Where in the world is Gwannel Sandiego?

Hadn't seen nothin' yet

2012-02-09T23:40:00.007+01:00

Turns out the snow the Monday before last was just a dusting compared to the snow on Sunday (which had already fallen by the time I blogged, but I hadn't been out in it yet so I didn't really realise). According to what I read online, we got about 10 cm of snow - the local newspaper had interviews with a bunch of people saying that this was the most they'd ever seen in 20 years or whatever. And it has been fu-reezing. This morning when I walked to work it was supposedly -11 ("feels like -14") Celsius, but actually it didn't feel quite as cold today as it has been. It was sunny today, so technically a bit colder, but definitely more pleasant than yesterday when we had wind and light snow falls all day. Consequently it's been taking ages to get around town because I'm petrified of slipping on the icy pavements! It is still kind of cool to have snow though!

For some reason, the park has been shut since it snowed on Sunday, so the snow is pristine (took these photos through the gates)

One possibility is it's shut to avoid accidents on the frozen lake

No work going on on the new tram in this weather

Ice on the Cher

Skyrockets in flight...

2012-02-08T15:04:00.001+01:00

AFTERNOON MARMITE!

Ha ha, my Mum and Dad brought me over a few jars of Marmite from New Zealand, and I'm pretty pleased about that. For our American friends who might not know, it's everyone's favourite yeast spread made from byproducts of the brewing process! (And yes, it does have competition in that category!) It is not the same as yucky Vegemite by any means. People who didn't grow up with Marmite usually think it's gross, but you're wrong. If nothing else, you've got to admire a product that's not afraid to write "yeast spread" front and centre on its label.

For our English friends - NZ Marmite tastes different from UK Marmite. And by "different", I mean "better". I suppose you can't tell from the photo, but it is darker in colour, thicker in consistency, and most important, yummier. I was mucho disappointo the first time I went to the UK and was disabused of the notion that our Marmites would taste the same. Now I do my best to keep my own stock in hand.

Baby, it's cold outside

2012-02-05T11:27:00.006+01:00

Some of us (me!) thought that because we'd got to late January with very mild weather, then it was plain sailing till Spring. This past week has proved me wrong, however. We got a fair bit of snow on Monday, and after a very cold week (it was -8 walking to work on Thursday morning, -12 with wind chill, and even lower temperatures overnight), the last bits of snow were disappearing from the streets when I woke up to snow again this morning.

I get pretty excited by snow - it doesn't snow where I'm from in New Zealand (well, a few flakes were noticed in high places last winter, which was very very unusual) so it still has novelty value for me. Especially since last winter it snowed once, lightly (in early December) in Tours and lasted a couple of days on the ground, and the winter before that I was in Nice, where it did actually snow a few times, but it's not exactly Winter Central. I got my fill of snow in England both years though, unlike this Christmas where there was no snow to be seen.

But I must say, snow is more exciting when it's either sitting on the ground looking pretty, or falling when you're inside looking out. I made the mistake on Monday of deciding to walk home regardless, since I thought otherwise I'd just be stuck freezing my arse off waiting for the inevitably late bus, and then have a long journey home in traffic packed in like sardines on the bus. It was not very fun to be out in, though - the wind was blowing the snow directly at me under my umbrella, especially on the bridges across the Cher and the railway, where it was absolutely freezing cold. I had my fingerless gloves on, and my fingertips puckered up like I'd been in the bath for too long - I couldn't keep them in my pockets due to holding my umbrella. By the time I got home, I was wet, my shoes were leaking and I was very cold! I made home-made chicken soup followed by hot chocolate with Baileys to perk myself up a bit.

On Wednesday I went to the gym - I'm used to walking home in my gym gear and shower at home, so I forgot until I got outside that I was in shorts with bare legs! I basically ran all the way home, so maybe that's a good training technique!

Yesterday was a bit warmer (about minus 3) and nice and sunny. I went to the "cat expo" with a couple of friends. Bit disappointing - I was expecting to be able to pat/play with the cats, but they were all in plastic-covered cages :( I suppose I understand they don't want everyone hassling them, but it was a bit of a bummer. Paying 5 euros to look at 800-euro cats in plastic boxes isn't my idea of fun. We followed up with a nice lunch - a "tourangelle" version of tartiflette, where they replaced the lardons with rillons, a special Tours kind of pork confit, plus a litre of wine between the three of us. Very ladies who lunch.

Some photos from the last week:

I risked turning into an icicle to take a photo of the Cher in Monday's snow-shower

Sunset over the Cher on Wednesday or Thursday - not snowing, but very cold!

The half-frozen lake in the park

A bit of snow on the ground in the park - I'll try to brave the outside world and take some more pics today since it's stopped snowing

Snow falling in a different park

The view from my bedroom window this morning. Since all my other windows are skylights, it's pretty dark in the flat today and I can't see out!

What do you get if you cross a rat and a log?

2012-02-03T11:42:00.008+01:00

A ragondin, of course!

Last night I went over to a friend's for drinks with her neighbour and a girl she met on a training course whom she'd invited specifically because "SHE'S SINGLE, YOU'RE SINGLE, YOU MUST GO OUT TOGETHER!" Turns out, as well as being single (rare among Frenchies), she's pretty cool. We have already talked about how we must get drunk and sing karaoke together and also get dressed up all fancy and go to the opera (different evenings, presumably). And she works at the markets and has offered to get me sweet deals on cheese. May be developing a girl crush.

Anyway, the point of this blog post is about the joys of cross-linguistic/cultural communication, or, how I learned what a ragondin is. Communication can sometimes be difficult, but it can also provide different ways of seeing things (or bizarre ways of learning new information). Sometimes it's like your whole life is a game of Taboo, where you can say anything except the name of the thing you're describing. And then sometimes it's more like charades!

We were, for some reason, talking about the botanic gardens at Tours and she mentioned that there were ragondins there. When I asked what a ragondin was, my friend Liz said that it was an animal that "didn't exist" in England and it looked like a big rat. Charlie the Frenchie defended the honour of the "cute" ragondin, and chose to describe it as a cross between a rat (pronounced "rah" in French) and "a big stick that you hit people with" – that confused me, but turns out she meant "rondin" – a log. How rat + rondin = ragondin, or how exactly rat + log is a sensible way of describing an animal, I don't know. This is, after all, a country that decides the most notable difference between a mouse and a bat is that the bat is bald (a bat is a "chauve-souris" – a bald mouse). Also, a log is a "big stick to hit people with" - this may be a worrying sign of violent tendencies chez New Droog.

I was also amused by her description that ragondins love dirty water and eat everything. If you have a dirty stream – why, get yourself a ragondin, pop it in, and it will eat up all the sewage tout de suite. But – attention ! A ragondin will eat anything, so if it runs out of sewage (apparently its meal of choice) it will start eating plants and fishes. So you must monitor your ragondin, and take him out of the stream once he's done his job. Presumably you then pat your ragondin on the head and take him to another dirty stream to feast on more delicious sewage.

If, by any chance (and I don't see how it's possible) you still don't know what your friendly neighbourhood ragondin is – apparently it's a coypu, and they don't get a very good rap in Wikipedia.

Oh and I also learned that in French "Little Women" is "The four daughters of Dr. March". Come on, France - he's not even in the book. Yeah, "Little Women" is pretty patronising, but how man-centric can you get?

Musee des vins de Touraine - Tours wine museum

2012-02-02T11:31:00.002+01:00

The lovely Mary Kay from Out and About in Paris recently visited the Paris wine museum and came away less than impressed. When I was out for a walk on Sunday, this sort of inspired me to take a look at Tours' own wine museum. After all, there's not a lot else to do on a Sunday in these parts. It was actually closed for lunch when I went past, so I went home, ate some cheese, blogged about eating cheese, then headed back out.

I had read on I think the official Tours website, either that or the website of the tourist office, that you could get in for cheap with your local bus pass. The girl on the desk had never heard of this, but she made a couple of calls and said that she would let me in for half price anyway. Sweet. So I think it was 2.50 instead of 5 - something like that.

The museum is just in one room, in the cellars of the abbey of St. Julien, dating from the 13th century - and very pretty it is too.

The church of St. Julien - it always seems closed and I'd always assumed it was ruined and not used anymore, but on closer inspection, although it was locked up, there was a sign mentioning church groups for youth held inside, so I suppose it must be open sometimes

A capital on the columns of the church

The back of St Julien's

Museum entrance

Inside the museum

Remarkably for a museum about the wines of Touraine, there is absolutely no information about what the most popular wines of the region are, their characteristics, what you might drink them with, especially good years to look out for, how the wines are made, a map of the different AOC areas... !!! There were about 5 pages that looked like they had been cut out of an encyclopedia from the 1970s which listed the different cepages (grape types) used in the region, and that was pretty much it as far as information on the wine went.

The rest of the room was mostly taken up with display cases on such themes as "Wine and Religion" "Wine and Social Life" and "The Benefits of Drinking Wine", which mostly contained photographs of people and wine and quotes from the Bible or famous authors. (My favourite of these was Victor Hugo saying that "God only created water - man made wine".) There were also cases in the middle of the room which contained wine glasses and jugs and associated implements through the ages.

Luckily enough, I am rather easily pleased with museums. I would rather a museum that's somewhat on the ridiculous side and hence amuses me, then one which is very serious but also lacks anything of particular interest. (Of course, a museum with spectacular exhibits and informative displays is also good.) I would rather hate to see these sorts of museums all die off and be replaced with the type where you spend the whole time pushing buttons and reading stuff off computer screens and the like (not that they can't be very good in their place, of course).

Here's some of my favourite things from the museum:

This is a bowl for a rôtie, a traditional drink of warm wine with sugar given to newlyweds the day after their wedding. I find the eye and the caption saying "I see you, naughty monkey" (exact translation up for debate) a little bit creepy! I looked online for a little more information on this tradition and found an article (first page only available for free) saying it was a tradition in the Auvergne to burst into the bridal room and present the bride and groom with a chamber pot filled with a mix of chocolate and champagne, which looked disgusting (and reminiscent of what normally would go in a chamber pot, of course) but tasted good. Everyone there would share the contents of the pot. As I said, the museum said the rôtie was wine and sugar, but if there was chocolate in the mix that might explain what's all over their faces in the photo they had of the ceremony (plus that pot does look a lot like a chamber pot)

I'd love to know who Martin Bigo was and what's going on here. It's around the time of the Revolution, but that doesn't clear anything up for me.

I thought these were pretty spiffy

A stained-glass window showing the AOC varieties of the region (so there is sorta a map)

A stained-glass window showing drunken people cavorting with a lion and a goat. Hey, why not?

Only in France would:

A picture of Mothers Day celebrations be considered ideal for a display on how wine accompanies us at all our important life events

A picture of schoolchildren looking at wine be captioned "Desire" (this was in the "Negative Effects of Wine" display by the way)

Someone write a book called "heal yourself with wine"

You get away with labelling a photo of a breathalyser "Alas! The alcohol-test"

Auto-entrepreneur stuff: The next step

2012-01-31T10:10:00.000+01:00

As I mentioned in my last post about becoming an auto-entrepreneur, the first thing that happens is you get flooded with mail, most of which I had no idea what to do with, so I put it off since I was busy with Christmas and New Years and going back to work and travelling to York and all the rest of it. Not to mention actually starting the work I created the business to do! But I vowed to tackle it this weekend, so here are some more handy hints.

One of the more confusing pieces of mail I got was to do with the AGIRC and ARRCO pension schemes. I actually got more or less the same form sent to me by two companies, Humanis and Reunica, although I see from looking online you might get them from different places, depending on where you are in France. One of my biggest stumbling blocks looking at this form was that is says "Choice of institutions" and there are two (AGIRC and ARRCO) but no boxes to tick or clear instructions to circle or cross out one of the choices, so I didn't know what to do with the form. I found a very helpful article online about this that explains these organisations aren't actually for YOUR pension - you selected a complementary provider at the time of creating your enterprise. They are for your future employees - but you still have to fill out the form whether you have employees or not. The reason there are two of them, is that "salariés" get one organisation, and "cadres" get another. If you don't have employees of any type, don't worry, you don't have to pay anything. That article I linked to does a pretty good job of explaining the basics on how to complete the form.

This form has to be completed within 3 months of creating your enterprise - I know this because I've already got a nagging letter in the post for not doing it. I assume I only have to send the form back to one of the (private) companies that has contacted me. Since I'm not planning on having any employees, I just picked the one with the easier form.

The second thing I got a lot of (apart from stuff from supermarkets and phone companies wanting my business) was offers of mutuelles - complementary health insurance. However, all of them seemed to be aimed at my imaginary employees, rather than myself, so I just chucked all that. Once I figured out what various stuff was there was actually a lot, including duplicates of the form I just mentioned, I could just throw away. And then there was also a lot of stuff like the official certificates of creating my business and registering it with different agencies that I just needed to file.

After all of that, the only thing left that really needed dealing with was the form to declare your income (having chosen the "régime micro-social simplifié" when you created the enterprise). The form actually looks pretty straightforward, and it comes with an explanatory page, but it also says you can do it online, which seems easier to me, so I went on www.lautoentrepreneur.fr to sign up for this. In typical fashion, you sign up and then you have to print out a form and send it in. I thought I would be able to save the PDF document it says it will create and print it out at work, but there is no option to save it. So when I logged back in at work, I couldn't find the form again at first, but eventually I found it by going to 'Le compte de votre établissement -> Gérer les inscriptions' then in the new menu 'Vos coordonnées bancaires pour télérégler vos cotisations d'auto-entrepreneur' then next to your bank details it has 'Afficher le formulaire d'adhésion'. The window with the form wouldn't open in Firefox, but it is fine in Chrome.

Then, presumably once you mail this form in to them, they activate your registration on the site so you can pay your taxes online. I'm mostly telling you this so that no-one thinks they can wait till the last minute to pay online. You have to declare every trimester, whether you make money or not. I had the dates on a piece of paper somewhere but I must have filed it, so I can only say the first trimester ends on the 30/04/12. Presumably the next is 4 months after that, then 4 months after that.

Oh hey - most importantly - I got paid! I am probably about halfway through doing the actual work. I'm a bit worried about how it will go because it depends on people emailing me back. It's not my problem if they don't, but if we do a second round of emails I can see me getting up to my hour limit (I think it worked out at only 19 hours or something) really quickly because it really takes quite a lot of time, even though it's a boring and simple task. Anyway, as I said I would, I've put the money in my savings, so I'm not tempted to fritter it away before the taxman's been paid and I've even finished the work!

Cheesewatch - Etorki and Tomme Noire des Pyrenees

2012-01-29T12:53:00.004+01:00

It's been ages since I did a cheesewatch - my very irregular reports on trying new cheese. Mostly because I often fail to try new cheeses. I came across Morbier recently and it's become a new favourite, but often I fall back on the tried and true or just don't buy cheeses for snacking unless I'm having people over or something. So I decided today that I would take advantage of being in France and try something new, and I selected Etorki because it was on sale and a Tomme Noire des Pyrenees just because it was reasonably cheap. By chance, they both come from around the same region.

The Etorki is a Basque sheep's milk cheese that looks much like a big Port Salut or Saint Paulin, with the same sort of rind plus semi-soft inside. It has a pleasant creamy texture and a good flavour without being especially strong. It actually reminds me of sort of a medium cheddar flavour, but with a completely different texture. Quite nice! However, because it is so creamy, a little goes a long way - you probably won't want to sit there eating the whole block (not altogether a bad thing!) It's not an AOC cheese, so you could theoretically make Etorki anywhere, although it's definitely marketed as a Basque cheese and my sample, at least, was produced in the region.

The Tomme, on the other hand, is a cow's milk cheese. I've had Tomme from the Nord-Pas-de-Calais before, when we toured a farm. As far as I remember (kind of traumatised by the video we watched featuring cow birth - or was it a sheep birth? We went to a cow and a sheep farm, so I forget) that was a very hard cheese. This one has a black rind (hence the name) and is softer than the Etorki, although still with approximately the same sort of texture. It has quite an unusual flavour, stronger and more distinctive than the Etorki with a bit of a sour cottage-cheese type aftertaste. I can imagine some people not liking it, but I do. I like cottage cheese too, for that matter (which they don't seem to sell in France? Fromage fouette is an addictive alternative though!) This one is AOC.

So there you go - two cheeses, two tasty new experiences!

Whuh?

2012-01-27T15:16:00.005+01:00

I'm always learning new things about my adopted home. Lately I've been watching the (very addictive) Engrenages/Spiral, a French cop show which, as well as being very entertaining, has been filling me in on how the French justice system works (hopefully in a way that is at least vaguely in line with reality). And today, I was reading Le Monde's commentary on presidential candidate François Hollande's proposal to make the famous 1905 law on the separation of Church and State in France (the wellspring for all those recent laws and debates on stuff like wearing the veil in public) part of the French Constitution. I was very surprised to read:

En Alsace-Moselle... le concordat napoléonien, survivance anachronique, oblige les contribuables athées à payer les salaires des prêtres par le truchement de l'impôt.

In Alsace-Moselle the Concordat of 1801, an anachronistic survival, obliges atheist taxpayers to pay priests' salaries via their taxes.

Wow, really? Apparently so - in this region, priests (and rabbis, pastors etc.) of the Jewish, Catholic, Lutheran and Calvinist persuasion receive a state salary, as Class A bureaucrats! This is based on the fact that Alsace-Moselle wasn't part of France when the 1905 law was passed. But surely someone could have changed the situation since? Is there a huge priest-paying lobby in the area? Surely there's got to be a lot of people, whether religious or not, who would agree that non-Christians/Jews shouldn't be obligated to pay the salaries of religious figures, and that it should still be at the discretion of even believers.

Of course, tax breaks for organised religions are not uncommon all over the world, including (and correct me if I'm wrong) the US and NZ, but it surprises me that France, supposed bastion of secularism, goes a step further (at least in one region) by actually directly paying the priests. I don't want to get into an argument with anyone over the benefits of religion to society or anything along those lines - I'm certainly not trying to have a go at religion in general, I just was shocked to find this information out! I have mixed feelings about the law banning the full veil in public, as well as some other stuff which is usually defended under the "we are a secular society" heading, but I feel like the continued existence of this tax system in Alsace-Moselle really undermines the legitimacy of such laws (whether or not you agree with them). Surely France should be cleaning house on the Alsace-Moselle law before turning around and claiming that they're oh so secular? If I were a Muslim woman living in Alsace-Moselle, pretty sure I'd be either wearing my veil until they got rid of that law, or refusing to pay my taxes. (Or probably neither, since I don't know if I'm really the "political firebrand" type, but it's easy to pretend when one's a hypothetical Alsace-living, veil-wearing Muslim woman on the internet.)

I must say I wouldn't mind though if they made Good Friday a public holiday for the whole of France, instead of just for Alsace and Lorraine!

Snapshots from York

2012-01-22T16:45:00.011+01:00

The rest of my time in York was spent in much the same way - a little bit of idle sightseeing combined with a lot of time in the pub. Very pleasant! I had to get up at 4.45 on Saturday morning, which luckily wasn't as painful as it might have been, since I hadn't been sleeping well and had been waking up early anyway. Everything went smoothly getting my two trains and plane, and I had packed so impressively light coming over that I managed to take back an extra two books, four cans of cider, a bottle of bitters for a friend, two cheddar cheeses, two packets of bacon, chocolate and the cardi I bought, and still be under the weight limit! Hurrah! I had time for a nap before having some birthday drinks for a friend of mine - I would otherwise probably have taken it easy after getting up so early, but couldn't really say no on someone's birthday!

New dress I got in the sales at Christmas

We had some birthday gin - this is special miner's gin from Wallonia (French-speaking Belgium), drunk out of cute little shot glasses with a handle! You're meant to sip it rather than shoot it, which to be honest is a little bit much for my tastes, however it did seem quite smooth and not so bitter by gin standards. I'll still have my next one with lime though, thanks!

York Minster

The memorial to the Boer War echoes the form of the Minster towers

The side of the Minster, with a Roman column in the foreground

The ruins of St Mary's Abbey, destroyed under Henry VIII

A shrine to St Margaret of Clitheroe, who lived in this house (white one) and was a Catholic martyr at the time of the Reformation.

Who thought this was a good name?

I can only assume the sausage-loving slebs work it off afterwards at Flabelos

Micklegate Bar. Confusingly, 'gate' means street, and 'bar' means gate (mickle means great). This was the traditional ceremonial entrance of monarchs to the city, and also a place where traitors' heads were displayed, including Hotspur's of Shakespearian fame!

Me on my walk around the walls. New coat!

On Friday morning, I went on a free 2-hour walking tour of the city. There was only one other couple on the tour, which was good. One of the advantages of travelling in winter! The weather was definitely colder and damper than the previous days, however the rain mostly stayed away until the afternoon, luckily. I was fretting the whole way round because even though it was a free tour by the society of voluntary guides (or something like that), I was expecting to give the guide a tip. Which would be fine, except for the small problem that I only had about a pound in cash on me. I was running slightly late getting there, and couldn't find an ATM, so I was hoping I might see one on the tour and just dash off for a sec, but no such luck. So when the tour came to an end, I was standing there cringing wondering whether to give him the pound or ask him where an ATM was, but to my surprise he just said "well, that's the end of the tour" and we all said thank you and then the next second he had disappeared! So it really was a free tour! Here's some of the things we saw:

The house where King Charles I spent his last night of freedom during the Civil War before fleeing and being captured by the Scots

A pretty half-timbered house. The guide told us that in the Middle Ages the daub (I think the white bit's the daub, yes?) would have been painted multicoloured - the black and white aesthetic is apparently a Victorian thing

The walls up to the parapet are Roman, and the rest are medieval. The red line of bricks is a characteristic Roman technique for making sure the wall's level. He also explained that the properly-preserved parts of the medieval walls had very narrow parapets, precisely to prevent those swashbuckling scenes you see in the movies where, if someone does manage to scale the walls, they suddenly have room to leap over and fight the defenders.

The smallest window in York, on King's Manor. Apparently formerly a window for a loo. He was great for pointing out these little things you would otherwise miss - some others included little owls and cats on many buildings, brackets which are used to periodically survey whether or not houses might be sinking or otherwise falling apart, and posts or boulders on the sides of houses to stop carriages coming through too close to the overhanging medieval upper stories and hitting them. He kept telling us, "In York, you have to keep looking up", which of course is completely foreign to someone living in France, where the mantra is, "You have to keep looking down, or you'll step in dog poo any minute now".

The doorway to King's Manor, with Charles I's coat of arms above it. He stayed here for several weeks.

Monk Bar. Legend has it the statues on the top will come alive and throw stones down on any attackers, but he pointed out that they don't have a great track record when it comes to actually pitching in.

An old church filled with unusual box pews, where half the congregation would be sitting with their backs to the altar and the priest.

The Holy Trinity church, which interestingly enough was once controlled by the Abbey of Marmoutier, which is just across the Loire from Tours, had a great exhibition on life in a medieval monastery. My favourite part was the illustrations from a bestiary produced by the monks:

Greetings from sunny (no, really) York!

2012-01-19T18:10:00.002+01:00

I know I had only been back in France (and at work) for a couple of weeks, but I have already taken a trip back to the north of England on Business of Mystery (I call it that, a la Chief Wiggum, so you won't be curious as to what I'm doing up here).

I travelled up on Tuesday - my flight wasn't until 2.10, so I had plenty of time in the morning to pack and clean the flat. Plenty of time, that is, until I nudged the cardboard box graveyard that occupies the entire east wing (I like to call it a wing to make it sound more like a stately house and less like an irregularly-shaped one-bedroom attic apartment) of my flat. And then HORROR! Behind the cardboard box graveyard, there is a happy little colony of mould. And not just a little spot or two of mould. This is an aggressive colony of green (complemented with the occasional spot of bright pink - wtf) mould growing over the ENTIRE WALL behind the cardboard box graveyard. You may ask how I missed an entire wall's worth of mould - I do clean, honestly. Just not behind the cardboard box graveyard, the centrepiece of which is the IKEA box that my fold-out couch came in. So yeah, when you have a box that's as big as a whole couch, you're talking serious wall-coverage here. I also think it's of relatively recent vintage, based on the fact that I haven't seen it before, it's been rather damp in the apartment of late (fostered by the constantly-filled racks of drying clothes I leave about the place) and the fact that - THANK GOD - *most* of the mould came off quite easily. Luckily, turns out that painted wallpaper can be scrubbed clean with relative ease. However, there remained about 10% stainage on the wall, especially those weird bright-pink spots, which need to be dealt with when I get back. I'm hoping either to find some sort of super product or to discover that an extra bit of elbow grease will do the trick. Because otherwise, feckballs. Don't tell the landlord, but Bob has already been doing his best to ruin the wallpaper with his sharp little claws, I don't need an entire mould colony jazzing up the place. Unless maybe I can sell it as a modern art installation? What do you think my chances are?

Anyway, enough wittering about Crisis Mould. I set out for the airport in good time, but still managed to miss the bus due to the fact that I was where the bus was supposed to be, and then it just drove right past without stopping. I talked to the woman in the bus place and she suggested this might have been because there was someone else in the appointed bus parking spot, but there was NOT. So I had to take a taxi to the airport, which luckily wasn't too traumatic, since the airport is nice and close and it costs 15 euros, as opposed to 5 for the bus. Plus I had a nice chat with the taxi driver and got to feel all smug about my French chatting abilities (some days I got it, some days I so definitely do not - the latter we shall call "workdays"). Everything after that - flight to Stansted, then train to York - went smoothly, and I even got to catch an earlier train.

Since then, I haven't actually been up to much other than my Errand of Mystery. I went shopping all yesterday morning, trawling in and out of pretty much every establishment York has to offer, but I think the cream of the sales has definitely been snatched up, happily for my wallet. I did get a nice gold shrug/cardi from Oasis - although I would prefer to call it "sparkly beige" rather than gold, seeing as it is a very nice subtle colour and I'm not a fan of a blingy gold look. Today I went to the Minster (cathedral) and found out that, since my last visit in late 2004, they have installed cash desks and you have to pay to go in. I felt a bit of a philistine for not paying, but I have been already after all. Instead, I had a Belgian hot chocolate (mmm) and had a walk around part of the medieval town walls. It was a lovely sunny day, perfect for a stroll.

I'm currently blogging from the pub - definitely a fan of the English pub, coming as it does with proper English cider (mmmm) and, in this case, free wifi, although chat is also a welcome option (other than with the guy who was talking very loudly on his cellphone about "pleading Not Guilty" to something or other). Not too sure what I'll get up to tomorrow - my last full day, before having to catch the train to the airport at 6 am on Saturday, boooooo - there is a free walking tour that I quite fancy, although I decided to only bring boots in order to save on luggage space/weight (Ryanair!) and consequently, my feet are not super happy with me, so I don't know how a 2-hour walking tour will go down.

What am I reading? The Butcher's Tale by Helmut Walser Smith

2012-01-11T12:22:00.003+01:00

The Butcher's Tale: Murder and anti-Semitism in a German town by Helmut Walser Smith

I've been doing quite a bit of reading over the Christmas break and since I've been making an effort to get back to the gym more regularly (if I'm torturing myself on the bike, I'm doing it while reading and listening to my ipod, thank you very much), so this isn't 'what I'm reading' so much as 'what I read before Christmas'. I would love to bring you more details from the book, but sadly when I went away for Christmas I forgot Bob's Golden Rule (heh) which is "If on the floor it be, then on it I shall pee" (Bob's words, not mine). So yeah, I foolishly left this book on the floor next to my bed, and when I came back a week later, Bob had peed all over it. Charming. Luckily enough, I had at least finished reading it.

Anyway, this book focuses on a murder that took place in Konitz, a small German (now I think Polish) town in 1900. The town's suspicions quickly turned on its Jewish inhabitants, and Walser Smith uses this incident to trace the history of the "blood libel" – the myth that Jews need the blood of Christians in order to carry out religious rituals. So yeah, it's "What Sarah Palin SHOULD have been reading". It goes back and forth between recounting what happened in Konitz – who accused the Jews and why, how anti-Semites came into the town from far afield in order to stoke the fires, theories on who the murderer might have been, etc. - and telling the broader history of blood libel accusations and anti-Semitism in Europe.

While I love a good murder mystery, I probably found the sections on the book which retraced the transmission of the blood libel idea most interesting. Walser Smith retraces how the blood libel story was formulated and passed down through time and space, flaring up at moments of tension despite having been consistently debunked (including by the Catholic Church) long before the dawn of the twentieth century. I often found myself wondering how people could still believe these things in 1900, before of course "remembering" that these sorts of beliefs and incidents are just part of the tapestry leading to the Holocaust.

Walser Smith doesn't really labour this point, but it is an interesting insight into the historical background of Nazism and a reminder that it wasn't just an isolated phenomenon based on an ideology totally foreign to contemporary Europe. It was also a reminder of how "history" (and religion) can be made into propaganda - the book recounts incidents of the cults of various saints, supposedly murdered by the Jews in the Middle Ages, being revived or plaques commemorating similar incidents being refurbished at moments when people, for whatever reason, wanted to stir up anti-Semitic feelings. History as politics. Of course, the act of remembering can also be a positive one, as with this book.

If you're interested in history in general, or any of these specific themes, I would definitely recommend this book. As a 'true crime' story, it is perhaps a little weaker, but then that's not really the point. It is popular history, but history nonetheless.

Venice: The final chapter

2012-01-07T19:13:00.016+01:00

Last week I finally finished off my trip to Strasbourg, and today I bring you an even older voyage - my November 2010 trip to Venice. I've already posted photos of Venice in Venice Wanderings by Water and Land, Around St. Mark's Square, Signs of Venice, St. Marks - details, St Mark's Interior, and Acqua Alta! and written about the trip in Venice Day 1, Venice Day 2 (original) and Last Day in Venice. Yet, unbelievably, there's more! I think I mentioned in one of the posts that I took 846 photos in the few days I was there. I had a pretty exhausting time of it, and saw a lot, although there was still lots of stuff I didn't get to see that I would have liked to. Even so, I'm not sure whether I'd go back. I left satisfied with my trip, let's put it that way. As you can see from the titles, most of the photos I posted already were wandering around Venice and in and around St. Mark's.

So I will finish up with photos from the main "sights" I went to, starting with the Accademia Gallery, which I saw on Day 1:

One of a series of trompe l'oeil paintings hung high up in the gallery

I wish I knew who this unfinished painting was by. Amazing use of perspective.

I learnt on my tour of the Doge's Palace that this technique - tying someone's hands behind their back and stringing them up - was the favoured way of torturing prisoners

Old painting of gondolas on the canals

Detail of someone taking his widdle doggie for a boat ride

Afterwards, I went to the Scuola di San Rocco, where the ceilings are dripping with canvases by Tintoretto. I got told off for taking photos, but it was worth it. Magnificent.

I finished up my first full day in Venice with a vaporetto ride down the Grand Canal by night:

On Day 2 I took a tour of the Doge's Palace, visited St. Mark's Cathedral and did a bit of wandering around the Ghetto, all of which is covered in text and photos in earlier posts (although here's a couple of extra photos of the courtyard of the Doge's Palace).

However, I've yet to post any pictures of the inside of the La Fenice opera house, where I also took a (audioguide) tour that day. As I recall, they were pretty strict on taking photos, but here's a few I managed to sneak in:

The lobby

One of the reception rooms upstairs

The ceiling in the opera hall itself

Me reflected in the mirror in I suppose the royal box or something

A few more miscellaneous shots:

Becoming an auto-entrepreneur

2012-01-04T16:38:00.005+01:00

There has been talk for months and months now about my doing some freelance work for a prestigious Parisian institution which shall remain nameless, which I've held back on blogging about since it dragged on and on with nothing happening for so long. However, it looks like thunderbirds are go, so I thought it might be helpful to some of my readers to talk about the process of becoming self-employed - an 'auto-entrepreneur' in French. Please note that this is my own personal experience, so while I've tried to put down the process to the best of my ability, you should probably seek further advice if you're thinking of taking the plunge yourself. Also, I have an EU passport, so I have no idea what hurdles you need to jump through if you are here on an existing visa or you want to move to France to set up a business.

I was initially quite reluctant to go ahead with this, due to a number of concerns - 1) I wasn't sure whether it was okay for me to take work on the side while remaining an employee, 2) I wasn't sure what it would do to my tax bill, and 3) I wasn't looking forward to jumping through administrative hoops that I would regard as a headache in my own country, let alone in a foreign language and in France, kingdom of bureaucracy.

To take those points in order: 1) legally, you are allowed to be an auto-entrepreneur and salarie, with the usual caveats about advising your employer and not entering into direct competition with them. I told my boss when this was first raised with me, and I never actually got a response to my email, so hopefully it's okay! I assume so, I'm not doing the same work or stealing clients (we don't have clients for starters) or anything like that.

2) The tax rate for people providing services is 21.3% of your gross revenue, and you can earn up to 32,600 euros per annum as an auto-entrepreneur. This covers all social security payments as well. You can choose to pay this online monthly or once a trimester. Everyone seems to say that this is absolutely ALL you have to pay as an auto-entrepreneur and you pay nothing if you don't make any money. *However* I ran a couple of simulations on the tax calculator at impots.gouv.fr and adding in the auto-entrepreneur money seemed to add a couple of hundred euros on to my overall tax bill (on top of the 21.3% which is paid separately), which isn't great news since I'm only getting 1000 euros for this job. After thinking about it, I decided to go forward with the job on the understanding that I might not really make much money out of it at all, basically because it will look good for me to have work for nameless Parisian institution on my CV, it will look good to have professional translation work on my CV, and you never know if something will come of it in terms of making professional contacts and potentially opening up new career options. When I get the chance, I'd like to go and talk to someone official and clear all this up, but in the meantime I'm planning on putting the money straight into my savings and holding on to it until tax time. Best case scenario, I'm doing something wrong on that calculator and it is only 21.3% and that's the end of the story, but if not, I'm prepared for that.

3) The most important thing you need to do is register online to create your enterprise and get the all-important SIREN/SIRET number, equivalent to your social security number as an individual. It's actually pretty quick and easy. I won't go through every step, but just some of the things I thought were important to highlight.

You will need (ideally) to have an electronic copy of your ID (e.g. passport scan). The first thing to do is say what the nature of your work will be - I ummed and ahhed a bit about this, since the work I will actually be doing, at least for this first job, is a bit difficult to define, but I opted for 'translator' as the simplest option. I later read somewhere (I think on a form I got sent in the mail) that this information was for statistical purposes only, so don't worry too much. This is classed as an 'activite liberale', which I think does make a difference to your tax rate.

Unfortunately, this next bit got cut off on my print-out of my declaration, but I'm pretty sure where it asks about the regime micro fiscal (BIC or special BNC) I ticked yes. Whichever option I ticked, it is meant to mean that you can pay all your taxes and charges when you do your monthly or trimestrial declaration, so there *should* be nothing left over to surprise you at the end of the tax year.

I think those are the main things I needed help with when filling out the declaration, the rest should be more or less straightforward if you speak French. You also have to pick a new organisme d'assurance maladie, although you still keep the old one as a salarie. I really don't know how the relationship between the two works - it still confuses me that everyone isn't just on the same system to begin with. It says there is no difference to your charges etc. depending on which organisme you choose so I just googled and picked one with an office in Tours, since I prefer dealing with people face-to-face if possible.

After I submitted my form, it only took a week or two for me to receive the notification that they had created my enterprise! Since then, mail has been rolling in about different aspects of being an auto-entrepreneur (plus I am now on the mailing list of every telecommunications company etc. in France), which I haven't really had time to look at. And by "I haven't had time" I mean "I've been too lazy to". It is quite funny getting stuff in the post directed to 'le dirigeant' etc.

Once things were moving forward with the SIREN/SIRET numbers, I had to provide a bill for my services. I followed a model on this website, with some obvious adjustments due to the nature of the work. Note the line telling you that you cannot charge TVA as an auto-entrepreneur! Because I was billing for a mixture of translation and other services, I divided it into a rate per word for the translation and a rate per hour for the rest.

I will put what I'm charging on here since I think it can be hard, especially as expats, to get this sort of information. For this job, I charged 20 centimes per word for translation, and 36 euro per hour gross for my other work (basically liaison work with "clients" and updating the website - I don't want to get too specific on what/who I'm working for on the interwebs). I had actually drawn up a bill at 10 centimes and 20 euro, which I showed to a colleague who basically told me to hike my prices. I have seen rates for translation quoted online at around 7-15 centimes per word, so I initially went for 10 since I'm not a qualified translator or anything. It was good for me to get some advice on this as I tend to be a bit timid and to under-value myself, so sometimes it is good to get someone else to come in and tell you that you're pitching too low.

The translation work I am doing is in a quite specialised domain and intended for an academic audience, so arguably it should be charged at a higher rate. I think so far on average my rate for translation is working out at around about 50 euros an hour, although obviously that's subject to variation based on the complexity of the text to be translated. I had some further discussion with colleagues who have hired translators for similar work in the past, and this seems roughly commensurate with what they have been willing to pay. I don't know how competitive one would be at this rate out in the market, but all things considered, I think it's a fair rate. However, I submitted my facture right before Christmas, so I actually haven't got any word back on that yet!

If anyone is interested, I'll try to keep you updated on any developments as I get to grips with things myself (it's still all a bit new and scary to be honest) and any feedback on any aspect of the process, working for yourself, making contacts, translating, etc. etc. is welcome!

Strasbourg: Continued

2012-01-03T12:30:00.000+01:00

I visited Strasbourg way back in July, and I blogged 'Day 1' and then with the whole flatmare (see what I did there) I never actually got round to blogging the rest of my trip. Which is a shame, because I see this blog as much as a record for myself as a way to communicate with others. And, predictably, I've now forgotten a lot of the details of what I did and saw. Apart from the cathedral, which I blogged about already, I remember blazing hot weather, visiting a bunch of different museums, eating a lot of yummy Alsatian food (my chicken thigh and spaetzle on my last day in town were a real standout), and the fabulous painted church I went to also on my last day.

Reaching back through the mists of time, I think my weekend went something like this: Day 1, arrive about midday, eat choucroute, wander around Petit France a bit and see the cathedral. Day 2, visit la Musee de l'Oeuvre Notre-Dame, which focuses particularly on medieval and Renaissance art, including the originals of sculptures and stained glass from the cathedral and other churches. I also went to the Fine Arts museum, and because you got a ticket for all the museums in the city, I ended up taking a quick look in the museum of the history of Strasbourg and in the museum of Alsatian life. I think I did some of these on the Sunday and some the next day. I don't really remember much about any of these museums, oops! The Alsatian one was mostly full of folk art and little bits and pieces from the lives of ordinary people, and was in a cool old house with a courtyard inside. The history museum was a bit disappointing since, bizarrely, it ended before the whole back-and-forth between France and Germany, which was really what I was interested in finding out about in the first place. Not sure if there were some rooms closed or that I just missed, because that seems like a very strange choice. On my last day, I got up bright and early and climbed to the top of the cathedral. I was lucky to get a great view and because I was up there first thing, I got the chance to take some photos by myself, before a group of annoying schoolkids came along. I also went to Saint-Pierre-le-Jeune Protestant church, built from 1250-1320, which is an absolute must-see for anyone going to Strasbourg. I had taken a few notes off the internet of stuff to see before I left, and then I think I left them at home, so I only had a vague idea that I had noted down to go to this church, but no idea why or if it really was especially worth seeing. So glad I did go, because it was absolutely glorious. Really wonderful polychrome painting everywhere (kind of ironic that it's the Protestant church), and almost bereft of tourists, so I was really able to enjoy it.

Thinking back on my trip and looking through my photos, I really did enjoy Strasbourg. Totally different from other areas of France, in terms of the architecture, food, culture etc. but a really lovely place which I would definitely recommend. At the time, I really needed the break as well, seeing that it came just days after finding out about G not paying the rent etc.

Views from the cathedral roof
You can really get a good sense of the distinctive Strasbourg architecture from on high

I think this is the Palais Rohan, which houses the fine arts museum

A statue of a king with money on his hat, for some reason

I love that this guy is looking up towards the top of the tower he's attached to/shading his eyes from the sun. I'll make the comment I always make about how human the Middle Ages were, contrary to the popular impression.

There was all sorts of carved graffiti left by visitors over the years on the cathedral roof. I liked this one from a Russian army officer, in the service of "All the Russias", as they say

What's the bet this "Pritish" officer got some German-speakers to carve this for him? Ha ha! I reckon his name was probably "Robertson", not "Ropertson" as well!

Inside the cathedral, the astronomical clock

A detail of the clock - it was Monday too, very impressive!

Out and about in Strasbourg

At first I wondered what this was meant to be a photo of. And then I saw the umbrella hats.

From memory, this sounded quite different on the menu, but it was quite nice. The central bit is a sort of soft pasta/dumpling rolled up with a meat-loaf type thing. I liked the small portion of choucroute as well, as opposed to my absolutely massive serving (choucroute garnie) for lunch the day before.

The caption says that in the Middle Ages, people sentenced to death by drowning, especially people who killed their fathers or committed infanticide (yeah, feminism at work) were shut in cages and thrown in the water on this spot. What was I just saying about the humanity of the Middle Ages?

Views of the canals and some buildings I liked

Museums

Why I oughta! The plague-ridden, demon-visited guy looks quite relaxed, by contrast. Nice insouciant ankle-cross.

Cute sign for the Musee alsacien. I wonder why it's not Musee alsacienne??

Aw, no idea what's going on here but these look like cute little doggies trying to help a brother out rather than ravenous beasts going for blood.

I can only imagine this was a moment of self-loathing, homophobic rage

A painting by Gustave Dore! I didn't even know he did real paintings. I just looked him up, and he was actually born in Strasbourg.

One of a series of four paintings of the seasons using fruit and veg. I wonder if it's by Giuseppe Arcimboldo or an imitator?

Eek! "Two deceased lovers" according to the caption. I wonder if they were lovers of the naughty kind, to receive this fate, or if it's just one of the usual "memento mori" type paintings. In case you can't see, the woman has a toad on her bits!

Saint Pierre le jeune church

My photos don't do justice to this place at all, it really is lovely!

The outside of the church reflected in a modern building

Fresco of the crucifixion, with the good thief on Jesus' right (from his perspective) getting his soul scooped up by an angel, whereas the bad thief gets his snatched by a devil

Detail of the bad thief

Chapel inside the church. I think that thing hanging from the ceiling is the top of the baptismal font

Interior of the church

Detail of a fresco on the back wall

A fresco representing different nations - here, Aragon and Castile plus another one I can't read

A fresco showing the whipping of Christ

The rood screen and organ. Fun fact, "rood" is the Old English word for cross :) Who said studying Old English (one class thereof) at university would be a wasted effort?

Bonne année 2012!

2012-01-02T17:30:00.003+01:00

For those of you demanding crazy stories of my wild doings on New Years Eve, I give you:

Yes, I defrosted the frozen fridge of doom! Actually not on New Years Eve, but it is the single most exciting thing I have done in a long time! I had been valiantly trying to eat everything in it so I could unplug it before I went away, but I couldn't eat fast enough (and I wasn't exactly going to drink bottles of mayonnaise and so forth) and I also had doubts about leaving it to defrost all over my flat, so I left it plugged in but decided it needed tackling regardless when I got back. At first, I just unplugged it and wandered off for a bit, but upon closer inspection it became clear that it wasn't going to just melt by itself in a hurry. So I developed a system of throwing saucepan-fulls of hot water on it, scraping at the ice with a ladle and then gathering the ice out of the bottom of the fridge and melting it in the sink.

It took about an hour of hard work before the remaining ice came off in a few big sheets. So bear in mind, this is AFTER melting about half of it:

It then took about another hour to give the fridge a thorough cleaning, including all the trays. It actually was pretty clean, considering I only got it in August, but it was a good opportunity to do it. So, New Years Resolution? Keep my beady eye firmly fixed on any signs that the Frozen Fridge of Doom is making a comeback!

Other than that, I don't really want to call it a resolution, but I went to the gym on Friday, Saturday and today. Not New Year's Day since it was closed and I was a little bit hungover, but still, good going! I read something recently by a guy whose resolution *last* year was to work out every day and he made the argument that it was actually easier to stick to, because you didn't fall in the trap of thinking "I have to go three times this week, so I won't today, and I won't tomorrow, but I'll definitely, definitely catch up later this week" and then falling off the wagon. I realise a lot of people say the exact opposite, that you shouldn't try to set these sorts of "extreme" goals, but it made a lot of sense to me. So, I might not make it to the gym every single day, but I'm going to try and make sure I get at least 3o minutes' exercise every day (which is actually not really a change from now) but that I really do also make sure I'm down at the gym as often as possible.

Happy Christmas, everyone!

2011-12-27T15:13:00.005+01:00

Another uneventful Christmas over. My sister Jess arrived on the evening of the 23rd, and on Christmas Eve we went up to Kendal to see the owls again, and then attempted to go to the Pencil Museum in Keswick or somewhere. We had quite a nice drive through the Lake District, but the weather in Keswick was absolutely miserable and when we turned up at the Pencil Museum it was shutting early for Christmas Eve anyway. Still, got a photo as proof we had been in the vicinity of the world's most exciting museum.

But alas! We will never know what the mysterious secret war-time pencil, envy of James Bond, is all about!

Christmas Day itself was fine. I seemed to receive a hail of presents, and Christmas dinner was very nice. I was expecting a day of interminable boredom, but helped out with cards and lots of cider, it was fine in the end.

Me, Mum and Jess at Christmas dinner

Yesterday we drove into Liverpool to watch Liverpool Football Club play Blackburn. We had pretty good seats, right up the top but in the middle, so we could see everything (although half the time I didn't really know what was going on anyway). They played pretty rubbishly and only got a draw, but that's fine. It's more about the atmosphere of being there anyway. It definitely is impressive hearing a whole stadium singing and cheering in unison.

The teams lining up before kick-off

My dad takes a notoriously long time to take photos, so I always end up looking like I'm in rigor. Liverpool are warming up in the background

Unfortunately didn't manage to get any group photos where everyone had their eyes open all at once

Other than that, I've hit the sales a little bit. I got a few things before Christmas when we went to an outlet mall, and yesterday I got a Clinique Happy perfume box set for only 22 pounds, which is an amazing deal. It has a 100 ml perfume, body wash and moisturiser and a scented candle in it, which considering the 100 ml perfume on its own was selling for 50 pounds, is quite the bargain! I got a half-price dress from Monsoon as well, plus I have got half-price sports shoes, a dress for 8 pounds, 2 tops, a Jaeger red coat (yay) and a Radley wallet (for Christmas). I wanted to get a Radley wallet last Christmas, but decided since I'd spent about 500 pounds shopping that I should show some restraint. Well, good things come to those who wait!

Other than that, things have been quiet. Jess just went back down to London and I am going back to France tomorrow. I should be able to get a train straight back from CDG to Tours (fingers crossed, as I really don't want to go through Paris if I can help it). Looking forward to getting back home and seeing if Bob has been very naughty or just slightly naughty in my absence, although it will be sad to say goodbye to Mum & Dad for another year.

This was in the window of a local engravers' shop. It made me laugh to think of why anyone ever would want a nametag reading 'self-employed'. I imagine Mr Barns going to speed-dating nights and just tapping the badge when the ladeez ask him where he works.

Merry old England

2011-12-23T09:58:00.006+01:00

On Tuesday morning, when I was setting off for my trip to the UK, I had somehow mysteriously forgotten to turn on my alarm, and was very lucky that I checked the time when the rubbish trucks woke me up. It was only 10 minutes later than I'd intended to get up, but you know how these things put you on the back foot a bit, so that, combined with the fact that I'd neglected to do some stuff like look for my NZ-UK plug adaptor the day before, had me running around a bit like a headless chicken. Never mind though, everything went smoothly with getting the train, up until the point where I got out of my seat to get off at Roissy-CDG and I was so busy telling myself not to forget my coat out of the overhead luggage rack that I somehow missed the step down from the seats to the aisle and fell straight over sideways into the seats on the other side of the aisle. Luckily enough, there was no-one in the aisle seat, but there was a young guy in the window seat whose lap I virtually fell into. He laughed at me, and rightly so. There was an awkward few minutes until the train pulled into the station, but oh well, I'll never see him again!

Of course, my saying that there would be no snow this year and my flight would therefore go smoothly managed to provoke a strike of the airport security staff. I was pretty much resigned, therefore, to long lines and a delay. In the event, it actually wasn't too bad. The security lines didn't seem any longer than on a normal busy day. In fact, I had too much water in the queue with me, and so I had to drink about a litre in 5 minutes in order to save the bottles to fill up again after security. I actually missed the passport control lines, as in a rash moment I decided to opt in to the French government's scheme whereby you provide them with your fingerprints and you can then go through electronic gates. My reasoning was mostly that I had already had to give fingerprints to the US governement, which really pisses me off because a) it's not optional and b) I've never even been into the US since they introduced this – my American readers might not know this, but non-US nationals have to go through the entire security procedure, including being photographed and fingerprinted (and maybe having an iris scan, I don't remember) just to transit through the airport. Ridiculous. Anyway, I actually had assumed that the French scheme would only want prints of my index fingers, like the Americans, but they actually took them all except my thumbs. So no more crime sprees for me.

We still ended up boarding a little bit late, and then there were two passengers who didn't turn up and had to be offloaded, so we were delayed a little bit more. Then we taxied off down the runway, sat around for ages, and then, unbelievably, taxied back to our stand because they had forgotten to do some paperwork! I've never heard such a stupid thing – if I were the captain, I would have lied about the reason! After all that water, I was dying for the loo by this stage, but of course you can't go on the ground. Once we finally took off I was up the aisle like a shot as soon as the seatbelt sign went off. I had an exit row seat with a ton of legroom, which was nice, although the seats weren't that wide across and the girl next to me kept touching me with her arm (Air France). Anyway, by the time we landed we were nearly 2 hours late. No-one actually seemed that agitated, I think everyone was probably expecting delays already, like me. Oh and I forgot to say how much I hate the fact that they always pick the holidays to go on these strikes. I support the right of people to unionize and negotiate with their employers, including striking if necessary, but deliberately choosing to make life as difficult as possible for the public, who should be on their side, is not on, especially at Christmas.

Anyway, finally landed at Manchester and it was lovely to see my Mum and Dad again after a year. Nothing very exciting has been going on here since then, with the exception of OWLS! Yes, your faithful correspondent got to play with owls! We were in the town centre of Kendal – up in the Lake District – doing some shopping, and suddenly came across a guy with a great big owl on his wrist. I assumed at first it was just one of those guys who sort of busk with a bird of prey – I'm not sure whether I've ever seen them in the UK, but they seem quite common in Eastern Europe. However, there was an empty shop next to him that was full of owls. Turns out they were a charity that rescued owls and took them round places to educate people about them and how they should be treated. There were some really sad stories. The big one, which was a European Eagle Owl, had been rescued from a guy who bought it to carry around on his wrist and look scary. Apparently he used to punch and kick it! Who would do such a thing to an owl? I'm amazed the owl didn't bite or claw him. I was a little bit scared of it myself, especially when it looks straight at you (although the guy explained that they actually aren't looking at you if their eyes are pointed straight at you, because they look out of the corner of their eyes). The guy said it took a long time to heal it, both physically, since it had lost feathers and so on, and to get it to trust people again, but it seemed incredibly tame by this stage.

The European Eagle Owl

Me and the European eagle owl. He's posing better than I am

Me, Dad, and the tawny owl

The tawny owl was my favourite. I think I'm a bit scared here, because the handler basically shoved it at my face and told me to cuddle it

I can't remember the name of this owl, but I think it came from South Africa. The white owl behind us is a barn owl

The church in Kendal, begun in 1201

Pretending to be a medieval carving of a Queen

Pretending to be one of the wise men

On slang

2011-12-18T22:48:00.004+01:00

Recently, I was having a conversation at work and astonished myself by hearing the words une nana come out of my mouth. Nana is French slang for 'chick', and I've undoubtedly picked it up (after always regarding it as a faintly ridiculous thing to say, given that its connotations in English are roughly diametrically opposite to in French) from my manager, who invariably refers to women he's come into contact with as "cette nana (qui travaille avec Roméo, qui m'a envoyé un mail hier, etc.)" I don't think it's meant to be offensive, I think he uses it just as the female equivalent of "ce mec" (this guy), it's just that, in French as in English, slang terms for girls carry baggage whereas those for guys generally do not.

That got me thinking about the perils of using slang in a foreign language. The next time I refer to someone as une nana (kind of hope there's not a next time, but hey) am I going to wind up inadvertently offending someone? Or will I slip up and follow my female boss's example of saying ça me fait chier! (which means 'that pisses me off', but literally 'that makes me shit') in a meeting? Even if I'm using the slang correctly, does it come off as being weird somehow? We've probably all encountered a non-native speaker of English who secretly makes you giggle when they bust out with "'sup dawg" when most of the time they can barely string a coherent sentence together. How does one find a balance between not sounding like someone's nana (in the English sense) on the one hand, and not sounding like a silly white girl who's watched La Haine (a famously slangy - and very good - French film set in the 'ghettos' of Paris) too many times? How do you judge whether a word that seemed fine when talking to your friends is okay to use with your neighbour? I was horrified when I learned that dégueulasse, which I'd just thought was along the lines of 'gross', could be considered closer to 'effing disgusting'. And it might be almost as bad if you drop a "slang" term in that was last current c. 1974 (like if someone told you something was "groovy, hepcat, can you dig it?")

I know, more from teaching English than from learning French, that there are different schools of thought on whether learners should be taught slang and other non-standard forms. The first camp holds that it will just confuse learners and lead them to making mistakes and embarrassing themselves, so you shouldn't teach 'bad' English/French/etc. and you should just tell students it's wrong if they ask you about it. I can understand not confusing someone who's just learning how to say "Comment-allez vous?" with all the different other ways to say this (the old dude at work who apparently speaks 'country French' - I often fail to understand him - confused me once by asking me "tu vas?" which literally means "are you going?", without the normal "how..." in front of it. I answered "Where?"...) but I think at a minimum you should acknowledge that not everyone speaks like your French textbook.

For one thing, language can change in more than one 'direction', so to speak. Words that were once acceptable or common may not be a couple of decades later. I've heard learners of English talking about "feeling queer", for example, and I remember the textbook we taught from in our CELTA course encouraging students to talk about their "turn-ons". In a French context, I've heard of many people, who learnt French in different countries, being tripped up by their textbooks or teachers telling them that baiser (the verb) means 'to kiss', whereas that meaning has been thoroughly supplanted by 'to f-ck'. Mysteriously, almost everyone seems to learn that the hard way!

When you get to a more advanced level in a foreign language, I think you should be actively providing students with examples of slang and other non-standard usages. It should be clear that it IS slang, but even if you tell them not to try using it themselves, it's always useful to actually be able to understand people (once you've got over the hurdle of being able to understand basic French, obviously). It seems to be a common sentiment (I certainly think so, although I don't know whether or not it's objectively true) that the French are pretty bad at slowing down and dumbing down their speech for foreigners, so you can't necessarily expect that a conversation won't be sprinkled with exotic argot.

The final phase is using slang yourself. I have some terrible habits in French, such as dropping the 'ne' in negation every time (everyone does this, but a certain type of French person will scold you for it because you're a foreigner) and ending sentences with quoi? waaay too often (kind of like 'innit?' in a UK-English context, or 'au?' or 'eh?' in NZ-English. Americans and others feel free to suggest what the US etc.-English equivalent may be), but most of the time I feel I use slang more or less appropriately, even if I sometimes feel secretly a bit foolish talking about bagnoles and fringues (cars and clothes), etc.

What about you guys? Do you feel you've mastered French slang? Or have you ever used it when you shouldn't have? Do you think foreign speakers seem silly using slang? Or sillier if they are talking like they've swallowed a 1950s phrasebook?

Anatomy of a messy apartment

2011-12-17T18:46:00.004+01:00

In the spirit of procrastination, I bring you this break-down of my messy living room. Certain non-neutral observers (*cough* Mum and Dad *cough*) will tell you my natural state is that of a pig wallowing in its own filth, but I'm actually usually quite a grown-up about cleaning regularly, while still not being the *neatest* soul in the entire world. I'll admit I've been a bit slack though, but since I'm going away on Tuesday, I need to do some cleaning! But first, it makes total sense to blog about the crap that has accumulated in my apartment. Kind of like those features in magazines where you see a writer's office or what's in someone's fridge, except I haven't run around and removed all the shameful evidence and put up pictures of the Dalai Lama and so forth. Some of the numbers are a bit hard to see, but they are usually next to each other and you probably don't care that much to be honest!

1) Presents! The fruits of my Christmas shopping, waiting to be wrapped and/or chucked in my suitcase as is. Liz walked in when I had my birthday drinks and got all excited that I had presents. Sadly, no, I only got two birthday presents (and glad to get them too, of course).

2) When I did a new load of laundry, the old lot made its way onto this chair and has remained there for several days now, apart from the bits that have fallen onto the floor.

3) Red shoes! I think they're here because I was Skyping someone while drunk and wanted to show them off?

4) A whole pile of paperwork that needs filing. (Just from the last week or two!) Until I moved to France, I had two methods of dealing with Important Documents - 1) Stick them in a shoebox and assume God will sort it out 2) Carry them around in my handbag until they get dog-eared and illegible and then conclude I might as well throw them away. I always have a bottle of water in my handbag, and even if it doesn't leak (which is like a once-monthly occurrence) then it often has condensation on the outside and manages to destroy documents and create a soupy loam of tissues in the bottom of the bag anyway. Reason 345 of 563 why you don't go digging around in a girl's handbag without permission. Anyway, when you move to France you quickly discover that these methods DO NOT FLY! Everywhere you go, from the tax office to the bank to the rental agency, people will want documentation of your movements from birth. "What do you mean, you don't have paperwork for the vaccinations you had as a baby?" "You need to give us evidence that you were resident in New Zealand for purposes other than obtaining a drivers licence.... What? No, being born there isn't enough!" etc. etc. So now everything gets filed (eventually) and smugly produced in triplicate everywhere I go.

5) Hard to see, but it's an empty can of Red Bull. My colleagues find the fact that I drink Red Bull an endless font of humour for some reason. I know it's not good for you (and for the record, I drink the sugarfree variety at work, this is the full-fat "weekend treat" version on my table though) but come on, 4 out of the 7 go on smoke breaks every half an hour and no-one frickin tells hilarious jokes about how they're "sponsored by Marlborough" or whatever. This ranks right up there with the minimum twice-weekly comments on how I must be cold (surely by like, the third time, you can deal with the fact that NO I'M NOT COLD, STOP COMMENTING) in the list of Things My Colleagues Do That Annoy Me. Oh and the one woman who rubs her hands together all the time and it sounds like they're made out of dry leaves.

6) There's a lot of crap on the table, so I'm not even sure what I'm drawing your attention to here. Maybe the industrial-strength cat claw clippers that allow me to clip maybe one of Bob's claws at a time before he runs away and sulks for half an hour. Maybe the empty box of Tortina biscuits from Monoprix (soooo good, go buy some!), or maybe the pile of dinner plates hiding behind my laptop.

7) The current batch of laundry, which is also dry and needs to be put away. Why is putting laundry away such an infernal chore? I don't even iron anything!

8) I don't see 8 anywhere, I think I forgot it.

9) A couple of squares of dark chocolate left over from the awesome brownies I made for our work Christmas lunch yesterday. I drank maybe like half a bottle of Vouvray (bubbly) and was *not* drunk, butI was sick as in the evening. Curses! Maybe drinking in the daytime is not for me after all.

10) The document file optimistically waiting for me to do that filing. There's also another pile of documents underneath it.

11) At Home by Bill Bryson, which I picked up from the library for a friend. We had talked about it ages ago and I said I'd get it out for her if she ever wanted (cos she doesn't have a card) and then when, months later, she texted to ask for "that book" I texted back "At home? I'm not sure if I can make it over there straight away but I'll try xx". The next day I got a message from her saying "Ummm... was that text last night meant for me?" As soon as I read it back, I realised that she thought I'd accidentally texted her in the midst of arranging a booty call. Ha ha! Overly optimistic, my friend!

12) I forgot 12 too. I'm a moron.

13) Clearly the giant cardboard box graveyard that takes up the entire east wing of the apartment is not going anywhere.

That's it. Does that mean I have to start cleaning now?? :(

Some of my favourite (French musical) things

2011-12-16T10:08:00.003+01:00

Of course, as soon as I say the weather's been good and we won't have any flight problems this year, there's only a bloody storm (called "Joachim") across half of France! According to Météo France, the wind got up to 103 km/hr here last night. It claims the storm is officially over in these parts (until it maybe starts up again in the afternoon), but it's still raining on and off and windy. Anyway, on to the topic at hand.

Other than having to study the entire oeuvre of Jacques Brel at school, most of my knowledge of French music dates from 2007, when I lived in the Nord Pas de Calais with a bunch of Brits, some of whom couldn't speak any French at all. Consequently, the music channels (and we had about 5 to choose from on Canal+) were on in the lounge 24/7. Since then, I've mostly come across new (to me) ones in clubs or at the gym. I never listen to the radio anymore, so if I'm missing some good 'uns, let me know! It's a bit of a mixed bag genre-wise, but here are a few of my favourite things!

I first heard this back in summer, but I only just came across the video. It's Mika, singing in French! And it's super catchy of course!

Elle Me Dit - Mika

This might be cheating slightly, since Martin Solveig sings (or has other people sing while he DJs) in English, but he is French! And he performs the miraculous feat of producing music that makes me want to get on a treadmill and turn it up to 10 kph (truly a wonder for the ages). Here's his latest:

Hello - Martin Solveig

Big in Japan - Martin Solveig

This isn't really a favourite as such, but dancing the Madison is a weird fitting-in-with-the-French rite of passage. (Although I think it's maybe an American thing originally?) Everyone knows it (at least vaguely), and people will actually do it in clubs. I put this clip up out of the many available on YouTube because they dance the Madison about as well as I do.

The Madison by ???

Talking of not being able to dance...

Les blancs ne savent pas danser - James Deano

This gets stuck in my head big time every time I hear it, but I still like it!

Champs Elysees - Joe Dassin

Okay, I didn't grow up as the only black kid in a small French town, but I still feel like I can relate to this a little bit after living in the Nord Pas de Calais countryside

Marly Gomont - Kamini

There is a rocky version of this that everyone always ends up linking arms and singing along to at 3 am in your favourite French club, but I can't find it online. Does anyone know who it's by?

Emmenez-moi - Charles Aznavour

Mostly linking to this so French-speakers can have a laugh at the amazing spelling of whoever wrote the subtitles. And then he gives up on it altogether halfway through!

Garçon - Koxie

You can skip the first 45 seconds of this video if you're not interested in seeing old French men (including Eric Cantona I think?) argue in a tabac. This video always makes me want to go re-enact it in Marseille

A la Bien - Soprano

Kind of the "Sid and Nancy" of France, in that the lead singer of this band killed his girlfriend

I got really sick of this after thrashing it back in 2007. But I am proud that I can rap along with it! Plus MC Solaar is a legend - we even had him in our textbooks when I was first learning French

Da Vinci Claude - MC Solaar

And finally, another 2007 classic:

Double Je - Christophe Willem

Talk of a winter wonderland may be slightly exaggerated

2011-12-14T21:29:00.006+01:00

It's still, for the most part, not that cold in these here parts. I'm a bit reluctant to jinx things, but I'm thinking this year won't see a repeat of last year's 6 (? I don't remember) hour flight delay and finally getting to bed at like 5 am. At least not because of snow. On the other hand, I was in a meeting this afternoon and there was what I thought was super heavy rain and thunder and lightning, and then when we got out of the meeting there was:

Not snow, but tons of hail

And a pretty rainbow over the HLMs

A picture of the Cher which has nothing to do with anything

I have managed to get most of my Christmas shopping done. I ordered a few things on Amazon and sent them directly to the UK, so I hope they do/have arrived in time. Should be fine. Of course, only having 4 people to buy for makes things relatively easy. Other than that, my suitcase will be weighed down with lots of wine, as usual!

I had a look at the Christmas market on the weekend. It was a beautiful, sunny day. Too many people around, too many prams and people walking uber extra slowly and I start to get all antsy because I hate slow walkers and being in a confined space in a crowd where you can't get around people. Except for when I had my mulled wine, in which case I also had to move very slowly to avoid drips.

Marche de something

Get your roasted chestnuts here

Tours is not exactly the Christmas decoration capital of the world, but it's still nice to see lights everywhere and Christmas trees and so on. Here's some pics:

Just so you know I'm really in France, here's a Christmas protest for ya

A rather vulgar display at the mall

Fountain in front of the Palais de Justice

Fountain and Christmas tree

Fountain and the Christmas tree by night

The town hall

This is to show the roadworks which are everywhere and have been for aaages. We are getting a tram. The tram is everywhere I wanna be, which is probably good in the longterm, but annoying for the minute

Lounging in Langeais

2011-12-08T10:23:00.006+01:00

For the day of my birthday itself, I was rewarded with beautiful blue skies and sunshine - very lucky, since it had pissed down all day on Saturday and Sunday wasn't much better. I was under stern orders from several people to do something fun, so I decided to head down the road about 20 minutes or so to Langeais, which I have heard nice things about, most recently from MadmoisElla who took a trip there which sounds much more chic than my efforts. She didn't (to my knowledge) come back with a photo of the toilets, for starters.

I arrived in at about 1pm, so I didn't want to go into the chateau before lunch, but I wasn't yet hungry. So I first went for a wander through the streets. Almost everything was shut, unsurprisingly for a Monday lunchtime in a small town out of season. There seemed to be relatively quite a lot of car traffic considering, but hardly any people out and about on the streets. Also quite a lot of empty (closed down) shops. Perhaps times are tough here, like everywhere. I came across a pedestrian street that climbed up the hill, so decided I would follow it. I ended up amongst some of the troglodyte (cave) houses of Langeais. Cave houses are not uncommon around these parts - I think the chalky cliffs are quite easy to dig into - but most of them are proper houses carved out of the chalk. This one? Not so much:

Based on this though, Langeais seems a pretty sweet place to be homeless. Find a cave all to yourself and you're set! I didn't want to stay around here too long though, to be honest. It was very deserted, and a cave with a blanket hung up outside kinda seems the perfect place to be raped (and by perfect, I don't mean it's what every girl dreams of ha ha)! So I forged on further up the hill, which disappointed me in that it didn't really provide good views of Langeais - too many bushes. So I headed back down to the river and checked out the bridge that is apparently a key tourist attraction and photo spot (according to the Langeais tourism website) even though it only dates back to the 19th century.

I then headed along the river back into town, passing the coolest sign ever:

"Poney", as I think I've mentioned, is my favourite French word, owing to its comical Cartman-esque pronunciation. Now I have the great pleasure of imagining a French person saying "La Ferme O'Poney". Just thinking about it cracks me up, I might actually have to show he picture to a compliant Frenchy and get them to say it for me.

By now, it was time for lunch. I went to the only place that seemed to be open, other than the fancy restaurant MadmoisElla dined at, a creperie next to the chateau. They had a whole bunch of outdoor tables, directly outside the restaurant and around the corner, under a canopy. But when I went inside to ask if I could sit outside the woman was all "No, it's too cold". Replying "No, it's not, I don't mind" didn't change her opinion of the situation, so inside it was. That's the French for you - anywhere else, if the customer wants to sit outside, they sit outside, surely?

This is a bit hard to see, but the menu sang the praises of oats - it's what gives Scotsmen (and horses) their legendary robustness and everyone else "physical force and sexual vigour". I didn't have any.

Instead I had an "English" crepe, seduced by talk of cheddar and bacon. It was okay, but I was a bit disappointed that it was plastic cheddar and French-style bacon, not quite the authentic English feast of my dreams. Oh well, only a couple of weeks until I'm scoffing bacon and cheddar to my heart's content! The icecream sundae I finished off with was nice though.

Duly fed and watered, it was time to hit up the castle.

It was first established at the end of the 10th century, by a guy with a pretty bitchin' name - Foulque Nerra, Count of Anjou, which I think means Black Falcon in old French, but I could be wrong. It subsequently got fought over quite a lot, before falling into the hands of the Plantagenets, and eventually getting destroyed by Charles VII, the dauphin backed up by Joan of Arc. The only bit of the old castle that still remains is the keep, up on the hill separate from the current chateau, which dates from the 15th century:

The joys of visiting somewhere like this on a Monday out of season is that it was totally deserted. I didn't see another soul other than the staff (and not much of them either) until I went out into the grounds later on. So this was basically a licence to dick around taking self-timed photos of myself in the rooms. On December 6 1491, the castle was the site of the marriage of King Charles VIII and Anne of Brittany (Ruth and I already learnt all this when we visited Anne's former home, the chateau of Nantes), and several rooms were dedicated to recreating this historic event.

Here I am at the wedding feast:

And at the wedding itself (disobeying the no-flash rule):

All in all, the chateau was pretty well done, nicely furnished etc. although not as lavish as somewhere like Chenonceau or with as many things to look at as Blois. Here's an 'interesting' tapestry:

And a mirror that I liked because it reminds me of the mirror in the Arnolfini wedding by Jan van Eyck. Like the van Eyck, you can even see me in it if you look hard:

You could also walk around inside the battlements, which was pretty cool. Here's a view from inside:

And me hanging out up there:

They even let you climb up some scaffolding onto the 11th century keep!

Finally, here's the promised picture of the toilets. The window, as you can see, was wide open onto the courtyard and I had very awkward eye contact with some guy outside! Luckily I was only hanging up my handbag onto the hook, but seriously, I don't really want any toilet-based eye contact with strange men. So watch out for that one if you're visiting Langeais!

Pop the champagne!

2011-12-04T10:55:00.010+01:00

Happy birthday to me (for tomorrow). Officially into the last year of my 20s, one step closer to dying alone and being eaten by Bob (the cat). Ha ha.

I had decided I wasn't up for doing a big thing for my birthday this year. Hosting parties tends to stress me out - will everyone turn up? Will there be enough food? (There is ALWAYS enough food, since I come from the "prepare for an attack from the eating equivalent of Genghis Khan and the Golden Horde" school of catering, as exemplified by my father, but doesn't stop me stressing about it for the next time.) Will they have fun? Will it be awkward and everyone will hold an impromptu ceremony to crown me Worst Hostess Ever? So I decided just to have a drink with Liz, my best friend in Tours. Also, I'd bought a bottle of champagne (Taittinger, in honour of our visit to the caves and the fact that it is delicious) and, being the selfish type, I wanted to share it with as few people as possible while not being sad and drinking a bottle of champagne all by myself on my birthday. However, just before I left work on Friday I got a facebook message from Stephanie, the American girl I met recently and went to the pretend-80s club with, asking if I wanted to grab a drink with her, so I decided to invite her around too. Again, because I'm a selfish person, I told her to come over an hour after Liz, so that we could quaff the champagne before she got there. Ha, I feel bad, but if you can't be a greedy champagne hoarder on (well, just before) your birthday, when can you be?

Liz blew me away with my birthday present. Way back last Christmas we were in Paris for the day together before flying out to Liverpool and Bristol, respectively, in the evening. Liz knows Paris better than I do, so she took us trawling through the Asian clothes shops by Republique. I think she wanted gloves or something. Anyway, I really wanted to buy this bag, but in the end I didn't get it because I was worried I was already going to be overweight with my luggage on EasyJet - I was going back to the UK with something like 5 bottles of wine, plus all my Christmas presents. When I came back through Paris to put my parents on the plane back to the UK, I tried to find the shop again - after all, usually when I stay in Paris I stay in a hostel right by Republique, so it should have been easy. But I couldn't find the street even, let alone the shop with the bag. So almost a year later, you can imagine how chuffed I was that Liz remembered the bag I wanted (I haven't thought about it or mentioned it to her since I tried to find it last January) and found it in Paris for me. What a star! And here it is, modelled by moi:

I then made Liz take a million photos with me and the champagne, including pretending to drink it straight from the bottle (ugly chin wattle photo not pictured), so we were concerned it might be shaken up upon opening. Liz stood by to catch any spray, but the bottle was opened without incident. 5 minutes later when I opened the fridge again to get some canapes out, the shelf, unable to take the weight of a bottle of champagne and 2 bottles of bubbly, collapsed. Hilarity ensued as I acted swiftly to save the champagne, which first spilled on the floor and then started foaming out. Not being the type to waste good champagne, I drank as much as I could straight from the bottle for real this time, until it stopped spraying. Bit of a bummer, but we didn't lose too much champers I don't think.

This wasn't even the first time that evening that the fridge had let me down. The fridge is officially known as the Frozen Fridge of Doom, since it is ridiculously cold. I've tried turning it all the way down to 1, all the way up to 6 and leaving it in the middle, but it still insists on freezing all my stuff. I often dive in for some hummus, or the cat's food, for example, only to find it frozen solid. It is good for keeping things like vegetables fresh for longer though, I must admit. But even I was surprised when I went to get some lemon to squeeze on to my smoked salmon canapes and found that the lemon was frozen solid. Who knew that was even possible?

The Frozen Fridge of Doom. This is to show the ice build-up at the back, not the apparent lack of human food in there.

Champagne time!

Me and my Taittinger, we love each other. Me and my Taittinger, always together...

Cheers!

Liz enjoying the privilege of getting some champagne

Bit blurry, but a nice photo of me and Liz having a larf I think

Me, Liz and Stephanie

Anyway, it was a nice evening, good to catch up with Liz, who I haven't seen in ages because she's been taking a course 9-5 and then teaching her classes at night, so busy busy. I have my actual birthday off tomorrow, so I'll have to think of something nice to do with myself. It was raining non-stop yesterday, so I was quite happy (well, as happy as humanly possible under the circumstances) to be in bed with a hangover all day.

A couple of random photos:

The evil spider who attacked me within seconds of my sitting down on the couch the other day. Credit where credit's due, he was still in the same spot when I got back from work, so I was able to kill him right away instead of worrying he might get on my knee again. Shudder! He's dead here, so imagine him not curled up and scary and on your knee. Eek! It took me about half a can of fly spray to kill him, then a lot of courage to dispose of the corpse. And then I had to wash the blanket he'd been on, partly because it had fly spray all over it, and partly because it had had a spider crawling all over it.

I've already ranted about how I paid La Poste 23 euros to redirect my mail, even though I'd changed my address with everyone I could think of, just so I could get the tax bill, and how it turned out they have a policy not to forward mail from the tax department. Well, here is the one and only piece of mail I've had redirected so far, an ad from the Monoprix supermarket. This is the side that the original address label was on...

And here's the other side:

Talk about useless! Not that I really care about a Monoprix ad, but supposing I did, way to stick a giant label over half of the information. What if it had been a postcard or something? Why not just stick the new address label over the old one? Or even just take a slight bit of care as to the label's placement? Nope, don't give a monkey's, La Poste.

And here's Bob, during cuddle time on the couch. He comes and hangs about on the floor next to the couch but won't jump up, so I have to lift him up and then he snuggles in between me and the back of the couch, often with his little paws on my shoulder (hence the blurry close-up). Look at his little round head, aw. Good news, Liz is staying in Tours for Christmas, so she is going to feed him. Yay!

What am I reading? Land of Eagles

2011-12-01T21:44:00.002+01:00

Fortuitously, I finished 1Q84 and the very next day 2 books that I'd ordered from Amazon turned up in my letter box. I am now the proud owner of an ex-library book from Illinois. The internet eh? Crazy.

A few weeks ago I happened to see a comment on a travel blog. Someone had written in asking for ideas for their honeymoon, and someone had commented and suggested Albania. The comment was only a couple of lines long, but this is just exactly the sort of place I'm always raring to go to, and it caught my imagination. I, probably like many of you, think of Albania - if I think of it at all - as a bleak, communist hole. But I hopped on to Google and was confronted first with the (obvious) fact that it's right there on the Med above Greece and across from Italy, which screams sea, sand and sunshine. Then I looked a bit further and liked what I saw - not too touristy yet, apparently some nice beaches exist amongst others that are skyscraper-ridden communist disasters, there are some great archaeological sites etc. etc.

So anyway, before committing myself any further, I headed to Amazon and ordered the first travel narrative book I saw - Land of Eagles: Riding through Europe's Forgotten Country by Robin Hanbury-Tenison. It got some good reviews, and apparently Hanbury-Tenison is something of a doyen of English travel writers, so I overlooked the fact that they were doing it on horseback. I've never been a horsey type (perhaps surprisingly, logistics aside - I was a very Lisa Simpson-ish kid in every other way), but that didn't seem an important factor when selecting a travel book.

However, as soon as I opened it up and saw their route map, I realised it wasn't quite what I was looking for. The vague idea I have in my head (after about an hour's internet search) is to fly in and out of the capital, Tirana, and to visit a few spots on the coast and the big archaeological site down south. They are taking their horses trekking through the mountains in the interior, with a stated goal of not setting foot in a city the whole trip. Not very me.

Well, that would still be okay if it was an evocative guide to the history, people, culture and landscape. It started out promisingly enough, with some brief but interesting background on the history of the country, the horrors of Enver Hoxha's regime and subsequent Balkan Wars, but for the most part I've gotta say it's just dull. He goes into great detail a lot of the time, but about stupid stuff like how his "much younger" wife divided all their stuff into four distinct boxes, and how that made it easy to find stuff and quick to pack up in the morning. Tons of stuff about the difficulties they have following whatever bridle trail it is they're on, getting lost in the scrub, horses balking at crossing rivers and so forth, none of which is really of any interest to anyone not planning the exact same horse trek.

Here's a sample from the page I happen to be up to:

I had photocopied in colour all the maps, so that I could give our driver an identical map to the one I was navigating by. In theory that would mean that we would always be able to find each other. But it didn't work out that way. We arranged to meet them where the clearly marked side road to Surroj peeled off. There we planned to enjoy the packed lunches with which the hotel in Kukes had provided us and which, to save them from being jiggled about and pulped on the horses, we had put in the Landcruiser. We reached the junction but there was no one there. They had either driven past or, knowing that we would be taking it, decided to go down the side track and continue until it ran out and became suitable only for horses. There was no signal on the mobile. It turned out they had driven past, and so we missed out on lunch.

Bored yet? It's certainly not inspiring me to visit. Where's the local colour? The crazy old man who, I dunno, drags you in to his house, tries to make you marry his daughter and tells you tales of fighting the Italians in World War I - or something. Where's the glorious descriptions of majestic mountains and soaring eagles? Where's something your average traveller, who's not going to start off on their voyage with champagne provided by the Acting British Ambassador (I kid you not) can use? It's a bit like reading someone's journal in which they've written down every single thing that ever happened to them. Well, I am 72 pages in since picking it up this evening, so I can say one thing for it, that it's a relatively quick read (over 100 pages to go though). Might have to invest in a guidebook or something to help me decide whether Albania 2012 is really a winner.

Why no-one's going to hire me as a professional Photoshopper anytime soon

2011-11-29T18:15:00.002+01:00

Thought I'd jazz up a photo of me and Jess in the fancy Reims restaurant a bit. It was really hard though, mostly because the wall was the same colour as the (now wonky) table. I also forgot that one of the prime qualities of glass is that it's transparent. I now have a full-to-the brim martini-style glass instead of my wine glass and I just got rid of the water bottle altogether. I also got rid of the wine bucket, but seemingly digitally spilt its contents on the tablecloth in the process. On the bright side, I made my arm a bit skinnier!

What am I reading? 1Q84

2011-11-28T23:54:00.000+01:00

Inspired by The Guardian's list of the best books of 2011 (the first of many such round-ups, I expect) I thought I'd kick off an occasional series of posts on (surprise, surprise) what I'm reading.

I briefly had a blog back in the day in which I decided I would read one book by everyone who's ever won a Nobel Prize, after realising I had read hardly any of the laureates. Looking at the blog now, I see I managed to get through 16 books, which is more than I thought. I actually have no memory at all of most of them (this is a general problem for me, that I forget books I've read, and even some I've studied, quite easily). If you'd asked me, I would have said I'd never read any Anatole France, despite him being a favourite of the French board of street names. But apparently I read him, and I didn't like him - "Pointless, that's the best summary of The Amethyst Ring by Anatole France, pointless from start to finish". I think the only book of the lot that really stayed with me was The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass, which is a masterpiece. But I see that I read that just before starting the 'project' anyway!

But anyway, while the constraints of reading a whole bunch of obscure Swedish writers and people chosen as much for their political beliefs as their writing wore me down (actually, I come across of a bit of a philistine in the blog - apparently I wanted to punch Jose Echegaray, 1904's winner, in the face ha ha), I thought it would be quite fun to blog about books that I had chosen to read of my own volition. So after that lengthy introduction, here goes.

I'm still ploughing through the 900+ page epic that is Haruki Murakami's latest, 1Q84. It's been quite a while since I read any Murakami, but I am definitely a fan. As I said to my mum a while back, it's now seemingly become obligatory to like Murakami. He's the perfect "I have pretensions to literariness, yet I like to think I'm a bit alternative" go-to guy. Not that I'm trying to say I was on the bleeding edge of Murakami appreciation and now I'm too cool for school.

I think I first read Murakami - Kafka on the Shore - when I was in Moscow in 2006, so I think I hardly "discovered" him. I have vivid memories of picking up that first book, with its white cover with a picture of a cat on it. I used to buy a lot of books at the big Dom Knigi (House of Books) on Novy Arbat, but I think I might have bought this one at the English book shop in Kitai Gorod. I ended up with a whole shelf of them in my bedroom, all of them abandoned when I left Moscow precipitously shortly afterwards. I used to read a lot - and spend a fortune on books I was later to discard - when I was in Prague and Moscow. The joys of having (some) time on my hands and no TV (or Russian/Czech only) and no computer.

In Prague I used to go to Shakespeare & Synove (Shakespeare and Sons) a lot. (I imagine it's probably something of an homage to Paris's famous Shakespeare & Co.) Shakespeare & Synove was a wonderful place to hang out - used and new books in the back (and they'd buy your old ones back too) and a coffee shop where you could install yourself by the fire with a hot chocolate and read for hours without being bothered. A rarity indeed in Prague, where generally a waiter will swoop within two seconds of you finishing your drink and ask if you want something else. At the time, I was unemployed, waiting to go to Moscow, and spent a month living in a hostel dorm room before spending a couple of weeks sleeping on the concrete floor of my friends' basement apartment (in one of their bedrooms, in fact), with only a folded blanket between me and the floor, and another thin blanket to sleep under. I used to wake up aching all over when my friend's alarm went off at about 6 am. The good part was that I was authorised to climb into her bed for a few more hours' sleep once she left! There was no spare key, so once I decided to leave the apartment for the day, I was out on my own until whatever time they made it back from long days teaching. I saw a lot of Prague, but it was getting cold by that stage (beginning of November, I think), and I'd been in Prague for a couple of months already, and so I spent a lot of time trying to drink hot chocolates as slowly as I possibly could in cafes or even sitting on the floor outside their apartment waiting for them to get back.

Very different to how I've been reading 1Q84 - on my Kindle, with no real sense of the weightiness of such a book, the pages left unread diminishing with every day; on the bus, in my lunchbreaks, or perched on the stationary bike at the gym. I found that Vol. 1 and 2 (sold separately from Vol. 3 in the UK, where my Kindle is registered) zipped by quite quickly. Even though I'd read some spoilers in articles and interviews before it came out, it did a good job of drawing you into its world and allowing some of the connections between characters to only gradually dawn upon you. There are definitely parts where it's genuinely gripping and you can't wait to see what happens next. But it's quite unevenly paced. Vol. 3, in particular, seems to be dragging somewhat in comparison, although there still is a desire to know how it all turns out. Somehow the surreal elements of the book seem a bit lacking in purpose. One feels that exactly the same essential plot could have been achieved without any of the Little People and air chrysalises etc. They don't really seem to be *doing* much in the book, and yet they're not so out there that you really go "wow, what the hell?" Or maybe that's just because we're all used to this sort of magical realism guff by now?

There is a good story there though, and I'm still looking forward to see what happens at the end (which I have heard is disappointing...) If anything, though, it's made me want to go back and re-read some of those books I read back in Moscow and see if I can recapture the magic.

PS Next time I will try to get down to business a bit faster...

123€ poorer, any wiser?

2011-11-22T18:38:00.003+01:00

All the ins and outs of the situation are too complicated to bore you with (anyone wanting to follow the flatmate from hell saga can look here, here, here, here, here and here - for starters...), but to be (kinda) brief (this may not seem like the simplified version, but trust me), I saw the agent last night, who gave me a copy of the lease, as requested by the taxman. She also let me know that she has no idea where G is these days; that G had been charging me more than half the rent when I was living with her - not really surprised at this stage, but unsure why that never came out before; and that G's dad had said she has always been a liar. True dat. Plus more stuff about how even when the agent had turned up to the apartment to bust her, she was spouting lies about how I (and she pretended I was 'Géraldine' and she was my flatmate) worked nights and wouldn't be back and she should come back during the day - whereas she knew I was right behind her, since we'd been at a mutual friend's place, but she was obviously hoping that she could get rid of the agent and I'd never find out.

Anyway, armed with the lease, I went to the tax office this morning (the whole thing took about 2 hours total). Unfortunately, didn't get to see the guy I saw last time, who got the whole sob story and told me how to sort it out. Instead, I got a woman who seemed much less sympathetic. To be fair, I didn't lay all the cards on the table at first, since I was thinking that, as I had been told I wasn't legally responsible, it didn't really matter what G had done to me. But she started off by saying I could have forged the agent's signature on the lease. I mean, first off, the agent had crossed out the girl who had lived with G THREE flatmates before me (and was never taken off the lease), and just written in that she left in 2008 but G was still there until the end of July this year. Why, if I were the legal-document-forging and lying-to-the-tax-department type, would I have bothered trying to absolve this other girl of responsibility? Wouldn't it have been easier just to leave things as they were?

After a bit of back and forth, thankfully she decided to believe me that I hadn't turned my hand to fraud to get out of a 450€ bill. Then she said she could cancel me off the tax (and thus make G solely responsible for it) but for some reason she couldn't take the TV licence fee out of my name. Why couldn't she? She just couldn't. Of course. Sigh. I pointed out that this was pretty unfair, since it was G's TV (technically - and I didn't tell her this - I did have a TV in my room too, but it belonged to G and I watched it max once a fortnight when the F1 was on, plus it's one fee per residence, not per TV, so didn't make a difference anyway) and she turned all snippy and said that normally everyone had to pay the taxe d'habitation, and I had been living there, so I shouldn't be complaining. Which was infuriating. At this stage, I had mentioned that G had stolen from me and not paid the rent (since she had initially suggested that I just sort out paying the tax between ourselves), so don't bloody talk to me about moral obligations! However, there was no budging her on this standpoint, so I just paid the 123€. At the end of the day, it's less than half the amount, which is what I was expecting to have to pay, and it's done with.

The only thing is, I'm left wondering if the situation is truly resolved now. She said (again, I don't know why) that G would now receive the bill for this tax in January or February. Somehow, I'm not picturing her leaping off to the tax office to fulfil her obligations (obligations? Obligations are for suckers). The agent said that if she doesn't pay, they will end up chasing the landlord for the money. In that case, she mentioned using a rent cheque I gave the agent for June and July (which she hasn't yet cashed because of accountancy issues chasing up the money from G's family - again, won't go into the details) to pay the tax. Sure, I was in the apartment in June and July, so I'm not contesting that I owe rent for those months, but it seems unfair to have that hanging over my head for who-knows-how-long. And the thought that she might just merrily not pay something AGAIN and not really have to deal with any of the consequences AGAIN really, really annoys me. And I feel that that's like, best case scenario - I just have visions of her somehow harrassing me.

This whole thing has been such a drain for the past six months. Even today, I was feeling physically sick to my stomach in the tax place. I just wish I knew it was over.

Fast times in Tours

2011-11-20T20:41:00.007+01:00

Anyone else impressed by the lack of typos in that 6 am post? I would like to say that's because I always perfectly master the keyboard arts, but here's how I sounded a bit earlier in the evening:

Lime IS the best of the flavours (with gin) and I think you can see the shots of vodka that took place between 1.27 am and 2.44 am. I didn't show the bit where I tried 10 times to spell 'bye' correctly

This chat also involved the immortal lines: "Hey, super good news! I just got news from the future from [mutual friend in New Zealand - and, therefore, 'the future', time zone wise]." The news from the future was "There was a cat and she looked like a Japanese lady! And then I laughed a lot and she said I should call her tomorrow." This was received with confusion, as you might imagine.

So, anyway, it was a fun night. In case anyone's wondering, I had my laptop out (with Skype still logged in) because we were gearing up for the supposedly-80s-but-secretly-not club with a YouTube-assisted walk down music's memory lane. Stephanie, a girl from Ohio who I met recently (and asked out on a girl date, go me!), is only 25, which is not that much younger than me, but which kinda showed when Marion and I were singing along to Tiffany at the top of our lungs and she was just sitting there a bit bemused. Whatever happened to Tiffany anyway?

Also Roxette, Heart, and Dragon - although that one is less an age thing than a not-being-a-Kiwi-thing (all the rest of you have been missing out big time):

Dragon - always reminds me of nights in the 80s bar in Wellington dancing it up with Ruthie G. Particularly one night when we were out on the smokers' (slash, I'm sweaty and I need some air) balcony and the rain really was coming down like sheets. That's Wellington for you... Good times :)

And then Marion introduced us to the most hilarious thing ever. Particularly after you've been drinking for several hours. I have to preface this by saying I do the opposite of endorse a guy who got caught pissing on a teenage girl on tape, but this is seriously comedy gold:

Just be warned, this "hip hopera" goes on for 23 "chapters", so set aside some free time if you're going to watch them all (I'm not all the way through, but trust me, it's insanely worth it).

Other highlights of the night involved arguing with the bouncer because he wouldn't let me take my handbag into the club (the other bouncer gave me his card on the way out though, so I don't seem to have burned all my bouncer bridges at the club) and stealing someone's Red Bull. Um, sorry about that... I have to laugh though, I basically said to Stephanie "Hey, look, someone left their Red Bull on the bar" (for at least 5 minutes, come on people, fair game) "should I steal it?" Stephanie: "Dunno, I don't really like Red Bull", Me: "Okay then, I WILL!" There's not needing much encouragement to vice, and then there's not needing any encouragement at all... I will note that I'm very unstealy when sober. And I would also like to note that 'dancing like a bunny' consisted of jumping up and down, not like hopping and doing the bunny arms or anything super embarrassing like that!

Luckily, I was tired and a bit brain-foggy yesterday, but no hangover and no return of the sickness. I have to go back to work tomorrow, which I'm kind of nervous about. I always feel like I'm being judged for having time off sick, even though in reality everyone is actually really nice and I do have a doctor's certificate (I got a call actually, someone found all the papers I lost and handed them in, which was nice. At least they're not all floating around Tours any more). But still. I haven't been at work at all for over a week, and before that I only had one afternoon after my Photoshop course, so it's been like 2 weeks since I was really there. I just feel weird about it and like Monday is surrounded by a cloud of impending doom. Well, I just have to get out of bed and go and it will be okay, right?

6.11 am

2011-11-19T06:11:00.002+01:00

And I'm blogging post-club. Post-what-was-meant-to-be-an-80s-club, but wasn't. On the other hand, I was expecting a "30s and over" club would be full of creepy old men, but it wasn't too bad. I danced with one guy like a bunny (I was dancing like a bunny, he wasn't like a bunny) and he said that no-one else there was dancing like me. Well, duh, when was the last time YOU saw a French girl dancing like a bunny? I don't think the concept of dancing like no-one's watching has taken off here (or probably most places, to be fair). Then it was too loud to catch most of the rest of his conversation, but it seemed to centre on how nice the toilets were and how we should check them out, which I thought Did Not Bode Well, so I left him to check out the toilets on his lonesome. I also danced with another guy, who I thought was quite fun. I am happy to dance with anyone, as long as they can do more than shuffle on the spot, so I had no particular complaints with this fellow, but my friends told me later that they nicknamed him "The Greek" because he kept dropping to his knees (which, I dunno, Greek people do?) and I was "The Highland Dancer" because by comparison I looked like I was undertaking almighty feats of leaping about. Maybe I was being a bunny again.

Anyway, I think I will regret it tomorrow, when I'm sober (hungover) and have probably regressed into officially sick once more. But at 6.18 am, I'm happy to report a fun night out. Time for bed.

2011-11-16T18:58:00.002+01:00

Terrible day in which I didn't go to work again, but instead went to the doctor and immediately afterwards lost a coat-pocketfull of papers the doctor gave me, including a prescription, my sick note for work and a blood test referral and then I cried in the supermarket when I couldn't find them again. And freaked out one of the check-out boys, so I guess I'll have to avoid him from now on.

On the other hand, today also brought me this, quite possibly the greatest thing any of us has ever heard, and I think I'm not going too far in suggesting you're probably a philistine if you don't agree:

In which nothing has changed

2011-11-15T20:57:00.001+01:00

I decided not to go into work today (kind of annoyed about spending another day of holiday, even though I have so many, but oh well) because I was still getting over the tail-end of being sick, I had the tax stuff to sort out and basically I didn't want to. I got woken up around 7.30 by my neighbour leaving his apartment (I would love to know what he does - he often leaves before I'm up in the morning, and he always gets in super late, like 11.30 at night. I have probably blown my chance for neighbourly relations though, by basically running into my apartment and slamming the door the one time our paths crossed in the corridor. It's not my fault, though - studies have shown that 9 out of 10 girls can't distinguish his footsteps on the creaky wooden stairs from those of an angry rapist) and - ding! - that was it, I was awake and worrying about the taxe d'habitation and all it represents (phoning people in French, notably).

I had called the agent on her cellphone a couple of times yesterday, left a message, and also called the agency where I thought she worked, only to be told (confusingly) that she doesn't work there "and she's not in today anyway". Um, okay then. I didn't hear back, so I gave it till 10 this morning and called her again (twice), the second time I got through, she recognised me straight away (for once, the accent came in handy, not like yesterday at the tax place where I said, and SPELLED, my flatmate's name like 10 times and the guy kept on going "Burton? She is English like you?" until I finally got through to him. Damn Rs) but asked if she could call me back in about half an hour.

No problem! Yay! I leant back, congratulated myself on being brave and persistent with the phonecalls and waited for her to call me back and for me to get everything all ship-shape by the end of the day. I don't know why I expected it to be easy. In an universe where someone can lie to and steal from a supposed friend and get away without paying rent for a year without any serious consequences (yes, she technically has to pay the money back to her family, but c'mon...) (and forgetting the whole 'spending years sleeping with a guy who has a partner and kid at home' bit - which, of course, is more his fault, but it's not super classy on her part you must say) and then karma or whatever you call it sticks me with 100% of the tax bill that even the tax office says she should be legally responsible for (leaving any moral questions aside), of course it's not going to be easy. Why would I get a break? And yes, I know I'm *dwelling* but I can't not while this is still not resolved.

So anyway, all that to say that I just waited and waited for her to call back and the call never came. I leapt on the phone once and it turned out to be some crappy autodialling thing which called me 6 times, and there's not even any message or anyone on the line! I looked up the number online (092583697 for any of you in France) and there are pages and pages of people complaining about getting constantly called by this thing. Apparently something to do with Free and Alice selling your number to advertisers or something - and sure enough, in the evening I got a call from an unlisted number and it was Canal Plus telling me that I had been specially selected for a TV upgrade offer. I managed to cut her off by telling her I don't have a TV (you may remember, I - almost - literally threw the TV back in G's face in the moving out process) so mayyyybe they'll give calling me a rest. I guess if you pick up the phone to the stupid machine, you get "selected" for a real person to call you at night.

Anyway, I'm rambling. The obvious question you'll ask is why I didn't call the woman back again. I thought about it, but first I thought I should give it more time, since I'd already called like 4 times (one message, one time actually getting through, oh and the mysterious place where she doesn't work but kind of does as well) and I didn't want to be harassing someone I essentially needed a favour from. And then as the day went on, I just got really down. I'm still down, if you can't tell from my perky post thus far. It's just difficult to have the energy to deal with it. It's hard to feel stupid and unfairly treated and put upon and lost at sea all alone in a foreign country. Plus I'm still kind of sick and I'm just so tired. It's just so hard. And I don't know how I'm going to get up and go to work tomorrow, I just want to lie in bed all the time forever.

Oh yeah, and now I'm officially past due for the tax that I never got official notification of and have no idea what the consequences of that may be (I'm hoping none for me and lots for G, who presumably already knows she's off the hook and is just somewhere cackling with glee about sticking me with it, but like I say, with my luck...)

Flatmate saga - it's not over yet

2011-11-14T14:53:00.009+01:00

Warning: Long post about my ongoing flatmate nightmare ahead!

I've just come back from the tax office, since that seemed like a completely fun way to spend my day off. Actually, I first went by in the morning, only for there to be a huge queue in front of me. Since there wasn't that much time left before they closed for lunch, I thought I would be all clever and turn up before they reopened their doors after the break.

Usually, if I need to go to this part of town, I make a detour past the best damn briocherie in Tours. I was kind of embarrassed this morning, cos the lady knew my order without me having to say. Maybe I've been there a couple of extra times lately, with the train trips to Chenonceaux and Poitiers (it's right next to the station), but I swear, normally it's only like once a month max that I end up nearby! Or maybe she just looks at me and thinks "definitely the chocolate chip version for that one"? But anyway, having already got my brioche fix in the morning, I tried to take a shortcut to the tax place and ended up lost in Sanitas, which is officially 'the dodgy part of Tours' - a quartier made up entirely of high-rise HLMs (State Housing) right next to the train tracks. The dodgy bit wouldn't have bothered me too much - it's broad daylight, and it's pretty much just code for 'Here Be Non-White People' I suspect - but I was literally on the wrong side of the tracks and there was no way to get over. By the time I finally found a pedestrian overpass, I had overshot the tax office and had to walk back up the road again, thus negating any possible benefit the 'shortcut' might have had. (On the bright side, this route did lead me past a building which is now a retirement home but was, in the Middle Ages, a home for lepers! You don't see that every day! I had a bit of a chuckle at the symbolism of having a 'ghetto' retirement home in an ex-leper colony. In fact, the leper home ended up giving its name to the whole area, 'Sanitas' being derived from sante - French for health. PS sorry I lost my special short keys to do accents when my laptop crashed, so you'll just have to imagine the accent on sante.)

Normally, I would take this as a Sign From Above to continue eating brioches (and also a good opportunity to work off like 1% of said brioche), but by the time I turned up, 5 minutes before the agency was due to re-open, there was a queue of about 35 people, which swelled to approximately 50 naughty French improper queuers by the time the doors opened.

Why so many? Well, as I would later discover, the taxe d'habitation is due TOMORROW. I still haven't received anything about it in the post, so I had no idea. I had to laugh (and internally hit my head against a brick wall) when I was talking to the tax agent later on and he told me La Poste doesn't forward any mail from the tax department, because otherwise people will try to get out of providing their real addresses to the tax man. This is literally the ONLY reason I paid them 23 euros to forward my mail. I haven't received one piece of forwarded post. Ah hahahaha, you just have to laugh or you'll cry.

Talking of crying, I almost did when I got to Man #1, who was in charge of screening people into the appropriate offices. I explained my whole situation to him - for those who aren't au courant, I was flatting with a French girl, I wasn't on the lease, I gave my rent money directly to her, she didn't pay either her rent or my rent for a year and lived off approximately 4000 euros of my money while quittin' her job to lie in bed all day. When this came to light, we were "asked to leave" the apartment and I had to find a new place without her lifting a single finger to help me with anything. Everything got squared away with the rent money, but I was still left incurring at least a couple thousand euros of expenses in the move. Anyway, I explained a brief version of all this, and the guy was all like "but you weren't on the lease?", "No", "then you shouldn't be responsible for paying". HALLELUJAH! But 2 minutes later he was just all "well, *normally* you shouldn't be responsible for paying, but for some reason the full amount is in your name, nothing's in her name and so hey, guess what, you're on the hook for the full 450 euros". He basically just did his best Gallic shrug when asked why that should be if I was never on the lease and he JUST SAID that I should therefore not be responsible. And then he was all "you can wait to see my colleague if you like, but he's just going to tell you the same thing". This is about the point where I was ready to burst into tears, but I held it together and said I would wait for his colleague, which just earned more "it's your funeral" type shrugging from him.

So, colleague it was, and I must say, this guy was super nice. He took the time to listen to everything I had to say and give me a little fatherly advice about how you should never be in a flatting situation without something in writing, even if it's with friends or partners, even if it's not a proper lease but just something scribbled on the back of an envelope. So yeah, too late for me, but maybe someone reading this will learn from my mistakes...

Another "pro tip" from the pit of despair - we talked about why it would be that it somehow ended up in my name. At first he just said that he didn't know how it worked, but maybe since they had two names on the tax declaration (she did apparently declare she was living there too, which is at least a start I suppose), they just picked one at random. Then he said something interesting - that I might have 'missed something' on the tax form. He explained that you can tick that you're in a flat as an owner, a renter, or that you're living there for free. Now here's the interesting bit - living there for free, in the eyes of the taxman, doesn't necessarily mean you're not paying rent, it just means that you're not legally responsible for the place e.g. you're not on the lease and therefore you don't get assessed for the tax. I had no clue about this, so I obviously ticked 'tenant'. He suggested that she might have been maligne (which means clever, but there's an air of 'sneaky, tricky' about it - you can see the relationship with malignant in English) and ticked that SHE was living there for free, and thus landed me right in it. And you know, that wouldn't bloody surprise me a bit. He also said I was naive - perceptive one, this taxman!

So Mr. Nice Taxman suggested that I needed to get on to the agency that rented us our old flat (rented HER our old flat, I should say) and try to get either a copy of the lease or the etat des lieux de sortie (the paperwork she would have signed on moving out) to prove that she was on the lease and I wasn't, and then they might be able to shift it on to her, which understandably they can't do just on my say-so (even if they have bloody well stuck me with it IMHO unfairly in the first place). If the 450 euros had been divided in two, I would have just paid my part, but it would really kill me to have to pay her part as well, and I know she's never going to give me the money just if I ask for it (for one thing, I "technically" still owe her for the last two months' expenses and supposedly some rubbish tax (as in, stuff you throw away, not bullsh!t) she'd never brought up in the previous 15 months I was there).

So I've called the agency, the woman I was dealing with is not there and wasn't answering her cellphone, so I left a message and am hoping she will get back to me, otherwise I'll have to like try and doorstop her the way she did when she came to get us for not paying rent, ha ha. Meanwhile, I am still legally responsible for this thing that's due tomorrow, and I don't really know what the consequences are for being late with it - the guy said they will "chase me" (although thanks to La Poste not forwarding their letters, I won't know about it ha ha) but I don't really know beyond that. He suggested maybe paying it and getting a refund, but I don't really trust that that will work out. Honestly, I hope that bitch falls into a well, I really do.

Bleh

2011-11-13T17:55:00.010+01:00

I'm sick :( Starting to feel a bit better than I was yesterday, when I felt nauseous and weak all day, but still feeling pretty tired and all I've done today is lie in bed and watch the F1 all day long (yay, Hamilton won but Button will finish the season ahead of him on points, which pleases me). I think I'll have the sniffles for a couple more days, but hopefully the worst is over. SO TYPICAL that it's on a long weekend (Friday was a public holiday and I have tomorrow off too)! I was planning on a short trip somewhere on Friday, but I went out to the shops for an hour or so and that wiped me out, so no dice. The weather has been great too :(

It all started on Wednesday night, when I went out and had ONE glass of wine and got home just after midnight. Apparently this is now too much for old lady Gwan to handle. Not even sleeping till 9 on Thursday morning could save me - I couldn't concentrate on my morning lecture, felt mildly hungover all day, and by Friday it was evident I was officially sick.

Going back further in time though, I had a great week! Monday - Wednesday I had a Photoshop training course. At first I was like "geez, three days, I'm going to die of boredom" but it was SO COOL! I have zero talent/patience for fiddly and artistic stuff, but even I managed to complete most of the tasks okay. And there was a lot to learn! Turns out Photoshop's super complicated. I only have access to it at work, so don't expect all my photos to be turning up 'shopped all of a sudden, but you'll know what's happened if suddenly I post pics of me with Pippa Middleton's bum. (That's right, I will have finally gone on that Dahmeresque rampage I've been planning.)

We practised a bunch of techniques, like artfully blurring portions of photos, making photos that are a mix of black and white and colour, removing things from photos, retouching wrinkles etc., sticking people's faces on a cat's body (luckily enough, since that's roughly 40% of my daily workload and I've been really struggling thus far) and then bigger projects like making flyers and business cards.

Anyway, these are not great masterpieces of the Photoshop oeuvre (I did them both pretty quickly since we were meant to be working on other tasks than retouching our own photos), but here's a couple of photos I knocked up quickly.

Original photo of the Friendship Monument in Kiev vs photoshopped one (the magic wand - I almost said "magic baguette" - ate the top of the arch, but oh well, like I said, no patience for fiddly details)

Original pic of Sophia Square, Kiev, and photoshopped (I think I did a pretty good job between the horseman's legs! That wasn't meant to sound all "as the actress said to the bishop" by the way, ha ha. Whatever he's holding in his hand and the crosses on the church went a bit squiffy though, if you look closely.)

One of the official exercises we worked on, reproducing an example we were given. I didn't quite get to finish it off, it was the last thing we did, but I still think it's pretty good (it might not look much, but there are a LOT of steps you have to follow to get to that final result).

It was a serious trial sitting next to my 60ish colleague throughout the training, but I won't say anything more about that lest I sound very ungracious and possibly ageist. But geez, would it kill her not to have to ask me about every little thing (and I'm not talking about things she missed/didn't understand, I'm talking about things like "do you think I should turn the computer off or put it on standby before lunch?") Grrr. But other than that, fun times!

Going back even further in time, the Wednesday before last Ksam from Totally Frenched Out rode into town in I think what she described as a 'soccer mom car/van' and joined me and a friend for a drink. Unfortunately, before we started she made me sign an oath in my own blood (or possibly tomato sauce, details are a little hazy) not to reveal exactly what went on, so all I can tell you is we went to a bar where the owner promised us "the hottest guys in Tours" and leave it to your busy imaginations to come up with the rest. I can say, though, that responsible, mature working ladies such as we would most certainly never do tequila shots on a work night and get kicked out at closing time. Never ever, so please don't imagine we did!

It was actually my first time meeting a fellow blogger in the flesh, and it was pretty cool! I had thought it might be a bit strange meeting someone who knew things about my life (and vice versa) although we'd never met, but I don't think it was really. I think it helped that I haven't been following her blog for ages (and I think the same for her) so we had a lot to talk about without it always being like "oh yeah, I read that already on the blog". (That's one thing I hate about Facebook btw, I always forget that people might have seen my statuses even though they've not commented and you start a story about how you fell over in the street or bumped into an old friend, and they're just like "yeah, I know". Conversation over. My mum thinks she's being cruelly deprived of being my friend on fb, but honestly, between the blog and that I would have nothing left to tell her in emails if she were my friend. There's nothing interesting on my fb anyway...) So anyway, aside aside, it was great meeting Ksam & maybe some day I'll get to meet more of you lovely people!

Back in action

2011-11-11T19:44:00.007+01:00

My laptop died last week, which particularly upset me, since I've had all the squillions of euros of expenses moving to the new place, then my ipod died a few months back, and then the laptop. Then I was in turn upset with myself for being upset because I like to imagine I'm above being attached to material possessions and money worries, even though it's a) clearly not true and b) kind of part of being a grown-up to stop being all starry-eyed and idealistic about not being driven by money. Sure, I don't have to think that money and possessions are the most important things in life, but I probably don't have to feel like some sort of capitalist stooge for acknowledging that they do matter.

Anyway, I put off taking it in to get fixed because a) I hoped if I unplugged it for a couple of days it might magically forget it was broken (didn't work) and b) asking "do you do repairs?" in French - "faites-vous les reparations?" - makes me feel like I'm a French interrogator in Weimar Germany. (Yeah, all that for a dumb history joke!) When I did take it in, I was amazed when the guy gave me a quote (40 euro) - I'm used to repair people being magically totally unable to give you the vaguest idea of what something might cost. He seemed to think it would be easy to fix, so I got my hopes all up only for them to be dashed when I went back the next day and he said he'd need to wipe the hard drive and it might be corrupted :( I was, of course, convinced that it WOULD be corrupted and I'd have to get a new one. But "good news everybody!", it is fixed and for the original price, yay! Luckily, since losing all my photos when my last laptop died, I've been a good little backing-up bunny, so I've spent the last couple of hours putting all my files back on the laptop and downloading stuff like iTunes.

It is soooo good to have it back. It seems kind of incredible now that I didn't bring a laptop when I was in Europe from 2006-07, and even as recently as 2008 we didn't have internet in our flat in Wellington. (Well, we did briefly, until the guy who was meant to be in charge of these things didn't pay the bills and it got cut off. Electricity almost got cut off too! Students, eh?) It seems like a totally different universe almost. Sometimes when I think about doing a PhD I seriously wonder if I would have the attention span for that these days, or if it would be just too tempting to check my emails or Facebook etc. all day long... I suppose in a few years I'll feel the same way about a smart phone (yeah, I still don't have one).

ANYWAY, I'm sure that is all very boring to everyone who's not me, so I'll just add (lots of) pretty autumn pictures I took on a lovely sunny day in the park. Stay tuned for news of wild partying with Ksam!

Bob rocks out with his... tongue out

I found it funny that the bake-it-yourself bread I bought "fears damp"

I made cream of cauliflower soup! Here, it is shown as part of a balanced meal :)

Ze moon, on the street where I used to live

If you don't like trees, or autumn, or parks, look away now...

Poitiers

2011-11-03T12:00:00.000+01:00

I already told you where I was on Monday night, but if you asked me on Monday day the question my blog perpetually poses, the answer would have been 'in Poitiers'! I was determined to go somewhere over the Toussaint long weekend, especially since I have my new 12-30 discount card for the trains. I looked into a couple of mid-range destinations where it would have made sense to do it as an overnight trip, but I couldn't find any hotel rooms cheaper than about 35 euro, which seemed just a leetle bit high to bother with. So I settled on Poitiers, which is about 45 minutes on the train from Tours, and I saved 20 euros on the ticket which made me a happy bunny. I knew nothing about Poitiers other than a vague sense that it was a historic place and had ties to Eleanor of Aquitaine and a couple of suggestions from blogger Eyelean at A Landscape Selected at Random. So I turned up about 11 am ready to explore!

My first impression was "wow, hilly!" I didn't realise until now, but evidently my brain (and my calves) have adapted to living in super-flat Tours and having expected Poitiers to look much the same, I was literally surprised to have to climb a flight of steps from the train station up into the city. (Where they were digging up the road, which is exactly like Tours!) I had no clue where I was going from there, and I first wandered into the neighbourhood around the Préfecture, which seemed to be mostly 19th-century buildings. With the buildings made of the local white tuffaut stone and the pavements and even the road surfaces white to match, I had the impression that the whole of Poitiers had been recently waterblasted, but turned out it was only that neighbourhood.

The whitewashed-looking 19th-century part of Poitiers, looking back from the Préfecture towards the town hall

Just hangin' out

After a bit more aimless wandering, I managed to find the tourist office where I picked up a map, a brochure of the city's sites and filled up my water bottle (aces). I don't know how many tourists Poitiers gets, but they seem to do a good job of putting information plaques up on lots of buildings and outside the main landmarks, and they have three tourist walking routes which are helpfully marked out with painted lines on the pavements - much easier to follow than trying to trace it out on a map. I was impressed! I think Tours could do a better job in this department - there are lots of old half-timbered and stone buildings around which are clearly medieval or Renaissance, but there is no information about most of them.

11th century palace of the Ducs of Aquitaine. I think everything in Poitiers was built either in the 11th, 15th or 19th centuries

I started out with the Notre-Dame-la-Grande church, which Eyelean had told me was well worth a look. It dates from the 11th to 13th centuries and is beautiful from the outside, but I loved the inside! I love painted churches! Unfortunately, I had checked my camera in the morning, and since I didn't have any battery warning, I decided not to charge it. Next time I'm going to do it just in case, because halfway through the church, the battery died. After letting it rest a bit I managed to get a few more photos later in the day, but I was a bit bummed out by that. On the other hand, I feel like sometimes I take too many photos and forget to just really look at things, so maybe it's for the best.

Notre Dame la Grande

The main façade

Carved capitals on the façade

The information plaque said the figures here were 'embracing or fighting', which I kind of liked. You could probably use that for the title of a rock album as well.

Inside NDLG

Painted columns in Notre Dame la Grande

This is hard to see, but I swear they've got Christ wearing a beret!

One of the stained glass windows in NDLG

Ceiling fresco in NDLG

After the church, I went and had lunch at the Cafe du Theatre in the square by the town hall. The food was average and the service VERY slow (lunch took over 2 hours) but it was a glorious sunny warm day and I had come armed with 1Q84 on my Kindle, so I was quite happy sipping wine and soaking up the sunshine while I waited for my food. I sometimes have to remind myself to take the time to relax and enjoy things instead of trying to rush about the place, so this was a very nice occasion.

After lunch, I followed the 'blue' route on the pavement around the Episcopal Quarter. This took me first to the cathedral, which is unusually wide and squat from the outside - apparently this is the Angevin (I think) or Plantagenet style, dating from the time of Eleanor of Aquitaine (12th-13th centuries). Inside, on the other hand, it was amazingly light and spacious. I kept thinking that it's exactly what people mean when they describe a space as being 'like a cathedral' - nothing like the heavy gloom I remember from the inside of Notre Dame de Paris, for example (many years ago now though).

It's hard to really see what it looks like. The tower on the right is taller than the one on the left, but neither is very tall, so it just gives a strange sense of being wider than it is tall, not your typical-style cathedral at all

Inside the cathedral - again, this doesn't really do justice to its proportions

12th-century stained glass window of the crucifixion. Unfortunately I could barely get my camera to function at this point, let alone zoom in, but it was pretty neat

After that, it was to the baptistery of Saint John. I was absolutely blown away by this place. It's a small building centred around a baptismal pool from the 5th century, with the rest of the building dating from between the 8th and 11th centuries I think. It, too, has amazing frescoes on the walls, from the 11th century. This was one of those places where I felt really privileged just to be there and to see it. It almost felt to me like places I've seen in the East - in Russia or Ukraine or Istanbul (the Chora church, for example) rather than the usual Western medieval style. I've been feeling a bit "meh, same old" about some places I've been (the inside of Reims cathedral for example) and this was a great reminder that I can still be amazed by new experiences and I am really lucky to be here and to experience all these things that I could never see or do in New Zealand. My camera had totally given up by this stage, so I bought some postcards and photographed them instead! I just had an all-day seminar on copyright and ethics, and so I do realise this is almost certainly illegal. Sorry! They came out surprisingly well though! Go visit the baptistery and buy some postcards.

Exterior of the baptistery (this photo I did take myself)

View of the interior

12th century fresco of the apostles

A knight on horseback

A 12th centuryfresco of a horse. I love this one, it just looks so other-timely, if you know what I mean. No-one would paint a horse quite like that any more.

A knight fighting a dragon

13th century fresco of Christ in majesty

The last place I went to was Saint Radegonde church, built to house the saint's tomb in the 6th century, although the present building dates from between the 11th and 15th centuries. There is a suburb of Tours called Sainte Radegonde, but I didn't know who she was at first. She was a princess from a Germanic tribe who was captured as a kid and later forced to marry a Frankish king (I think one of Clovis's kids, or maybe Clovis himself). Anyway, the info I read in the church said something like she performed her marital duties to the full, but she still wanted to lead a religious life and after her husband killed her brother, she ran away (you would, wouldn't you?) and founded an abbey in Poitiers. Her tomb was despoiled during the Revolution, but it's still there in the crypt and apparently there are some bits of her left. The church also had some nice painted columns, with beautiful decorative capitals showing things like people getting attacked by dogs. That's why we love the Middle Ages!

All in all, I had a really nice day out in Poitiers. It really surpassed my expectations, which I suppose wasn't hard since I didn't really have any, but still. I think I would like to take another trip some time, take some photos in my favourite spots, and see more of the town. After all, it's just down the road really!

On Halloween, part 2

2011-11-01T11:02:00.004+01:00

Luckily in my last post about Halloween I did say I was willing to participate in it as a boozy, adult activity, otherwise I'd look pretty silly right about now, ha ha! Anyway, I got a text when I was in Poitiers asking if I wanted to go out for some Halloween drinks. Since I wasn't working the next day, I thought it sounded like a fine idea. But then the next text asked if I had any costume to wear, since they were planning to dress up. Erm, no? And being in Poitiers (more on that later), I had no way to assemble one anyway.

I racked my brains (not very hard, as we shall see) and all I could come up with was 'sexy librarian', on the grounds that people could quibble with the sexy part, but there's no arguing with the librarian bit (although actually, French people do, they always call me a 'documentaliste', which annoys me for some reason). This literally involved putting on clothes I would wear to work anyway, adding patterned tights, shiny red shoes, a belt, glasses, hair in a bun, red lipstick and, the pièce de résistance, unbuttoning the top two buttons of my cardi. Ha ha!

I then amused myself with a home photo shoot of the results. I should put a disclaimer here that, despite the stereotype, librarians do not all wear glasses, have their hair in a bun, and spend their time shushing people. Also, the people you see in libraries shelving books are almost certainly not librarians. That's below my pay grade dahlink. Also a disclaimer that these are just me pissing about, not seriously going for sexy!

I had enormous fun by myself at home, music playing, getting ready and larking about taking photos, and then the actual night out was really average. Always the way, innit? I think I should just stay at home drinking and having one-person parties in future. Oh and I got a call from my friend partway through my little photo shoot to say that no-one was dressing up, so the sexy librarian never saw the light of day anyway! So this is a 'web exclusive'...

Just shelving, as usual, lalala... What's that, a camera?!

SHHHH!

You're not trying to return a book after the due date I hope?

On Halloween

2011-10-30T13:09:00.007+01:00

Around this time of year, you tend to get a lot of (mostly) Americans expressing horror at the idea that I (and the French) didn't grow up celebrating Halloween. Don't I feel like I missed out? Well, no, actually. To take the example of another festival going on right now, it's like asking if you (presuming you don't celebrate it) feel like you've been missing out on Diwali for all these years. I'm guessing your probable reaction would be something along the lines of "looks great, it would be fun to take part in some time, but it's not part of my culture so no, I don't feel as though I missed out on it".

Sure, as a kid it would have been great to dress up and get given a lot of free chocolate by people. Well, actually, maybe not so much the dressing up part. We weren't really a "dressing up" family. Infamously, one year when I was about 5 or 6 (and my Mum is probably going to cringe hearing this brought up again), for the school Book Week my older brother got kitted out as Biggles (fictional ace fighter pilot) which included having the plane built around him, whereas I (the family's limited energy for That Sort Of Thing having been exhausted) got to go as The Paper Bag Princess. In case you're wondering, to the best of my recollection, that involved cutting a neck-hole in a heavy paper rubbish sack and sending me off to school in it. I couldn't sit down in the thing all day. Apart from school plays, I remember dressing up one other time as a kid, which was Pippi Longstocking (also for Book Week, I think). I can't remember what Pippi Longstocking wears exactly, but I think it consisted mostly of stripey tights and putting my hair in plaits with wires in to make them stick out. So yeah, not really ones for going all out in that department.

But even as a kid, I was aware of Halloween from books, and I honestly don't remember feeling like I wished I could take part in it. Sure, I wished I could be like Claudia Kishi with exotic-sounding American "candy" stashed all around my room, but I never remember wishing to acquire said candy at Halloween. (How I longed as a child to be eating HoHos and Babe Ruths and whatever else you have. Then I grow up and discover almost everything has peanuts in it. Gross. I have a (stupid) theory that the chief cultural divide between Europe and the United States is that, in America, everything has peanuts in it, and in Europe, everything has hazelnuts in it...) If anything, I wanted to be a little English girl enjoying Devonshire teas and lashings of ginger beer on the lawn, not a little American girl going trick or treating and watching out for razor blades in my apples (seriously, what kid wants apples if there's chocolate on offer anyway? It's like how my Mum and Dad - sorry, Santa - used to put an apple and an orange in my Christmas stocking because that was a treat when they were little. War's over, Mum and Dad!).

And as an adult, the whole idea of Halloween (other than strictly adult-only costume parties involving lots of booze - and even then, I still don't really have the dressing-up gene) appalls me. I'm going to sound like the Halloween version of the grinch, but I don't like children. The idea of having troupes of them coming to my door and demanding MY chocolate is the stuff of nightmares as far as I'm concerned. (Now I probably am going to have a nightmare about it and wake up screaming, "My chocolate! My chocolate!" and chewing the pillow.) And the whole idea of 'trick or treat' is really offputting. I don't know whether in real life people actually go around egging houses or throwing toilet paper in trees like in the movies, but the underlying concept of "give us stuff or we'll exact our revenge" is horrible. It kind of reminds me of the tipping thing - again, I expect in real life it's not as extreme as you see on TV, but the whole trope of the badly-tipped waitress spitting in your food or your mailman breaking your packages etc. is just nasty from where I'm standing.

As with most aspects of American culture, Halloween seems to be catching on more and more at home (at least when I left). Next thing you know we'll be celebrating Thanksgiving... Of course I don't think this is any sort of deliberate cultural imperialist ploy by the average American citizen - for one thing, my English Dad (I don't have an English Dad and another Dad, just to be clear) has stories of carving turnip lanterns at Halloween as a kid (much to the general mirth of the family, who think that's about the most country bumpkin-ish thing we've ever heard) - but it is in the interest of American (and other) manufacturers of chocolate, decorations, costumes etc. to rope as many people around the world into these things as they can. Add in all the American films, TV, and books and Halloween just becomes normal to the younger generations. Well, fun as it may be (and I don't begrudge anyone else celebrating it, nor am I saying that I am anti celebrating it myself) it's never been an important thing to me, and that's why I've never felt cheated out of growing up with Halloween.

(PS I feel I should say that I realise this might come off as anti-American - it's not meant to be, I respect you have your traditions and that Halloween isn't a purely American invention anyway, I'm just trying to explain my cultural perspective on things. Also, this isn't aimed at any specific person, I've just heard it a lot over the years that French people are missing out on Halloween, or I've missed out on Halloween, so this is just something to think about if at this time of year you're looking around you at the lack of Halloween celebrations here in France and thinking "oh those poor kids". It would suck to be the one kid out of everyone you know who's not participating, but if no-one is, I don't think you really care.)

Why France is not a workers' paradise, no matter what you may have heard

2011-10-26T21:21:00.004+02:00

Today we all had to go to a 'laboratory council' to vote whether a technician working in our team should get 'titularisé' - that is, get a permanent (and in France, they really mean permanent) job or not. I found it really bizarre that one's colleagues have the right to vote on this. Basically, the procedure was that our team leader said a few words about his performance (he had left by this stage), then the head of department said a few words, and then we all cast a vote by secret ballot, which consisted of choosing amongst slips of paper reading 'Oui' 'Non' or blank and putting them in a box.

I was mortified when the results were read, because there were like 15 Ouis and one abstention, which was me, and now I feel guilty for abstaining and fearful that he'll somehow find out by a process of elimination that I was the abstainer. (So totally, writing about it on the internet is a great idea.)

Although I work in the same team with this guy, and I can say he's a really nice person, our paths don't really cross in a professional sense, so I didn't feel in a position to pass judgement on whether or not he was worthy of getting a 'post'. In fact, since I handle the English stuff, I'm quite often just working away in my little corner with not very much in common with everyone else, but that's even more true where this guy's concerned.

And if I'm brutally honest? The second reason I abstained is because I think it's unfair that he should get titularisation when no-one else in our team has it - we don't even have permanent contracts (I won't go bore you going into the differences between the two or why it is that he's able to get titularised while we can't). Not even our direct manager has a permanent contract. This guy is a grade or two below all of us, and the last person to join the team. And getting titularisation means all kinds of benefits, most of which I don't even know about - I assume there are health care and retirement benefits. What I do know is he gets 2 months' bonus salary every year. He's officially below us on the pay scale, and while I don't know by how much, I'm betting 2 months' extra salary means he'll now earn the same or more than I do. I have 2 Masters' degrees, he only has the Bac, and I'm doing a supposedly higher-level job.

I know I sound bitter and it's not this guy's fault how the system, or our particular workplace, operates, but it is like a kick in the pants. It honestly does make me wonder what the point is in staying in France where it seems not only are there zero chances for advancement or pay increases for me, but I don't even feel like I'm getting appropriately compensated if the only thing that matters is whether or not your employer decides to create a permanent job for you, not the work you do or the qualifications you have. After all, unlike most people I know, online and off, it's not like I have a boyfriend or any other significant tie keeping me here. Just an apartment full of expensive stuff I had to buy after getting screwed over by one of my only "friends". #Depressed.

Girl Gone Mild

2011-10-25T14:11:00.003+02:00

Just posting about "Going Wild" - as Keith from the highly addictive A Taste of Garlic blog puts it - evidently exhausted me, since last week was very quiet. I did go out on Friday, but only round to a mate's where we drank wine and ate blinis and no-one Went Wild in the slightest. Is there possibly a "Girls Gone Mild" section I haven't noticed?

Actually (and this is 100% true) the most exciting event in my life last week was that I finally bought a dressing gown after discovering that Auchan sells ones that don't cost 40 €. Last night it was finally dry and ready to wear and I have therefore vowed to spend my winter thusly: 60% in bed, 30% in my dressing gown, 10% in my dressing gown making soup. Work may have something to say about me turning up in a giant blue dressing gown, but honestly it would be NO WORSE than what half of my colleagues actually do wear. So much for the French being chic.

As for the soup, I bought a big soup pot and a stick blender and I have decided I am going to spend the winter living off soup and beans and hot chocolate with Baileys in it (it's been a heady time for making decisions on how to spend the winter, I tells ya). I was going to start last night with the soup, but I forgot to buy onions and hence I was forced to eat a can of beans which were meant to go in the soup for dinner and they were surprisingly delicious. Hence why beans make the cut for my winter menu. I also had what I've decided to call une baguette éventrée, because everything sounds so much classier in French. This consists of fisting a baguette in order to extract its fluffy inner goodness, and then throwing the crust away. I confess this under conditions of strict anonymity, since I'm quite sure that if the French catch you in the act it's 10 years' imprisonment on Fort Boyard for you!

(By the way, if you think me talking about soup and dressing gowns and beans is too exciting for words, pity my poor mother who also got a whole email of me talking about soup and dressing gowns and beans.)

If you're anything like me, this weekend you failed to care that New Zealand won the Rugby World Cup. It did, however, give me the chance to smirk at some rugby-loving Frenchies, which is better than having rugby-loving Frenchies smirk at me, so it's all good. I did actually try to go and watch the final (and by 'watch', I mean 'not watch' while seizing the opportunity to drink cider at 10 am in the morning without people judging me). I was meant to meet up with some friends at The Pale, an Irish pub near the cathedral, but when I got there it was so packed that there were lines out both the doors with people standing on chairs in the street to try and get a view of the TVs. I hung around outside for a bit until I got a text that the people I was meant to meet had decided to go to Place Plumereau instead, which is about 10 minutes away. When I got there, however, I got another message saying everywhere was too full and they might be going to around the train station (in totally ANOTHER direction) but would text when they had found somewhere. I hung about for a bit then decided to walk towards the station, mostly because there is a place there that sells the best brioches in town and I thought I might have one for breakfast. When I got there, the brioche place was closed, I'd been wandering about for 45 minutes and still hadn't received a text, and so I decided to go home. Where I proceeded to not care about the rugby some more. (Actually, I was chatting to my friend Rick, who is American, on Skype, and he informed me of some of the rules of rugby – I thought you could only kick after a try, apparently this is incorrect. We mutually decided that an American explaining rugby to a New Zealander is probably a Portent of the Apocalypse, so if your week is disturbed by plague and pestilence and horsemen, you probably know who to blame.)

Then I had a nap with Bob (the cat) and woke up feeling like I had a hangover. Which is even Not Fairer than when I feel like I have a hangover after only a couple of glasses of wine, since not only had I not been drinking, I had in fact been THWARTED in my plans to drink before noon, which only goes to show that you may as well just get pissed in the morning and not care who's going to judge!

How to poison friends and put people under the influence

2011-10-19T19:38:00.006+02:00

This happened about 6 weeks ago, but I was too busy dying of a terrible hangover to blog about it until now.

I had a few friends over for some drinks at my new apartment. We like nothing better than dressing up and drinking cocktails, thus the evening started out with what I'm going to call Kir Royales, but was actually Vouvray with syrup in it (totally the same thing), followed by Liz's famous Cosmopolitans (the secret seems to be burning some orange peel over the glass), followed by Gin Fizzes. A good time was had by all, and Liz and I decided to head out to a club we'd never tried before.

Ah, the days when I still had a tan! Liz was convinced I'd set the camera up in the wrong position and all that we'd get was her arm.

Liz, Laetitia and me

By this time, I was pretty drunk to be honest, and decided it would be a fabulous idea to do some shots of the vodka I brought back from Ukraine with me. Remember that vodka? It got me into a polite debate with the airport security, then I had to go check it in with the help of a nice German lad who gave me some free newspapers to stuff around it in the plastic bag. I primarily bought this particular vodka because it came in two varieties with three 'free' shot glasses. I'm not sure whether that's what gave me the bright idea of doing shots, since in general I'm not really massive on shots, particularly not shots of vodka.

Laetitia and Liz were also a bit dubious about doing shots (I'm not sure honestly why Laetitia agreed, since she wasn't coming out to the club with us) but I managed to persuade them by telling them it was honey vodka. What could be nicer than a shot of honey vodka? Genuine, Eastern Bloc honey vodka! Nom nom nom! Smooth as silk! Good for what ails ya!

Well... turns out this vodka was just about the burniest, harshest firewater I've ever tasted (and I was recently persuaded to try rakia). I put the shot glass down mightily regretting that I'd poured myself a shot twice the size of the girls'.

But it wasn't until a few minutes later that Liz held up the bottle and we discovered just why this vodka was so evil:

Yep, that's a giant chili pepper right there! I can't believe I managed to purchase, transport, unpack and serve this vodka all without ever noticing the horror lurking within! It's not exactly invisible! In my defence, it does *say* honey on the label, but it says it in the tiny letters right underneath where it says PEPPER (Pertseva, but in Cyrillic obviously) in big letters. I assume I saw this strange word written really big, didn't know what it meant, decided that logically if I didn't know what it meant than it must be unimportant, and then forgot about it. I can tell you, I got much abuse the next day from the girls as the effects made themselves felt, but it didn't make much difference since I was already dying from the evil chili hangover anyway! (Obviously the wine, gin, cointreau and normal vodka had nothing to do with it - it was all that damn chili's fault!)

And when we got to the club everyone there was at least 5-10 years younger than us, at least in the downstairs bit. (The club featured "two ambiances" - downstairs, which was a normal club, and upstairs which was full of couples slowdancing at 3 in the morning for some reason.) These dickish young guys tried chatting us up - in French - and one of them said to the other one right in front of me that you could see the whole of my boobs (which was NOT true, as the photo evidence above attests). And then when I called him out on it, he said he said it because he thought I wouldn't understand the word (nichons, which is slang). Um, saying rude things in front of me because you think I won't understand you makes you even more of a dick? And is pretty stupid, since we've been having an entire conversation in French up to this point. Then one of them asked if Liz would be upset if he undid her bra (she had on a backless dress and you could see the clasp). Sigh, why are the only people who go out in this godforsaken town under the age of 21? Safe to say that was as close as they ever manage to get to nichons!

A disappointing weekend and a stroll by the Loire

2011-10-17T21:02:00.006+02:00

Last time I posted, I mentioned my friend Amber was coming to visit. Amber is a fellow librarian with a special place in my heart since she once made me Eggs Benedict when I was badly hungover. She then forced me to watch the Home and Away Omnibus, but I suppose nobody's perfect. Even though she was only scheduled to be here from Friday afternoon to Sunday afternoon, I took both Friday and Monday off work (for house-cleaning and hangover recovery purposes). Sadly, though, just as I was thinking about getting up on Friday morning, I got a message that she couldn't find her passport, and thus the trip was off. Bummer :( Especially because, although Friday morning started off horribly, it subsequently cleared up and we've had nothing but blue skies and sunshine since then. So I was left all of a sudden with a 4-day weekend and nothing to do...

I decided I wanted to do something with my day off anyway, so I headed to the movies to see We Need to Talk About Kevin. I couldn't help constantly comparing it to the book (I don't want to give anything away, but let's just say I thought the psychological aspects and the build-up to the ending were better handled in the book) but it was pretty good, although the succession of 30-second scenes was a bit irritating, especially early on. It really was a different story than the book, not because they changed anything material in the plot, but just because of the nature of film and certain choices in how the story was told. After that, I went and had a pint (of cider) at an Irish pub and watched the world go by. Lots of tourists about! I was down by the cathedral, where I don't normally spend a lot of time, so I don't see tourists all that much usually. I would have thought the season was finished, but I suppose you've got the people like me who don't like travelling in peak season so much.

On Saturday I met up with Marion the kiwi to check out some French classes I'd heard about. She doesn't speak a word of French, so she has been looking for classes and I asked around and found this voluntary association that gives classes for only a 36 euro annual membership fee. Amazing! They are aimed at helping immigrants integrate into French society - to be able to pass exams in the hope of getting into university or getting a job. I have been slack as in terms of studying French. It's been 9 years since I've taken classes, and to be honest, other than living here I do absolutely nothing to improve. I have improved nonetheless, but I know there are still plenty of gaps and grammar I've forgotten or never properly learnt. So I thought I might as well check it out as well, and although I'm not sure how committed I'll be to 4 hours of fairly disorganised classes with a wide range of levels jammed together on a Saturday afternoon, at 36 euros you can't go far wrong.

On Sunday, I set my alarm for 7 am to watch the Formula One race. I have much more commitment when it comes to getting up early for F1 than I do for work! Unfortunately though, I woke up feeling sick after only 2 glasses of wine the night before. If there's one thing I hate, it's a hangover without having even had a proper night out. If I'm going to be sick anyway, I may as well have been out drinking cocktails and making a fool of myself. So anyway, I ended up watching a few laps and then going back to sleep and watching the replay later. Okay race, a good fight between Webber and Hamilton in particular, but not a classic. If you'll permit me to talk motorsport for 1 more minute, it was sad to see news of the death of a British IndyCar driver, Dan Wheldon, this weekend. F1 is the only motorsport I watch, but I saw news footage of this, and it's just a waste. I couldn't help thinking, "why was that fatal? Why was his car on fire?" Say what you will about F1, it has really become incredibly safe compared to the past, and apparently compared to other types of motorsport. Compare it with a crash like Robert Kubica's in Montreal in 2007 or Mark Webber flipping his car in Valencia in 2010 and you see how safe F1 really is (Kubica had to go to hospital, but no-one was badly hurt in either of these incidents). Sadly, Kubica has actually been out all season after badly injuring himself rallying in the F1 off-season. Fingers crossed he makes it back into F1 soon, he had so much potential.

Then today, I thought I should also do something worthwhile with my day off, and decided to go for a long walk on the banks of the Loire. I used to go for walks all the time in Nice, but a combination of having less spare time, the bus routes being terrible in the countryside round here (don't want to walk for hours and then there be no bus back for 2 hours) and there not being any scenery quite as lovely as the Cote d'Azur in these parts means that I haven't really done it here. But today I had a very nice walk in about 18 degree sunny weather along the Loire to just after Rochecorbon (about 5 miles according to Google. I'm not sure why it's suddenly in miles. Apparently that's around 8 km in sensible units of measure). Then a less pleasant walk part of the way back on the main road (due to the bus situation).

Presumably the 13th century fortified farm I saw a sign for

Pont Wilson (as in Woodrow)

The library and cathedral viewed from Pont Wilson

A church on the north bank of the Loire

Some autumn colour on the banks of the Loire

Reims videos

2011-10-14T10:52:00.004+02:00

I tried to post these with the post below (a thrill-a-minute account of days 2 and 3 in Reims, don't miss it!) but it wasn't working properly for some reason. Anyway, here are some very short videos of the light show at the cathedral. Unfortunately, now I have uploaded them, I realise you can hardly see anything (on my computer, they look a lot clearer and they are also rotated the right way up). So, they weren't great to begin with and they are even less impressive posted here. But anyway, I've uploaded them now, so if you want to get a very vague idea of it, it will only take up about 1 minute total to watch all of them. If you don't have that long, #5 is probably the best.

Where there's a Reims part one, there must be a...

2011-10-14T09:56:00.009+02:00

Reims part two! I thought I'd better do this today because my friend Amber is visiting this weekend and I'll have that to blog about next. As I think I've said before, it is easy to lose the motivation to blog about "part two" of a trip - there are usually tons of photos to go through, you feel like you're rehashing stuff and/or just presenting a mundane list of things you saw and did - and that only increases the more time that passes between the event and the blog. That's why I made a real effort to blog in "real time" as it were in Ukraine.

Anyway, on Saturday Jess wanted to go and watch the France-New Zealand rugby match. I am not *at all* a rugby fan, and to be fair Jess isn't really either, but she thought it would be fun and a cool atmosphere to experience seeing a game in France. After all, it's not very often that the French remember we exist. The game started at around 10.30, but I was up and ready a bit before that, so I decided to head out early to see some sights and meet Jess at the pub we had scoped out the night before.

I headed to the cathedral, which was pretty much empty at that time of day - which was nice, it was already starting to fill up with coachloads of tourists by the time I left. To be honest, it's not the most impressive inside of all the cathedrals I've been to (a lot!), most probably because it was gutted by fire in WWI. Reims was the coronation cathedral for the French monarchy, dating back, as we know, 800 years. It was built on the site of the basilica where Saint Rémi baptised Clovis, the first Catholic French king, in 496.

Reims cathedral

Bizarre camp dinosaur-looking gargoyle on the cathedral

This statue looks like a right moody so-and-so. Pretty sure she'd punch you if she wasn't missing her hands

A chap who lost his head (and got some sort of weird neck growth in return?)

Allegedly famous "smiling angel" statue. Kind of creepy. Also kind of inspecting his/her nails

Bum!

Inside the cathedral

Stained glass windows by Chagall

When I got to the pub, I found Jess sitting with two strangers, one of whom was in an All Blacks shirt and thus presumably Kiwi. They turned out to be a couple who were roadtripping around Europe before planning to do a year working in London - very typical Kiwi stuff. They were really nice & it was fun to watch the game with them. Much more knowledgeable about rugby than us, especially the guy! I didn't pay all that much attention to the game, but it was good that we won! There seemed to be some All Blacks supporters somewhere in the back of the pub at first, but then I think they left for some reason, and you would just get silence punctuated by some "woohoos" from our table (at which everyone turned round and stared, every time) when the All Blacks scored a try. After the game, we moved outside into absolutely blazing sunshine and had a pub lunch with the Kiwi couple. I got to have some proper fish and chips for the first time in a long time, yum!

Jess wanted to head back to the hotel for a rest after lunch, and I wanted to find somewhere to watch the F1 qualifying - the pub where we watched the rugby was showing a replay of the same game. I found a different pub but they told me the qualifying was on in the middle of the night, which it wasn't, and explained to me that Singapore was in a different time zone, like I was an idiot. Yes, Singapore is in a different time zone, but Singapore is a night race! Anyway, thwarted in the attempt, I wandered out of town to the basilica of the aforementioned St. Remi, where he is buried. Again, it was nice enough, but not particularly interesting to blog about.

Tomb of St Rémi

I thought these unusual late 13th/early 14th century lead engravings were pretty cool

I finished off the afternoon by visiting some Roman ruins - a 'cryptoportique', the subterranean remains of a grain storage markety thing. Basically just a big underground room, but it was free! I always forget how far the Romans got and that they actually had real, functioning settlements all over the place.

Cryptoportique

When I got back to the hotel room, I found a bottle of Dom Perignon chilling in the bathroom sink, packed in with a couple of packets of frozen potato bites (cheaper than ice, apparently). We enjoyed our champagne out of the plastic cups they leave on the side of the sink, which is probably such sacrilege that we would have been run out of town had we been caught in the act. Jess had also bought a packet of the allegedly famous pink biscuits of Reims, which my friend Liz had insisted we try (never having had them herself, mind you). We tried eating them straight out of the packet, only to find they were hard and dry. I read the back, and you're supposed to dip them in champagne or a sweet wine like port, kind of like biscotti and coffee I suppose. We gingerly tried it out with a small amount of champagne. Turns out they're even worse dipped in something - mine instantly turned to complete sugary mush, thankfully not in the champagne glass though, that would have been even more criminal!

On Saturday night, we had our Michelin meal, which has already been blogged in loving detail. After that, we just went back to the hotel room to bed.

I forget the exact sequence of what we did on Sunday... We had lunch at the same pub where we watched the rugby (chicken burger for me this time, and flammenkeuche for Jess) and just enjoyed the sun. Ah, I miss the sun already! It really was fabulous, hot weather, we were really lucky. We visited the Palace of Tau, the old bishops' residence adjoining the cathedral, where its "treasures" are kept. This was a bit disappointing, since the vast majority of said treasures seem to have disappeared in the Revolution - no crowns or sceptres to be found. There were some nice tapestries and some of the original statues from the cathedral, and that was about it. One really cool thing was some gargoyles that looked like they had metal tongues - turned out that during the fire, the lead pipes had melted and run out of the gargoyles' mouths and then cooled in place, so it looks like the gargoyles are spitting out lead.

Lead-mouth gargoyles

A necklace supposedly taken from Charlemagne's tomb

There was a display of pieces made by people training to be master carpenters or something. Some of them were actually pretty good, but with all due respect to this guy, you do kind of look at this and think "300 hours' work, REALLY?"

A sort of storage room for bits and pieces of statues. Just kind of liked this photo

Later on, we went to the art gallery, which was okay. I was disappointed that only 2 out of their collection of Cranach engravings were on display at any one time, but oh well, preservation and all that.

We had time for a glass of wine or two before the train, then a smooth journey back home & Jess went back to London the next day, while I went to a workshop on copyrights and the ethical diffusion of information (thought rather than taking the day off I may as well get paid to sit around doing nothing and get a free lunch into the bargain. Plus it's good for the old CV).

Things they don't teach you in French class

2011-10-11T19:38:00.009+02:00

...How to understand (or reproduce) French handwriting. Below is a password a colleague wrote down for me. Perhaps I shouldn't be posting passwords on the internet, but seriously, if any of you want to figure out how to hack into the admin interface of the local-host version of our Theses and Dissertations Database, please just do some indexing while you're there. We is Dublin HARDcore, bitches! (Ah, library jokes, the best of all. PS Even for a library joke that one was stupid and didn't make a lot of sense, even if you know what Dublin Core is, which you probably don't... I promise not to make any more, or to pretend I can pull off saying 'we is' or 'hardcore' or 'bitches'.)

ANYWAY... I've been in the habit of writing 7s with lines through them for a long time, since I used to write a lot of barcodes out by hand in an old library job & my 7s ended up looking like 2s. Here, though, their 1s look like 7s (without the bar).

I often end up writing 1s as just a line and then going back and adding the little tail they have here later (curse you, 2011!), but there are plenty of other weird differences that always trip me up, and presumably cause problems for French people when they try to read my handwriting. (My name on my Monoprix loyalty card, for example, has an extra E and L in it, and I'm always getting an O tacked on to the end of my name as well. And the birth date they have down for me is wrong, but I don't know how, so I can't actually use my loyalty points. Quel scam!)

It took me about 5 goes to decrypt this, and that was after having typed it in the day before (with my colleague reading it out to me).

What do you think this says??

Oh, and remember my awesome pun about the cardboard boxes - ça cartonne? Of course you do, you've only just managed to stop laughing about it and I'm going to go and set you off again - and on top of that, you're already in fits over my awesome Dublin Core joke. Sorry!

Well, the 'happening' was written up in one of the local rags, but they missed a trick! Someone give me a job as a French journo, tout de suite!

PS I have just remembered that Jennie en France did a post on handwriting differences several months ago. And I saw it, and I commented on it. Never mind though, she has quite a different blogging style from me, so other than the general subject I don't think our posts have that much in common, so feel free to enjoy them both. Or if sensible and informative is your style just read hers, but TOO LATE, you already got this far with mine! Muhaha

Haunted city

2011-10-09T12:02:00.001+02:00

For me Tours has become a haunted place. Everywhere I look I seem to see the ghost of my old flatmate. And the sad thing is, I'm actually frightened at the thought of seeing her. It's like breaking up with a boyfriend and wondering what you'll do or say if you run into them again, except with less worrying that they might think you're looking fat or be with someone else, and more worrying that they'll just skitz out at you. Come to think of it, breaking up with my boyfriend of six years was both more amicable and less financially complicated...

I'm quite shortsighted, and every time I see someone in the distance or from behind who looks a little bit like her, my heart is in my mouth. The other day, I thought she got on the bus (even though she never takes the bus). Then I thought I saw her in the supermarket and I had to go hide down a different aisle until I was sure it wasn't her. I don't even know if she is still in Tours, or if she left to move in with one of her parents, but I still think I see her everywhere.

I hate feeling like this. Firstly, I'm not sure why I'm so nervous. Surely, in her position, if she saw me she wouldn't want a confrontation. What do I think she's going to do? Scream at me? Attack me? Secondly, it's ridiculous. I did nothing wrong. She stole from me, lied to my face, quit her job and spent 6 months lying in bed living off my money while I was getting up and going to work every day, and she topped it off by finally causing me to lose my home... So why am I sure that I'm the only one dreading the thought of running into her?

Even on a practical level, the repercussions of what she did are not over. Very soon we will have to pay a tax which is based on where you live (kind of like rates, but tenants have to pay it too) and should, at least in theory, be in both our names. I went to the tax office last month to explain the situation and ask if we could be assessed separately. They told me it was too late for that, but it was too early to tell me if the bill was in fact in both our names. It should be, because they calculate it off your tax return and I assume she at least had a grain of responsibility (or self-preservation, more likely) left and declared her taxes properly. Still, it was a bit disquieting when they gave me a piece of paper with just my name and the full amount showing on it. The question is, what happens next? If her mail is getting forwarded too, I don't know what the post office will do with a letter addressed to both of us. I really don't want to talk to her, I definitely am not going to give her money to pay on my behalf, and I don't want to be stuck with the full amount (450 euros). I'm hoping the bill will come to me and I can persuade the tax people to just let me pay my half, give me some document to say I'm not responsible for the other half, and to hell with her. It's so effed up that this is still affecting me.

On the other hand, you may remember that I told her to send me copies of all the outstanding bills, plus copies of all the utilities bills for the time we lived together, and I'd make a decision on what I thought was my fair share of them. 2 1/2 months later, I haven't received anything from her, so I feel like I have a clean conscience on that front. Lots of people told me not to give her a cent anyway, but I'm glad I at least left the door open on it and she's the one who didn't follow up, so I still have my integrity intact. My suspicion is that she had actually inflated the electric bill and that's why she hasn't responded. Even if it was only 20 euros extra a month or whatever, over a year and a bit that's not a negligible sum of money. I did see a couple of bills, but after everything that's happened I think she was quite capable of strategically showing me a couple of very high ones and just blagging it that that was what it was every month. It's not that I can't read an electricity bill - I'm not stupid, and I even briefly had a job where I was responsible for paying the EDF bills for some 200 properties (and took great pleasure in analysing the nitty gritty of them and refusing to pay out for the portions of the bills I thought our company wasn't responsible for). I was just trusting, and I therefore didn't look at anything too closely, or question her about anything.

Now, of course, I feel stupid about that, but at the same time I don't want this to destroy my general faith in human kind and expectation that someone I'm close to probably won't be secretly screwing me over on a long-term basis. Let's hope it somehow works out with this tax thing so that I can finally start to feel like most of this episode is behind me. And maybe then I can stop seeing the ghosts of flatmates past.

I am stupid, my bank is too

2011-10-07T12:23:00.000+02:00

The other day at the supermarket I somehow broke my brain and just completely forgot my PIN, which I have been using successfully for two years now. I think the problem is, right before I put it in, I for some reason thought "Oh my god, what's my PIN?" and once the thought entered my mind, I froze up and just completely forgot it. There are certain things - reversing in a car for example - that I totally can't do if I think about it. This, it appears, is one of those things. Anyway, I was dumb enough to try three times and then my card stopped working - temporarily, I thought, otherwise I may not have gone for that third attempt. I then tried to use it the next day - turns out it was permanent. Not permanent in the sense that you go and see the bank and they fix it, permanent as in you go and see the bank and they have to order you a brand new card. D'oh!

So far, it's all my fault. But when I went to see the bank, I got the mumbliest woman in the world who was just generally unhelpful. She started off by telling me "I shouldn't have done that" when I explained how I'd blocked my card. Um, yeah, you think? I know that now and am not planning on running back out and putting the wrong number in again. She later rolled her eyes when, after dealing with my card, I asked if I could take some money out while I was there - seeing that I wouldn't be getting a replacement card for a week. Reasonable enough, no? And she never asked me for ID despite the fact that I had obviously failed at the PIN test and she was letting me withdraw money from my account. Same thing at the supermarket - forgot my PIN, blocked my card, and then when I had to pay with a New Zealand credit card the girl didn't even try to look at the signature! Dodgy much?

But the reason I say the bank is stupid is because my original card was expiring anyway in October. The bank girl pointed this out and asked if I could wait for the replacement. Obviously, I asked when the replacement would arrive. End of October - nope, don't want to wait that long. So she orders me a new card. THAT EVENING I arrived home and my replacement card was in my letterbox. Seriously, what kind of system are they running where there's no information on file about that and apparently no-one has any clue whether replacement cards are routinely sent out at the start or end of the month in which the card expires? Weak. So I had to go back to the bank and tell them to cancel the other card. Now I'm just hoping that that works and they won't for some reason decide to cancel the new card I just got.

Oh and it took me *three days* to remember my PIN - I actually remembered it when I was on the way back to the bank for the second time. For some reason I had become convinced it started with a certain number and had been running all sorts of combinations through my mind, but a 5-digit number, starting with that number, kept popping into my mind. I kept dismissing it, since obviously it couldn't possibly be right, until it struck me that maybe my feeble mind was trying to tell me something. All I had to do was drop the first number, and voilà, I remembered my PIN. Now all I have to do is stop thinking about it again...

But wait, there's more to this story. Because I couldn't possibly have created enough inconvenience for myself up to this point... I bought a 12-30 special discount card for the trains on the internet the other day (usually it's a 12-25 card, but for the 30th anniversary of the TGV trains, they extended the age eligibility up to 30. Yay!) and hadn't got around to picking it up from the station. Up until the moment I left the bank to head over to the station, I had forgotten that you need to present the bank card you used to make your purchase in order to pick up the 12-30 card. The card that the mumbly girl had cut up in front of me the day before. Fail. So I waited for a very long time in line for a nice man to tell me that I would have to purchase a new 12-30 card and then fill out a form and I would be reimbursed the original 50 bucks from my online purchase in about 1 to 2 months. Which is not very efficient, but after all it's not the SNCF's fault that I am a PIN-forgetting numpty. I must say that I've never had anything but friendly and helpful service at Tours train station. The guy even sensed my lostness (I think) at his original suggestion that I write a letter to get my money back, and helped me fill out a claim form instead. So now I am the proud owner of a 12-30 card, and in a couple of months I'll get a bonus 50 euros coming to me. Not too bad really! And now to plan where I can go with my shiny new 12-30 card!

Bad at bises, part two

2011-10-06T09:42:00.004+02:00

I wrote a part one about the French custom of kissing (or air-kissing) ages ago when I lived in Nice, I think. So has probably every other blogger who's ever moved to France. But I think most of them only cover the potential awkwardness that entails when interacting with the French (from "they thought I was rude when I didn't kiss all 20 strangers at the dinner table" to "I hate kissing my colleagues when they roll into work sweating from their bike ride". That last one is true). I don't think I've seen anyone cover the potential for awkwardness when encountering another expat in the wild.

In New Zealand, as I probably said last time, we don't tend to kiss. We may hug people we're close friends with (or who are that particular kind of huggy girl, you know the type). We may handshake in professional settings (and even then, there's plenty of scope for awkwardness, especially as a woman - I would handshake at an interview with no problems, but feel a bit weird shaking the hand of a new colleague or someone from the other department down the hall who I've never met before). If you're the type of person who has "bros", then you can give them a sort of reverse nod, where you tip your head upwards rather than downwards, accompanied with an eyebrow raise. But mostly we just bob about in a sea of awkward. Popular awkward gestures include waving at the person who is stood right in front of you, or just doing the sort of awkward "I'm acknowledging your presence" shuffle. English people seem to be just as bad at this part of thing, while Americans I think do slightly better, being that they seem a bit more disposed to hug - but I'm sure they, too, must frequently run into people where a hug would be inappropriate.

Being in the land of the bisou throws a spanner into the works. It certainly can reduce awkwardness muchly - I have expat friends here that I kiss, we all know that's what we do upon greeting and farewelling each other, and the system works marvellously. But if you meet an expat stranger, the question se pose - do I kiss this girl/guy, who I wouldn't dream of kissing back home, or not? The other week I positively lunged at an English guy who responded with something of a panicked look. Which stopped me mid-lunge."Oh, so um, no bise?" I said. This led to him having to both kiss me and have an awkward conversation about the awkward situation of not knowing the protocol for expat-bisous.

So, dear readers, do you do the bise with your expat friends? What about when you meet an expat for the first time? Awkward, or not so much?

A public service announcement

2011-10-04T15:45:00.002+02:00

I am bored at work. This is becoming a major trend.... So I have two work-related things to say:

1) Everyone who ever makes a website - please put a million RSS feeds on it. Particularly if you are doing something like EVENTS LISTINGS where it is stupidly stupid not to have RSS feeds for people, or even often any kind of anything to tell you which events are new, and poor schmucks like me have to just keep clicking the same things over and over because they forget that they actually saw that notice already back in March. Librarians will thank you.

2) If you ever find yourself writing a book, or article, or lecture, or thesis that involves cities in any way, do not entitle it any variety of 'A tale of two/three/four/fifty cities'. I promise you that a million billion people already had that idea.

That is all.

Miam miam Michelin!

2011-10-03T20:14:00.000+02:00

I had my first experience dining out in a Michelin-star restaurant in Reims at Le Foch restaurant. This is definitely not the sort of dining experience I'm used to, but our parents had very kindly sent some money for us to have a special night out together, and my sister generously pitched a bit in as well. As for me, I mostly shut my eyes because I wouldn't have dared order anything otherwise! Jess wanted to go for the dégustation menu - she's a pescatarian (fish-eating but otherwise vegetarian) and it was her lucky day since there was only one non-fish course of all the seven on the dégustation menu. We had read a review saying they were very unwelcoming and rude to vegetarians, but while I imagine there were few options if you didn't eat fish, they were actually very accommodating in swapping the meat course for us. In general, I was a bit nervous of rude waiters and having to be very formal, but it was absolutely fine. The waiters were all nice and helpful, and we even had a laugh and joke with some of them, and got them to take photos for us, so there was really no standing on ceremony. As for the meal - amazing! It was really a memorable and unique experience for me - who knows when if ever I'll be eating in a Michelin-star restaurant again - and great to share that with my sister! I don't know if taking pictures of all your courses is the classy thing to do in a fine dining establishment, but what the heck, I did it anyway!

All good things start with champagne! We went with Taittinger, in honour of our visit the day before. I'm clearly sitting up straight on my best behaviour here!

Before our official 7 courses even began, there was the amuse bouches. 1) Cold cauliflower velouté. I'm not generally big on cold soup, but this had a really nice flavour and smooth texture and wasn't ice cold. 2) Cheese with ham. We had already explained that Jess was a vegetarian before this turned up, but I suppose the message didn't get through to the amusing department. They made her a new plate with no fuss though. I'm not big on ham but this had that strong cured flavour and was very nice. 3) Mini brown shrimp tart. Seafood is not really my thing, so this was my least favourite of the three, but still not bad at all.

Not a bad photo except for THE CLAW which has taken up residence in my lap.

First course: Carpaccio de langoustine avec caviar d'Aquitaine. Langoustine carpaccio with Aquitaine caviar.

Sorry, I forgot to take a photo before I started eating. I assure you it turned up in a perfect circle looking much prettier! As I said, seafood isn't my favourite, so raw langoustines weren't going to be the biggest hit ever with me. The flavour was okay, but the texture was a bit weird to my taste. This was the only one of the 7 I didn't finish, but Jess took care of that.

Second course: Galette de légumes croquants, homard bleu, parmesan. A galette (in this context, basically a fancy way of saying "round thing") of crunchy vegetables, blue lobster and parmesan.

This definitely looked very visually appealing, although Jess and I tut-tutted (not seriously) that our plates didn't look identical, which Top Chef and the like has taught me should be the goal. I'm not sure whether I've had lobster before or only crayfish, but either way, this was nice and there was a generous amount of lobster too! In fact, all the way through the dishes were a good size without of course being huge (and trust me, with 7 courses you do not need huge!) I think we all have the concept that you will get a millimeter-sized cube of food at these fancy places, but it was not the case this time. I think this was virtually the only vegetables all night though!

Course the third: Saint Pierre roti, haricot cocos de Paimpol, émulsion de crustacés. Roast John Dory with beans that I can't find a translation for but I think we thought at the time were butter beans and a shellfish emulsion. I actually thought while eating this that it was a tomato foam, guess I don't have a great palate. Anyway, this doesn't look that special on the photo, but it was definitely my favourite course and I think Jess's as well. The emulsion was full of flavour, the beans were meltingly soft, and the fish was fresh, firm and delicious! Total foodgasm!

We've moved on to some yummy Sancerre rosé.

Fourth course: This was the only course we had to swap on the menu to suit Jess. It was meant to be veal, but instead we got monkfish with crispy leeks and I think a tomato compote. I'm not vegetarian, but I liked the sound of monkfish better than veal as well. If they had been serving chicken or something, I would have been all over it though! This was also very nice, again great texture to the fish, nice and flaky. Oh and in that little copper pot is potato purée. Very cute!

Very nice photo of Jess

The amazing cornucopia of cheese on offer!

Fifth course: My selection of cheeses, half eaten again. The big bit in front is Brie - I wouldn't have gone for something as "boring" as Brie, but the waitress told me it was very good, and it turned out to be incredibly different from the supermarket version, this actually had strong flavour and character. It was also practically oozing out of its skin, which doesn't sound appealing at all when I put it like that, but it was just ripe and lovely. I forget what the others are, not sure if the one on the right is a Port Salut or just something like a Port Salut, and I think on the left is a goat's cheese. All very tasty though, and served with different condiments selected to complement them.

Course Six: Macaron rhubarbe-framboise avec barbe à papa: Rhubarb-raspberry macaron with candyfloss. This was divine! Unusually for me, I think I liked it better than the chocolate dessert that followed. I ate the candyfloss separately, not too teeth-achingly sweet like a fairground version, and then underneath was a raspberry sorbet, rhubarb compote, fresh raspberries, a touch of cream, and finally the macaron. It really tasted like raspberries, which I adore, and the macaron was really soft, not chewy like they often are (I enjoy a chewy macaron too though). The cream was just right as well - I don't like too much, but it just added an extra softness to it all.

Another view of the macaroon minus its candyfloss hat. Looks kind of like a crimescene photo with the raspberry coulis escaping!

Sugar rush!

Concentrating - this is serious stuff!

As you can see, everyone else in the room (we weren't in the main dining room) has left by this stage, including people who arrived after us! No-one else was doing a dégustation, and our meal took a total of around three and a half hours to munch through!

Wahey - I managed!

Seventh course: Moelleux au chocolat de Saint Domingue, Paris Brest à boire. Chocolate fondant pudding (I assume the chocolate comes from Santo Domingo and is not associated with an actual saint?) with a liquid Paris Brest. A Paris Brest is a kind of doughnut-shaped dessert (it was made in honour of the Paris-Brest cycle race, so it's wheel shaped) made of choux pastry and praline cream. So basically it was a sort of praline milkshake. I don't really remember how it tasted, but despite preferring the macaron, I can tell you that the moelleux was very rich, cocoa-y and delicious. I even finished off Jess's! That's a real testament to my determination to hoover up any chocolate on offer, since as you can imagine, our intestinal fortitude was being severely tested by this stage of the evening!

Me and my Paris-Brest

We started off with an unheralded amuse-bouche, and I can only assume this was to really really make sure our bouche had been amused. I actually said to the waiter "you're going to kill us" when he brought this out, as I think both of us were full to bursting! We took one for the team though, and enjoyed the soft little cake at right (I think it was just a plain madeleine or something, not too sure, but it was light and pleasant), the wee little tarts and of course the chocolate, which again, was really cocoa-tasting rather than being just all fat and sugar.

One last photo, well and truly stuffed and ready to stagger home to bed!

On the primacy of Paris

2011-09-30T09:42:00.006+02:00

Paris obviously reigns supreme over all other cities in France in terms of size, global reputation, tourism, musuems and galleries, political influence etc., nesting like a spider at the centre of the transport network. And plenty of people like it that way. I've never (as a grown-up as opposed to a 13 year old starting to learn French) really wanted to live in Paris, but I know many people do. I think when I was that 13 year old starting to learn French, we were only given the vaguest of ideas that a country existed outside Paris. I remember learning about the different arrondissements of Paris, how to purchase a carte orange to travel the metro (probably via screenshots of the Minitel, which seemed such a futuristic wonder to us at the time), about the pooper-scooper scooters and much more about Paris, but I have absolutely no memory of learning about any other city other than Paris, and from what I can gather, nobody else does either. I've lived now in 4 different regions of France, but it's guaranteed that if, outside of France, I tell someone "I live in France" they'll instantly come back with questions or anecdotes about Paris. It's a bit like when you tell someone you're from New Zealand and they tell you they used to have a mate called Bob who lived somewhere in Auckland. Well, it's not really, but in both situations people somehow assume that an entire country is collapsed into a tiny zone of connections and you really ought to have something to say on the subject of Paris (or Bob).

Anyway, today I came across a particularly flagrant example of this in an interview with Rem Koolhaas, architect of the Euralille complex. In case you're wondering where Euralille could possibly be, the clue's kind of in the name. But here's how the interviewer described it:

"Euralille, the massive urban development you finished building outside Paris in 1994"

Outside Paris?? Allow me to illustrate just how "outside Paris" it is:

By these standards, I live "outside Paris" too. "Massive urban development next to Belgium" would have been more accurate! And getting back to that transport system thing, it can be extremely difficult to get from A to B in France by train without hitting Paris. I was just looking at tickets to maybe take a trip to La Rochelle. On the map above, you can see Tours around the middle south-west of Paris. Where's La Rochelle? South-west of Tours, on the coast above Bordeaux. Does the train website suggest you get there via Paris? You bet it does!

Anyway, this is just a reminder that this is a big country, relatively speaking (and yes, I know it's still only the size of Texas) and there is life outside Paris!

And I probably don't know Bob.

Reims part 1

2011-09-27T16:33:00.010+02:00

On Thursday evening, Jess and I headed out to dinner with my friend Liz to a local place called Mama Bigoude's. It's pretty much your standard crepe restaurant, except every room has a theme - you can eat in the living room, bedroom, laundry room etc. I chose the bathroom. It was a lot of fun - it's sort of clichéd but true that fun and playfulness are sometimes rather absent in the French ethos - and the food was actually pretty good as well. Often with these sorts of gimmicky places, that gets put to one side, but I was pretty happy with my duck crepe (confit and magret in the same crepe yum yum) and salted caramel and chocolate sundae (with amazing caramalized pecans) and I think the others enjoyed it too.

Me and Jess dining in the bathroom

Liz and Jess

Afterwards we ended up at a tiny little wine bar. It was nice to be out somewhere for once where I didn't feel like the oldest in the room (Tours has a pretty studenty scene, after which I think the majority of people go off and have babies and dinner parties or something) but the flipside of that was getting periodically bothered by middle-aged men, one of whom stood right next to me and said "we can say anything we like in front of them, they don't speak French". My sister was right, I should have waited to see what they would say before disabusing them of this notion, but let that be a lesson to all of us that just sometimes, people can actually speak more than one language. I'm sure I'm sometimes guilty of saying things a bit louder than I should, but it never fails to amaze me whenever I hear English-speaking tourists in France having what they obviously think are private conversations right in the middle of the bus or metro or whatever. Funny how they forget the (mythical) idea that "everyone speaks English" as soon as they feel the need to whine about how everyone on the metro stinks (usually true, but keep it to yourself).

We didn't have a big night, because on Friday it was up early to catch the train to Reims. Despite having two changes (shuttles from the TGV on both sides) everything went very smoothly and we got to Reims about 11.30, checked into our hotel, and headed out in the direction of the wine houses. I hadn't got around to booking anywhere, for various reasons, so we ended up going to Taittinger, one of the only houses where you don't need a reservation. Apparently this was one of the busiest weekends of the year for some reason, so most of the others were booked solid. We got there just before they closed for lunch, got tickets for the afternoon tour, and then traipsed around in the hot sun trying to find food. You'd think that there would be some options around a major tourist draw like that, but after being turned away from a fancy restaurant that was full, we opted for the other end of the scale and got croque monsieurs from a tabac. Mine was pretty nice, but the dude panicked upon being asked to make one without ham for Jess and just shoved 10 ccs of extra cheese in, so I think hers was a bit much.

The champagne tour was actually more interesting than expected. I learned of the existence of people called Riddlers (LOVE that) who have to turn the bottles in the racks over the course of months so that the sediment gradually gathers in the neck. Apparently they turn something like 60,000 bottles in an hour, if I'm remembering correctly. Can that be true? They must have the wrists of an 80 year old prostitute! (Sorry for that.) Once the sediment is in the neck, they plunge it into a very cold solution so an icecube forms around it, then open up the bottle, it shoots out, and they add a bit more sugar and something else I forget to get the bubbles back in it, then cork it up again. Who knew? The house are on the site of a former monastery, where the monks used to make wine, and the champagne is actually stored in Roman quarries excavated in around the 1st century A.D. We didn't know this going in, so it was an extra treat to have that special dimension to the tour. And of course the tour concluded with a glass of the main attraction, which we drank while chatting to a lovely mother and daughter from Los Angeles. Very nice the champagne was too, good flavour and nice fine bubbles. I don't get to drink champagne very often, but I would say that's one of the chief differences I noticed compared to other sparkling wines - you can actually really taste the delicate flavours as opposed to just getting the sensation of bubbles hitting your tongue.

In the Taittinger cellars

We had dinner at an Italian place, and then we were lucky enough to get to see a light show put on for the 800th anniversary of the cathedral. If you are in France and you possibly can, I would really encourage you to go see this! It is far and away the most impressive spectacle of this sort (including fireworks and lazers and so forth) that I've ever seen. It lasted about 25 minutes, and was more than just a projection on the front of the building, it was really tailored to the cathedral, with the lights tracing out individual features or giving special effects like projecting workmen lifting statues into place on the façade or showing the effect of a royal procession entering the cathedral, etc. I'm sure my photos don't do it justice (I also have some videos that I'll try to upload later, or you can look on their website http://www.cathedraledereims.fr/) but might give an idea of some of the different effects. By the way, there was a bush in the way on the lower left-hand side, so that's why there's a dark spot there. Definitely a memorable event and really pleased to have been able to be there while this was happening - it wasn't planned that way, I just knew Jess had been wanting to go to Champagne for ages, and I had realised on the way to Strasbourg that there was a TGV past there that didn't go through Paris, so it was fate. Especially since I just saw that if we had gone next weekend, there would have been no show!

I think this was meant to show beams on the cathedral as the workers 'constructed' it

The workers rolling the rose window into position etc.

These flags were 'lowered' down until they covered the whole façade (as you can see in the next photo)

I think this is meant to give an idea of how the cathedral may have looked in the Middle Ages, when the exterior would have been painted. My sister was asking how that could be true when she'd seen far more ancient preserved painted façades in Egypt. I was just having a look on the cathedral website, and according to them, it and other cathedrals have been cleaned over the course of centuries. It doesn't go into further specifics, but what I gather from other websites is that people's sense of aesthetics changed and even in Catholic countries they came to prefer gleaming white edifices to brightly coloured ones. Of course, even Roman and Greek statues were once painted (those creepy blank eyesockets weren't always that way) but to us it is really hard to imagine them any other way than pure white marble.

An impressionistic-style projection

All these lines opened up so it seemed like the cathedral was sort of unfurling from the centre

Bit hard to see, but this is the builders again, who sort of danced across the façade like in a ballet

Chenonceau, again

2011-09-22T19:22:00.006+02:00

Yesterday after work I went to pick up my sister, who had arrived off the 2.10 flight. After stopping by my place, we headed out to the guinguette. The guinguette was meant to close last week, but obviously the weather and the mairie conspired to keep it open so Jess and I could revive our memories of dancing to Bad Billy and F@cking Butterfly while plying a 22 year old with cheap wine. Things were a bit tamer this time, but one wine still turned into several wines... and some cider... and a delicious tartiflette (each)... and I decided to text my boss and say I wasn't going to be in the next day (like, legit holiday, not pulling a sickie or anything). Say what you will about my job, but it is at least very easy to not go to if I don't feel like it!

I was very pleased about that decision today, as we headed out to Chenonceau in some lovely sunny weather, much warmer than expected. Much better than sitting in front of a computer in the quasi-basement room (it's actually above ground, it just doesn't feel like it is) at work. I had been to Chenonceau way back when I first came to Tours for my job interview, but that was in the middle of February, and it was quite a different experience seeing the place with flowers in the gardens, leaves on the trees, the sun in the sky, windows open, and, of course, packed with coach-loads of tourists!

Some Chenonceau photos:

Me in front of the giant caryatids

Jess made it to the centre of the world's cunningest maze!

The gardens of Diane de Poitiers

Me with the bed in the 'room of the five queens'

Culture vulture

2011-09-22T10:18:00.000+02:00

This weekend was the journées du patrimoine, i.e. the festival of cultural heritage, when there are all sorts of events from guided tours to exhibitions to special openings of normally private buildings, most of it free. Last year my sister and I went to a brothel, heralding a year full of people coming to my site looking for brothels in San Diego (or worse, brothels and sisters). It's a great opportunity to be a tourist in your own town – I must admit that I am quite lazy about going and seeing the fabulous sites around here. I know plenty of people dream of just a trip to the Loire Valley, but in between apathy, laziness and saving things up to visit with out-of-towners, there's still lots I haven't seen.

I was busy on the Saturday (waiting for a delivery (new microwave!), trip to Ikea, and then I was helping someone move, fun times) but I was determined I would be up and at 'em on Sunday for a guided tour of the city. When I got to the tourist office, I was annoyed (since they didn't say anywhere that numbers were limited) to see that the tour was full, so I hot-footed it over to the town hall instead, since there was a guided tour just about to start there as well. I can report that it was built around the turn of the twentieth century by noted architect, local boy Victor Laloux, who not only has an awesome name but also helped design the Gare (now Musée) d'Orsay, which is inspired by his work on the Gare de Tours, not the other way round – take that, Paris! Is it weird to be quasi-patriotic about the achievements of Tourangeaux (people from Tours)? It also enabled me to check out the marriage hall, just in case I ever get married in Tours (ha!), which is decked out with some very bourgeois-looking frescoes.

In the afternoon, I visited the cloisters of the cathedral, which ordinarily you have to pay for. Glad I didn't, since apart from a nice staircase that looks a bit like the one in Blois château but not as good, there's really nothing of interest in there. Then I went on a guided tour of another set of cloisters, the only remains of the old basilica of St. Martin (the new one was built in the nineteenth century by our old mate Victor Laloux) and to the museum of St. Martin (also free). My favourite part of the St. Martin story (which I think I've mentioned before, but it's still fun the second time) is that the Tourangeaux tricked him into becoming their bishop by luring him out of his monastery by pretending a sick person needed him, then capturing him and making him bishop. Heh. My second favourite part of the story is that later on they nicked his body from where he died in Ghent by getting the locals drunk on (delicious, I'm sure) Loire wine and taking his body out through the window and on to a barge. Cheeky monkeys! Of course it paid off, with Tours becoming a pretty important pilgrimage site. You can still see the palm symbols going through the town on the route of St. James of Compostella.

My sister arrives today, and we'll be spending the weekend in Champagne! (The place, not in a vat or anything, although honestly you never know...) Yay!

Back to school

2011-09-16T15:35:00.002+02:00

As some of you might remember, back in July during my professional assessment interview at work, my boss suggested I might like to pick a course of my choice at uni in order to work on my French. What's not to like about that suggestion? I get to learn for free and I get to do it in work time, win-win! So after going through the course brochure and finding something that looked interesting but not too much hard work (yes, learning is fun, but let's not push it) I settled on a 3^rd year undergrad paper in comparative literature entitled "Novels of Transgression", emailed the professors to ask if I could sit in, and had my first class on Thursday.

First off, in case, like one of my colleagues, you're about to get all excited at the idea that we're going to be studying the Marquis de Sade and The Story of O or something, calm down, it's not that exciting. We're doing Crime and Punishment, The Picture of Dorian Grey and The Confusions of Young Törless. That last one was new to me, but I've read the other two and so I thought it would be a good start tackling books I was mostly familiar with.

I only just started reading Crime and Punishment in French the other day. It's slow going, I will admit, but actually not all that difficult to understand. I even think it forces me to pay closer attention to the text and thus I may even be getting more out of it in a way than reading in English. I have been underlining words I don't understand, since after all the goal is to improve my French, but haven't yet gotten around to looking any of them up. Thus the only word I think I've learnt so far is désarrois – the 'confusions' plaguing young Törless (presumably the same root as 'disarray'). I'm also getting practice on the passé simple tense, a tense that is now used virtually only in literary writing, with the result that I never bothered to learn it (but I do know it when I see it, which is pretty much all you need where that's concerned).

As for my first course, it was pretty interesting. I have an MA in English Literature, but I never did any Comp Lit, so it was something new for me in that sense. The first lecture was mostly taken up with discussion of translation issues and what place these novels had in French intellectual history, which for some reason we usually neglected to discuss back in New Zealand. I think I managed to follow most of it, despite the very loud susurration of the willows outside (and yes, I wrote that sentence just to throw in the word susurration, but they were unusually noisy, sounded like someone was sweeping the pavement outside except we were on the 4^th floor). Next time I might have to do the classic "mature student" thing and sit in the front row. I've heard stories from people who teach in uni that French students are particularly immature and talkative, but this crowd seemed okay, perhaps because they're third years or perhaps because we were in more of a large classroom than a lecture hall.

I was also at the uni this week to go to a conference work was sponsoring. When we turned up, for some reason the entire entrance hall was full of cardboard boxes which the students were flinging about with gay abandon (they were particularly delighted when someone broke a light fixture). One of my colleagues described this as 'a happening' (or, to be precise, 'un 'appening') which made me laugh. Has anyone called anything 'a happening' since 1975? I later discovered that this particular 'appening involved transporting 5000 cardboard boxes on a tour of the city by manpower alone. Apparently they came from Nancy, but I'm not sure if people carried them all that way, because that seems very far! I did my bit by carrying one box inside anyway.

Most importantly, it gave me the opportunity to make a pun in French! There was a professional-looking photographer there and I said that if they wrote about it in the local paper the headline would definitely be "ça cartonne!" If you're not laughing already, I should explain that "ça cartonne" means something is really great or successful, and that "carton" is obviously a cardboard box. I think I mostly got sympathy laughs out of my workmates, but I think that was a pretty decent effort!

Thank you fellow bloggers

2011-09-13T21:36:00.006+02:00

First up, a big thank you for your kind comments and useful suggestions. It's always helpful to know that struggling with feeling lonely and isolated is one of those expat things and not a side-effect of me being wrapped in a giant ball of fail or something - and that there are ideas out there to overcome it!

I got a lovely email from Mumsie as well saying how proud she was of me for being resilient and so forth. And you know what, it's true! Probably for every expat, there are moments where you can just crumble or you can take things on the chin and roll with the punches (hmm one too many boxing metaphors? Nah...) Apart from the recent housing debacle, a couple of moments in my travelling career that really stand out are turning up in France for the first time with 12 euros - as in 12 euros *total*, not 12 euros cash. And I promptly went and spent about 5 of it on a kebab because I didn't want to look poor in front of my new colleagues. (Annnnd, you know, maybe I wanted a kebab, it happens to the best of us, just no-one usually talks about it.)

Another biggie was when I moved to Russia. I was looking back over my blog for that time, and while I remembered the stress it all caused when my wallet was stolen just before I had to buy my Russian visa, I had sort of forgotten the time frame. I think it was something like wallet stolen on a Tuesday, and I had to organise picking up my letter of invitation, getting a visa, and booking flights (or, in the end, a train to Germany and then a flight), all with very little money and no credit cards and no idea how much the visa would cost or how long it would take, in order to start work within about a week. Looking back, I shudder at the concept of thinking "Ok you've got a week to move to Russia... GO!" even without the added complication of losing my wallet at the last minute!

Of course, it helps enormously that my family have always been there looking out for me with support, whether it's been ringing up banks in New Zealand, helping me out financially, or putting me up on couches etc. xxx

Anyway, I started the week on the right foot by going out to the cafe des langues last night. I don't know if I met any lifelong friends, but I chatted to a few people and promised I'd be back next week, so it's a start.

Then tonight, in what was not a friend-making activity but is at least more jolly hockey sticks than sitting around drinking gin and weeping or what-have-you, I cooked spaetzle - German egg noodles. I adored these when I had them in Strasbourg, then Starship blogged about them and made me want them again, so I thought I'd give them a whirl. The internet made them sound VERY EASY, but they sort of turned out like dough porridge :( Actually not that terrible tasting, but I do now feel a bit like I swallowed a ball of raw dough. The trickiest part was getting them to be noodley. The internet told me to squeeze the dough out of a plastic bag with a hole in it directly over the boiling water, cutting the dough into lengths as it went. Clearly, the dough they had in mind was significantly firmer than mine turned out to be, because as soon as I chopped the end off the plastic bag it just all started splooging out uncontrollably. I was scissoring away frantically, but with rather uneven results. Plus I got a little bit burnt from splash-back of the dough falling in the water. Oh and later I found the corner of the plastic bag in my meal, which had boiled happily away with the "noodles" for 10 minutes. So, perhaps not the world's best culinary masterpiece, but I suppose the internet has enough blogs written by people who make you jealous with their cordon bleu creations.

Oh and PS I have real live internet of my own! No more secretly squatting on the unreliable, slow hotspot of a friend's boyfriend! Huzzah! I gave up on getting fibre optic with Numericable when it emerged they would have to run a cable up the house and through the wall, and to get the landlord's agreement I would have to make a little drawing of how this cable would look and I didn't want the responsibility of translating a vague conversation I had with a technician back in August into a drawing that would doubtless come back to haunt me once the technicians came (probably sometime in November) and fecked up the whole front of the facade somehow. So I went with normal ADSL and thus will have to continue to only imagine the glories of super high speed internet.

Starting over

2011-09-10T22:56:00.004+02:00

Last night I met up with a kiwi girl off couchsurfing who's just moved to Tours to be with her French boyfriend, who's just about to start his masters here. It's such a cliché to come across the other side of the world and hang out with only expats, especially if it's expats from your own country, but, as we talked about last night, Tours is not London, and kiwis aren't Americans or English - there just aren't that many of us around, so it suddenly becomes special when you get the chance to hang out with someone who just gets your accent and cultural references and sense of humour (whereas in London I felt more like, geez, came all the way over here to get away from you people ha ha! Not really, but there are heaps of Kiwis and Aussies running around there).

We started out at the guinguette - after a miserable start to the day, it turned hot and sunny in late afternoon, so it was great to actually get to spend some time there before it closes for the season (next week I think). What started out as a quiet drink after work ended up with us splitting a bottle of rosé and, a bar and a club later, only getting home around 4 in the morning. She's going to be a bit back and forth in and out of Tours, as she doesn't have a visa and consequently has no job and no real plans for the moment. But it was great to meet someone new that I clicked with straight away.

One of the other things we talked about - hence the title of this blog post - was making friends. It's kind of hard for me to admit it, but I am feeling lonely at the moment and quite down about feeling like I've ended up, a year in, with hardly any friends here. It's just sinking in how much time I used to spend hanging out with G. Weirdly for someone who seemed to know just about everyone in Tours, she never really seemed to 'make plans' to go out and meet up with friends, so if ever at 5 pm on a Saturday I was bored and felt like going out, she was pretty much always up for it, and we'd head in to town and usually run into people she knew. Otherwise, we were often organising drinks at our place or in town, usually with my friend Liz and maybe one or two others, so I always felt pretty busy and content to hang out with the same small group of people.

Now, as well as pulling the rug out from under me in terms of my living situation, my social life has kind of crumbled as well. Liz and I are still tight, and there's a couple of other people I can hang out with, but especially with now living alone, I really feel quite isolated. In many ways, I'm in a bit of a difficult situation. I don't have a lot of the resources other people have to call on - no French boyfriend (despite everyone's confident predictions that, having failed in New Zealand, I'd catch me a man in France), I'm not a student and I'm older than student age but not old enough to fit into that middle-aged family expat scene, not many people at work who are around my age and sociable etc. Last year I made friends with some of the assistants but - while you never know - I feel like this year I'm probably too old and too far out of the whole assistant experience to plan on doing that again. Marion the kiwi is a little bit older than me, which is great, because everyone else who seems to fetch up in Europe seems to be straight out of uni or something. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but as time marches on it does get a bit weird hanging out with 22 year olds and I imagine they would feel the same way about hanging out with me!

But I've decided that I need to make more of an effort. Perhaps I did get too cosy, relying on G for a social network, and not trying to get out there and do things and meet people. Hopefully last night was a good start and I can motivate myself to do things like go back to the Café des Langues language exchange or figure out some other ways I can meet new people (suggestions welcome!) It's hard not to feel like there's something wrong with you or you've failed somehow in this situation, but I'm trying to be optimistic and think that I can change things up this year.

On a funny note, we were at an Irish pub last night when suddenly a bunch of English guys were surrounding us. I discovered they worked for EDF and you should have seen one of their faces when I said "Oh my gosh, I know your brother!" At first I think he thought I was full of it, but I was able to convince him of it in the end (despite not being able to remember his brother's name)! I had met him in town a couple of months ago when he was visiting and he'd promised to put me in touch with his brother but he never did. Anyway, we swapped numbers and I suppose in the friendly spirit I'll get in touch again. They all had that very laddish Brits abroad immature sort of a vibe, but hey, might be fun to go have a pint and watch football with or whatever.