Heading to Spain tonight

And now for a ramble:

As it is now the Tuesday after Easter (and a day when people are no longer 0ff-work, the exception being us with les vacances already), I am on the receiving end of a lot of rejection. I knew that a lot of replies would come from universities that only accept lectrices from other universities with whom they have an agreement, but it's still le suck to get them. Ah well, I will keep on keeping on (and my info will still be on file at those places if one of their agreed upon candidates dropped off). Okay, so, there have only been two rejections so far, but they were rejections from schools I was really hoping to work for.

Project for the Spain trip: writing a Masters application.

I feel positive still, however. Where there's a will, there's a way. Talking with EU friends can be a little maddening though. Their only concern is finding a job, they don't have to find a job that will sponsor a visa. I was speaking with one who was telling me to go to the pole emploi to look for a job "and then you can also apply for unemployment benefits!"

Me: "Uhhhh I'm pretty sure that's not possible, given I'm an American and once my visa is over I'm officially a tourist."

"Oh, right."

Life has been exceptionally great, however. Lots of celebrations, lots of meeting new people, lots of saying goodbye. Saying goodbye is not great, but discovering that these people you just met a half year ago care about you and want you to stay a part of their lives is great.

MCJ

A super weekend

This weekend was one of my best yet in France. It started out with cookie baking chez D, dinner and drinking chez D's colleague and ended with a party chez G. I discovered that D's colleague was supposed to have come to Rice as a French lecteur during my sophomore year. He had his visa ready to go and everything when he decided to switch career paths slightly. Tant pis, but I've met him now. It was nice to tell a French person I went to Rice and have them recognize the name. It was an emphatic first. Many, many fabulous people were involved with this Friday night. The real end to the night was finally seeing "my" night bus driver again for the first time in 2012. It was extremely exciting, I got to wish him and his family a bonne année. When I went to sleep on Friday, my cheeks were actually sore from laughing and smiling.

Saturday, S and I finally went to see The Artist. Due to its success in America, it has been rereleased in French theaters. Damn is that a good movie and damn do I wish Jean Dujardin weren't married. That man is talented. And attractive. Very attractive. We were supposed to go ice skating with some others but ended up making a dinner and eating bonne maman ice cream instead (so there was still ice involved... sorta).

Sunday, one of my Breton classmates invited me to lunch with his family. This being in France, it was a six hour affair. For the apéros, we had a white wine with andouille and a rillette made of something seafoody whose name I forgot. We discussed politics and diwan schools. I got to learn a bit more about Breton politics and the different Breizh separatist parties. I also learned that back in the day, my little town (and quite a few nearby) was communist. For the meal, we started with langoustines (prawns). I know how to eat them now! It's pretty simple to get at the meat and they are quite delicious. The main dish was lotte fish in a tomato sauce and for tea/coffee/dessert we had a trio of a madeleine, far breton (a cake) and dentelle-topped beurre salée (aka caramel, aka you never want it to leave your mouth it tastes so good). Oh yes, and prior to that there were the cheeses. It is clear that France has not yet made me a big fan of cheese. I'm slowly getting there, however. Very slowly.

After the meal, they took me to see Gavré, another lovely coastal town in the region. They then dropped me off in Lorient where I hung out with friends at the one place (an Irish pub) open on Sundays.

So yes, an excellent weekend.

Next weekend is looking like it could top this one's. I might just be going on a roadtrip.

Bisous,

MCJ

VACANCES pt deux

Larmor Plage, the day after a storm

Courtesy of my sixièmes, snowmen

Monster Snowman

Bonsoir my lovely friends and family (except for my parents, who should be boarding their plane to France right about now)!

I'm sorry about my incredible lack of posts since the sickness. I'm all better now! Yay! I'd been putting off posting as I worked through an existential crisis.

I'm also very sorry to the personal friends that will get the next news from this rather than "in person." Also to said friends, LET'S SKYPE THIS WEEK!!! I will have access to wifi this week at all hours. Wonderful!

So, big news, I've decided not to apply to grad school in the US for next fall. I'm not 100% on my plans for next year aside from my hope that it be in France, Austria or Germany next year. I'm looking into grad school in France next year. French grad school is cheaper than American grad school, by which I mean the schools I've looked at are less than a thousand euros a year INCLUDING paying for social security to the state (which shouldn't really count). For the summer, I'll be back in the US. I'm looking into working with disabled children over the summer (or doing something similar that would relate to a future speech language pathology career). In the meantime, I'm researching grad programs here and prepping for the DALF exam.

I could write really profound things about this, but I'm le tired and I'll be getting up earlyesque to meet my parents at the airport!

Highlights from the last week of classes:

- Singing "You are my sunshine" for the Breton Association's end of the year soirée

- Getting a lovely card from one of my sixième classes.

- Going to an amazing dinner at one of the Spanish assistants' with her lovely, fun friends.

- Going to Lorient's Christmas fair (the rides were only 2Euros, what, like, half the price of the same rides at the Texas state fair/Houston rodeo)

- Giving my Monday primary kids American cookies. "Miam miam miam miam miam miam miam miam."

Much love,

MCJ

This post was supposed to be about Fest-Noz

But I failed in transferring the folder with the pictures and videos onto my usb this morning, so Fest-Noz will have to wait. Probably for the best given that I've got a little sickness going on.

Some scattered thoughts on teaching:

Teachers make an incredible difference. Without going into detail, how the teacher treats their class is fairly evident from how the class treats each other and how they treat me. This also tends to translate into how much time they give me to prepare something for the class. On the fly creation of lessons does not go well. When I have time to prepare something (and this really doesn't have to be a lot, it can just be looking up of games and such), the class goes much much better.

Rowdy kids can either be a blessing or a curse. When I've got a super energetic kid, I try to harness their energy and enthusiasm into something productive for the class. Let's be buddies, rowdy kid, work with me! When this works, it's a beautiful thing. Sometimes, however, the student just really doesn't want to do this. They don't give me a chance and frankly I don't see the collège kids enough to establish a rapport that could lead to fixing this.

Primary school kids are incredibly well-behaved. This is in part because there is zero tolerance for misbehavior. Primary school is where the children learn how to be students. Some collège kids decide to casually forget this once they've changed schools, plus there's the fact that they're becoming teens. Oh teens. Les ados. In my CE1 (first grade ish) yesterday, a storm started up outside. The classroom has a wall of windows that look out onto the playground. The teacher noticed that some of the children were distracted. "Oh is this the first time you've seen rain? No. This is unacceptable, you don't stare out the window for rain, for snow, for anything." But then he had all the class stare out the window for a few seconds so they could get their fix. "C'est trop beau!" one child cried. After that, the kids weren't distracted by the rain. Impressive.

Kids that don't try make me sad. Instead of trying and making a mistake, they just go straight to "sais pas" with puffed out cheeks and a little pop sound. Especially when it's something simple like "what's your name?" that all the other students have attempted and succeeded at before them. They're definitely able and the fact that they're not trying now only spells out a future of continued lack of effort. And that makes me sad. One day they'll probably just say "bah je suis nul avec anglais" or "I've just never been good at learning languages." Bullshit. You just turned yourself off to the idea out of fear of messing up.

And because this amused me a lot and hasn't been posted yet...:
Student [rifling through glossary at the back of her English book]: Miss, are you too' 'all?
Me [mightily confused]: too tall? How tall am I? [Gestures height]
Student: Uhhhh non non non uhhhh are you uhhh TAOWN ALL
Me [goes over to glossary, sees what student is pointing at] AHAHAHA
Student was pointing at mairie = town hall, trying to ask me if I was mariée = married.

Nope, I am neither town hall nor married.

Gros bisous,

MCJ

I have no idea

Today, I was working on lessons at the collège when one of the teachers came up to me. You need to go see l'intendance right now! There's a man coming to look at your heater. Oh... okay? I haven't tried to use it yet so I have no idea if there's something wrong with it or why this man is coming.... It's kind of like when someone came to put in a telephone line and then it was cut because I really don't need a fixed line.... Bizarre bizarre bizarre.
So I meet the guy and we go to chez moi. It turns out I do not have a heater, I have four. For my one room apartment. I have no idea. It's not like we're in a super cold place... it's supposed to rarely go below freezing. So from best I could understand (not because of the French but because no one really seemed to know), I'm getting a new heater so I don't use the water-based heaters as that would be using water from my neighbors' and I'd be adding to their bill. And then the electric heaters are apparently in crap places where they wouldn't help me at all... so I'm getting a fifth. For my one room. Five heaters. I have no idea.

Good stuff: http://www.history.com/topics/thanksgiving
Also, looking at Thanksgiving food when hungry is a terrible idea.... So hungry now.

I have Breton class tonight for the first time in a few weeks... wish me good luck, I haven't been studying and there's going to be "la presse" there tonight.

In which I ramble... a lot

I forgot to say a lot of things in this video... but I managed to fill up over ten minutes anyway. Sorry not sorry. I'm alive and slowly making a few French amis. It has become time where I need to stop acting like a newb in front of the actual teachers.

Classroom things:
- Currently preparing a lesson on Thanksgiving for the 6èmes (the littlests at the collège)
- Had a semi successful failure at teaching family words to one of the primaire classes. In class, it didn't seem like they were getting what I was teaching at all... but then they remembered everything today! I was amazed!.. and very, very happy. *
- Learned another baller Hello/What's your name song. I'm so cool.
- May have been exposed to a French form of pig latin.... the girl asked me if I spoke, what sounded to me like, Javanese. Uh... non. I am the English assistant. Then she started going off in something that her friend could understand. They looked pretty typically French, hence my doubts.

The Bordeaux pics will (or won't) be posted eventually. It was raining most of the time so they're not quite as jolie as I'd like.

I am now a card carrying member of the Leclerc loyalty family. It's like having a Kroger plus card only I'm not sure when the savings start to kick in.... Ah la France.

Massive bisous,

MCJ

faire ses choux gras

faire ses choux gras is a French idiom meaning to profit or take advantage (of a situation). According to my handy book La puce à l'oreille which is full of the histories and meanings of French idioms, this originated in the middle ages when the poor only had vegetables -- more or less -- to eat. The idiom literally means make one's cabbages fatty. The cabbages (choux) were quite common in idioms originating during that time due to their prevalence in the poor's cuisine (thanks to their ability to survive all sorts of weather). When one was doing well, they were able to fatten their choux, hence faire ses choux gras meaning to do well.

I am hoping this year to faire mes choux gras. I leave on Sunday and am getting pretty nervous (still excited, of course). Even though I spent the past four years away from home, this is entirely new adventure. This is the first time I'll truly be on my own. Luckily, my contact teacher has been excessively kind and it seems like she's really preparing things for me (asking me about preferred foods, allergies, etc).  It's going to be strange to be at the mercy of other people's kindness and patience, it will be humbling, it will be a great experience. As someone that wants to work in an occupation of helping others to regain (or improve) their language abilities, it will be very good to put myself into a situation where I won't always be fully able to articulate my needs and confusions. It is good to be humbled.

Additionally, I will have limited access to the internet this coming year (don't worry! I'll have enough to update my blog regularly, it just may be that the photos come in sporadically). This will make the challenge of figuring out how to contact home/skype particularly interesting. This, too, is a good thing. I need to learn how to keep in contact with friends and family. My family can easily attest to the fact that I'm terrible about calling home or writing. This year will have to be different. Without 24 hour access to the internet, too, I won't be able to spend all day on the internet. This, too, is a very good thing. I'm not going to France to facebook, I'm going to experience France.

All the fears I have (meeting people, opening a bank account..., not committing too many social gaffes and so on) will ultimately strengthen me as a person IF I force myself to overcome them. As I see it, there is no other option than to ignore my fears and stride boldly on. In that vein, I have a few goals for myself:

1. Couchsurf at least once when traveling
2. Attend some sort of meet up with mostly French people soon after arrival
3. Strike up a DNC-style conversation on a train (my favorite French professor with whom I traveled twice to France, DNC, had an amazing knack at conversing with anyone and everyone, I hope to be fearless like her)
4. Learn how to eat seafood. Despite spending many summers in Maine, I never learned how to eat oysters or lobster or anything beyond fish, kind of. I'm sure I eat boned fish wrong. In any case, as I will be on the Breton coast this next year, I should become better acquainted with seafood. I hear it's exceptionally exquisite.

This is an incomplete list, certainly, but one to get me going so that I can faire mes choux gras. Bonne chance à moi!

La Mer

Mary: star of the sea, dew of the sea, bitterness of the sea (depending on who you ask)

A painting of me playing in the Maine coast by my mother

Despite (or perhaps because of) growing up in a land-locked state, I have always loved the sea. During my childhood, my family visited the Maine coast every summer. We stayed in my grandmother's cottage by the sea and I would fall asleep to the sound of the waves breaking on the rocky shore. Through these summers, I learned to love the smell of salt water. This love and fascination was strong enough that I adored even the beaches of Galveston (a mere hour from my university). While a lot of my classmates had had great experience with California or nicer Gulf beaches and dismissed Galveston as dirty -- they're not wrong, it is dirty -- I still loved the feel of the sand and the taste of salt in the air.

Galveston does have its moments

While watching TF1 the other day, they started a report on les phares (the lighthouses) of Brittany. They now have automated lighthouses that don't require people to live in relative isolation. Unfortunately, these lighthouses are falling into disrepair. I've never been to Brittany, but the images I've seen of its coast line (particularly the Côtes d'Armor -- armor means coast in Breton and côte means coast in French) recall my wonderful summers in Maine. I can't wait to get there. Though I won't be living on the coast, I'll be less than an hour away and that's close enough for me.

Lighthouses in Cannes (2010), Marseille and the Chateau d'If (2008)

Nice at Night (2010)

By the way, my current background is a painting by Berthe Morisot of the Lorient harbor (Image source: wikipedia) in 1869.

Les plus beaux voyages se font par la fenêtre!

The most beautiful trips start with the window. (Le Roi de Cœur, 1966, one of my favorite movies in any language)

I took this picture on a 2008 trip to France. I had taken a course on Paris during the spring semester and the class took a trip to Paris that summer. A friend, Curls, and I decided to add on extra travel before and after the class trip. This picture was taken on the Île d'If (where the Chateau d'If is located... which is where the Count of Monte Cristo was imprisoned). This trip was an exceptional introduction to France. Though I had spent a month in Paris in high school, it was the three weeks that summer that gave me a real taste for the country. From an early age I had felt drawn to French and had the good fortune to begin lessons with a French neighbor when I was ten. It's amazing the sheer diversity of France. For a comparatively geographically small country, it packs in so much history and so much culture.

Nearly nine months ago, I was trying to choose what three Academies to list as my preferences for teaching in France through TAPIF (Teaching Assistantship Program in France). Down to the last hour before the application was due I was still beset by uncertainty. And yet, despite days and days of research and confusion I kept the same three academies as my top three: Strasbourg, Rennes and Rouen. I wanted to be placed in a region with a distinct culture separate even from the French. This thought process motivated the first two, the third choice was the hometown of the woman who taught me French. Though I actually feel very drawn to the south of France (especially after spending four years in the sun in Texas), the added bonus of being in a linguistically diverse region was too much to pass up.

In April (after months of anticipation), I was accepted to the program and was delighted to find out I had been placed in the Rennes Academy! Rennes (and its Academy) is situated in Brittany. Some time after that, I received my placement in the commune of Quéven (or in Breton, Kewenn). I will be working in elementary and middle schools there. Lorient is known for its Festival Interceltique and I hope to gain plenty of exposure to the Breton language (and possibly take classes?). The Breton language has a particular draw to me as a Celtic language. My great grandmother was Welsh and her legacy instilled in me an interest in the Welsh language. Welsh and Breton are both Brythonic Celtic languages and share many features that I, as a Linguistics major, find really fascinating.

I'm happy to be taking this window of opportunity to learn more about another culture and more about myself.

Helpful links for the Lorient region:

Local Transportation around/in Lorient

BreizhGo (in English -- an itinerary planner for the whole of Brittany)