I do not dance – not well, not professionally, not publicly, not even in most well-lit areas.
I do not know anything about dance in a technical or artistic sense.
I know when I like a dance and when I don't, and sometimes I am even capable of appreciating certain qualitative differences between certain dancers and certain performances.
Sometimes.
Mostly, I just sit quietly in the dark, appreciating the lighting and muttering to my internal dialogue, asking myself what the hell is going on.
Contemporary dance is an especially humbling experience, as I like to imagine that I am a relatively intelligent person with a certain propensity for appreciating the arts.
Unfortunately I must admit to spending most of my time at contemporary performances trying to figure out if everyone in the audience is really that much smarter than me and then attempting to read the mind of whoever it was who invited me to this blasted thing in the first place in a desperate attempt to gauge whether or not the performance is good; whether I should say I like it or not when the lights come back on.
Historically, this person trying to share the wonderful world of contemporary dance with me is Line, my german friend who invited me to visit her up in the cold land of Latvia, where she is working as an intern for a contemporary theatre.
She (the jerk) has spent at least the last 7 years studying contemporary performance arts in a very in-depth and analytical (see "German") way.
She can (and has) watch a performance in which a woman, standing on a chair and wearing a giant black paper-maché balloon as a mask, slowly becomes tangled in stretched ribbons and at the end say "Hmmmmm, I think it was about female sexuality."
Really!?
I was just sitting there trying to decide if the mask was heavy, and if her neck hurt by the end. I was thinking that the lights were kind of nice, but a little poorly timed. Where the heck did anyone say anything about sexuality?
In short, I have experience with Line and theatre, and I have, with time, grown a bit wary of anything she describes as "contemporary."
Given this tendancy to feel like an idiot whenever "contemporary" meets "dance," I was less than stoked to go see the performance at the new theatre where Line's working.
I'd been working all week on posters for them. I'd seen oh-so many pictures of the shows they do and I can garuntee that I would struggle to understand a single one.
But I went. Because she is my friend, and well gosh, the ticket was free.
As it turned out, Line didn't end up sitting with me because she had to work the ticket counter, and the lighting design was pretty underwhelming, so I was left with no choice but to actually contemplate the dance. And you know what? I liked it! And for the first time, I felt like maybe I understood it.
It was kind of beautiful and chaotic in a loose way. There was one piece especially that made me think of human relationships – there's all this flailing about trying to make some sort of contact, and when finally that contact is achieved, it is followed by long stretches of awkward reaching out. Like insect feelers almost, exploring the other person, trying to find meaning, trying to matter, spinning out of control, only to collide again. And from time to time, there are perfectly synchronized moments. Moments when each person is perfectly in time with the other. Moments of sensuality – beautiful and fleeting, and then returning to chaos.
The final piece as well had all three dancers spinning, crashing into one another and then those perfectly choreographed, albeit ephemeral, moments. It made me think of communities – people occasionally leaving their busy schedules and hectic to-do lists and actually just making connections.
It was nice.
It was enjoyable.
And most importantly, I understood it.
After the performance was over, I reunited with Line, feeling so proud that for once I had something to say _ human contact... chaos... sensuality... blah blah blah –
"What did you think?" she asked
"I liked it."
"Well," she said "they seemed really unfocused tonight. This is not my favorite style and..." well crap. There I go.
"The music was cool though. I liked how the guitarist built upon a looped recording."
"Yeah, electric guitar gets used a lot right now in contemporary pieces."
"Hmmm, well, it was nice...?"
"Yeah. It was an easy one."
So there you have it. Finally I understand and relate to a piece of contemporary dance and it's because it was unoriginal and easy.
Sometimes I hate academia.
I'm about one more performance away from writing a diatribe against pretentious contemporary art as the masturbatory and nombrillistic fancies of an under-worked, over-privileged society. You don't see cryptic dances or impossible installations being made by people who have to hold down day jobs.
All of their stuff is pretty straight-forward.
Monday, April 11, 2011
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Winter. Part II
otherwise known as:
My Grand Return to Spain
Barcelona was my last visit when I left Europe two and a half years ago, and so it was perfectly appropriate that it be my first holiday from France. Something kind of poetic and perfect.
I sort of figured that when I saw my spanish friends for the first time after almost three years of separation that, for a moment at least, the world would stop turning, birds would fall from the sky, that the lights lining the streets would buzz as they flickered brighter and brighter and that finely-tuned meteorological instruments would be thrown off their charts.
I expected something huge; an explosive moment, or a burst of energy and light in some swirling, truly cinematic way.
But that's never really what happens, is it?
I watch too many movies.
There were however, yells of joy, running, hugging, kisses on faces, and amazing smiles. And I got something better than some high-impact moment that would burst through train stations and town squares and then dissipate. I got so much more.
After the greetings and the hugs came conversations and walks and dreams, and among all of this, I found a part of myself. A part that maybe I lost three years ago when I left Spain that was just waiting for me to come back and reclaim it. A part that maybe I had just drowned out with grey moods, hip attitudes and lost causes. But here, in the land of palm trees and torros is life and wine and love. Here in Spain, surrounded by people who are so alive – people with plans – people who aren't just sitting and talking about doing something, but actually going out and doing it, jumping feet-first and seeing where they land – I remembered that I have ambitions. I used to DO. I used to create.
It's taking some time to re-integrate this part of me, but slowly I'm moving towards creative productivity, and it feels like finally, I am home again.
And of course, it wasn't just seeing my Spanish friends, but also seeing friends from Montana that I hadn't seen for at least a year as well that made the holiday more magical than any sort of sweeping movie moment.
Sitting in cafes in one of the world's great tourist destinations, I felt so terribly at home, so wonderfully back in Bozeman. Sam, Ben and I had all been living with and around each other for four years, and Katie Kosaya had so quickly become one of the group in Bozeman that she might as well have been with us from the very beginning. Reuniting in Barcelona was amazing. We wandered through the streets, planned new adventures and caught up on a year's worth of stories and dreams.
Between Barcelona, Valencia and Bozeman... I could not have asked for a better christmas holiday, for a better gift.
For my friends.
So, now that it has taken me a whole month and a half to actually finish this post, I am publishing it from my friend's home in Latvia... my latest adventure!
With any luck, it will only take me a month to write about this one... haha
My Grand Return to Spain
Barcelona was my last visit when I left Europe two and a half years ago, and so it was perfectly appropriate that it be my first holiday from France. Something kind of poetic and perfect.
I sort of figured that when I saw my spanish friends for the first time after almost three years of separation that, for a moment at least, the world would stop turning, birds would fall from the sky, that the lights lining the streets would buzz as they flickered brighter and brighter and that finely-tuned meteorological instruments would be thrown off their charts.
I expected something huge; an explosive moment, or a burst of energy and light in some swirling, truly cinematic way.
But that's never really what happens, is it?
I watch too many movies.
There were however, yells of joy, running, hugging, kisses on faces, and amazing smiles. And I got something better than some high-impact moment that would burst through train stations and town squares and then dissipate. I got so much more.
After the greetings and the hugs came conversations and walks and dreams, and among all of this, I found a part of myself. A part that maybe I lost three years ago when I left Spain that was just waiting for me to come back and reclaim it. A part that maybe I had just drowned out with grey moods, hip attitudes and lost causes. But here, in the land of palm trees and torros is life and wine and love. Here in Spain, surrounded by people who are so alive – people with plans – people who aren't just sitting and talking about doing something, but actually going out and doing it, jumping feet-first and seeing where they land – I remembered that I have ambitions. I used to DO. I used to create.
It's taking some time to re-integrate this part of me, but slowly I'm moving towards creative productivity, and it feels like finally, I am home again.
And of course, it wasn't just seeing my Spanish friends, but also seeing friends from Montana that I hadn't seen for at least a year as well that made the holiday more magical than any sort of sweeping movie moment.
Sitting in cafes in one of the world's great tourist destinations, I felt so terribly at home, so wonderfully back in Bozeman. Sam, Ben and I had all been living with and around each other for four years, and Katie Kosaya had so quickly become one of the group in Bozeman that she might as well have been with us from the very beginning. Reuniting in Barcelona was amazing. We wandered through the streets, planned new adventures and caught up on a year's worth of stories and dreams.
Between Barcelona, Valencia and Bozeman... I could not have asked for a better christmas holiday, for a better gift.
For my friends.
So, now that it has taken me a whole month and a half to actually finish this post, I am publishing it from my friend's home in Latvia... my latest adventure!
With any luck, it will only take me a month to write about this one... haha
Winter. Part I
The holiday season was insanely busy and beautifully crazy and tragic and wonderful, and in the middle of it all, i completely neglected my blogging (surprise, surprise).
First of all, the most lovely and amazing Samantha came to visit me, freshly released from her contract teaching English in Korea. It had been more than a year since we'd seen each other and i could hardly contain my excitement. I was in fact, so excited that I sang about it.
Yeah, I am a huge loser.
This we know.
Being reunited with my Sam was marvelous, and she was one heck of a trooper. She arrived from three days of traveling halfway across the world in buses, planes and trains and I threw head first into a mexican dinner with about 8 frenchies and all of the sudden, not only was she jet-lagged and forced to sociable, but she also had to deal with a lot of language.
I gave the precursory tour of Nantes. We went out with my friends. We tried to catch up on a year worth of stories and gossip and hugs. That poor girl drank an entire glass of pastisse (a naaasty licorice-flavored concoction) because in Korea it is rude to not accept a drink or food that is offered to you. In France it is not rude. In France it is perfectly normal. It was even offered to her with a "you can try this if you want, but if you don't like it, just give it to me and I can drink it." But she didn't believe them I guess.
Poor, poor thing.
(photo courtesy of samantha panger)
I played a song to make her feel better. I am like the pied-piper of happiness.
Then she let me drag her to Rennes (Rennes, the city of my dreams... and my former study abroad home-base) so that I could meet up with my friend Maïwenn, who I hadn't seen since I left France 3 years ago. Rennes was, as always, perfectly magical. We ate gallettes at the market, drank a café and enjoyed wine and cheese in one of my old haunts. We spent the afternoon wandering through the winding cobblestone streets and stumbling upon a tacky, blaring neon fair.
In true Rennes fashion, there was a loud demonstration of crusty punks and hippies who were protesting a new law calling for the ban of "ephemeral housing" (a very shite law, truth be told. Look it up.) by crashing what was supposed to be a visual presentation in front of the town hall and lighting a bunch of crates on fire while blasting aggressive trance music.
There were fire-dancers.
I LOVE fire dancers.
(photo courtesy of samantha panger)
I was more than happy to join their numbers, until the municipal police showed up and starting telling the gathering crowd of parents and children who had come to see the now-interrupted presentation that anyone with children needed to leave. Nay, not just leave, but to "get as far away as possible."
I turned to Sam and said, "we need to leave.Now." When she asked why, I asked her if she remembered the G.I. Joe SWAT teamsters that we saw gearing up a few blocks away. "That's why."
According to the paper the next morning, the team showed up minutes later and fired tear gas into the crowd.
I'm not that sorry that we missed it.
Especially because as we were wandering the streets, killing time until our rendez-vous with Maïwenn, we heard the beautiful sound of accordion music echoing through the streets, and followed it to find the most beautiful young punk playing Yann Tiersen songs. I gave him money and some day Samantha is going to find him and marry him. We will live across the street from each other and her beautiful, musically inclined new husband will teach me how to play the accordion while Sam and I make movies together.
It is a fool-proof plan.
Finally, we met up with Maïwenn, had a drink, and an excellent dinner in a Lebanese restaurant, and then she was kind enough to drive us to the train station where we were to catch a 10o'clock train back to Nantes.
Well, we were lucky that she drove us, because due to my being an absolute idiot, there was in fact, no train, and so, instead of leaving us to sleep in front of the train station all night, Maïwenn invited us to stay with her at her sister's home. Her sister and her brother-in-law were not only amazingly hospitable, but really really cool.
They stayed up with us into the wee-hours drinking tea and talking about music and film, they shared some 20 year-old Calvados that his father had made on their farm in Britany, and in the morning, we got to eat breakfast with their beautiful daughters. (The youngest is two and she is ADORABLE)
Sam pointed out that ALL European children have the same high-pitched little voice, and it makes your heart melt. It's wonderful.
So a day later than planned, we made it back to Nantes, went to visit the Machines of the Island (see previous posts) and packed for our Big Spanish Adventure.
Also, just in case you're curious, here is the video of Nantes that I made for my family at christmas. It's like a shaky, fast-paced walking tour.
First of all, the most lovely and amazing Samantha came to visit me, freshly released from her contract teaching English in Korea. It had been more than a year since we'd seen each other and i could hardly contain my excitement. I was in fact, so excited that I sang about it.
Yeah, I am a huge loser.
This we know.
Being reunited with my Sam was marvelous, and she was one heck of a trooper. She arrived from three days of traveling halfway across the world in buses, planes and trains and I threw head first into a mexican dinner with about 8 frenchies and all of the sudden, not only was she jet-lagged and forced to sociable, but she also had to deal with a lot of language.
I gave the precursory tour of Nantes. We went out with my friends. We tried to catch up on a year worth of stories and gossip and hugs. That poor girl drank an entire glass of pastisse (a naaasty licorice-flavored concoction) because in Korea it is rude to not accept a drink or food that is offered to you. In France it is not rude. In France it is perfectly normal. It was even offered to her with a "you can try this if you want, but if you don't like it, just give it to me and I can drink it." But she didn't believe them I guess.
Poor, poor thing.
(photo courtesy of samantha panger)
I played a song to make her feel better. I am like the pied-piper of happiness.
Then she let me drag her to Rennes (Rennes, the city of my dreams... and my former study abroad home-base) so that I could meet up with my friend Maïwenn, who I hadn't seen since I left France 3 years ago. Rennes was, as always, perfectly magical. We ate gallettes at the market, drank a café and enjoyed wine and cheese in one of my old haunts. We spent the afternoon wandering through the winding cobblestone streets and stumbling upon a tacky, blaring neon fair.
In true Rennes fashion, there was a loud demonstration of crusty punks and hippies who were protesting a new law calling for the ban of "ephemeral housing" (a very shite law, truth be told. Look it up.) by crashing what was supposed to be a visual presentation in front of the town hall and lighting a bunch of crates on fire while blasting aggressive trance music.
There were fire-dancers.
I LOVE fire dancers.
(photo courtesy of samantha panger)
I was more than happy to join their numbers, until the municipal police showed up and starting telling the gathering crowd of parents and children who had come to see the now-interrupted presentation that anyone with children needed to leave. Nay, not just leave, but to "get as far away as possible."
I turned to Sam and said, "we need to leave.Now." When she asked why, I asked her if she remembered the G.I. Joe SWAT teamsters that we saw gearing up a few blocks away. "That's why."
According to the paper the next morning, the team showed up minutes later and fired tear gas into the crowd.
I'm not that sorry that we missed it.
Especially because as we were wandering the streets, killing time until our rendez-vous with Maïwenn, we heard the beautiful sound of accordion music echoing through the streets, and followed it to find the most beautiful young punk playing Yann Tiersen songs. I gave him money and some day Samantha is going to find him and marry him. We will live across the street from each other and her beautiful, musically inclined new husband will teach me how to play the accordion while Sam and I make movies together.
It is a fool-proof plan.
Finally, we met up with Maïwenn, had a drink, and an excellent dinner in a Lebanese restaurant, and then she was kind enough to drive us to the train station where we were to catch a 10o'clock train back to Nantes.
Well, we were lucky that she drove us, because due to my being an absolute idiot, there was in fact, no train, and so, instead of leaving us to sleep in front of the train station all night, Maïwenn invited us to stay with her at her sister's home. Her sister and her brother-in-law were not only amazingly hospitable, but really really cool.
They stayed up with us into the wee-hours drinking tea and talking about music and film, they shared some 20 year-old Calvados that his father had made on their farm in Britany, and in the morning, we got to eat breakfast with their beautiful daughters. (The youngest is two and she is ADORABLE)
Sam pointed out that ALL European children have the same high-pitched little voice, and it makes your heart melt. It's wonderful.
So a day later than planned, we made it back to Nantes, went to visit the Machines of the Island (see previous posts) and packed for our Big Spanish Adventure.
Also, just in case you're curious, here is the video of Nantes that I made for my family at christmas. It's like a shaky, fast-paced walking tour.
Saturday, November 27, 2010
Winter is Here to Stay
It just snowed!
Now normally, I am very opposed to the idea of snow.
It's cold. It makes your shoes and pant-hems soggy. It makes getting around by bike a little more dangerous. It's cold. It turns dirty in a couple of days. It's cold.
But this snow did not stick. Not even a little bit.
And it was all fluffy, fat flakes, drifting gently down through the street lights.
Today was also the first day of the Christmas Market, and the first day that all of the christmas lights got turned on, so as long as it doesn't become a regular thing, it was quite nice.
I may have also felt a little less angry about it just because people got so excited. It doesn't usually snow here, so when it began to fall, there was a kind of collective excitement and a city-wide gasp. "Waaoah. Il neige!"
Now normally, I am very opposed to the idea of snow.
It's cold. It makes your shoes and pant-hems soggy. It makes getting around by bike a little more dangerous. It's cold. It turns dirty in a couple of days. It's cold.
But this snow did not stick. Not even a little bit.
And it was all fluffy, fat flakes, drifting gently down through the street lights.
Today was also the first day of the Christmas Market, and the first day that all of the christmas lights got turned on, so as long as it doesn't become a regular thing, it was quite nice.
I may have also felt a little less angry about it just because people got so excited. It doesn't usually snow here, so when it began to fall, there was a kind of collective excitement and a city-wide gasp. "Waaoah. Il neige!"
Thursday, October 21, 2010
I Am Developing a Twitch...
in my left eye.
Seriously though... it was pretty bad for a while, and it is all the fault of France.
I know that I haven't written for quite a while (a really, really long while) which is bad of me, and there's quite a lot that's happened since last I wrote. It was, after all, about a month ago. I'm going to try my best to tell the most complete tale possible, without having this blog stretch out into eternity, because lets face it, you don't really want to read something that long.
The most important thing that you need to know is that, even though I have been in this country for almost two months now, I have JUST started actually working in my schools.
This is because France lied to me a couple of times.
The first lie was in July when they sent me the paperwork for my contract telling me that I needed to be ready to start working on October 1st. This is why I scheduled my flight for the middle of September, so that I could have a week or two to figure out my living situation, get settled in and be well prepared for the first day of work.
The second lie came to me a couple weeks before I left for New York, when France told me that the first meeting would be October 7th. I thought, "Geez France, you could've told me earlier, now I'm going to have 3 weeks in France with nothing to do...oh well."
Well, there WAS a meeting on October 7th, and I guess that technically my contract DID start on October 1st... but at that first meeting, I was informed that I wouldn't actually start teaching until after Halloween. HALLOWEEN!? And while I did spend a couple afternoons each week chasing down instructors and trying to build a schedule, this meant that essentially I was supposed to just hang out for a month and a half with no money and nothing to keep me busy. Grrrrrrr.
Lucky for me, France always keeps itself busy, and what with all the social unrest lately, there were more than a few protests to check out.
I know that in the news they made it sound very bad and potentially dangerous, but personally, whenever I hear that there's going to be a strike, I associate it with free entertainment. Seriously! What is more fun that watching people take to the streets en masse?! And since I wasn't working or studying, and I don't use any gasoline-powered vehicles, I was absolutely not affected by the strikes.
(check out this video!)
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xf7k2i_retraites-les-lyceens-maintiennent_news
Okay, maybe a little affected, because whenever there are strikes people block the tramways (what kind of stupid city has Trams anyway?! They have to wait for traffic, they are easily blocked by protesters and they are really easy to ride without paying. Metros and subways are definitely the way to go.) but I usually ride my bike to work, so for me, this was just one big spectacle! My friend's sister was driving up from the south with her boyfriend and they got stuck in Nantes because they ran out of gas and all of the stations were empty. Apparently there is a big Gasoline reserve in Saint-Nazaire, which is only about 40 minutes away, but the streets surrounding it had been barricaded by burning tires (not too savvy, if you ask me... for several reasons). I myself had to cross a fire-barricade that had been set across a tramline to keep people from reaching the gas station once gasoline had finally been re-distributed... I had to cross it THREE TIMES, which, by the end, was not necessarily fun, because people were starting to get a bit cranky.
That was the day the aforementioned eye-twitch really started.
It was the end of a week spent trying to get my teachers to commit to a schedule, and as I work at two schools, and apparently nothing in France can be organized by email or conference call, I was having to bike back and forth between schools (both of which are about 25 minutes from my house) trying to create a schedule that worked for both groups... and then, as soon as I thought that I had everything figured out, one of the schools decided that that wouldn't quite work for them, so I had to start hopping back and forth again.
On the day of the fire-line crossing, while listening to some more wishy-washy non-committal "well maybe on this day..." planning, my eye started twitching like-a-crazy!
This was irritating, because I like to think that, in general, I am a pretty easy-going person. I am perhaps a bit particular about certain things, I may be mildly stressed, but I am certainly not tightly-wound and I am definitely not an organization freak.
And despite all of this, France gave me a twitchy eye!
Those jerks.
Don't worry though! It has since stopped twitching.
This may have been, in part, due to the two week vacation (yes, a vacation from doing practically nothing, haha) surrounding the Halloween weekend.
Jonathan Driggers came to visit me, and we had many, many grand adventures, including, but not limited to exploring the lovely and historically important Chateau d'Anne de Bretagne, celebrating Halloween in a properly American way, with costumes and drinks and candy, and we introduced several French friends to the joy of my favorite holiday. They even got dressed up and bobbed for apples!!
Jonathan and I also ventured to Niort to visit Katie again (Montana solidarity, yo!) ate more bread and cheese than was healthy, and went to see the Machines de l'Ile in Nantes, the MOST MAGICAL place EVER!
It's all Jules Verne-inspired steam-punked Animals made from beautifully carved wood and fashioned together with gears and designed to carry people! I am in love with every project these people have in the works. I want very badly to develop some machinist skillz and join their ranks!
Jonathan also had the good fortune to experience the beauty of French strikes. Not only did I drag him to see a protest:
(Seriously! Free entertainment!)
but he arrived at the very zenith of the three-plus week Garbageman strike. Haha.
I spend a lot of time telling everyone how beautiful and lovely and clean France is. (Even when it smells like a toilet, the streets are clean) I like to talk it up and romanticize it, maybe just a little, but when Jonathan stepped out of the train station, he was greeted by mountains of trash. Huge piles of food and garbage and recycling that had been mounding up over the course of almost a month. In some places, protesters had even helped themselves to a bit of the refuse to use as tender for their fires. So not only was it just generally really dirty, but there were the melted, twisted ashes of trash fires here and there. And the SMELL! I'm just going to say that we were lucky it was a cool fall, because if October had been a hot month, Nantes would have been unbearable. As it was, the city was starting to get pretty ripe.
It was not France's classiest moment...
And moving on...
So, my classes have started (finally!) and so far, I've really only met the kids; oh man-alive, are they cute! No jokes, French children are Adorable (with a capital A). And mostly they have a lot of questions for me.
The questions start out pretty standardized: What's your name? How old are you? Where are you from? Do you have brothers and sisters? Do you have pets? Do you like animals? etc.
But if they are given enough time, the questions get really special. Here are a few of my favorites:
"Is Hannah Montana from Montana?"
"What do American Policemen look like?"
"Do you only eat Hamburgers?"
"Have you met Michael Jackson?"
(this was my favorite question, because I laughed, said "No, and what's more, he's dead." and then, about 5 minutes later, I was asked THE SAME THING. Apparently, they reeeeally wanted me to have met the Prince of Pop.
And... I think that may be it. I have officially caught you up on all news strike and-or school related.
I shall try to keep this blog a little more up to date from now on.
Bisous
Seriously though... it was pretty bad for a while, and it is all the fault of France.
I know that I haven't written for quite a while (a really, really long while) which is bad of me, and there's quite a lot that's happened since last I wrote. It was, after all, about a month ago. I'm going to try my best to tell the most complete tale possible, without having this blog stretch out into eternity, because lets face it, you don't really want to read something that long.
The most important thing that you need to know is that, even though I have been in this country for almost two months now, I have JUST started actually working in my schools.
This is because France lied to me a couple of times.
The first lie was in July when they sent me the paperwork for my contract telling me that I needed to be ready to start working on October 1st. This is why I scheduled my flight for the middle of September, so that I could have a week or two to figure out my living situation, get settled in and be well prepared for the first day of work.
The second lie came to me a couple weeks before I left for New York, when France told me that the first meeting would be October 7th. I thought, "Geez France, you could've told me earlier, now I'm going to have 3 weeks in France with nothing to do...oh well."
Well, there WAS a meeting on October 7th, and I guess that technically my contract DID start on October 1st... but at that first meeting, I was informed that I wouldn't actually start teaching until after Halloween. HALLOWEEN!? And while I did spend a couple afternoons each week chasing down instructors and trying to build a schedule, this meant that essentially I was supposed to just hang out for a month and a half with no money and nothing to keep me busy. Grrrrrrr.
Lucky for me, France always keeps itself busy, and what with all the social unrest lately, there were more than a few protests to check out.
I know that in the news they made it sound very bad and potentially dangerous, but personally, whenever I hear that there's going to be a strike, I associate it with free entertainment. Seriously! What is more fun that watching people take to the streets en masse?! And since I wasn't working or studying, and I don't use any gasoline-powered vehicles, I was absolutely not affected by the strikes.
(check out this video!)
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xf7k2i_retraites-les-lyceens-maintiennent_news
Okay, maybe a little affected, because whenever there are strikes people block the tramways (what kind of stupid city has Trams anyway?! They have to wait for traffic, they are easily blocked by protesters and they are really easy to ride without paying. Metros and subways are definitely the way to go.) but I usually ride my bike to work, so for me, this was just one big spectacle! My friend's sister was driving up from the south with her boyfriend and they got stuck in Nantes because they ran out of gas and all of the stations were empty. Apparently there is a big Gasoline reserve in Saint-Nazaire, which is only about 40 minutes away, but the streets surrounding it had been barricaded by burning tires (not too savvy, if you ask me... for several reasons). I myself had to cross a fire-barricade that had been set across a tramline to keep people from reaching the gas station once gasoline had finally been re-distributed... I had to cross it THREE TIMES, which, by the end, was not necessarily fun, because people were starting to get a bit cranky.
That was the day the aforementioned eye-twitch really started.
It was the end of a week spent trying to get my teachers to commit to a schedule, and as I work at two schools, and apparently nothing in France can be organized by email or conference call, I was having to bike back and forth between schools (both of which are about 25 minutes from my house) trying to create a schedule that worked for both groups... and then, as soon as I thought that I had everything figured out, one of the schools decided that that wouldn't quite work for them, so I had to start hopping back and forth again.
On the day of the fire-line crossing, while listening to some more wishy-washy non-committal "well maybe on this day..." planning, my eye started twitching like-a-crazy!
This was irritating, because I like to think that, in general, I am a pretty easy-going person. I am perhaps a bit particular about certain things, I may be mildly stressed, but I am certainly not tightly-wound and I am definitely not an organization freak.
And despite all of this, France gave me a twitchy eye!
Those jerks.
Don't worry though! It has since stopped twitching.
This may have been, in part, due to the two week vacation (yes, a vacation from doing practically nothing, haha) surrounding the Halloween weekend.
Jonathan Driggers came to visit me, and we had many, many grand adventures, including, but not limited to exploring the lovely and historically important Chateau d'Anne de Bretagne, celebrating Halloween in a properly American way, with costumes and drinks and candy, and we introduced several French friends to the joy of my favorite holiday. They even got dressed up and bobbed for apples!!
Jonathan and I also ventured to Niort to visit Katie again (Montana solidarity, yo!) ate more bread and cheese than was healthy, and went to see the Machines de l'Ile in Nantes, the MOST MAGICAL place EVER!
It's all Jules Verne-inspired steam-punked Animals made from beautifully carved wood and fashioned together with gears and designed to carry people! I am in love with every project these people have in the works. I want very badly to develop some machinist skillz and join their ranks!
Jonathan also had the good fortune to experience the beauty of French strikes. Not only did I drag him to see a protest:
(Seriously! Free entertainment!)
but he arrived at the very zenith of the three-plus week Garbageman strike. Haha.
I spend a lot of time telling everyone how beautiful and lovely and clean France is. (Even when it smells like a toilet, the streets are clean) I like to talk it up and romanticize it, maybe just a little, but when Jonathan stepped out of the train station, he was greeted by mountains of trash. Huge piles of food and garbage and recycling that had been mounding up over the course of almost a month. In some places, protesters had even helped themselves to a bit of the refuse to use as tender for their fires. So not only was it just generally really dirty, but there were the melted, twisted ashes of trash fires here and there. And the SMELL! I'm just going to say that we were lucky it was a cool fall, because if October had been a hot month, Nantes would have been unbearable. As it was, the city was starting to get pretty ripe.
It was not France's classiest moment...
And moving on...
So, my classes have started (finally!) and so far, I've really only met the kids; oh man-alive, are they cute! No jokes, French children are Adorable (with a capital A). And mostly they have a lot of questions for me.
The questions start out pretty standardized: What's your name? How old are you? Where are you from? Do you have brothers and sisters? Do you have pets? Do you like animals? etc.
But if they are given enough time, the questions get really special. Here are a few of my favorites:
"Is Hannah Montana from Montana?"
"What do American Policemen look like?"
"Do you only eat Hamburgers?"
"Have you met Michael Jackson?"
(this was my favorite question, because I laughed, said "No, and what's more, he's dead." and then, about 5 minutes later, I was asked THE SAME THING. Apparently, they reeeeally wanted me to have met the Prince of Pop.
And... I think that may be it. I have officially caught you up on all news strike and-or school related.
I shall try to keep this blog a little more up to date from now on.
Bisous
Monday, October 11, 2010
What Grand Adventures We May Find
I have just returned from the most wonderful of weekends!
I hopped a train on Friday to take me to Niort, a lovely town about 80 miles south of Nantes, to visit my friend Katie, who is working there as an assistant. I wasn't sure what the trip held in store, but I figured that it would be fun to travel a little bit, since I am doing so very little work here, and I was really looking forward to seeing Katie, since gosh, when is a little Montanan solidarity not a good thing?
She greeted me at the train station with that familiar, beautiful, blue, Montana flag and walked me back to her house (which is adorable!) where we were almost immediately joined by the landlord's 7-year old daughter. She's great! I love talking with kids because our vocabulary is very similar!
All this was good and dandy, but good and dandy escalated to Friggin Fantastic when, that evening, we went to go see a concert by a group called MORIARTY who I'd listened to a bit before and knew I liked but really didn't know that much about them.
All you need to know is that they are amazing (and yes, they sing in english, so fear not) and the show was really powerful and moving; a Rock&Roll religious experience, if you will.
Seeing music live is always something special, but there exists a certain kind of passion that, when added into the mix, can reach directly into you soul.
They had that passion.
Also, they're opening band had a ukulele player as the lead singer, a girl who played the singing-saw and the violin and a pianist who also played a horse's jaw-bone.
It was all like some sort of gypsy fantasy!
I had assumed, as one is inclined to do after an amazing show, that that would probably be the highlight of the weekend, but gosh! Was I ever wrong!
Waking up early Saturday morning, after getting only a few hours of sleep, we walked down to the cathedral to meet up with one of Katie's friends and a brother and sister, Alex and Marie) that they had met through couch surfing who were kind enough to drive us to the nearby town of La Rochelle and it's neighboring island, L'ile de Ré. They took us to an open-air market, showed us around the town and we spent the day on the beach, picnicking, wading into the chilly water, watching waves crash over the dikes protecting the town, and of course, trading vocab and linguistic lessons back and forth, speaking a happy mixture of French and English.
The ocean always makes me feel better – peaceful, calm, pensive etc – and so I was ready to call it a day, but as it turned out, Alex and Marie have some friends who were hosting a party, and they had decided to take us along.
Now, I was expecting a house party, maybe, MAYBE, a cook-out, but what we got was SO much better.
There's a group of people who live in yurts all year long, and during the summer they organize camps for kids, to teach them about nature and how to live outdoors etc, but staring this week, they are moving their camp to higher grounds and so this was their farewell-until-next-summer party, complete with carneval-esque lights, a theater performance based on several of Mark Twain's writings, and musicians that were still going strong by the time we left at 3am!
It really was this magical sort of dreamland that can only exist at very specific moments in very specific places and with just the perfect mixture of people.
I simply could not have been happier.
(also, here is a video of the most amazing violin-playing 10-year old ever! Holding his own with the big dogs...)
The next day, Katie and I slept until noon and lazed around the house until it was time for dinner, at which point we pulled ourselves together and went to eat at a really great Asian restaurant and then wandered the deserted warmly-lit streets of Niort.
All in all, as bout as much happiness and adventure that one could hope to fit in to 48 hours.
I hopped a train on Friday to take me to Niort, a lovely town about 80 miles south of Nantes, to visit my friend Katie, who is working there as an assistant. I wasn't sure what the trip held in store, but I figured that it would be fun to travel a little bit, since I am doing so very little work here, and I was really looking forward to seeing Katie, since gosh, when is a little Montanan solidarity not a good thing?
She greeted me at the train station with that familiar, beautiful, blue, Montana flag and walked me back to her house (which is adorable!) where we were almost immediately joined by the landlord's 7-year old daughter. She's great! I love talking with kids because our vocabulary is very similar!
All this was good and dandy, but good and dandy escalated to Friggin Fantastic when, that evening, we went to go see a concert by a group called MORIARTY who I'd listened to a bit before and knew I liked but really didn't know that much about them.
All you need to know is that they are amazing (and yes, they sing in english, so fear not) and the show was really powerful and moving; a Rock&Roll religious experience, if you will.
Seeing music live is always something special, but there exists a certain kind of passion that, when added into the mix, can reach directly into you soul.
They had that passion.
Also, they're opening band had a ukulele player as the lead singer, a girl who played the singing-saw and the violin and a pianist who also played a horse's jaw-bone.
It was all like some sort of gypsy fantasy!
I had assumed, as one is inclined to do after an amazing show, that that would probably be the highlight of the weekend, but gosh! Was I ever wrong!
Waking up early Saturday morning, after getting only a few hours of sleep, we walked down to the cathedral to meet up with one of Katie's friends and a brother and sister, Alex and Marie) that they had met through couch surfing who were kind enough to drive us to the nearby town of La Rochelle and it's neighboring island, L'ile de Ré. They took us to an open-air market, showed us around the town and we spent the day on the beach, picnicking, wading into the chilly water, watching waves crash over the dikes protecting the town, and of course, trading vocab and linguistic lessons back and forth, speaking a happy mixture of French and English.
The ocean always makes me feel better – peaceful, calm, pensive etc – and so I was ready to call it a day, but as it turned out, Alex and Marie have some friends who were hosting a party, and they had decided to take us along.
Now, I was expecting a house party, maybe, MAYBE, a cook-out, but what we got was SO much better.
There's a group of people who live in yurts all year long, and during the summer they organize camps for kids, to teach them about nature and how to live outdoors etc, but staring this week, they are moving their camp to higher grounds and so this was their farewell-until-next-summer party, complete with carneval-esque lights, a theater performance based on several of Mark Twain's writings, and musicians that were still going strong by the time we left at 3am!
It really was this magical sort of dreamland that can only exist at very specific moments in very specific places and with just the perfect mixture of people.
I simply could not have been happier.
(also, here is a video of the most amazing violin-playing 10-year old ever! Holding his own with the big dogs...)
The next day, Katie and I slept until noon and lazed around the house until it was time for dinner, at which point we pulled ourselves together and went to eat at a really great Asian restaurant and then wandered the deserted warmly-lit streets of Niort.
All in all, as bout as much happiness and adventure that one could hope to fit in to 48 hours.
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
I Started Drawing Again Today
I am, needless to say, happy about this.
They're really just doodles on notecards, but It's been so, SO long since I've really drawn anything.
They're really just doodles on notecards, but It's been so, SO long since I've really drawn anything.
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