Two Cups of Coffee and Two Glasses of Wine

For those of you who find this blog entry title disconcerting (probably my parents), I am happy to assure you that I have not become a caffeine addict nor a wine-o (although I guess I probably wouldn't admit it if I had). But nonetheless, this blog title comes from the two very interesting conversations I had recently: one yesterday afternoon and the other evening.

Yesterday was Wednesday and as I "work" (I put it in quotes because I don't actually start teaching until next Thursday, so it still doesn't feel like real work yet) in the elementary school system, I have Wednesdays off. So I woke up bright and early to go to the CAF (Caisse des Allocations Familiales -- the bureau which offers reimbursements to young workers who don't get paid very much, like me) to pick up some forms. Then I made some serious progress in Au Bonheur des Dammes -- only 95 pages to go, out of the original 495! I had just made some lunch when I got a phone call from my downstairs neighbor.

A little backstory: last week I wrote a letter to each of the two families who live on the bottom two floors. Steph and Charly told me that they both have kids and that the English teaching assistant who lived with them last year, Anna, would babysit for these kids occasionally. Having your babysitting job in the same building seems like a pretty sweet deal to me, so I dropped a note in each of their mailboxes explaining who I was, how long I would be here, and that I would be more than willing to babysit. I ran into the first-floor neighbor last Saturday and he told me that his family doesn't use babysitters very often -- no luck there. So it was Mr. Oldendorf, whose family lives on the second floor, who called yesterday to say that they would love to have me babysit occasionally for their two daughters and invited me down for a cup of coffee. Since I happened to be in the building and didn't have any other plans, I accepted. Mr. Oldendorf is German, but his wife Corinne is French. Their two daughters (the one who was home yesterday appeared to be about 6 and was very shy, and the other is apparently 11) speak both French and German. He is an artist/professor at the art school at the university here and she works for the French ministry of culture.

Mr. Oldendorf brewed us both a cup of very strong but very delicious coffee and we talked for quite a while about Besançon, Bern (the area where he grew up), and Paris. Then his daughter's friend came over for a playdate, so he brewed some more coffee for the playdate's father, and it turned into quite an extensive conversation about the United States, 9/11, and many other things. Afterward, I reflected upon whether this conversation could have taken place in another context. For instance, was the interaction only interesting because it involved two (later three) people from two (later three) different countries who were interested to hear the opinions of someone from another country? For instance, even if I was the "new neighbor" at home, another American would probably be less inclined to ask how I felt the US had changed in the aftermath of September 11th. I am positive that my sending the letter offering to babysit was what prompted the invitation for coffee -- otherwise I might have gone the whole 8 months here never meeting or having a real conversation with my neighbors. Maybe part of it too is that this conversation took longer because it involved translation -- Mr. Oldendorf speaks fluent German and French and his English is fairly fluent (I would probably classify it as fluent, even if there were a few words he asked me to explain or define). My French is certainly fluent by American standards, but not quite there when compared to the speech of a local. Or maybe it's because I'm not yet incredibly busy, the way I often become when I'm at home or when I was at Wake. It made me wonder if I ever missed out on conversations like this, because I was zealous in filling my schedule with activities...

And now for the two glasses of wine. So Charly, the second half of the couple with whom I share this apartment, has been in Bordeaux for the past week. He is working on his PhD in archeology and part of his thesis research involves analyzing soil cores from Greenland. Apparently there are some scientific devices at the university in Bordeaux which they don't have here in Besançon, because he had to drive some of the cores there this week to analyze them using said equipment. I noticed earier this week that Steph hasn't been cooking as much as she normally does when he's home, so I offered to cook dinner for the two of us tonight.

The entree itself was pretty simple: peppers stuffed with a combination of rice, chickpeas, tomatoes, onions, and cheese. But along with that we had a simple salad, some whole-grain bread from a local boulangerie, a bottle of Pinot Noir from Bourgogne, and for dessert some chocolat noir noisette (dark chocolate with hazelnuts) made by Cote d'Or, a brand which is available in the grocery store but which I selected at random my second week here and found to be absolutely delicious. The stuffed peppers turned out to be quite good -- I made quite a few substitutions and sort of guessed for the measurements, since it was an American recipe, so I was particularly pleased that they worked out. This picture doesn't quite do the meal justice... I took it somewhat hastily, I promise it was much more appetizing than it appears here:

But the best part of the evening was the conversation. I didn't really note what time we started eating... it was probably about 8:30pm (I got back from observing in the schools around 5:45pm after running a few quick errands on the way home, went for a run, showered, then started cooking). But we didn't finish until nearly 11:45pm! We didn't talk about anything earth-shattering, but all sorts of things both banal and personal. It was very pleasant to take the whole evening preparing dinner and enjoying the meal -- I wasn't wearing a watch and had no reason to consult the time outside of cooking times. I know that my schedule will not always be this free-form, and so I'm glad the Type A that dominates my personality was able to take a backseat tonight, even if it was just for an evening.

Well now it's well past my bedtime! Bon soir!

First Day in the Schools

So yesterday was my first day observing in the schools. I woke up bright and early so that I could catch the #10 bus before 7:30am, to guarantee I would be at Ecole Champagne in Planoise before 8:15am. Classes start at 8:30am, but I wanted to make sure that I got there early so I could meet some of the other teachers and figure out which classes I would be observing.

Waking up that early was a bit of a jolt, to be honest. I've been waking up around 8:15am for the past 2 weeks, because that's the time sunlight comes streaming through my window and floods the room with light. And the #10 was packed. But it only took 22 minutes from my stop to the one in Planoise, and less than ten minutes to walk to the school. I went first to the Directeur's office and he showed me to the salle de maîtres (teachers' lounge). I got to meet most of the teachers (about 10 in total, 8 of them women and mostly of the same height and with brown hair -- remembering their names is going to be an issue). I was surprised at how young the teachers were -- all of them seemed only a few years older than me, at most. Maybe this is because Planoise is seen as sort of a "difficult" area, so veteran teachers move on to schools in more desirable neighborhoods? At 8:30am the teachers went out into the cour (schoolyard) and collected their students, who were lined up by class. First I shadowed Caroline, the English referent (point person) for Ecole Champagne. Her class consists of twenty-two CP students. CP is the equivalent of first grade in the US (six year-olds).

Here's the terminology:

1st grade, 6 years old   ==> Cours préparatoire (CP)
2nd grade, 7 years old ==> Cours élémentaire 1re année (CE1)
3rd grade, 8 years old ==> Cours élémentaire 2e année (CE2)
4th grade, 9 years old ==> Cours moyen 1re année (CM1)
5th grade, 10 years old == Cours moyen 2e année (CM2)

Twenty-two students doesn't sound like a lot for someone coming from the context of college seminars. But twenty-two 6 year-olds? Yikes! After only 15 minutes I started to get a headache just from all of the constant motion coming from the little bodies in my field of vision. Caroline wasn't teaching any English on Monday morning -- she told me they reserve the mornings for the core subjects of French and Math -- but it was helpful to see how she conducted the class. I will be assisting in one class at Ecole Champagne which has CP students in it. It's actually a class of CP and CPE (6 and 8-year olds together). Fabienne, my liaison, explained that this is due to budget/hiring cuts, but I'm still not sure why they would put kids two grades apart together. I'm definitely going to request to observe that class when I go in on Thursday.

I spent all morning at Ecole Champagne and ate lunch with the teachers there, then walked over to Ecole Bourgogne. The walk took about 10 minutes -- I'm positive there is a faster way than the one I took, but I didn't want to get lost on my first day and the way I took followed a main road/sidewalk.

At Ecole Bourgogne I followed a teacher named Annette who speaks very fluent British English. I was able to observe her CM2 class for their English lesson, than another CM2 class Annette instructed (while her class was learning German), and then Annette's class again during their history/writing class. I found the CM2 kids to be much more manageable. Maybe that's not the right word -- but the teacher's role in those classes seemed less like babysitting and more like teaching. The two classes were both full (22 kids in each) of exuberant, eager little ones. They were awkstruck when Annette told them that I came from the US. At the beginning of the history/writing lesson, she let her class ask me some questions about myself and the United States. Here were some of the memorable ones:

• Do you know any famous "pop stars"? (in quotes because that's the term the girl used in French)
• Do you know President Obama?
• Have you ever stayed in the White House?
• Do you know David Guetta?
• Were you there on September 11th when the twin towers (les tours jumelles) fell?
• Do you really use dollars and not euros?

There were a couple of other ones like: "Was your school like ours?" and "Where do you live?" For this last question, I whipped out the quick sketch of the US that I made when the teachers at Ecole Champagne asked where Ohio is located. I labeled my horribly-inaccurate sketch with the places I thought they might recognize: NYC, California, and Texas. I also added North Carolina, so I could show them where I went to college. Here's my sketch, just to give you a few laughs (yes, note that Texas's border problem is a fiction as it does not share a border with Mexico):

Also, when I named my home state, quite a few teachers immediately referenced a relatively famous French song whose title is the same name. Isabelle Adjani, a French actress from the 1970s, sang "Ohio" (click to hear it on YouTube). I remember Sabrina and Yohan, the French ex-pat couple who helped me out when I was stranded in Casablanca three summers ago, told me this too, but at the time I was too weary to process it. Other French people have mentioned it to me again since, but this was the first time I wrote down the singer's name.

So overall my first day of observing was highly successful. The teachers were very welcoming, and seemed to lead their classes effectively. One thing that struck me was how long it took to get the students from one place to another: walking from the schoolyard to the classroom took forever because the kids were perpetually wandering out of line and talking too loudly. Despite being in what people keep referring to as a "difficult area," the schools seemed to be well-equipped and well-maintained.

Another word on that: I feel like my blogs haven't done Planoise justice. Yes, it's a neighborhood consisting of high-rise, low-cost apartment buildings built in the 1960s and 1970s for new immigrants. The apartment buildings' architecture reflects their vintage (that is to say, they are ugly). But the area, at least the part I'm in, doesn't seem anything like what I would consider a "rough neighborhood." Maybe it's because there are trees everywhere. Despite all of the buildings, Planoise is just as verdant as the rest of Besançon, maybe even more because it's more spread out than the c-v. It's hard to tell to what extent Planoise's reputation comes from general French phobia of foreigners, particularly those from its former colonies.... But I'll let you know as I spend time there regularly!

Today was our stage d'accueil (orientation), tomorrow no school, then observing again on Thursday. Friday I have a journée pédagogique (teachers' workshop). Last night I went to another Ultimate practice and tomorrow night I'm playing in a mini-tournament at the university! That's all for now!

Une Journee Chez La Famille Coudel

Whew, this has been quite the weekend!

Friday evening I had my second UC Visontin practice (the name of the Ultimate team). My arrival at the practice was complicated by the fact that the car belonging to Fred, my ride, broke down right after he arrived around the corner from my apartment. We had to call the team captains and they brought a handful of people to help push the car into an actual parking space. As of this evening the car was still there (I think Fred said his mechanic doesn't work on the weekends). But we got there eventually! This practice is inside a gym. In Europe, there are two seasons of Ultimate: indoor and outdoor. Personally I don't really like playing inside, but I guess winter is so cold and so long that most parts of Europe wouldn't get to play without an indoor league.

After practice about half of the team (we were only 15 or so on Friday evening, but you play 5 v. 5 indoor) went to a bar/brasserie. Someone explained to me that there are really only 2 big bars in the c-v, so whenever they go out it's to one of those. Luckily both are only a short walk from where I live. The special of the night was Maredsous 10, a Belgian beer which is sweet but also very strong. One was plenty! I had a great time though -- it was good to see that I could hang out and chat easily with people from the team outside of playing Ultimate (where there is a lot less talking required).

Then Saturday was the big apple festival at the Coudel's (see blog title: "A Day at the Coudel's")! I arrived in Leisle around noon and, a bit to my chagrin, they were already well into the process. Apparently they picked most of the apples on Friday and started pressing them very early on Saturday morning. So while I got to participate for about 2 hours, that was only a small percentage of the total. Here are some pictures:

Adding apples to the slicing/mashing component. To me the apple-mashing machine appeared to be identical to the machine the Davey Tree people use to cut up branches that fall in the street, just smaller.

Diced/mashed apple bits spurting out into the tubs below:

The pressing element: you heap handfuls of the mashed apples into a mold, lay a piece of cheese-cloth on top, then add another layer. The metal bar at the top has a winch attached, so that the bar descends and presses the apple bits down tightly, extracting all of the juice:  

Turning the winch below. The cheese cloth is brown, which is why you can't see the layers of mashed apples:

And the juice flows into the waiting buckets: 

 

And then the contents of the bucket are poured into these:

So my contribution was to work on the team checking the apples for rotten spots, and cutting them open if they appeared to have any flaws. I got to chat with some of the other people there: most of them were friends of Jeremy (the Coudels' oldest son), either people he met in high school/college or people he works with now. Most of them were about my age, maybe a little older.

Then around 3pm we went back to the house (this whole process was taking place in the yard and barn of a house-turned-hostel on the other side of the village) for a giant meal. 19 people necessitated two tables, and we had a sumptuous meal including a salad of beets, endives, apples, and pine nuts, then a lamb, apricot, and fig tajine over couscous, then the requisite cheese, bread, coffee, and cake.

We spent most of the rest of the afternoon just lazing around the house, chatting, playing games, reading. A little later some people went back to start pasteurizing the juice (all but a few of the 400 bottles would be pasteurized so that they could be drunk throughout the year, not just in the next two weeks). The pasteurizing process really only required three people, so we couldn't all work there at once, but I got to see it before I left (it just meant heating the apple juice, small barrels at a time, to a certain temperature for a certain amount of time).

I took a train back to Besançon a little before 7pm and turned in early. Then this morning I went to a service at the Église Reformée de Besançon (a protestant church). It's in the c-v, right by art museum in the Place de la Republique. It's a really neat chapel: probably about the same size as my church at home's sanctuary (without the balcony), but made of stone with vaulted ceilings. I'll have to find out more, but I bet the chapel itself was once a Catholic church.

I was really surprised by how many young people there were there! I went to church once in Dijon and was wholly unimpressed by how dingy the space was and how cryptic the service seemed to be (although possibly it was my own shortcomings in comprehension that made it so). There were probably 45-50 people there this morning and the majority appeared to be under 40 years old. This is certainly unusual for churches in France, at least based on everything I've ever heard. We sang probably 8-9 hymns throughout the service -- they were much shorter than hymns I've sung at services in the US. At home I've often thought the hymns have too many verses, but today I saw the value in having 4-5 versus instead of 2-3. It takes about two for the congregation to get a hang of the rhythm, and with these hymns they were over before we really ever sang them in unison. The sermon was on the victory at Jericho (Joshua 6) and how the "peaceful" victory can be a metaphor for approaching the problems we encounter in our own lives. Don't ask me to go any further into detail than that, not only did I have a bit of trouble following the sermon, but there was a baby two rows behind me that squawked intermittently throughout the service (they did invite the children to go to Sunday school but either that's not available for infants or these parents didn't want to go that route, because the crying definitely lasted the whole service). Despite the small-child wailing, I really enjoyed the service and will definitely go back again.

After church, I spent about 2 hours reading Au Bonheur des Dammes in Parc Micaud (I posted pictures of it in an earlier entry, it's the one right by the banks of the Doubs). I really like that park a lot!

Then at 3pm I met up with Candice and Laurie, two other assistants who are living together, at the Musee du Temps (Museum of Time) for a tour of the Palais de Granvelle, the building in which the museum is located. It was the "palace" (I put it in quotes because it's closer to my idea of a French chateau than a palace) of Nicolas Perrenot de Granvelle who became an advisor for the Holy Roman Emperor Charles the Fifth. The palais is remarkable because it was built in 1534 and reflects a style of architecture which was then unknown in the region. Nicolas Perrenot traveled extensively on behalf of Charles Quint, including to Spain and Italy, where he saw the new styles of architecture and art which would come to be known as the Renaissance period. 

His palais is an adoption of those styles, with some modifications to make it work in Franche-Compte (the region where Besançon is located). For instance, it has severely angled roofs, to help channel the snow and rain which fall regularly. You can see too that the roof tiles were done in the toit bourguignon style (the patterned roof tiles which are commonly found in Bourgogne, the name of the region where Dijon is located). I'm sure that the roof tiles are more recent than 1534, but they're still cool. You can see from these pictures (to the left and right of this paragraph) that the attempt at Renaissance-inspired symmetrical design didn't last very long -- look at the photo on the left and follow the lines up from the columns on the ground floor to the inset columns on the floor above. Now look at the picture on the right -- oops! In fact none of the four "corners" of the building are set at right angles either, because of flaws in the execution of the design or because the foundations shifted after the building was constructed. The visite (tour) was really informative. It blows my mind that this structure has been in Besançon for nearly 500 years! 


After the tour we went up to the tower and I got to take some cool pictures of the city:

St. Jean's Cathedral! (and the construction cranes for the Citadel):

Looking down Grande Rue ("Big Street," or Main Street), past the toit bourguignon roof of the Palais de Granvelle:

A closer look down the same street:

And then the afternoon/evening turned into a series of (unexpected) social occaisons: one with Janice, an American and former assistant who now lives in Besançon with her French husband and two kids (don't worry Mom and Dad, I will come back). Candice had arranged to meet with her just to hear her advice and suggestions, and Laurie and I ended up tagging along. Then after dinner I met up with Pierre, the guy I sat next to on the train from Paris to Besançon. He was home again this weekend and sent me a message earlier today asking if I'd like to meet him for coffee during the time between when he arrived in Besançon from Pontarlier (the town about an hour away where his family lives) and when his train left for Paris. Traffic delays on his way to Besançon meant that we only chatted briefly in the gare café, but it was kind of cool to see him again. It's weird to think that it's only been two weeks since I arrived; it feels like I have been here forever -- and at the same time like I moved in with Steph and Charly last night. Then, when I got back from the gare, Steph and Charly asked if I would like to join them in their Sunday evening beer. I keep forgetting to write down the name... they've invited me to join them once before and we had the same beer; it's definitely a German variety but I can't recall the name. We also had some of the apple cake Steph made this afternoon -- it was quite good! Charly leaves tomorrow for Bordeaux. He'll be there for a week using the lab equipment at the university to analyze his soil cores in other ways than he can here.

And now I am off to bed! I'm not even going to check the word count as I most certainly over 1200 works, but thanks for sticking it out to the end! Tomorrow is my "first day of school" (observing) and I'm very excited! Bonne nuit (goodnight)!