I know it's been a while since I last wrote, but (with a few notable exceptions) you haven't missed out on much. The kids at school have been keeping me pretty busy, and then I woke up last Saturday morning feeling under the weather and didn't fully recover until yesterday. Oh well, considering the amount of time I spend with a large number of small children it was really just a matter of time until I caught one of their maladies.
Before my descent into illness, however, I was living the wild life here in Normandie. Last Friday night I went with Katherine, Ivan, another of our boss-friends named Sébastien, and two of his friends to see the L.A. rapper Busdriver perform in a small town outside of Caen. I've never been to a rap concert in the US (which may come as a shock to many of you), but I'm pretty sure Hérouville's version is not typical. When we arrived at the venue, there were maybe 4 other cars in the parking lot. We had also parked next to some sort of senior citizens' center. Neither of these things seemed to bode well for the concert. Sébastien's friends were asking if there actually was a concert, so Ivan turned to them and told them that he had actually exaggerated the scale of the concert and that we were here to support his cousin: Il est américain et chauffeur de bus.
Luckily, things began to look up from here. The venue definitely was not crowded, but it was very nice, it was nice talking to everyone before the concert began, and the opener, Blake Worrell, was decent. He actually spoke some French, and would start talking to the crowd or introducing a song in a perfectly respectable way but then would get nervous, I guess, and self-consciously trail off into English. I felt sorry for him because to me it seemed like he felt he was just talking into empty space because no one would respond to him, so when he asked what time it was I yelled out "9.30!" because I wanted him to know someone understood him. My friends all laughed at me, though, and in retrospect I guess it may have sounded like I wanted him to get off the stage. Sorry Blake.
Busdriver himself, though definitely a rapper, was more of a hipster than a gangster. He wore Chuck Taylors, a tshirt that said "Happy puzzling!", big glasses, and a cardigan (according to my father, the mark of a real man), and there was a definite lack of bling. Like Blake, I think he was a little frustrated by the crowd, since French people for the most part kind of just bob back and forth with their hands in the pockets. Unlike Blake, however, he actually communicated with the audience to try to fix the situation: we were asked to put our hands in the air, throw up Rockefeller diamonds, and, at one point, he even told us he expected to see babies being born. Thankfully, no one obliged on the last point. Despite my inability to dance as Busdriver expected, and even though it wasn't the sort of music I normally listen to, I could still tell he had a lot of talent. His breath control was amazing (they rap soooooooo fast, and I never heard him take a breath!) and his his music was pretty intelligent--one song he performed began with Mozart, and he rapped to it, which was really impressive. He also made some interesting cultural references; I forget now in what context they were mentioned, but the O'Reilly Factor and Glen Beck actually came up.
After the concert we had to make a tough decision: continue the American theme of the evening by going to McDonald's, or get kebab instead [NOTE: kebab in France is more like a gyro: shaved meat on a pita with a delicious sauce. If I ever make a reference to shish kebabs, I'll say brochette.] Since Katherine and I don't really like McDonald's, and I'm pretty sure we would have been judged if we had showed a desire to continue in the American theme, we picked kebab, and kebab it was. It was really nice to interact with people in French outside of work (particularly since they were over the age of 7). Sébastien's friends were really funny and inclusive, and they seemed interested in what Katherine and I considered the positives and negatives of France. In my limited experience, this is the genre of question that French people love to ask Americans, and it's kind of difficult to answer without sounding cliché or judgmental. I think most of the positives I mentioned had to do with food, neat things to see, and nice people and the negatives related to bureaucracy and manifestations.
Eventually, we parted ways and returned to our car, where we had the second concert of the evening: Ivan was in rare form and belted out every song he knew on the radio. It was a pretty amazing experience, particularly his rendition of "Self Control" by Laura Branigan. She apparently was the first true love of his childhood...which is pretty frightening since Katherine and I looked up the youtube video last night, and it's incredibly bizarre.
I think he has multiple songs put to classical music, but the one we heard was "Me time...".
