A Tax on Trash and other Trucs

*Truc is French for "thing" or "stuff." It's the sort of word that causes teachers to wince when it is employed by their students, but is considered a perfectly acceptable catch-all in casual contexts.

First of all, it finally snowed! Okay, so it happened once before, back in December, but it was so fleeting that it seemed like it didn't happen at all. This snow has lasted two full days, so I think it counts. Tuesday morning I woke up to this outside my window:

Tuesday morning was a lazy one; all but one of my classes was canceled due to a big teachers’ strike. A couple of weeks ago, the French government announced it would be eliminating 42 posts in the département du Doubs (equivalent to Doubs county), including one post in each of my two schools. There were protests this past weekend and a big national strike organized for Tuesday. All but three of the teachers at École Champagne participated in the strike. So what happened to the kids whose teachers weren’t at school? Normally the city provides a kind of group day-care at the maisons du quartier (neighborhood community centers, similar to YMCAs). But none was offered this time at the maison du quartier in Planoise, where my schools are located, so parents without cars were in a jam. Presumably they left their kids with friends or family, or stayed home from work. This kind of large-scale hassle is of course the goal of a strike.

On one level, I can sympathize with the teachers because I have seen the law of diminishing returns at work when it comes to overcrowded classrooms, and I know that the removal of another teacher from the schools where I teach will only exacerbate that problem. But it would be interesting to compare the amount of money spent on dealing with the consequences of the strike (such as the price of employing people for daycare) with the amount the government plans to save by eliminating posts throughout the country. Thought for the day: what are the costs and benefits of a system in which strikes are permissible, and their consequences are paid for by the taxpayers?

This is the salle des maîtres (teachers' lounge) at Ecole Champagne... I took advantage of it being empty to snap a pic! 

Now onto this entry’s title: my roommates Steph and Charly announced earlier this week that as of February 1, Besançon will institute a weight-based trash tax. As of now, households pay a flat tax to the city to have their trash collected. Our apartment building’s residents split that tax based on the square footage of each apartment. But starting this week, our building will be taxed based on how many kilograms of refuse are in our trash container.

This concept, of course, presents all kinds of unintended consequences. I suggested people might start throwing their trash in the recycling bins, since there are no fees for recycled material. Steph replied that the plan calls for the trash collectors to check the recycling bins at the same time they collect the trash, and if they see trash inside they will add the entire contents of the recycling bin to that household’s trash count. This creates the desired negative incentive against residents disposing of trash in the recycling bins, although costing the garbage collectors who-knows-how-much time to check each bin. 

Another possible consequence: people will start throwing their trash in their neighbors’ bins. Response: we're getting a lock for ours. Not very charming, but I suppose it will be effective. A third possible consequence: people will start dumping their trash in parks or public places to avoid paying the tax. Not sure how they’re going to avoid this one. I suggested people might also try to dispose of their trash at their workplace, although I can’t say I considered that option for myself (can you imagine me carrying our trash on my 45-minute bus commute to Planoise?) We’ll see if the trash tax lasts...

One more quick thing. I saw a t-shirt in a store window a while ago and have wanted to put it on my blog ever since. Keep in mind this store doesn't seem to sell the classiest garments ever, so I doubt their design team really dedicated a lot of time to their translation. But still... So the shirt features a woman's face, artfully silhouetted and set at an angle across the whole front of the shirt. The material is white and the image and writing are a silvery gray. At the bottom is written: "Yoo're God's great paramour and sweet." Wha??? I have no idea what they meant to say, but whatever it was, they failed.

Another linguistic truc: I have a little "1 Minute a Day for Correct French" calendar made by the "For Dummies" people and it recently featured the word antonomase, whose English equivalent is "antonomasia." Still lost? It's the term for a proper noun which becomes so fully integrated into a language that it becomes a common noun. Think "Kleenex" or "Wellingtons." The examples my little calendar sheet gave me were les poubelles (apparently Mr. Poubelle, the prefect of Paris at the time, required garbage cans to be placed in the city streets in 1884 and they were named after him) and la silhouette (Mr. Silhouette, the Finance minister under Louis XV wanted to raise taxes on the rich and took a leave of absence after doing so, lending his name to the nebulous outline of an image). The term in English can also be used to describe a phrase which becomes inextricably linked with a personage (think "The Bard" for William Shakespeare or "The Gipper" for Ronald Reagan). 

So there's your French/English lesson for the day. Hope you're all well!

The Recipe for a Great Weekend: Friends and (host) Family

Since arriving in Besançon last September I have been invited to numerous raclettes and have wanted to host one myself. As soirée concepts go, this one is pretty basic. Myriam, one of the teachers at Ecole Champagne put it this way: "If your raclette isn't a success, you've got some issues" (my rough translation of her French). For the food, all that's required is to purchase the cheese, assorted hams and sausages and bread and to cook the potatoes beforehand. I wanted to go a little bit beyond, so I decided to bake some savory madeleines (similar to the texture of muffins) to go with the aperitif and also bake brownies for dessert.

Steph and Charly went to Steph's family's house for the weekend, so I had the apartment to myself. I spent all afternoon Saturday cleaning and getting ready for when Candice, Laurie, Kati, Justine, Franzi, GuiGui and Colin would arrive at 8pm. I wouldn't call my apartment big, but I'm glad it's not any bigger or I'm not sure I would have gotten everything finished in time!

But it worked out just fine and (don't worry Myriam), the raclette was a success. Franzi brought a bottle of Porto to share for the aperitif. I have seen port wine on menus before but never tried it. It's usually a sweet red wine (although apparently there are some white port wines and dry port wines) and it comes from the Douro Valley in the northern provinces of Portugal. It was quite tasty and went well with my sesame and Coppa-and-olive madeleines (see a picture of the sesame ones below).

Before I go any further, I have a confession: I didn't take any pictures during the raclette. I don't even have the excuse that my camera battery is dead... the charger arrived on Friday afternoon. I had my camera out and everything, but I forgot to designate someone to take pictures early in the evening, and I was just too busy being the hostess/trying not to be the busy hostess to take any. I'm very sorry. The only picture I have is this one of me, which Colin took while I was getting dinner ready (and yes, he did help in addition to taking this picture).

So all in all the party went really well. We had way to much food (read: I will be eating raclette for at least the next week), which is always better than the opposite scenario. Toward the end of the evening GuiGui played DJ and introduced me to a group called The Baseballs (irony?) who take obnoxious pop songs and remake them in the style of early rock n' roll (as in Elvis-era). Check out their version of Rihanna's Umbrella (the video is good too). If you like that song, check out Bleeding Love, it will make you think the song was written to be sung this way. I'm in love with this group! Their music is the kind that just makes me want to dance, and I almost forget how inane the original songs' lyrics are in the process -- success! I think I might have been born in the wrong era...

Sunday morning I had to wake up bright and early to catch a train to Dijon to see my host family!! Finally! I'm really sorry we didn't find a way to meet up sooner because it was so absolutely wonderful to see them again. It was a little strange to be back in Dijon. It looked exactly the same, except for there are purple barriers everywhere for the tram construction. They were just starting the tram when I studied there in the fall of 2009 and it's supposed to be finished by the end of this year; the area around the train station and Place d'Arcy is still a mess though. My host family actually moved from the house where they lived in 2009 to an apartment just off Place d'Arcy (about a 5-8 minute walk from their old house). Now they're even closer to the train station and the center of the centre-ville.

The move was precipitated by their purchase of a moulin (mill). Let me explain: their friend Dominique owns a 17th-century stone farmhouse and the surrounding property, about 50km from Dijon and my host family loves to go there and take long walks on sunny Sunday afternoons. I went with them to the farm twice and what we did there can only be described as frolicking: walking, hiking, picnicking, enjoying nature. Last year, while they were celebrating Orane's 16th birthday with a party at the moulin (mill) which is part of the farm property, Dominique offered to sell it to them. Joseph and Noëlle, who prefer either the music and culture of Paris or the absolute silence of the country (and who didn't plan to live in Dijon forever), jumped at the chance. 

So they sold their house, moved into the apartment, and started planning for the refurbishment of the moulin, which right now resembles a ruin more than somewhere you would want to live. Before I talked to them this weekend, I knew that they had bought a moulin and even seen pictures, but I thought it was a fix-'er-up project for a vacation cottage; I didn't realize their plan was to retire there. Although it is in the middle of the country, apparently there is a train stop not too far away, which means it's only 1.5 hours from Paris. 

So you can probably tell from the pictures that we went to see the site after lunch. It was pretty cold, and as gray a day as they come, but I found the area just beautiful. There was something entirely serene about it, and I could imagine perfectly how magical it would be in the summer, with all of the trees and plants in bloom. The little creek you can see in the background is the river Seine, which at one point was the water which turned the mill wheel. 

On the way to see the moulin we stopped at la Source de la Seine (the source of the River Seine, the one that divides Paris in half). It's pretty comical to see how small the Seine is at its origin... I've seen bigger streams in the gutter at the end of our driveway at home after a big storm! But as it flows towards Paris this little trickle is joined by thousands of tiny tributaries until it becomes the massive river which empties into the English Channel at Le Havre.

Before we went to see the moulin I caught up with Noëlle and Joseph and we had a delicious and enormous lunch: beef in stewed tomatoes with mashed potatoes, bread and cheese, a fruit tart, coffee, and a kugelhopf which Noëlle had made that afternoon. As usual, it was all delicious! By the time we got back from the moulin Orane was home and I got to chat with her. She interviewed me for her bac project: The Portrayal of Women in American Film. I got back home around 10:30pm on Sunday night after a gloriously relaxing day. Noëlle invited me to come back for Easter weekend, when their whole family will be home, plus Ginou -- the Chinese student who lived with them for a little while and who has become their adopted nephew. I met him when he came to visit while I was living in Dijon. I was thrilled to be invited, I love spending time with them. Overall, another great weekend! I hope yours was just as good!