Happy birthday to me!

Today is my birthday, in honour of which I took a long weekend off work (Friday and Monday, so still off tomorrow yay). On Friday, I had planned to go to the art gallery, but I wasn't feeling all that well and Mum told me I should rest up before my party on Saturday. I didn't quite obey instructions to the letter because I got bored of being in bed feeling like I was wasting my day off. Instead I went shopping, and bought a skirt, two tops, a cardigan, a hat and a headband... Some practical, some not so much. I took some photos on Friday, but then my camera ran out of battery.

Anyway, after that I walked over to the gallery, and instead of going in, went and had a nice hot chocolate at a nearby chocolaterie, which I had planned on doing after the gallery. I had a caramel hot chocolate, which was good but not as nice as the dark chocolate one I had last time. I took a book and sat there for about an hour and a half, they had a fire and it was a little bit snowy outside, so it was perfect. I also had a Bavaroise, which was like a chocolate dessert thing with a hazlenut and something I didn't understand filling. Mmm. And those two things cost nearly 10 euros, so reserved for birthday treats only! But hey, 10 euros for over an hour of contentment and some nice food, not too bad really.



Snow out the living room window



Snow in a park near the Cathedral



The bavaroise



Rue Nationale lit up at dusk



Lights on Avenue Berenger



Place Jean Jaures, where the main axis roads meet



Christmas tree in front of the Hotel de Ville

I spent pretty much all day yesterday food shopping and cleaning the apartment ready for some drinks in the evening. As usual, I way over-catered, waste of money :( but hopefully I'll be able to get through most of the food before it goes bad. I always get anxious that there won't be enough of everything, so go overboard. But nevermind, it was a fun evening, I got some unexpected nice presents - a necklace, dressing gown, plant, chocolate, spa set and wine :D We hung out in the apartment until around 2 am and then went to a club, got home at about 6.30 d'oh! My flatmate was meant to go to work today, I'm not sure that she made it, haven't seen her but I think I heard her going to the loo, but then later on someone came in the front door, so bit confused. Have been in bed all day, only slept for 4 hours though so quite tired!



New top and festive headband



Maeva, me (wearing the necklace Géraldine got me) and Sara



Géraldine, Me, Garrett, Rémy and Maeva



Géraldine, Maeva, Garret and Danielle



Garrett Rémy, me and Liz



Garrett, me and Sean



Sara, me and Liz



Me and Maeva



Me and Géraldine

A couple of French podcasts

Really having trouble getting to sleep at the moment, despite being tired by bedtime due to lack of sleep from previous nights. Right now, the naughty cat is on the spare pillow next to me, which at least stops her from scratching on my door and crying for a solid half hour or so. There will be trouble if she pees on anything though! I can't really blame her for being more than usually eager to get in though. I think today's high was -3 and low -6 (or that's what it was when I got up this morning anyway). No snow, but it was cold! I think I almost gave myself an insta-cold walking home from work, I had watering eyes from the wind, a runny nose, swollen glands (unless that was my imagination running away from me) and frozen ears, fingers and cheekbones by the time I made it in the door. I need to suck it up and buy a hat, even if I do look silly in it. Also need to buy some more hand cream, my hands start to crack as soon as it gets cold, especially along the joints of my thumbs, and then they just never heal up :(

Anyway, the point of this post was meant to be to share a couple of podcasts I came across recently. They're both from RFI (Radio France Internationale, www.rfi.fr). The first is the Journal en français facile, which is a 10 minute daily news roundup. When I came across it, I was a bit concerned that 'français facile' would be way to easy for me. Instead, it only goes to prove that French people don't really understand how to speak slowly and clearly for foreigners. I swear, 90% of French people will say something at exactly the same speed and clarity level, whether it's the fifth time you've asked them to repeat it or not. That becomes a bit more comprehensible when you listen to this podcast, tailor-made by professionals for people learning French and realise that that's how fast they speak when they're trying to dumb it down! I can understand it, but I should considering I live here and everything - I think a beginner would be totally lost. They even have things like soundbites from correspondents in Cambodia or the Ivory Coast or wherever, who do not always have the easiest accents to understand. Still, if anyone happens to teach French, they would make good listening exercises, or obviously for improving your own listening comprehension. Plus I don't always pay a lot of attention to the news, particularly the French national news, so it's nice to have half a clue about what's going on.

The second one is 'Apprendre le français avec l'actu' which I really like. These are shorter, around 2 - 3 minutes, also entirely in French, and focused on one word or phrase 'making the news' at the moment. For example, today I listened to the one on 'mi-mandat' (this was a few days old). Of course, you don't even have to speak French to figure out that 'mi-mandat' is 'mid-mandate' i.e. referring to the recent mid-term elections in the States. But rather than just explaining the word, they give a brief account of why this word is in the news, and then more about the use and etymology. Unlike 'demi' (but like 'mid' in English), 'mi' is a particle and can't be used on its own. As they pointed out in the podcast, it's obvious but easy to miss that 'mi' turns up in words like 'minuit', 'midi' (formed with 'di' from the Latin), and 'milieu' - literally in the middle of a place. The other day, I learned that 'portefeuille', which means a wallet, can also mean 'portfolio' (and there's obviously a common root there), in the sense of a cabinet minister's portfolio - this is because 'portefeuille' used to refer to a folder for documents. Which makes sense when you think about porter - to carry and feuille - which is a sheet of paper as well as a leaf on a tree.

Anyway, I won't go on boring those of you who don't speak French, but if you do speak French to a reasonable level, I would recommend these, especially the learning French from the news one. Even if your French is really good, you will learn interesting little things about the French language I'm sure!

The 7 month itch

Hey, so I've been in Tours for 7 months now! There's not really any itch associated therewith, just trying for a snappy title.

Normally, of course, 7 months wouldn't be a big deal, but it happens to be the same length of time I spent in France in 2007, and also of course the same as my contract in Nice. It's amazing how much faster the time has flown by here in Tours, it definitely seems to have gone faster than in Nice. I suppose a lot of that has to do with working full-time instead of 12 hours a week (and that only in theory, I hardly ever did the full 12 hours). Funny how time passes faster when you have things to get up for in the morning eh? Another part of it is that I hated where I was living (or, to be more accurate, who I was living with) in Nice, so I'm much happier now that I don't feel trapped in my bedroom because I don't want to run into my flatmate in the hall. Plus there are lovely, huggable kitty cats in this flat :)

Of course there were good things about Nice as well. As anyone who read my blog back then will no doubt recall, I really got in to going for longish walks around the region - just stunningly beautiful and very easy logistically speaking. I feel a bit bad now that winter's set in that I didn't figure out the logistics of how to do that around here in summer, but maybe next year... Speaking of winter, yep, it's cold, it's been snowing a little bit, and much as I get excited by snow, maybe Nice does take the cake in weather terms. But Tours just feels more homey - I love being able to walk pretty much everywhere I want to go (so far there's only been a handful of days where I haven't been able to walk home from work due to the weather) and the city has a nice general atmosphere. There's always something going on, but on a pretty small scale, so things don't get overwhelmingly busy or touristy (well, if I block out getting stuck behind old ladies at the Saturday markets or tourists on Rue Nationale in the height of summer).

Still waiting to hear if I get to stay (i.e. renew my contract) for another year. Soon, hopefully... With the help of the mostly useless Wolfram Alpha computational search engine, I've worked out that between now and the end of my current contract, on the 30th of April, there are 152 days. Take out weekends, and that leaves 109 week days. Now here's the crazy part - I have 35 days of holiday left to take by the end of my contract. 109 - 35 = 74 & let's not forget Good Friday and Easter Monday, taking me to a grand total of 72 work days left. Yep, that's right, between now and the end of the year I'll be working less than one day in two! Even after I come back from my 3 week Christmas break, I'll have enough days left over to take over a week off in February, March and April if I choose to do it that way. And let's not forget, when I do turn up to work, these are 7 hour days we're talking! Ah France, you crazy country, that's why we love you so!

The discovery of France

I've been trying of late to improve my knowledge of French history, because although I took a paper on the French Revolution at uni and several general ones on European history, I've always felt a bit fuzzy on some of the particulars of French history, especially the whole Napoleon-Louis Napoleon-Revolution-Republic-another Revolution-Monarchy bit of it (unfortunately I still am majorly confused on all that, so if anyone knows a good book or something to brush up on it, let me know!)

So first I listened to an excellent Open Yale podcast course on the History of France Since 1871, taught by John Merriman - more info here. Unfortunately, this started after the whole confusing mess mentioned above, but it was still really interesting on the recent history of France. Good to learn who all those 'hommes politiques' every bloody street in France is named after are! Jean Jaurès, for example, who has a major square where the two main axis routes of Tours named after him, was the guy who united the French socialist parties back in c. 1905. He was assassinated on the eve of WWI due to his unpopular pacifist stance.

Anyway, I am currently reading The Discovery of France by Graham Robb (best 1p I ever spent, thanks Amazon! FYI for those reading from France - I always compare prices on amazon.fr and amazon.co.uk - English books on amazon.fr are almost always shipped from England anyway, and althoug the cost of shipping from England is a bit more, often the prices of the books will be much lower and thus offset the shipping & currency conversion differences) and I'm enjoying and learning so much that I thought I should share with any other francophiles who may be reading.

Essentially it's an exploration of France before France i.e. teasing out the 'real' France that existed before everything got centralised and homogenised. I think most people know that France used to be a patchwork of different languages and cultures, but the amount of differences and how long they endured were a real surprise to me. It's billed as a sort of travelogue - one guy exploring France on a bicycle - but it's actually not at all. While the author, a former Fellow at Oxford, really did go around France on a bike, there's very few mentions of this in the book and no sort of 'wacky encounters' or anything like that, just a historic account of what "pre-modern" (i.e. up to the 20th century and sometimes even beyond) France was like.

The first section, which basically describes life in some of the regions and maps out the cultural and linguistic differences, is especially interesting. Did you know, for example, that there used to be a hated minority group in many parts of France called the cagots (or a variant thereof)? They weren't a linguistic, religious, or ethnic subset, just a sort of caste that was shunned and restricted to living in certain areas and working in certain trades, for reasons unknown to even those who were persecuting them. I found it particularly poignant that, when the Revolution came, the cagots tried to take advantage of the situation by burning the records that identified them as outsiders, but this initiative failed because their names were memorised and passed down in the rhymes of the village children. The Wikipedia article on cagots is largely sourced from Robb's book.

After the many fascinating 'did you know' moments in the first third, I found the middle third dipped a little bit, with an over-emphasis on tracing the development of transportation in France and how it opened up the provinces to change and 'discovery', but it's still interesting. I'm currently on the last third (these are my divisions rather than the actual structure of the book) which is describing the impressions of tourists from the Ile-de-France in the regions. One interesting point that is made is that many of the hallmarks of regional identity - cuisine, costume etc. are actually either quite recent - whatever fashions etc. these tourists found at the exact moment they arrived in a region in the 19th century became the 'traditional' costume of the region, even if it had actually been at one a wide-spread fashion throughout France that had just hung on in the slower-changing provinces, or not really representative of traditional life in the province at all e.g. the sorts of rich, meat-filled regional cuisines we know today, which may be native to an area but would have been far out of reach of most of its subsistence-level inhabitants before the modern era.

To sum up, I found (am finding) this a fascinating alternative to the typical Paris-centric, great man sort of history that you normally read about France or anywhere else, full of interesting tidbits and insights into a bygone world. Highly recommended!

Licensed to thrill!

In what surely must be a record, it only took 3 1/2 months and two trips to the préfecture to get my French driver's license! They told me after my last trip that they would reply within 2 to 3 months - they waited exactly 3 months and then asked me for a bunch more stuff, including a 'justification of my presence in New Zealand territory when my license was issued', proof of address here and other stuff that I had already given them the first time. So this time I was not expecting them to actually give me the license, I was thinking it would take several more months, IF I was lucky.



So I'm pretty excited, even if honestly I'm way too scared to drive here, with: a) manual transmissions (I suck), b) parallel parking (I suck), c) on the other side of the road and d) surrounded by French people. But you have a year to do the exchange, so I thought I might as well do it and that way I'd be set to drive if I have/want to. And it works anywhere in the EU of course!

Bit bummed that I had to surrender my NZ license, especially since it had a half-decent photo and was a nice plastic wallet-sized card, unlike the cardboard monstrosity that is the French one! More importantly, though, they only gave me a license that lasts three years from when my NZ license was issued, stingy! So it runs out in August 2012, after which I have no idea what happens. They don't tell you that when they tell you you can swap it! They missed the fact that I'm meant to wear glasses when driving, suckers (I mean, I will obviously, but there has been the very odd occasion in the past where they were at the optometrists or whatever).

So, anyway, excited! It feels like another big step towards genuinely living here and not just being a fly by night expat. Not that I know what the future holds, but anyway...

Not even for $173 an hour

What's with the creepy paedophile hostage situation being used to illustrate this scam?



In other news, I have spent my long weekend doing next to nothing. Last night went out to karaoke, which was fun. It's fairly amusing listening to French people trying to sing in English, even the ones who were doing a good job of it were waaaay over-enunciating. I did Maggie May by myself and Dancing Queen and Hit Me Baby One More Time with others.

Today is of course the final F1 race of the season :( Alonso is in a very good position to make my pre-season prediction come true and take the title, but we shall see, there's a long race to come. I hope Jenson and Lewis do well in any case.

Acqua alta!

So it turns out I took 846 photos in Venice! Digital cameras - both a blessing and a curse... Don't worry, I won't be putting them all up, but I'll stagger the best (bearing in mind I'm no ace photographer) by theme over the next little while. To begin with, shots of the acqua alta in St Mark's Square (I did see a bit of flooding elsewhere, but it was mostly confined to St Mark's, apparently the lowest point and also sea-facing). It's pretty awesome how you walk to the edge of a paved square, and there's the sea right there, literally lapping at your feet.