Bread

Bread is such a food staple in France, that even when eating a meal which consists mainly of bread, such as the croque monsieur, the French will eat a baguette on the side.
(croque monsieur: a hot ham and cheese--typically emmental or gruyere--grilled sandwich with lots and lots of butter--basically as staple a food to France as pb&j is to the States).

Meg & I spent the weekend at one of my English professor's homes, where we drooled over the cuteness of Maxou, the cat, almost as much as over her 17-month-old son, Hugo, the tiniest little Frenchman I've ever met with the biggest smile I've ever seen from a Frenchman.

After a jaunt to the local piscine, where I found I could barely lift my pinky finger after a mere hour of swimming (it's hard to stay in shape when it's snowing outside and you keep eating bread and cheese with wine every five seconds), we ate a delicious lunch, which included: a salad made almost entirely out of croutons, with baguette bread on the site, and a two croque monsieurs each, with baguette bread on the side.

Normally, when you eat a French lunch (meat, potatoes, cheese, some kind of sauce), you use the baguette bread to mop up the sauce and such left on the plate. Today, there was so much bread--in the salad, on the table, on my plate, crumbs flying everywhere in a frenzy of floury dust--that I found myself finishing off the meal by using that last piece of baguette bread to mop up the bread crumbs off my plate.

Perfectly French

Three-and-a-half hours west into the heart of France is Thiers, a tiny town perched on the hills of a typical French countryside.

In this cutlery capital of France, Meg & I spent three lovely days eating incredible gourmet French food in the home of Jean-Mi & Martine, the so perfectly French host parents of our friend Isabel--and, we got to wake up to this view every morning:

We had a personal tour of the tiny town, where residents still attend mass in churches built in the 1100s and ruins of cutlery factories line the river, a perfect scene for an impressionist painting.



Food adventures of the weekend included the traditional raclette, a meat and cheese miracle, and a meal based entirely on meat (beef, pork, veal, etc.) cooked on a hot stone on the table. Never have I eaten so much meat in my life, and never has it been so good.

We also took a quick trip to Clermont-Ferrand, where we gaped open-mouthed at a cathedral built entirely of volcanic stone. To check out photos of these two ideally French towns, click here! or click on the "Thiers" link on the photo menu on the right. Enjoy!

La Greve!

Only in France would I get the day off because my fellow teachers are going on strike :) Vive la France!

Sunny Day in Lyon

Today I took a lovely stroll along the river in the unusally warm sunshine that came with the scorching 8 degrees celsius temperature (46 degrees farenheit, for my American friends).

I sat down to unwrap my pb sandwich, folding back the tinfoil and lifting the deliciousness of an American staple food to my mouth when--splat. Splat splat. Three dollops of bird poop landed on the ground directly in front and on the side of me. Delicious.

I looked up. There was a single tree hovering directly over half of my bench, and I was in the middle. So, I scootched over until I was exactly 3 milimeters from the edge of the tree-less half of the bench. And quickly ate my pb sandwich in shoulder-hunched apprehension.

Tapatio

Today I sat in the infrequent sunshine filtering through the windowed balcony doors and ate huevos in a tortilla with Tapatio hot sauce.

The fact that the cheese I had to use with my Mexican meal was Emmental or that the doors were still closed to keep out the cold didn't bother me one bit. :)

Halfway

It's mid-January. I've been here 3 1/2 months. I have 3 1/2 months to go. Weird.

Finally completed my medical visit today (2nd try). Sitting in the waiting room with 6 other English assistants, I asked how everyone was liking work. We looked tired, a bit at the end of our ropes, and it's only halfway through. We love living in Europe. But, this job is proving to be a bit (quite a bit) different than we expected.

(photo: I got my own copy of one of these today)

Slow paperwork. Unappreciative students. Absent teachers. Where's the challenge, the excitement, the "job well done!"? In some other country, obviously. In France, the challenge is to earn the respect of your peers and students, to energize a class of sixteen 16-year-olds who sit in class from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. and are unaware that high school is anything other than a drudgery of tests and homework (where are the school sports teams, drama club, student government?).

The first month or two was exciting. We were the "new guy" that everybody was curious about at school. Students paid attention to us because they had to get used to our accents. Things may not have been perfect, but we had the promise of the months to come to look forward to.

But now we're halfway through. And things haven't gotten much better. Maybe you could say we're more "French," experiencing this lack of communication between ourselves and the teachers. Or simply that people around school have gotten used to seeing us (in particular, students), so we're not someone to care about anymore.

It could just be the mid-winter slump. After all, the Lyonnais don't know what to do with all the snow this year--buses have stopped running, so students have stopped coming to school and half the teachers have about given up; meanwhile, my Canadian friends are snickering at the sorry excuse for snow.

Who knows what it is. I don't have much hope of things improving; sadly, if I remind myself that I'm in a "secondary" position, where people mostly don't know what to do with me (as an assistant, and as an expat), then it's not so bad. And thanks to the new stamp on my passport, I can prove that I am tuberculosis-free :)

Snow Day

Watching kids making snowmen and a man trying to cross-country ski in the park in front of my building....while in a tank top, in the comfort of my well heated apartment :)

Christmas Trip Photos

Check out the photos from our trip!

They're out of order, but the order is: England, Barcelona, Paris, & Lyon.

Enjoy! :)

Fate

Some things just seem like fate. Today, after a trip to the bank yet again (this time to discover why my password to get onto my online account wasn't working), I decided to kill a few minutes before I could pick up the Christmas package from my mom at 5 p.m. (thanks, Mom!).

Walking down central Gratte Ciel minding my own business, I suddenly hear this scratchy, frail voice calling, "Mademoiselle, Mademoiselle! Pouvez-vous m'aider?" Can you help me, this cutest little old French lady, perched on a curb, was asking me with a huge, begging smile. She needed help off the curb, and down the street. "Mais bien sur!" But of course! I replied. Who could resist offering an arm to the petite-est old lady who was using a rolling shopping bag (see photo) as a cane? It turned out to be my best idea of the day. As we had a brief discussion about the weather and the United States, walking nearly 0.075 mph, this little French woman could actually understand my French, and she was so appreciative, that it gave me a huge confidence boost.


"Everyone here is so nice!" exclaimed little old French lady (in French, bien sur). "Every day, I walk outside to buy a newspaper or whatever, and someone always helps me get around," said she, who was clearly not fit to be out walking in the snow-laden streets (see other photo).

Little did little old French lady know, it was her bright nature, and her genuine interest in where I was from and what I was doing in Villeurbanne, that was the true blessing of the day.

After dropping off little old French lady on her doorstep and bidding her a "Bon Annee" (Happy New Year), I turned around and grinned--all the way home.

A California Girl In a Winter Wonderland

"I'm living in a postcard."

*To see more pictures of snow in my city, click here.

Blind Date

Finally home in Lyon :) Sorry for slacking on the blog posts lately. I spent the past 9 days in England, in the tiny, relaxing, Petalumaish (red brick buildings on a river) town of Reading, where I took full advantage of relaxation time (hence the blog slacking).

Though my family was celebrating Christmas 5,000 miles away in California, I was fortunate enough to spend the holiday with Nick and his family in England, where his dad will be working for the next month. Thank you, Benavides family! :-)

In this quaint town, we discovered the hole-in-the-wall-ishness of the Hobgoblin, a very cozy pub that's been around practically since Medieval times like everything else in this gray country, and also like most every place else in this gray country, it serves lots of good, local beer. 4,000 different types of beer to date, in fact. Think old, stained wooden tables. Corners with fireplaces. Lots of drunk middle-aged Englanders singing bad 80s songs to ring in the New Year. (see photo)

We took a couple days to do the usual sightseeing in London, as well: Westminister Abbey, Buckingham Palace, St. Paul's Cathedral...

But, the highlight of the trip quite possibly was a day at Warwick Castle, the best preserved medieval castle you can find (it was never attacked). We took a tour of the dungeons and torture chambers, where I happily had my innards extracted behind a curtain for our tour group :) After, Nick's Dad's work 'mate,' Sean, treated us to a fantastic Indian food dinner in Leamington Spa.

The flight home was fun. Six weeks prior to my trip, I apparently thought it a grand idea to book a 6:30 a.m. flight out of London Gatwick; it was the cheapest flight they had. What I didn't realize is that transportation from Reading at this time in the morning is impossible. Nick and I ended up paying for a hostel in London the night before and skipping sleep to take the 3:30 a.m. airport shuttle. Though Nick was flying out of Heathrow for California at 11 a.m., he came with me to Gatwick to spend a bit more time together. Of course, we had to split up on the bus to get seats, Nick stuck in a crowd of over-caffeinated Portuguese discussing something in loud voices around him, both of us drifting in and out of consciousness...

Lyon feels much smaller now that I've traveled. 'Went for a walk today, crossing the rivers and eating a panini in this French town I now strangely call my home. Everything is as I left it, though something seems to be missing. Returning "home," to a foreign country, alone, I realize how much I enjoyed introducing Nick to Europe and Europe to Nick. As far as I can tell, it's one of the best blind dates he's ever been on.