Without further ado, I'll take the miracle as it comes and go straight into things:
Tuesday:
This Tuesday was, unfortunately, no more memorable than the last. Apologies.
Wednesday:
After school I met up with Fanny for lunch. I got slightly lost on the way to her school, but luckily I managed to find it okay. She showed me to this beautiful little restaurant just off of Place Plumereau which was amazingly good and amazingly cheap. We both got this delicious pasta dish made with a house-made pesto with almonds and a spice I'm forgetting on top for six euros. For comparison, I've found kebab places that sell a panini, fries, and a beverage for six euros. It was a steal. I think I might just be making that my Wednesday lunch stop from now on... We also shared a pichet of Chinon, which was lovely, and finished off with chocolate mousse and warm berry crumble (we split in half and shared). Yes. I'll definitely be going back there.
After that, we walked around town randomly for a bit, and ended up visiting a museum of craftsmanship run by some Masonic order (the emblem was everywhere). It was pretty interesting; there were shoes of all different sizes (mouse to giant), model chateaux made of everything from horseshoes to sugar, and various other pieces of artwork. It was interesting, in any case.
After that, we sat by the river for a while before going back to catch our buses. Unfortunately, I missed mine, so I wasted a half hour and bought myself a pain au chocolat aux amandes since I knew I wouldn't have time to eat at home-- we went to the opera that evening as a class, and since I missed my first bus that left me five minutes in between the arrival of the second and the departure of the one I was taking with Susan to get there. So once I got back, I sprinted up to the house, where a woman was waiting in front of the door looking for Catherine, who wasn't back from work yet. So I told her that I didn't have the time to help her but gave her Catherine's cell, which evidently was the mystery of the evening and got Camille into trouble a bit because no one realised that I had ever come home, so it was assumed that Camille had given her the number and had just forgotten about it. (She was coming by to see if Catherine would do yard work for her; Catherine already has a full schedule and isn't accepting new clients) I dropped off my backpack, grabbed a few biscuits and then sprinted back to the bus stop again, where I waited literally thirty seconds before the bus arrived. Kind of stressful. Just a bit.
The opera was nice enough; however, it got long towards the end, and the singers were exhausted from the rehearsals and so weren't singing as strongly as they could have. I think I preferred the first, but all the same, I'm glad that I had the opportunity to go.
Thursday:
There was school, which was a math and PE day. I utterly cannot play volleyball, and that's all that needs to be said for the morning. In the afternoon we threw a surprise birthday party for our English teacher, which was fun; I was designated the one who waited in the classroom and made sure she didn't leave to look for us while everyone met up and prepared everything. It was great-- we listened to Michael Jackson and Frank Sinatra and had way too much sugar. I made Rice Krispie Treats, since it's now become my personal mission to introduce the French to them, and when Mme. Juigner saw them she was thrilled-- she went so far as to tell me it was like Proust's madeleine for her. Evidently her father had a job at Stanford when she was in kindergarten, so she went to elementary school in the US. At the cafeteria there, she has happy memories of such treats as peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches, mini-hot dogs and Rice Krispie Treats, so it was a sort of blast from the past for her. I wrote down the recipe so that she can make them with her daughter. I was happy that I could do something nice for her, since she and her class have made my experience at Lycee Vaucanson that much richer and more enjoyable.
In the evening, we went to the theater. I think it's my favorite of the plays we've seen thus far. The title was 'Le 20 novembre' (I shouldn't need to translate, I think), and recounted the final hour of a teenage boy planning a school shooting. It was an amazingly intense piece: it was a monologue, and the actress was incredibly talented. She really engaged the audience, asking them questions, looking them straight in the eye (her gaze was impossible to hold. When she looked at me, I couldn't)...the set-up helped with this: the audience was seated in a semicircle on the stage (the normal seating was closed off), and so she could move around and get really close to the people present. Extremely intense, disturbing, and fascinating. Afterwards she had a Q&A session with the audience and detailed some of her reasons for deciding to play this piece, her background as an actress, etc...She's German in origin, and she mentioned that when she puts on this piece in Germany, it can last up to ten minutes longer at the end because the audience will talk with her (the last line is, 'Do any of you have anything to say? Some commentary you wish to make...?'). In France, though, no one ever says anything. It made me want to see the piece played in the US, to see how the audience would react there...I could already see vast differences in my perspective in comparison to the French students. There has never been a school shooting in France (in Germany there have been a couple, however). I had another great conversation with Susan directly after... I bought the text of the monologue, because it made me want to react, write something in response. Tear it apart. Critique it. Poeticize it. Transform it. Something. I haven't figured out what exactly yet, but it's waiting on my bedside table for when I figure it out.
Friday:
The morning didn't start out brilliantly-- I didn't get to bed until two in the morning the night before (insomnia. It happens), and then for some reason neither my alarm nor Catherine's went off, so I got up ten minutes before I had to leave. Not only did I not get a shower, I didn't even get to wash my face or brush my teeth because the water was shut off (they were doing work down the street), so I ran out the door smelling and looking terrible, running on five hours' sleep and not happy with life in general...But luckily, the grumpiness manifested itself as a drawing inwards, falling-asleep-at-the-desk kind rather than a snappish kind, so mostly people looked at me and said, "Mais Angela, tu as l'air vachement fatiguee!" My general response was along the lines of, "Yeah... I think I've been tired since I was born, basically."
See, I have a sense of humor. Twisted, but I have one.
So, yeah. There was school, where classes and a lot of I-should-be-working-but-I'm-playing-Uno-instead-because-I-can't-concentrate-for-being-tired during the free periods happened.
Last bus story of the week: since English got out early, I managed to get to the bus stop and barely make an earlier bus into town to catch the 52 to Mettray. Normally I take the 5:55 bus in town to get home, but there's also one at 5:20 that I usually miss because I take a later 8 into town that doesn't get in until about 5:30. But since I got the earlier one and there was traffic that prevented the 5:20 from leaving, I managed to catch it by sprinting off of the 8 and just got it while it was stopped at the light just before it turned green. My closest yet-- ten seconds at the most. I'm starting to get the hang of public transport, I think. It'll be a disappointment going back to cars.
In the evening, Sandrine (a friend who goes to a different school) came over for help with her English. They're studying Shakespeare (I know, I was like, what? too), and so I corrected a few pieces she'd written and then helped her with comprehension of the passage. The balcony scene. I failed to find a good translation for the word 'prorogued,' though, so I ended up just paraphrasing the whole line ("My life were better ended by their hate/ Than death prorogued, wanting of thy love"). I also recited the prologue, which I only half-remembered (up until "Whose misadventured piteous overthrows/ Do, with their death, do bury their parents' strife.") It was fun, I enjoyed myself. And then we spent until midnight with Camille looking up crazy clips on YouTube, the best of which was Remi Kart:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MytfhzcSF-Y
Enjoy.
Saturday:
Not much. I got up late, and in the afternoon Camille took me around to some of her old neighbors' houses to sell some of my mysterious raffle tickets. Nine down, thirty-one to go. If all else fails, I'll buy the rest myself. I only had to pay fifty euros for the trip, really nothing compared to what I'd have to pay in the US; marking it up another sixty wouldn't be that bad. Think about it, London for a week for only 110 euros? Definitely worth it.
Apart from that...I called my parents...and... that was it.
Sunday:
A friend of Catherine's took me to the Easter brunch meeting of Tours's France-Etats-Unis organisation. It was a pleasant morning; it was the first time in a while I've had muffins or pancakes (classic-style, with maple syrup; Laurene made chocolate ones on Thursday for the surprise party which were really good, but not quite the same thing), and whoever made them made them quite well. Along with the food there was a poetry reading, in French and English. The woman wrote quite beautifully in French, but when she tried to recite in English...oh, lord. I don't find accents funny anymore, because I know how hard it is, but even so, I was biting my tongue. She tried to recite 'Imagine' as a poem, but the accent was just...I didn't even realise it was supposed to be 'Imagine' until two verses in, it was that bad. But in return I embarrassed myself by reading 'The Trolley Song,' without knowing the tune (I was pushed to the stage and she just put the paper in my hands, so I didn't have much choice), so fair's fair.
After that, there was a photo exhibition of national parks in the western US, where again I was biting my tongue. Despite the fact that all the photos were labeled and the man giving the presentation had been on the trip with the photographer who took the photos, he kept saying the pictures were from drastically different places...for example, he tried to put Joshua Tree in Arizona (it's in California), Chaco Canyon in Colorado (Good old NM), and even had some pictures Jasper-Banff, which is in Canada. He wouldn't believe me when I tried to correct him, though, despite the fact that I live in the western US...
After that, Catherine's friends showed me their photos and videos of Florida, which mostly consisted of Cypress Park in Orlando. The thing I found most interesting: during the video, they kept smiling and making comments like, "For us, this is America," and "I think we saw the essential." Whereas I found that they had mostly pictures of the kitsch and glitz that I absolutely detest in Florida. I just sort of smiled and nodded and kept myself from saying, "Yeah, baguettes and the Eiffel Tower: for me, that's France."
I also found it interesting that for how much they proclaimed to love the US, they had absolutely no interest in talking to me about where I live.
After the videos, they took me to the movies. It wasn't my type of film but it wasn't terrible either and I could tell that their daughter really loved it, so I didn't mind going. Their daughter was really nice and I liked her quite a bit; she has Down Syndrome, but she's really quite sweet and she was the only one that was really interested in me. She asked me really cute things like if I liked chocolate or if I was planning to have kids someday. And she didn't freak out about whether or not I understood her, which was better than her mother. It was really strange: her mother would ask me if I understood something, and regardless of whether I said yes or no, she would go ahead and re-explain it anyway. I think she re-hashed the movie plot for me no less than three times, despite the fact that I said that I understood it the first time she asked. And I will always ask and did ask a few times with her when I didn't understand something, so it shouldn't be that she thought that I was trying to cover up that I didn't understand.
Oh, and later at dinner, three different people tried to tell me that you pronounce the 'l' in half. And they were still suspicious and barely conceded that I was right in the end. I kept wanting to ask, who's the native English-speaker here?
I don't know. It was an interesting day. I know that they meant well and I think they were all quite sweet and generous to have taken me around, but all the same... It's just been very busy and hectic and I'm starting to feel a bit of the mal du pays, with two weeks left before spring break and an hour-long oral exam on Thursday (yep, analysing French literature on the spot in my second language-- fun!). But I think there are ups and downs and if this is the down then I'm happy to take it. It could be much worse. And I'm optimistic that this week will be better, despite that exam-- for one thing, I have seven hours fewer of class since all the French classes have been cancelled to make room for the exam, so that's already quite the treat. And who knows, maybe something spectacular will happen. Nothing on the horizon, but we'll see. You never know.
'Til the next!
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