Casino: Making small town alchoholic dreams come true

Nightlife in Dieppe after 8pm consists of two things: going home, or going to the Casino, which every Friday and Saturday hosts a charming mixture of everyone from the age of 14 and up. And I do mean up. All the way to 65 up. I do wish that I could say the Casino is one of those small town, charming, everybody knows your name watering hole, but it is in fact, not.

In fact if somebody took high school prom, a discotheque, and the lounge room of a hunting lodge (you can’t see it but the adjoining room is equipped with leather chairs and a boar’s head), Im pretty sure the result would be something along the lines of the Casino. I’ve patronized this night spot more than I would like to admit, usually to accompany my roomates, and not be the odd one out always refusing invitations to do things (I’m the chronic event turner downer- excuse maker as it turns out, I’m trying to get better.)

And honestly, I’d rather stay at home reading a book than avoiding drunken chaches with gold bling and sweaty hairy chests. But that’s just me. I always inevitably end up standing in a corner, full drink in hand, shamelessly watching men try to hit of self-conscious girls, the same alcoholics standing by the bar for hours on end week after week, and girlfriends storming out in tears, and quite frankly if it weren’t so entertaining, it would be depressing as hell.

People always ask me why I high tail it to Rouen or Paris, and don’t go to discotheques in Dieppe.

Guys, THIS is why I don’t go to discotheques in Dieppe.

Beer! Cars! Germans!

I’ve rarely seen Miriam more happy then when talking about her family or the car that her brother Martin has promised to fix up for her since November. Well Miriam, today’s your lucky day.

Ever since Saturday when Martin phoned to say he would be coming with a new (well old/new) car, Miri has been walking on cloud nine, crazy with happiness Can’t-wipe-that-darn-smile-off-your- face happy; giggling at everything from burnt toast to my ridiculous sparkly long johns (although I have to say this deserves laughter from just about anyone).

After Martin and her father arrived at 5AM this morning in a little black beauty, it’s been a regular old happy shit-eating-grin fest of a day here in Dieppe. And sure I’m happy that I now don’t have to walk a kilmometer uphill from the grocery store, or hang around shady drunk people at my bus stop at 4 in the afternoon (well at least not as on a regular of a basis), but honestly seeing Miri so happy is enough to make anyone trickle and percolate with giddyness, car or no car.

It’s like we have yes. possibility.

Needless to say everything was celebrated over lunch with hearty rye bread, beer, and sausage.

Prost…

Given Pause

I’ve been finding a lot of photos backlogged on my computer lately. It always surprises me how you can in one moment put in the effort to actually create something and then completely forget about it as if the one moment where you actually cared enough to make it never happened. It becomes like looking through somebody else’s memory box and then realizing it’s your own. This was taken in London over break, beneath the Eye.

Also, NPR continues to stir up the same butterflies in me usually reserved first kisses (or 10th, or 100th…), the perfect cup of coffee, and when something unexpectedly works the way it’s intended, or the way it was not intended but should have been all along.

Vin Chaud and Ratatouille

This was actually really good.

To help alleviate some of the recent boredom and self-pity that has fallen over me this past week like standing besides a bus on a rainy day only to get soaked head to toe, as well as alleviate some massive investment in the Bar des Bains that Miriam, Rocio, Estefania and I seem to have patronizing with excessive zeal lately, I’ve been spending more and more of my time cooking.

For anybody who knows what exactly my kitchen is equipped with, (microwave, two hotplates, and some silverware and a ladel to be exact) I’m not talking Bobby Flay coffee encrusted lamb chops or slow roasted sweet potato sprinkled with butter and coriander (droool).

Saturday I set out to make Ratouille and accidentally ended up with about 10kilos of ratatouille which i then had to eat for three days. Today I made corn and bean salad with balsamic vinegar and cilantro and salmon on the side. I’m not setting out to accomplish great culinary feats or anything, but.

In fact it surprises me how gray matter food has taken up lately. I find myself talking to Brenda at night on what we made for breakfast, or things you can add nuts to, or how adding raisins to oatmeal makes all the difference. And maybe you can chalk it up to floating hours between classes, or getting paid less than 1000 euros a month, but sometimes (at risk of sounding like my tight fingered grandfather), I feel like we should come out with one of those discount cook books you find buried from the 80’s at Half Price, title something like “Cooking on hotplates” or “Cuisine on five dollars a day”.

When my family visited I was often taken by surprise by how good French cooking is (who knew?!)- and it’s mostly because I rarely end up eating out.

Still it surprises me how much entertainment one can get out of figuring out how to eat.

I mean who knew you could make good vin chaud on a hotplate?

Dials

Drunk dials never, and i have reason to believe, will never cease to amuse me, particularly when they are of the foreign language- coming from strangers variety.

Usually I’m too much in my head to be in any way actively responsive to anyone…which means that solicitations for phone numbers are usually met with a “huh?” and me realizing four digits into reading my phone number aloud that I actually don’t want them to have it.

And so some random man named Yahid ended up with mine two weeks ago after me and some friends found ourselves accidentally stumbling into a goth club near Oberkampf in Paris, that looked more like Lane Road Park’s annual haunted house than anything else.

A pale slouchy form of a man that resembled a cross between Robert Smith and and some Irish actor I can’t remember enthusiastically told me to call him next time in Paris. Uh huh. Not likely.

I guess I never really expect on anybody’s 3am drunk dial hit list, so getting a call from Yahid at 2 am last Saturday , was confusing, to say the least, as shaking off cobwebs, I sleepily answered the phone to be met by a torrent of french ending in “sortir?”

I guess phone conversations are no different than real life- I still had no idea what he was saying and I still never expect to hear from him again.

Doldrums, Dyschord, and Din

January seems to be the month where things sort of slip into repetivity- you pass the hours drinking tea, or hamster wheeling it at the gym, or in my case, attempting yoga and reading.

Sometimes the absurdity of my wasted-spaciness catches me so off guard that i feel like i have to justify myself being here by rushing back home to plan a lesson or something, and I’m constantly wanting to jump up and down and run up to people and say, “I can do things really!”

I usually feel like I don’t really do my time here in France any justice. And it’s probably because the times I find myself in front of the computer I usually am just passing away hours until something else happens or somebody calls.

But I can’t shake the feeling that sometimes or perhaps this happens with most things- my time in France is more impressive in theory than in practice. Kind of like my 4-hours-a-week-haphazard CLC tutoring from last year makes a much more impressive appearance on my resume; the title Language Assistant-living-in-France sounds like much more than my daily routine of waking up half an hour before class, shaking off cobwebs, going to cafes, and eating more than my share of pain au chocolat, sitting on my bed and reading.

I guess that’s what happens when you’ve worn out your I’m-just-a-language-assistant bandwagon welcome, too many hours spent in long johns turn your brain to mush, etc., etc., the whole blah damn thing.

I dont know why i posted this picture. Probably because every time I look at it, I can practically hear Andrea’s perfectly Spanish accentuated English accent in my head saying “yes! this is my new most favoritist picture of me EVER!” And it makes me bubble with happiness.

…I really cannot wait until I’m busy again

Basketball….!!!

Up until I was about 20 I was the smallest person I knew- sophomore year of high school the only girl shorter than me lacked growth hormones and even she was taller than me the next year. I always played soccer, but basketball let it be said, was not my strength.

My last memory of basketball involves me joining my Siebert floor 7 intramural team at OSU in a misguided fit of gung-ho “let’s go out and make some friends!” After much arm flailing, and pummeling by the 8 foot tall women who had apparently had MANY years of basketball games in them, I vowed to never attempt the sport again.

Until last Tuesday. Rocio convinced me to go down to the gym with her to throw the ball around with some other men and women who recreationally play basketball in DIeppe.

I guess since my first month at OSU, I’ve grown about 5 inches and put on about 50 pounds but that’s pretty much it.

Arms flailing as I dribbled the ball down the court with people yelling things at me , I realized I still don’t know the rules of basketball, and even less so in spoken in French.

I guess this time around, at least I had the excuse of being a clueless foreigner.

Guess I’ll have to wow ‘em next week.

Flunch: low point? Or cutting-edge cuisine

The odd and funny part about the aptly named French cafeteria style “restaurant” Flunch is that it is a cross between the words Flush and Lunch which is pretty much what you want to do with the food they serve there.

I secretly revere the buffet style restaurants or old school cafeterias that you find in the States (the blue haired ladies at MCL anybody?), but Flunch seems to embody neither of these disgusting yet endearing traditions, and instead feels like somebody took McDonald’s, added some table cloths and decided to serve the kind of food you had to bounce first to test for edibility in the 4th grade (legumes and steak hache?).

What further intrigues me is that Flunch actually seems pretty popular. People bring their kids. You see couples reaching over the table to hold hands and adoringly gaze at each other over a piece of three day old Flunch manufactured tarte. And I just can’t seem to comprehend when with an artinsnal food culture a strong as France’s, it just boggles my mind as to why anybody would would buy a coffee from the token operated Flunch machine when they could go across the street and buy cafe and fresh tarte normande for about the same price at a boulangerie.

An maybe I’m just spoiled with the often unassuming dining options available in the U.S. Maybe I’m used to living in a culture where the more you can eat the better- a culture where steaks the size of footballs are passed around like they were picked from orchards. Which leads me to ask: Has France has actually advanced so far beyond the peak of culinary arts that in order to keep evolving it has actually had to revert back to the cutting-edge via cafeteria fare?

As Dom, Steffi, Richard Fox, Andrea and I took a break in Rouen yesterday, Andrea looked up at us mid-conversation, forkful of frites halfway to her mouth, and exclaimed, “guys we could actually be anywhere in the world right now in this restaurant.”

It’s true. I swear I’ve seen the same carpets in the Wendy’s right across the street from my old High School- the same porcelain coffee cups, the same yellow walls.

Amendum

Apparently “Lara Spotting” has given way to students asking the english teachers at Delvincourt when they can see the “American Lady who knows a lot of things.”

I’m not sure where they got the impression that I “know a lot of things”, or even when that became a describing characteristic.

I can’t even think about it too long, though. Because every time I do, and I have no idea why, but it absolutely and totally breaks my heart.

Why do they do this to me? Adorable little suckers.

Hairy Accents

The gray area that occupies which accent goes where has been getting a little hairy around these parts lately. Until recently I assumed that accents were something unchangable- something as indispensible to your anatomy as a long nose or a big butt.

Something like “she has brown hair. She has a Spanish accent”. So much so that I often forget that speaking a language is much like going to the gym or perfecting a sport. You work out the muscles you want, and if you don’t use them- well, atrophy.

I’m exaggerating of course. Sculpting a perfect French accent will not appear just because you went to Paris for a week. It won’t manifest itself if you live to Paris for 20 years. But little by little and sure enough, little French mannerisms will appear. Maybe you’ll sound more muffled. Maybe you’ll start speaking english as if you’re chewing on a wad of gum. Maybe you’ll round out your words more.

I’ve often noticed little Americanisms slip into my mom’s Spanish accent. A little twang haire, a long “e” there. My great aunt speaks with a light British accent after living in the UK for 20 years, and my cousin Roxy changed accents everytime she moved as a child- alternating from Fijian to Australian.

This weekend a French guy thought my friend Erin was a French person pretending to be American speaking French. I’ll let that sink in. Erin has gone beyond an American speaking French, and turned into someone essentially mocking her own accent. While speaking Spanish to someone from Madrid, he noted that I sounded like a French person speaking Spanish.

Wow. I never had intentions of picking up the often mumbled blur of French. I never intended to look like I was doggedly chewing baguette while trying to say camel. Or empanada for that matter.
And I’m not trying to insult the French accent or anything, except that, well, I don’t consider it mine…

And up until recently I hadn’t realized how malleable accents are. My American and Spanish accents were as unchangeable as my propensity to easily get split ends or my flat feet. These aren’t shoe sizes or eye colors. They aren’t short legs or long torsos, or the bags under your eyes that your grandfather had that begin to appear at age 35.

And I know this isn’t permanent, simply the fact that my mouth has been working overtime to pronounce words like bahhhh oui! and pardon instead of corroncha and pues.

But it’s odd to see the physical manifestation of the all places I’ve been start to show up like stowaways in cargo into my being. I often forget that we are always where we came from, but we are also (excuse the cliche) the sum of all the moments we have lived, the places we’ve been, the people we’ve talked to, and technically the only thing that changes is the percentage of that time that we have spent where and with whom.

I know that if I move out of France, the Frenchisms that have started to permeate my language will probably dissapate. And I wonder how much of a stamp that will leave on me in the future. But I wonder how much permanent changes these little accent changes will leave on me in 20, 30 years. Will there be little bits here and there that refuse to leave? Our brains change with every experience we have. I never thought about how that would happen with language.