Le Pays des mégalithes

I don't know if I mentioned this before, but when I arrived at my lycee I discovered that the previous assistants who have lived in my room have accumulated and left behind quite a few interesting and useful things, from the mismatched dishes and cooking utensils to a random assortment of books to a collection of partly-used bottles of dish soap and cleaning solution and the French version of Febreze. (There's also a trio of unframed prints of vegetables on the wall that I find very odd but can't justify taking down, seeing as I don't have anything better to put up.) One of the more intriguing and unexpected items lurking in my closet was a French press.

I'd never used a French press, but I do love coffee, and I was not about to go buy a drip coffeepot for the time I'm here even if it meant subsisting on instant coffee for seven months. (I actually don't mind instant coffee. My tastes aren't refined enough, I guess. I mean, I can tell that it sucks compared to “real” coffee, and given the choice I'll always pick something better, but coffee has to be truly terrible for me not to want to drink it, and even instant rarely falls that low on the scale.) I finally got around to buying some ground coffee last week (sorry, purists, but I'm far too lazy to grind my own even if I had a grinder at hand) and finally got around to trying the press pot over the weekend. And oh my God. Heavenly. Maybe it's only because all of the coffee I'd had in the previous six weeks had been either instant coffee in my room or espresso in cafes (because apparently ordering a coffee here always gets you espresso unless otherwise indicated), but I still think I may not go back to drip coffee once I get home.

But back to my story: There is also a Museum of Prehistory in Carnac that I wanted to visit while I was there, but my bus choices for leaving the following morning were approximately seven or approximately noon. Go France. The former was before dawn and would not allow me to make it to the museum. The latter was after check-out time and would force me to take my ridiculous backpack with me to the museum, and also would not give me the time to do my other hike at Erdeven. I chose the early bus, reasoning that the original intention had been for this to be primarily a hiking trip, and that there are tons of museums on my agenda for this year and missing that one wasn't the end of the world. Even if it sounds awesome.

So after paying my hotel bill the night before, because there wasn't going to be anyone at the front desk so early in the morning, I got up at an ungodly hour for the second day in a row and stood at the bus stop in the dark and the drizzle and was the only person on the fifteen or twenty minute ride to Erdeven, where I had to find my way through the deserted town and down a surprisingly not deserted country road to the trailhead in the dark. (It was pretty creepy, and one of the most anxiety-inducing things I've done since getting to France.) My route began at another set of alignments, which, like many megaliths in Brittany, are just hanging out by the side of the road like it's no big deal. There's a small parking lot for visitors and a little signpost with some information, but that's it. And it's a lot, compared to the vast number of sites that aren't acknowledged in any way whatsoever. Anyway, I knew I'd reached the right spot when I saw the stones rising up in front of me—big shadowy shapes slightly darker than the dark around them. I initially thought they formed a circle, which got me really excited (I love stone circles even more than dolmens, I think, which is interesting given my attraction to all things tomb-like), but once it was light enough for me to see beyond the nearest ones I realized they were in rows like the ones at Carnac. I need to read up on megaliths, because it seems that alignments are the thing here in Brittany and circles are more of a British/Irish phenomenon. I need to find out if that's true or if I've just made it up based on my very limited experience.

Anyway, the prospect of being there at dawn made the 6 o'clock alarm and the eerie, wet walk entirely worth it. I sat on the fence and ate an apple and waited for there to be enough light to start trying to take dramatic pictures. I started too soon, of course, and took many a failed picture*, but it turned out that dawn was anticlimactic anyway, because this is Brittany and day did not break so much as slink up unnoticed. It very gradually became light enough for me to see that it was going to continue to be a dark, grey day, and I didn't actually see the sun until close to two hours after it supposedly rose.

The trail away from the alignments led into the woods, and there it stayed for most of the three-hour walk, winding among dense trees and passing, meeting, or crossing an assortment of other paths. I was very glad of my guidebook, and even it wasn't entirely helpful—as well as being in French and using a lot of words with which I was unfamiliar, it occasionally did not give detailed enough directions, as when it failed to mention the crossroads at which I ultimately took the wrong path, ruining the loop and causing me to skip an entire leg of the hike so as not to have to backtrack any more than was already necessary. That was irritating. I like to think it got its just desserts when it fell into a mucky puddle later on, though.

Anyway, my short[ened] walk in the woods took me past an absurd number of megaliths, both more alignments and some awesome dolmens. Some of them were signposted (not informative signs, mind you, just names and arrows). Others were not. None of them were fenced or roped off or otherwise protected in any way. Anyone can walk among them, touch them, sit on them, crawl inside the tombs. (I do not do those last two things, because I have some respect, but I know some people do.) They're everywhere, and no one cares. It blows my mind. I don't mean that as a criticism, necessarily, just that I can't imagine ever thinking of freaking megaliths as just part of the landscape, no more worthy of notice than an oddly shaped tree or a hollow in the creek bank.

On a slightly different topic, I've been pleased to discover that walkers/hikers in France smile and greet one another in passing just as they do in America. That doesn't happen in the cities. You ignore the other people on the sidewalk, who stare at you with perplexed hostility if you try to make eye contact. But on the trail, whether it's on the cliffs outside of Brest or deep in the woods in rural Morbihan, people experience the same sense of friendly camaraderie as on trails back home.

Or maybe hiking just appeals to a certain kind of person. Maybe we all walk around town feeling awkward about avoiding contact with the people around us.

It's a little ironic that you find indifference when surrounded by people and warmth in the places you go to get away.

* I have a love/hate relationship with my camera, which is a Canon Powershot of whatever mid-range model was current as of the summer of 2010. I love that it's small enough to fit into a pocket, sturdy enough to tolerate being dropped now and again (a necessary feature for almost all of my gadgets), and good enough at what it does to take usually satisfactory and sometimes excellent pictures without the assistance of any real photography skills on my part. However, I hate my inability to manipulate it, which is partly a result of same lack of photography skills and partly due to its being a point-and-shoot. Obviously a point-and-shoot is all that's necessary for someone without photography skills, but it also simply cannot do some of the things a better camera could do. One thing in particular that it cannot do, that frustrates me endlessly because it's a feature I actually would know how to use if we had it, is to allow the shutter speed to be manually adjusted. I can adjust other things I don't even understand, but I am not allowed to control the shutter speed at all, and just that one simple thing would allow me to make good on so many more of the dramatic photos I see in my head...

Walking Into Prehistory

France is a hiker's paradise. It's big enough to have enormous variety in terrain and climate*, so there're plenty of choices. It's full of parks and protected areas of all sizes. And it has tens of thousands of miles of trails, from short local loops to long-distance paths across regions or even the whole country, all of them marked and maintained and many of them interconnected. You can almost-literally walk anywhere. There's a company that publishes guides to all of these trails, a set describing short hikes and another for planning trips along the long trails (or sections of the really long ones), both organized geographically. The guides fill an entire section of shelves in bookstores. It's frustratingly difficult, if not impossible, to find useful free information, but the guides are fantastic. They break down each leg of the trail with directions, give distances and time estimates, point out sights along the way and where to find hotels, food, bus stations, etc., and have tons of short side articles about the towns, landmarks, and local culture along the routes.

I bought two of them at the beginning of the Toussaint vacances: a guide to day hiking in the Parc naturel regional d'Armorique, which is only a short distance away from Brest, and a guide to the Morbihan (southern Brittany) section of the GR (grande randonnée) 34, which follows much of the coast of Brittany.

After marking all of the interesting-looking possibilities in the guide to the Parc naturel regional, I starting looking into how to get to their locations. It was at that point that I began discovering the limitations of the French bus systems. (See my earlier post about transportation.) Forced to concede that I was not going to be able to access some of the places I most wanted to and that others were going to require a lot of additional walking, probably along roads rather than walking paths, from the nearest town with a bus stop, not to mention the hassles of timing any trip to correspond to the severely limited bus schedules, I gave up and turned to the other book to plan a trip to Carnac. There I discovered still more transportation issues (though at least not the kind where I simply couldn't get where I wanted to go) and the issue of nonexistent budget accommodations. After attempting multiple itineraries, I eventually managed to settle on one that was a lot more limited in scope than I'd wanted, but was relatively straightforward in terms of transportation and involved only one overnight stay, in a reasonably priced (but definitely not cheap) hotel in the town of Carnac.

Here's how it worked: I got up in the dark on Wednesday morning of that week and left, still in the dark, a few minutes after six a.m. I actually really like being out that early, when I have a good reason to be. Everything is still and quiet and you can feel that you're right on the cusp of a brand-new day. And when you've just gotten up at that hour, as opposed to not yet having gone to bed (probably the more common reason I'd be awake two hours before dawn), the darkness and the empty streets are thrilling instead of threatening.

I took a seven o'clock bus, the first of the day, to Quimper, where I caught a train to Auray, the first train station beyond my ultimate destination. (Yes, I could have taken the train all the way from Brest, but I'd also have paid a lot more for it.) Then I started backtracking, by taking a bus a few kilometers back towards Carnac and getting off in a seaside town called Trinité-sur-Mer, 10 km and 2.5 hours, according to my guidebook, from Carnac by foot. And there I started walking.

My original lofty goals for the trip had involved a lot more walking from place to place and a lot less waiting for buses, but with all of the various time constraints I was facing I unfortunately had to prioritize my destinations over my journeys. I was determined to see the alignments at Carnac and get to the town of Erdeven the next day with enough time to do an interesting loop hike there, and to accomplish both of those I had to give up on spending the majority of the trip on the ground. But I was still determined to arrive at Carnac on foot.

The stretch of the trail from Trinité to Carnac is probably not the most interesting one, although some of it is very beautiful. Leaving Trinite, the shoreline was rocky and I watched people gathering shellfish, obviously taking advantage of the beautiful weather and, in some cases, of the fact that the kids didn't have to go to school. The small rocks gave way to boulders, and I stopped for lunch on a windy headland looking out from the tip of the point. Someone had been there before me and gathered up enough little white rocks to build a tiny model dolmen** surrounded by a little stone circle—which I thought was way cooler than a sand castle.

After rounding the point, the rocks thin out suddenly and the trail crosses over sand dunes and though a stretch of pine forest before eventually hitting a road, which crosses a lovely marsh and runs alongside a couple of nice beaches, but which makes for a long, dull walk on a sidewalk instead of in nature.

I should point out that the hiking guide was actually written for someone going in the opposite direction, so not only was I trying to decipher directions in French, I was trying to do it backwards, which would have been confusing even if they were in English. Fortunately, most of the trail was well marked or unmistakable or both, but I did have a couple of moments of uncertainty. I also eventually lost it entirely somewhere on the outskirts of Carnac, but since at that point I was on my way into town anyway, I just kept walking instead of going back to try to find the official route.

I should also point out that the French like to close up shop (and that's any imaginable kind of shop, along with banks, post offices, assorted other kinds of offices, museums, and anything else you can think of) for a couple of hours in the early afternoon. The French like their long lunches, and they take their not-having-to-work time very seriously, and it's all very frustrating to an American who's accustomed to being able to get stuff done in the middle of the day. Anyway, I arrived in Carnac around 1:30, which is exactly the wrong time of day to be able to do anything in France other than eat lunch or have a drink. Especially in a small town.

So I walked around for a bit just to see what might be interesting to go back to later, and then I sat outside the tourism office waiting for it to reopen, which turned out to be a waste of time (because I didn't find anything very useful there, not because it never reopened). Then I went to find my hotel, where I found the door locked even though I was well after the 2 pm check-in time (oh, France...), so I grudgingly continued carrying my backpack with me as I headed up the road towards the alignments, which are just north of town. In fact, they turned out to be closer than I thought—maybe a ten minute walk from my hotel.

And they're awesome, of course. I took far too many pictures, but else can you do? There is no photograph man could take that would encompass the scale of the place, but you have to try. And try. And try.

The stones vary in size from up to about my waist to several times taller than me, and they seem to get gradually larger from one end of the alignments to the other. The rows are very straight and all completely parallel. And they go on and on, as far as the eye can see. There are actually several different sets, and I only visited one and still couldn't believe the enormity of it. I just stood in the middle of the field and stared for the longest time.

And yes—I did just say “the middle of the field”. Because in the off-season, when the crowds are less, you don't have to pay for a guided tour to be allowed to go in among the stones. They just open the gate, and you're free to wander as you please.

When I couldn't look anymore, I went back to my hotel and then back into town. Carnac is divided into two parts, the town proper and the beachfront town a short distance away. (Archaeology and the beach all in one spot--what more could anyone want?) The beach had come to life since my stop in the afternoon, and felt just like an American boardwalk in the summer, which for me was both weird and really cool. I walked around watching families and looking at the arcades and carnival rides and peeking into tacky souvenir shops, and eventually succombed to the lure of an awe-inspiring snack stand where I bought a waffle covered in salty caramel (a Breton speciality) and white chocolate, which I ate on a bench overlooking the ominously rough ocean, watching the crowds that hadn't already hit the town packing up their cars. 

From the Neolithic to the epitome of modern tourism in less than two hours and no more than a few kilometers. France, my friends, is an interesting place.

Also, one of the fun facts I learned this past weekend is that the French for "time machine" is "machine à explorer le temps". I like that, but it seems unnecessarily complicated, if you ask me.

Like many things in France.

* France has four different climate zones, if I remember correctly. The US, by comparison, has about ten or eleven. That's not exactly a proportional difference considering France could fit into the US almost 15 times. (Yes, I did the math.) You could easily hit several different climates in France in the space of a couple of days, which would be considerably more difficult in the US.
** A prehistoric stone tomb.

I live in France... Nope, that still sounds super weird.

So I'm way behind on updates. Without going into the details of my quest for internet, suffice it to say that I still don't have access to blog sites at home. It's super frustrating and I don't understand why a school should feel the need to block ALL blogs unilaterally, regardless of their content, but c'est la vie, at least ici.

(I spoke franglais to a student yesterday, too... but it was mostly on purpose, at least. It's very hard to be witty when no one even understands you being literal.)

Anyway, I'm still trying to sort out the internet situation, but it's going to take me at least a few more days.

In the meantime, here are some things that are awesome about France:

1. French markets. I love markets. I delight in summer farmers' markets back home, and I thought the Christmas markets in Ireland were the most fantastic things I'd ever seen. But French markets? First of all, they're everywhere, all the time. There's hardly a neighborhood in Brest that doesn't have its own, and there's at least one somewhere in the city almost every day of the week—even Sunday, when France practically shuts down. And they have everything. If there's anything you want—from foodstuffs to clothes and shoes to housewares to books—that you can't find at the market, you're not going to have an easy time finding it at all.
2. There is a bakery, a pastry shop, a chocolate shop, or (most often) some delightful combination of the above on nearly every block. In the main commercial areas of major cities, it's likely to be more like two or three. And they're all wonderful. And no one gives you a funny look if you walk down the street munching on pieces of plain baguette.
3. Cheap wine is still good wine, and even bad wine is still pretty good. There's a shockingly pink sparkling rosé we buy sometimes that's surprisingly delicious—one of the British assistants calls it “the €1.60 bubbly of dreams”. Six or eight euros is almost kind of a splurge for a bottle of wine, and I can only assume it's delicious, because I've yet to spend more than about three euros, and most of what I've gotten so far has easily been comparable to the inexpensive-but-not-quite-cheap wine I might buy in America. That's not to say expensive wine doesn't exist here, just that I can't imagine why you'd ever need it when the price of quality is so much lower than it is where I'm from.
4. Hardly anyone is hostile to me when I don't understand their language or have trouble making myself understood. (Granted, I'm not in Paris.) (And if you're an American feeling sympathetic about that, maybe you should think about it next time you meet someone struggling with English. Nobody can learn a new language overnight.)

But, there are some things that France needs:

1. Better, or at least easier-to-navigate, public transportation systems. I've already ranted about this, so I'll leave it at that. And I'm not being hypocritical, because I make the same complaint about the U.S. Even though I do drive most of the time in America, there are definitely times when it's mostly because we have comparatively shitty public transportation options.
2. Electronics stores. France is in dire need of something like Best Buy, or at least Staples. I know where there's an Apple store, and phone/internet providers often sell tablets and at least a couple of different laptops, but other than that I have no idea where the French buy things like computers and computer accessories. It certainly seems you can't get them and TVs and MP3 players and cameras and video game systems all in the same place.
3. Coffee to go. I have definitely had days where this was what I missed most--even more than my car or American TV or being able to do business on Sundays. And yes, I know it's a wasteful habit. It's just that sometimes when I'm by myself and have time to kill, I don't want to sit alone in a cafe; I'd rather get a drink and take it with me to sit in the park or on a bench overlooking the harbour. In France, you can get the barman to put the rest of your beer in a plastic cup so you can finish it on the street, but good luck getting your coffee served any way other than in a little white cup with a saucer and a tiny spoon, with a single chocolate or a biscuit on the side. Charming, but not conducive to getting out and enjoying the sights.

Where Planning Is Half The Adventure

It's come to my attention that there are some text-formatting issues going on with this blog. I'm not sure why, but I'll try to sort it out.


According to Wikipedia: “In Britain and Ireland, there are a number of superstitions regarding magpies[16] 

• A single magpie is associated with bad luck (see rhymes below)  
•  One should make sure to greet magpies when they are encountered in order to either allay bad luck or encourage good luck as related to the number of birds and therefore their place in the Magpie poem. Common greetings include "Hello Mr Magpie" "How is your wife/where is your wife?", "Good Morning/Evening Sir" and other marks of respect.
•  Upon seeing a lone magpie one should repeat the words "I defy thee" seven times. 
•  On seeing a lone magpie one should pinch the person they are walking with, if they are alone they are to pinch themselves. The custom in Devon is to spit three times to avert ill luck. 
•  If a lone Magpie is seen, one should salute it to show you respect it. This formality can be forgone if the Magpie looks directly in your eyes, which shows it respects you.”

and also, “In Scotland, a Magpie near the window of the house foretells death.”


The article does not have as much to say on how the French feel about magpies, but even if the British superstitions carry over, I don't think I have to worry too much about ever seeing just one magpie in a given place in Brest. That said, it would be impossible to go around greeting all the magpies I see—I'd never be able to focus on getting anything else done.

But, one of the several mornings last week that I woke up to a drenching rain, there was a very wet, sad-looking magpie hunkered down on my windowsill. So I guess that's bad. Good thing I'm not in Scotland.

I guess technically that's a lone magpie, but there were others around the parking lot, in sight. I wonder how big a geographic area is standard for the counting of magpies.

Anyway, as everyone who's friends with me on Facebook is probably already aware, I got seriously frustrated with France a few days ago. I had wanted to do some hiking, maybe a short backpacking trip, before coming to Rennes, but after going through the two [first of many] hiking guides I bought early last week and beginning to try to plan, I encountered some unforeseen problems. Actually, I guess they weren't entirely unforeseen, because I'd already begun encountering them in trying to plan to go to Rennes, but I hadn't yet fully appreciated their extent until then.

I guess I forget sometimes, being from the U.S., that France is actually a pretty big country by most other standards. Including, perhaps, standards of certain kinds of practicality. Public transportation exists, but it's a complicated and time-consuming way of getting anywhere and a nightmare to navigate even if you sort of understand the information available. There are the TGV trains, which seem to be the only real way to get anywhere over long distances because there is basically no such thing as interregional bus systems in France. As far as I can tell, I can't even get from Brest to Rennes or vice versa on a bus, because they're in different departments. I can (and did) use the regional train network, which is inexplicably cheaper than the TGV even though it takes the same amount of time and makes the same stops. Then, finally, there are intercity bus systems in each department, which are quite cheap and efficient (at least in Brittany). But you still have to take a train at some point to get from one department to another. And then, of course, there are some places that are so small or so remote that they just aren't served by any public transportation whatsoever.

All of this together turned trying to plan visits even to places relatively close to one another into a logistical nightmare. There were some places I wanted to go that I literally can't get to unless I take a bus into the next closest town and walk (probably along a road with no sidewalks), and even among places where buses do go, the need to reconcile multiple schedules, many of which have buses running with annoying infrequency or at really inconvenient times, and allow enough time for walking the legs I was planning to walk and for visiting attractions that are open for specific hours, made things anywhere from unnecessarily complicated to flat-out impossible.

To make matters worse, France is not the Mecca of cheap accommodation I have come to expect in Europe, and that's true in some major cities as well as the small towns I'd have to stay in along some of my hiking routes.* Hostels are few and far between and still often cost more than 20 euros per night, a cheap hotel is often forty or fifty euros a night, and B&Bs, though I haven't really looked for them specifically, do not appear to be the middle ground between the two that they often seemed to be in Ireland. It had not occurred to me until I really started looking that I would need to plan on spending two or three or even four times as much for every night away from home as I did when I traveled in Ireland, and I'm concerned that's going to put a damper on some of my within-France travel plans. I know it made my trip this past week into an overnight one instead of the two nights I'd originally planned.

Anyway, after spending something like five hours at my computer on Monday night trying to find a way to make some of the things I wanted to do work out both in terms of timing and in terms of not spending over a hundred euros on transportation and a place to sleep in just two or three days, I finally gave up and went to bed pissed off at the world.** Tuesday I woke up late, to another gray, rainy morning, and grudgingly worked out an itinerary that involved a lot less hiking and a lot more ridiculous bus schedules than I wanted, and grudgingly made a hotel reservation in Carnac for Wednesday night. Then the biggest problem was that I can't find my Maya necklace anywhere. I know it came to France, but I don't remember when or where I last had it and I have no idea where it's gone. I'm actually pretty upset about it, because I've worn it everywhere, on every trip I've taken since I got it (including symbolic ones--I was wearing it underneath my graduation dress last spring).

That afternoon, though, the weather cleared up and I went out to find the trail along the coast. I was a little miffed because I knew I was starting much too late to get all the way to the westernmost tip of the peninsula, where there's a lighthouse right alongside an abbey in ruins (my responsable took me there the first weekend I was in Brest), but I figured I'd go as far as I could and still be able to catch a bus back. By the time I walked all the way across town to find the trail, that wound up only being a few kilometers before it started to get close to dark and close to stormy again and I wasn't sure how far it was to the next place with a bus stop, but they were a much-needed few kilometers of wild cliffs and beautiful woods and views over the harbor, and I felt much better about life and much kinder towards my most recently adopted country by the time I got off the trail—just in time to see an enormous rainbow right down to the water.

*Camping out is not an option (even if it's legal, which I don't know) because A) I have no equipment, and B) I do a lot of things by myself and some of them border on risky, but sleeping in the woods alone in a country where people don't speak my first language is not going to be one of them, at least not at this point in time.

** Mostly France.

Little Things

Oh, the joys of central heating! Imagine being able to wear just one or two layers of clothes, to take a shower (in a mildly drafty, tile-covered room) without freezing to death, to have wet laundry and towels actually dry out when hung up for a few hours, even to wake up in the morning and be almost too warm under the covers... I had almost forgotten what such simple pleasures were like until the end of last week. It was a little chilly in my room, and a little more so in the bathroom, from the start, but it's getting colder now and by the last few days before the heat was finally turned on, I'm told it was getting down to 3 degrees Celsius (about 37 degrees Fahrenheit) in the early mornings. I was wearing two good pairs of socks most of the time, and multiple shirts/sweaters, and sometimes tights underneath my pants. I avoided showering and when I had to I tried to do it in the middle of the day. We'd been told the heat wouldn't be turned on until after the Toussaint holidays, and there wasn't really anything else I could do; I cooked in my room once or twice a day, so the oven gave off a little heat, and I could boil water for tea and then set the open kettle in the middle of the room to steam for a while, but mostly I just bundled up and shivered and dreaded the ten days of ever-colder vacation time with nowhere in particular to go and no heat at home.* So imagine my delight when I came back from class the day before the holidays and discovered that the radiator was hot!

I am now more determined than ever before that if I ever have a house of my own, my number one criterion is a working fireplace. I don't care if I end up in a beach house on the Gulf Coast; it will have a fireplace.

Despite the cold, there are still somehow insects hanging around, including mosquitoes. I think they must have superpowers, or perhaps be demons in disguise. They're driving me nuts, because France doesn't really do window screens and because there's no reason anything not warm-blooded shouldn't be dead or hibernating by now.

Anyway, as you might have gathered, I'm on a break now. There are four vacances scolaires in the French school year: ten or twelve days around Toussaint (All Saint's Day) in late October and early November, two weeks at Christmas/New Year's, and about two weeks in February and again in April. It's a pretty sweet deal for language assistants—almost eight weeks of vacation time for a seven-month contract, AND a monthly salary that's the same regardless of whether we have two weeks of work or five? Bring it on. But before you start thinking that French students have it pretty good, bear in mind that they may only have six or eight weeks of school before another break comes around, but their year starts at the beginning of September and isn't over until the end of June, and they may have much longer days when they are in school than their American counterparts do (classes at my school, for example, begin at 8 and finish at 5:30). So it all evens out somewhere. They spend just as much, if not more, time in class as American students.

I'm currently in Rennes for the next four days with one of my best friends from college, who is also an assistante and lives just outside Paris. I am waiting for her to arrive as we speak. It's fantastic to see her again after five months apart, and it's also fantastic just to be with someone familiar. I really like the other assistants in Brest and we all get along well, but there's still something to be said for being able to spend time with someone you've known for more than a few weeks.

In other news, I now have [limited and inconsistent] access to the internet from my room, though this blog, Skype, and many other useful things are blocked, because apparently censorship in French schools isn't just for porn. I also have my French bank card (as of a couple of weeks ago, actually), my French social security number, and confirmation that my immigration paperwork was received by the appropriate office, which means I should be done with administrative formalities until I get the time and place of my mandatory medical appointment. Assuming everything was done correctly, I should be getting paid any minute now—my first-ever paycheck in euros and also my first-ever monthly salary. I've never had a job that wasn't paid by the hour before, and it's kind of funny that this one isn't, because the powers that be are so much fussier about us working exactly the right number of hours than anyone was at most of the hourly jobs I've had.** 

I've noticed a little bit of an improvement in my conversation skills. There's still a long way to go. I still can't eavesdrop on other people very well, and I still get lost in group conversations (unless it's the other language assistants and everyone is speaking slow, badly-accented French), but I have more extensive one-on-one conversations in French with the other teachers and everyday interactions like buying train tickets and talking to my bank representative and checking into a hotel have gotten ever more successful. I'm not going to be ready to discuss philosophy anytime soon, but I'm a lot more comfortable with my ability to function in society without someone there to help me.

Also, in case you missed it, I shaved my head last summer, and my hair is now finally about two inches long—long enough to sort of lie down instead of standing straight up like a cartoon character. I still don't like it and it's still more work than is fair considering there's so little of it and the work yields such little result, but it's huge progress all the same. Soon there will be enough for me to just wear headbands and ignore it until the long, miserable growing-out process achieves a reasonable length. I know I don't get to complain, because I did this to myself (literally) and it wasn't even a snap decision, but if I'm not going to be bald or buzzed*** anymore, than I want my hair back and I want it now.

*And read. I spent most of my free time over the last week or two re-reading the entire Little House on the Prairie series (in eBook form). They brought up a lot of nostalgia, and some poignant emotional connections in the later books (which I thought were totally boring when I first read them as a kid) where she writes about teaching school for the first time and about growing up and leaving home, but they also just made me feel a lot better about the temperature situation.

** Bon-Ton was a notable exception, because they wanted to get as much work out of me as they could and not pay me for a second more than was absolutely necessary. Bon-Ton is also the exception to such statements as “I've been really lucky to have laidback employers who've treated me well,” “I've liked most of the people I've worked with/for,” and “I've really enjoyed most of my jobs.”
*** YES, I know how that sounds.

Counting Again

1000 hits!

I guess maybe that would be more exciting if this blog wasn't more than two years old, but still. Averaging more than one page view a day is better than less than one, right?

Tomorrow, I will have been in France for a month. That's a weird thought. It seems like last week that I was wandering through Celtic Classic thinking about how much I love Bethlehem and how much I was going to miss it, but I'm also so settled in my life here that it's a little hard to believe I've only been walking these streets and talking to these people for four weeks.

It's also hard to believe there are still six months to go. I know it will fly, just like the last six months have, and I'm already worrying about how much I want to do and how I can't possibly get it all done, but it sounds like such a long time. And it is kind of hard to shake the feeling that my life is on pause right now, like I'm taking a time-out from whatever I'm really supposed to be doing to fool around in France for a while. I don't necessarily mean that in a bad way, but there's no way around the fact that this is ultimately a detour, of one sort or another. I'm a little worried that by the time I figure out what it means, it'll be over, but at the same time, there's so much happening that I'm not there for and so much I feel like I could be doing instead that it seems really important to make all this time count for something. I do sometimes feel like I'm in exile. That part of it doesn't bother me as much as it did when I was in Ireland, though (for a variety of reasons, none of which is any reflection on Ireland itself--or on France, for that matter).

I also realized today that by the time I go home at the end of this year, I will have spent more than a year of my life outside the U.S. Assuming I travel after my work is done and stay abroad until around the end of May, the grand total will be just shy of fourteen months. I'll be twenty-three in May, so that's... roughly 5% of my life.

Maybe not that much compared to some people, but I think it could be worse.

Students: First Encounters

My schedule will change after Christmas, but right now I am working with ten classes. Two of them are sécondes, which are roughly the equivalent of American sophomores; they're all fifteen or sixteen, and this is their first year of high school. They are shy and bright-eyed and braces-wearing and make me feel old, because even though sixteen does not feel that long ago for me, they seem SO young. But they're my favorites, because they're so polite and energetic and enthusiastic about learning. The rest of my classes are BTS, which is, as far as I've figured out, a two-year, post-high-school professional degree program; they are studying things like electronics and combustion engines and product design, and they are anywhere from eighteen to older than me. Most seem to be around nineteen or twenty, but I stopped asking them to tell me how old they are after finding several who are my age and at least one who's twenty-three already. They are overall less interested in English, but there are at least a few in every class who do want to improve and who try very hard and at least a couple of classes that seem legitimately motivated. I've been struck by how little difference there is in level between the sécondes and the BTS students; my responsable explained it to me as a result of two factors. She thinks that speaking gets emphasized more in middle school than in high school, so they get here doing well but lose some of those skills as they progress to higher grades, and also, the BTS students are required to take English even though many of them don't want to and don't understand why they need it—plus they're college-age and just don't want to do any work.

My job is to get them to talk, which means finding a way to engage them. Some of the more artistically-oriented programs of study have a lot of girls, but in some of the more technical/mechanical courses ALL of the students are boys. Some of them are very nice and polite and both interesting and interested. Others are big, macho boys who play sports and ride motorcycles and play violent video games. Not to fall into gender stereotypes, but their fields of study and their hobbies are things about which I have very little knowledge—they want to talk about their cars, and I'm like, “Uh... what color is your car? Is it big or small? That's great, want to look at these pictures of historic buildings in my hometown? No? Okay... what else do you like about your car?” I love boys, I think they're great fun, and a part of me was really excited about teaching mostly boys, but it's also going to be a challenge. Many of these particular boys are not like the boys I've always hung out with—instead, they're the boys I didn't talk to much when I was in high school myself—and it remains to be seen how much we have to discuss that's interesting to them but still within the realm of things I can understand and teach them words for.

The other challenge with them, and with all my BTS students of all genders*, will be how to relate to them. Do I try to set myself apart and be teacher-like, or do I try to act like one of them and be pals? It's tricky. Part of my job is to be fun; if I try too hard to be their teacher, they'll hate me. But if I don't try hard enough, they won't respect me, and that's no good either when half of them don't want to do any work.

I suppose “not wanting to work” is relative, though. Almost every class has asked me outright whether I speak French, and it would be difficult to pretend not to anyway, since sooner or later most of them will either hear me speak French to a teacher or at least notice that I understand a lot of what's going on when the teacher speaks French to them or vice versa. However, I have yet to have a problem with students trying to speak French to me. Sometimes, they ask, “How do you say ____ in English?”; in front of the regular teacher I usually try to let him or her handle it, but if it's just me and the students, I usually acquiesce, especially with the sécondes, although I have offered my dictionary to a BTS student on occasion rather than feed him a word (also a good strategy if I don't know the word they're asking!). Technically, I'm not supposed to speak anything but English to them, and had always intended to be strict about that even if about nothing else, but as long as there's no pretense about my knowing at least some French, I am willing to translate provided they ask the question in English. Sometimes when I see the BTS students outside of class, even off of school grounds, they still speak English to me, which makes me very proud. (Sécondes tend to just avoid speaking to me at all outside of class, but maybe we'll get there.) My two favorite interactions concerning the language barrier were both boys in BTS. The first was my first day in a classroom, and went something like this:

Student: Do you speak French?

Me: I speak a little French, and I'm hoping to get better. But you have to speak English to me.

Student: So we can speak French to you?

Me: No, there are plenty of French people for me to talk to if I want to practice French. In here, we speak English.

Student: Say something in French.

Me: Je m'appelle Erica.

Student: Say something longer. With more words.

Teacher: She has to speak English to you! Drop it!

She rolled her eyes at me and told me later that he's always going to be “the cheeky one.” I thought it was great. He wasn't being rude about it or anything; he just wanted me to prove I could speak French. He also later became the first student I ran into outside of school and we had an entire conversation all in English, which he initiated. I told the teacher about that the next day, but sadly she did not seem as impressed and proud as I was.

Anyway, the other was a boy in one of the more difficult classes I'm working with, who asked about my French and then told me almost immediately that he doesn't speak English. I said, “Well, you're in an English class, so you have to speak English to me.” It turns out he speaks English quite well once he starts talking. He speaks better than he understands, as a matter of fact, and with most people it's the other way around. When I caught him translating something for the boy next to him, I said, “See, you do speak English!” and he said, “No, no, I speak Italiano.” I laughed. 

He later asked me if I'd brought any girlfriends with me to France.

My first day in each of the classes I'm working with this term has been introduction day. I introduce myself briefly, make the students introduce themselves to me, and then give them free rein to ask me questions. (The younger classes get a few minutes to think and write down some questions to ask; the older ones just have to go for it.)

Classes vary a lot in terms of their level of interest in interrogating me; sometimes there a lots of questions, and sometimes only a handful of students speak up while the rest just sit and shake their heads if I ask if they have anything they want to ask. There does not seem to be a pattern to this related to the age of the students, to what they're studying, or to whether the class is mostly boys or mostly girls. The things they ask are interesting. They all want to know why I'm here, how long I'll be here, how I like France/Brest/French people/French food, if I've been to France before, if I speak French, what my hobbies are. Many want to know what I studied, what my hometown/home state is like, if I've been to New York (and/or California), what my favorite movie/book/kind of music is, what 9/11 was like. Sometimes I get asked about Obama or about DSK**. But some of the questions I would have thought most obvious don't get asked very often—only one class has asked about siblings or pets, only a couple about my car*** or whether I can speak any other languages, and less than half about whether I'm homesick or about how I think living in France is different from living in America (SUCH a hard question to answer!). I've also gotten surprisingly few questions about what American high schools are like. I have, fortunately, not gotten any inappropriate questions, even from older students, and I've only been asked once whether I have a boyfriend (I decided not to consider that an inappropriate question as long as there aren't any dangerous follow-up questions)--and then it was a girl who asked. I have been asked a few times about whether I eat hamburgers a lot (because there's a stereotype that Americans all eat fast food all the time), and I get “What is your job?” embarrassingly often, because they don't seem to understand that my job really is just to sit there talking to them. (I suppose it's possible that at least sometimes they mean my job in America, but if so, no one has actually succeeded in asking that yet... and I wouldn't really have an answer anyway.) Some of the better/more original questions I've gotten have included “Have you seen any French movies/Do Americans watch a lot of French movies?”, “Could you see yourself staying in France forever?”, “Why did you choose Brest?” (I always feel awkward when I have to explain that I didn't), “What is your favorite part of France (and/or of America)?”, and “What are your origins?”****

I've now been in the classroom officially for two weeks, so I've met all my classes and started taking the lead in most of them, though there are only a few where the regular teacher lets me take on lessons without supervision. I'm starting to plan real lessons now (my first real lesson without a real teacher present was this morning, in fact), and it's a little intimidating, but also a lot of fun.

On a slightly different note, I was told today that my French has already improved. I replied that I'm just having a good day. If anything, I have a lot of lost ground to regain (from months without French classes and with French classes in which I never spoke if I could avoid it) before I'll be able to acknowledge any real improvement.

* There's my inner Obie coming out [no pun intended]. I think the actual likelihood of encountering anyone with a nontraditional gender identity at a French tech school is exceptionally low. But now that I've thought about it, I'm curious about how one handles such issues in such a rigidly gendered language...

** The first time this came up, I was not only embarrassingly unprepared, but embarrassingly confused. It stands, of course, for Dominique Strauss-Kahn, but I had never heard him referred to by only his initials before. The students were understandably shocked when I had no idea what they were asking about, and an incredibly awkward explanation ensued, and I'm still not sure how successfully I conveyed the fact that I had, in fact, heard about the case and was only confused because of the way they asked.

*** This oversight is interesting to me because they clearly have the idea that everyone in America drives, and drives a lot, and drives big cars.

**** This was also initially a confusing question. I'm sure I looked puzzled, and the teacher said, “She's American, she just told you,” but he explained [to her] in French that Americans come from all over and he wanted to know where my people lived originally. Then I was pretty proud of him for being so insightful, and also pretty proud that I got to rattle off six countries in response while they all looked impressed.