more about cliches
In this ever painful process of throwing away/packing/mailing all the junk that has accumulated in this apartment, I found more cliches about Americans written by my students from my stereotypes lesson. (See this post.)
– The americans are Great actors in life all the days. (Oh, all the days!)
– All women want to become a cheerleader. (Curse you, Bring it On!)
– American are too superficial and they all have the same hair colour: blonde. (This one is ironic because I’m likely the only American they’ve ever met.)
– Their monies are often spectacular. (I think they were trying to say some people are exorbitantly wealthy, but Andrew Jackson is a handsome man.)
– Californians live only for surf. (There was a joke my freshman year of college that when the Californians on our floor were in high school, they all surfed to school. I’m glad this has been confirmed.)
– Some have like names = Bob and Brenda and Kimberly. (Are they only watching films from the 80’s?)
– Their music sounds are everytime sometime about sex. (I’m glad this gross error was corrected.)
– Americans people say allways “damn” “oh my god!!!” (ALWAYS!)
– They know only footbowl, NBA, and base-ball. They don’t know Zidane!! (I am definitely an expert on footbowl, and it’s actually a pretty legitimate complaint that Americans don’t know Zidane.)
– They are arrogant, they think that everywhere speak english. (But everywhere DO speak English!)
– Their gastronomy is equal to the humberger. (Mmmm, delicious quarter pound humberger.)
– The village people. (There were two that said this.)
– Girl -> bitch, pompom girl, Boy -> gangster, footballeur, cowboy. (This outlines the glass ceiling and double standards regarding gender roles in American society really well, don’t you think?)
Oh, how I will miss humorously awful French teenager English.
Speaking of cliches, Matthew and I saw this romantic comedy the other day:
I don’t enjoy many romantic comedies but I think it’s tired to dismiss them collectively as a genre, and occasionally I’ll see one that rings true or is at least original and charming. This wasn’t one of them, as roguishly charming as Romain Duris is.
Essentially, Romain Duris plays a guy who runs an agency with his sister and brother-in-law in which he is hired by friends or relatives of women in unhappy relationships to stage a romantic intervention and break up their couple. They do research on the women beforehand to find out their likes/dislikes/what makes them tick, and on principle will only intervene if the woman is unhappy. Then Romain Duris sweeps in, charms them, finds something to get emotional about, kisses them, claims he’s not good enough for them, the women say “Thank you,” he says, “For what?” and they say “Just, thank you.” And that’s the trick. Oh, and they inexplicably speak tons of languages. (Arnacouer is a pun in French, combining “arnaquer” [counterfeiter] and “coeur” [heart.])
Vanessa Paradis, known in America pretty much exclusively as Johnny Depp’s girlfriend, is getting married in a week (!!!) to someone with whom she is happy (!!!!) For reasons that are left cryptic at the beginning but turn out to be pretty boring, her father doesn’t want this, so he hires Romain Duris, who originally refuses to break up a happy couple but ultimately he takes it because for some reason he owes some Serbian thugs money and he really needs the job, so he pretends to be the bodyguard her father hired to protect her before the wedding.
(uh, spoiler alert…)
So predictably, Romain Duris pulls out all of the tricks and it doesn’t really work, and then he falls in love with her, and then the night before the wedding they have an amazing night together, and then she gets all the way down the aisle before she decides she’s in love with him too, and then Romain Duris runs back from the airport and back up the hill in Monaco where the wedding is taking place and Vanessa Paradis runs down the hill and then they run into each other and kiss and it’s over.
This whole running-away-with-another-guy-who-she-really-loves-when-she’s-about-to-get-married cliche was parodied in the Baxter, the under-appreciated Michael Showalter film which follows “The Baxter”, meaning the guy who gets left at the alter. The thing that makes this cliche kind of work is that “The Baxter,” while always shown to be a great guy, is kind of a square, and the guy who steals his woman is always kind of rugged.
Not so in this film! Both Romain Duris and Andrew Lincoln (aka that English guy in Love Actually who is in love with Keira Knightly who is married to his best friend…maybe this is karma?) are charming and handsome and appealing. They present literally nothing unlikeable about her fiance, or even any real evidence that she’s not in love with him. The only mildly unappealing thing is that his parents are jerks, but so are hers. And everything she likes in Romain Duris turns out to be a lie. He figures out in his research that she likes Dirty Dancing and Wham (seriously, what a terrible character) so he sings along to Wham in the car and, in the epic climactic night they spend together, does the Dirty Dancing dance with her in the middle of an Italian restaurant. (Said epic night sequence also involves a pretty criminal use of CGI dolphins in a swimming pool.) Everything that makes her fall in love with him is based on research he did beforehand to push her buttons.
In conclusion, this movie is terrible. Matthew’s main complaint is that all Asian people in the movie were assumed to be Chinese. (Matthew is half Filipino and frequently assumed to be Chinese in France.) This connects nicely with the “Stuff Parisians Like” post about generalities about Chinese people.
In other news, I got into the American master’s program I applied to, which is great but I’m still hoping to get into the French one. Also I am going to Frankfurt and Amsterdam and have a million things to send home and no source of income so I am going to be destitute when I go back to the US.
Hooray!
london and so many other things
I haven’t put anything here in almost a month and a lot has happened. Generally I write long posts full of word vomit, so this time for the sake of my sanity and yours* I will break things up into shorter posts over the few days**. The first thing is my trip to England over “Easter vacation” which was actually two weeks after Easter because of the breaking up of France into vacation “zones” so everyone doesn’t go on vacation at the same time, and also because France only pretends to be a Catholic country.
Parliament and Westminster Abbey from the Eye
Most of the time I was in London visiting Ben, who is a very nice young man who lived here in Paris for a couple of months and invited me to visit him when he went home.
This is what he looks like.
I went to London during the Toussaint vacation the year I was in Paris as a student and I’d already visited most of the major tourist sites, so while Ben was at work I did a lot of walking tours of areas I probably wouldn’t have visited on my own and learned interesting factoids.
This church was the inspiration for the first tiered wedding cake!
This is the church Shakespeare attended!
This bridge wobbled too much when it first opened, so they had to close it until a team of New York engineers fixed it. We saved them, just like after the war. ***
Seeing as the last time I was here the weather was less than stellar, I also spent a good amount of time in parks.
Tulips!
Tulips and the London Eye
Seriously, what is it with Europeans and squirrels?
Probably the most interesting part of the trip was going to Brighton, a seaside town in the south, mostly for an event at a little independent gallery where various artists/journalists/professors talked about reality as a concept, but also the sea!
Carnival rides on the pier
Gazebo on the beach at night
Chocolate-truffle-peanut-butter milkshake from a place called, I kid you not, Choccy woccy doo dah.
Overall an excellent trip with an excellent host who took excellent care of me.
Back in Paris, things are starting to get sad because I’m on my last month here (at least for the summer) and people are starting to go home. Katarina is back in Australia, and David’s gone to Frankfurt to start a real grown-up job. Determined not to write about grad school here until I’ve actually gotten acceptances/made a decision, out of fear of jinxing it. At least Matthew is here. He moved into David’s room for the month and he talks a lot, which drowns out all my neuroses bouncing around in my brain.
OK@+!
*I realize it’s narcissistic to assume this blog affects your sanity or even my own.
**I can’t promise this. I have a lot of free time now that my job is over but I am also very lazy.
***I don’t really think this, I just say things like this because in case you haven’t heard, I’m hilarious.****
****I am probably not hilarious.
paca pâques
I went south for Easter weekend with David.
First we were in Toulon…
He is happy because he's not in Paris.
Place de la Liberté
Then we went, on the recommendation of one of the English teachers where I work, to Ile de Porquerolles. It’s one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been, and the only reason I can think of that it wouldn’t be as touristic as some of the other places in Cote d’Azur is that it’s off the coast of some of the uglier cities in Cote d’Azur (Toulon? Hyeres? Eh…) If it was closer to Nice and Cannes, it would probably be packed all the time. It would be nice to go sometime when there’s actually beach weather and bike around the little paths…
Pretty!
Me being saucy (Before you get too jealous, it wasn't really warm enough for me to be barefoot with no jacket...)
Steps from the beach to the bike path
The island is mostly known for beaches, bike paths and parks. One of its only monuments is a little windmill called “Le Moulin de Bonheur,” or the Windmill of Happiness, which is supposedly how the owner sarcastically named it in 1971 when it was a ruin and he was placing an ad in the newspaper looking for a wife.
GET IT! HE IS DON QUIXOTE BECAUSE HE'S SPANISH! (This was his idea, not mine.)
The place in Hyeres where you have to catch the ferry to and from Ile de Porquerolles is called La Tour Fondue…
Does it look like a melted tower?
The next day we got up early and took the train to Nice…
Beasts of the fountain
Cote d'Azur, being azur
Bittersweet graffiti
He's thinking about Nutella.
We took a detour to Villefranche, which was beautiful before it started raining…
Cute little passageway...
Villefranche right before it started pouring...
…then back to Nice at night. There are seven statues of men in different sorts of meditation positions that glow and change colors at night. The “seven” are supposed to represent the seven continents, which sparked a long and heated debate on why in America we learn there are seven instead of five. David thinks we don’t consider “America” to be one continent because we don’t want to be associated with South Americans. He is just jealous because America is the center of the universe and all Spain has is ham and matadors.*
USA baby. U. S. A.
Our last day was the only day during which the weather was actually beach-appropriate. Cannes was somewhat overrated…it has a nice enough promenade but it’s not as pretty as Nice or Villefranche, and most of the beaches are private.
Private beaches in Cannes. Marylin Monroe is also arbitrarily on everything.
My parents told me to take this because there is a picture of me on this carousel as a baby.
We finished our trip in Antibes, which had nice beaches and a fantastic view of the Alpes.
I got more sunburned than I'm proud to admit considering how short of a time we were actually in the sun.
Other things:
1) My inability to find summer employment means I’m going back stateside at the end of May. I would have liked to stay the summer, but most of the people I care the most about here will be gone by then anyway, apart from my small handful of friends who are actually French and never seem to have any free time. This means I will probably get to go to Washington in June to see my friends before they all graduate and disperse, which I’m pretty happy about. I am a little bit worried about wasting away jobless at my parent’s house in July and August, but then I will start grad school either at Madison or here in Paris, and everything will be okay.** I’ve applied for a summer job in Portland, but I have learned not to expect much from such things.
2) Places I would like to go before June:
a) London
b) Marseille again
c) Frankfurt when David moves there? Maybe?
d) Somewhere Latin with a coast (Portugal? Italy?)
3) Now that it’s getting warmer my students have gotten in the habit of remarking how sexy I look. This job has been good to me but I’m still pretty happy it’s ending.
*In case this is the first time you’ve read this blog, that’s a joke and not actually how I feel.
**Or I will be rejected from all the grad schools I apply to and will starve in the street.
on rugby
Living with a sports enthusiast, I have gone to two rugby matches in the past month or so. I became moderately interested in it when I was here as a student because the World Cup was in Paris at the time, and because I caught glimpses of it on TV in bars and it looked like American football with all the boring parts cut out, and because on the night of the nuit blanche the French team beat the strongly favored New Zealand All Blacks and everyone in the street went crazy.
I’ve become moderately more interested because one of the teams that competes in France, Racing Metro 92, is based in Colombes, which is the city where I teach, and their stadium, Stade Yves du Manoir (which hosted the Summer 1924 Olympics and the 1938 World Cup Soccer as Wikipedia just told David!) is right across the street from the high school. Earlier this month we saw a match of the Paris team in the much bigger, much flashier Stade de France (complete with groping security and what we are pretty sure was a drag queen pre-show.) The Paris team lost to Toulouse, supposedly because Toulouse is a significantly stronger team but I don’t think their cotton candy colored uniforms help.
Seriously, this is what they look like.
Today we went and saw Racing play against a team from a town that starts with a B that I haven’t heard of and still haven’t bothered to look up. It was a little weird taking the bus to Colombes on the weekend. One of the other important things about the Racing team is that it’s home to Sebastien Chabal, one of the stars of the French national team. He’s known because he’s very large, even by rugby player standards (and also because he’s good at it or something) but he’s mostly famous because he has impressive facial hair, which is a big deal for me to say because I lived for some time in the pacific northwest.
Don't you want to touch it? I bet it gives you magic powers.
In conclusion, we won but just barely, it was an exciting game, and I got a flag of the team and David managed to get a picture on his cellphone of me accidentally poking myself in the eye with it but that will not be displayed on this blog.
I will leave you with a picture of David and his German friends with the weird pizza that we made before I go off and drink the beer they left in our house.
It had corn and ketchup on it.
Bisous mes petits lapins!
some german things
Photo dump:
Piece of the Berlin Wall
Matthew buys candy
Marx and Engels, hanging out in Berlin
Reichstag Palace/Parliament
David outside the zoo
Tiergarten park
Brandenburg Gate/Paris Place!
A feral German child. I gave him a 50 cent piece and told him to invest it wisely. It was the least my bourgeois heart could do.
Charlottenberg Palace
Jesus
Perhaps an oversimplification?
Gate to Sachsenhausen concentration camp: Work makes freedom?
Electric fence and Sachsenhausen
Travel buddies in Hamburg!
Hamburg town hall
Church in Hamburg - the middle was bombed out in an air raid by the allies
March 1st: Hamburg decided Christmas is over
Jazz! On a boat!
Beer!
Obervations:
1) German is a hideous language.
2) One of the English teachers at my school told me she didn’t like Berlin because she thought it had “no soul.” I don’t think this is entirely fair. It’s definitely not a beautiful city the way European capitals are generally advertised as being, but the cheap cost of living has created a community of young people that doesn’t exist in a lot of big cities.
3) Call me the PC police, but concentration camps = maybe not the best place for Facebook photo ops? “Oh, crematorium! SMILE! Check out that blood stain still on the ground from when the Nazis would pretend to take people’s heights, then shoot them in the back of the neck! OMG THIS IS TOTALLY MY PROFILE PIC!” Slightly tasteless.
4) German food was too beefy and greasy and mostly gave me stomachaches, however: Kebab in Germany = WAY better than kebab in France. We went to a kebab place for dinner one of the first nights in Berlin out of desperation and I was a little disappointed, because kebab in France is generally something I eat because I am hungry and nothing else is open, not because I enjoy the way it tastes. How wrong I was! In addition to being a few euros cheaper, kebab in Germany is grilled to perfection, not too fatty, full of vegetables and doesn’t end up half on your plate at the end of it. French kebabs have gone from being disappointing to basically inedible in my book.
5) Hamburg is pretty!
6) We spent all night Saturday at a club called Magnet in Berlin, which was especially fun because:
a) They played music I actually enjoy (The Pixies! The Postal Service!)
b) The alcohol was actually affordable and
c) The crowd was full of people who mostly look and dress like I do.
This is a sharp contrast to clubs in Paris, where:
a) They mostly play David Guetta and a lot of this nonsense
b) 5 euro beer! 10 euro cocktails!
c) The crowd is full of men in their 40s hitting on 17-year-old girls while all the girls who are not 17 stand around the perimeter of the room making judgey faces at anyone who looks like they’re having fun.
David (who is particularly vitriolic against the lack of sociability in Paris) said as we were leaving, “Look! You see how much fun we had! We almost never have that much fun in Paris. That’s every weekend in Madrid!” I thought about this, and told him that I like Paris because I like taking walks around pretty buildings and listening to people speak French, and that maybe I’m willing to sacrifice a more fulfilling and more affordable social life for that. He thinks I am ridiculous. I would probably be a happier person if I didn’t have such misplaced priorities. Oh well.
7) Here is a Takashi Murakami-produced music video that was featured in a Pop Art exhibition we saw in Hamburg. You will enjoy it if you enjoy cutesy Japanese things, vaguely racist double entendres and Kirsten Dunst.
new frontier
The past couple of days I have been sort of homesick, which is a pretty big deal because I am a person who has moved around a lot and I don’t feel homesick all that frequently.
A while back I met a guy from Oregon who is here studying at the HEC (a pretty well-to-do business school) who said while he likes Europe, as an American he misses the concept of “a frontier”. I remember at the time thinking this was a pretentious and slightly narrow-minded thing to say, but thinking about it the past couple of days there is some metaphorical truth to it.
My students here already have large parts of their future decided for them. They are smart, they will take this type of baccalaureate which will get them into this kind of “grande ecole” and they will be successful. They’re not so smart, they will take this type of baccalaureate and be a nurse’s assistant or a paper-pusher.
And all people have been saying about getting a Master’s in France is that it’s grueling and soul-destroying and unemployment is high, high, high. And for all the aspersions that can be cast about Evergreen and the employ-ability of its graduates, I really did feel like I was learning and being productive and building myself a future when I was there. As much as I would have to pay for a Master’s in the states, maybe that’s a really important element.
The field behind my house in Minnesota, December 2006
I know the idea of a meritocracy and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and there is always hope on the horizon and blah blah blah that America likes to sell is largely smoke and mirrors, championing stories of certain lucky people to make the exception look like the rule. But regardless, America DOES manage to sell that image. It sells the feeling. Feeling hopeful is equally or more important than hope actually existing, isn’t it?
Mostly I just had a disappointing weekend and I will probably still be submitting everything to everywhere and keeping all my options open, but I should probably start doing more sleeping and less thinking.
boulangerie cycle of shame
1) Why would I get a croissant when I could get pain au chocolat, which is the same thing but with CHOCOLATE?
2) Why would I get bread when I could get brioche, which is the same thing except with BUTTER AND SUGAR?
3) As long as I’m getting brioche I may as well get brioche with CHOCOLATE CHIPS!
4) If I am going to get a baguette, I might as well EAT THE WHOLE THING IN ONE SITTING COVERED IN CHEESE AND HAM AND DELICIOUS!
je veux mettre des batons dans les roues
(mettre des batons dans les roues = “put sticks in the wheels” – throw a wrench in the works)
I was listening to the Dan Savage podcast the other day and this college girl called in saying she really, really wanted to get pregnant, to the point that she was considering messing with her birth control without telling the people she’s sleeping with because she can’t shake the urge to get pregnant. Dan Savage said that she was probably feeling tempted to throw everything off course because when you get stuck in a routine in college, it’s tempting to want to shake things up, get off the tracks, move your life in a different direction, etc. but that having a baby was a pretty extreme manifestation of that.
I definitely and unequivocally have no temptation to have babies at this point* but I have been wrestling with the self-destructive temptation to “throw a wrench in the system.” I am working on getting all the paperwork I need together to apply for a masters in France/America/summer job/renewal of contract/etc. so I have lots of options open for next year, but everytime I go to fill out a form I am overwhelmed with a sense of “Why are you even doing this? Do you even want this?”
Maybe it’s because it’s winter, maybe it’s because I am 22 and my quarter life crisis is keeping me firmly in its grasp, maybe it’s because I see my Facebook acquaintances/fellow Evergreen alumni doing things like literally running away and joining the circus**, maybe it’s because some of my personal relationships aren’t really going in the direction I would have hoped*** and it’s given me the feeling that in the end no one cares what I do because no one will be around but me and I am only really accountable to myself, but I have been tempted lately to just buy a one-way plane ticket to Seattle, with no real plan, just to see what happens.
In the end I will probably pull things together and turn in my applications and choose a direction and make myself a real future like a real grown-up, but this is the first year I haven’t had a solid plan for the following fall and I have sort of enjoyed the thrill of it. And also, as much as I love Paris, I do miss Washington because it’s the only place I have ever felt completely secure and surrounded by people who like me for me, as opposed to Paris where I am made to feel inadequate relentlessly.
In conclusion, aaannnnnngggsssst.
gray grey gris
*Although, Axel’s mother is on bedrest because she’s pregnant with twins and the other day his dad was going out for the night. He made sure everything was prepared before he left, but he told Axel to be good and to do whatever had to be done to help his mother. Axel slapped his face on both sides like the Home Alone cover**** and said “Oh, mais je ne sais meme pas comment faire la cuisine!” (“Oh, but I don’t even know how to make dinner!”) which was pretty much the cutest thing ever, and I was reading a movie review the other day that said foreign children are automatically cuter than domestic children, which I think is true. But I still don’t want babies, at least not today.
**I am not acrobatic enough for this but I would probably make an okay clown.
***Not all of them, just a couple of the more important ones.
****I should stop making dated references that are overused anyway.
la chute de l’armoire
1) Katarina came over because I was making dinner on Friday night. We were talking in the kitchen while I was tenderizing chicken (which was luckily in a plastic bag). Katarina was supposedly leaning on the kitchen cabinet when suddenly the whole thing lurched forward and fell on our heads and shoulders.
At least my chicken got super tender.
Cleaning up the wreckage
When we lifted it off the oven to put it on the ground our hands got sticky because the back was covered in glue. It’s a good thing that’s what was holding it to the wall, as well as two bent screws. Luckily no people and only two dishes were harmed in the accident, one of which is reparable.
2) This week I am on pretend vacation because the premieres and terminales have a practice bac exam all week, and since only two of my classes are with secondes the teachers told me I could just not come. I have no idea what to do with this week, apart from a lot of sleeping, some shopping and possibly a visit to this place. I should also get around to climbing the Arc de Triomphe at some point, since I can do it for free.
3) I am applying for a summer job as a study abroad counselor for high school students coming to Paris for a few weeks. This is the only job I’ve ever applied for that I’ve actually felt qualified for, instead of just tweaking my resume to make it look like I’m qualified and then hoping for the best, though I should probably not get too cocky because I am excellent and counting my eggs before they hatch.
4) Speaking of idiomatic expressions, I bought a book of them at Gilbert Jeune. Some choice ones:
avoir des fourmis dans les jambes: (to have ants in your legs) To have ants in your pants…it doesn’t rhyme in French, and having ants in your legs is a little weirder than just having them in your pants.
se noyer dans une verre d’eau – (to drown yourself in a glass of water) To be stressed out and distracted to the point that you make stupid mistakes – I am frequently drowning myself in glasses of water.
du jus de chaussette – (sock juice) – weak coffee. Gross.
avoir le vin gai/triste/mauvaise/etc. – (to have happy/sad/bad wine) To be a good/bad/sad/happy drunk…the entire first chapter of this book is about drinking.
avoir un chat dans la gorge – (to have a cat in your throat) – To have a frog in your throat…one of my parents’ favorite stories to recount from my childhood is the time when I was six and woke up with a sore throat and my mother told me I had a frog in my throat, and I was distressed about it the whole day to the point that I told my teacher I was really worried about the frog in my throat. Perhaps if the expression was “cat” and not “frog” I wouldn’t have taken it literally, since at six I probably would have known a cat wouldn’t fit in my throat. A frog however…
avoir l’estomac dans les talons – (to have your stomach in your heels) – to be very hungry. This is another expression I would have taken literally when I was six.
ramene ta fraise – (bring back your strawberry) – get your butt over here. Katarina pointed out that this sounds dirty. I’m resolved to stay away from even the most innocent of fruit metaphors.
5) I am going to Berlin and Hamburg with David and Matthew for the February vacation, and I anticipate everyone in Germany talking and behaving like Karl Lagerfeld.
6) I really wish I was in Seattle for Valentine’s Day so I could watch Dan Savage destroy leftover articles from dead relationships again. Last year was the best Valentine’s Day ever. If you are in Seattle, you should go.
7) This American Life reminded me that this is an excellent song:
je n’ai pas peur des americains
“ni des cons ni des poiliticiens
mais j’ai peur de t’attraper la main
et que tu m’esquives encore”
1) I have decided to stop complaining so much about work, because it is sort of unreasonable to complain about a job that gives me an almost-livable salary for 12(ish) hours a week of n’importe quoi. I am still going to make fun of people at work who do ridiculous things, though, such as:
a) During a lesson about cliches when I had students think of cliches they have about Americans, one girl said all of our movies have “happy hands.” Everyone in the class agreed, American movies definitely always have happy hands. I had no idea what she was talking about, so I made her show me what she wrote – “happy ends.” This is an example of hyperforeignism, because there is no aspirated H sound in France and the French often forget to pronounce the H when speaking English, so sometimes they overcompensate and put it where it doesn’t exist. This is like when Americans use the expression “coup de grâce” (“blow of mercy”/the final blow that puts someone out of their misery) and pronounce it without the “ce” sound because often in French they don’t pronounce the end of words. (In this case what Americans say sounds like “coup de gras”/blow of fat.)
Happy hand?
b) A conversation with a French teacher at the high school:
Teacher: Your name is Amanda?
Me: Yes.
Teacher: That’s weird. It sounds African. Is that a common name in your country?
Me: Yes, it’s very common.
Teacher: That’s so strange. French girls are never called Amanda.
Me: [No, because French girls are all called Anne-Laure-Sophie-Claire-Marie Dupont-Chateaubriand.] No, the French version seems to be Amandine.
Teacher: Yes, but only old people have that name.
I smiled politely.
2) I finally went to the university to inquire about enrolling with my weird transcript. I didn’t really succeed at explaining that I do not have grades, not even ABCD grades, until finally the woman said as long as they’re in English and not Danish someone will be able to read them. I will have to take a French proficiency test, which makes me nervous because I’m bad at standardized tests and because even though I get lots of compliments about my spoken French I haven’t had to seriously write in French since the last quarter at Evergreen. I would still rather take a French proficiency test ten times that take the GRE once, because I’ve realized the only reason I can add/subtract/multiply/divide at all is because of the flashcards my dad made me do constantly in elementary school and not because I actually understand how math works.
3) Yesterday David and Katarina called me out for doing this French air-puff-lip thing that involves filling your lips with air and blowing when someone asks you a question you weren’t expecting and you’re trying to think of a response. I have either picked this up from Corentin or my old host mother, because they both do it constantly. Two is not really a good sample size for calling it a “French thing” but I’m going to assume it is anyway.
4) We have started doing pub quizzes on Monday nights. It’s sort of like knowledge bowl in high school, except with more alcohol and less crushing disappointment.
5) Can anyone tell me why the little feedjit thing on the right thinks I’m in Bordeaux whenever I come on this blog from the high school? I am quite far from Bordeaux.
6) I have evangelized Community to David and Katarina. I’ve loved it ever since I went home for Christmas. How come no one told me how great this show was earlier?
@+
Panda in Paris 