aaaaaand, break!

So after three (not quite) full weeks of teaching, I have a week and a half of break.  Oh, my life is so hard... I should be leaving on Monday to spend a week in Barcelona with Molly.  I say "should be" because although we have already bought bus tickets from Toulouse to Barcelona, you never know what can happen with these French people deciding not to work and not letting people buy gas, etc.  So as the Senegalese say, I'm going to Barcelona, inchallah.

Yesterday, I had a lovely class with my terminales, students in their last year of high school.  Less than half the class showed up because of the strikes, so we stayed in Anne's classroom and had a discussion about strikes and retirement pensions, and differences between France, the US, and England.  I actually learned some interesting things from them (and I hope they learned some from me as well!).  They explained to me how the students actually have meetings, where they discuss and vote on whether they're going to block the doors of the school on a given day.  I thought it was just mob mentality, and things just spiraled out of control like the French Revolution, but in fact it's a democratic process and students are allowed to object, and finally they take a vote.  I in turn explained to them that in the US, if students decided to stand outside of school and block the doors and throw eggs, we would call that a protest, but not a strike, as they call it.  Then we talked about why they're striking (remember the retirement pension thing?) and they were surprisingly familiar with the French retirement system, parliament decisions, etc.  I was kind of embarrassed that I had to keep saying, "Well I'm not sure, but I think it's this way in the US..." I mean, people my age have no hope of retirement, right?  We're all just going to work until we drop dead... Which is why we Americans find it so ridiculous that the French are up in arms about having to work and extra 2 years, until they are 62, which is basically middle-age.  I mean, they barely work when they do work (no more than 35 hrs per week, with no less than 5 weeks vacation) and they stop working when they're 60, and then they complain about the government taking away their precious relaxation time.  I mean, I know Americans work too much and all that, but you have to work sometimes!  It's just a complete difference of attitude towards work.  Americans spend a lot more time worrying about what they're going to do when they grow up, because whatever you choose basically defines who you are, whereas here you have to decide when you're 16 what career path you want to take, so most kids probably just choose at random, but it's not a big deal because they don't define themselves by their work like we do.

Tomorrow is Marta's birthday, and she kind of got carried away planning things so apparently we're having a birthday potluck dinner tonight, going out dancing or somthing, and then having a birthday barbecue lunch tommorrow afternoon.  Then Sunday evening, Marta and I should be driving to Toulouse, so she can spend a few days there and I can get my bus Monday morning.  So convenient!  I don't want to take my computer with me so probably won't write till I get back from Spain, alors, bon weekend à tous, et à la prochaine!

weekend recap

So.  All the Tarbes assistants were planning to go to Toulouse this weekend, but since the strikes are still going on, we decided not to even bother trying to get on a train.  Plus we wanted to save money.  As fun as it would have been to be in the city, it was actually awesome spending the weekend in Tarbes!

Friday I invited myself and Hadley over to Sam's to use her kitchen, so Hadley and I met at the grocery store to get stuff to make a quiche lorraine.  We made the quiche (which was delicious and super easy to make!) and drank a bunch of cheap and delicious french wine, then decided to go out.  Sam lives with Nancy and Marta, the Venezuelan and Spanish girls, in a really big apartment building with a bunch of other people, which is really cool, but unfortunately we couldn't convince the others to go out with us.  Anyway, we went out to the (only) street with bars on it, where all the high school students hang out (that will be pretty awkward once I start seeing my students at bars...) and had a drink at each of the 2 good bars.  At the second one, we found flyers for an 80s night at the club that Céline took me to a couple weeks ago, and we decided to go, because how can you pass up 80s night??  It was excellent--we somehow ended up dancing there till 5am because we were having so much fun.  Whoops!

Saturday, after sleeping in until 12:30 the three of us got lunch at the kebab place across the street from my school, and ate sandwiches in the park.  We wandered around town a bit, and something really loud was going on so we had to check it out.  It was a bunch of guys break-dancing on a stage.  Go figure!

After an exhausting half hour spent watching other people exercise, we decided we needed coffee and pastries so we went to this cute organic bakery we had been admiring in town.

After that we decided to go to this sports store to look for bikes, since they were having a sale.  It was much further away than we thought but we managed to walk there anyway, then took the bus back.  We went to Hadley's to have dinner and then went out again, this time keeping it tame by only going to 1 bar.  We called it a night early, since we were still tired from Friday night.

Pictures from our long walk

Hadley and Jessica in front of the Rex hotel, which has really cool lights at night

Today, after laying around in my room all morning, I met up with the other assistants for coffee.  There were the 3 americans, Nancy and Marta, and the German assistant, Birgit.  It's great to have met all the assistants in town, and since we're not all English assistants we have to speak French with each other (I'm actually pretty sure they all speak english really well too, but we pretend our only language in common is French since we all want to practice).  There was a fair today, for the fête de Sainte-Térèse, not really sure what the holiday is but anyway the Place Marcadieu has been overtaken by carnival rides and food stands for the past week.

(Please note the woman in the hairy coat)

We got crêpes and french fries (yummm) and then Sam, Hadley and Jessica came back to watch The Holiday in my room :)

pays des grèves

-written on Thursday, October 14, 2010-

You may have heard about the recent strikes in France.  Apparently the government is talking about changing the retirement age from 60 to 62, so people (teachers, transportation workers, etc) are going on strike to protest this change (making it very difficult to plan trips by train).  Apparently high school students care about this as well, because today my students went wild.  In the morning, they blocked the main doors of the school with trash bins from up and down the street, and after my class at 10, they took to the streets, shouting and blowing whistles and generally creating havoc for cars and passersby.  Of course, their march took the route I wanted to take to the market, so I was forced to take a detour.  As annoying as this was, I must admit I'm pretty impressed by this amount activism in a high school population.  When my students told me about the protest this morning, I was skeptical and asked if they really cared about their retirement pensions at the age of 17, or if they just wanted to skip class, but they assured me no, it's their future too.  Upon further discussion on the matter with Sam, she pointed to me that additionally, if people are forced to work longer before retirement, there are fewer jobs available when these kids graduate in, oh, about 7 months.  Well that would piss me off, too!  It just seems weird to me since I didn't grow up in a place where strikes are the norm.  Marta, my spanish friend said that they refer to France as "le pays des grèves" or "the country of strikes" and I have also heard strikes referred to as France's "national sport".

I eventually managed to get out of the line of fire and made it to the market to meet up with Hadley and Jessica, and after perusing the market for a while we headed back towards the main square to have lunch.  We decided to go into this really fancy chocolate shop to treat ourselves to truffles after lunch, and I couldn't resist trying the tomato-basil chocolate, which was actually quite good, despite tasting exactly like tomato, basil, and chocolate...

I finally got around to taking some photos of my school's courtyard on Wednesday, when the students have the afternoon off

a most excellent conversation

Last night, I went out for a beer with Molly, Hadley, Sam, Nancy, and Marta, and the following conversation happened (I'm paraphrasing because it was in french):

Nancy: wait, I want to ask you guys about something, does this happen in your country?

Marta: (laughing) oh yeah, we talked about this yesterday.

Nancy: whatever. ok.  when you send a letter, do you have to buy a stamp to put on it?

Americans: yes.

Nancy: so, like, you put it all in an envelope, then you stick a stamp on it?

Americans: yes.

Nancy: that is so weird, because--

Marta: yeah, we talked about this for like 3 hours yesterday.

Nancy: no, for like 15 minutes.  well anyway, in Venezuela, you just bring your letter to the post office and buy an envelope and then they mail it for you.

Marta: yeah, but the envelope must have a stamp on it already.

Nancy: no, you don't put anything on it.  There's no stamp.

Marta: yeah but that's just because you've never looked at it.  There must be either a stamp or some kind of built-in stamp on the envelope, or else they put it on after you leave.

Nancy: I don't think so.

Americans: yeah but there must be some kind of indication on there that you've paid the postage...

Nancy: I don't know...

So this conversation went in circles for about 45 minutes, and we ended up agreeing to disagree.  We couldn't believe a silly little thing like sending a letter could be so different

My second day of having my own classes went much better than the first.  I was ready for the wall of silent angst, and prepared something much easier this time (as in, I didn't really prepare anything).  Instead of trying to have a serious discussion I decided to play getting-to-know-you games, otherwise known as ice breakers.  After doing the "two truths and a lie" game, where each person says 3 things about themselves and the others have to guess which one isn't true, I basically thought of as many "If you could have one... what would it be?" types of ice breakers as would take up the rest of the hour.  They seemed to like that a lot more than having actual discussions, so I'm thinking most of the activities I'm going to do this year will end up being games.

Other than my four hours of class, I had lunch outside in the Place de Verdun with Sam and Hadley, the two other American assistants in Tarbes, and Sam and I had coffee in the afternoon after all our classes were done.  I have to say, I just LOVE cafés.  Especially in France.  Because you always sit outside, and there are always tons of people there, even when you think everyone should be at work, and they always give you a little piece of chocolate with your coffee and everyone is always just sitting around enjoying life.  Basically I just love the way the French don't rush anything, and they actually take the time to do nothing sometimes.  The other day I was walking around and sat down in the park and I thought, Oh I should get a book out and read so I'm not just sitting.  Then I looked around and everyone else around me was actually just sitting.  Sitting and watching the cars and people go by.  Not doing anything.  Personally, I love doing nothing, but in America it always seems like if you have time to just sit around you should be doing something.  Like, we don't have time to just sit around.  I always read things in magazines about how mentally and emotionally it's good to do nothing sometimes and I'm like See? I was right!  But no one ever seems to think it's appropriate to spend time doing nothing.  Until I met the French!  In Senegal, I was always annoyed by how slowly people moved and how unmotivated they were to do anything, but here they seem to have found the right balance between being productive but also taking the time to relax and recharge.  They do work during the week, but the weekend is a time for relaxing and spending time with one's family, not working from home or running around doing tons of projects or anything.  At Gisele's house, the only work to do on the weekend was to prepare some awesome meals to enjoy en famille.  I mean, don't get me wrong, I do get annoyed that everything is closed on Sunday, when I've waited until Sunday to do all my errands, but I appreciate the idea that you're forced to stay home and enjoy the weekend.  However, being forced to enjoy a two-hour lunch break during which you also can't do any errands seems a bit like overkill.

Anyway, after hanging out with Sam I got some groceries from Monoprix (the best store ever after Target) and then came back to do some internetting.  When I was getting ready to bring my bread and cheese into the kitchen for dinner, Madame Chazottes came back and we ate dinner together and talked about our lives.  She's the CPE at school, I have no idea what it stands for but she's basically in charge of student affairs/well-being and she has to sleep here 2 nights a week to be responsible for the students who board here.  She's lovely and it's great to have someone to chat with occasionally as I'm alone in my wing of the building most of the time.

Friends! and a good weekend.

So.  My day got a lot better after I blogged about my frustrating bank experience on Friday.  One of the English teachers accompanied me to the bank that afternoon, and when the lady refused to accept the fact that I would not share my parents' tax returns with her, we closed the account and went to another bank, where the only documentation they needed was my passport and proof of residence in Tarbes.  Whew.  As soon as we were done setting up my bank account, Katia, the english teacher, dropped me off at the train station to meet Molly, who came to stay for the weekend.  We wandered around Tarbes for a while, got some bread, wine, and cheese, and eventually met up with Sam.  We were sitting in the Place de Verdun, the central square in Tarbes, and we ran into 3 spanish assistants (2 from Venezuela and one from Spain) who already knew Sam, and who were also looking for something to do.  We decided to all go out to a bar together, where the 7 of us got everyone else in the bar dancing, and the bartender proceeded to give us several free drinks for being the most fun people in the bar (at least that's why i think she liked us).

Saturday, Molly and I had a leisurely morning of sleeping in and eating bread and jam and drinking coffee. We eventually wandered off to the train station to spend the rest of the day in Pau.  As soon as we got there we were hungry again, so we sat down in a little italian restaurant and had pizza, coffee, and some fabulous raspberry cream dessert.  We then did a little walking tour of the city and its university, finally coming back to a pretty square and sitting down under an awning (it was starting to rain) to have a beer.  We slowly made our way back to the train station, noting all of the shopping we want to come back and do once we get paid.  The city of Pau is built up the side of a hill, which is really nice for looking out onto the valley below and mountains across from it.  However, the train station is at the very bottom of the hill.  When we got there we were good and walked all the way up the hill, but on the way back down we decided to take this thing called a "funiculaire" in french which is basically a tiny free train that takes you up and down the hill.  It seemed so stupid we just had to do it.

When we got back to Tarbes, we were hungry (again) but all of the restaurants that looked good were way out of budget, so we went to the kebab place across from my school and had sandwiches and fries.  We went to a bar in the Place de Verdun to wait for our friends, who ended up decided it was raining too much to go out.  We made a night of it anyway, having an overpriced drink and then heading back to my room with a bottle of wine to watch Dick, the best movie ever which Molly hadn't seen.

Today, we woke up late and spent the whole morning and most of the afternoon laying in bed and chatting.  It's so nice to finally have someone to hang out with, after spending the last two weeks basically by myself all the time.  The teachers have been really nice about talking to me and stuff, but it's not the same as having friends your age.  And now that I know most of the assistants in town, I'll have people my age to hang out with anytime.

So.  It was a good weekend, and I'm looking forward to next week, although I didn't realize quite how much effort it was going to take to get a single word out of my students.  I was totally unprepared for their sullen silence on Friday, and I don't think knowing to expect that will make it any easier.  It's amazing how the entire french youth is supposedly obsessed with America and American culture and yet they can't think of anything they want to ask me about it, except whether I know Eminem.  As much as I appreciate how painfully awkward high school can be and how they would be so shy to speak up in class, it's so so frustrating for me to be standing there with everyone gaping at me, while I struggle to think of other questions to spark their interest, after they have totally dismissed the lesson I had planned for that day and which I thought would have inspired an hour-long discussion.

Has it ever taken anyone longer than 10 minutes to open a bank account in America?  Yeah, I didn't think so.  I opened an account at Chase this summer and they were like, "What's your name? Oh OK, no, you don't have to prove it or anything but do you want a credit card to go with that too?"

I have now spent over a week trying to open my French bank account.  When I first went into the bank, the lady told me I needed, among other things, proof of residence in France, work contract, my parents' identification, and proof of their residence in the US.  When I had finally gathered all of these papers (as if my mother doesn't have anything better to do than sit around scanning unnecessary documents to send me in France), I went back for my meeting today.  In the process of opening my account, she asked me for all kinds of stupid information like how much I'm earning here and how much the school is charging me for rent.  I was like "Well, isn't someone nosy?"  So she finally opened my account, but said "oh, you didn't bring me your avis d'imposition, you'll have to send me that ASAP.  Well that's basically a tax/earnings statement, and there is absolutely no reason that I would have one, since I've never worked in France before.  But she was like "it's ok if you don't have it you can bring me your parents' tax returns".  Well. THAT was the last straw.  I said I'd see what I can do and left.  I really really wanted to try do do things on my own, but I finally decided to ask the english teachers for help, because the 3 other assistants I know were given bank accounts with no problem, and didn't have to bring any of the ridiculous shit that I was asked for.  The teachers were equally outraged, and offered to go to the bank with me this afternoon, which is super nice of them, but I'm still SO frustrated that I have to deal with this.  It's absolutely ridiculous.  And to top it all off, I had my first group of students on my own this morning, and they basically stared at me for the entire hour of class, despite my pestering them with question after question.  ARRGGHHHH.

I will now attempt list some good/funny things to try to counteract my frustrating morning.

•  Molly is coming to spend the weekend with me, and we're going to beautiful Pau on Saturday.

• When high school students are not in class, they are either outside smoking, or lurking in corners making out with each other.
• 2€ wine.
• It is still really warm and sunny here, in the middle of October.

Yeah, can't really think of that many good things right now, but at least it feels good to rant about stuff, even if only in cyberspace.  Sorry if this is depressing, I'm hoping it will eventually be funny...

Welcome to French High School

Whoa.  WHOA.  I never realized how great and organized my high school was.  I mean, I know a lot of high schools in america are underfunded, disorganized, etc, but leave it to the French not to organize ANYTHING.  Monday's 4 classes went very well.  The students asked me questions about myself, I asked them what there is to do in town, they all laughed.  Tuesday, I was supposed to have 3 classes, starting at 8am.  I went to the room the teacher had told me his class was in, only to find it empty and locked.  I went downstairs to ask the building coordinator what the deal was, she said yes, that was the correct classroom.  I went to the receptionist and she said yes, she had seen the teacher come in that morning so he wasn't out sick.  I then went to the library, computer lab, vie scolaire (sort of like student advisors) and everyone confirmed that the teacher was there and the class should be in one of 2 classrooms.  I walked around the whole school (twice) and looked in every single classroom (of which there aren't many) and every single room had a class in it that wasn't mine.  I finally went back to the building coordinator, reported on my (lack of) progress, and she said "Oh, maybe he cancelled the class and forgot to tell you! The first-year classes get a day off every six weeks!"  At 9, I found the teacher in the teacher's lounge, and he confirmed "oh, i'm so sorry, I forgot to tell you we didn't have class!  Well, at least you get the day off, since my afternoon class is cancelled too!"  And my 3rd class of the day was cancelled due to Anne having a meeting.  So the upshot of this is that I will basically only work a sixth of the hours I am supposed to work.  If that.  I really don't expect that I will ever work all 12 hours in a week.  And I guess I don't expect any of the teachers to tell me ahead of time if we will have class that day.

Yesterday (wednesday) I went to Toulouse all day for the teaching assistants orientation.  All the language assistants for the whole Academie de Toulouse (the Midi-Pyrenees region) had the same orientation, so I took the train at 6:17 am with 2 other english assistants, (one american and one jamaican) the spanish assistant from panama, and the german assistant.  The morning was spent with the school administration personnel introducing themselves for about 3 hours.  We had lunch, then in the afternoon we were given a presentation about the French education system, then finally, FINALLY split up into groups by language to learn some teaching methods.  Of a day-long teaching orientation, 2 hours were spent learning how to teach.  They really can't expect that much of us.  We were let out an hour early, so I spent an hour and a half wandering around Toulouse with Molly, Hadley, and Nandini, 3 other english assistants, and then Molly Hadley and I got back on the train to head back to Tarbes.  

This morning, I had another great experience with the incredibly organized high school I work in (not).  I showed up in the proper classroom for my 9:00 english class, where the teacher decided to split the class up into 2 groups, and I was supposed to take my group to another classroom.  This will eventually be happening in all my classes, where I alternate groups each week because the classes are too large (30-35 students) for me to take them all on my own.  Well, I didn't know where I was supposed to take them, given that last time I asked the building coordinator she had said there weren't enough classrooms in this school.  I went to see her again, and she told me room 106 was open, so I led me students up there.  Well actually they led me, since I couldn't find it.  It turns out that rooms 106 and 107 are one room, with a divider in between that the teacher in 107 told me I couldn't close so basically room 106 was already occupied.  In short, we ended up spending the next 20 minutes wandering around the building, with various people sending us to various places that were also unavailable.  Finally, we had to kick 2 girls out of the study lounge and use that room.  And this will probably happen every time I have class, so 12 times a week.  Awesome.

In spite of all the administrative problems, I do actually really like my classes so far.  It's a bit difficult to get the students to talk, since they're not used to having to speak out loud in class, but I think I will manage to get some oral work out of them and I have some ideas of fun lessons I can do with them.  The other plus is that I only take half of each class at a time, so any ideas I do think of will last me 2 weeks, as I obviously plan on using the same lessons for every class.  If anyone has any ideas of fun discussions we can have about american culture, don't hesitate to comment! 

Also, in case you haven't heard, the french are AWESOME at burocracy.  Yesterday they were telling us about all of the things we need to do and papers we need to fill out in order to be allowed to live here, get a bank account, get paid, get social security, etc etc, and it reminded me of this:

Oh yeah, I almost forgot.  As if it wasn't embarrassing enough that my students had to experience me being totally lost and unprepared this morning, I thought one of the girls in my class was a BOY.  omg.