Announcement

Manchester College has made a very small change in the email system that will result in huge inconveniences. Allow me to apologize. Technologically speaking, this probably has a good reason behind it. I will leave that to the techies, and continue to fume about it for the rest of the semester.
My new email address (for those of you using the Manchester account) is:
crhamilton@spartans.manchester.edu
As of 20 April, I will no longer receive emails in my old account, so please do make this change.

Wishing you the happiest of springs,

A Rich Life

The French have rightfully earned their reputation as connoisseurs of cuisine: if there’s one thing they do well, it is to eat. Meals are an affair surrounded by formalities, tradition, and intentionality. Main courses are scrupulously paired with wines, the meal proceeds through certain stages in a certain order, and everything has its purpose. A few basic guidelines of French mealtime ideology:

Eat with someone: No one should eat alone, especially if there are other people in the house. Eating is a social activity, the focus being the discussion and the time passed together, with good food as a backdrop. Take time to be together.

Begin eating only when everyone has been served: Since each meal is considered more an experience than a necessity, that experience has a definite beginning (bon appetit) and ending.

Stay at the table: Forget time efficiency—this is no time to get up and run the vacuum while others are finishing their soup before the cheese course. There is a sort of “team mentality." You can’t very well begin one thing before you finish another, and you can’t very well be finished until everyone is. Sometimes there’s even transition time between courses, while one is being cleaned up and the next one warmed up, when you’re left with only conversation on the table (which, among friends, is sustenance enough).

Appreciate everything: From the smells wafting through the room to the color of the food on your plate to the feeling of it in your content stomach, every aspect of a meal is meant to be enjoyed. Take time to do so, and thank your host. My two particularly favorite moments of a meal are the mixing of wine and cheese and bread in my mouth and the smell of the last sip of coffee after the last bite of dessert.

So, a week ago a friend and I decided to forgo solo dinners (I rarely eat at the same time as my host family, since I cook for myself and often return home late evening; Alex’s host mom was gone for the week) and take part whole-heartedly in this French tradition. We spent much time cooking, more time talking, and the best time enjoying ourselves and our meals. Here’s what we came up with:

Always cheese: you can see here some goat cheese (chèvre), comté, gruyere, and camembert. The wine was Alsatian pinot gris in traditional Alsatian wine glasses.

Baked potatoes with onions, beets, and pureed carrots on a bed of peas; bread; red wine from Anjou in the Loire Valley.

Cubed squash simmered in white wine with dill, served on a bed of rice; classic Alsatian riesling (white).

“Pot-au-feu” or vegetable soup with cabbage, carrots, onions, celeriac, leeks, and rutabaga; bread; olives; red wine from Corsica.

Homemade bread: although very, very unnecessary in France, it still felt good to get back into the flour and bake some.

Go clean yourself up—you’re drooling.

I Like to Ride My Bicycle

I really do.

I ride it to school, to market, into town.

My bike and I go along canals, through parks, along windy streets, on bike paths.

It helps me not be so late all the time:

I am inevitably five minutes behind, which made me very late

when I had to wait for the next bus

but sometimes not late at all on my bike.

You can hardly hear my bike it runs so smoothly.

Except, of course, when I ding the bell

but that has a nice ring too.

I like riding my bike out Wednesday mornings to la Wantzenau

where I teach English and have lunch with a nice family.

I pass bus stops called “Unterjaegerhof”

(I’m convinced it’s an Alsatian insult)

And one called, literally, “Fields.”

Being on my bike

puts me real close to the blossoming

forsythia and lilacs and magnolias.

I try to breathe in as much as I can when I pass by,

but not so much that I get light-headed—

you always have to be watchful on a bike.

I’ve already given in and named it.

It’s a she.

Her name is Rembrandt,

though I don’t call her that here

(I don’t like the way it sounds in French).

There is a little French flag painted on the frame

above her name.

I like bicycles.

All Roads Lead to Rome

So, I took one. Then another to Florence. One to Venice. Then, finally, a road home. Over the course of a week, I explored these parts of Italy with two other BCA spring arrivals, Amanda and Charlie.

We arrived Saturday (16 February) night in Rome, with just enough time to catch a fine pizza dinner in a neighborhood bistro. I like how I just used the words “pizza” and “bistro” in their “native” contexts: I was enjoying Italian food in Italy. And it was everything you imagine! Pizzas, pastas, bruschetta, gnocchi, lasagna, stuffed ravioli, eggplant parmesan, calzones, and Italian cheeses and olives everywhere smothered in olive oil and topped off with tiramisu, canola, espresso, and limoncello. Not to mention loads of gelato: what an excellent excuse to eat ice cream all week long! I tried to photograph the food in this land of ambrosia, but pictures just don’t do it justice.

Sunday: Ambling around Rome, Stumbling upon Ruins

You really can’t avoid them. Old means one thing in the US (18^th century), something different in France (15^th century, 6^th if you’re lucky), and something completely different in Rome (into the big BC). The most wonderful thing about Rome was that, no matter which corner you come around, the city surrounds you with character and history. We covered the Roman forum, the biggest and oldest playground in the world (pictured below), and the center of THE CATHOLIC CHURCH. All in a day’s walk!

Monday: Paying to see the really famous ruins

The Coliseum, Palatino, Circus Maximus: check, check, check. Here, I have a confession to make: finding that the European Union has wised up and started charging non-Europeans less to enter historical sites (in place of a student reduction!), I pretended to be a French citizen to get a half-price ticket. I sort of felt guilty about it. But only sort of. So I worked up some good Catholic guilt and went the next day to repent of my faux-Europeanism.

Tuesday: Getting Holy at the Vatican

I thought I’d cross an international border and enter the smallest country in the world: Vatican City. Walking along the Tiber River, I kept my eyes open for Roman legions, chariots, and togas, and having one of those moments of realization: I am walking along the Tiber River in Rome, on my way to the Vatican from the Coliseum. It’s one of those sentences you say to yourself only so many times over the course of a lifetime, you know? Walking around the square in front of St. Peter’s Basilica was just as flooring, though I broke my own sense of awe by giggling at the funnily-dressed Vatican guards. After passing through metal detectors and almost having my passport checked, I entered Vatican city and quickly climbed 550 steps to the top of the basilica’s cupola to get a good look. Here’s what I saw:

Impressive, huh? And the inside of the Basilica even more so. You honestly don’t know whether to look at the floor, the walls, or the ceiling: all is so highly-decorated and incredibly beautiful. I wonder what God thinks of it?

Wednesday: To Florence

Trains are probably my greatest source of joy at the moment. They represent the highest form of public transportation: clean, efficient, fast, comfortable. Like a tour bus, trains take me on tours through the countryside and then onto everywhere I want to be. Better than Visa. We left Rome in the morning for Florence, admiring the scenery of Tuscany and enjoying the chance to rest our feet for a few hours. Once arrived and checked into our hostel (hostels are also a great source of joy: mostly clean, safe, fun, cheap places to stay in the hearts of cities; the one in Rome even had a pasta dinner every night), we paid a visit to David. Take my personal guarantee that he is just as beautiful today as the day he was carved (Michelangelo, 1504). It may sound a bit pompous, but I feel no need to ever see another statue: David is that good. From face to hands to…feet, he is a masterpiece.

Florence is the artists’ city, and that much was obvious when I visited the Uffizi art gallery, which features a large collection of the work of the fifteenth/sixteenth century Florentine school. Even outside the gallery, everything in Florence is artsy. Well, except for the Ponte Vecchio, a very famous touristy bridge, the only one not destroyed during World War II. At some point the Duke of Florence gave the bridge from the Woolmakers’ Guild to that of the Goldsmiths, so the shops on the bridge, like the Rialto bridge in Venice, are exclusively jewelry stores. Expensive, to say the least.

Thursday: Obligatory picture holding up the tower of Pisa

No, you’re right: I didn’t take it. I thought this post was a fine substitute, though. We spent the most pleasant afternoon in Pisa: the weather was so nice, we bought a soccer ball and played on the grassy area around the tower. It was possibly my favorite part of the trip, and I’m thinking of catching a cheap Ryanair flight back just to visit Pisa again. It’s a smaller town, relatively unremarkable except for this strangely sunken tower. You can buy a ticket and go up the tower, but as a general rule I don’t climb on falling buildings.

We came back to Florence that evening and had dinner with a dozen Italians, friends of our friend Elisa (studying in Strasbourg now but who had studied in Florence in high school, and was back visiting). She played translator a lot, but through hand motions and facial expressions and over good food and wine, we all managed to communicate and have a wonderful time. Really, nothing beats a calzone, tiramisu, and espresso.

Friday: To Venice

Venice was like a playground: no two bridges look alike, no roads are straight or wide, gelato calls to you from every corner, and boats take you around instead of bikes or buses. It seems very odd, in a playful sort of way. It’s not worth having a map: give yourself an afternoon and content yourself with wondering around wherever your fancy takes you and getting lost. When you want to head back, just ask someone, and he’ll point you on as far as he can (about three turns), then you ask someone else. Once you’re back in the tourist/main area, gold plaques point you toward the five main sites, sometimes pointing in both directions. Welcome to Venice.

Saturday: Of Dukes and Pigeons

When in Venice, BE SURE TO VISIT THE DUCAL PALACE. This is probably the most impressive building I have ever been in, and I’ve been in quite a few buildings in my time. Through this former palace-turned museum, you learn about the history of the Venetian Republic while wandering through vast meeting rooms, private court chambers, dungeons, and golden staircases. Sometimes I wonder what it would have been to call places like this my own, without tourists walking through it to interrupt my contemplation of the largest tableau in Europe.

When you leave the Palace and enter St. Mark’s Square, WATCH OUT FOR THE PIGEONS. Even if you don’t pay a euro to buy a tiny packet of birdseed, the pigeons will still love on you. I was glad to be fully covered with coat, hat, and gloves, because the pigeons land everywhere. Very sociable animals. I named this one Chet.

Sunday: HOME

Well, after a night flight and bus into Paris, we arrived at a friend’s house to spend a short night before catching a morning train back to Strasbourg. The Strasbourg cathedral never looked so good.

Hint

If you,
perchance,
just so happen,
to have the time,
and the mind,
to drop a line...
that little piece of happiness should be sent to:
BCA
7 Avenue de la Foret Noire
67000 Strasbourg FRANCE

Hello Friends

As I count it, this concludes my fifth and last week of sabbatical. Or rather, my last week of avoiding writing home, and of wondering why I had this compulsion to avoid writing home. Or, honestly, having a mild existential crisis over the whole concept of “home.” I’m tempted to proclaim that this whole sabbatical was a wash, that I am not more rested, fully present, or French-speaking after these five weeks, but I know that would be undervaluing all that has happened. It wasn’t restful: classes started, with all the French university chaos which surrounds establishing anything like a schedule or routine; I traveled to seven cities in three countries; and, even when you’re putting a thought to stew on the “back burner,” it still takes up a good bit of energy, and I had several back burners going. For that reason, being fully present was difficult to achieve. And I spoke loads of English, mostly due to the fact that just as the semester began I acquired a new, dear, genuine, “on site” friend, whose one detracting characteristic, if you can say that, is to be English-speaking. That ruined my linguistic intentions from the get-go, but I can’t say I regret it. As close as we can be through letters, phones, emails, blogs, and the blessing of Skype, we are still very much apart. It makes a difference.

Still, thank you for the space. Since I have recently been acutely reminded by several of you who sincerely missed hearing from me, I’m back. So, to try to encapsulate the last five weeks:

School

My schedule has finally settled down, and I don’t think anyone will envy me the “opportunity to have such enriching experiences.” And I don’t have to remind you that it’s all in French, even though now that is a much less difficult detail.

Monday:

10-12: Germanic Cultural and Linguistic Change

12-14: Sociolinguistic Approach to the Situation in Alsace

14-15: Grammar

16-17: English-French Translation

17-18:30: Tango

Tuesday:

Market Morning!

11-13: Regional Language and Culture

13-17: English teaching internship at bilingual school in town

17-18: Linguistic Diversity in France

18:30-20: Alsatian

Wednesday

9:30-14:30: English tutoring

16-18: Grammar

Thursday

11-12: French Linguistics

12-14: Internship teacher’s meeting

15-17: Grammar

18:30-20: Couples’ Dance

Friday

8:30-11:30 Internship

12-14: Linguistic Policy in Education

Yes, I do like all my linguistics classes, and am glad to have the opportunity to learn so much about the field. My English teaching internship is for my TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) degree, something I’m hoping to do for the next several years, whether outside or within the US. I work with 6-10-year-olds who spend half their day with one teacher in English, the other half with another teacher in French. I really enjoy it, teaching things like how to write a letter, what makes a sentence a sentence, and spelling lists. Mostly, I just marvel at the opportunity these students have, envying most of them for their bi-/multilingualism. One six-year-old girl speaks Portuguese with her mom, Dutch with her dad, and English and French at school. Wow. And the dance classes are a nice addition to the mix: learning tango is as serious and technical as learning a gymnastics routine, but the couples’ dance course is just plain fun. Thanks to the “workshop” dances they have once a month, I’ve already learned (only the basics, I’m telling you) the paso, bolero, salsa, bachata, cha cha, swing, waltz, and meringue (my favorite).

If you’re gonna do it, do it up big

Then came the season of Carnival. Move over, New Orleans Mardi Gras, because the Europeans know how to party. Carrying on a long history of celebrating the end of winter and ushering in springtime, Carnival is only marginally linked to the Christian tradition of Lent. Think of it as Halloween: Everyone dresses up in costumes they’ve worked on year round, parades through town, sings, throws out candy, plays jokes, and dances to loud music. Parades last several hours, and after the parade, the drinking. And you’ve never seen so much confetti! I suspect entire forests of trees are planted just to be harvested, dyed the colors of the rainbow, and thrown into the air to end up, well, everywhere. Imagine cleaning that off cobblestone streets. I saw Carnival first in Freiburg, Germany, where Leslie and I went for a weekend to visit a Manchester professor there on sabbatical. Dr. Gilliar is a gifted, inspiring, passionate native German who’s spending her year teaching English and working for a Freiburg newspaper, and wonderfully hosting any MC students who drift her way. We went on a historical tour of Freiburg, focusing on the period of the witch hunts; had dampfnoodle, the most wonderful creation of soft bread bathed in vanilla sauce and cinnamon; discussed the bronze name plaques placed among the cobblestones outside any home in Germany that had belonged during the 30's and 40's to deported Jews; and just caught up with each other. It was a wonderful visit.

We went directly from Freiburg to a small German town called Gengenbach, to watch another Carnival parade with the BCA group. It starts with music; then each “float” parades past showing off its costumes, masks, and this year’s theme; groups of schoolchildren march past, sometimes singing or at least equipped with noisemakers; people ride past on bikes, throwing out candy; and once the parade makes it all the way around, the music bands start, people go for hot chocolate or coffee or beer at the stands in the main square, and everyone mills around in good spirits. Here they are, doing just that:

And then, during a two-week “winter break” three weeks after classes started (I know, rough life), we had another BCA excursion to see the Carnival in Basel, Switzerland, supposedly the biggest one around. Though we arrived at noon, it began at 4:11am, when all the lights in the entire city were turned out for the lantern procession officially opening the Carnival. Basel is a beautiful town, German-speaking, dealing in Swiss francs instead of euros, and full of Swiss chocolate that has earned its reputation. I’ll have to return sometime to see it when it is not buried under three feet of confetti. Case in point:

one of our BCA director’s sons, four years old, face-painted, thoroughly enjoying the parade.

A Familiar Face

Tuesday to Friday I spent in Marburg, Germany, a not-so-big but incredibly hilly university town a bit north of Frankfurt. I didn’t go there for its castle and gardens (though they were beautiful), its steep cobblestone streets (which had quite a bit of character), its crooked-tower church (yes, crooked), or its genuine Birkenstocks (though a few were acquired while I was there). Frankly, I could have been anywhere, as long as I was spending time with my lovely smiley dear friend Nicole, who recently arrived from Manchester to spend the semester studying in Marburg. Poor thing: she’d only been there ten days when I came to visit, but managed her way to the train station to pick me up, and I couldn’t have been more elated to see her. Someone from home! Someone who knows me! Someone who is not new, whom I already know, with whom I have shared much! We passed our time telling stories, cooking and eating together and with other BCA students, reading, going to her English teaching internship, napping, wandering around Marburg, giggling, remembering. Possibly my favorite trip so far.

Contemplating said crooked tower, the town of Marburg spread out below.

Me with Amy and Nicole, a common combination for dinner.

Soon to come…

And finally, I spent all last week traveling in Italy. But as this post is already getting long, the hour is already late, and I’m obliged to post this tonight, I’ll continue with stories of gelato, Florentine art, St. Mark’s Square pigeons, and the Coliseum next time. Ciao!

ps. I bought a bike! A genuine French Rembrandt, with a lovely bell.

General Announcement

In the interest of this linguistic endeavor, I will now be taking a sabbatical from the English-speaking world.
A fancy way of saying that I have not gone one day without speaking, hearing, or seeing English since I have arrived in France, and I'm feeling a bit cheated out of my "immersion" experience. I have also spent a good deal of time and energy convincing myself and those at home that I had not, in fact, fallen off the face of the earth. And I have enjoyed doing it!
But, finding that a year is not a semester, that life does not pause at home just because I am here, and that I can't keep going with this "get by" mentality, I've decided to take some time to be fully present where I am, with whom I am, and doing what I am. I will be by no means distant (well, in the figurative sense) or unreachable: if anyone needs to urgently contact me during the week, please use the email crhamilton.abroad@gmail.com; any other emails can still be sent to my Manchester account (crhamilton@manchester.edu), and I'll check through them on Sundays. I will ALWAYS love to hear what you have to say, I just may be a little slower getting back. I expect to try this for the next month or so.
So, I wish you all the best of months, and encourage you to take some time being "fully present" wherever it is you find yourself.

Paris: Check

Meet up with the Jan Term group of MC Professor Thelma Rohrer, the woman who does everything: Check.

View of Paris from the amazingly elevation of the Sacre Coeur church (which used to be in the countryside outside of Paris: Check.


Visit the oh-so-opulent Opera Garnier, home to the Phantom: Check.


See (at least) two sections of the impossibly large Louvre museum: Check.


Be silly in the courtyard of the Royal Palace: Check.


Visit roomfuls of Monet's waterlilies, Orangerie Museum: Check.


Stand next to a VanGogh painting in the Musee d'Orsay: Check.


Bask in the stain-glass-window-tainted light of Ste. Chapelle, the "jewel box" of Paris: Check.

Also accomplished: the Musee Cluny (medieval and Renaissance art), Centre Pompidou (contemporary and modern art), an afternoon in a cafe, mastering the metro system, good and adequate sleep and food, entertaining company, and no missed trains!

Things to love (and love to hate) about the French language

It is very empowering to be able to speak and understand another language, especially one that has been fervently arguing itself “the most beautiful language in the world” since at least the sixteenth century (see “Defense and Illustration of the French Language,” DuBellay, 1549). Sure, in some areas, French falls desperately short of English: just look at any bilingual dictionary and you’ll see that the English-to-French section is thicker thanks to English’ broader vocabulary (half of which was borrowed from French during the three-hundred-year Norman [northern French] rule in England). In French, you can’t “storm out,” “speed away,” or “tiptoe around,” only “leave like a storm,” “move away quickly,” and “walk on tiptoes.” Nevertheless, I like French: not in a self-justifying way because I’ve put so many years into studying it, and not in a rose-colored way because I’m speaking a “romance” language (a silly English mix-up of the adjectives that describe love stories and also things stemming from a Roman or Latin base). In fact, I don’t just like French; I revel in it, in all its exactness and absurdity. Here are a few cases of both:

Pronominal reprise

French is maddeningly and wonderfully repetitive. Grammarians try to give the impression that every upstanding French Academy-trained citizen over the age of six moves onto the most succinct and efficient forms of linguistic exchange; after all, French is the world’s most beautiful language. But I am just as likely to find “baby talk” like Elle est où, la mer? “It is where, the sea?” coming from the mouth of a six-year old, a fellow university student, and my host mother. But let’s not be prescriptivists here, judging good grammar from bad and rapping knuckles for improperly-conjugated verbs. Asking a question in English can be unbelievably cumbersome, and it’s a wonder any of us can correctly use the word “do”: Do you have a pen? When do you think I could borrow it? A miracle of linguistic acrobatics, and quite unnecessary when a rising inflection (when speaking) or a question mark (when writing) confer the same meaning to a declarative sentence (a statement). Thus, the statement You have a pen becomes the question You have a pen? without messing around with “do” or inversion (placing the verb before the subject, as in Have you a pen?). In French, not only is it perfectly acceptable to change your statement into a question simply by changing your tone at the end of the sentence, it is also possible to just repeat yourself.

Il est où, mon stylo? It is where, my pen?

Ton stylo, ça je l’ai vu là-bas. Your pen, that I saw it over there.

Tu es sûr que c’étais mon stylo à moi ? You’re sure that it was my pen of mine?

And yes, when you respond, you even have the opportunity to refer to the same thing three times. The first time, you identify it by calling it what it actually is ton stylo. Then you insert randomly (you really have to have an ear for it) the pronoun ça, which means “this/that” but is used mostly as a filler word. Then you confirm what you’re referring to by using the pronoun le (l’ before a vowel) as a direct object: “I saw the pen,” “I saw it.” Whenever you use this structure, you are being about as inefficient with your words as possible and managing to avoid any sticky linguistic rules. Bravo! Then, just to be sure we’re referring to the same pen, the pen that belongs to me, I reemphasize my ownership of it. I saw this used quite a bit during the student rallies in “Our university of ours!” I don’t know when this ingenious technique came about in the French language, or what the prescriptivist linguists thought of it, but I guess if you can’t beat it, name it: and thus was born the reprise pronominale.

Impersonal expressions: Il faut and universal law

Although language students will never cease to complain about and probably will never completely conquer the subjunctive tense, it is inexplicably useful when preceded by the expression “Il faut.” The subjunctive is just a different way of conjugating every single verb to convey a notion of doubt, obligation, and other things too complicated for my purposes here. We don’t use it very often in English, except to say things like “If I were a butterfly…” when normally we would say “In a former life, I was a butterfly.” Regardless, the expression “Il faut…” in French means someone like “one must,” but implicating a God-given way something “must be done” without outright implicating the person who must do it this way. So if I say Boire, conduire; il faut choisir “Drink, drive; one must choose,” I sort of imply that if the choice is not made, the world stops turning. One cannot proceed without choosing. And yet I say it without specifying that I am the one that must choose, nor am I the one imposing the choice. I’m just describing a fundamental law of the universe, something French-speakers do without so much as shrugging their shoulders. If I do decide to specify that I am, at a particular moment, the object of concentration of a universal law, and say something like Il faut que je parte (and here comes into play the subjunctive tense) “One must that I leave/I must leave,” I manage to convey the absolute necessity of my depart while sloughing off the responsibility for leaving. Who am I to argue with universal law? It’s a convenient way to avoid stating how one actually feels about leaving, regretful or otherwise.

Reflexivizing any verb I darn well please

Okay, so “to reflexivize” is a word I just made up, which is ridiculously easy to do in English. It refers to the group of verbs called “reflexive” in French that one automatically uses for expressions that involve oneself, including body parts. For example, “to brush my teeth” or “to wonder” are actually me laver les dents and me demander, “to brush myself the teeth” and “to ask myself.” I haven’t quite gotten the logic of not being able to call the hair on my head “my hair” and reflexivizing a normal verb screws up everything you thought you knew about it’s past tense form…but it has its upsides. On top of this “Il faut” ability to express judgment without in any way implicating oneself, but by referring to a God-given way it “must be done,” French also allows the speaker to impart rules of propriety without involving oneself or reverting to passive constructions (example: “The cat eats the mouse” is direct, forceful, and does not use the verb “to be,” an overused verb and thus weak in meaning, like in the sentence, “The mouse is eaten by the cat.” This passive construction degenerates even further when the acting agent is unknown, which is most of the time, resulting in “The mouse is eaten.” Doesn’t “degenerates even further” sound much better than “is made even worse”?). In English, we have no choice but to say either, “One eats chocolate croissants at breakfast,” or, “Chocolate croissants are eaten at breakfast.” Even worse, the impersonal “one” is falling out of use and sounds quite “hoity-toity” in today’s English, which leaves us with the statement, “You eat chocolate croissants at breakfast.” In French, I can just take the verb “to eat,” make it reflexive (like “to ask oneself” or “to shower oneself”), and voilà! the pat expression Les pains au chocolat se mangent pour le petit déjeuner “Chocolate croissants eat themselves for breakfast.” You can do similar magic with the verbs dire “to say, That says itself often,” faire “to do/make, That does not do itself like that,” and acheter “to buy, These often buy themselves around Christmastime.” Once you accept that you don’t really mean what you are actually saying, you start to realize the creative process of reflexivizing verbs and telling people (again) the God-given way things “are often done.”

What do all these words have in common?

suis es est sommes êtes sont

été étant

étais était étions étiez étaient

fus fut fumes fûtes furent

serai seras sera serons serez seront

sois soit soyons soyez soient

serais serait serions seriez seraient

The miracle of French: all these words are just different forms of the verb être, “to be.”

Copied from a page of the Bescherelle verb conjugation pocketbook, a priceless commodity for any French student or student of French. Note: several forms, for reasons too complicated to explain, have been left out.

English’ saving grace: ambiguity

Not that I feel any need to defend my native tongue, but these days it feels almost positively secretive to speak English. If can say “a friend” without specifying gender; use any adjective I please without making it agree in gender and number with the noun it modifies; start a sentence with a verb like “wish you could come” without giving away exactly who wishes it, since verb conjugation doesn’t change between I, we, and they. Plenty of grammatical nuances make English more complicated (in French Il pleut means both “It rains” and “It is raining”), but at times it can be blissfully ambiguous.

Why can’t I say “to can”?

A linguistic riddle for you to ponder:

I can, you can, he/she can, we can, they can but

I will be able… and to be able…

Hmm. Tell me if you find a linguistic study on that one.

Cheerio (an outdated British farewell as well as a type of cereal...oh language!)

Christmas 2007 in the Touraine

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, Happy Holidays…

French Cuisine

They tell me Lyon is the capital of French cuisine, but I have a hard time believing it gets any better than the dining room chez Marrec, the grandparents.

I would just like to take this moment to recount how I have been spoiled and indulged in the last several days. Good cookin’ bar none:

Welcome dinner

Aperitif: munchies (pistachios, chips, cashews) and kir, a drink made of a dab of fruit liqueur (often cassis, blackcurrant) and white wine or champagne

Appetizer: tomato and egg dish

Main dish: rabbit in a red wine sauce

Potatoes

Always bread

Cheese: goat cheese, tome, camembert, gruyere…

Ice cream cake

Tisane: tea specifically to aid digestion or sleeping.

Christmas Eve lunch

Aperitif: munchies, kir

Appetizer: oysters

Main dish: chicken on rice

Eggs and vegetables with homemade mayonnaise

Cheese

Apple tart

Coffee.

Christmas Eve dinner

Start time: 8:30pm

Aperitif: octopi, eggplants and sun-dried tomatoes wrapped around goat cheese and pepper sauce, kir

Appetizer: clam

Second appetizer: foie gras (fattened duck liver)

Main dish: salmon with red wine sauce

Cheese

Ice cream

End time: 12:30!

Varieties of wine served: four! Champagne, a late-harvest (sweet) white wine, dry white wine, and red wine.

Christmas Day meal

Aperitif: munchies, kir

Appetizer: oysters, shrimp, snails, crabs

Main dish: chicken, rib roast, again with red wine sauce

Cheese

Chocolate and coffee

My modest contribution to all this? Mom’s cinnamon rolls, which of course never turn out quite like Mom’s. The family was thrilled. I took a picture of them all taking a picture of the rolls, but since they’re all in pajamas, I decided for their sake not to post it. I was glad to give a little, after all I’d devoured and digested and delighted in!

Needless to say, it was exhausting. ;-)

The rest of the vacation I recuperated at the Noë’s home near Orléans, with no less excellent meals (though smaller portions, to be sure), still in the excellent company of Isabelle, Frédéric, Lucie (11), Louis (8), and Charlotte (3). I dug into the seventh Harry Potter book and didn’t venture too far from the fireplace. Even in the “Garden of France,” the weather was terribly gray and rainy, so we were all content to stay put, except for a day trip to the two nearby chateaux of Cheverny and Chambord. I slept a good deal…really accomplished nothing of importance…just enjoyed family and movies and a good book…a successful break, I’d say.

I entered 2008 before you did!

I made it back to Strasbourg without too much trouble (then again, I can’t think of anything to rival my previous experience), and Leslie and I rang in the New Year at her apartment in the city. There were plenty of fireworks to watch right out the window, and we had our bottle of Crémant d’Alsace (because Champagne only comes from the Champagne region of France), and our comedic abilities are highly-prized: so we got along alright. Cheers to all of you, wherever you were when the second, the minute, the hour, the day, the month, and the year changed!

2008 is a year I haven’t ever given much thought to: 2005 was graduation, the big change from high school to college; 2006 was the supposedly-uneventful-but-ever-so-eventful year; 2007 revolved around leaving for France and, along the way, discovering a garden. 2008 I suppose will include returning from France, and all that that entails; starting a last year at Manchester, but not finishing it until 2009, so that’s next year’s thought…Could 2008 be the year of improved posture, the one resolution I made? What does 2008 hold for you? What are you expecting, in the sense of both hoping and waiting for?

General Announcements:

I’ve booked my return flight for 29 June.

And enough with the peanut butter! I’m swimming in it! I think I now have enough to return to the States with at least a jar. It was a very good thought…but then all of you had it! Please see below my current collection (which does not include the jar already sitting in my cupboard). So much for moderation in all things:

Traveler's Curse

24 December

I think I may just have the worst luck in Paris. Of anyone. In all of history.

I left yesterday morning to visit the Noë’s, a very friendly French family with three thoroughly adorable children, and to spend the holidays with them. The Noë’s lived in Grand Rapids for six years, during which my family was invited to join the circle of wonderful French families in the area. They have all been a blessing for us. This family moved back to France the summer of 2006, and this is the first time I’ve seen them since, but I feel like I’ve been received into my own family.

But we’re not talking about blessings here. We’re talking about a horrendous day of travel. Yesterday morning, I was due to leave Strasbourg on the high-speed train for Paris, then Orleans, at 8:45. I arrived at the train station at 8:25 (plenty of time for train travel in France, which I’d recommend any day over air travel anywhere), and as I got off the bus, I had a seizure of conscience that I ought to check my ticket and my departure time. Okay, so I realized I hadn’t yet done that, that morning or before, or really since I had bought the tickets. But when you know, you know, right? 8:45am.

Wrong.

My train had left at 8:10. I couldn’t believe it—I felt like an idiot. I was so sure, like I had already checked the ticket a thousand times. I don’t know why I was so far off! I got in line to exchange my ticket, and of course the line was long, and the ticket windows were short-staffed, and the staff were short-tempered: “It is the 23^rd of December," the woman at the counter reminded me.” Many trains were leaving for Paris that morning, but all of second class on every one was already full, and first class costs quite a bit more. So I opted for a train early that afternoon, called the family that was expecting me and told them I’d arrive at 6pm instead of noon, and sat awhile at the train station being mad at myself.

Finally I got on a bus to go home. While I was on the bus, the family called back and asked if I could change my ticket to arrive directly near Tours (the grandparents’ house, where we’re spending Christmas), instead of having them wait in Orleans to meet me and then driving to Tours, where the grandparents were expecting us for dinner. Of course it made more sense. I got on another bus back to the train station. When I went to change my ticket, I paid to change the second half between Paris and Orleans to Paris and Tours, because the ticket is only exchangeable one time, and here I was a second. I got on a bus again to go home, stayed home for approximately fifty minutes (long enough to realize that I’d already eaten or given away or frozen all the fresh food I’d had, so there wasn’t much left to make a lunch with), and got back on the bus to go to the station for the correctly-timed train.

The ride to Paris was blissfully uneventful, though we got off a little late. The man sitting next to me insisted on giving me his number (it happens almost every time, I don’t know why), even though I slept most of the time and made small talk only the last fifteen minutes. I arrived at the Gare de l’Est and had to catch my other train at the Gare Montparnasse in the south of Paris, taking the metro from one to the other. I would have had forty minutes between the two trains, and the metro only takes about 10 or 15, BUT because we were a little late getting out of Strasbourg, and because you are forced to walk through a maze of tunnels upon leaving the metro line and arriving at the train lines, YOU GUESSED IT: I missed the train again. I quickly exchanged the ticket for the next train to St.-Pierre-au-Corps, which thankfully comes every hour, and called the family again, almost in tears of frustration, to tell them that I would, again, be late.

The train was set to leave at 6:10, and I calmed down sitting with my bags in front of the large screens of train schedules, waiting for my platform to be announced. Half an hour passed: 5:55, fifteen minutes before, by which time the platform is usually announced. At 6:00, still nothing. At 6:05, an announcement that the train was being serviced by an intervention team, though I’m not sure what that connotes. At 6:10, departure time, still nothing. Finally, at 6:12, the platform was announced, and we all rushed towards the train, which left about four minutes later. Tough rocks for those who passengers whose eyes weren’t glued to the screen. I made it, but to top things off, of my several seating assignments that day, I remembered the wrong one, and ended up four cars down from my actual seat. But when I found it, oh did I relax.

And when I found the Noë’s waiting for me on the platform, oh did I rejoice.

Spa Treatment

You probably all know that I am not one to pamper myself at expensive all-inclusive spa resorts…But there’s a first time for every thing. My mother will be happy to know that I soaked out the last of this summer’s garden dirt from under my fingernails. The rest of you will just be jealous!

Exams and papers finished for me Thursday evening, and Friday several other BCA girls and I decided to head to Baden-Baden, Germany, to relax in the world-renowned thermal baths at Caracalla. But first let me describe “exams,” conducted in France in a manner you may not be familiar with, may not even recognize, may even laugh at. I certainly laughed a few times over the week: it was the only way to keep my sanity.

Contrast #1: In the US university system, several exams, projects, presentations, and papers will usually form a student’s semester grade. In the French (and other European) university system, one exam given at the end of a semester’s worth of lecture determines the grade. Sometimes, if the class is year-long, this exam is only considered “partial,” something more like a midterm.

Contrast #2: Whereas exams back at Manchester are given during a certain 1:50 time period during a certain week at the end of the semester, exams at Marc Bloch ranged from one hour to four, and though all of mine were given this week, the semester doesn’t actually end until mid-January, at which time exams can also be given. Bizarre. Even though I finished my exams this week (one even before the final session of class), I have no classes after Christmas Break.

Contrast #3: Exams at most US universities consist of multiple choice, true/false, short answer, and essay questions, typed on sheets of paper which are (mostly) checked and re-checked before being systematically distributed to students. My exams this semester were all medium answer/essay questions, which is a change I completely agree with. However, let me describe my first exam “episode”: Saturday afternoon during a four-hour period, I took my Francophone Literature exam. The professor, not one of my favorites, had told us that the exam for our class of 30ish students would take place in Amphitheater 1, the largest on campus. We thirty arrived, along with…300 other students. I think they were all students of literature electives in the Department of Letters. We weren’t seated in any particular order, and so I can’t imagine how the professors imagined distributing all of the exams, but this is how it went: one professor would call out the name of his course, would begin walking up and down all the steps around the entire amphitheater searching out his students and handing them the exam. In the meantime, one of the other professors in front, perhaps embarrassed by the relative silence and feeling a need to move things along, would call out the name of her course. This would, of course, result in students of two different sections sitting patiently, hands raised, waiting for their professor to come around, often receiving the wrong exam paper. It was ridiculously inefficient, and I sat there incredulous, hand raised, dodging eye contact with any professor not my own to avoid receiving the wrong exam. And I was lucky: other students had their subject dictated to them by someone other than their professor (I didn’t catch if it was lack of time or lack of money that resulted in dictation instead of paper copies). After everything settled down, over half an hour had passed. I looked over at the paper of the student next to me when he swore under his breath and shook his head, and watched him cross out the page number cited on his exam sheet and replace it with another (correct) page number. Then I looked down at my exam sheet: five questions, the first of which was “What meaning does Elysée Réclus give to the word ‘francophonie’?” Now, at the beginning of the semester we’d read an essay by Onesime Réclus, the geographer who first used the word “francophonie” to describe all the places in the world where French was spoken in 1880. Elysée was his slightly-more-famous brother whom we mentioned in passing as being more famous. That was it. He didn’t write about “francophonie,” as far as I know. What was he doing in the first question of our exam?! I wasn’t quite sure what to do—I simply crossed out Elysée and wrote in Onesime. I couldn’t imagine that the prof had actually intended the former over the latter, but I could neither fathom that on a once-a-semester exam, there would by a typo that serious!

Flabbergasted, just flabbergasted.

The rest of the exams continued normally over the next week, including a test in English-French translation, art history, French linguistics, and French cinema (with a film analysis to hand in as well). The week sped by…and Friday morning I found myself on a train headed into Germany.

It takes two trains and a bus to get to the baths at Baden-Baden, but luckily two of those who went had already been before, and I didn’t have to worry about travel plans. There was snow and sun and lots of fur coats, and mostly I enjoyed seeing the sun, which doesn’t shine very often during the Strasbourg winter, and doesn’t climb very high when it does, so that weak 1:00pm sunlight feels more like 4:00, and night falls by 5:00. When you enter the baths (which are not too expensive, actually), the first pool of warm water feels like a bath, and the second like a hot tub. The pool extends outside, where everything beyond three meters is lost in the mist. But once in awhile, it’s nice to have a world that extends only three meters around you. After swimming around a variety of pools with currents, bubbles, whirlpools and jets galore, we went to the steam room. I think the purpose of this room is to “sweat your butt off.” The light is low, and supposedly-relaxing rainforest bird calls complement the fake starry skies above. As you sit, sweating, breathing thick, humid, Vicks vapor rub-scented air, the occasional drop of hot liquid (I think water) falls from the ceiling. It’s quite the experience. After the steam room, we went to the sauna (85 and 95 degrees Celsius—keep in mind that 100 degrees Celsius is boiling), the purpose of which is also to “sweat your butt off.”

Here I have a confession to make. For those of you who know the thermal baths at Baden-Baden, you know that the sauna is located on the second level. You also know that the second level is the nudist level…While clothes and suits are not allowed, fear not: I maintained towel coverage. I also saw quite a few naked people, though almost all wear towels when just walking around. It was quite a European experience. Giggle.

All in all, the day was very relaxing, and I’m glad I went, though it will rest (probably) a once-in-a-lifetime indulgence.

Because there’s work to be done.

Christkindelsmärik

The Marché de Noël (Christmas Market) has taken over Strasbourg this past month. Two million two hundred thousand people have visited the three thousand craft and food booths set up all around the city.

It’s madness.

It’s not much an exaggeration to say that the lights strung up around the city outnumber the starts in the sky. The air smells perpetually of hot-spiced wine, and candies and crepes have become part of a balanced diet. It’s a mix of heart-warming tradition and hyped-up tourist attraction (except Sunday—then it’s simply insane).

See for yourself: