Things tourists Do. I mean, Ack! Tourists!

Having family visit me in another country adds a whole new dimension to la vie en France indeed. Whereas normally I pass people quietly on streets , with a friendly headnod leaving a slight mystery of who I am and vice versa, or a “bonjour” to the boulanger- I now have a harang of followers passing all sorts of chaos and disquiettude on the poor reserved french.

NOT that my family are disrespectful travelers at all. They have weathered hitchiking in Africa, and moving to other countries. Assimilation seems to not be a problem for them. My dad learned to hunt in the jumgle with pigmy tribes. My mom moved to the states and has lived there for over 20 years. As far a travel goes, they have skills. They are seasoned.

I dunno. Maybe it’s something about being on vacation that makes people throw caution to the wind. Maybe it comes with the territory of being in a group of 5 people. But everywhere we go, and even toned way down, we are the loudest. We attract looks from other tables. I look across the rolls of bread and confit du canard to see my Dad in tears laughing much to the chargrin of the old couple seated next to us. Even I unwittingly find myself at dinner mid story with my hands in the air punctuating and anecdote with a “but I mean, JESUS FUCKING CHRIST!”

I’ve always thought Americans take up a lot of verbal air space. I mean we take up space in general. We have more space to take. Including verbal. But myabe not. Maybe it’s just groups. Or maybe just groups with no reponsibilites or worries. At least for two weeks. “Hey. It’s VACATION”.

And honestly this past week is the first time in awhile I feel like I actually have been on vacation. I get to see cro-Magnon caves. I stay in hotels. It’s a lifestyle that seems just as foreign to me as anything else but I don”t have to worry about lessons or what I’m going to eat. Everything is quite comfortably solved, even if the price is a buffer. I even see my normally reserved and prudent mom stuffing cracckers down her shirt at breakfast to take with us in the car. I’m running around Sainsbury’s taking pictures of boxes of “pork faggots”, only to have some father comeup to me minutes later exclaiming, “I’ve never seen anybody take pictures of fudge before”

I feel like a foreigner in a completely different way than normal. I still get wierd looks from people, but from the opposite angle. It’s strange to have people depend on me. I usually can’t depend on myself.

British what?

Usually December finds me at my parents house, lost in a sea of holiday parties and stuffing my face with a continuous stream of eggnog and butter balls and foot diameter wheels of camembert on crackers, slowly slipping into the inevitable holiday coma that comes with sitting on couches at holiday parties in rooms that are heated an average of 30 degrees warmer than they should be.

This year, I find myself hopping a ferry to England, and making my way north to Ipswich where my family meets me and we spend the holiday season stuffing our faces with cookies in rooms that are heated to 90 degrees, except. It’s in England.

We’ve become that disgustingly syrupy family who sits around over mounds of peking duck and cashew chicken and basks in the kind of revelry of our togetherness that can only come when you are reunited with people who have known you since you were throwing baby food across the kitchen. We walk around little christmas markets while laughing at cryptic but stupid jokes and wiping hot chocolate moustaches offf of each other’s faces.

Today Rox came up from London, and Brenda’s coming up soon.

And everything is so christmasy and enveloped in bear hugs and sugary and warm and fuzzy, that I might actually puke.

If I weren’t so godamned happy.

McCroque? McCrook.

Globalisation Personified.

Christmas Things

lights

Wednesday Dom showed up from Barentin with a bouquet of yellow daisies to hang out for the day. Miriam and Rocio baked me cookies and cleaned my room because they didn’t want me to come home and start cleaning.

I got out and this is what Dieppe looks like.

Somehow without me knowing Dieppe exploded with Christmas.

Lara goes to France- AND Pays a Visit to the Hospital!

With my luck, it was really only a matter of time before I landed in France’s healthcare system. I should have been expecting this for awhile- keeping a little overnight bag packed and ready by the door- like those expecting couples who have everything prepared“just in case”.

I have often marveled at my friends’ abilities to do things like attempt wheelies off of their rooftops or jump off bridges into rocky shores below with nary a scratch on their knuckles to show for their effort, whereas all I have to do is stay at home on a Friday night, and you can bet I’ll turn violently ill, and end up with a 5 day stint in the hospital hooked up to heart monitors and a million IV’s. I’m not a risktaker, and for good reason. Risks seem to find me. I’m the accidental risk taker. Or maybe not. I’m the accidental risktrapper.

So it should come as no surprise that three months into my stay in France, I ended up staggering into the “Urgances” on  Saturday night, on the verge of diabetic DKA, after a hit and run by the stomach flu from hell.

After throwing up for 14 hours on Saturday, my sugars kept climbing and finally and extremely dehydrated I called my prof Dominique and asked her if she could take me to the hospital. I guess I didn’t realize how bad it was until Dominique told me on Monday that the doctor’s had called her at midnight to tell her I was finally stable and that if I had waited any longer I probably would have gone into a coma. As I said. These things seem to happen to me. Accidental risk trapper indeed.

Still I have to look back on a 5 day tour de force of the French hospital system and laugh.  I passed so many colleague boundaries in the past week I don’t know if I’ll be able to look at my fellow profs the same the same. I mean. Dominique has now seen me in a backless hospital nightie. She’s seen me rolled over and stuck with needles. She’s seen me pee in a BEDPAN for chrissakes. No shame.

Even so, I spent 5 days in a hospital by myself in the ICU in a foreign country, and speaking entirely in another language. If I can handle that, well… I guess I could write more about the wonders of French healthcare, but it’s been a long week.

Chalk it up to another life experience:

Hey remember that time you and Johnny tried to put on a circus in your back yard and you tried to do a flip and almost knocked your front teeth out?

Remember that time you tried to sled of the roof of your friends’ garage?

Hey, remember that time you almost died in France?

yeehaw

One of the unexpected (and one of the only) upsides to English Assistant training in Rouen is that I get to meet people who understand the absurdity of little known American gems like Put in Bay. Standing in the hall at IUFM last Friday, I realized that my friend Sam has family from Sandusky, and we spent a good 20 minutes discussing the thick necked, golf cart driving, red faced, muscle tank sporting population that seems to crowd around Put In Bay bars every July. He posted this about a week later:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2CjiDf1nOY

Thanks Sam for not letting me forget where I came from.

Might as well be called Asimo, Robot of the 21st Century

My first journal had a picture of a hampster and a combination lock. I used to test out every color of pen i owned, spilling my deepest secrets in evergreen glitter ink. Over the years, my journals may have changed, and the ink color may be less green and more blue and black, but my journals were always like thought parking lots for my days- scribbled with poems or quick sketches- entires that I would refer back to later to add into stories, or use to piece together broader wave patterns in my life.

Before I came to France, the one thing I made sure I had was a new journal. Forget clothes. Forget medicine. Two black covers filled with graph paper, AND. Yes. Possibility.

However, I realized today that what started out as a legitimate excuse for poem writing and documenting thoughts and reflection has quickly devolved into a directionless collection mumble jumble- of tedious list-making, account numbers, of bus times and grocery lists jotted down at the last minute- in general, less Miranda July, and more “Meal planning Mon-Wed”

And maybe these are the kinds of thoughts that fill my head 90% of the time or maybe these are simply the thoughts that seem to manifest themselves onto paper 90% of the time…but my God ARE these the thoughts that fill my head most of the time?

What am I going to eat? How do I call my parents? What’s my bank account number? What do I need to do to enroll in SS?

Fuck if I know, and these are all quite important questions.

When I moved to Rouen I thought Id be spending my abundant free time in cafes writing a collection of short stories or taking pictures.

Turns out planting yourself smack in the middle of another country leaves less room for creative thought processes and just super ups the inquietude factor of living in general.

Suddenly little details and bothers that were dismissed and taken care of so quickly in Ohio; like how to get to point A from point B, or where to go to find screws, seem to be annoyingly pertinent, not to mention persistent, here. Come to think of it where DO I buy screws. Better jot that in the journal.

I don’t know when I stopped being creative, and turned into an anal list-making monger that instead of filling my journal pages with short essays and stories and parking lot non sequitors, fills them with grocery lists and bus tables, and recipes that I jot down next to instructions from my parents on what order to dial the billion numbers you have to use to call on their phone plan.

So what will I eat for dinner tonight? I dunno. I’ll check yesterday’s journal entry right after I look at the Dieppe bus schedule I wrote down October 10.

Pfft. So much for creative thinking.

I have nothing else to report so I’ll talk about THIS.

I'm becoming quite adept at picture posts- seems like I have nothing else much to say

For months now I’ve been staring at blank walls- gradually filling them with pictures I’ve taken of Dieppe- and old street here, some pebbles there, and postcards that I’ve found around advertising art openings, etc., etc.

All these little bookmarks of my time here line my walls, but for weeks now, I’ve been looking for something larger to cover the large blank empty white space on my side wall beside my bed.

When I was 8 I went to Chuck-E-Cheese for a birthday party and somehow tricked the woman working there into giving me a stuffed bear in exchange for 5 tickets (I think it was actually like 300 tickets or the equivalent of like 20 cents). Convinced I was a marked criminal and a big time thief, I actually had my Dad help me write a letter a week later to Chuck-E-Cheese admitting my theft along with a dollar to pay for the bear. I can actually see my Dad’s strained serious face as he helped me, trying to be supportive and understanding, as the corners of his mouth twitched from trying not to laugh.

Over the years, I got used to seeing my friends steal; a chapstick here, some stamps there, until it became normal, a way of sticking it to the man, or just a way of getting by. I never stole anything in France- becuase ummm deportion never seemed a worthy risk for an envelope.

And somehow dressing in pencil skirts and teaching children and hobnobbing with teachers and having my own mailbox at work over the past months seemed to exempt me from such behaviors.

but as I was sitting in the teachers room last week sipping coffee, and planning a lesson for Christmas, waiting for class to get out, I saw this poster neatly hanging on the bulletin board across from the coffee machine. The copy lady left, and the room settled into silence. Eyes darting across the room I neatly tore it down, and couldn’t help imagine what Michele and Jean-Pierre would think of their colleague tearing down posters in the teachers room during break.

And ok. Maybe it’s not exactly stealing. And I highly doubt anybody noticed it was gone. In the big scheme of things it would have gotten thrown away anyways.

And maybe I’m just justifying it for my own means.

Or maybe I should write Delvincourt a letter of apology.

Sometimes, I like to think I’ve made great strides over the past few years…

BUT it looks quite perfect hanging on my side wall. Problem SOLVED.

Things to do December 2:

1) Wake up. Make toast and coffee. Check

2) Don’t burn toast or coffee. Check, and Check.

3) Buy dried apricots. Check.

4) Go to Social Security Office. Check. Inscribe to social security. Check.

5) Get redirected to newer social security office half and hour away. Check.

6) Get told told CPAM office is not the right office. Get redirected to another office to be told that the CPAM was in fact the right building. Check, check, check.

7) Go back to the bank.

8 ) Go back to the Social Security office…

9) Wait a month for my health insurance card…

….check, check, check, check, CHECK!

“Maison Sucree Maison”

I’m not ashamed to say that living in Dieppe has turned me into an eighty-year old woman. In Columbus, I was often so busy that my meals were usually of the “put your hand in the fridge and see what comes out variety” or the “bowl of cereal” variety. I rarely went to bed before 3 am, and would often stumble to work, hair unbrushed and hidden under a hat. In Dieppe, I’m finding that it’s not hard to find time to take care of myself. I take my medicine on a schedual. I get enough sleep. I go to bed at 10. I find myself actually having the time to care about things like whether my dinner will have grains AND vegetables AND protein. I brush my hair.

In Columbus I would so often would take for granted that the phrase “there’s nothing to do” was rather figurative, and that if you really wanted to you could probably find something, or at least find somebody to talk to. I could easily ride my bike to Monster house if I was bored, and see Joe or Troy try to skateboard off their roof.

I so often find myself feeling fake nostalgic for things that I know I don’t miss. I don’t miss being bored in Columbus, I really don’t. On Friday I opened my gmail to find that my Dad had sent pictures of their Thanksgiving dinner, and while I miss them all unexplicably, I found myself looking at the picture of the table, pinpointing my seat, and imagining Ed elbowing me in the ribs and saying some joke like “what do you call drunk potatos? SMASHED potatos” har har.

And I find that here, it’s all too easy to fall back into the pattern of missing things for the sake of missing them, for blaming a lack of total happiness on a change of zip code.

As if the amount of food consumed Thursday was not enough to ring in the holiday month, I decided it would be a good idea to go to Rouen on Saturday to stuff my face with copious amounts of food at an evenbigger Thanksgiving celebration hosted by Keri and assistant in Rouen and her Australian and British roomates. Thanksgiving here seems to be met with same reaction by everybody who is not American. Bemusement at the strange holiday mixed with equal enthusiasm since it’s as good of an excuse as any to eat and drink.

Home Sweet Home

The room was packed, heady and stuffy in a good way with tittering voices in at least 3 languages, and I had forgotten how good it felt to be surrounded by a group of people and buzzing conversation fueled by the copious amounts of wine that seems a requisite for any gathering here and the warmness of yellow light that always seems to make everybody glow.

Frank the Colombian

Georgie, Amanda, Keri

Nicholas

Here in France, I often feel like I have so much time to think that I actually forget to look around at where I am. Discontent may not be fooled by a change of address… but neither is contentment.