The witness box

As une petite pause from my incessant sharing of photos (never fear, there are plenty more to come) I thought I'd post a passage from the book I'm reading (The Blessing, by Nancy Mitford) that epitomizes how I sometimes feel about the conversations I have during recess with the teachers at Breney.  To give a little context, Grace is an Englishwoman who just moved to France to join her French husband and his family after World War II.  

Grace felt that they were trying to place her. ... They wanted to place her views and inclinations, her turn of mind.  They wanted to know if she was Oxford or Cambridge, whether she preferred The Times or the Daily Telegraph, what she felt about Shakespeare and Bacon.  Their questions were not at all hard to answer, but she felt that by her answers to these, possibly deceptively, simple questions, she was being for ever judged.  

She found it a great strain, and had said so to Charles-Edouard after the last tea-party.

'But that is what French people are like,' he had replied, shrugging his shoulders.  'In France you are always in a witness box.  You'll get used to it.  But you must sharpen your wits a little, my dearest, if you want a favorable verdict.'

-p 67 

Alertes

I never know what sort of a day it's going to be when I go to school in the morning.  A lesson that worked perfectly with one group can be an utter disaster the next day because the students are excited about going to the pool or tired from a long week.  I've gotten to know my students' schedules relatively well and try to take the rest of their day into consideration when I plan my lessons, but sometimes things that are completely out of my control take over.  Take, for example, the costume ball one Monday in the middle of March that meant that my 4 year olds came to my class dressed as Spiderman, hippies, witches, clowns, knights, etc.  Their focus that day certainly wasn't on English.  Or consider the situation last Thursday when I went to my kindergarten class and was greeted by the long-term sub telling me that half of the time normally given to English was going to be taken up by confinement.  That, as he explained to the students and me, means that we were going to have a drill for the following situation:  Say one day there is a huge fire over there [Laurent gestures out the door in the direction of my house].  Everybody in the school would need to go to the top floor, where we would close all the doors and the shutters and turn off the lights so as to avoid breathing in the "bad smoke".  

Honestly, how had we made it until April without preparing ourselves for bad smoke?  I never heard the official story, but my guess is that, because so much of French energy comes from nuclear power, the City wanted to prepare for the sort of nuclear meltdown they experienced recently in Japan.  I'm not sure how being on the second floor would help us in this situation, or why at the end of the confinement we all went outside and lined up for a head count like it was a fire drill (were we practicing for two distinct emergency situations, or is there some sort of disaster that requires both being enclosed and then outside for survival?), but if a tsunami or nuclear meltdown or nefarious smoke situation does occur then I trust I'll be well cared for.  The cafeteria staff gave us all cups of water and some of the aides were assigned to be nurses; I even saw one of the teachers taking "hurt" students over to the infirmary. 

Nutrition Facts

I've heard people make all sorts of comments about the alleged French paradox.  Some attribute it to the consumption of appropriate portions, others to the less sedentary lifestyle, but something that I never hear mentioned is the clarity of the nutrition facts on French food packages.  That's because they are completely useless, if they even exist at all.  For example, your 30 g Kinder Bueno bar tells you how many calories there are in 100g of the product...but not 30.  Or take the seafood spread I had on pita bread tonight at Felix's house.  The ingredients for both products were listed, but there were no nutrition facts to be found.  Go figure.  

Lil Wayne's passport

It's a good look for me, n'est-ce pas? 

Last Friday was a first for me: I missed work so that I could get my carte de séjour, a sticker in my passport that, paired with my visa, allows me to re-enter France should I leave within the next 10 months.  As with any bureaucratic process, a lot of very specific papers and items were required.  Despite that, I found it to be much less stressful (and a bit more bizarre) than my trips to the Chicago consulate for my visa.  


Early in our time in France Katherine, Cathya, and I mailed a stamped form given to us by our consulates to the OFII (Office Française de l'Immigration et de l'Intégration) in Caen, and not too long thereafter we received convocations requesting our presence for a doctors appointment in the morning and then a bureaucratic appointment in the afternoon.  As much as we enjoy teaching our classes, I don't think any of us were particularly disappointed at the prospect of a 3 day weekend.  Friday is my busiest day and I teach the tiniest children that day, so I was happy to be given reprieve in the form of my appointments.


And last Friday arrived and off we went, laden with our passports and papers and ready to be examined.  Katherine had already had to jump through these hoops when she was here her junior year, so she was able to warn us about the chest X-ray, for which we aren't allowed to wear a shirt (thankfully they first directed us to an antechamber where we were given a hospital gown top).  I had to hug a machine, and the X-ray technician told me to gonflez et bloquez, which in my mind meant "inflate and block" but correctly translated means "inhale and hold".  Et voilà en haut le résultat.  

The next step was the physical.  I knew this would be a special experience as soon as I saw the doctor, who was probably in his early 60s, and, based on the amount of graying chest hair that was showing, did not appear to be wearing a shirt under his lab coat.  I thought the point of a lab coat was to keep your home germs from the hospital and vice versa, but maybe I'm wrong.  Anyway, the doctor was very nice, and, except for the fact that he didn't leave the room for us to undress like they always do in the US, it was pretty much the same as any other physical I've ever had.


We had a nice little lunch break, so we ate outside at a café that faced the beautiful church in downtown Caen.  It's always more expensive to eat outside than inside (there's a surcharge, I guess for the scenic-ness) but it was the first beautiful day we had experienced in a long time so I thought it was worth it.  


Next stop was the OFII, where we saw pretty much everyone who had been in the waiting room with us at the medical clinic.  While waiting to be called back we got to chat a bit with our fellow foreigners.  First we met 3 girls around our age who live in Deauville and Trouville and are studying at the business school in Deauville.  One is from Russia, one is from China, and the other is from Laos, and they seemed really nice.  We exchanged phone numbers, and hopefully we'll be able to meet up some time.


Also in the waiting room were two Moroccans who seemed like very nice people and one Charles Emmanuelle from Côte d'Ivoire.  Charlie got really excited when we said we were from the US and started asking us if we had ever seen his favorite musicians (Lil Wayne, Drake, Jay-Z, etc).  I think he genuinely was asking if we had ever crossed paths with these fellow Americans as we were doing our grocery shopping back home; he, like our students, seem a bit confused about the scale of the United States's hugeness.  He was also interested in how Obama was--it's always good to know that our president is viewed to be as much of a celebrity as Lil Wayne by some people.  The most amusing moment of our conversation for me was when I getting my papers in order for the meeting and pulled out my passport.  From Charlie's reaction you would have thought I had pulled out a million dollars.  His eyes got huge and he said breathlessly, "That's Lil Wayne's passport!!"  Not exactly, my friend.  Still, that was the first (and probably the last) time anything pertaining to me has been associated with a rapper.


The OFII visit itself was very straightforward.  The lady who gave me my vignette was very helpful and gave me suggestions (unsolicited, for the record) for renewing my carte de séjour without having to go back to the Chicago consulate and doing this whole process over again.  And here I am, a legal French resident for the next 10 months!

Cathya and me in front of the church (photo from our first visit to Caen, several weeks before the OFII visit)

Katherine and me 

The flags from the castle in downtown Caen.  The non-French flag is that of Normandy.

On fait grève!

Let's face it:  You can't spend more than a few weeks in France without experiencing a strike.  Just thinking back through my four months spent in Rennes my junior year, I can recall at least one postal strike, a planned SNCF (national train system) strike that miraculously didn't wreck my weekend trip to Paris, a library workers strike that closed the school library and left me with nowhere to study, and a teachers strike that closed the elementary school where I was an English intern.  The French penchant for la grève can be difficult to grasp for the American mind that prizes efficiency and customer service, but I guess that's kind of the point:  it's SUPPOSED to be inconvenient, dang it!

I had barely been on French soil 3 weeks when I experienced une grève firsthand.  I had noticed signs left by various teachers at Breney informing their students' parents that there would be no lessons on Thursday the 23rd because the teachers were going to be grévistes.  At the time I had no idea what was at issue, but it was going to affect me all the same:  When schoolteachers go on strike, many parents decide to keep their children at home.  For those who work, however, the schools are required to provide les service minimales--essentially, day care.  No lessons can be taught during this time, since it would be like bringing in scabs to replace the strikers, but clearly someone has to be there to watch over the little darlings.  That's where I came in on Thursday.  The teachers for both of my Thursday morning classes were striking, so I helped one of the aides watch a GS (kindergarten) class.  About half the students had stayed home, so we only had 1o kids, and frankly, it was a ton of fun.  The students spent a lot of time coloring and playing with blocks and legos, and between helping them build an airplane, complimenting them on their beautiful artwork, and taking them to their 4 recesses, the day passed very quickly.  I also enjoyed having the opportunity to get to know the aides and the non-striking teachers better since I ate lunch (Breney has AMAZING food, by the way) and spent the whole day there.  The only negative thing was that I wasn't able to teach my afternoon CP classes at Fracasse because I was still needed at Breney.  That seemed a bit unfair to me, but I am definitely the lowest person on the totem pole (side note:  French people are OBSESSED with Indians.  As in Native Americans.  It's bizarre.) so I couldn't protest.  

And what was the strike about, you ask?  At recess I heard the aides and teachers discussing pensions and retirement, and that proved to be the issue.  This New York Times article  states it better than I ever could, but essentially Sarkozy wants to raise the retirement and pension-receiving ages, and the French workers aren't pleased.  http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/24/world/europe/24france.html?_r=2&hpw

The strike only lasted one day, and as far as I know there aren't any more on the horizon.  Still, this is France.  La grève, c'est attendue.