Never See Come See

Horben

2012-01-29T17:01:00.002+01:00

SCHNEE!

Wurst, Casual

2012-01-19T23:35:00.001+01:00

Heute haben wir zwei Würstchen gemalt! Sad, I know. Getting unstuck.

"Alles hat ein Ende, nur die Wurst hat zwei!"

Everything has an end, only a sausage has two!

This is a pretty popular German saying, but I only heard it yesterday.

Um den See

2012-01-14T19:33:00.001+01:00

Baustelle/ Chantier/ Construction Site

Around the lake. autour du lac. Winter hasn't proven as ugly and depressing as it was in the Lorraine last year, maybe because I have more things to do and a better camera.

Eichhörnchen/ écureuil/ squirrel

Happily, I've begun the new year without an actual job and a giant list of things to do that involves only art and languages and no fixed schedule. This is the luckiest I've ever been. And I've been pretty lucky!

teufelskreis Schwan/cygne vicieux/ vicious swan

It would be better if a friend hadn't stepped on my Kindle and ended a week-long e-book orgy, or if I hadn't spent half of my holidays missing my friends.

about to give me the gouti-look-back after my narrow escape

Anyway, I felt really strongly like this a few weeks ago. Reading all five parts of the The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy helped me cope with the change in weather, the birthday blues and the curious mis-logic of being really really far away from the black kids who I've forced to love and feed me.

"Though they looked like humans, and even moved and soundedlike humans, they didn't breathe and they didn't wish for things.

Breathing and wishing for things, on the other hand, wasjust about all that Arthur seemed to do all day. Sometimes he would wish forthings so much that his breathing would get quite agitated, and he would haveto go and lie down for a bit. On his own. In his small room. So far from theworld which had given birth to him that his brain could not even process thesort of numbers involved without just going limp"

Mostly Harmless

Dezemberzeit

2011-12-09T11:01:00.001+01:00

Spent last weekend saying goodbye to the good and bad Freiburg, weeping shamelessly on the tram even though I'll probably be back there in time for Christmas.
Of course when I decide firmly that I must get back to practising French in time for an exam in January, I fall madly in love with German and decide that I want to learn it now.
So I've been walking around Frankfurt and Montpellier listening to Die Aerzte, which was really popular with teenies like a decade ago.

But that's okay because everyone I hung out with in Germany was able to translate a little more for me, so now I can ride around Montpellier giggling at these hilarious songs.
Here is a French translation of one version, so we can learn twice as much!
And here is Elke in English:

This began when she called me, I was already lost

Es fing an, als sie mich anrief, da war ich schon verlorn
Ça a commencé quand elle m'a téléphoné, à ce moment-là j'étais déjà perdu.

Her voice sounded so gentle and soft in my ears

Ihre Stimme klang so zärtlich und so sanft in meinen Ohren
Sa voix a sonné si tendrement et si doucement dans mes oreilles.

She sent me a photo, my heart nearly stopped
Sie schickte mir ein Foto, mein Herz blieb beinah stehn
Elle m'a envoyé une photo d'elle mon coeur s'est presque arrêté

She seemed like a slice of Pizza, she was marvellously beautiful

Sie sah aus wie ein Stück Pizza, sie war wunderschön,
Elle avait l'air d'un morceau de pizza et elle était merveilleusement, merveilleusement belle.

I wrote her a rose-scented love-letter
Ich schrieb ihr einen Liebesbrief mit Rosenduft sogar
Je lui ai envoyé une lettre d'amour, avec même l'odeur des roses.

And 2 weeks later, we were a couple
Und 2 Wochen später waren wir ein Liebespaar.
Et deux semaines plus tard, nous étions en couple

Elke, fat Elke

Elke... die fette Elke
Elke la grasse Elke

We met up, alone at her house

Wir haben uns getroffen, allein bei ihr zuhaus
Nous nous sommes rencontrés, seuls chez elle

She seemed much, much fatter than in the photo

Sie sah noch viel viel dicker als auf dem Foto aus.
Elle avait l'air énormément plus grosse que sur la photo

I held her in my arms. well, I tried

Ich schloß sie in die Arme, das heißt ich habs versucht
Je l'ai prise dans mes bras, ou plutôt j'ai essayé

I fell into her fat like into a gorge
Ich stürzte in ihr Fettgewebe wie in eine Schlucht
Je suis tombé dans sa graisse comme dans une gorge

She's a real chunk, 3 cubic meters
Sie ist ein echter Brocken, 3 Meter in Kubik sie
C'est un sacré morceau : trois mètres cubes

She's like Turkeybreast with Pickles in Aspic
Sieht so aus wie Putenbrust mit Gurke in Aspik.
Elle avait l'air d'une poitrine de dinde avec un concombre dans l'aspic

Elke, fat Elke.

Elke... die fette Elke
Elke la grasse Elke

I ate with her, a really chic candlelit dinner

Ich war mit Elke essen, ganz schick mit Kerzenschein
J'ai mangé avec Elke, un diner chic aux chandelles

I ate a little tofu, she ate a whole Swine
Ich aß ein bisschen Tofu, sie aß ein ganzes Schwein
J'ai mangé un peu de tofu et elle un cochon entier (un cochon entier)

She is so cute, I have such a crush on her
Elke ist so niedlich, Elke ist mein Schwarm
Elke est si mignonne, j'ai le béguin pour elle.

In summer she gives shade, in Winter she keeps warmth
Im Sommer gibt sie Schatten im Winter hält sie warm
En été elle fait de l'ombre, en hiver elle tient chaud.

She has hundredweight thighs, she is infinitely fat
Sie hat zentnerschwere Schenkel, sie ist unendlich fett

Elle a des cuisses des quintaux, elle est graisse sans fin.

Recently, I climbed her, without even an oxygen tank!

Neulich hab ich sie bestiegen, ohne Sauerstoffgerät
Récemment, j'ai grimpé sur elle sans bouteille d'oxygène.

Elke, fat Elke
Elke la grasse Elke
Elke... die fette Elke

One time I called her a Hippo, of course only kidding

Ich nannte sie mal Nilpferd, natürlich nur im Scherz

Et puis une fois, je l'ai appelée " hippopotame ", juste pour rire bien sûr,

But in doing so, I broke her big fat heart

Doch ich brach damit ihr dickes fettes Herz

Mais en faisant ça j'ai brisé son gros et gras coeur.

She's dead because of that, my sweet little dear
Sie ist daran gestorben, mein süßer kleiner Schatz

Elle est morte à cause de ça, mon mignon petit trésor.

I couldn't bury her, there was no space in the cemetery!
Ich konnt sie nicht begraben, auf dem Friedhof war kein Platz.

Je n'ai pas pu l'enterrer. Dans le cimetière il n'y avait pas de place.

Elke, no space for Elke!

Kein Platz fur Elke!

Elke pas de place pour Elke

Elke, fat Elke
Elke... die fette Elke
Elke la grasse Elke

And well, I've fallen extremely ill and so am tucked into bed and hoping that Carisse will stop dragging me out at nighttime and turn on the heat in her room so that I can get better. Soon we go to KFC, so exciting!

No clever photos of Douglas Gordon's work at the Frankfurt MMK, unfortunately. The museum itself is a bit labyrinthian, and coming out of the damp drizzly city into this sterile maze of forbidding attendants (what a difference there is between docents and attendants!) treasured Warhols and darkened halls, wasn't exactly comforting and exciting.

"With his analyses of images drawn from the collective memory and everyday culture, Gordon exposes basic patterns of perception. Within this framework, his works often revolve around phenomena of duplication and reflection: the couple, the double, light and dark, guilt and justice, etc."

Yeh, Etc.

After about 7 hours and 50 euros of fun, I was cold, hungry and had had about enough of Frankfurt's goddamn museums and rain, and made my way to a payphone to find out why my hosts hadn't called me to take me to the freaking Christmas Market already, only to find out that I'd been tucked away in museums all day so my cell phone had had no reception. So it goes.
Then we had tonnes of warm apple cider, a giant chocolate-covered Brezel each, spiced white wine and rode on this carousel while Last Christmas played. Hardly intellectual but warm and comfortable and even though I'd only known Joscha and Felix for a day or two, we'd smoked enough hookah together that they started to remind me of all my other friends in other countries and this weird perpetual homesickness was eased for a while.

My flight to Montpellier from Frankfurt Hahn was a blur. It cost 13 euros, isn't that amazing? By the time I boarded the shuttle into town I had a fever and my head felt like a giant balloon. Maybe I shouldn't have had so much wine, so much cheap beer-mixed-with-energy-drink, maybe I shouldn't have run around in the rain without a hat or an umbrella. And my shoes are hardly waterproof.

Knock-knees in the hotsun and col'breeze

At Palaver les Flots, it's a long hard trek to get close to this fisherman's groin.

wie ein Traum/ comme une rêve/ like a dream

Since I've been sick, everything's been strange and trippy. Scenery, scenery, always scenery. Suns go down and come up, mountains disappear under the wheels of tiny cars and cardboard aeroplanes. The sea is here, finally. I wonder how long it will be until it drifts away from me again?

Meinen Tag

2011-12-01T13:22:00.001+01:00

The contents of my hand-bag. Because I've become one of those people who carries around a handbag. I'm not trying to show off; my phone, sunglasses and ipod weren't expensive, and that Shiling Oil is from Pennywise in Trincity Mall. Ahhhh! These are the contents of my day, really.

My copy of Atlas Shrugged was left out as today, my month-long Books in English binge ended, and I'm back to plodding through my Grammatik and figuring out Deutsch in time for an exam in Januar. And I'm not sure that I really want to be one of those people who reads Ayn Rand, anyway.

On weekdays, the baby and I head into town to do fun things like try on all the pullovers in H&M, mooch off of the internet in Starbucks and borrow DVDs from the Carl-Schurz Haus. It all gets very Anglophone, so on our hour-long return journey by bus and tram, we enjoy classic German literature. She (the baby) is proving to be resistant to The Brothers Grimm, sadly. Maybe when I leave she'll make that discovery.
When we get home I put her to bed, make lunch for her older sisters and, if Alles ist in Ordnung, have a nap. Or settle with a book, or, if Alles ist nicht in Ordnung, guard the knife drawer.
Lately their Papa has been home all day as well, and because of our differing belief systems, this parent and I clash on some issues. For instance, he takes affront to my project of training the baby into getting in and out of her high chair on her own, pouring her own juice, etc so that my life is easier (Which it has been since she learned these things.) And doesn't get why I don't really indulge opulent ideas like Vacuum Cleaners and salad dressing.
After months of Carte Blanche with the care and supervision of three wildly different and curiously volatile little White Babies, the one thing justifying my laissez-faire attitude (ie, my clever adult machinations) is now often directly questioned and/or impeded. Even though we have a great time and most days it feels like I'm on vacation, I was never really mentally prepared to deal with three kids, of different ages, who are constantly in need of entertainment. Especially when no one wants to read Harry Potter with me.

Usually, when I'm overwhelmed by the Papa's wilful ignorance of his childrens' need to develop autonomy, I shreik "Too many cooks! Too many cooks!" and go for a long walk in the forest. Meaning, to my room to watch Mad Men and play dress-up with my new Fall wardrobe.

I live just within the fog, a little further down from here. The cow is not a prop.

When I was alone with the kids and overwrought, I used to sometimes cry a little in the bathroom and wish really hard for a big plate of curry and some black friends before getting showered and going into town to get plastered at some white peoples' house. But the curry and friends need was sated in London, so now I turn to books. Arthur Dent saved my sanity almost as many times as he believed he'd lost his own.
The White People and the booze are still there of course, and I'll have a last lap of that before going off on vacation forrealz. I'm going to hunt for all the black girls I can find in France, so we can cook together and party and share make-up tips.

And I'll get back to that beautiful place in my head where I can lovingly spin sentences behind my eyes while I doze off on a train, or mix just the right shade of grey-blue and draw the cornice of a roof at exactly the right angle and exactly the right size on the first try. I've missed that place.
My Starbucks time is up. Bis spater, folks, and wish me luck.

BRB

2011-11-20T17:29:00.001+01:00

Baigneuse Assise Regardant une Libellule

A few months ago, I thought I was going to have all these adventures, and that I'd be able to blog about them.
Well, I've been having all of the adventures, but I've been very busy getting to know my new home (finally!) that I haven't had the Lust or the Envie or the Verve to sit down and sort out the photos and the anecdotes and the emotions into the lovely mediocre little paragraphs to which you all are by now accustomed.
Although it has been stunning to see a beautiful city change colours all year round, I've really had to force myself to stay away from Strasbourg in order to get to know sweet little Freiburg.
I've found hilarious and clever people, great food and shopping, not to mention impossible nature shit but alas! Nothing can fully replace the French!
So I'm off now to gt shitfaced and eat too much cheese.
But there's no internet at the house, so maybe I can make the most of my time without facebook, regretsy and um... *really educational websites* to package and illustrate my stories digitally, yay!
Here is another sculpture from Strasbourg.

Painting at the Pond

2011-10-17T18:32:00.000+02:00

Yesterday I accompanied my host family to their Oma's 85th birthday lunch. There was a flea market going on in the auditorium of the hall that they'd rented. I got a pair of black leather ladies' gloves from the 60's, as I've been watching Mad Men and think that they're swell. And also I might get a typewriter just for the heck of it. Because they are neat.
Lately I've been actually making use of my watercolours and making notes on certain landscapes as I encounter them, rather than taking a couple photos which sit forever, unused, in an enormous folder called 2011, weighing heavily on my hard drive and gathering dust.
So while the kids roared all over the countryside and I lost my host family in a sea of blinding sunlight and matchily dressed white people, I perched on this rock and painted a little. One of the girls drew this on the train home.

So this is me, opposite the duck-house covered in poo, obliquely opposite the bridge and the whole composition is exact except the ducks are swimming in the wrong direction, haha.

Lycee Charlemange

2011-09-22T16:16:00.003+02:00

A Retrospective.

Student Portrait!

There's something about being thrust into one of the coldest regions in France with three other language-loving girls that made for a loving, whimsical little community. Maybe it was the watercolours in my room, the giant ancient building, the romance of living and working in France

Since September 2010, I've had the pleasure of knowing nearly a dozen beautiful, driven French students from all over the world. Well, Germany, England and the States. And one girl who I'd already met from Jamaica!
The three girls with whom I lived were zany in their own way and as I like to assert, I was our Leader. Well anyway, when mail was sent to All Of Us, the concierge put it in my mailbox, so that must count for something.

Cara, the American, was always off doing her own mysterious thing and we'd go weeks without seeing her because she'd gone running and then gotten a massive cold and was cooped up in her room, dying, and the occasions on which we did cross the hall and go down the stairs and mount the ancient infirmary to search for her, she was off buying salad or tiny regional liquers. Cara strung postcards onto used wine bottles with red candles stuck in the mouths for Christmas, and hollowed out beautful hardcover novels to make Secret Books for Milly and Angelique when they were leaving Thionville.

Angelique self-portrait, Cafeteria

Angelique was always in Germany. She used every possible means of transport to get to and from her Uni, and took almost as many "Personal Days" as I did, except her Responsable wasn't lame, so she was never in as much trouble as I was. She was also really dramatic for no reason- Madame Bovary made her cry, repeatedly- and had a brief affair with a Pupil that she didn't really know about while it was going on. I liked going to her room (barren, empty, because she was never there) on afternoons to paint or draw; I'd work on my sketchbook and she'd work on a Calendar for her roommate back in Kiel; an elephant's bum today, a bizarre fur-collared man with three buttons sewn on the next. Our schedules were also similar, and the other two girls worked at different schools so I got to emmerde her more often than they did, haha!

Contributions to British Response to Thanksgiving meal 2010

Kate could be disarmingly shoolmarmish until she burst out into complete madness and was just the most amazing little redhead who ever stomped into my life with her freshly re-heeled Fitzwilliam Darcy bottes. She made more use of my little portable watercolour set (of which I was very proud) than I did, although that might have to do with me not being able to look at it after she trashed it with her inexpert brush-poking and repeated rinsing and rewetting for the same colour. But no, really, Kate's art was unparalleled.

Kate's Family Portrait of us 3

Kate's Spring is Here! Celebration

She even inspired my doodles, like this one of a strange night at the home of one of her teachers; a divorcée whose son is an English major. The two youths were supposed to hit it off but apparently all they shared was a passion for tea, as evidenced by his giant tea-making and storage machine thing and her being British. With the humming refrigerator, the aquarium for his pet prawns and the lack of eye contact with anyone but the cat, mutual tea interest hardly made the 5 hours pass very quickly for our poor Kate.

A Night to Never Remember!

Unfortunately, the 7 months in which I worked there went by in the blink of an eye. Between holing myself up in the school on precious weekends and sleeping for days at a time during the furiously tedious winter months, I feel like I missed most of the opportunities to spend time with the other great girls in our town. Our school was big, comfortable, I didn't have to go further than two floors down on some days, in order to work. But luckily I was stuck indoors with these hilarious creative minds.

By the way, I have carefully omitted all the drawings and food shaped like penises that we created. That stuff is going in my memoirs.

A Real Treat

2011-09-20T16:38:00.000+02:00

Because every so often, I like to brush up on my English.

The past few weeks have been non-stop German Vocab and Grammar, and I've been cheating on my flagging Deutsch with my French, even sneaking away to Strasbourg on Sunday to just eatitallup again. Indescribable mal du pays*.

Sat down yesterday to write an entry for this long-neglected blog (coming soon, it have plenty photos and links) and unbelievably,I already knew all the words that I wanted to use. I already knew just how to say everything!

I miss metaphors and humour and people who get excited over phrases like, "If the accident will." Language is such beauty and yes, it's the best thing for work and travel to be a Native English Speaker but what is it to know (or think you know) and love words?

My next English Writing project is to finish responding to beautiful cards, postcards and letters in time for everyone to send me something back for my birthday, but for now I'm off to German Class. Ha!

*French: homesickness.

Raven Gegen Matschland // MS Dockville 2011

2011-08-21T09:49:00.005+02:00

handbrot mit schinke/ hand-bread with ham

Aside from wanting to eat every few minutes (anxiety, disorientation?) and being pissed off by the mud and having missed Toy Horses, my old German roommate from Thionville and I recently enjoyed the MS Dockville music Festival in Hamburg. Since then, I've been trendily downloading soundclouds etc from Good Bands From Dockville and Music That Sounds Like Good Bands From Dockville. Yeah.

Also, we camped. In a tent with an air mattress and sleeping bags and everything!

The whole bloody site!

People got very creative with their weather gear.

Festivals can be, obviously, smorgasbords of great bands and great musical energy, with some weed here and there. And lots of booze. You can get up close to musicians, roadies and managers because security, if I were to take Dockville as the standard, is lax.
Some unfair shit happens, too, like The S L O W D O W N being rushed unceremoniously offstage so that some really awful Northern European band could play on time. German Ernie's rendition of the rubber ducky song pretty much played them offstage, the horror! Ange and I were allowed backstage, and kissed up to the band as they were stowing their gear. They'd driven all the way over from *somewhere across the channel* just for Dockville! I mean seriously, thrilling.
The godawful Northern European Band , by the way, was a nightmare for everybody who wasn't high.

From one of the swiftly destroyed installations.

There were some bands, like Crystal Fighters, whose music was amazing live and whose recorded stuff just didn't do it for me. Maybe their live show was so wunderschön simply because of Spanish accents flowing out of loudspeakers across a crisp dockside afternoon when the sun had only come out just as it was about to go down, with a breeze picking up the keyboardists's hair and drifting out towards your clammy, steamy armpits as you raise your hands to thaw your fingers and think, hey, wait, I'd really like to go to the beach right now (but you can't because the mud has dried around your ankles and your feet are so swollen that your boots can't come off). Or maybe they are just pro. But whatever, it was great. No videos because I guess people were enjoying it too much to make crappy videos like the one really crappy one from Dockville 2011 on youtube, oh well.

The Good Morning Diary, from Hamburg.

Douchebag organisers finally started giving out standardised info halfway into the festival.

Kakkmaddafakka!

A darling little angel, asleep in front of our tent after rummaging through our rubbish bags.

Is Tropical! We stalked them backstage and were accidentally allowed to hang out in the Bands Only area. We felt cool and pretended to ourselves that we were their girlfriends. Ange had an accent and everything.

We'd been listening to some bands that we'd never heard of before, and felt super cool and underground to have found The Greeks by Is Tropical, until we heard it in H&M on the day before the festival.

Front row for an artist whose music I haven't been able to tolerate for years. But her baddist backup girls were really a joy to watch. Santigold.

Glorious view from the bankside.

Mess!

Andreas Dorau. Annoying vocals, lewd lyrics and cheap tunage but enjoyable until everyone started to get impatient for Egotronic!

Best angle to study drummers. From a sunny little hill behind the main stage.

Bumming out on the floor in the Maschinenraum (a giant shittily mounted circus tent with more leaks than patrons)

Maschinenraum.

Die Anmut findet Schönheit in die hässliche Dinge (?)

Crystal Castles.

This is your Bap-ti-sm!
And then there are eloctronic units like Crystal Castles who sound as intense when recorded as live. Their singer, as we saw from our perch in front of a dangerous mudtrap about 60 feet away from the stage, was a badass tiny wonder of excitement and BALLS.

Thrashing about, crowdsurfing for more than 5 seconds (huge deal if you're a girl and everyone is drunkenly planted in a foot of sludge) From that distance, she was a writhing silhouette of celestial incredibleness and her show was dramatic, exciting, and made you dance even though your boots were rooted past your calves in the soft mire.
Close up, however, she looks like this:

Alice Glass, of Crystal Castles

Glad I wasn't up front for that one!

My Own Papillon
Although I'd never heard of Editors, they were the second largest band billed on the flier, so on the first night we trudged through the drunken zombie mud mob to the main stage where they were playing. As we approached, I felt a strange sort of heartache when their vocals soared towards the crunchy wooden steps, paved with stale dirt and gravel. The voice was familiar, the music was familiar, and it brought to mind this one song, that I'd heard on this podcast that I try to impose on um... everyone. Because for the past couple years this essentially Britpop Pops and Scratches blog has provided the closest thing I've ever had to my own music.
But I wasn't going to be able to hear the song that I was thinking of, it was just a song from that silly podcast. This band wasn't that band, they were some Indie band like most of the guitar-laden units at Dockville. And I wasn't Indie, whatever that was, but stolidly Britpop since 1998. My listenership was too stunted for this Festival and once again, I was out of timing and out of place.
So we hung back, because we'd agreed that we only fight-up at the front of the crowd for Bands We Really Wanted To See (sometimes we didn't agree and parted ways because we are cool like that) and then... it began.

I KNOW THIS SONG! I shouted, and that tidal wave of panic quickly abated. It was suddenly easy to barrel our way to the front of the crowd, and luckily I'm tiny so the larger people let me stand in front of them. A pair drunk aggressive assholes were tunnelling through the front rows, and as mobility was limited in our wellies (sunk 2 inches into the mud) it was kind of a dangerous situation. I threw one of them off of me, cursed and shoved him, amazed by my own strength (turns out, Ange had pulled him away from me and my feeble little arms would actually have done nothing to prevent me bring felled and trampled) and for the next few minutes I was on some kind of adrenaline rush.
Puzzlingly, I kind of felt like I was in an episode of Young Hercules.

Even as the set's amazing music progressed (so repetitive and catchy that 30 seconds in, it doesn't matter if you'd never heard the song before or not!) and the energy of everyone else at the front rose, I was still halfway looking for a rumble.
The chance came within seconds of the encore; a roundish, softish, middle aged man stumbled drunkenly into me, hurling himself towards the barriers in front. Almost gleefully, I shoved him away, shouting HEY, NO!
His glazed eyes turned from the band's parting spectacle onstage towards me. red and yellow lights flashed across his startled and confused face. He said something in a British accent, sounding a little hurt.
This clammy little man, shoving towards Editors with a beer in hand and a slimmer, sober friend guiding him back to where the patrons were less aggressive, could well have been the Pops and Scratches man who'd compiled and shared so sweetly his musical collection with strangers, for free. He could well have been the Middle-Aged British man whose musical taste was as limited as my own.
Tiny waves of guilt began ebbing at my conscience, despite how stoically I was now bopping along to All Sparks.

"I've prevented someone from getting close to a loved band." I thought, putting an arm behind my head and resting the other on the small of my back, twisting my hips a little.
"Isn't that what Festivals are for? He probably came here just for Editors," My head nodded forward, I smiled through my hair at the wall of swaying Germans behind me.
"I, who knew nothing, who was sour all day," raised a foot and shimmied my left shoulder,
"who was selfish and defensive and undeserving, had stopped this man-" Twist.
"- this Pops and Scratches type man!" Stomp.
"From enjoying this amazing band." Shimmy.

And for the rest of Dockville I was alternately cold, hungry and guilty. But I danced a lot.

And well, aside from my anger at how shittily the organisers treated us campers, I have been really really happily musically evolved ever since. Because apparently, Britpop has been recycled into Indie for the past decade and I no longer have to limit myself to the music of 5 bands from the nineties, because their music is now being made by about 50 bands from the noughties!
Yay!

(Not) Learning German

2011-08-01T22:34:00.050+02:00

I moved to Germany in May, but I've been in denial all summer and kept going back to my empty place in Thionville on some pretext or other (well, sometimes it was necessary). Then I kept going back to Strasbourg and Luxembourg and just... not wanting to be in Freiburg. Because even though I moved here with the intent of learning, I don't understand German, I don't care for it, and anyway everyone speaks English and assumes that I'm from India. So I kept running off to France where I learn new vocabulary every day, everyone assumes I'm from the Phillipines, and the apero starts whenever I walk into the room.

But a couple weeks ago, I finally got back into contact with the first girl I'd met here in Freiburg, in February, and she and I went to see this play, put on by the Uni's English Department's Drama Group. I thought, okay, this is the beginning of My Life Here. I will have Things To Do in the city, which I will finally bother to get to know as well as I know um... a half-dozen cities in which I've never really lived. I will begin to like German, I will resume loving things other than the French language, I will love these hyperintellectual twenty-somethings and I will want to be like them. Not like my happily unemployed perpetually drunk idols in France.

I will respect the Anglo-German lifestyle!

Devoured and annotated Cunt, still plodding through Bridget, and carefully misplaced the other two within hours of taking this photo. Scandale :P

But unfortunately the play was as dull as dishwater so I'm going back to Strasbourg this weekend. I may never learn German. Meanwhile, here is some vocabulary from the playbook.

due north- Richtung Norden

That's the way the cookie crumbles- So ist das Leben eben.

the john- Toilette

guinea pig- hier: Versuchs-kaninchen

parakeet- Sittich

reticent- zurueckhaltend

patronizing- herablassend

to bewilder- verwirren

catholicity- Vorurteilslosigkeit

Skip it!- Kannst du dir sparen!

coloured queen- schwarzer Transvestit

to pluck- zupfen

strongbox- Tresor

adulterous- ehebrecherisch

a stiff- eine Leiche

dour- muerrisch

to plumb- ausloten

post adolescent- postpubertaer

muffled- dumpf

misanthropic- menschenfeindlich

rabid- wild, tollwuetig

half-assed- halbherzig

to bolt- sprinten

to gobble- verschlingen

to knead- kneten

to snivel- flennen

to implore- anflehen

deliverance- Erloesung, Befreiung

enticed- fasziniert

to feign- vortaeuschen

transient- Durchreisender

stench- Gestank

imbecile- Schwachkopf

bum- Tunten

a nut- Verrueckter

dispossessed- von einer Besessenheit befreit

Booking a Train

2011-07-07T10:59:00.000+02:00

Trying despertely to get back to Mulhouse tonight and a WWII bomb is all of a sudden being dismantled, of course!

Thomas Reflects on Luxembourg City

2011-07-04T22:40:00.006+02:00

Upon entering this tiny geographical novelty of valleys, towering ancient walls, international banks and mysterious monuments nestled under a dense cloud of Smug created by thousands of soft-bellied expat financial industry workers, it is suddenly and firmly felt that one is not in France anymore.

This change is arguably so drastic only because of the city's unimposingly cheaply dressed populace, but Thomas, in his seemingly relentless evolution as a Language Lover, turned to Google when unwilling to articulate the issue himself.

'How can this be true?' he marvelled. "No results found for 'Luxembourg is a weird city."'

This exclamation was soon countered by a result for "Luxembourg city is weird."

'A bridge dating back several hundreds of years, what is he like American? And to think they did it without any of the modern machines was impressive (though then you just think of Europe's history and you know it was probably done with slaves so it's a bit tainted that way).'

'Touché,' he muttered as this ship sailed across his nation's collective memory, and returned to his quest in search of less New World perspectives. 'Nothing even for "Luxembourg is unsettling," now I'm just stumped.'

The factories steamed and hissed gently as the sun set over a stunning panorama of Hayange in early summertime.

No results found for "Luxembourg is too full of itself."

He decided to search in French; his vocabulary was, after all, as intricate and solidly-constructed as the Casemates du Bock .

Aucun résultat trouvé pour "Luxembourg me dérange."

Aucun résultat trouvé pour "Luxembourg me touche profondément."

'Nothing even for that, and this is simpler, so more likely... but nothing.' The apparent originality of his thoughts and ideas began to stun and scare him.

Aucun résultat trouvé pour "Luxembourg me perturbe."

Aucun résultat trouvé pour "Ville de Luxembourg a l'air bizarre."

Aucun résultat trouvé pour "Ville de Luxembourg me fait peur."

Aucun résultat trouvé pour "Ville de Luxembourg me chatouille."

Aucun résultat trouvé pour "Thionville me rechauffe le coeur."

Aucun résultat trouvé pour "Moi, j'ai vomi à Luxembourg."

Forcing himself to think seriously, deeply, about what disturbed him while he was actually within the confines of the city, he began to dissolve, googling wildly.

'The flames... haha there's a raw diamond here! Well it's not raw so much as rough. It's not got herpes.'

'Seriously though, I am always perturbed by the city, it's so disjointed. Haute ville / basse ville, European centre vs THE FACT IT'S TINY. What is its language? And it's so hard to buy an SNCF ticket there. One machine. ONE. What is that?'

'And you get on the bus and buy a ticket and push through the little waist-level barrier while everyone else gets on the millions of other doors and just sits down,' he lamented. The burden of perpetually playing it straight forced him to distract himself by reverting to searching phrases in English.

No results found for "Luxembourg city rubs me up the wrong way."

The innate Britishness of this last phrase evoked the following epiphanies, which occurred simultaneously to our young hero. The first was that different domains provided different results, for example google.fr, google.lu, google.co.uk and google.com; how much googling did he actually have to do in order to
thoroughly scour the internet? Thomas' second epiphany was about the content that he'd unearthed when googling without quotation marks; feeble travel blogs written by euro-happy americans, mostly wimpy males, all doing language assistant or erasmus programmes just like Thomas himself. Except they weren't Thomas, they lacked his perception, his elocution, his grace; Europe had not long been romanticised by young Thomas.

Even if he were to stay up for hours searching various phrases on each google syndicate, what would he find? Nothing worth his time.
Because the only people willing to sit down and type out what they did or did not feel in Luxembourg Ville then publish it freely on the internet (with captioned pictures of course) were crappy western blog-owners with whose voices he simply did not identify.

Carefully, he extended a long, pale arm across the dining table where he'd placed his laptop exactly 9 inches from his crisp cotton torso, dimmed the screen and closed the lid. Carefully extracting himself from his vinyl-seated aluminum chair, he stood up and turned around. Even though the sun was a few minutes below the horizon and his kitchen was lit only by luminous clouds shuffling westwards over Hayange's sprawling factoryscape, he did not switch on the light.

With even breath and a steady hand, Thomas closed the kitchen door and went to bed.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

2011-06-23T20:37:00.000+02:00

Soon to be released as a feature film! Picked this up after Cunt (very informative, very worthwhile despite the author's crappy tone) and have been slowly relishing the bounty of the English language; haven't gotten to this level of comfort in French (still underlining and scribbling vocab into poor Bridget Jones) and it's finally hit me that my German is scheisse, and is going to stay shit unless I apply myself. Bleh!
For months I've been travelling using almost every method available in France, Switzerland, Luxembourg and Germany, and on Tuesday I let an itsy local bus schedule get the better of me and ruin my life. The shame!
Anyway, I'm on page 194 of 201; Tuesdays with Morrie and Quick Fix German Grammar come next!

Ma Benz (Brigitte)

2011-06-16T23:21:00.000+02:00

genius

Rain Rain (Going Away)

2011-06-16T21:26:00.002+02:00

It's been that kind of day, when at 06h00 you reached for the pink wine instead of the water to take your pill and you've been stuck indoors with two (and then 3) kids since 08h00 watching The Chronicles of Narnia, Twilight and The Chamber of Secrets and making currywurst and refereeing rigged games of Candyland, all the time in awe of your growing ability to understand German and then finally at 17h35 your host dad takes you to Immigration and you find out you have to go to London for two weeks but it's okay because your real dad is paying for the ticket home that you'd need to enter the UK anyway. And despite everyone's anti-statism rants and their incredulity at the shitty nature of your second class world citizenship, and despite rage and bitterness at having read a white American lady's privileged angry pro-womyn directives in a beautiful little paperback called CUNT, you're giddily, giddily excited because at 13h46 the boy you like Liked your profile picture on facebook and you haven't been able to stop thinking about it since.

Lille, Take 1.

2011-05-30T22:58:00.004+02:00

As Fana was only coming to Lille for one day, I decided to make every effort to find myself there on the 28th of May, and in the process take Thomas' delicate couchsurfing flower. (Memoirs of a Geisha-type value was placed on that thing, and it is mine! Mine!)

However, the date upon which we had agreed was in fact June 2nd, and by the time I realised this, I had already booked a mitfahrgelegenheit from Freiburg to Strasbourg, a covoiturage from Strasbourg to Lille (and back), a couchsurfing host for Friday night (sans Thomas) and another for Saturday night (avec Thomas). Already knee-deep in the Scheisse, I trudged through.

My journey began in this Strawberry Field next to a dog-training park, off of the autobahn out of Freiburg. The driver was Swiss and thus ignorant of the inhabitability of the designated waiting space; the only discernible shelter was a locked port-a-potty near the fire station across the road. I waited out the pouring rain in a cafe in a nearby village and then trekked through the strawberry field (no photos of strawberries because I ate them all) looking at horse-riders and beautiful collies and waiting, waiting for my trilingual prince to come.

The wait in Strasbourg for my Covoiturage guy was neither as fun nor as picturesque; I'd broken my own heart in that city and it was the worst of ironies that I'd chosen to cut myself off from it just before moving to the nearest German town, making it necessary to stop in Strasbourg almost every time I ventured back into France. The ensuing 6 hour trip to Lille was as comfortable as sleeping in the front seat with your mouth open in a car full of perfect strangers can be.

My first host, as I had earlier suspected he would, picked me up from the train station after midnight in a state of minor inebriation. 6 hours and many, many pitchers of red bull and bottles of Grey Goose later, I finally got to bed.

Only to wake up at 10am to get his charmingly hungover friends dressed and out of the apartment, make myself look and smell like a human being again and find Thomas at the train station. Small stop at H&M on the way, and we were off to Our New House to meet Thomas' First Couchsurfing Host. (Less rip-rollickingly fun than the previous night's but delightful nonetheless) All our Witty Britty observations on Maxime's looks, parents, appallingly flexible Asian sister-in-law, gorgeous girlfriend and bed linens made, we ventured out with city maps in hand.

The search for Vieux Lille culminated in a tour of the Citadelle, pictures of the Opera and wishes that we were richer, whiter, and more attractive. Oh no wait, that was just me. Another tour of Rue de la Soif (Thirsty Street, actually Rue de Solferino) and we were out like little lights, a manic post-post-colonial twinkle behind my eyes and a francophile gleam in his as he began phrasing, I imagined, the best ways in both languages to share our experience with Milly and Kate the following week.
Sunday morning took us to the nearby town of Roubaix for views of closed windows and doors to wonderful awesome things; independent fashion houses and studios, a museum in a swimming pool, leading us only to a vending machine in the train station that took 4 euros for one Coke GAH. Then we left.

And I got ready to do it all again the following Saturday with Fana!

OnlyLyon

2011-05-03T13:04:00.002+02:00

25/04/11
can you hear me knockin? Cocaine Eyes on repeat. One sunday in Strasbourg I ignored the paths and climbed a hill using a slippery muddy trail. Some of the dirt is still on my boots. and on coat.
Rented GrandLyon bikes for 1€/jour yesterday. La veille nous ètions a pied et j'etais pas contente.
L'Anglaise is reading Dave Eggers' HOW WE ARE HUNGRY, another borrow from l'Americaine. We're all smart girls with novels by our beds (my collection is the lamest), even had stirrings of a Book Club, passing around Milly's copy of David Nicholls' ONE DAY between us for weeks and expressing carefully worded rage and condemnation afterwards. (Projecting here slightly). Want these bookworms in life always, this mean will spend more time on internet after return home?

"tout sera mieux si tu range tes affaires felisha"

2011-05-02T12:58:00.005+02:00

Nevermind reposing, just delved into my horrendous abyss of a suitcase and now I have chores:
1. Laundry
2. Hand-washables
3. Postcards and Other Mail
4. Art Shit (theory)
5. Art Shit (practical)

Listed in descending order of doability, ie even though laundry is the simplest I really don't have the energy. Searching for breakfast first!

4 hours later:
Oh no I took all the important stuff out of my handbag and shoved the rest under the bed, why?

the besancon cube

2011-05-02T09:06:00.002+02:00

Between terrible train ticket prices, weather disasters and shit travel decisions on my part (one night I had a glass of rosé in one hand and my debit card in the other), I ended up not spending as much time in Besançon as I would've liked but luckily my host was full of energy and very accomodating. Even though I'm a terrible cyclist in Lorraine (the countryside) and even worse in the city (a dozen near-death experiences in Lyon and Strasbourg) I still have vélo**-fever and Benjamin was totally down for cycling around the city and doing a tiny tour of the smaller towns around Besancon on motorcycle. Now I can cross "Ride bitch on a motorcycle" off of my Bucket List! Of course that means that I have to write it down first.

Needed Courage for Motorcycle Ride

When I got in on Friday night I stunk of SNCF* and the disgusting train from Lyon- one of the old, coppery smelling ones where the lights don't work right and the cabins are flung about more than usual- and by the time I finally had a shower it was too late to go out so we decided to go hard on Saturday night instead.

Porc, potatoes, saucissons, vegetables (my contribution)

After a morning of biking Check out the Gare de l'Eau which I did not see in October!, my barbecue cravings (the pit, the ash, the slightly burnt meat and the sauce, the sauce!) were sated and we headed through Vaire le Petit, Novillars and Amancey en moto. I was like :D the entire time, and we nearly died only once! Apparently it wasn't at all very fast but the dead mosquitoes encrusting my helmet and my super chic (not) leather jacket and gloves told a different story.

Sushi, the only thing that is okay to be raw!

Japanese Ravioli

Raw Chicken!

Caille!

Although my French has made serious progress since shedding my boulet earlier this year, Le Tokyo restaurant threw my dearth of vocabulary into sharp relief. I ordered a dish with Poulet Cru, my latinate mind thinking that the chicken had been cooked until CRUsty. Not at all. Luckily Benjamin is a Yes Man with a sturdy tummy so he had that while I nyammed*** 4 tiny roasted birds with liberal helpings of a sweet brown sauce.

The rest of the night until 5am can be accounted for in pictures, specifically, this picture:

At 10am I forced myself to wake up and shower in order to go see this Lapicque show at the Musee des Beaux Arts (his tiger touched me in February in Dijon, sigh) but at 11 received an order to find myself at the train station to meet my ride (I presumed) to Strasbourg. So I rode my 2nd Vélocité bike back to a bike-stop and we cruised the 30 seconds to the station then I was introduced to my friend's ummm entire extended family in a scenario like the beginning of Bridget Jones' Diary.

Btw Nico I don't understand how Elie took so long to get to know Besancon, everything is juste à coté!

*Société Nationale des Chemins de fer Français (French National Railway Company)

** bicycle

*** to eat heartily (Trinidad slang)

Cochon au Lait à Baume les Dames

2011-05-01T20:31:00.002+02:00

Suckling pig, the after-soiree brunch, first time in a small town with small-towners. Woke up an absolute wreck in Besançon (med students go hard all over the world, it seems) and spent the afternoon in a haze of hot sun, springsmelly flowers, beautiful baby monsters and immense amounts of delicious, fresh food at Baume-les-Dames. And the Bourgogne accent!
Finally back in Strasbourg (2nd home after Thionville) after 9 days of constant travel. Without the drinking and the junk food it probably wouldn't have been so exhausting but now I know how to roll when I go to see l'allemande in Kiel this week!
But first, two days of Absolutely Nothing But Lots of Water in this beautiful city.

Aix-les-Douches

2011-04-29T19:02:00.001+02:00

28/04/11
Aix les bains. Ai pas vu le lac. Connaissons personne ici, pas assez de temps pour voir plus. La premiere fois depuis longtemps que Nico n'a pas m'emmené au ghetto.

Le Lendemain

2011-04-27T10:48:00.001+02:00

Scarf is in the pool, no one asked if I could swim before throwing me in!

On Commence A Feter

2011-04-26T20:34:00.001+02:00

Drinking until we get warm enough to get intothe pool. Last day with l'anglaise apres quelques mois du vocabulaire anglaaaise. Im goin to stop correcting her a la Thomas oops.
On va faire la nuit blanche parce qu'elle a un train a 05h!!
Excited. C'est enorme

Good Morning Grenoble

2011-04-26T07:31:00.001+02:00

On why it would be inconvenient to visit me in Trinidad:
"Growing up, I had fresh cow's milk, squirted into my face every morning."
Because I told her I knew nothing but UHT.

La Chatte Regard Le Plafond

2011-04-25T21:46:00.001+02:00

02.05.11edit:

While couchsurfing in Dijon, l'Anglaise and I met this hilarious couple who later invited us to Grenoble. We spent 3 days there (Apr 25- 28), drank a lot of rosé, met a lot of people, and Nico came over on the Tuesday and Wednesday to kick it with us in his city.

I suppose we are boring in that we don't drink that much, usually wake up very early, and are always on some tourist shit, but I tried to walk the line last week, between alcowhore and intellectourist and seriously, it's hard. Maybe I'm too old for this?

Anyway, sometimes l'Anglaise and I couldn't decide what to do because I wanted to go to museums and bike around but she wanted to profit from the sunshine. I tried to get Giuseppe on the phone to explain that A Trini Will Complain About The Cold But Always Seek Shade When The Sun Is Out but he wasn't available. And anyway I do love a big full museum with audioguides and Rooms Just For Monet where I can doze queitly on a padded bench.

Grenoble was great, huge and I'm glad that we knew at least 3 great characters there!

Indian Highway IV

2011-04-24T22:04:00.002+02:00

24/04/11
In conference room of musee d'art contemporain. Hiding from polo-clad tanned families so noone will think I'm part of the exhibition. Smell of incense on 2nd floor elicited desperate homesickness and an attendant saw me cry. Memory Drawing back on screen so I guess I'll go find Kate, who's got her Velo out and is riding around Parc de la Tete D'Or.

INDIAN HIGHWAY IV

Only recently have I overcome being instantly enraged when people assume I'm from India, or that my native tongue isn't beautiful, inescapable, dazzling English. "Colonialism is a terrible bane for a people upon whom it is imposed, but a blessing for a language*" and all that. As much as I lack- a family history going back more than 2 generations, a degree from a University with a plausible-sounding name, the ability to pronounce vowels coherently- I've been able to pursue tonnes of things (and succeed at a few) because I was born in The West.
Some hundred years ago I had an ancestor who was desperately poor and/or had a case of Hot Foot like me, and decided to board a British ship (with family or not?) and cross the Atlantic in search of Something Better. I've been taught that most Indentured labourers merely created East-Indian enclaves when they arrived in the West Indies, thinking that they would return to India after the end of their labour contracts, and even worse, some changed their names to Maharaj in order to perpetuate the vile caste system, but this time with their families on top. The whole idea of being Indian in Trinidad is a very twisted thing for me.
Honestly I don't know that much about Where I Could Possibly Have Come From or Who, mainly because there is little that is written down and when you're told that you have absolutely no family history, you don't want to go delving into a culture that is hugely relevant for millions of people and never will be for you. I tried once, it was heartbreaking.
In sweaty armpit videos at this exhibition, I saw the shapes of faces of people I know; her teeth; his mouth, her eyes and That Haircut. You know the one. But these greasy face shapes were speaking with different accents, of different places, they had different names.
Is there a British West Indies highway somewhere out there? Can you make a road movie among islands? When I go home, I worry, who will want to talk to me about these things? What do I need to read first, how do I need to dress? Am I too eager, too young, too Indian Girl from South, what?

*Yann Martel, Beatrice and Virgil

Dimanche de Paques a Lyon

2011-04-24T10:39:00.001+02:00

24/04/11
On parle du moyen-est, de Yemen et Marrakech et le pere de l'Anglaise. On decri les lois entre France et l'Ecosse et entre Oman et Grande-Bretagne. Il fait beau mais on reste a l'interieur, content avec la conversation au lieu d'une douche ou les musees gratuites. "You wouldn't happen to have a brother in Besançon would you?" Or in Bale?
Travesti.

Backwards on a Train

2011-04-23T03:00:00.000+02:00

22/04/11
In dijon, on train. Every trip must have cough? Is obscene. Long for netbook. About to have 2 weeks of healthy distance between us. How do i make it to italy?
Reading Beatrice and Virgil. So-so. Excited and bored. Also cramped between window and greasy plump blonde reading chick lit/ fantasy. Is nothing high-minded as cover is elaborate, modern, colourful; everything the intellectual french ROMAN* is not.
Am worried that Yann Martel will describe everything in the world before I get up the balls to properly pen even one of those short stories i get so excited about creating that i wear myself out mere seconds after jotting down only elements.
Brought the journal and watercolours. penser fort and think strongly are two different things, never the same nuance. Je pense fort a toi, a elle, a lui. your memories aren't in my native tongue, when i think of you i'm not at home in my own head. Sabado sera and all beyond it, all around it, even less than all within it is a hazy tingling as yet undescribable question. A herculean task for a collecter of adjectives, similes and metaphors.
*novel

Les Poètes Chuchotent

2011-04-17T21:18:00.004+02:00

Poets Whisper.

'Intimate installations for poetry readings.'

L'Autre Anglaise's parents are visiting this weekend and because they were like something out of a film, I tagged along with Cara on their family trip to Metz where we did a city tour in a tiny tram.

As much as I've patronised poor Kate that she really doesn't know the real Metz does she? in all my adventures there I seem to have completely missed the Parc du Lac aux Cygnes and the Promenade Hildegarde. Huge! Then again, no one was looking for walks and lakes in the winter.

Also taking place this weekend is L'Ete du Livre which was cool for us assistantes because we are super nerds. This means you, l'Americane! On Place de la Republique, familiar to us before as The Place With The Ferris Wheel, there were these mysterious machines, handled by sometimes attractive little men.

I had the lyrics of Jacques Brel's Chanson Sans Paroles* whispered to me, and I swear I smelled cigarettes and wine on the other end, a stale fragrance that I've come to associate with french lovers and thus, to love. I think that I understood most of it; the vocabulary is basic:

J`aurais aimé ma belle 
T`écrire une chanson 
Sur cette mélodie 
Rencontrée une nuit 
J`aurais aimé ma belle 
Rien qu`au point d`Alençon 
T`écrire un long poème 
T`écrire un long " je t`aime " 
 
Mais le temps que s`allume 
L`idée sur le papier 
Le temps de prendre une plume 
Le temps de la tailler 
Mais le temps de me dire 
Comment vais-je l`écrire 
Et le temps est venu 
Où tu ne m`aimais plus

He says he'd love to write you a song, but after the time that it takes to get his pen ready and decide how to write it, you don't love him anymore. Triste!

At L'A- Paranthese, the site reads:
"The desire to build a unique moment when a passerby, a pedestrian or a man in a hurry, can indulge in listening to a text interests the Company personally. Finding people in their everyday world and offering them a stroll, a poetic moment in content and in form, that is what this show meets."

The comedian (ne) s readers: Estelle Baussiers, Fabien DONEAU Thomas Drelon Denis Fouquereau Helen MAILLOU, Jean-Pierre Morice, Marie-Penvern PICHAUD Helen CHICK Dominique Rambaud, David ROPARS Benjamin Tudor.

*Song Without Lyrics (French)

DernierFirst Week-end Thionvilloise

2011-04-17T21:14:00.000+02:00

First week here, I ate a tonne of this stuff. Paella Royale!

Our market's pretty comprehensive food-wise.

More greasy vegetables than anyone could stand, really.

For Ange.

Paris-Metz; mind-blowing macaron-framboise (FRESH RASPBERRIES) concoction

On Sundays the Metrolor (our regional commuter line) uses some clunky old trains!

In memoriam of the sweet little dog who nearly threw up on us outside of Paul

Graffiti inside the Cathedrale St Etienne


Whispered poems and texts

takeaway poetry

I crave this stuff, 4 months ago this would've been unacceptable as a meal!

And I was like baby, baby, baby, no!

2011-04-16T12:11:00.000+02:00

Dieu Merci pour les cigarettes!

Luis Vasquez: P&E

2011-04-16T09:37:00.000+02:00

Luis Vasquez: P&E: "Frederick Street, Port of Spain, 3rd April 2011 Robert Street, Woodbrook 3rd April 2011"

Florence + The Machine - Dog Days Are Over (2010 Version)

2011-04-13T10:31:00.001+02:00

Fortunately, my terrifyingly mainstream musical taste helps me relate to my students. Inverse Immersion still counts as Immersion, right?

3 Photos and an Explanation

2011-03-13T18:20:00.000+01:00

For Weenis

I'm staying at the apartment of some couchsurfing pros in Strasbourg, and this afternoon as I was stuffing evidence of my vacation into my overflowing valise and weekend duffel, I came across this gem under the coffee table.

As Weenis is having an existential crisis (not rare for her) I saw this tome as an opportunity to bring something useful to her psychological table (rare for me). However, an essay on the painting of Alberto Giacometti caught my eye (there is about to be a showing of his oeuvre at the Kunsthaus in Zurich where I spent my entire day on Tuesday) and between that and having listened to Jim Nous Portera for the entire preceding weekend (where Morrison sings about a dangerous hitchhiker alone on the road and Cantat frenchies on about infinite destinies and everything disappearing) it was pretty easy to start feeling melancholic about space.
Giacometti's sculptures are stark, elongated figures in motion, whereas the paintings that Sartre describes are figures contained within planes of imposing space (I think? yeh?) The sculpture describes the space around it, whereas the painting deals with the space within it.
So I was in the middle of my usual Europe-is-so-big-but-why-is-it-easier-to-move-around-here-than-in-my-own-home-space lament, thinking how ironic it was to find stuff about personal space and strangers commuting alongside each other for years without making eye contact in a couchsurfers' apartment, when I flipped through the book and found this note.

It says "I'm sorry I was angry because you couldn't express your feelings to me, we've communicated well in the past and I forgot we don't speak the same language. I hope that you and I can enjoy the time I've got left here.... I can't do it alone, I need you to help me make it positive experience [sic]" and is written on pages torn from a pocket-sized moleskine notebook.

Under the note was a receipt from a Barnes and Noble in MA.

Who buys a heavy translation of Sartre before going to France, pocket-sized moleskine notebooks, and talks about sharing emotions while travelling around Europe? Here is where I started worrying that I am becoming one of these pretentious young collegiates, what with the art museums and the reading. Why don't I just get drunk and eat everything in Europe, taking trips only for the sake of making a facebook album? What is this little brown Caribbean girl trying to find in Europe, really?

And so I had my own little existential crisis which was the best possible thing to do for poor Weenis as empathy really is the only solution in these cases. Or lots and lots of Toti.

au Musée Tomi Ungerer

2011-03-13T13:35:00.001+01:00

Either I head out to this or I park up in a big leather chair in the corner of this room with Bridget and my spanking new vocabulary notebook. Last day in Strasbourg and I'm torn!

POLITRIX

Venezia Venezia Venezia!

2011-02-28T20:16:00.181+01:00

Fatto a mano! Hand-made, can you tell?

When my hands finish trembling from excitement and the open window I will post everyone else's photos and give the whole story of this year's Carnival experience- I know last year I cried and decided I would never ever sit out the parade again but either way this wouldn't have been the same.

maschere di carnevale/ Carnival Masks

l'Americaine, Nicolas, la Jamaicaine et moi sommes allés a Venise en bus pour voir la carnavale! Our Thomas Cook in Thionville had a super great deal just to go for the day on Saturday when the Festa del Marie was scheduled to begin at 1400h, along with the Rievocazioni Storich and the Cioccolata in costume al Gran Caffe Lavena later at 1800h

lampade a tinte rosee/ rose-tinted lamps!

Of course as soon as we got there the cameras came out and I realised my first glimpse of Venise was through the lens of my cameraphone and not romantically through a fine mist of lagoonspray from the ferry. Luckily it was a very sunny day (slight wind chill but say what) so all our photos are gorgeous :S

V per Venezia!

As there were no parades in the morning and we arrived pretty early, the only thing to do was to take in the surreal quality of the architecture, look for souvenirs and try to find a place to rechauffer un peu (beautiful french phrase for having a coffee or a small drink, literally means to warm up/ reheat a little). All around us were masks and fans and it was possible to put together an entire elaborate costume from any of the stalls and make-up booths set up around the Piazza San Marco and environs.

ventilatore delicato/ delicate fan

The quality of craftsmanship of even the cheapshit commercial masks reminded me of the ideals we had when I started working at the mas camp. Even though something is temporary, even though someone is just going to sweat in it for one or two days and probably throw it away (although it's doubtful that anyone would do that with their souvenir masks but we missed the street parties in the nighttime so I really, really don't know) it deserved to be well made. Not glue-gunned and bomb-sprayed and packed into a box.

ombrello nero!

Everything was so strange and new and colourful that I didn't have as much time to think about how lame it was to be missing Carnival at home this year (Mille says it's become her Christmas, I think the same has happened to me. Carnival Tuesday was like opening the best present and eating the best meal that you'd spent at least a month sweating over.)

gondoliere!

We paid 20euro a head for a gondola ride which honestly I am never going to do again unless someone is marrying me or something. Honestly, wtf. I made a half-hour long video for KGrzl but honestly I didn't enjoy it, mainly because I wanted to go through all the itty canals and instead we spent 25 minutes in front of the Rialto like if that meant you could see something new and amazing that you couldn't see from the bridge or by walking. The mossy ground floors and flooded back entrances of houses are more amazing dammit! Or maybe I just can't enjoy things I actually pay for?

gionarta splendida! lovely lovely day!

All day there was a great sense of anticipation amongst the fleuve du monde (French, literally river of people, which means just tonnes and tonnes of people moving in like a current through a city/ place) and when we started seeing tiny tall tables being put out, bars being set up and mic checks beginning I knew that after the sun set the city would become the most awesome dance party masquerade mess of noise and beauty ever. No fat pink tourists in nylon windbreakers and plastic maschera (Italian for mask), just people gettin ornn. *sniff* I missed that Bacchanalia too because the bus left at 8pm and I took the 6pm ferry back to the pick-up point!

ci siamo ispirati a questa installazione poco, e abbiamo comprato scatole di vino rosso al supermercato!!

Anyway we saw THIS beautiful little incidental still-life and decided to get completement bourree, or at least to just sparkle a little. So a quarter bottle of delicious Bellini and two juiceboxes of 100% vino italiano later, I somehow lost my 3 companions.

lavanderia! il SUD! laundry, the south!

We'd been watching these little boys, college age or younger (college= middle school or forms 1-4) play football with their dad and occasionally, just like in the Pepsi commercials, young men would show up and kick around the ball with them. We really, really wanted to join in, or at least, I really wanted l'Americaine to join in as she plays "soccer" (it's okay to call it that only when girls are playing) but we lacked the essential vocbulary, "Vogliamo giocare anche noi" and also, testicular fortitude. Italian football has to time for the ballsless.

BIG UP me and Vanessa

Our contingency for Lost Persons (no one's cellphone had service) was that at the next hour, we meet at the Loggetta del Campanile di San Marco. So I wandered the streets for a bit, taking as many back-alleys and peering into as many open windows as possible, giving mournful looks to street stages and people dressed as bottles of Bellini, halfway wishing that I could be actually lost and be forced to stay in Venice that night, noting the locations and opening hours of cybercafes and hotels until, heavy-footed, I made my way back to the Piazza. All the time I was thinking that the girls and Nico were off having dinner somewhere (they'd been planning to eat whereas I was like, naw) and would meet me at 6pm at the tower as we had to get back to the Bus at 7pm anyway. Little did I know that they were actually fervently searching for me and we only had to be back at the bus for 8pm and the plan to leave Venice at 6pm was just super precautionary.

i santi, in tutto il mundo/ the saints, everywhere

The minutes ticked by. 6pm came and went. at 6:02 I realised that making it back to the bus was the priority, and not finding me. The ferry took 45 minutes to get back to where the bus was waiting- they were on the ferry and we were supposed to meet there, instead! So I ran to the ferry, shoving tourists aside, begging polizia to let me run on the other side of the street, ducking under barriers and totally feeling like Jason Statham, stamped my ticket and sprinted onto the boat seconds before it was unhitched from the harbour. They were bound to be somewhere onboard, right?

L'Ora D'Oro da Rialto! The Golden Hour, from the Rialto!

Except they weren't. They were seriously looking for me in town, and were at that moment mounting the bannister of the Loggetta and calling my name, having walked all over town looking for me as it was super bizarre that I had just 'disappeared.' I think they thought I'd been grabbed and sold into slavery or something. re: Taken.

Eventually they made it back to the bus, where a rastafarian (2nd most recognizable character on the bus) and his gf from Thionville had led me back from the Harbour (I couldn't remember anything from the morning as I had paid zero attention to what direction we were walking) and yeh my friends were pretty pissed that I hadn't waited until like, a little more past 6.

Was life filled with moments like this before the existence of cell phones? Were there tonnes of really pissed off people left waiting and searching, no idea where there friends were if even they were just 2 minutes gone from the very same spot? Or was everyone just a little more cautious about punctuality, knowing their whereabouts and just really Zen about stuff, like oh, we'll find each other eventually. No need to panic.

Seriously, what was life like?

Lundi Matin en Vacances

2011-02-28T09:26:00.003+01:00

Monday Morning on Vacation

Nicolas and Une Jamaicaine are visiting, I'm headed to Zurich on Thursday and we're listening to Jamaican parody radio while planning our day in Thionville. I just made scrambled eggs with red onions, chorizo fort and grated emmenthal. Yummy. In the middle of doing last night's dishes, the tap ran dry.
Is this what happens when two or more third-world residents spend a night in a building in France? Water ehn cut off since I come here.
What's next? The wifi? Also, I have a cold and while searching for a tissue in my little burrow at the head of my bed, I find a perfectly unused tissue still folded into a square in my nightstand, into which I blow my nose. While looking down to inspect my mucus (sometimes there's blood making lovely patterns) I see a tiny drawing of a tiny man in a crown, and turn the tissue over to see a sneezy word and "bless you" written on the other side.

How did my flatmate know that I would blow into the part of the tissue on which she hadn't written?
How did she know that I would use a tissue that was just lying around on top of some books in my nightstand since God-knows-when?

:O

Priming my Mask

2011-02-25T12:46:00.002+01:00

Carton and glue and brown paper, 3Euros at Cultura

Primed with Acrylic Gesso

And awaiting inspiration!

Myum

2011-02-21T12:32:00.001+01:00

Moutarde au Miel, Steak Haché, Pommes de Terres. Déjeuner; ma colocataire vegetarienne est scandalisée!

Moutarde au Miel/ Honey Mustard

2011-02-07T10:34:00.005+01:00

From MacDonalds in the centre-ville, two awesome floors of recessed lighting and wooden furniture.

Taking lots of photos, travelling about, changing your facebook photo to include incredible European architecture- it's europacking bullshit but I felt I needed to at least try it. I'm trying to be here, to get a handle on where my life is headed and what I really should be doing with my time. Skyping and being beholden to my cellphone were really starting to get me down.

Kate and I play the Hipster Couple.

So this weekend l'Anglaise and I decided to be adventurous and discover Dijon via couchsurfing.org, which is an amazing mostly safe website for meeting people with similar interests. After overcoming the original hurdle of explaining that it wasn't a dating website, we picked the best-looking guy in Dijon and sent him a request.

We were so fed up of Pain D'Epices after all the Christmas Markets last year that we didn't bother to try Dijon's (a specialty here)

I got there on Friday night, after a gruelling 8am class, a battle with a migraine from the night before and a pretty cool covoiturage with a lady from Brussels, a rasta French teacher who'd worked in Mexico and two graphic art students who live in Nancy. When the driver gave me a paracetamol and we sang along to America's A Horse With No Name, I felt like yeh, I'm alone in a cold country with no family and no emergency contact, friends insanely far away and still, life is PRETTY great!

And they're showing Le Discourse d'un Roi!

When I eventually got to the guy's First Apartment (later referred to as The Hobbit Burrow), two of his friends were already there; a couple from Grenoble. She was Chilean and he was nuts, and when 4 more giant French men showed up, I tried seriously to dispel my creepy visions of them as grown versions of my pupils and boom! The beer came out and between that, my Kefta kebab and the music I kind of fell asleep in the middle of the party. A little shameful!

Parc Darcy! Like Mark Darcy! There was a great Pride and Prejudice feel to it here, too.

Waking up in a Hobbit Burrow that smelled like beer and other people's sex was definitely an Adventure in Europe but before I could finish panicking properly our host showed up like a Knight in Shining White Adidas loafers (tennis-playing Italian man) and carted me off, still crusty-eyed and crease-cheeked to the train station to pick up my roomie.

Colour! Light! Relaxing flowing water!

Cheeks as rosy as her brightly coloured Roxy backpack, l'Anglaise and I chose to explore Dijon without our poor fatigued host (I felt pretty bad about asking him to come out with us in his state and about texting him our whereabouts in case we woke him up again but I guess we came off as a little asshole-ish because it just looked like we up and left, ack.) After finding a Glorious high-ceilinged MacDonald's in the centre-ville, having a cup of tea and a face-splash in the bathroom, we went for one of the most uplfiting, beautiful walks I have ever experienced. The sun was out, the streets were clean (except for the occasional Piss Alley of course), everything was giant and old and sturdy and spacious and even though I'd experienced the same in Besancon, it wasn't cold and I didn't need to pee so. Awesome!

La Poste! The line was too long here to send KGrzl's postacrd though.

I got Keisha a postcard, sent it, we frolicked around Parc Darcy, which got us more excited than was absolutely called for, but I guess that's what happens when you're a girl, English or surrounded by English, who has seen Pride and Prejudice (BBC version) and Bridget Jones' Diary way too many times. To think of how much I've grown and changed since I first read that book when I was like, LITTLE! 17!

Moutard! I only got a medium bottle of Honey Mustard though.

Anyway, we went back to the guy's second apartment where he'd brought our stuff and I had a shower (glorious) and lunch. The couple- now called Bonita and Claude- were there and we all spent the weekend together from then on. They were brilliant and hilarious and drunk 80-100% of the time, and even though we pretty much spent all our time talking to Bonita I feel like we should've talked to our host more- he was pretty cool with the music and the Intl Business and the not-drinking-very-much-ness so I feel like a shit guest. I guess next time I will make notes on the people's profiles and be super attentive?

A metaphor for the blocks of weeks and weekends until I finish working at the school and am forced to wander Europe.

Because even if we did pick him for being handsome, we did read through and decide that yes, we trust this person and we'd like to get to know them. That's supposed to be what the site's about, not just having a couch for the night. But gladly we met Bonita and Claude and even though Claude stepped on my One Dream of seeing Oasis in concert, we really love them.

Place de Theatre, near our host's place where we got lost for about half an hour.

We had another night out after the Musee de Beaux Arts off the Palais des Ducs et Etats de Bourgone where this Lapicque with the tiger changed my life and I had a lie-down in the room off the living room. While I was half-asleep, I heard someone enter the apartment and everyone say "Salut." This country's compulsion to BISE is so strong that in my half-conscious state I cringed breifly, expecting the newly arrived frenchman to march in, hit the light, flip me over and bise me on each cheek at any second. Seriously.

St Michel in the Golden Hour!

A lot of people feel like the French cities are all the same, but I'd only been to Metz, Strasbourg and Besancon before and even though all the Musee des Beaux-Arts start with the gilted religious stuff and carry into the pasty nobles then a wing's worth of wacky modern art full of colour and lacking in sense, and even though the skinny black-trousered art students in the chairs in the corner are as important an installation as the works themselves, it's still breathtaking to see, close-up, paintings from my textbooks, really well-sculpted marble statues, details and flaws and preservation efforts and to think about the care taken- to make a work, collect a work, install a work. I can't really elaborate why I love the museums and the galleries, but I just do.

Sunset at the top of a hill overlooking the lake; reminded me sooo much of Beverly Hills in Kingston, JA. Surreal!

That's right! I'd really rather wander through hallways of centuries of white people's devotion to Christianity/ madness than wander through malls or shops or markets; maybe it's because in a museum no one's hailing you out, there's no pressure to acquire, just to feel. Plus there's the whole sharing of perspectives and expressions bit that the google art projec t is doing.

L'Americaine's internet is too shit to fully experience the site so she told me about it this morning but my notebook screen is too small but guess what! We're in France and half of this stuff is right outside our door tee hee.

Anyway, listening to our host's cds of choice this weekend made me crave my old music, and luckily I made a 90's alternative playlist on my jango so I'm taking that in and blogging about it later!

Have a good Monday folks!

On Being A Language Teacher ('s Assistant)

2011-02-03T11:58:00.001+01:00

Glossary of Terms:

assistante de langue: my job, a high school language assistant

responsable: the teacher in charge of the assistants' schedule, paperwork etc

lycee: high school (ages 15-19)

college: middle school (ages 10-16)

proviseur: headmaster/ principal

euro section: classes that have geography and society classes in english and german

On the third day of my job here I was thrown into a classroom with 30 students, with no warning whatsoever. Hands swinging and spoken French almost nonexistent, I didn't exactly give as great a show as Daniel in his Lions' Den.
It turns out that Assistants aren't supposed to have classes on their own for like 3 weeks, but neither I nor my Irresponsable knew that, apparently, so I've been proper teaching for months now and only assisting for a couple weeks. Luckily other teachers and school staff pointed me in the right direction when the IT guys pointed out how Flaming Ignorant I was about High Schools In France, so I soon knew how to look up activities online, book an Audio-Visuel room online, pick up the key from the Horloge, and soon it was forgotten that The Assistante Was Given 5 Classes But No Classroom.
I now have several solo appearances under my belt, some of which billed me as the Main Act and a few in which my partner bailed for 45 of the 50 minutes of our Stage Time. Some have been utter flops, like the time I played a grainy 20 minutes of Heavy Metal with shit audio that confused my 2eme Groupe de Competence, or the time I asked a 17-year old quite carefully and loudly why he chose to study English and he replied "Because I'm English" and the time I printed the Taboo cards on plain paper and this one boy kept seeing all the answers from behind and shouting them out before anyone else could guess, or the one time I kept drilling a Poor Kid about why he didn't plan on going to University.
Sometimes when the teacher is absent and I know the material, I could have the class all to myself but the Proviseur says that that's against the rules, which makes sense I guess. I mean, I won't go to him and say my assistantship here hasn't exactly been orthodox, I think I've gone to him with all the larger complaints already like, "We have no internet access" and "Please give me a new Responsable." Twice I've forlornly led a class to the supervision room, put my photocopies back in my room, and wandered the halls with nothing to do and no idea what to eat for lunch.
Anyway, some classes have been super great and successful and uplifting, like today when a college student asked if I'd be back here next year (THEY LIKE ME :O) and I introduced a Euro Section class to the Fine Art Elements and they learned like 5 words and concepts! Yes! I can't WAIT to finish next week and then start breaking pictures or objects down into lines and colours and textures and asking why, how, what does that make you feel?
Yummysimplefun.

There are beignets de crevettes for lunch today so I might have lunch at the Canteen now.

Bon Voyage (-s)

2011-01-31T20:25:00.000+01:00

UGH 50 euros UGH

Zurich!

Venice, Carnaval!

J'ai décidé de profiter d'être en Europe. Finalement!!!

Another Picture-Taking Day

2011-01-29T19:39:00.001+01:00

Losing my camera is probably going to be the best thing that ever happened to me in 2011, because now I'm forced to use my little HTC if I really want to take a photo of something, which means I have to get back into that creative How To Use A Shit Camera To Take A Decent Photo mindset, plus I have been doing more watercolour work, which I wasn't horribly shit at when I was younger.

The Lorraine region is super laden with castles.

Anyway, after all the pain I went through to finish my degree on time, i'm probably not going to benefit from
that because UWI is showing no signs of wanting to send me my certificate anytime soon so I probably won't be starting my masters for another year.
Lame? Lame.

But that means another year of seemingly aimless adventures on this blog! And I can do more with the whole imagined landscapes deal. Transnationalism and all that.

Yeah.

metaphor for ridiculous hole that is life without proof of degree

I Found A Blue Button

2011-01-24T16:45:00.001+01:00

On the way to the Poste Principale. But you don't know the significance of this, do you? In my 4 months in France, no one has dropped a blue button, ever! It's always greys and blacks and browns but finally, finally, someone has dropped a non-winter colour.
Spring, spring is on it's way folks! The skies are brightening and it is about to rain blue and white and green and rose buttons and soon it will be summer but by then I won't be looking for buttons anymore because I will be running naked through the streets screaming joy, joy, I can see the sun!

Working on my Sketchbook

2011-01-19T14:07:00.002+01:00

Covent Garden/ Chicago mash-up

Tea Paper carte du monde

Razzle Dazzle

My Closet is..

Hand Me Down Central

Razzle Dazzle em

Another Great Day Out

2011-01-16T16:53:00.001+01:00

5 of us assistantes thionvilloises walked up the river past one of the smaller villages, sat on a bench for a bit, basking.

That's the nuclear power plant's emissions marring our lovely blue sky, but look at this tree!

Having People Over For Ice Cream on a Friday Night

2011-01-15T10:37:00.001+01:00

Means that this is the first thing you have to do

On A

Saturday

Morning

2011-01-08T15:58:00.044+01:00

Today, for the first time in a long time, there was no snow on the ground, no ice and the sky was a distinct shade of blue.
Aujourd'hui, pour la première fois depuis longtemps, il n'y avait pas de neige ou glace sur le terrain, et le ciel était une teinte distincte de bleu.

The American, who is from California and therefore understands my seasonal blues best of all, she and I decided to seize this day and go frolic at the rose garden near the Moselle.
L'Américaine, qui est de la Californie et qui comprend ma déprime saisonnière meilleur de tous, elle et moi avons décidé de saisir ce jour et aller gambader dans la roseraie près de la Moselle.

Along the Moselle, there are about 3 parks in Thionville and one camping site. The rose garden was beautiful when we got here in September, with yellow roses the size of baby cabbages, lush red roses and delicate pink ones.
Au bord de la Moselle, il ya environ 3 parcs à Thionville et un terrain de camping. La roseraie etait beau quand nous sommes arrivés ici, avec des roses jaunes de la taille des choux bébé, luxuriante roses rouges et roses délicates.

I was in awe that they hadn't all been picked and sold off by the piper who lives under a tree near the river. Okay, maybe he's not a piper but he is quite Bobo Shanty looking and no one knows what he does at the river as he is never fishing nor have we ever seen him with a boat.
J'étais en admiration qu'ils n'avaient pas tous été pris et vendus par le Piper qui vit sous un arbre près de la fleuve. Ok, peut-être il n'est pas un Piper, mais il est tout à fait Bobo Shanty et personne ne sait ce qu'il fait à la rivière comme il n'est jamais de pêche, nous n'avons jamais vu avec un bateau.

As the rain and ice came in November, most of the roses lost their sheen and now this is what's left of them, but there are so many that the carnage of the lot is still beautiful.
Quand la pluie et la glace est apparue en novembre, la plupart des roses a perdu leur éclat et maintenant c'est ce qui reste d'entre eux, mais il ya tellement que le carnage du lot est encore belle.

The Moselle is rising, rising!

I still have to layer up though, bleh.

The 3 Ducks Hostel

2011-01-05T15:34:00.001+01:00

In Paris.

On my way back from London, I missed the last train to Thionville from gare de l'Est and ended up staying the night at this place. There was a special on; 21 Euros for a cot in an 8-person room. I only had 5 people in my room though; 2 annoying Americans, 2 serious hipster Americans and a Swedish girl.

from my room/ de ma chambre

the floor's toilet/ la toilette de l'etage

the church in front of the bar/ l'eglise au cote du bar

smaller rooms, more costly/ chambres moins grandes, plus chers

courtyard/ la cour

view from downstairs/ vue d'en bas

church again/ encore l'eglise

had a walk around before heading to felix faure/ j'ai promene un peu avant d'aller a Felix Faure

I slept without rented sheets, in my street clothes as I couldn't be bothered trying to shower or change because I was so ill that all I really wanted to do was die. And eat free croissants in a melancholy manner in the front window of the bar/ reception desk downstairs. The people are friendly enough and the place itself was pretty standardly charming for Paris; old building, inner balconies looking out onto a cobblestone courtyard, absolute filthy wreck of a staircase inside.
Don't think there are bedbugs but you really can't be sure about those things I guess. Accidentally deleted my photo of the building front, but here's the 3 ducks website. Pretty great place if you've got no one to stay over by in Paris.

Seriously

2010-12-10T15:34:00.000+01:00

This is in my little kids' textbooks. They are 12 and mostly boys. :O

2010-11-19T03:27:00.000+01:00

Oh Em Gee

2010-11-11T17:45:00.000+01:00

Thinking about studying for the GRE Literatures in English, downloaded a practise test an bam! What's the third question? Biswas! Biswas Biswas Biswas!
I'm sure this sense of exuberant I Think I Can will not last long, so I'm sharing it while it's still around.

Power Points

2010-11-08T15:34:00.000+01:00

Guess which of my old part-time jobs I'm writing about!

Au Centre Pompidou

2010-11-04T18:12:00.001+01:00

Dimanche. Trop de gens!

Weekend in Metz

2010-10-30T22:02:00.000+02:00

House-sitting and dog-watching for one of the profs at my lycee.

The house is full of Foucault and Proust and every Man Booker Prize winner I ever gave half a thought to reading.

So this is what life could be like without the internet!

Uncle Ben's Paella Rice

2010-10-29T14:47:00.000+02:00

€1.60 for two at Match.

Hell Yes!

D'etre Vautour

2010-10-28T11:39:00.003+02:00

Roughs for my sketchbook; working with India Inks, which I haven't done properly in years. You know how it is when you haven't drawn or written for a while? I hate that feeling and yet I feel like I've spent more time out of practise rather than in the art zone. Struggled with my lame handwriting and retarded drawing for hours this week, until my hand got used to holding a pen with a nib, to dipping and gauging how much ink it picked up and how long it would last and how dense it was.

Until my hand got used to holding a drawing pencil again, until the slumbering artist in my head woke up and took over, reminding me gently that I learned how to draw years ago, that I know shapes and I know colours and that I didn't need to press so hard, score so deep.

French spelling errors aside (the story of my life!) I think I'm going to soon be ready to actually start sticking, stitching, scrawling stuff into my book.

When I put on gloves to pull my luggage, freak out when people press down on my shoulders, rant about my delicate artist hands, I'm not kidding. My poor abused right hand, doing the dishes and opening doors and washing behind the ears and tying laces and pulling zippers and lifting grocery baskets, is my livelihood. Or at least the instrument of my talent.

Anyway the instrument of my talent is numb because it's 9° out the bathroom window. Headed to Metz this weekend as I cyannot afford Paris until Monday.

Au revoir!

Buttons at Thionville Street Fair

2010-10-26T23:57:00.001+02:00

This is literally killing me. On the plus side, I think I got paid today.

Can't wait until tomorrow to find out!

La Choucroute

2010-10-26T12:31:00.001+02:00

My school is 100 years old this year, so last week there was a tonne of activities and dinners and the European Hymn and displays and a great "Spectacle" that I missed on Friday night because I was on my way to Besançon. On Thursday the German assistant and I were invited to this huge dinner that everyone else had to pay for (20€!) and it was just too much food!

Salmon appetizer

This dish (below) is called the Choucroute and it is a specialty of the area; an Alsace thing I guess. 7 types of meat! Because l'Allemande is vegetarian, she let the catering staff know that she couldn't eat the main dish (the plat principale) so they agreed that she would eat fish.

le Plat Principale

She thought that they meant the appetiser, which was salmon, and when she was served her main dish, it consisted of sauerkraut and 4 potatoes, which is Choucroute sans viande et saucissons.

des fruits de mer

But a few minutes later they brought her this giant mass of awesome seafood, which she turned away. She later felt massively guilty and as the choucroute was waaay too much meat for me, I remarked that I'd have preferred the seafood.

flowers that we took up for Kate and lovely fruity white wine

An officer sitting opposite us heard this, and being a gentleman, decided to hail one of the waitresses and ask her to bring me the seafood instead. Unfortunately, this was after I'd filled up on potatoes and sausage. With panicked eyes I drank more wine, hoping that the alcohol would help me quickly digest the food I'd just eaten.

why is there always cheese?

After I was instructed by delighted Europeans on the art of eating mussels, I was helped along with the prawn and eventually the fish. I was so full! But then the old man opposite me, a darling treasure of a fantastic frenchman who spoke really slowly and carefully for me, bought a bottle of red wine so that I could taste it. His stories of the lycee after WWII seemed more and more surreal... pupils would play with pistols they'd found 'in nature' during class, his father had fought in the first war. Surreal!

red wine

At some point I realised that my cheeks were flushed and that my first successful French joke "Quelq'un a cassé une assiette?" was hilarious, but it came from some deep dark reservoir of forgotten vocabulary that was only accessible via panic or booze and that I was indubitably, irrevocably drunk.

Dessert

Knowing that I had 5 flights of steps to walk up and two bottles of rosé waiting in my room for the other two girls and me to celebrate the beginning of our vacation, I downed as much cheese and coffee as I possibly could.

coffee and dark chocolate!

But when the dark chocolate was discovered, I was forced to try it with the red wine. It was spectacular. It made the presence of so much cheese almost forgivable. With stained lips and warm collar I helped judge the drawing of the tombole (raffle) with all the other token foreigners in the room.

Someone promised me a bike and an oven, someone remembered me from the patchwork exhibition the past weekend, someone said they'd soak the label of the wine bottle for me to collect the next day. Someone let me have the flowers from our table; to take for the Anglaise.

I remember somehow making it up the stairs, talking for a bit with the roomies, then falling down dead on my bed with the light and half my clothes still on.

Europe, wtf. I could stay here forever!

C U Next Tuesday! 1

2010-10-25T22:39:00.001+02:00

Collecting Yonic symbols for l'Anglaise, who is utterly repulsed and offended by the C-word.

I used to be the same until Mille declared 'But it's a beautiful word, it's a beautiful thing!'

I guess that's what this girl at the art school was trying to deal with when she made that video of herself saying it over and over.

But to me that was still unresolved.

I love the idea of it as a vessel, a beautiful petalled, welcoming vessel.

I've got a bicycle, being given to me by a retired English teacher (I met him at this huge dinner the other night) and it's covered in pink roses he says.

My bedsheets are covered in pink roses, and my comforter is laden with paisleys.

I am surrounded by yonis and the thought is so warming and comforting that I feel really secure being all alone in cold heavy Europe right now.

The Sketchbook Project!

2010-10-25T08:42:00.000+02:00

My theme is "I'm A Scavenger"

posting work in progress soon!

Gum Traps!

2010-10-24T17:39:00.001+02:00

Partout dans Besançon! J'ai pris une photo de chacun, j'ai vu jusqu'à ce que la batterie de mon appareil photo est mort. Ils sont blocs de papier que vous mettez votre gomme, plutôt que de le jeter. Une belle idée, mais on peut se poser les deux questions suivantes:

1er:
Combien de gomme à mâcher sait-on vraiment ici?

2e:
Qu'en est-il des arbres, de la France? C'est beaucoup de papier!

All over Besançon! Took a photo of every one I saw until the battery died. They're pads of paper that you stick your gum to rather than toss it. A nice idea but it begs the following two questions:

1st:
How much gum do people really chew here?

2nd:
What about the trees, France? This is a lotttt of paper!

En Automne

2010-10-19T16:52:00.000+02:00

Samedi passè, la fille de Martinique et moi nous sommes allées a une exposition de Patchwork à Manom, une ville pres de Thionville.

Je suis revenu le dimanche, et les femmes étaient tres sympas. Elles m'ont donné des gateaux et des tartes pour les autres assistantes.

Les boutons m'a excite, et aussi l'aiguille étonnant!

Ces points jaunes miniscules sont très difficiles!

La Litterature

2010-10-16T20:13:00.000+02:00

Half of the Blackboard

I have been given half of the students from a Literature class once weekly, and next week I am giving them short stories from their childhoods, from adult perspectives.
Like Hansel and Gretel, Red Riding Hood, Snow White and The Three Little Pigs. It is going to be soooo awesome! If anyone knows of any resources I can look into, that would be great.

Je suis Gourmande!

2010-10-16T20:05:00.002+02:00

As it's getting colder I find myself seeking the comfort of a warm meal more often. My frigo isn't working and a man came to take it away last week so I can't buy things to cook in my room like the other girls. I love having that excuse! The couscous I made the other day was disgusting btw. If I'm going to eat or cook anything out of a can here it will be chilli! Because chilli in a can always tastes lovely to me.

Chocolate Mousse

Most days I show up three times a day at the cafeteria for breakfast, lunch and dinner and I've been asked howcome I eat so much and stay so thin, and I tell them it's because I have five flights of stairs to run up and down every day but I think I am actually doing a dangerous dance between relative slenderness and obesity by eating the way I do.

Dinner at the school cafeteria.

So on weekends I am forced to scavenge for food in Thionville and pay out my ass for sandwiches and pastries and then hope that l'anglaise invites us over for tea and sweets. Which she always does :)

Fall harvest and flowers at the Saturday market.

Every Saturday morning there's an amaaazing open-air market just near my school and today there were tastings there and in the centre-ville so I've finally had truffles and cider and some soup that was made entirely, I am sure, of butter! And spiced bread and superlong super red saucissons and dried apples and ginger and I bought a lemon and a trail mix that the man said was a "produit de japon!" and I basically had lunch via samples.

Saucissons!

I bought a pie with lapin in it, which is rabbit, and I don't know if it's because I was reading Watership Down before I left but I absolutely hate the taste and texture of it. Blech!

Pastrami etc.

The situation with my fridge means I can't have milk, which I really love having in my coffee or my tea (made with sugar packets stolen from McDonalds, or cubes taken from the cafe or borrowed from my neighbours) and if I try to have a warm drink without milk I end up hyper and tense for hours. It's awful.

Saturday lunch in my room w/Americaine et Allemande

What I love about the market is that there is one Vietnamese woman, a tonne of meat, fruit and veg vendors, and Pretzels galore! Everything is super cheap (the fresh stuff anyway) and you just feel like its more organic and good-for-you than the stuff in the groceries. There's dirt on the carrots and everything.

Euro-Crunch!

I've stayed loyal to my Nestle Crunch whenever I go to the cinema, and my roomies seem partial to pureed fruits and gummy snacks. Blech!

At the place where we got our beautiful rotisserie chicken.

There is just so much meat in France that the poor Allemande, who is vegetarian, has been eating nothing but cheese bread and fruit from what I've seen. We wanted to pick her up something at the market this morning but she is in Paris until Monday and we didn't know what would keep until then.

Maggi Bouillon Cubes!

The Anglaise cooks a lot and doesn't come to the cafeteria with us. I envy her proactivity and bravado in that respect but as long as I don't have a fridge I am cool with not cooking.

Really wish I had some milk though! Going to see if I can get some powdered milk on Wednesday, but I don't think they have that in France!

C'est Trop Cher!

2010-10-16T14:37:00.001+02:00

My first glimpse of Europe, flying into Paris Orly airport

As I am terribly shy with French, and I couldn't fly straight to Thionville, I got a friend to meet me in Paris so I wouldn't be completely disoriented. There was a rail strike on the day I arrived, so we couldn't take the metro out of the airport like I'd planned. Thank goodness for Nicolas! We stayed at the apartment of his uncle, where there were three small loud miserable boys who were just hilarious but waaay too much for me to handle all at the same time.

5€ buffet at a Pakistani shop downtown Paris

On my first day we ate a tonne of food and between that and the metro I watched my summer cash that I'd worked super hard for just... evaporate. After that I tried to starve myself and scavenge but Paris is not DC, in that there were no water fountains or free bathrooms or soda fountains in McDonald's that you could just stock up on Root Beer and be fine with. Why did I pay five TT dollars just to pee? And why was all of the food cold?

My knock-knee at Fabien Chalon's installation, Gare de l'Est

Although everything was as WOW as it looked in Inception, I really felt as if I needed to experience the city as a half of a retired and/or loaded couple. I guess we needed to get to know the city better but I hate it when I have to spend money to have a good time. Free parties and clubs were aplenty, however the trains and buses were not. We got stuck out one night and ended up having to walk home in the blistering cold (the maps were sideways upside down so we kept reading them wrong and the streets never have their names on them, just arrows pointing to important bits, like the post office or a garden or something) and I needed to pee and my legs hurt and I was too cowardly to rent a velo (for only 1€!) and just ride home.

Gotta be that tourist!

Ate a sandwich just to get warm up here.

It was a bit like watching the Monument from the Lincoln Memorial.

On the same night it showed at SFC back home!

I really enjoyed the walk down Champs-Elysees because I got to go into FNAC and listen to french music and be warm and wander around Sephora and try everything. I think those of you who are familiar with the chipped-up state of my nailpolish would be glad to know that I finally got it all off. After a few months yes, but it's been gone, so yay.

Europe is hilarious.

Every day is hangover day for this poor Sphinx.

Everything I scrutinised was sooo detailed and lovely.

The view from La Basilique du Sacré-Cœur

Montmartre!

really, with these narrow streets?

I tried to pay in USD for my itty shitty little espresso.

Sacre-Coeur!

For Damian, who should move on to store and cafe windows.

Little Bombay, with lots of familiar names of course.

Museums are great places to people-watch. At the Louvre!

I spent 2 days at the Louvre and I could spend the rest of my LIFE there!

Something tells me I'm in Europe.

Here she is called 'La Jaconde'

The summer rush was mostly over eh.

Near les Halles!

Anyway Saturday was supposed to be my day to relax and blog a little and finally write that email to KGrzl but I've just gotten a call from a genuine French girl to take me round Thionville at 4 until I get to come back at 7 and Gtalk me lovey. And write that email to Keisha.

Pieces!

Trente Kilomètres, Trois Boutons et Trois Jours!

2010-10-15T16:09:00.001+02:00

On Tuesday I was informed that some of the teachers would be striking, so l'Allemande and I took the opportunity to spend our afternoon biking to the German border and back. We rented a bike (2€ per half-day) from the bike place near the train station, because the one I'd been using which might have been the bike that l'Anglaise's precendent reportedly left for her use (she wasn't sure, no one was) had a wonky chain. We paid down 50€ each which meant that we had only 20-something € in cash left. But that wasn't a big deal because we were just riding through the peaceful countryside right? If there was a robbery or anything the river pirates would get v little from us.

Vous etes ici!

We rode and rode, enjoying the fair weather and the crisp breeze and our runny noses. We felt like we had the whole day ahead of us. As I am perpetually chickenshit about anything with wheels, when we got to roadways or the road crossed the bike path (called Chemin de la Moselle) I walked my bike. L'Allemande felt bad to let me alone in my moments of cowardice so she kindly also walked hers. By the end of the day I was brave and tired enough to just ride with the cars though. The motorists are very accomodating of bike-riders, something I had not wanted to immediately take for granted. Maybe because I grew up in Trinidad where steering wheels turn Jekylls into Hydes.

Pants at roadside, button glinting in sunlight.

On the way to the train station in Thionville that morning I'd found two buttons, and on the way I kept looking out expectantly for a third, which I eventually found on this pair of pants. It was one of those route stretches where I was walking the bike (there was a detour from the chemin) and l'Allemande had ridden ahead to check where the bike path began again. I don't know why there was a pair of pants on the side of the road and no I didn't smell it but it didn't look very dirty and I used hand sanitizer and I know I am like a junkie with these buttons. After I took this photo I took out my housekeys and used them to rip the button off and tossed the pants back in the grass.

Inside an abandoned camper house thing.

Luckily l'Allemande is quite adventurous so when we stopped to look at the map near this crack-den-looking camper she happily explored with me. We figured the local youth use it to smoke etc.

Nomad Accessory that I am seriously considering acquiring.

It was nifty-looking, with its tiny beds and tiny fridge. I want one, and more than that I want to live somewhere large enough that I can roam with my tiny house on my back like a tortoise and just wake up to a different place every day.

Along the Moselle. Screw spin class!

When we fianlly got to the German town of Perl, we were exhausted and crampy and tired. We resolved to take a train back to Thionville (it was only 30km so our itty bit of cash should have been enough for a one-way train ticket each) rather than attempt to bike back. My state of horrible unfitness showed whenever we had to go uphill; I always gave in and just walked the bike up. I found out yesterday when I was fiddling with the handles what GEARS are for. My bike had 6 gears and mine was on 6 the whole ride. Turns out that's the worst one for going uphill! I turned it to 5 and all of a sudden my ride was easy peasy and I made it up hills with some difficulty yes, but I actually made it uphill without having to get off and push my bike. So I'm not totally unfit, just moderately unfit. Yay!

Tiny bottle of Jagermeister in the drain. Hello, Germany!

Perl, which we found quite by surprise, was so quiet and suburby that if you listened well enough you could hear the sound of yuppies settling (toddlers' shrieks and mums talking about yoga class and SUVs whooshing past). We pushed and pushed our bikes up thes silly sloping hills until we finally got to a cafe and ordered large desserts and coffees (kaffes) and I said my First German Word to and Actual German Lady, "Danke" and it was beautiful! Especially because the pastries and coffee were super cheaper than in France. Half the price, even.

The suburban town of Perl!

The menu at Cafe Schaumpaul in Perl.

I ordered this because the name was so complicated.

Apple Pie, so delicious and rich and moist!

After eating we went to a bakery and got some real German rye bread and a cake for l'Anglaise (she is everyone's Gretel), walked around some gardens, took a lovely stroll through town, and took some photos which are so mundane that they don't deserve uploading. We lahayed, essentially.

This is how you secure things at construction sites.

Back at Perl's train station there was no one, so we figured we'd just ride to the nearest French town anyway. The train station there was closed as well and it was getting dark and it was getting cold, but it was a small town and it wasn't a long ride to the next town, which had a bigger station anyway. Called Sierck-les-Bains, it was a nice enough little town with a Centre du Tourisme and a Poste just like Thionville. Although this station was also closed and empty, there was a printed train schedule reassuringly posted near the Quays, that told us the next train to Thionville was coming at 7:22pm.

Recycling at Sierck-les-Bains

So we again walked around, and waited. And waited. And the train never came. We knocked on the window of a place near the train station to ask about the next train. "Il n'y a pas de trains!" a woman shouted at us through the glass.

La Poste at Sierck-les-Bains, hardly large and reassuring.

We talked to a woman who had parked her car nearby. She explained that there was a rail strike. We hadn't bothered to check that, but in France you have to check the strikes the way you check the weather or the directions. As there were no buses, hotels or hostels and 20€ wasn't enough to get a taxi to pick us up in Sierck-les-Bains and take us to Thionville, she quite kindly gave us a ride to Yutz, which is a town near Thionville. But we had to leave the bikes at the train station, locked to a pipe in the cold :(

Bike at the bottom of the Moselle, seen on our walk back to Thionville from Yutz.

On Wednesday l'Anglaise was able to help me go to Sierck-les-Bains to get the bikes back but the trains and buses were sooo iffy because of the strike and after three false starts to the day and our great bike-retreival misson, the only certain trains/buses were in the evening and went to S-l-B but there were none from S-l-B.

We went that night to Metz to party away our troubles but the last thing back to Thionville turned out to be a bus which we had been having very bad luck with all day so we ended up staking it out for like 2 hours at the train station because it was too cold to wander Metz anyway. The bus was cold and shitty and lame but luckily we met a French teacher from our school and got a little practise in with the language.

So we decided to try again on Thursday with the bikes, no luck even getting to S-l-B because I had classes during the available bus times! L'Allemande and I eventually got a ride from a guy who works at our school, so he dropped us off there in the afternoon and we biked back to Thionville and returned the rented bike. It was much shorter as we went along the chemin on the other side of the Moselle and I wasn't chicken about riding on the roadways and I'd discovered that thing about the gears so I was able to ride like the wind. Seriously!

the long day's button haul

The kind lady at the Bike Rental place didn't charge us for the extra days we'd had the bike out because of the strike. "What could you have done?" I was grateful for that. I'm sad that I missed a train and so the SATA magazine soiree last night though; if the strike weren't so bad there would've been another right after rather than a shitty bus an hour later :s

Just give them what they want please please, this grève is ruining my life!

2010-10-12T11:32:00.002+02:00

Last week or so I wanted to go see Des Hommes et Des Dieux, but as I couldn't quite afford it I had to starve myself for a few days before actually coughing up the 5€. It was well worth it. The French was intelligible (because the audio was really good and the lips for reading were quite large haha) and we all felt at once uplifted and super heavy afterwards. It's about a group of monks in Turkey (I presume) who were under terrorist threat. That very day, I'd looked up the root of one word, filialité, which means lineage or descendancy. They'd found this in their daily work (at the monastery or the town, amongst each other and with the muslim people they helped and lived among). It was a beautiful (educational) film, and with the prices of movies here I think I will only pay for movies like this. Harry Potter I will have to save for, would be my birthday present to myself if my heart wasn't already set on M.I.A.

The theatre in downtown Thionville, La Scala, shows two films per night, mostly independents and older films. This weekend we were all jazzed to go to a trendy club in Metz but the trains back to Thionville were either at 11:30 on Saturday night or 5:30 on Sunday morning, which put a little pressure on us to party super hard. l'Anglaise was in Nancy and I'd bumped into l'Americane at the market and she et l'Allemande et moi had all had a long day of walking around looking for a can opener, eating too much meaty stuff from the market (had my first genuine seafood Paella but I scarfed it down before I could photograph it, sorry!) and in my case, labouring over a super basic PowerPoint and Skyping at a cybercafe. Greasy keyboards agh!

So we forfeited our demographic and headed to La Scala for Nathalie Granger, which l'Allemande wanted to see. It must have been a very good film but it was made in the 70's and the audio was not excellent and most of the dialogue escaped me. It was certainly dramatic and evreyone moved so deliberately and poetically, ha. Frenchies. Gerard Depardieu (one of the 3 French acteurs I know) had two or three monologues which I really wish I'd understood. He was vacillating/ in despair about his career choices, which I am totally doing right now.

La Liberté Guidant La Peuple at the Louvre

Vive la France! Off to lunchers.

Klik Hier Voor Tickets

2010-10-11T08:55:00.001+02:00

MIA
Concert
Eindhoven
NOVEMBER

Put me socks and me kettle on

2010-10-10T20:59:00.001+02:00

Now to labour over some grammar, biglong day of powerpointing and classes tomorrow.
Starting at 6:30am!

From the Farmers' Market

2010-10-10T10:00:00.000+02:00

I remembered to get a green apple for Shrzl.
Photos of the marché are on my camera so all the organic meaty euro-vending will be shown later.

Making Couscous

2010-10-09T09:59:00.000+02:00

Because Ramen was too expensive at the supermarket. I have to cook or eat out on weekends cuz the cafeteria is closed :/

NYTimes.com: Found in Translation

2010-10-07T15:52:00.002+02:00

So agonisingly relevant, if a little tangential, to my current situation as a 'writer' learning a foreign language.

OPINION | October 03, 2010
Op-Ed Contributor: Found in Translation
By MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM
How the author of "The Hours" learned to write for his reader, not for himself.



Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company \| Privacy Policy

Fort de France Button Necklace

2010-10-07T12:18:00.001+02:00

How else was I to while away the hours in Martinique?

Dessert!

2010-10-07T12:17:00.001+02:00

Chocolate mousse. Alooooors!

Lavo-Matique

2010-10-07T11:54:00.001+02:00

With the cost of the machines, the detergent and the fabric softener I might as well just buy new clothes!
Which I think I will do.

La Poste Principale

2010-10-07T11:45:00.001+02:00

My favourite building in Thionville so far... It's just so big and old and reassuring.
Are these Colonial stirrings?

Lunch and Breakfast

2010-10-06T12:10:00.001+02:00

Is actually quite yummers

View out the bathroom window.

2010-10-03T14:56:00.001+02:00

Is this Fall now?

Making a Pink and Grey Bib Necklace!

2010-10-03T14:55:00.002+02:00

Freaking love buttons!

Sunset From My Room

2010-10-03T10:07:00.002+02:00

Feels weird being on this end of the earth.

Alain Simon's Pourquoi Pas?

2010-10-03T09:37:00.002+02:00

Changed me life. More later when I can get all the photos up.

Might Go See This Later

2010-10-03T09:31:00.002+02:00

What stands out?

2010-10-03T09:28:00.002+02:00

At the second-hand bookstore, the 1€ rack.

La Nuit Blanche

2010-10-02T19:02:00.000+02:00

There's a parade out my window.

2010-10-02T15:25:00.000+02:00

Some sort of March, was too sleepy to bother to go down and find out.

I'm BROKE Biatch!

2010-10-01T23:29:00.003+02:00

Views from my room.

The whole assistantship thing is quite costly at the beginning, I really wonder how some people can afford it. I've been graced with a lot of free stuff and a predisposition towards cheapness and even I am already waist-deep in debt.

My room at the Lycee is free free free yippee! I don't think I'm allowed visitors but as it turns out I don't know anyone here :s

Anyway, thank God for parents! And friends and lovers, too. Here is a list of all the jazz- necessary jazz mind you- that I've been forced to shell out money for:

Mobile phone SIM 15€
Bank Account 50€ (not a deposit eh, but just the fee for opening)
Insurance for room 55€
Security deposit for room 150€
Train ticket to assistants' meeting 80€ (you're reimbursed eventually)
Photocopies, photos, postage 40€
Train ticket to Thionville 60€
Plane ticket to Paris (1way) 500€
Orly airport shuttle 20€
12-25 card 50€
Cafeteria 20€
Hostel my first night in Thionville 20€

Oh and then I had to feed myself and take the metro etc while I was in Paris, but that was optional because I wanted to come to France early to acclimatise meself. Lucky I did because my first week at the Lycee I've been balls-deep in errands and paperwork.They don't pay you until the end of November by the way, so it should be fun to see how I survive until then.

Mural at McDonald's

2010-10-01T23:29:00.002+02:00

Damn i'm cold.

Black Bibs

2010-10-01T17:37:00.001+02:00

Made these back in Trini, with buttons. Still making button stuff here, luckily I found a store that sells all the trappings I need right in our town centre!

Mirabelle

2010-10-01T17:35:00.002+02:00

A specialty pastry of the area. Yummy!

Tome II

2010-09-30T17:42:00.002+02:00

My passion for the English language was cultivated through novels. You know, those things that old people use to make themselves feel better about having to get prescription eye-wear? Those things that the NY Times bestseller list prescribes in order to seal you within your demographic? Those things you were forced to carry around in school that are now yellowing on a shelf in your room somewhere? You know, those things.

Trekking back to the Lycee from the Poste Principale today (all the while cracking up that I am in the places in the textbook, ha!), I spotted a 1€ rack outside a second-hand book/cd/dvd shop laden with novels, mostly paperbacks. I figured I could work on my French by engaging in my onetime favourite pastime, as skimming Beaux Arts mags over the summer was fun but not v practical. At first glance the only accessible thing was a horrible Nicholas Sparks book... Was I that desperate to learn the French language? I shuddered.

Luckily after some very mild foraging (I'm super conscious of my perceived capacity as Thionville's token Brown Person\ West Indian so I'm trying to give Trini a good rep) I found a beautifully kept paperback edition of "Les desastreuses aventures des Orphelins Baudelaire; Le Laboratoire aux serpents. Tome II"

Bullet! I'm reading like a child, and it would realllllly help if I'd remembered to bring any one of my three French-English dictionaries but so far I've learned a lot by reading the first chapter. "Ruban."

Next I'll hunt for a dictionary at the store to tide me over until I get that laptop. Then I can move on to Twilight in French, yayyy

Luckily I do not have a laptop as I would just be watching television all day. There is a French version of Ugly Betty, called Le Destin de Lisa, and for just 15€ I can own the entire first season on DVD :O

My French Phone

2010-09-28T17:08:00.002+02:00

http://www.coolstuffinparis.com/prepaid-phones.php
That link helped me top up my phone, thank God for hapless Aericans or this hapless Trini would be lost in a sea of curious phlegmy french accents!