This just in...

We have a priest to marry us! Yay!!!

Things that are just different in France

There just aren’t as many charitable movements as there are in the US or England. Mildred explained to me that rather than taking care of poor people or sick people because they want to be nice people, French see it as their duty as a citizen, so they authorize their governments to do it. The debate rages on.

The concept of a “hug” is almost non- existent. I keep running across the word in stuff I do with my kids (ie apples to apples “getting a hug” “giving a hug”) and not knowing how to define it, except to demonstrate, and then I get “oh, oh, un calin, un embrassade.” Not quite. Calin roughly means “cuddle.” Embrassade is too general. We just greet people with hugs. Just like they just do the “bisou.” Usually cheek to cheek, kiss in the air by each side, or three or four times in some regions of the country. And this is when you first meet someone. Sometimes someone who knows you a little better will actually kiss your cheek. Or hold on to your arms. Of course, this applies to girls meeting girls or girls meeting guys. Guys meeting guys just shake hands. Maybe a guy will use the bisou on a man he’s particularly close to (further study required) and some older men make a habit out of it, but there just is no manly bisou equivalent to our back thumping “see I’m not gay and/or into you.”

I’m getting used to the bisou. The problem is when I meet people from other countries, like other Americans, I never know what to do.

I love you: the French just don’t say it that often. Even to their parents. They’re more likely to say “bisous” (kisses). It’s just too strong, I guess. You can say “je t’aime bien” (I like/love you well) or even “je t’adore” or “je t’aime à la folie” (I love you like mad) but strupped of modifiers, “je t’aime” is too much.

Lots of things close at weird times. Like Wednesday afternoons. Or Mondays. As for the bakery at the bottom of the hill, I still haven’t found a reliable pattern for when it is open and when it is not.

No home room. Kids get periods off, get to go home for lunch if they want. They’re split up already by 1er or Terminale into different subject concentrations, so while they move from class to class, all the students stay together. (I’ll attempt to explain the school system another day.) Hall passes as far as I know do not exist.

Dogs are generally allowed into any building that doesn’t explicitly exclude them, including shopping malls and bakeries.

There are nuns in the comic book I checked out from the library, and they seem good and sincere, but the nuns in “Saint tail” just didn’t wear habits that were quite as form-fitting…(ok, so St. Tail is Japanese)

People make out in public and no one makes anything of it. The stairwells in my school and the escalators in the mall seem to be particularly popular places for this. I keep wanting to take pictures and then feeling shamed at the potential invasion of privacy and then remembering that privacy does not appear to be their first and foremost concern.

Banks have these weird antechambers where you have to press a button to be admitted, and then ring at another door, which will eventually open after the first one closes, ostensibly to help retard bank robberies. Does this exist in New York?

There are self- cleaning pay toilets in parks and big shopping/tourist areas. The toilets at the mall are free from 9am to 8pm, but they don’t tell you how much before or after those times they cost to use.

People don’t really say “Bless you,” when you sneeze. Not even the French equivalent (deliver us from Ben Affleck)

Teachers actually have time to plan lessons and grade tests built into their work week.

Political bumperstickers are just about unheard of. Bumper stickers featureing activities or places or something to the affect of “Baby on board” are much more popular.

Christmas isn’t considered “religious” enough, or maybe it’s just too much a part of the culture, to get it thrown out of schools on the pretext of laicity. Nothing up about Hannukah or Kwanzaa, at least not around my neighborhood.

English is generally spoken as it is in England (the other day Maud was trying to tell me something was maudlin or sappy and went through about six words in English and two words in French that I completely didn’t recognize before she managed to communicate what she meant. (Has anyone heard the term “mawkish” before? )

You can get a meal at McDonalds for about 6 euros fifty

They sell beer at McDo and Evian. And Yoghurt. And the Croque McDo, the golden arches’ version of the Croque Monsieur, traditional snack of a grilled cheese sandwhich with ham. Evidently introduced in the wake of Mad cow disease.

Also, evidently, the French love abbrieviations... more to come

Still playing catchup...

Today in theater we played the same scene from Arizona Dream for the third time in a row. I don’t know if anyone is familiar with this film outside language teachers partial to art films (has anyone else heard of it?) but I’m curious to know what happens. In our scene, Johnny Depp meets his uncle’s 23 year old fiancée from Poland who seems just keen on marrying his 50 some uncle, until she’s reminded of the age difference. She is quite happy to meet Johnny Depp’s character. Quite happy.

So I think we were getting a little tired of it today. People seemed to be just going through the motions. Until we decided to a take “delire” and had our one guy play our one female character- the bride. Suddenly people actually started playing the roles. It was amazing. And hilarious. None of the guys approached the apparent puff-chested self satisfaction of the Uncle that Paulette did…and Bruno’s sobs upon learning that his “nephew to be” was about the same age as him were more dramatic than any of the girls’. Like finding themselves in alien gender roles they actually started acting in the exaggerated way we’d been trying to get them to use all along.

Back a week ago to last Sunday- kept meaning to describe my time in Paris.

Somebody told me awhile back that they preferred Disneyland, Paris to Parc Asterix (the Parisian themepark based on an actual European cartoon character.) It was like entering a fairyland, she said. I don’t see how Paris itself doesn’t fulfill this requirement. I was walking by Notre Dame and the Hotel de Ville, all lit up different colors for Christmas I think, with gothic turrets and towers everywhere, with people milling about everywhere speaking about forty different languages that were not French. I walked around for ever and spent about two seconds each in the Chapel of the Miraculous Medal and a certain “little” church (probably about the size of the Cleveland cathedral) with a little personal history attached to it. Just reminds me I need to go and spend awhile just milling around the City of Light (and Shadiness, for that matter, but I don’t plan to spend that much time around the Rue Pigalle and environs)

Swing was pretty good. A lot like anywhere else. As much as any town’s swing is like another’s. Charleston, slow to medium tempo lindy, some balboa…no east coast. Hope I can find a time to go back…without obliging T., who was a great sport and picked up Charleston quite fast but who didn’t seem overly enchanted with the whole deal all the same.

But she sketched her wedding dress for me, and I got to see her wedding ring (It’s huge! It belonged to her fiancé’s mother. She wore a glove over it on the subway. She say’s it’s too big and makes her feel like some old noble lady…she said she liked mine better…I tried to point out her ring’s good points…but it wasn’t easy…I like my ring better too J

Even better…I finally got to meet her youngest sister. The one who was still in her mother’s womb last time I was there. She’s now six. When I arrived she presented me with a picture she had drawn for me, in which she spelled my name “laurène” (actually shows a great understanding of the French phonetic/graphemic system, I think…if you were to spell it in French based solely on how it sounds, that is exactly how you would do it.) and didn’t say two words for the first twenty minutes I was there. And then she wouldn’t stop talking to me, or let anyone else talk to me either for that matter.

We played with the cardboard nativity set she had made and she showed me more drawings she had done and some Christmas decorations in a book she liked. Already has the French attraction to interior design. She also showed off her English, told me she was hungry (with an awesome h) and thirsty (very impressive “th,” I wanted to bring her into my classes to demonstrate for my students) and told me (in French) about a puppet show she saw in English class about some English people who took a boat to America and met some Indians who helped them survive the winter.

Oh, you mean it was about Thanksgiving, I suggested.
Yes she said
Did you understand it all? I asked
Yes she said.
I was sad this year, I complained. I missed Thanksgiving.
You mean you missed the boat? she asked.

C. told me all about how awesome he thinks Star Wars is. The new ones, in fact. Apparently the dialogue in the no. 3 French dubbing is not as horrendous as it is in the film we all know and love/hate. As in whatever French person translated the movie is a better dialogue writer than George Lucas. Not surprising. But I’m glad there’s a decent version of the movie somewhere.

Come to think I believe I watched the second one dubbed in French and liked it a lot better that way…

(Mental note: find out the French for “We don’t know what’s wrong with her. She’s lost the will to live.” )

This weekend: went back to the community of the beatidudes. No dancing this time. But lots of adoration, advent celebrations. Advent wreaths. Stayed in the Ste. Claire room and the bible verse at my plate this afternoon was something like “Love admits no fear. In fact, perfect love casts out fear.”

Kate and I went for a walk yesterday. She is staying here for Christmas with her community but seems contented with it. It’s funny, her English is definitely a little Frenchified, in the grammar and word choice if not by the accent (though I noticed she does tend to annunciate all the consonant sounds.) She kept saying stuff like “it’s normal.” And as we were passing the forest ranger’s house, she told me the “forest people” lived there. And was quite amused when I raised doubts about her community’s new age spirituality.

Anastasia's Birthday Party

I just found out that Anastasia and her boyfriend are PACSed. I’ve never known anyone who was PACSed before. PACS is the name of the civil union that came as France’s answer to the gay marriage issue. It involves many of the same benefits as marriage, is less binding than marriage, and easier to dissolve than marriage. It can be made between people of any gender, even people who are related, so that brothers and sisters or sisters and sisters could ostensibly form households together. Seems to explain why no one in France gets married anymore. The only advantage, besides union with the church but I really shouldn’t mention that in the same paragraph as matters of state, as I believe it might violate some tenent of laïcité (ok, I’m exaggerating. Some.), resides it would seem from the modern view, in the big party you get to throw. Further study required.

Anasatsia- as sweet as ever
Her friends- very cool. All English teachers, but none I knew already. Talked lots about experiences teaching in foreign countries.

Staying up until one trying to follow the conversation of eight French friends with their own private jokes and frame of reference- exhausting. I felt awful, but I think Anastasia noticed me yawning and nodding off.

Ice cream:
Chestnut: have come to a conclusion I’m not a big chestnut fan, even when it’s in icecream.
Orange flower honey: very subtle. Or didn’t taste like much.
Carmel and salted butter: a lot like Pralines and cream. Without the pralines.

For people who are Catholic, people who think Napoleon Dynamite is incredible, and people who can take a joke

Joyeux fête de Saint Nicolas

pictures as promised (you'll have to take my word for it, the âne's baskets are full of tangerines.

wait...what indulgence?

anyone want to look at another essay? you know you want to...

A short (fewer than 500 words) personal statement about how your current and/or past academic and work experiences, including volunteer work, have influenced your ability to become a leader in the information professions.

Recent experiences have fostered my life-long passion for books and enabled me to work with diverse populations. They have also illuminated structures underlying information use, including language and literacy development and systems, methods, and requirements of education across the lifespan. They have challenged me to address the problems of orienting the next generations to our burgeoning information stores and fostering in them a passion for literature.Throughout my undergraduate studies, for my senior thesis, I worked on a children’s novel, researched topics related to my plot, and reviewed children’s books that inspired my work. I also helped organize a reader’s response session in which local elementary students critiqued my work. I was thus able to reflect on a population’s literary requirement, to work with others to organize literary discussions, and to collect and implement feedback from readers.
However, it was during my speech language pathology graduate studies that I first considered a library career. My fellow students’ limiting preference for online texts over specialized databases referencing journals available in the library amazed me and alerted me to the potential mismanagement and misuse of information that accompanies its immediate availability. I was often more concerned about the correct handling of information for projects than about the information itself, conscious of how vital that handling is when information availability is exploding at its present rate.

As a student clinician in this program, I also worked with children of various ages and abilities in various educational settings and counseled parents about their children’s speech and language development. In addition to insight on developing readers’ information needs, clinical practicum gave me the opportunity to comb public libraries for books to use in therapy. Reading and re-reading children’s literature, I became versed both in new titles and books I missed as a child.

Further inspired by my reading and language development coursework, I expanded the reading program at my summer daycare job, encouraging children to chart their own reading progress, selecting books to read aloud, and experimenting with storytelling techniques. By the end of the summer, children who had shown no independent interest in books were requesting favorites from the library. I was encouraged by my successful identification of a need and development of a program to help meet it.

Seeking to confirm my interest in libraries, I volunteered in a media center in a school for children with disabilities. There I explored collections management software and databases, as well as various classification systems. Drawing on this experience, I am currently developing a cataloguing system for a library belonging to a small student organization in Rouen, France.

I am confident the unparalleled learning environment offered by the Catholic University of America would develop the insight, inspirations, confidence, and experiences I have had until now. I look forward to beginning there a lifelong struggle against obstacles to future information consumers’ effective pursuit of life’s facts and fiction’s truths.

twelve students dancing

I’ve been very bad about writing lately. Sorry. I think I’m getting used to the place a little, and there just aren’t as many wonders waiting around every corner. Or at least there don’t seem to be. I probably just need to wake up and open my eyes.

I dreamt last night of writing a blog entry entitled “Seven swans a-sleeping,” as in my dream I kept running into dens of sleeping swans. This is perhaps brought on by my teaching students “The Twelve Days of Christmas” all week. I felt justified in doing this as my French teacher not only made us sing two French Christmas songs before going on with class every day in December, she made us get up and dance during the instrumentals. And far from being the kind of thing to which people normally get their groove on today, these “instrumentals” closely resembled the tinkling of a music box. So naturally, we all had to rise (“Levez-vous! Levez-vous, tout le monde!” I can still here it today), place one finger on our heads, and turn slowly in the fashion of music box ballerinas. Yes, even the guys. Not that there were many, it being French class, but still…

Anyway, I am not so cruel. And I’ve been taking a lot of time out to encourage things like “On the fourTH day of Christmas,” rather than the prevalent “On the force day of Christmas” (perhaps that’s what the Jedi sing during their winter holiday…There was a movie about that, wasn’t there? Anyone want to fill me in?)

I’ve found new inspiration to work on pronunciation…It really is vitally important.

One of the teachers (really an English English teacher) was telling us about how one day he was asking his English class what they wanted out of life. And one of the girls said “happiness.” Only she put the accent on the middle syllable. And didn’t pronounce the “h.” You figure out the rest.

I kid you not.

The teacher said he nearly dropped his chalk before the French error systems dawned on him, and then the poor sweet innocent thing couldn’t figure out why he was laughing so hard.

Later he went on to work on the screenplay for Hot Shots.

Ok, there I’m kidding you.

Jah

We’ve had two German lessons to date with Hans. I think we end up discussing English and French as much as German. Today Hans brought us some German chocolate mit Haselnüsse. To date, the German expressions I know (that is, I have written down in my notebook) include:
The days of the week (Montag- Sonntag)Ich heibe Lauren (my name is Lauren)Mir ist heib. (I’m hot)Mir ist kalt. (I’m cold)Ich brauche Hilfe! (I need help!)Entshuldigung, ich suche die Toilette. (Excuse me, I’m looking for the bathroom) Ich gehe nach hause. (I think that’s right…) (I’m going home.)
I keep forgetting Hans isn’t American…at least until he starts talking about world issues. His accent is perfect. He sounds like an American imitating a British or a Scottish accent when he tries to put them on. He even says things like “Fo shizzle, bizzle.” I’m so jealous.