Fancy Nancy

Here are some more pictures of Nancy, my future home.  

This picture was taken in the Musée des Beaux Arts, which I adore.  It's small but has a Picasso, a Monet, and the light room in the above picture.   Start saving your pennies to come see me.  

Things in Eyguières right now are on the upswing because...

I made some French friends tonight.  Well, I actually found them on couchsurfing.com, which is a website where you can find people to either stay with or meet up with in different cities all over the world.  They were the only people in Eyguières, and I sent the most sad and pathetic email telling them I didn't know a soul in the village and asked if they wanted to meet up.  They invited me over for an aperatif and invited some of their friends from Salon.  They're all very very nice, welcoming people.  They invited me over to their house for a party on Saturday, and have offered to take me to Arles one weekend.  They also said that they didn't hear errors when I was speaking French.   Oouuuuuuuiiiiii

Things are also better with the family after another series of talks.  I think the Cold War between the mother and me might be over.  It's hard to explain the situation in the house, but both the parents and I realized our shortcomings, and we're all trying to overcome them.   

I also found out that I can watch episodes of "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report" online.  So I've been catching up on American news and comedy, and that's cheered me up.

Other than that, I guess I'm getting excited that I don't have THAT much longer here.  With my new plane ticket, I return to the US the 1st of August and spend the weekend in Atlanta so that I can go to the consulate on Monday the fourth and come back later that day.  Carlos arrives the 15th of August, and we both leave on the 9th of September.   I'm telling you all this so that you can all clear your schedules to see me at some point.  Carlos and I will be going to Greenville, New Orleans, Birmingham, and possibly elsewhere so maybe we'll be seeing you.

And here's your quote of the day compliments of my new friend Florent, which I think gives some insight into French cuisine.  "What you can do is, mix some goat cheese, red wine, and scallops and then you wait a year until it's moldy and then you eat it.  Yeah...it's pretty good." 

Cats don't bite.

Who out there has noticed the degradation of my English? Carlos gleefully reported some errors in the last entry, which in my defense I wrote in a hurry because I wanted to publish the news about my new job. Further, constantly switching back and forth from French and American keyboards is enough to screw anyone up. But it's no lie that my English wasn't what it used to be--that I'm making grammatical errors and that my speech has become a little awkward. For someone who wants to be a writer, a craftsman of language, living in a foreign country and losing my English is probably a bad idea. Oh well.

Speaking of losing things, I'm wondering about my accent. I have no idea where it is anymore, but I just know that within five minutes of being back in the South, every other word will be "y'all," every word will have at least two syllables, and I'll be back to talking like a bumpkin.

Anyway...

I'm thinking that part of my problem here is a result of some cultural differences. My friend Liz and I were talking the other day, and she was telling me that French parents are notoriously strict, and I found some interesting newspaper articles when I did a google search

(if you're bored, read this 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/portal/main.jhtmlxml=/portal/2007/06/15/nosplit/ftmaman115.xml). Who knows what "il faut" means? We don't have a real, direct translation in English, which I think is telling. It means, "It is necessary to," and people use it all of the time "Il faut do things exactly like this" or "Il faut do things exactly like that" There is a specific way that everything has to be, and it is the job of the parents to enforce this every second. The newspaper article I listed above states that parenting in France is only about a transmission of information, instead of providing a loving environment.  

However, there is another factor in this household to account for the insanity around here. The mother has a talking problem--she talks all of the time. She's one of those people that thinks out loud--seriously, all of the time. So part of the reason we had trouble communicating at first was because most of the time, I couldn't tell if she was talking to herself or to me. And I still don't know a lot of the time. So when there's nothing to say, her verbal cascade is aimed at the children. Poor things.  It even goes to the extent of contradiction.  One day in the living room she said to Julie, "Watch the television!" and two minute later it was, "Stop watching television!"

The other day Sushi told the mother how the cat bit her while she was gone (which was true), and the mom said, "No, it didn't. Cats don't bite. Dogs bite. Cat's don't. God, you're stupid," and she continued to talk talk talk about how cats don't bite for another twenty minutes. Sushi sat there showing her mother the bite marks and looking confused.

The mother also completely undermines my authority. Anytime I give an order (even when I'm trying to enforce something she just said to do), she immediately says the opposite. Whenever I try to do something for the kids when she's there, they won't let me and want their mom to do it. She should just say, "No, Kate is going to do it," but she just does it. So I can't do anything at all when she's there, and even when I'm alone with the kids, they demand their parents.

So anyway, life here returned to uncomfortable despite my sit down chat with the father, and I don't know why. The mother finally conquered her fear of talking to me, and with this came a deluge of criticism about the way I do everything--all the things I haven't been doing right for the past two months. Sometimes it's good because before, it was just obvious that she wasn't happy with the way I was doing things, but I didn't know how she DID want me to do them. And I want to respect the rules of the house and the way they do things around here. But most of the criticism is the same with the kids--constant and unnecessary.

I've been to Salon-de-Provence a few more times since I last updated, mostly to take care of some banking issues, but I took the opportunity to go to Nostradamus' house, which was kind of spooky but pretty neat.

Reorganizing my trip home along with Carlos' has been super super-stressful, but now I am able to start imagining my life next year, which is exciting, looking for roommates and an apartment, etc etc. Nancy is a center of Art Nouveau art and architecture, which I adore. I'm really starting the countdown to get out of here. I'm hoping that all the planning for my fun next year will help the time pass quickly!

Hired

So...the good news is that I got a job for next year. I got hired to work as a lectrice at the Université de Nancy. Who remembers Nancy? Avid blog readers should know that I have been there twice on day trips (it's 45 minutes from Metz by train). Let me show you a picture of my future home.


I'm feeling a little bit underhanded in the way I found out about the job. I was reading the blog of one of my friends from Metz. She fell in love with a French guy and is trying to stay in the area. She applied to a bunch of lectrice positions and accepted one at a small school in Alsace. After accepting this one, she got offered the Nancy post, but sadly had to decline it even though Nancy is a bigger, cooler city and is closer to her boyfriend because she's already accepted the post at Mulhouse. So...as soon as I read her blog post about how she sadly couldn't accept the post at Nancy, I sent my CV to the guy at Nancy. And I got it. Yay! I am so thankful to have employment. I hasn't heard anything about being renewed as an assistant next year, and I was starting to have nightmares of working in Barnes and Noble again. The good news is that I will definitely be in a decent sized city and can probably take some classes at the university at the same time. And the pay is better. The work I think involves helping students learn English specific to their respective disciplines.

BUT...and there's always a but, isn't there? The job starts earlier than the assistant job, and I'd already gotten my plane ticket based on the assistant timeframe. Stupidly, I booked my ticket through some silly website which might not refund the ticket or allow me to change it (Beware of edreams.com, people!) So I'm looking at having to buy another plane ticket, and Carlos who still wants to visit me in the states, will have to change his too (luckily his ticket is refundable!) And coming home earlier means that I will no longer be going to Spain before heading home, which is a real pity because I was looking forward to a few weeks of relaxation on the beach.

I'm not able to be happy about this quite yet until I get this plane ticket business resolved, and because my apartment company in Metz owes me about 1000E, and we've been playing some pretty vicious phone tag. This is made worse by the fact that my cell phone has no credit, and I'm also out of Skype credit because for some reason Visa's measures to protect my card from theft are also preventing me from using it online so I can't call anyone...including anyone in France. Why hasn't anyone over here ever heard of a 1-800 number. Geez...

So in the end, my supernanny tactics worked, and the kids are much more obedient with me. I guess they were just testing their boundaries with me at the beginning. Now when I tell them to do something, they usually do it, and I haven't had any major tantrums in a while. They're better behaved with me than they are with their mom, and they're happier because I let them play like normal kids. So keeping the kids is usually a cinch.

Plus, I've developed a babysitting strategy that I employ all of the time. Make them tired. This is my mantra. So they ride their bikes a lot. We go to the park and run around, etc etc. One day when Julie was acting très vilaine, I made her go outside and take a few laps around the house. The main reasoning for this strategy is that they will take a nap in the afternoon, and the more tired they are, the more they sleep, and I can get up to 3 hours of free time in the middle of the day. The other reasoning is that they're usually bad when they just have a lot of energy that they don't have an outlet for so when they're tired, they're better behaved in general.

Having the kids like me more has its problems too, though. Now it's hard to go to my room without a lot of knocks on my door. Sometimes it's sweet. Sushi knocked on my door the other day just because she wanted to give me a kiss. But privacy is hard when they want to play all of the time. The solution to this is to get out of the house more when I am not needed. The other day I went for a walk, and ended up in the middle of the mountains. I am in the middle of the Alpilles mountain range, which is pretty picturesque.

I'm lonelier than I thought I would be in general. I thought that having projects, like working on my French and Spanish and the ambitious cross-stitching project I've taken on would keep me busy enough, but none of this really compensates for real social interaction (nor does sending facebook messages or emails to my friends). I've actually started to develop a little bit of a Scottish accent because the only interaction I have with spoken English is through the Spanish-learning podcasts that I have downloaded, and they are given by people from Scotland.

I made a friend the other day, which was pretty exciting. It happened in the park at the slide. She's a young mother who actually worked as an au pair in Chicago so I think she was sympathetic to my situation and gave me her number. I'm a little nervous about calling, but I think I will...I'd do just about anything to get out of the house and to talk to someone else.

I'm developing a sort of resistance to French, which is a result of just being tired of being in a foreign culture. I'm speaking in a weird franglish (ex. "Qu'est ce que tu do?" which is franglish for "What are you doing?" w) I'm not using English when I don't know the word in French or when I forget that I should be speaking in French. It's just my body/mind saying, "No, French, we're tired of you."

I am still having problems with my landlord in Metz if you will believe it. He actually stole a lot of money from the company and disappeared. With this money is my 500E deposit, which I still haven't gotten back. AND as if this wasn't enough, I got my bank statement yesterday, and my rent was drafted for the month of May out of my bank account even though I moved out in April. This is starting to get a little bit unreal. Carlos is going down there first thing Monday to yell at them.

Switzerland?!

I spent Saturdaynight at a country music festival in a suburb of Geneva, Switzerland with Carlos.

I'm as surprised as you are. No really. Let me try to explain how this happened because the last time I updated I had no travel plans and wasn't planning to see Carlos until August.

I found out recently that I had to take an errand to Switzerland for a reason I don't really want to talk about because it just makes me mad, but I'll tell you that it's the result of the fact that various functionaries (or dysfunctionaries?) mislead me so I had an errand there. So Thursday I was talking to Carlos for the first time in a while since he's without internet and has had exams and papers lately. So I mentioned how I was not excited about going to Geneva because honestly, I have had enough traveling lately, especially alone. And then only 12 hours before my departure, Carlos ran down to the train station and bought himself a ticket to Geneva. The family agreed to let me have the entire weekend off. Et voilà...instant romantic weekend. in Switzerland.

The official title of my blog is "Kate's French Misadventures," but I think another good title of the blog would be "Why I Hate French Trains." Every single time, I have a tight connection, my arriving train is late, and every time I have a connection that is too long, the departing train is late. I will omit describing in detail how this happened to me on each of the 6 branches of my trip and will limit my rant to the Lyon-Geneva section My train to Lyon was 30 minutes late giving me a total of 4 minutes to get to my connection . I ran to the big board of departures, and somehow the track of the train wasn't posted. I ran past all of the tracks looking for one headed t Geneva to no avail. Finally, one minute past the departure time, the name of the city disappeared (meaning it had left). I asked some train workers, and they said "Oh, it's not a train. It' s an autocar. Go outside. Hurry." My ticket said specifically "train," but I ran outside , found 20 unmarked buses, asked around until I found one to Geneva, climbed on and got the last seat. About an hour into the ride, someone came up to the bus driver and said, "There is a mysterious smoke filling the back of the bus, even though no one is smoking. We are starting to suffocate." And what did he bus driver do? He opened his window a tiny crack, and didn't even stop So I spent the rest of the ride hoping I didn't suffocate and praying that the bus didn't explode.

I did make it to Geneva in one piece, and a few hours later Carlos did too We had a lovely weekend, despite the rain. I saw some UN building,s a cool art museum, John Calvin's church, the famous Jet of Water in Lake Geneva, and well, a lot of banks. There is a Swiss law that hotels have to give guests cards to get free public transportation so Saturday night Carlos and I decided just to surf the trams around the city. We ended up in a suburb where we saw a music festival so we jumped off the bus...and what did we discover but tents full of Swiss cowboys and country music. So we grabbed dinner (and the best crepe full of Swiss chocolate that you could ever imagine) and enjoyed the festival and the most random night I've had in a long time.

A weekend is simply not enough time for something like this. I ended up crying more than I would have liked. You just wait until someone jumps on a train to another country for you with less than a day's notice. You will cry too. And on top of that, let's be honest, I'm starting to develop a little bit of Cinderella complex around here in Eygac,mfewfjkm,. The other day the mother just turned the light out on me...twice. It was clear that I was in the room, and then she turned it out, and I was in the dark. I'm feeling like a servant these days. It's not that I'm overworked--just kind of ignored, neglected. So being in beautiful Switzerland with Carlos was amazing, but I couldn't shake the knowledge that all-too-soon I had to go back. So now I'm back with a heavy heart and a backpack full of chocolate, wondering if I'm happier now after my wonderful weekend or sadder after having such a great time and then having to come back here.�