which is very traditional and thankfully not as full of paprika as Hungarian goulash) and some wonderfully cheap cocktails at a jazz club near the castle district, and hung around until the show started in the basement bar, but were unwilling to pay a cover charge higher than the cost of our dinner, so the evening ended there and we said our goodbyes, since I was leaving the following day. <br> <br>The next morning I did have time to go back into the city centre to try to get some pictures of things I hadn't before. I did not manage, amid the confusing streets, to make my way back to the Jewish quarter where I'd been unable to take good pictures in the dark near the end of my tour on Christmas Eve, but I did go to see the statue of Wenceslas. The whole square around the statue was filled with thousands of red votive candles left as offerings in memory of Havel, along with some flowers and notes. It was a very visual testament to what I'd thus far only heard about the almost universal grief of the Czech people, and it was very moving. <br> <br>I then returned to the Bethlehem Chapel (which I'd actually found on Christmas morning, but it had been closed at the time), which was one of the sites I was really determined to see, not because of anything that specific, but because it's associated with Jan Hus and it's called the Bethlehem Chapel, for crying out loud. Unfortunately, unbeknownst to me until I got there and opened the door, you have to pay to actually enter the chapel. Now, even leaving aside my resentment at having to pay to enter a place of worship in the first place, I didn't have time for that. I had a train to catch and still had to get back across town to my hostel to retrieve my stuff before I went to the train station. I just wanted to step in and see the place for a minute. But no. (And for the record, getting there earlier wouldn't have helped, as it had only been open for a few minutes by the time I did get there.) So I left feeling pretty annoyed and disappointed about having missed out another one of the things I'd been most excited about. <br> <br>Just one more reason to go back to Prague someday...<br> Ericahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12042385757154431516noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4520017628666989475.post-47350614084529019552012-02-08T06:46:00.001-05:002012-02-08T06:46:35.178-05:00Adventures In Socialized MedicineThis is an attempted re-write of a post that was finished a week ago that Gmail lost. Like many re-writes, it's not as good as the first version, but it'll have to do.<br><br>So, the week before last, I had my first foray into the French healthcare system.<br> <br>Not by choice, mind you. I'm overdue for some routine stuff that it would be wise to take care of here, and I've considered finding out how much of a new pair of glasses would be covered by social security, and at some point very soon I will need to find a doctor who can vaccinate me against yellow fever and prescribe some kind of malaria prophylaxis before my trip to Senegal in May. But it wasn't any of that. My little adventure that Friday was entirely involuntary.<br> <br>Basically, what happened is this: I eat a lot of bread. I have a bad habit of holding a piece of bread in my left hand while I cut in half. I have long been aware that this is asking for trouble, but really, you don't usually need a whole lot of force behind your bread slicing. Unless its a French baguette, in which case you can potentially do some serious damage to whatever's behind the bread if the knife goes through easier than you expected. And last Friday, whatever was behind the bread happened to be my finger. And by "serious damage", I mean I think if I had somehow managed to do the same thing but with a chopping motion instead of a slicing one, I might actually have cut said finger off.<br> <br>It actually didn't hurt that much, nor did it bleed much. I rinsed it off and looked at it for a minute, and tried to think of an alternative to getting stitches, because it really didn't seem that bad. But there was literally a hole in my hand, because the cut was on the joint where the finger joins the hand and the skin had kind of just pulled apart. So it was just sort of hanging open, and although I'm not well versed in the anatomy of what's between the bones and the outside and therefore don't really know exactly what I was looking at, I'm fairly sure I should not have been able to look at it. And I thought, "Crap. I can't put a band-aid on that, can I?"<br> <br>I wrapped it in a paper towel and went next door to Miguel's room to ask if he knew whether the infirmary at the school could treat us as well as the students, in the hope that a trained nurse with first-aid supplies could work some magic that didn't involve the emergency room. He said yes. I said, "Okay, good, because I just cut my hand open." And because he's an incredibly nice guy, Miguel jumped up and came with me. Technically, the infirmary was not open for the afternoon until 2:30 (this was around 2), but when I told the nurse who came out to the waiting room that I'd cut myself, she decided they could take a look right away, and took me into the back room, where three nurses surrounded me asking lots of questions. I have a hard enough time following one conversation in French, let alone fielding multiple lines of questioning, and I've observed before that French women tend to converse like my sister's high school friends--all at once, and somehow everyone just magically understands everyone else. Anyway, I told them who I was and what happened, and showed them my hand, and all three of them kind of hovered over it saying, "Ohh... that's DEEP." One of them pulled me over to the sink and poured disinfectant all over it, and another one asked if there was anyone who could go with me to the hospital (to which I responded, "Uhhh...."), and then she went out to ask Miguel if he could take me to the hospital, while the other one wrapped my whole hand in an excessive amount of gauze.<br> <br>Crap.<br><br>Miguel did indeed go with me to the hospital, which was definitely above and beyond considering it wasn't REALLY an emergency, and was awesomely helpful and supportive the entire time. After a stupidly long bus ride and some effort to find the actual emergency department, we entered a very small, very quiet reception area where I showed my passport and the letter with my temporary social security number on it to a girl at the counter. She took my information and made copies of my documents and sent me to another window where I explained what happened to my hand, said I didn't have a doctor here, and declined to give an emergency contact number. (And also where Miguel, much to my entertainment and that of the woman behind the counter, got to explain who he was--my colleague, and my flatmate, but only my flatmate, definitely not my boyfriend.) And then she sent us to a cluster of chairs in the corner to wait, and that was that. No long complicated medical history with irrelevant questions no one knows the answer to. No insurance chaos. Not even any forms to fill out. <br> <br>After a short wait, I was called into an office where I was asked some more detailed questions about my hand and whether my vaccinations were up to date, and then that guy took us to a different, bigger waiting room to wait for the actual doctor. We joked a bit about how the real reason everything seemed so relaxed was that people were just spaced out amongst a series of different waiting rooms, but seriously, I can't imagine an American city the size of Brest with an emergency room as calm and uncrowded as this one.<br> <br>Side note: When the doctor called me back, Miguel initially came with us until I told him he didn't need to wait with me and he went back to the waiting room. That exchange happened in English, just because we're used to talking to each other in English, which prompted the doctor to ask me if I speak French. I said yes, then laughed and added, "Well, a little. Sometimes not very well." He then asked if we were Portuguese, which I thought was an interesting guess. Definitely not one I've gotten before. I said, "Oh, no, I'm American, and my friend is Colombian," at which point I think he was even more confused, but he let it go.<br> <br>The next thing he asked me was whether the cut on my hand was deep. I said yes. (I was there for stitches, after all...) He said, "Oh. Well, we may have to move you to a different room, then. We're not set up to deal with deep wounds here." (I don't know.) I said, "Well, at the infirmary they told me it was pretty deep..." I didn't really know how deep was deep, so he decided he'd just look at it first and then decide. He asked me a bunch of questions, about what I'd done to my hand and also about medical conditions, allergies, etc.*, and, again, whether I was up to date on tetanus shots. Even with a minor language barrier, the interrogation only took a few minutes, and everything he asked me seemed more or less related to the situation, or at least generally important. (He did not, for example, ask for the date of my last period, or whether I've ever had [insert random unlikely disease here], or whether my mother's second cousin's brother-in-law died of heart disease.) I think I had to give a more unnecessarily thorough medical history to get a driver's license in the U.S., let alone be seen by a doctor.<br> <br>Anyway, then he asked if the knife had "touché un osse", which I did not immediately understand. I gave him a blank look and said, "Touché quoi?" and he managed to come up with the English word "bone", which both impressed and embarrassed me, because <i>duh</i>. I of all people should recognize that word, especially in an obvious context. I told him I didn't think it was that deep, and he said if it was I'd need an x-ray. Great. Then he made me move my finger around, and tapped various places on my hand to make sure I could feel it, and then he finally unwrapped the gauze. <br> <br>And he poked around the cut for a minute, and then said he was going to go get his colleague to come take a look at it.<br><br>To be fair, he was an intern, so it's really not all that surprising that he wanted a second opinion and his supervisor's okay before he did anything.<br> <br>He came back a moment later with an overly cheerful orthopedic surgeon, who proceeded to make me explain again how I'd cut myself and then did some more extensive testing for nerve damage. Satisfied, he started talking [over me] to the intern. I didn't catch everything he said, but it went something like, "Blah blah blah, yes, it's superficial, blah blah... See, the vein runs along here, and the nerve along here, and we know they're both okay because she still feels everything and she still has blood in her fingertip, so blah blah blah you need to just make very superficial stitches, very shallow, just stay right above the vein..."<br> <br>And the intern said, "Yes, that's what I'm going to try to do."<br><br>And I looked back and forth between them and said, "I understand enough to be a little afraid."<br><br>The surgeon laughed and said, "Oh, no, don't worry, it's really very superficial." Yeah, you're not the one who just heard the doctor say he's going to "try" not to stitch her vein.<br> <br>He said some other stuff I didn't catch, and then, "But you're going to have a scar."<br><br>Well, yeah. There's a hole in my finger. I'm expecting some kind of scar.<br><br>So he left, and the intern numbed half my hand** and successfully put three stitches in my finger. It could have used four or five, but it was hard to get to, being between my fingers. Three actually took a while. He also didn't realize how long it was until he'd thought he was done and wiped away the blood, and then he said, "Oh, look, it extends all the way over here... Well, that part's very shallow, we'll just put a special bandage on it and it'll be fine." (And honestly, if all of it had looked like the part he didn't bother to stitch, I wouldn't have gone to the hospital in the first place.)<br> <br>He sent a nurse in to do the dressing, and she also had to take some time to figure out how to go about doing it. "You know," she said, "if you were going to cut yourself, frankly you could have done it somewhere else. This is not a good place at all."<br> <br>But she figured it out, and I retrieved Miguel from the waiting room and took my stack of papers (a list of dressing supplies and instructions to change it every two days, a completely unnecessary prescription for paracetamol, and the order to have the stitches taken out after fifteen days) back out to the front desk to get them stamped. The woman who'd checked me in stamped each of them without looking at it and dismissed me with a smile. "Do I have to pay anything?" I asked. Nope. They would send me a bill if there was anything to pay. (And when I told my friends later that night what had happened, another girl who's been to a French emergency room before said she thinks that's probably unlikely to happen. "They take the Hippocratic oath very seriously here," she said.)<br> <br>The whole thing, from the time I cut myself to the time we arrived back at home, took about four hours. And since we didn't actually leave for the hospital until almost 2:45, which means we couldn't have gotten there until after 3, and we still had to take the bus back after all was said and done, total time spent at the hospital couldn't have been more than about two and a half hours, tops. I don't think that's bad at all considering that with an injury that minor, I could have waited longer than that just to be seen at a lot of American hospitals. (Hell, I've waited that long at my doctor's office before, with an appointment.) When was the last time you saw an American emergency room that wasn't crowded with crying babies and mentally ill drug addicts and people who just have the flu and could have gone to a regular doctor except that they don't have health insurance? Here, there were only a handful of patients around, and everything was calm and quiet. The staff weren't rushed or stressed out, and everyone was very nice to me and took the time to chat as well as the time to explain everything that was happening, despite the occasional language barrier issues. Even though everyone who saw me asked me to explain my hand, they didn't make me repeat anything else over and over again, nor were they constantly looking at my chart for information. And when was the last time you saw any medical professional in the U.S. and didn't have to fill out five pages of detailed questions about your medical history first? I can't remember one.*** All in all, aside from the fact that I'd hurt myself in the first place and was spending my Friday afternoon in the E.R., the whole experience was remarkably easy and stress-free. I've had worse experiences with regular doctors in the U.S--and I've always had health insurance. <br> <br>Also, because I just need to reiterate this, all I had to do was show my ID and my social security number, and after that there was no mention of payment or insurance until <u>I</u> brought it up, and even then, I didn't have to pay for any of it. Not even with a temporary social security number, which I'd been under the impression meant I would have to pay for treatment up front and then get forms to be reimbursed for some of it later. It's just... taken care of. We complain about/mock all of the bureaucracy involved in doing anything in France, but this is an instance where dealing with that at the beginning really does make everything simple and streamlined later on. Everything is centralized, and it's all more or less the same for everyone. They put my number into the computer, took care of my hand, and sent me home. It was that simple. It didn't even matter that I hold a foreign passport and don't have a<i> carte vitale</i> yet; I'm in the system, so it's fine. The end. And even if I <u>had</u> had to pay, it wouldn't have been a big deal, because it would have cost a fraction of what the same stuff would have cost in the U.S.<br> <br>The closest equivalent experience I have to this is my college health center, which is subsidized by the school so that most services are free or really cheap for students, and which usually wasn't very crowded because it's specifically for people on campus. Sort of a microcosmic comparison, and still not entirely the same. But it's all I've got.<br><br>Try explaining how health care and health insurance work in the U.S. to kids who grew up in a country that's had socialized medicine since the end of WWII. Try explaining why people in the U.S. are so opposed to changing the system. They'll look at you like you might as well be speaking Hebrew. It's unfathomable to them. <br> <br>I had the first of two of those conversations so far about four days before this happened. I told them I don't understand it, either.<br><br><br>* That was fun. First, I told him I'd had my wisdom teeth out by pointing to my jaw, because I couldn't remember how to say "wisdom teeth" even though it's a direct translation. Then I realized I had no clue what was the French name of my one important medication allergy. #goodthingstoknow, especially since it's an unusual allergy to an <u>extremely</u> common medication. He seemed to understand when I gave him the name I know, though, so presumably it's pretty close.<br> ** Having lidocaine injected into my hand hurt about fifty times more than actually cutting myself had. I almost wished he hadn't bothered and had just got on with it.<br>*** The most reasonable experience I can think of was the swine flu vaccination clinic I went to, which I think did manage to limit itself mostly to the relevant issues... but then again, it was a free shot, so there were no health insurance companies to deal with. Ericahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12042385757154431516noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4520017628666989475.post-29365901763204031452012-02-07T14:07:00.001-05:002012-02-07T14:07:15.442-05:00Lost [and Stolen] and FoundImportant things I've lost since coming to France:<br><br>1. My Carte 12-25, the train discount card for young people. I bought it as soon as I arrived and promptly lost it later that day. It was fortunate that no one ever checked my ticket on the second train I was on on my way to Brest, because at that point I already didn't have the card and would have been fined for having a discounted ticket without it. I was eventually able to replace it for a fee of eight euros, which seems like extortion, given that the original cost forty-nine euros to begin with and literally all they had to do was look me up in the system and print out a new card, on plain old ticket paper. Whatever.<br> <br>2. My Maya necklace. I bought it in Belize, and it was a carving of the hieroglyph for my birth "month" in the Maya calendar. Over the following two years I wore it on every trip I took, even just driving back and forth to college. I was wearing it when I got to France, and I vaguely recall putting it "somewhere safe" when I was unpacking, but I have no idea where it is now. I don't remember whether I wore it again after that--by the time I tried to find it for my hiking adventures, it was already missing. I'm still hoping it's hidden away somewhere in my room and I'll find it before I leave. <br> <br>3. My Swiss army knife. It was my first pocketknife, and my only really good-quality one, and I'd had it for about eight years and carried it everywhere, so I was pretty fond of it. But more importantly, it was given to me by my grandfather, who I was also very fond of and who died when I was nineteen. Can't replace that. As with the necklace, I'm still holding out hope it will turn up somewhere unexpected, but unlike with the necklace, I do know where I last had it--and it was in a hotel room in Rennes.<br> <br>And finally, most recently, 4: My wallet.<br><br>Except I'm about 99.9% sure I did not "lose" my wallet. I maintain that it was stolen from my coat pocket at the Spanish bar this past Saturday night. My pockets are deep, and the wallet fits them perfectly; it couldn't have just fallen out, and anyway, I and my friends looked all over the place when I realized it was gone, and it was actually gone. I also did not misplace it; when it wasn't in the pocket, it was in my hand or on the table in front of me, and I put it away before getting up. In fact, I put it away several times over the course of the evening (we may or may not have been at the same bar for six hours), so someone would have had plenty of opportunity to see that it was in my pocket. And, when I went to retrieve my coat at the end of the night, it had been moved, even though no one else had sat in my chair since I'd been up. (And for the record, I didn't move any farther away than the other side of the table at any point except to go to the bathroom, and even then my friends were still at the table. It was never actually out of our sight. We just missed whatever happened.)<br> <br>I left my phone number with the barmen in case it turned up. My friends tried to make me feel better, and some of them offered to lend me money. I went home in tears, called to cancel my two bank cards and my credit card, and called my parents. <br> <br>I didn't lose that much cash--I'd taken out twenty euros before going to the bar and spent about half of it before my wallet disappeared. But the cards were a pain in the ass, and I had no idea how to go about replacing my driver's license from here. I also lost the international SIM card for my phone, which still has credit on it and which the company will not replace for free. But more upsetting than all of that was the stuff I wasn't going to be able to replace at all--along with some no-big-deal stuff like my AAA card and my public library card from home, the wallet had contained my college and high school IDs, my immigration registration card from Ireland, and the rest of the Czech currency left from my trip. No amount of phone calls, no number of expensive minutes on hold, could get any of that stuff back.<br> <br>I got up on Sunday morning and went to file a police report, and took the street the bar is on so that I could peer as inconspicuously as possible into as many garbage cans as possible, since the guys at the bar had told us that often people steal wallets, swipe the cash, and then dump the rest somewhere right outside. No dice.<br> <br>Also no dice on the police report. Remember about France shutting down on Sundays? THAT INCLUDES THE LOCAL POLICE STATION. I KID YOU NOT. <br><br>Good news! In France, there are no non-emergency crimes on Sundays. Clearly, I and my wallet had achieved something noteworthy. <br> <br>I walked back home severely annoyed. On the way I walked past my bank branch, where I had been planning to go first thing Monday morning to ask about a new card (I'd been able to cancel it over a hotline, but they told me had to get in touch with my branch to deal with the rest.), and double-checked the hours: CLOSED MONDAYS. Are you kidding me with this? <br> <br>Bear in mind that at this point, I literally had no money, and no way of accessing money (other than to borrow it from someone). I was counting on getting to the bank as soon as possible to make an old-fashioned withdrawal as well as to deal with getting a new card as quickly as possible.<br> <br>Monday morning, I set out to re-attempt the police report. I went into the station and approached the woman at the counter and told her I wanted to make a report that my wallet had been stolen. She said, "Have you asked at the town hall?" (There's a sort of central Lost And Found there where stuff like wallets are supposed to end up if someone turns them in.) I said no, and she said I should do that first. So I did, and of course it wasn't here. But by then I only had a couple of hours before I needed to be back for work, and I wasn't sure how long a police report would take. I also figured it was Monday morning, and everything had been closed since Saturday night, so it probably wouldn't hurt to wait another day, ask again at city hall, and then go back to the police if it still wasn't there. So that was that.<br> <br>This morning I had class at eight, and after that I went straight to the bank, where someone confirmed that the card had been canceled and no one had tried to use it, had me sign some papers, and let me withdraw some money for the next few days until my new card arrives, hopefully at the end of this week but certainly by next week. (Assuming the bank employees don't go on strike the way they did last fall while I was waiting for my first card.) Then, this afternoon, I went back downtown and back to city hall. <br> <br>Only this time, when the woman at the front desk put my name into the computer, she said, "Oh, yeah, the police sent that to us earlier. It had a student ID in it along with the bank cards?"<br><br>Someone actually found my wallet! And turned it in! A miracle!<br> <br>The cash was gone*, of course, including the Czech kroner, which I'm still bummed about.** But everything else is there. I haven't lost my assorted IDs or my SIM card (or my Starbucks card!), and I don't have to deal with getting another driver's license, thank God. I mean, I'm still screwed in that I've already canceled the bank and credit cards and will have to wait for new ones anyway, but I'm relieved to have everything else back. I had completely given up hope after I didn't miraculous stumble upon it outside the bar on Sunday morning. And the driver's license was going to be the biggest pain, I think--plus, I like having that around, because if I am going to lose an ID, I'd rather it be my license than my passport.<br> <br>Stuff like this has, weirdly, happened to me a lot over the years. Never my whole wallet, but lots of lost IDs and occasionally other important documents. I had kind of been assuming that having my whole wallet stolen was some kind of karmic payback for all the other times I've narrowly escaped losing various things. <br> <br>Anyway, I guess everything is sorted out now, other than how and when I'm going to get my American cards, since they could only be mailed within the U.S. I'm not really sure what lesson I am supposed to have learned from all this, though. Miguel suggested that I stop carrying around important documents I don't need, but as I said above, I like having some kind of ID in case I need it, and I don't want to carry my passport around. I will stop carrying around all of the sentimental-value stuff that's not necessary anywhere, though. And I'll find a new home for the extra SIM card, though I'm a little afraid I'll then just forget it next time I travel. But as for the night the wallet was taken, I'm not really sure what I could have done differently, other than carry my money (and maybe ID) in my pants pocket with my phone and leave the wallet at home. Not leaving my coat even nominally unattended I guess is another option, but as I said, we were all right there the whole time. And everyone's coats and bags were just lying around; it could have happened to anyone. But no one else had anything taken that I know of, and I think someone would have noticed if someone was lurking around randomly going through everyone's pockets. I'm sure it had to be someone who'd seen that there was a wallet in my coat. At that point I'd have had to keep wearing the coat, or carry the wallet around with me all night, to keep them from being able to get it. If I hadn't had my wallet in my coat, I'd have been carrying a purse, and that could have been taken just as easily. I suppose it also would have been easier to keep with me, but again, everything was always in someone's sight, and other people had left their bags lying on or around the table, too. I didn't do anything that's not commonplace here, nor anything nearly as risky as things I've done in the past. I guess that doesn't mean I couldn't have been more vigilant, but still. People just suck. I could have guarded my stuff like a mastiff all night and then gotten mugged on my way home. Shit happens.<br> <br>And it seems to keep happening to me. I'm almost afraid of what this weekend is going to bring, after the last three have gotten progressively worse, from annoying (spilling coffee on my computer and screwing up the keyboard) to downright sucky (cutting my hand--belated post forthcoming) to well, this. And one of the worst things about this was that it was otherwise an AWESOME weekend, one of the best I've had in Brest right up until one o'clock on Saturday night/Sunday morning when some jackass ruined it for about ten euros and change. <br> <br>The upside: That it was, otherwise, a fantastic weekend, with going out on Friday followed by epic brunch on Saturday followed by tapas and shooters and generally fun and merriment at the Spanish bar Saturday night, and then coffee on Sunday afternoon and at least the start of the Super Bowl that night. (I only made it through the first quarter, since I'd been up all night the night before dealing with theft stuff, but at least a few others held out to the end, around 4 a.m. our time.) And also, that my friends are completely wonderful. I was so surrounded by love and kindness I didn't even mind that I cried in front of about twenty people, and that, my friends, is a special thing indeed.<br> <br><br>* But not the coppers, which I find mildly amusing. They actually took the time to pull out all the coins that were worth more than 1 or 2 cents and left the small ones behind.<br>** I hope whoever took it had their day totally ruined when they tried to exchange it and discovered its face value was about five times its worth in euros.<br> Ericahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12042385757154431516noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4520017628666989475.post-70705180822729912852012-02-02T15:14:00.001-05:002012-02-02T15:14:38.874-05:00Generic "My Life in Brest" PostI'm finishing up the second-to-last week before yet another two weeks of <i>vacances scolaires</i>. I can't decide how I feel about a school system that takes this many breaks. While it's great for me, it kind of seems like it must create a rather disjointed learning experience for the students. I guess maybe it evens out because of the shorter summer break where they presumably forget less than American students do during our long summers. And I guess they do have longer school days and more work, so maybe they need more frequent breaks. It's hard to judge from where I'm standing, I suppose. I'm not ready for another break yet, personally--I haven't really made any plans or researched the plans I was hoping to make. It's been a busy five weeks since the New Year--my TESOL course, lots of lesson planning, catching up with friends, trying to catch up on blogging, trying without success to figure out my life after France--and I'm not sure how much time went by so quickly, but I am entirely sure I did not get done everything I was intending to get done by now.<br> <br>This afternoon, I wished my tutee luck on his big English exam this weekend. It was actually our first meeting in several weeks, after he had initially told me he wanted to practice every week in January. I hope we didn't because he's been busy and not because he couldn't pay me--that thought didn't occur to me until today, and then it made me feel bad. I think he'll be okay, though. He still makes a lot of mistakes, but he really is very good at making himself understood. I spent most of our hour today saying, "Yeah, that was good," and reminding him not to stress out. Talking to him has been less immediately rewarding than some of my official classes, but only because there's less progress to be made. On the other hand, it's kind of a relief, for the same reason and also because he has so much motivation where so many of my high school students have none. <br> <br>Meanwhile, winter seems to have finally struck. It's cold here again, after weeks of 50F days. It's still well above freezing in the daytime, but I'm at least back to bundling up in hats and gloves when I go out. It even snowed a little last night (!), though not enough to cover the ground and most of what there was had melted by the time I left my classroom at 11 am. I am certainly not complaining about a relatively warm and snow-free winter, but I am holding out hope of getting at least one good snowfall, mostly so that the assistants from warm climates who've hardly ever seen snow before can experience a proper snowball fight at least once in their lives.<br> <br>Speaking of assistants, I don't think I've actually written much about the social aspect of life here, other than the interesting language mélange. There are several dozen language assistants in Brest, plus a few foreign <i>lecteurs/lectrices</i> (lecturers) at the university. (We also occasionally meet students who are studying abroad at the university, either through the <i>lecteurs</i> or because they hear us speaking English when we go out and introduce themselves.) This isn't uncommon for a city the size of Brest, and bigger cities might have even more language assistants, or assistants from an even greater variety of places. (We don't have any Arabic assistants, for example, and if there's a Russian assistant I haven't met him or her. We also don't have any English assistants from Australia or New Zealand or Canada, which I think is kind of strange.) However, based on what I have heard from the Internet, from friends in other places, and from friends here who also have friends in other places, I think it is uncommon for all of the assistants to get along as well as we do. It seems that in a lot of cities, the assistants are very clique-y. People find a few others they get along with and don't really interact much with the rest. They tend to divide along language lines, and to bunch up in twos and threes and fours and never really hang out with other assistants in the area. <br> <br>In Brest this year, it's not like that at all. After a few big meet-and-greet parties at the beginning of the year, pretty much everyone knows everyone else, and that includes some assistants who live in the suburbs of Brest, or even farther away, and only come into the city now and then. We all get along, for the most part. Things have gotten cliquier over the course of the year, but not in an unfriendly way, just in a consolidating kind of way. You can't ALWAYS hang out in groups of twenty or thirty, after all. Even so, the people I consider to be "my group of friends" still numbers about ten or twelve regulars, and it's still very fluid. We are always inviting or running into other people. <br> <br>I've already explained to several people that being an assistant, and in particular, being an assistant in Brest right now where everyone is friends with everyone else, is kind of like being in college all over again. There's a concentration of young people who all work during the day and have very little to do at night. We have a lot of disposable income, and alcohol is cheap. The difference between this and college is that we have even fewer immediate responsibilities than we did in school. All assistants talk about the amount of free time available to us, and it's true. We work so little it's ridiculous. So, yes, we party a lot here in Brest. We drink a lot; we go out a lot; there's often nothing to prevent us from doing it during the week as well as on weekends, because we no longer have "homework" other than maybe a few hours of lesson planning each week, and many of us have at least some days where we don't have to be at work until late morning or even afternoon. <br> <br>But we do other, more wholesome things, too. We have regular soccer matches and multilingual poker nights. We go to the cinema--in French and in English--and on "field trips" to the music library and to the Sunday market. Sometimes we eat dinner together on bluesy Sundays, and sometimes we go out for crepes or eat brunch together after a night out. We celebrate birthdays, and we did Secret Santas before Christmas. We have a plethora of inside jokes. We sleep on each other's couches and floors, and we share everything from snack food to DVDs to lesson plans. We look out for each other. We travel together: There have already been group trips to St. Malo and Rennes, and during the vacation this month we are all going to Barcelona. We may even travel together in May after our work here is over (though I may have to miss some or all of that because of my trip to Senegal). All in all, it's rare for anyone--even a hermit like me--to go more than a couple of days without seeing the others. If someone is missing from a big event, the others bombard him or her with text messages to find out what's going on. We joke that it's creepy and cult-like, that we're all codependent, that friends who come to visit from elsewhere must think we're all crazy, but the fact is that even in a place like Brest, we aren't like this just because we're needy or desperate for companionship. It's because we truly like spending time together and we all feel comfortable with each other, and given that none of us CHOSE to be in Brest, how amazing is it that all just happened to end up here together? We might be friends now because we're all in Brest, but we all think we'd still have been friends if we'd met somewhere else. <br> <br>This is why I say I've been so lucky to be placed in Brest, even if it is kind of a rough, boring place to live from which it's near-impossible to get anywhere else. I'm not outgoing enough to go anywhere with high hopes for socialization, and after my exceptionally lonely semester in Ireland, I was expecting to spend a lot of this year doing my own thing. Instead, I haven't gotten a lot of what I planned on doing done, but I have made more wonderful friends than I would have imagined in my wildest dreams. They come from all over the world and I hope we will always be able to visit each other and to meet up in our travels.<br> <br>All right, I'm done being sappy [for now]. <br><br>One other thing about living in Brest, before I move on to something more focused: Brest has not just one public library, or a public library with two or three branches like my hometown. No. It has a whole network of public libraries scattered throughout the city. They all have a little of everything, I think, but some of them specialize in a few things. Like, there's one library that has an especially good travel section, and another that's good for mystery novels, and another that has lots of foreign-language material, and another that keeps most of the regional special interest stuff like local history and books in Breton. I've been borrowing a lot of DVDs, trying to A) improve my language skills, and B) find something redeeming about French film*, and I'm sort of trying to get into <i>bandes dessinées</i>, although I'm not really sure where to start. There's also a "study library" that specializes in nonfiction and reference and documentary films and has WiFi and lots of space for people to work. And there's the "discothèque"**: the music library. Basically, it's a great big room full of CDs, and you can check out as many as you want at a time, up to whatever the limit is on the total number of things you're allowed to have checked out at once. (There's a three DVD limit.) It's awesome. AND, there's also a section of sheet music and scores, and an electronic keyboard with headphones that anyone can come in and play, first come first served. I haven't really taken much advantage of that last part yet, because the discothèque is kind of far from where I live and I often just have time to go exchange my CDs for new ones, but it's totally cool nonetheless.<br> <br>Sadly, that's one of the most exciting things I can say about Brest. My tutee and I had a good laugh this afternoon about one of the questions he might be asked in his speaking exam: "Tell us about the most important building in your town." First of all, he lives in the suburbs, so we were like, "Hmm... Ikea?" I suggested he just pick something in Brest instead... and then we realized we still couldn't think of anything. We eventually decided he should talk about the castle.<br> <br><br>* I'm sort of kidding. Actually, no, I'm not, I'm just being a little hyperbolic. I've found a handful of French movies I like, including some I'd seen before I came, but I think they're still in the minority of the total number of French films I've seen.<br> ** language joke... but actually, that's what it's called<br> Ericahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12042385757154431516noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4520017628666989475.post-44515692999278739952012-02-01T15:21:00.001-05:002012-02-01T15:21:35.433-05:00Holiday Travels, Part 6: A Very UnChristmasy Christmas in Prague[Not proofread yet. Apologies to early readers.]<br><br>So, I arrived at the central train station in Prague around 9:30 in the morning on Christmas Eve. The past eighteen hours or so had completely sucked, I was tired and stressed out, and I didn't speak any Czech. I had directions to my hostel, but first I wandered around the station for a long time, 1) looking for an ATM, 2) buying breakfast from a shop where the cashier looked extremely displeased about the large bill I was using for my very small purchase, not to mention my silence, and 3) trying to figure out how the &^%! to get out of the train station. When I eventually succeeded, I stood outside looking around, looking at my directions, and looking around again for a long time before figuring out that the directions were confusing, and in fact I needed to get on the metro inside the train station. So I went back down and spent a while looking for that. Then I spent a while staring at the old-fashioned (coins only, and you push a button next to the kind of ticket you want) ticket machines trying to figure out what I needed.<br> <br>The metro was as old and shabby looking as its ticket machines promised. I emerged from it, two or three stops away, at a station where I could transfer to the tram for the rest of my ride to the hostel. I walked outside to find the tram and discovered that we were more or less under the highway. Everything in sight was dirty and run-down and made of concrete and covered in graffiti. Welcome to Eastern Europe.<br> <br>The hostel, called Sir Toby's*, was a block away from the tram stop, in a newer neighborhood across the river from the city centre, a neighborhood with wide streets laid out in a grid pattern, boxy buildings with large windows, and a noticeable absence of both greenery and people. I had heard that this part of the city was sort of an artsy, up-and-coming area, popular with young people. It looked empty and quiet and, if not quite sketchy, then at least tired. It looked like what it is--a post-communist city in a recession. And it looked sad.<br> <br>I was not in love. I was unimpressed and sleep-deprived and starting to wish I were in Bruges with my friends and all the canals and medievalyness.<br><br>My welcome at the hostel was encouraging. It was an old building, but an attractive one. The lobby was cozy and cheerful, with mismatched furniture and maps everywhere and wood paneled walls. The front desk attendant spoke to me in excellent English, which was a relief, and, after checking me in and giving me a map, patiently told me everything I could possibly need to know about the place without my having to ask any questions. I went down to lock my things up in the luggage room, and then sat in the adorable basement pub, where a handful of other guests were still eating breakfast, to drink the iced coffee I'd bought at the station and send emails to my dad and to Sam and Jimena to let them all know where I was. Encouraged, caffeinated, and determined that being in Prague must be better than getting there had been, I eventually worked up the energy to venture outside. <br> <br>Side note: Outside was, and continued to be for the remainder of my stay, ridiculously freaking cold. Maybe I'm just spoiled, living in Brittany, because it rained while I was there, which obviously means it can't actually even have been below freezing, but there were times when it seemed like the coldest place I'd ever been (other than northern Ohio in January, which at this point still takes the prize). It was terrible. I think Christmas Day was the worst, but it was cold the whole time. And there wasn't even any snow to make up for it. I had been so sure that if there was anywhere I wanted to go where I could be sure of a white Christmas, Prague was it. I didn't even see frost.<br> <br>Anyway, I decided to walk downtown, even though it promised to take quite a while. Not far from the hostel I passed a marketplace, which I assumed from the giant bull** statues on either side of the entrance was once a livestock market. Now it's just a typical food and stuff market, and it was pretty quiet at midday on Christmas Eve, but there were a few stalls open, so I wandered through and wound up buying a purse from an East Asian guy who seemed just as happy as I was to communicate in English instead of Czech.<br> <br>I then walked along the river, and across the river, and beside the highway for a moment, and eventually found my way into the city centre, where I promptly lost all sense of where I was. (This became a recurring theme over the next couple of days.) I believe I have mentioned medieval street layouts a time or two. The heart of Prague is gloriously medieval and therefore impossible to navigate without a map (and sometimes even with one). It is a maze of narrow streets, almost none of which follow straight lines for more than a block or two at a time or begin and end at what would seem like logical places. "Blocks" are not rectangular, intersections are rarely at right angles, and the lines between "street" and "alley" and "walkway" are ill-defined at best. And you are surrounded by tall buildings at all times, which gives the sense of being an a kind of tunnel and also makes it completely impossible to see anything else around you. Even extremely tall landmarks only a few hundred meters away are blocked out by the row of four or five story houses right in front of you. You could be only just street over from your very prominent destination and never have a clue. It's a recipe for claustrophobia as much as for disorientation.<br> <br>By sheer luck, or perhaps the fact that all roads lead eventually to the very heart of a city, I fairly quickly stumbled into Old Town Square, essentially THE center of Prague, in history and spirit if not in modern geography. There was a huge Christmas market there--complete with a stage and an giant chess set made of Christmas lights, along with the usual treats and souvenirs--and an astonishing crowd of people considering it was Christmas Eve in a country where that, rather than Christmas Day, is the big holiday. Every single building around the square is gorgeous, so I wandered around gawking and taking pictures, then I wandered through the market and bought a sausage and some mulled wine, and then I wandered around taking more pictures until it was time for the afternoon's free walking tour.*** There is far too much in Prague for a three hour walking tour to cover it all, and it was already dark for the last third of it, so it was hard to see some stuff and impossible to take pictures, but all the same, we covered a lot. It didn't really help me to learn my way around, but I learned some really cool stories along the way. Some examples: <br> <br>* This one's actually true: Part of <i>Amadeus</i> was filmed in the old opera in Prague because it basically hasn't changed since Mozart conducted there. <br>* The golem (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golem#The_classic_narrative:_The_Golem_of_Prague" target="_blank">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golem#The_classic_narrative:_The_Golem_of_Prague</a>) is a neat story in any version. In the one I heard on the tour, the rabbi was in the middle of the Sabbath prayer service when he was called out to deactivate the rampaging golem, and since you're not supposed to interrupt the prayers once you've started, and he had to to save people's lives, he started the service over again once the golem was taken care of. And to this day in that synagogue, the prayers are still said twice. Also, centuries later, a Nazi officer heard about the golem and boasted about going up to the attic of the synagogue where it was supposedly kept, and he went up and disappeared and was never heard from again. The Jewish Quarter is full of great stories, actually. And not all about the golem. There's a funny story about the name of the New Old Synagogue, for example, but I've forgotten what it was now. I'm sure it involved a mistranslation at some point. Also, the old Jewish cemetery was built up to make some absurd number of levels of graves, all stacked on top of one another, because the city wouldn't allow them to expand it outwards.<br> * One old church has a mummified arm hanging from the ceiling. (That part is true; the legend behind it I'm not sure about.) The story: There was once a statue of the Virgin wearing a beautiful jeweled necklace, and one night a thief came to try to steal the necklace, but when he touched it, the statue's arm grabbed his and wouldn't let go. When the priest came in the next morning, the thief confessed and begged him for help, but the only way the priest could see to free him was to cut off his arm. Once the arm was severed, the statue let go of it, and the priest kept it and hung it up as a warning to future thieves. (It would seem that the Czech Republic in general is totally okay with gore and death and the generally gruesome and morbid.)<br> * The maker of the famous astrological clock was blinded after he finished it, to ensure that no other city would ever have one like it. His revenge was to feel around and remove an essential part so that the clock would stop working. It took anywhere from months to a hundred years for someone else to figure out how to fix it, depending on who's telling the story.<br> <br>There are plenty more where those came from. Prague is fascinating. It's also ridiculously beautiful. The buildings are all ornately decorated with sculpture and painted designs. Everything is brightly colored. There are statues everywhere you look. Even the sidewalks are beautiful--half of them have black and white mosaic designs, and I'm not sure I saw any two alike.<br> <br>Anyway, by the time the tour was over, it was dark and drizzling and approaching dinner time, and a sensible person would have ended the day on a high note and gone home then. For no particular reason, I opted to walk back to the market in Old Town Square, and then discovered I didn't actually know where to get the tram back to the hostel. In the end I walked back to where we'd ended the tour and found the nearest tram stop, figuring as long as it was headed in the right direction I could figure it out. Then I discovered I didn't know where to obtain a ticket for the tram. There are not machines at every stop, or even most stops, which seems idiotic, and you can't buy them on the tram, and I hadn't had the foresight to buy any from the front desk at the hostel before I left. Not finding any at the stop where I was, I wandered across the nearest bridge to another stop to see if there were any machines there. There weren't, but I figured out there was a metro stop there, too, and went down there to buy a ticket. Then I came back out and waited for the tram. Several trams came by, but none that were going the direction I wanted. I waited. And waited and waited and waited. No tram. After almost an hour, I gave up and went back to the metro, and took it to the same place I'd gotten the tram (a different tram) that morning, which was a very roundabout way of doing things but seemed better than standing around in the cold or wandering around an unfamiliar city in the dark. I had to change metro lines, and had to wait a ridiculously long time for the second train. I hoped that the lack of public transportation in Prague was due to the holiday and not a constant thing.<br> <br>So I eventually got to the other stop, and then I waited for that tram for a while. It didn't come either. <br><br>Eventually, I gave up and walked, following the tram line back to the route I'd taken when I walked that morning.<br> <br>At that point, I was tired, and cold, and late for dinner (the hostel was providing a free Christmas dinner to all its guests, presumably at least in part because the city was shutting down for the night), and deeply frustrated. None of these were good things to feel on Christmas Eve, when I was also lonely and homesick to begin with. When I finally got back to the hostel and went down to the pub, it was insanely crowded, and I was not in the mood to socialize with strangers, so, unable to find a quiet corner to hole up in, I ended up taking a plate upstairs to my room and enjoying my chicken schnitzel and potato salad and chocolate cake in silence and self-pity.<br> <br>Christmas Day was better. I went back to Old Town Square and the market first thing that morning and had a traditional Czech pastry rolled in cinnamons and almonds for breakfast. Around lunchtime I met up with Ali, the English assistant in Guingamp that I traveled from Paris with when we first arrived in France, and a friend of hers who's an assistant in the east of France, near Lyon. They introduced me to Bohemia Bagel, an English-speaking BAGEL SHOP in the middle of Prague. Apparently it's a big expat hangout, and how could it not be? Real live bagels, for crying out loud. While we were eating, we remembered it was Christmas. It didn't feel like Christmas for anyone. And it never did really feel like Christmas, even that night when I went back to the hostel and Skyped with my parents and sister. There just wasn't anything about it that's normally a part of Christmas for me. It was a good day, certainly, I just sort of feel like I skipped over Christmas entirely.<br> <br>That afternoon we went on another walking tour, this time of the castle district. Ali and Shayna had gone on a tour with this company before I arrived in Prague but hadn't been able to see the castle because Vaclav Havel was lying in state at the time, so they'd been told they could come back another day to do that part. My tour the day before hadn't gone anywhere near the castle, so I tagged along as well. I should clarify here that Prague's "castle" is not what you're probably thinking based on the term. It's not medieval, and the only towers are on St. Vitus' Cathedral. Most of the castle complex is seventeenth or eighteenth century, I think. Some of it might be a bit earlier, but only a few small pieces of it are actually from the Middle Ages, so it doesn't look like what you usually think of as a castle. Kind of like Dublin Castle in that regard. It's very very pretty, though. Very big and elegant. And St. Vitus' Cathedral is amazing. It's definitely the biggest church in Prague; I don't know for sure if it's the biggest in the country, but it must be close. And it's stunning. Unfortunately, you have to pay to go beyond standing in the back near the doors, so I didn't get to see much of it. All the same, it was breathtaking. I think Czech cathedrals might be even prettier than French cathedrals. The architecture is fairly similar (at least to my untrained eye), but Czech churches are full of painted murals, and there's something about Czech stained glass that I think is more beautiful than French stained glass. It's more delicate, somehow. Less abstract.<br> <br>Anyway, other highlights of the castle complex included the life-size straw nativity scene outside the cathedral, the assortment of guards in fuzzy hats who were trying not to smile, and (on a creepy note) the large sculptures of people murdering each other on either side of the entrance. I'm not sure what that was about. I assume there is symbolism involved that was lost on us, but to me it just looked violent and disturbing. But I say again, the Czech seem to be pretty nonchalant about the darker side of life.<br> <br>After the tour, we walked around the castle district for a bit (absinthe ice cream, anyone?) and then had coffee in a nice café on the way back to the river, which we crossed on Charles Bridge. Charles Bridge is another of Prague's major landmarks. It's a very old, very wide pedestrian bridge lined on both sides with an assortment of sculptures. There are various stories about some of them, and a great deal of confusion about exactly which one you're supposed to touch for good luck, and exactly how you're supposed to touch it to make sure it is indeed good luck and not bad. It was kind of hard to fully appreciate some of the sculptures in the dark (let alone take pictures), but Prague is so beautiful at night it was hard to mind. <br> <br>* Despite its less-than-ideal location, I would highly recommend Sir Toby's to other travelers. It's super nice, has everything you need (including cheap laundry facilities!), the staff are great and all some level of English-speaking, the pub is awesome and even serves food, and it seemed like a really good place for mingling. I only had brief conversations with some of my fellow guests, but there was a very social atmosphere and I saw some people really making new friends in the pub in the evenings. The other big downside besides location was that you have to pay for breakfast, and breakfast starts weirdly late, which was fine over the holidays but might have been irritating to me otherwise. That said, breakfast is very much worth the price and starting late means it's available until almost lunchtime, so if you are prone to sleeping in, you're still set.<br> ** Definitely bulls. Definitely not steers.<br>*** Same company I went with in Dublin and Amsterdam. Not the best tour of the three by any means, but definitely worthwhile. Probably would have been more enjoyable if it hadn't been so bloody cold once it got dark (which was really early--like 4/4:30 p.m.).<br> Ericahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12042385757154431516noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4520017628666989475.post-42347478021491584162012-01-26T13:06:00.001-05:002012-01-26T13:06:59.681-05:00Holiday Travels, Part 5: The Van Gogh Museum We interrupt the otherwise sort-of-consistent chronology of my tale to bring you this unnecessary ramble about an overpriced museum dedicated entirely to a single artist.<br><br>But seriously, it was great.<br> <br>First things first: Whoever decided to put the Van Gogh Museum in a city where a large percentage of the tourists are high a large percentage of the time was a freaking genius.<br><br>I'm not saying I was high when we went (and even if I was, I wouldn't announce it on the internet); I'm just saying those are two things that I think would go very well together. Van Gogh did so many cool things with color and texture and shape that his work is fascinating when you're completely sober. Imagine being surrounded by it when all you want to do is stare at interesting things.<br> <br>I love Van Gogh. I always feel like kind of a turd saying Van Gogh is one of my favorite artists, if not my very favorite, because it seems like a cop-out—everyone knows Van Gogh, you don't need any knowledge or appreciation of art to claim Van Gogh as your favorite. It's an answer for people who aren't actually that interested in art but have enough culture to like famous pretty things. But it's true. I'm not super well versed in art by any means, but I've taken art history classes, I've been to countless museums, and I have deep attachments to some works of art much more obscure than anything Van Gogh ever painted... but I still love Van Gogh.<br> <br>And it's a very different love from my love for other famous painters. I love Monet and Sisley and assorted other Impressionists because all of their work is superhumanly beautiful. I love Rubens and Vermeer and assorted other seventeenth century painters because their subjects are interesting and because I could spend hours just looking at the use of light in baroque paintings. I love Leighton and Waterhouse for beautifully painting beloved legendary/mythological figures. I know next to nothing about any of those artists themselves, only their art. With Van Gogh, on the other hand, I know his life story, and I did even before I could recognize much of anything other than "Starry Night." He fascinates me. I guess all tortured artists fascinate me, but I tend to go for writers rather than painters—except for Van Gogh.<br> <br>And that's why I love the Van Gogh Museum (aside from the mere fact that it's full of Van Gogh paintings): It's all about context. It's a museum that tells a story, which is something I'm not sure I've ever seen from another art museum (as opposed to, say, a history museum). Art exhibits, sure, but never an entire museum. The Van Gogh Museum is the story of Van Gogh's artistic progression, but also of his life, and I thought it was wonderfully designed.<br> <br>It starts with an exhibit that describes Van Gogh's development as an artist and puts his work in a stylistic context, displaying works by artists who influenced him as well as by his contemporaries and those he influenced.<br> <br>Upstairs, almost all of the paintings on display are Van Gogh's work, with a few more from his friends and contemporaries scattered throughout. They are grouped in chronological order in rooms arranged according to periods in Van Gogh's life and accompanied by extensive biographical information, both in the introductory text for each room and in the information about particular paintings, especially those of people or of views, as well as the more unique paintings. Each chronological period is also associated with a particular place where Van Gogh was living at the time, making everything even more organized.* So as you make your way around the floor, you see not only the distinct periods and changes in his art, but you are able to place each painting squarely within the framework of his life. Most museums give you a time and place; at this one, you also know why he was there at that time, what his life there was like, and where he'd been before. You've learned about his family, his friendships, his pre-painting life, and his illness--and all the while, you know where things are headed, even if you haven't already glimpsed the photograph of his grave that stands at the very end of the exhibit. You watch his life unfold through the lens of his paintings. Or perhaps you watch his paintings unfold through the lens of his biography. Whether it's Van Gogh's life story told through his art or the story of his art told through that of his life is something of a chicken and egg question. Which one shaped the other is a matter for debate. Either way, the two are inextricably bound up together.<br> <br>I realize there's a school of thought in the art history world that says that an artist's biography and social/political/historical context don't matter. I think that's crap, and I don't care if you pardon my French or not. Context matters. It always matters. No, I don't think everything a person ever creates is necessarily autobiographical or a statement of their religious or political beliefs or a social commentary about their surroundings. Obviously sometimes a flower is just a flower, let's say, and it's there because it's pretty and for no other reason. But all of those things influence what a person does overall. What they're interested in. How they relate to the world around them. Even if it's subconscious, even if it's not super important for interpretation, it still makes a difference. I write instead of painting, and my poetry is super personal and autobiographical; my fiction is not, at all, but it still reflects things about myself and my relationships and my views on life. People create based on what they know, what they think, and what they feel. How much is open to interpretation--maybe there's a direct connection between all of the darkness and grotesqueness of Caravaggio's paintings and the drunken violence of his own life, and maybe there's not; I don't know. Maybe Virginia Woolf wrote stream of consciousness because her mind was damaged, and maybe it's a coincidence; I don't know that, either. But to completely discount all of the things that make a person who they are, to dismiss them outright and say they have no bearing on that person's art, is ridiculous and narrow. I guess if all you're interested in is technique, then fine, but if you're after the big picture... life matters. Even artists who choose their style and subjects for entirely pragmatic reasons still have reasons, and what makes them practical depends on the time and place and circumstances. Nothing in this world happens in a vacuum.**<br> <br> On the floor above are temporary exhibits. When I was there, there was one about the influence of Asian art styles on Van Gogh and his contemporaries, and a really fascinating one about conservation work and research on the famous bedroom painting, with lots of before and after photos, photos comparing the different versions of the painting (one is in the Van Gogh museum, of course; another that I've also seen is in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris; I don't know where the third is--NYC, perhaps?), and a full-size reconstruction of the room and its furnishings. It was pretty great. Also, I feel like I've seen a lot of conservation exhibits in various museums over the past couple of years, about everything from paintings to decorative art and furniture to architecture. which is also great. It's good for the public to be aware of those kinds of issues and realize there's a lot more to museum work than just rearranging pictures on the walls, and it's a good way to get the more science-y minded among us interested in the art world.***<br> <br> The very top floor is a more wide-ranging exhibit of late nineteenth century art, mostly of Van Gogh's friends and contemporaries. Lots of Gauguin and Pissarro. <br><br>So that's pretty much it. We were there for probably somewhere between two and three hours altogether, and I could definitely see spending even a little more time there without being bored. I thought I had a lot more to say, and maybe I do and it's just not in words yet. (Or it was in words at the time and now I've waited too long to get them out properly. That's also possible.) And maybe a lot of it isn't really about the museum, but about Van Gogh himself, which doesn't necessarily have a place on a travel blog. Anyway, it was one of the highlights of Amsterdam for me. I bought seven postcards, which I think is a record for any one museum, let alone any one artist at a single museum, and they didn't even have postcards of a couple of my favorite paintings. I haven't figured out what to do with them yet.<br> <br>Now back to my story, speaking of things being in order. Stay tuned for tales of adventure (and NOT of museums) in Eastern Europe.<br> <br><br>* You know, now that I'm thinking about it, it's possible one of the primary reasons I like this museum so much is that it conforms so perfectly to my obsessive-compulsive tendencies: Everything is in order AND broken up into neat categories. Plus, for the most part, there's really only one way to move through the museum, so there's a set path. No chaos anywhere.<br> ** See also my rant about anthropological theories of culture that insist that social and political history are immaterial to understanding the present-day functioning of society. <br>*** I never really thought of myself as being science-minded OR art-minded until college, but when both of those things changed I was really excited to discover the field of art (and archaeological) conservation. If I'd known earlier in life, I might even have attempted the necessary chemistry coursework to get into conservation myself. Ericahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12042385757154431516noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4520017628666989475.post-84231928395350954572012-01-23T05:36:00.001-05:002012-01-23T05:36:34.147-05:00Holiday Travels, Part 4: PurgatoryIt occurs to me that it's now been a month since the trip I'm writing about--which is CRAZY, I can't believe how fast time is going--so I'm going to try to move this along.<br><br>However, that also means I'm halfway through my time in Brest. It's been almost four months since I came to France, which is also crazy. Time flies, I guess. Maybe a little too much for those of us who don't know what we're doing next, or where we're doing it, or when we're going there. Yikes.<br> <br>I've been kind of homesick lately, which is weird for me. The only times I've ever really experienced homesickness before all involved a boy (other than some time in Ireland when I was homesick for Oberlin, but I was very lonely in Ireland, which is not at all the case here). I've never really been one to actively miss being at home, even though I like being there. I think it's a combination of the lost, what-do-I-do now feeling and the fact that I have, whether it seems like it or not, been gone a really long time. I was in Ireland for exactly four months and one week, which until now was the longest I'd ever been away at a stretch, and obviously at this point in my time there I was getting ready to leave--saying goodbyes and strategizing packing and looking forward to Christmas and family and old friends. This time the things I'm looking forward to are much farther away, and home isn't even on the horizon. Right now I have no idea when or even if I'm going back.*<br> <br>Anyway, this morning I had the surreal experience of being at a French market talking to my [non-Francophone] friends in French, and then receiving a text message in English from a French person. Irony.<br><br>But back to Amsterdam.<br> <br>After I left the Anne Frank House, I wasn't entirely sure where the nearest tram back to the hostel was, so I just sort of wandered around for a while. It was getting dark, and I got a little lost, but I think it was a good way of decompressing. I just walked, and took pictures of houseboats, and watched swans in the canals.** Eventually, I made my way back to a familiar area and found a tram (and there's a story about that tram ride for another time), and settled down with my computer in the hostel lobby to wait for Sam and Jimena.<br> <br>The next morning we went to the Van Gogh Museum, which was amazing and deserves its own post, so that's next. That afternoon we took a boat cruise through the canals. In theory, it was a tour, but to hear the tour you had to sit inside and listen to headphones, and that was no fun at all when we could be sitting out on the smoking deck feeling the wind and seeing the city go by all around us instead of just through the weirdly low, smudgy, glare-y windows. So we did not really learn much about Amsterdam or its canals, but we enjoyed the ride. <br> <br>The next morning we parted ways. I was really upset. A) I did not want to leave Amsterdam, not even to go to other cool places, and B) I had spent almost the entire last week with Sam and Jimena and didn't want to say goodbye, even temporarily. Normally I'm perfectly happy to travel alone, but having had such a marvelous time with them made me really reluctant to go off in a different direction. I had kind of started regretting my decision to go to Prague instead of going to Bruges with them for Christmas.<br> <br>Within a few hours, "kind of" regretting turned into full-on "Why on earth did I do this to myself?" but we'll get to that.<br><br>First, they left that morning, but I was in no hurry to go anywhere, because all I had to do that day was get to a town a couple of hours away, just across the German border, and my night train to Prague wasn't going to get to that town until something like 11 p.m. So I stuffed my luggage into a pay-by-the-hour locker at the hostel and headed around the corner*** to the Rijksmuseum.<br> <br>The Rijksmuseum is filled with masterpieces of Dutch art, mostly from the Golden Age (17th century-ish). Rembrandt, Cuyp, Vermeer, that guy who painted church interiors. Also sculpture and decorative arts and an enormous model ship. Its crown jewel is an enormous group portrait by Rembrandt called <i>The Night Watch</i>. Apparently it is quite famous, although I was [embarrassingly] not familiar with it and didn't really see what the fuss was about. <br> <br>Unfortunately, the Rijksmuseum is currently undergoing extensive renovations, and most of it is closed. The selection that is still on display is still pretty substantial, though, so I can only imagine what seeing the entire museum would be like. It must be enormous. According to Wikipedia, its permanent collection comprises a million pieces. Presumably those are never all on display at once, but still. That's more than the Louvre. By a lot.<br> <br>I spent maybe an hour or two at the museum, and then I retrieved my stuff and went off to catch my first train. My night train reservation was from Wuppertal, Germany, and to get there I had to take short trips on two different regional trains.<br> <br>And that's where things started going wrong. I got on the wrong train.<br><br>I realized it pretty much as soon as the train started moving, which was actually a good thing, because it meant that I was able to hop right back off again at the first stop (which was in Utrecht, not that that matters) and immediately onto a train going in the correct direction. So no harm done, other than adding an extra step to my multi-step journey, but not a good start to my solo travels.<br> <br>And it got worse!<br><br>I got to Wuppertal without further incident. I was going to have several hours of waiting around ahead of me, but I figured I could just hang out in the train station. Unfortunately, it turns out the Wuppertal train station is approximately the saddest place on earth. It's ugly and dirty and shabby and mostly underground. Everything is concrete. Its highlights are a café/bakery and the newsstand. There is literally no place to sit down and wait other than the scattering of benches along the platforms. An enclosed "waiting area" on the far platform contains exactly four chairs and a lot of empty space. <br> <br>Also, the extent of my German is as follows: I can say hello and goodbye, please and thank you, yes and no. "Good." "I love _____." "God in Heaven." I can count to about twenty. I can say "Do not speak German," but I don't know how to conjugate it properly. I know a couple of swear words and a handful of random other words that aren't terribly useful (schadenfreude, anyone? fernweh? also some slightly more practical ones, but still not anything I'm likely to need in simple conversation). I can sing the first verse or two of "Silent Night".<br> <br>That's about it. I can often puzzle out more than that if it's in writing, but I can't understand any more than I can speak, which clearly is not enough to get by. For some reason this is far more stressful when one is alone than when one is with others, even if they also do not speak the local language.<br> <br>I wandered around the station a few times. Then I wandered outside and found a Christmas market in the street next to the station, so I walked and looked for a bit, and eventually bought a sausage in a bun in an awkward "I-do-not-speak-your-language-at-all" sort of exchange. But I was dragging all my stuff with me, and it was getting dark, and I couldn't just walk up and down the street all evening, but I didn't know where else to go (in the grand metropolis of Wuppertal), so I went back into the sad train station. I went to the café and had a coffee, and frustrated the girl at the counter who clearly assumed I spoke German even after I looked blankly at all the signs and asked for the least German thing on the menu (café au lait) without using any other words. I sat there and fiddled with my computer until it looked like they were starting to get ready to close. I went to the newsstand and looked around, and contemplated buying a couple of English-language magazines geared towards foreign language students, in case I could use them for my classes, but they were weirdly expensive. Finally, with nothing left to do and several hours still to go, I parked myself on the ground squarely in front of the departures board to wait for my train to appear on the list.<br> <br>But apparently, you can't sit by yourself on the floor of a train station without looking like a beggar. And that's when an old man (who I'm actually pretty sure was a beggar himself) approached me holding out a coin.<br> <br>Ever had to explain to someone that no, you're not homeless, and you really appreciate his kindness, but no, you don't need money, and he's very nice, but honest, you're just waiting for your train? Ever had to try to do that across an enormous language barrier? I have! (It involved a lot of smiling and head shaking and pointing at the departure board.)<br> <br>So I gathered up my things and went out to wait on the platform in the cold. And when I got too cold and bored, I came back down and stared (standing up) at the departures board for a while. I tried to go to the bathroom and wasn't willing to pay for it. I bought some candy bars from a vending machine. I went to wait on the platform in the cold. I got cold and bored and went back down to stare at the departure board. I went back up to sit on the platform in the cold. <br> <br>It was the longest two hours of my life.<br><br>Also, by that point in the evening, the only other people loitering around the station were men. Vaguely creepy older men by themselves. Raucous young men traveling in packs. Once in a while a family came through, or a few young women, sometimes with boyfriends, but never alone. But they all came shortly before their trains and then vanished, and it was just me, by myself, in the dark, with bunch of non-English-speaking men of varying degrees of sketchiness.<br> <br>Fun times in Germany, guys.<br><br>Finally, at long last, it was eleven o'clock and the train was arriving. I found my car (home of the cheapest available seats). Now, I had never been on a night train before and didn't really know what to expect. I knew I'd bought a seat instead of a place in a sleeper car. I guess I was expecting a typical train car, with rows of seats, maybe a little roomier than usual and hopefully able to recline. Nope. It was a compartment car, and my compartment was full. There were five people already there when I arrived, and my seat was in between two of them. There was nowhere to put my luggage. So I squeezed in, and set my backpack on the floor between my legs, and held my other bag in my lap, and resigned myself to a thoroughly miserable ten hours on top of my already miserable day.<br> <br>Eventually, the two old ladies across from me shuffled some stuff around and invited me to lift my backpack over them and cram it into a small space on their luggage rack, which was nerve-wracking, because my bag was heavy and I'm short and I was afraid I'd hit one of them somehow, but it worked out. So that helped, because I didn't have to hold it upright anymore, and I could put my smaller bag on the floor instead. There still wasn't really any space. Plus I was tired, but anyone who knows me knows I don't sleep in moving vehicles.**** So that was out. I had imagined being productive during my sleepless night on the train, but I couldn't really maneuver things around, and I didn't really have much with me that wouldn't have required turning on a light. My computer was pretty much dead. I listened to my iPod for a while, but it died, too. So I just sat. Tried to sleep. Mostly sat. Early in the morning, still dark out, the two old ladies got off. The young couple to my right got off in Dresden, a little before dawn. Then me and the remaining guy each took a side of the compartment and stretched out. I managed to sleep for an hour or so that way. Then I sat up and watched the Czech countryside appear out of the lifting darkness. It reminded me weirdly of Pennsylvania, with its wide open fields and distant mountains and rivers wilder than anything I've seen in France so far. That made me start to feel a little bit better about my decision.<br> <br>I was still pretty determined to find a way NOT to take the night train again on my way back, though.<br><br>* OK, that's a <i>little</i> melodramatic; I'm sure I <i>am</i> going back sooner or later. But I really don't have any idea when, or for how long.<br> ** We don't have swans in Brest, and I love them so much.<br>*** It was literally that close. So was the Van Gogh Museum.<br>**** If I'm ever on another night train, though, I might shell out for a sleeper car and see if having a bed makes a difference.<br> Ericahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12042385757154431516noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4520017628666989475.post-58686717596588397212012-01-22T11:37:00.001-05:002012-01-22T11:37:41.059-05:00Education in France, Part 1I've been tutoring a university student who's planning to take an important English proficiency exam in February. He's doing this because he wants to apply to a program at McGill University in Montreal, and I've been really impressed by both his motivation and his focus. This kid knows exactly what he wants and by God he's going to do it, and if Plan A doesn't work, he's got Plan B, C, and D all ready to go. He's also just a good kid: pretty nerdy, but really smart and really, really nice. I'm not sure how effective a tutor I am at a level as advanced as where he is, but I really enjoy working with him and I really want him to succeed. <br> <br>Anyway, he sent me the cover letter for his application so I can give feedback on his mistakes, and as I'm sitting here looking at it I decided it's time for my rant about the French school system. <br><br>I have many criticisms, but the problem of the moment is this: In all of my French classes in the U.S., I was always taught that translating is bad. Not in general, obviously, but as far as creating something in your second language is concerned. You don't write your essay in English first and then translate it into French; it's much better just to write it in French to begin with. American foreign language teachers, at least the ones I had, encourage their students to start <i>thinking</i> in their new language as much as possible as early as possible, because it improves fluency and it helps to avoid the kinds of mistakes where you try to translate phrases or structures that just don't translate directly. It's easier to see the things you don't know how to say coming if you're trying to think about them in your non-native language as opposed to trying to translate your ideas as you go, and that in turn makes it easier to find ways around them. You make fewer mistakes, not to mention less complicated ones, if you're only using the language you know, as opposed to trying to take complex ideas formed in your native language and express them in your fumbling attempts at your new language.<br> <br>Is this difficult to achieve? Of course. At the early stages it seems impossible, and I still think in a mangled combination of French and English more often than I actually think in French, because I'm just not fluent enough. And there continue to be times--very frequent times, in fact--where I want to express something I just don't freaking know a way to say. (I tried to explain the Peace Corps to a friend in French this morning. That was interesting. And not entirely successful.)<br> <br>But it really is useful to at least try. It really does help make things easier.<br><br>However, this is not a concept I have seen in action in French schools. If anything, I've seen the opposite. French foreign language education still has a lot in common with old-school methods involving lots and lots of grammar and translation and not as much emphasis on actual communication. Things have gotten better, I think; a lot of the teachers I work with try really hard to work in all kinds of oral comprehension activities and want me to do whatever I can that gets them to talk [in English] in class. At least one teacher has discouraged me from having students write anything in my classes, so they're forced to speak without preparation. But it's still not the same kind of education as what I had, and there's still a lot of things like "Listen to this audio file in English and then write about it in French," or "Okay, we've read this English text in class, now your homework is to translate the first two paragraphs into French," and I haven't heard anyone but me say anything about the importance of thinking, rather than just writing and speaking, in English. I've even seen kids using online translators in class instead of dictionaries, and the teacher just kind of shrugs and moves on.<br> <br>And I don't think having practice in translation is inherently a bad thing, but the fact that there's no distinction being made between translation as one thing and really understanding/speaking a language as a separate thing bothers me. If you can only understand a language based on how it relates to your native language... there's going to be a lot you never understand at all.<br> <br>And again, it encourages weird, complicated mistakes. Now I'm sitting here looking at this cover letter, and I don't even know where to start, because it's just a mess. I've had conversations with this kid; he makes mistakes, but he can make himself understood, and since most language learners write better than they speak, especially with time to edit and correct, I think he could have written a brilliant letter if only he had just written in English. Instead, he wrote it in French first and then translated it, with the result that he has a very eloquent French letter with a lot of very formal, complex language; and a very awkward and forced English letter with a lot of misused words and poor phrasing, whereas if he'd started out writing in English, he'd have been more or less limited to saying things he knew how to say and it would have come across a lot more clearly. Even if he'd made some mistakes or had had to look some things up and then not quite used them correctly (something I still do all the time in French), at his level those would probably be small things that are easy enough to fix. Instead, he has whole sentences that need to be rearranged or that don't make sense at all. Now I'm going to have to completely take it apart, and I worry it's going to be very discouraging, when I know firsthand that he's actually quite good at expressing himself in English. <br> <br>It just frustrates the hell out of me.<br><br>Obviously no education system is without flaws, and no one is ever going to agree on the best way to teach languages. There probably isn't one, since everyone learns a little differently. And foreign language education in the U.S. definitely needs some improvement, in attitude even if not in method. But this is one area where I really think we're doing it better than the French. I have a hunch that this has a lot to do with the reason some of my students can barely string a sentence together even after years of English classes. We could argue pros and cons all day, but I have right in front of me as I write the evidence that translation as a language-learning approach does not work better than, or even as well as, communication-based approaches.<br> <br>Of course, I don't even express myself well enough in English to be sure I've explained all that effectively, so...<br><br>I'm actually going to leave this here for now, but there will probably be more to come on my experience with French schools and French students.<br> Ericahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12042385757154431516noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4520017628666989475.post-71726256457227916672012-01-21T14:10:00.001-05:002012-01-23T08:31:52.110-05:00Holiday Travels; Part 3: The Anne Frank HouseThe building now known as the Anne Frank House looks more or less like every other tall, narrow brick building lining Amsterdam's canals. I actually walked past it once without noticing, though once I was looking for it, it was fairly obvious by the remodeled facade and the short line outside the door. There's a rather steep entrance fee (with no student or youth discounts--the Netherlands is not as generous to the young and cheap as France), but it's worth it, and I'm pretty sure much of it goes toward preservation of the building and the museum's educational outreach, so there's that.<br />
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For those of you a little fuzzy on your history, the "house" was actually an office building in the WWII era and housed the business that belonged to Otto Frank (Anne's father) until Dutch Jews were no longer permitted to own businesses, at which point he legally signed it over to his partner but continued to be involved in its day-to-day operations, behind the scenes. And when the family decided to go into hiding for the duration of the war, it was in a "secret annex" on the top two floors of an addition at the back of the property. They lived there secretly for two years. Several employees who worked in the offices below were responsible for bringing them food and information, but the majority had no idea there were eight people hiding upstairs. <br />
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Now it's a museum, established in the 1950s with a lot of effort and input from Otto Frank, who was the only one of the eight to survive the war.<br />
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When you enter, on the ground floor, it looks like a museum. Everything is very clean and modern and shiny--lots of tile and glass and metal. Tickets are carefully checked (within six feet of the purchase counter, mind you) and bored security guards peer into your bags. You walk past restrooms and a bookstore and even a café (I thought that was weird, do you think that's weird?) before entering the exhibit. The first stop is a dark, empty room where several TV screens are playing a short introduction--much of it Anne's own words being read over film clips and photographs--on a continuous loop. The film (as well as most of the text elsewhere in the museum) is in English; a scattering of telephone-like speakers offers a choice of translations.<br />
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Once rendered appropriately somber, visitors file past a row of photographs of Anne, taken just before the family went into hiding, and into the office building itself. There, they move through a series of storerooms and offices where various photographs and documents and artifacts are displayed. Everywhere, there are photographs of the people in question and of the building as it looked in the 1930s and 40s. Poignant quotes from Anne's diary are painted on the walls, adding tidbits of first-person narration to the story told by the materials on display. Some of the windows in the front of the building, overlooking the canal, have faint photographic images on the glass, superimposing the 1940s view over the present-day one.<br />
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In the first room there is background information about the business, and also about what was happening in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam in the months leading up to the Franks' decision to go into hiding. A display case holds a faded yellow star and a "Jews forbidden" sign. Later rooms are devoted to the role of the "helpers" who knew about the secret hiding place and risked their own safety to help those living there survive. Another film clip shows an interview with an elderly Miep Gies, who explains that when Otto Frank approached her to ask if she would be willing to help the family in hiding, she answered yes without even considering. <br />
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By the time you have taken in the backstory--the reasons for hiding in the annex, the preparation for it, the functioning of Otto Frank's business while he was hidden away upstairs, the burden on the few trusted individuals who helped the people in hiding--you have moved up several stories. There, you find a detailed scale model of the Secret Annex showing exactly how it looked during the two years it was inhabited. It is complete down to the tiny pillows on the tiny beds and the tiny photographs pasted on Anne's walls. <br />
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The model is necessary not just to help the visitor get a sense of the layout of the annex, but because the annex today is completely empty. Except for being briefly refurnished for the purpose of taking photographs that now hang on the walls to help visitors visualize the way the rooms would have looked, all of the rooms have stood empty since the arrest of the people in hiding. So the model shows us how things would have been. How functional--and how crowded.<br />
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After you have studied the model, tried to memorize its details so that you can imagine them in their place in the rooms of the real annex, you pass through a short corridor lined with photographs of the eight people in hiding. Plaques give both their real names and the pseudonyms Anne used for them in her writing.<br />
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Then, you enter the Secret Annex.<br />
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The movable bookcase that once hid the door from prying eyes now stands aside. The door is squat. There is a big step up, and most people of at least average height (not me) will have to duck while making it to avoid the low lintel. Seemingly perilously close is a steep* back staircase leading down to the floors below, once used by the helpers and now covered by thick glass, presumably to keep tourists from falling down it while trying to get past the bookcase and into the annex.<br />
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The annex is dark. Imagine two years in which not only can you not venture outdoors, but you cannot look out of your window at the outdoors. The curtains are always drawn. No sunlight.<br />
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It is also, as I said, empty. And yet--not empty. There are the few photographs showing the rooms as they looked in 1942-44, and short texts to remind us which room was used for what, but there are also traces of life there. For the most part there is no furniture, but the bathroom sink and the kitchen counter remain. A map still hangs on one wall, still with pins marking the advance of the Allied invasion. On another wall there are pencil marks, still legible, tracking the growth of Anne and her sister. And on the walls of Anne's narrow room, protected under sheets of plexiglass, are, still, all of the postcards and magazine pictures she pasted there to try to cheer up the little space. <br />
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These are not just empty rooms. They are a strange sort of hollow shrine.<br />
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They are also very, very small. <br />
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You think you understand that. You think you realize that with eight people living in five rooms, day in and day out, there must never be any privacy. There must never be anywhere to go. But nothing, not reading the diary, not even studying the model of the annex on the floor below, can actually prepare you for just how small that space is. Every room serves more than one purpose. Every room sleeps at least two people. One person sleeps under the attic stairs. The "big" common room on the upper story looks reasonably sized until you look around and try to envision it as living room, dining room, kitchen, pantry, AND bedroom for two. Imagine eight people there, constantly. The staircase is long and uncomfortably narrow and treacherously steep.** Imagine walking up and down it multiple times each day. <br />
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Standing in the center of the room where Anne slept, you can almost touch the walls on either side with your outstretched hands.<br />
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Two years. Imagine two years in this place. Two years of fear and hope. And in the end--it's all for nothing.<br />
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I defy anyone to stand in those rooms and not want to cry.<br />
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That part where you actually cry, though--that comes later.<br />
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You leave the Secret Annex by a tunnel that takes you back into the attic of the main part of the building. It is bright and open. The light is a relief--and also jarring. Then you emerge from the passageway and come face to face with the epilogue. A sign explains what you already knew, but had forgotten*** while absorbing the realities of the annex: Eventually, the hiding place was betrayed, and raided, and all eight people were arrested and deported. Here you file past their photographs again, this time interspersed with graphic images from liberated concentration camps. This time their captions tell you where and when each person died. Near the far end of the room, another heartbreaking video clip plays, this one an interview with a childhood friend of Anne's who encountered her again at Bergen-Belsen just days before she died. <br />
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The next part of the exhibit details Otto Frank's return to Amsterdam, his decision to publish Anne's diary, and his efforts to open the Secret Annex to the public as a museum. It's pretty amazing how much he was able to pick up and move on with his life after Auschwitz, and even more amazing how willing he was to share his family's story. <br />
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And the most heartbreaking of the heartbreaking video clips: Otto Frank talks about his reaction to reading Anne's diary for the first time, and informs us that parents never <i>really </i>know their children.<br />
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The last part of the main exhibit is all about Anne's writing. There are original pages on display, including the original first diary, and also a neat display of some of the many, many editions and translations of the diary that have been published over the years.<br />
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At the very end, back on the ground floor of the museum, there's a small exhibit dedicated to the life of Anne's mother. I didn't spend a lot of time with it, but I thought that was a good idea. I would imagine there are very few mothers in the world who look good viewed through the lens of their teenage daughters' diaries, so offering a more neutral perspective is a really nice gesture on the part of the museum.<br />
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Overall, I think it's a very well-designed museum. I really like that it manages to be both chronological and thematic. It's also very thorough, in a way that manages to be sensitive withut shying away from the gruesome details. It's depressing as all hell, of course, but it's powerful. Nothing really drives home the message of the Holocaust like seeing the remnants of its destructiveness, and the fact that end of the narrative at the Anne Frank House is Otto's post-war activism and Anne's legacy as a writer is really inspiring. Humanity overcomes.<br />
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* STEEP<br />
** It's a little like climbing up a steep hill that's also in a tunnel. I have pretty small feet, and I still felt unbalanced because the steps are so narrow and steep. I also, as I've mentioned before, am afraid of heights, complete with vertigo. This is normally an issue for things like cliffs and ladders and bridges. It's not normally a problem on an enclosed staircase. It was on this one.<br />
*** But actually, I kind of did. I don't know if I was just so focused on imagining life in the annex that I stopped thinking about it, or if being in the annex just makes you want so much to believe that it was all for a purpose, that it worked, that you briefly slip into denial. Either way, for some reason I was feeling like leaving the annex was the end, and walking out into the rest of the story was kind of a suckerpunch.Ericahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12042385757154431516noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4520017628666989475.post-91618708219396417002012-01-14T08:07:00.001-05:002012-01-14T09:17:07.546-05:00On Communication<div style="color: #444444; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: small;">I love it when French guys ask me if I speak French because they're either too drunk or too busy concentrating on their English to notice I've been replying in French for the last half hour.<br /> <br />Language is an interesting thing. Bilingualism and multilingualism are more interesting things.* I've already given a lot of thought to the phenomenon of code switching over the years, because I have several friends back home who also speak some French and with whom I've had many delightful mixed-language conversations. ( It's also true that I get endless entertainment out of insistantly speaking French to people who either don't know any or have just started learning.) Still, there's something really fascinating about conversation among people who aren't speaking their native language.<br /> <br />Even among the language assistants, there are a lot of linguistic adventures. We tend to default to English, at least within the group of people I see most, because the English assistants are the most numerous and it's the second most widely shared language after French. English skills among the non-Anglophone assistants vary from "I'd really be more comfortable speaking French..." to basically bilingual, but hardly anyone speaks no English at all, although there are a few with whom I can't recall ever speaking English, only French. At least one of the assistants doesn't really speak French, which means there have been times there was no ideal common language within a given group. Often at larger gatherings there are multiple conversations taking place in multiple languages--the Anglophones (and the German-but-no-French speaker) speak English to each other, the Hispanophones speak Spanish to each other, and mixed groups speak French to each other, while some people shift from group to group and language to language). Fascinatingly, despite coming from such a variety of linguistic and cultural backgrounds, there is consistently a surprising number of things about French culture over which we can bond as being different from what any of us is used to.<br /> <br />Speaking to French people is also interesting. I work with seven different teachers, all of whom have different habits when it comes to talking to me. There is one who nearly always speaks French to me. There are two or three who nearly always speak English to me, or switch into English after a few sentences even if we start out in French. And the rest speak to me in both languages at different times. There are two (including my <i>responsable</i>) who pretty consistently speak English to me in the classroom and French the rest of the time, but then there are others with whom I'm never entirely sure which language I should be using, especially if I'm initiating the conversation. The worst is when there's a group of people trying to talk to me and some of them are speaking English while others are speaking French. I am at least proficient enough in French that I sometimes don't notice which language I'm using right away--I might answer an English question in French and then turn around and reply to a French statement with English--but if I do notice, or think about it too much, I sometimes get confused by the lack of consistency. <br /> <br />There is also wide variation in how much they assume I understand in French. In particular, one of the teachers who usually speaks English to me is constantly explaining things other people are saying, especially when our students are speaking French amongst themselves, even though sometimes I already understood what was going on without translation. Meanwhile, there's at least one other teacher who usually addresses me in English who nevertheless seems to assume that I follow her long stretches of grammar explication in French and can provide word-for-word translations on various topics at the drop of a hat. (The other day she wanted me to say the word "oil well" and it did not seem to occur to her that the French word she was barking at me was not one I would ever have had occasion to learn.)<br /> <br />Some people try to slow down or enunciate more clearly when speaking to me, and some have even figured out that it's easier for me to understand when I'm spoken to directly as opposed to just trying to follow a conversation among several other people. Others are not so aware of these things, or just don't care.<br /> <br />This is particularly true outside the teacher's lounge. It makes sense that teachers, even teachers of subjects other than foreign languages, would be more patient and accommodating. In the world outside my school, there are fewer accommodations. My bank representative is always very kind and very careful to try to speak so that I can understand her, but with most other people I have business interactions with, I just have to try to keep up. (That's not a complaint, just an observation.) I ran into one bitchy woman at a train station ticket counter once, but other than that most people are willing to politely repeat or explain things if I look confused or tell them I didn't understand. They don't, however, slow down for me. I am particularly terrified of vendors at the markets: When they call out to me as I'm looking at merchandise, or walk over to tell me about something in particular I have my eye on, they're usually speaking very rapidly, not especially clearly, and sometimes with a heavy accent, and I almost never understand a word they say. And since I'm usually caught off guard, more often than not I just smile and nod and run away. (I'm aware that that's not the appropriate way to handle the situation, but it's very disconcerting to have no idea what someone is saying to you in a country where you're supposed to be able to speak the language.) When I bought the gloves I sent my mother for Christmas (and therefore had to interact with the boy selling them), I was really struck by the fact that he absolutely did not change his manner of speaking in the slightest after it became [abundantly] clear that I was not a native speaker of French. Again, not complaining, I just couldn't help but be intrigued, because I definitely alter my pace and sometimes even my vocabulary when I'm speaking English to speakers of other languages, especially if they're having trouble understanding me. Not so the French.<br /> <br />On the other hand, I have also encountered an astonishing amount of English here. Maybe it's just because French students all learn English at school--some of them are bound to retain at least a little into adulthood--but it seems like everywhere I go people are speaking English to me. The bartenders, at one of the Irish pubs in particular, sometimes speak English to us, and I've had many a caught-between-languages conversation with everyone from guys hitting on me at bars to the owner of the laundromat to people at the front desk at little local museums. Some of the assistants get really frustrated with the number of people who immediately start trying to speak to us in English once they realize we're Anglophone, but it doesn't bother me that much most of the time. Sometimes it's clear they're trying to be nice and make things easier, and other times it's pretty clear they just think we're exotic and want to show off and/or practice, and either way I don't really mind. When I made Francophone friends at UCC, I pretty much always spoke to them in English because I knew that was why they were in Ireland, to work on their English, but I won't pretend I haven't spoken French to, say, travelers I met in hostels even in Anglophone places. (There were also a surprising number of French vacationers in Virginia last summer.) It's exciting to have the opportunity, for one thing, and I also understand the impulse to want to make someone who might be out of their element feel like they're not completely isolated. It's not easy to be somewhere where you're surrounded by a language you don't understand, or only partially understand--but more on that when I write about my travels outside of France.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: small;">Often when people here insist on speaking English to me and I'd rather be speaking French, I'll let them talk in English and just answer them in French. I've had entire conversations in which both people were speaking the other person's language the whole time, sometimes by agreement and sometimes just because. I think it's a good compromise.<br /> </span><style type="text/css">
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</style><span style="font-size: small;">But anyway, it's not just from people I meet that I run into English all the time, but also on signs, in advertising slogans, in product names... it's everywhere. It's a little disconcerting, actually, and it really makes me wonder how it can be that so many students remain disinterested in learning English, or just don't see the value in learning English. It's becoming more and more clear that English's dominance is growing and that what I've been told by people from all corners of the world about how "you need to know English" is probably true, and only getting truer as time goes by. To see and hear so much English in a country that has a reputation for a level of pride in its own language that verges on snobbishness really drives home that belief. And as distasteful as I find the idea, because English-speakers have such a bad reputation as it is for thinking our language is best and most important and we shouldn't be bothered to learn anything else, it seems it's also only becoming more true that a person can get by in most of the world by speaking only English. My travels in other countries where I didn't speak the language at all were a little stressful, and I was constantly embarrassed not to understand the local language, but I got around just fine. No one here seems to hold it against me that I speak English and bad French and almost nothing else, even though many assistants whose native languages are something else speak three or even four languages, including English, all better than I speak just two. And maybe that's just because I have the grace to be ashamed, and to do the best I can with my bad French instead of insisting on English, but I still think it says something about how the relative global importance of languages is shifting. I've heard that in some parts of Scandinavia, it's more and more common for young people to speak only English to one another, so that there are fears that Scandinavian languages will start to die out within a few generations. My neighbor the Spanish assistant (who speaks English to me and usually not French) told me that on his layover in Frankfurt he and the German customs official communicated in English. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">One of the assistants from Austria has a French boyfriend and they speak to each other in English even though each of them knows a little of the other's native language. I had a long conversation with an assistant from Ireland one night about the problems with way the Irish language is taught and how little its students care; Gaelic is a minority language already, and if something doesn't change, I'm afraid its revival will soon be over. </span><span style="font-size: small;">My mind was blown when I discovered there are English language assistants from India—I know that shows my ignorance more than anything else, but given the number of languages spoken in India and the fact that assistants have to be considered native speakers of the language they're here to teach, that's at least a little bit amazing to me. </span><span style="font-size: small;">English is now taking over even in parts of the world where English speakers have never had political control and in places where local people once pushed back and revitalized their own linguistic cultures.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"> </span><span style="font-size: small;">It makes me feel like it's not all that arrogant of me to think that what I'm doing here, or at least trying to do here, is important, and it frustrates me that so many of my students—many of them studying things like engineering and product design, fields where their careers will almost certainly have an international aspect—don't seem to believe that English will be incredibly useful to them later. When I wrote in my application essay about my feelings on the importance of foreign language education, I was thinking more in terms of broadening students' horizons and opening up the world to them a little more and the way that understanding someone else's language gives us insights into how they think about things. I'm not sure I really thought at the time that learning English was a matter of day-to-day practicality, but it seems that it is for a lot of people.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">I've never really felt lucky about being Anglophone before.** And that's not an insight I was expecting to gain from a year in France, either.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">That's part of why I feel like pursuing TESOL certification might actually give me a chance to do something meaningful. Especially if I stay out of the swanky international schools for wealthy expat children and keep doing stuff like this, teaching city kids in tech programs or kids hoping to find a way out of poverty in developing countries for whom English might really open doors, or if I go back to the U.S. and teach ESL to immigrants who really need English to have a future there. Learning French changed my life, for sure, but not the way learning English has the potential to change the lives of speakers of other languages. I'm a little embarrassed to say that, and I don't think I would have a year ago, because it sounds so much like the outdated imperialist mindset I railed against last semester when learning about what French education was like in the colonies. But I'm not talking about using English to wipe out other languages. The idea of that happening even unintentionally is heartbreaking to me. I think we have to find ways to stop that from happening where possible, but the more I see of the world, the more I think it's true that English is becoming the global language. (Irony much?) I think learning it is going to continue to be important for anyone who wants to travel or communicate internationally.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">That's not to say I don't still believe that English speakers should also learn other languages. If I ever have children, they will be raised bilingual--even if I still don't speak French well enough to be comfortable having them learn it from me, they will be getting some other language from somewhere. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">And on that note, I need to go out now and fumble through some more broken French.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">EDIT: This video, blatantly stereotyping though it may be, is also hilariously accurate. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: small;"> <br /><br />* Disclaimer: I do not claim, and probably will never claim, to be fluent in French. Not even close. I still routinely answer "a little" or "badly" when asked if I speak French, and I don't think it's untrue. According to the guidelines for language levels in the first lesson of my TESOL course, I would judge my own spoken French to be no better than intermediate, which at this stage--after nine years of classes and three and a half months in France--is just depressing. I am one hundred percent serious when I say that some of my students speak English better than I speak French, as do some of the Spanish assistants, for whom English is one of three or four languages bumping around in their brains. My reading and writing skills probably qualify as advanced, but that's little consolation in terms of day-to-day communication. <br /> ** And really, I still don't when I look at how much better foreign language education is in countries that speak certain other languages.</span> </div>Ericahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12042385757154431516noreply@blogger.com0