TGIF

TGIF--while I am glad that it's Friday, I am kind of anxious for next week to start--that is after I do some lesson planning this weekend.  I taught my kids TGIF today among other things.  I only taught for an hour today so now as I sit on my bed with my kiddy cocktail and store brand "little school boy" cookies I can finally update you guys.  It is about 20 degrees Celsius here in Strasbourg and sunny :-D (so like high 60's I think).

Last week Thursday I went to Triberg, Germany which is in the Balck Forest.  It was actually a very cute little town, apparently known for making cuckoo clocks.  There are stores where the walls are covered with all different kinds of cuckoo clocks not ticking at the same time...I don't know how someone could work at a store like that and not go crazy.  Their main attraction is having the "highest waterfalls in Germany."  We climbed up the path as high as we could, which was quite a feat.  After the hike, we got lunch at a tiny little restaurant--I of course got a brat and sauerkraut with a little bit of Hefe Weissen (I mean, who goes to Germany and doesn't get those things?).  After a somewhat salty meal, we were in the mood for something sweet so we made our way to a german boulangerie and had a slice of the Black Forest Cake.  The Black Forest Cake is basically like a rum cake with cherries in the middle...it was not bad.

This past week I started teaching and shadowing.  At my junior high I was mostly just shadowing the teachers and answering questions from little kids in English.  The questions ranged from "what is your origin" to "what is the fashion like in America" to "have you ever seen jackie chan" to "do you have a boyfriend" and so on and so on.  The first question that I was ever asked (and I hope I didn't put this in the last blog post?) was "do you have any hobbies?"  However, I heard the word "hobbies" to be "obese" because the French have a hard time with our H sound.  I think the funniest question however, was "Miss, I am Muslim, does that make you scared?"  I answered with a blank face, "No."  Then she recanted with "But if I am Muslim, that means I am terrorist.  Does that make you scared?"  Again, unpahsed, I asnwered, "No."  The levels of English that I will be teaching range from very good, where the teacher can talk in english 90% of the time to first time learners of English where I have been given the authority to sing nursery rhymes with them if I so choose.

I will admit that I was a little shell shocked in terms of teaching after this first week, but the last class that I had today went really well so that gives me hope for the next week.  I do have some classes that don't behave but that's natural.  I realized one day that I kind of felt like Mr. Stanek from freshman year humanities at ETHS, so after that class all I could do was laugh.  Anyway, I feel like things are finally starting to pick up and now that I have an actual schedule (and internet at my place!!) I am feeling more completely settled in.  I continue to live on a pretty tight budget here, I am certainly not living in the lap of luxury out here.  I mean, when it comes down to it, when you live somewhere and are setting yourself up it's kind of all the same--minus the quality of bread, freshness of food, and relaxed lifestyle.  Oh well, more to come later.  A bientôt!

All I Can Say Is That My Life Is Pretty Plain...

Ok, sorry for the long overdue blog post!  I have been in Strasbourg for about 2 weeks now I think.  Still not feeling completely settled in, but that's probably because I don't have internet at my place yet...although I figured out who I'm going to go with finally so hopefully in like a week and a half I will have internet at my place...we will see.  Right now I'm in Mcdonald's (I know, I know, it makes me sound really desperate for internet...well I am) and it's quite a scene.  A lot of computers, because the WiFi (in France pronounced wee-fee), a couple having a romantic date across the way from me, and they are out of the Royal Cheese, which is a cheeseburger, however they have the Royal Bacon available which is, as anyone could guess, a bacon cheeseburger.  That was just a run on sentence, wasn't it?  Oh well, that's Mcdonald's in France for you: romantic dates, computers, and no cheeseburgers available, but bacon cheeseburgers and big macs available.

I am enjoying my little studio because even though it's small, it's cozy and I have way less places to get dirty.  I am still doing a lot of cooking which is very enjoyable, although I have given in and bought some frozen meals too--although when the frozen meals have Joël Robuchon on them (he was voted chef of the century), the frozen food is really not that bad.  The endless baguettes are amazing.  The espresso is fantastic.  The tarte flambées, as volatile as they would be for a lactard like my dad, are delectable.  Most of my fruits and veggies come from the market by my house hence they are a lot more fresh than in the U.S.  The Laughing Cow cheese (La Vache Qui Rit) tastes better here.  The butter is different here, but in a good way.  :-D

The people are also awesome.  I honestly have not met another assistant that I don't like yet.  It's nice to know that there are other Americans out there having the same struggles with a french bureaucratic system also haha.  I have met most of the teachers I will be working with and they all seem pretty nice.  I'll let you know how my classes are when I actually start working.  There is a médiathèque here which is bascially like a huge library that also has tons of CDs, DVDs, and Tv series.  So I have taken advantage of this by renting the 6th season of Seinfeld and one of the seasons of Law & Order SVU (in french it's New York: Unité Spéciale).  I am watching DVDs in season 5, and actually came upon an episode that I have never seen before!  I was amazed. 

So all in all, things are going well.  Still working on the internet sitch, but I guess that's ok.  I'm going to the Black Forest tomorrow with some friends so that should be fun.  They're actually the same mountain range as the Vosges mountains, although the Black Forest is the part that is in Germany.  That's about all I have to say.  Hope all is well on the other side of the big pond.  Love and miss you all.  Barring any complications, I will most likely be home for Christmas break...

2 days left on this side of the ocean!

Hello Everyone!

I've decided to keep the same blog address/site from the year that I studied abroad just for simplicity's sake.  So I'm finding out that my ways of procrastinating have not totally left me yet...or I'm just simply allowing myself to set back to french time already :)

For those of you who don't know, I'll be living in a little garden level apartment in the same building that I lived in when I studied abroad.  I am really lucky.  I will be helping teach both at a professional high school and at a junior high (I know, multiple people have said that those are bad ages to teach...well, it's called a job for a reason...can I really complain?  Well, I guess we'll see...but still).  From what I can tell after emails and talking to prinicpals and stuff, I'll mostly have small groups and basically just get them to be conversing in english.

Even though I'm returning to Strasbourg, this time I'm setting up everything myself--I don't have an awesome study abroad program to set everything up for me.  Fortunately, however, I have a lot of contacts thanks to keeping in touch with people and even from friends back home, all of which I appreciate greatly.  I feel like my french is a little rusty, although I hope I'll pick it back up quickly.

Alright, enough I's from me...a bientôt!

Hoping...

Just as an update I applied to teach English in France for next year so here's hoping for the best...I'm crossing my fingers!  Of course if I do get it I will continue this blog with more entries!  Here's to hoping!  Chin Chin!

Les Vosges...Strasbourg...La France me manquera tellement

Salut tout le monde!  So it is May 3--Essentially 11 days until I come home.  Had a great second to last weekend in France and just thought I should share it with you before I do some more studying (don't worry I don't actually have finals until Tuesday...).

Alors, Friday was a "jour férié" basically a holiday, the french's version of Labor Day.  So I slept in a little bit, got up, cleaned my room.  Then one of my friend's host parents was nice enough to let her have a couple people over for brunch.  So she made french toast (yes, I had french toast in France haha, although really french toast is an american thing...) and fruit and whipped cream was brought along with orange juice...and champagne...Good start to the day!  Also, one of the girls who was here last semester, Helen, came in this weekend to visit so it was really nice to see her and reminisce about the first semester (Helen's in Rennes right now so it was easy for her to come by train).  Then I met up with some friends for tarte flambées for dinner and Alsatian beer.  Anyways, I called it an early night after having worked very hard for my finals for my Syracuse classes.  Oh yeah--all done with the classes at the Syracuse center...most of the Syracuse students have dispersed...except for the other students doing the same program I am and other students who are kinda lingering...otherwise they already are back home or are traveling around Europe.

Saturday...not much done.  Got up around 9am, did a little work, or as much as I could throughout the day.  Saturday afternoon I took the train to Selestat and my host mom picked me up at that train station to go up to their house in Thannenkirch.  Relaxed, did a little studying, had dinner, watched a movie with my host parents, went to bed at like 11pm--sounds dorky but the 9ish hours of sleep I got felt great.

Sunday--AMAZING.  Woke up at 8:30 to have breakfast.  Then got changed and went on a hike with my host mom up to one of the tops of the mountains called Taennchel.  I'm not sure of the distance we hiked, but I know that the ascent was 950m, which my host mom and I did in less than an hour--we thought that was pretty impressive.  This top is kind of famous in the Vosges because it is a top of a mountain that is flat.  Literally, at the top it is pretty much as if you were walking down Central Street.  Anyways, the association that keeps up the trails in the Vosges every first Sunday of May each year has a mass at the top of the mountain to bless the nature.  Then of course people stay after and talk for a while, have some wine, coffee, bring some lunch.  This year they had a pig roast at the top of the mountain.  NOTE:  WHAT I'M ABOUT TO SAY WILL PROBABLY SOUND A LITTLE BARBARIC...Anyways, I was hesitant to take a piece of meat off the pig at first.  But then I heard everyone else say how good it was...and it had been smoked and was cooking for a good while, in other words the meat looked done and everything so I took a piece that the very nice gentleman cut off of the pig for me (the feminine side of this is that I let the men on top of the mountain do all of the barbecuing and cutting, etc.).  IT WAS AMAZING.  They had put sauce on it while it was rotating over the fire...it was smoky, tender, barbecue-y, juicy, delicious.  Mind you this all is at the top of a mountain.  I was at the top of a mountain, talking to french people--not one word in english, sipping on some wine, eating delicious pork that was just cut off the of the pig rotating in front of me.  What a cultural experience.  Dad are you jealous?

hehe anyways, now I'm back in Strasbourg.  And my clothes still smell like smoke from fires in the forest.  It reminds me of when we used to go up to Paschen's cottage.  One of my favorite smells, I was even kind of reluctant to take a shower because then the smell would get out of my hair hahaha.  Anyways, agenda for the next 11 days: study, pass exams, pack, ship some stuff home, try and soak up as much of France as I can, if that's still possible after my cultural experience today.  Get home the 14th into O'Hare International Terminal 5 at 4:40 pm.  Let me tell ya, it's going to be damn hard to leave this place.  Can't wait to see everyone at home.  Can wait to leave France.  Love and miss you all.  See you soon.  

Joyeuses Pâques!

Salut tout le monde!

Ok, in english now...Easter weekend was actually great. I did not travel out of the country, although now that the weekend's over I'm glad that I did not. Friday I had off, it is a holiday in the region of Alsace (but no where else in France haha we're special) and I actually did not do much that day. I think my body was still thrown off from having to wake up at 4 am on Tuesday morning to register for classes in the fall. Anyways, I slept in, ate lunch, and then seeing as it was practically beach weather, I met up with some friends to walk around parc de l'orangerie (big park in Strasbourg with a zoo, bowling alley, it's own mini river where supposedly you can row, flowers, fields, gazebos, you know, no big deal). I ate dinner at home to make things cheaper and then went to see the movie Ponyo with my friends. It's a japanese animated film about a goldfish who wants to become a human--and it is ADORABLE. I highly recommend it. The illustrations, music, story line, everything was well done. Went out for a beer afterwards.

Saturday I went on a hike in the Vosges mountains with the sports center at the french university. We started in Turckheim, which is still in France, the whole hike was still in France even though the names sounds German. Then we made a huge circle to Kaysersberg and ended up back at Turckheim. However, we often went off trail...multiple ascents and descents instead of one ascent and one descent. Distance: 22km Amount of elevation: 950m, sorry can't do the conversions in my head. Anyways, it was exhausting and I was hurting by the end. However it was nice to meet other students from Spain, the Czech Republic, Italy, and Albania, and France of course. Despite the pain that I was in at the end, it was beautiful and great to meet new people and speak french all day and be in the Vosges mountains!

Sunday, needless to say was laid back. I got up and went to church at the Strasbourg Cathedral. Lots of stupid tourists in the cathedral, heard multiple phones go off during the mass (granted I was more towards the back but still), people who would get up mid service and just walk out (down the main aisle mind you) like as if they were tourists who just wanted to see it for two seconds. Seriously, it annoyed the heck out of me. But anyways, it was a pretty ceremony--the Strasbourg cathedral is beautiful enough in itself, a men's choir did the singing, the organ belting out hymns, the mass said in the beautiful language of french. Ok, enough of that. I returned home after that to eat lunch, nap, straighten up my room, and then headed to the train station to go back up to the Vosges mountains. I took the train to Selestat (south of strasbourg) where my host mom picked me up to go to their house in the Vosges mountains. That night I had dinner with my host mom, host brother, and his girlfriend. Dinner was baked potatoes, and they had an aparatus where you could put things in a mini plate and melt them so like lardons (ham) cheese, stuff like that, and you mashed the potatoes and then after the things you put on the hot plate were melted, you mixed everything together and ate it. Delicious. Dinner was followed by two games of scrabble in french haha. My scores were around 90, but for my first time playing scrabble in french not bad right?

Today my host mom's brother and his wife and two kids came up to the house in the mountains. We had a nice big lunch and then did another hike through the mountains. The hike was not nearly as intense as the one on Saturday, but it was good. Her brother was in Chicago for 9 years in Wheeling and Skokie, so it was fun to talk to him about Chicago in french. He told me that he was more of a fan of the bears and that he didn't really have a preference between the Sox and the Cubs. Smart man. Anyways, then I returned to Strasbourg and here I am.

Again, all in all, a great weekend, and now you see why I am glad that I didn't travel. It was a lot cheaper too haha. Hope everything is going well on the homefront. Just barely over a month until I come home. Holy Cow! as Harrey Carray would say. Love and miss you all, can't wait to see you. More to come :)

Paris, je t'aime toujours

Salut toute le monde! This past weekend I went to Paris with my art history class--needless to say it was a weekend chockfull of museums all with tours guided by my art history teacher (Louvre, Orsay (my fave!), Goustave Moreau, Picasso, Maxim). On one hand, it was great to feel really smart and see the paintings we had been studying in class up close and personal--some of them are gargantuan as Quinn would say. But seriously, they are. However in my opinion, the Mona Lisa (La Jaconde en français) is very anti-climactic, not to be Debbie Downer.

Anyways, did I hit up any of the really touristy places besides the museum that I went to? No, I don't feel like I am really a tourist anymore in Paris when I go there. I love it. I went to a museum that I had never been to, Musée Maxim, metro stop Concorde on line 1, just to let you know. (Side note--if you go to Paris, line 1 on the metro is the tourist line, which means it hits all the touristy spots which means you need to be especially careful of your purse on this when you are on this line. Faites Attention s'il vous plait!) They had an exposition of drawings by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. If you don't know the name, think of all the famous poster designs for the Moulin Rouge Bal--Toulouse-Lautrec did plenty of them. At one point in his life, he did 39 drawings of the circus to make prove to people that he hadn't lost his memory, and this expo was all 39 of those plus some. Very interesting to see.

Otherwise, I met up with Maggie again. Went to Sacre-Coeur and Montmartre. Listened to live music on the steps of Sacre-Coeur, saw crazy drunk old man dancing to the music. Got a video of it. Laughed a lot, ate good food. Walked a ton. Actually saw the first gay people in Paris this past weekend besides some of the guys who have been in my program. It was funny because there really is no gay scene in Strasbourg. And they all dress so well...and with European fashion and labels. Beautiful.

Hostel I stayed at with my class--FIAP Jean Monnet. Decent hostel, but not centralized at all for tourists who want to see the touristy sites. Across the street from a mental institution--No joke. So I'd suggest looking at other places, you can definitely find better. But it was not bad, I can't complain.

In the process of planning courses for summer online and fall...going to wake up at 4:15 am for registration. Going on a hike this weekend in the Vosges mountains, then maybe up to Thannenkirch for sunday night and come back monday day "so i don't have to be alone on Easter" as my host mom said. Man am I going to miss my host family. Wow.

Anyways, hope all is well on the homefront. Happy opening day! GO CUBS!