Oh, ze papers

Woo, I finally found a spare ethernet cable lying around and have since acquired internet in my room! No more of that silly Word-to-blog transfer business... though unfortunately it's still the school's internet, and I have no Facebook or online access past 7:00pm or on weekends. Still, this is certainly much more convenient than having to go into the school and use their computers.

Today has been entirely productive, starting with a good 11-hour-long sleep. Almost a week after leaving the US, I finally feel well rested! I had many questions to ask Françoise about all the papers I need to fill out -- I swear, for all that they're very diligent about recycling and about conserving energy, the French probably kill more trees than the rest of the world combined when it comes to paperwork -- so I walked over to the high school around noon, when she had her break. But no sooner had I said "Bonjour" when another English teacher comes up to me (I don't even know her name yet), says, "Oh, good, you're not busy! Can you spare an hour for my lesson?" Well, no, I had some paperwork -- I mean, yes, I guess I could, although I'm technically not supposed to start until tomorrow -- oh, you're already dragging me to your classroom, ok then... and off we go as she explains to me that she doesn't have a lesson plan for today and that I am the replacement.

What followed was one of the most awkward hours I have yet spent in France, as she kept prompting her students to ask me questions about myself in English and made them take notes to share with their absent classmates (which made me feel highly silly, as I don't know that I've yet done enough of importance yet in my life to make it worthy of having students take notes on it!). When they'd exhausted their repertoire of questions about my age, family, hobbies, etc., the teacher said it was my turn to question them. It seemed like they didn't understand some of my questions at first, but when I tried to elaborate on or rephrase them in French, the teacher insisted I only speak English, even though she was speaking French when they didn't understand her. Oh, it was so uncomfortable. But the hour was mercifully soon up, and I was left to take my French paperwork questions back to Françoise, who thankfully was still on break.

With slightly more clarification, I went to go finish filling out my paperwork with the school's secretary, and she gave me even more papers that would allow me to sign up for European social security and open a French bank account (at last!). I also had to run by the post office to mail my birth certificate to a translator (30 euros for that little service, bleh) and yet more papers to tell the French government that I'm making good use of their visa by being here. I got myself enrolled in -- or at least applied for -- social security, though they initially refused my application since I didn't yet have the coveted RIB (Relevé d'Identité Bancaire) that proves you have a French bank account. But rather than wait until the next day when Françoise had suggested I go to the bank, I thought I'd try and knock it out this afternoon. It was open and I wanted to get the social security paperwork out of my hands, so why not?

It's surprisingly easy to open an account once you have the proper paperwork, though I can't put any money in it (and thus perhaps can't get my own internet quite yet, though I'm still going to try) until the actual check card arrives some time next week. But with a dozen copies of my RIB in hand, I tromped back across the street to the social security office, where I think they were a little surprised to see me again so soon. But now it's all taken care of, and I only have a few more papers that they signed and stamped to drop back off at the school!

On the way back home, I ran into Fanny, who had just moved in and was headed to town to get a French SIM card for her phone. I was about to accompany her back to town when I remembered that Françoise was going to be dropping off the toaster oven after her last class, and I didn't want to go until Monday without it! There are many less foods made specifically for the microwave here than in the US, so the acquisition of the oven has exponentially expanded the list of things I can now cook at home.

One exceedingly sad discovery I made around lunchtime was that even though our little fridge was set on the middle temperature setting, it froze everything solid that was in it... including my fancy cheeses. I've set them out to thaw (and it's cold enough in here that they're probably not in danger of going bad soon anyway : ), so hopefully they will make a decent recovery and I can have dinner tonight.

I'm about to lose internet for the evening, so I'll stop here for now. My first day is technically tomorrow, but since most of the English teachers don't work on Fridays (or Wednesdays, or Tuesday afternoons... Oh, France and its relaxed work weeks), I haven't been requested to sit in on anyone's classes until Monday. But perhaps this means that I can have Fridays off as well in my permanent schedule and take a few long weekends to travel at some point!

Feurs: First Impressions

September 28, 2010 - 11:00pm

The apartment is attached to the school and juts out like a cute, cottage-like little tumor. The window on the left is my bedroom. It’s entirely furnished by the teachers’ donations, which is both a blessing and a curse. Woo French social collectivism! We’ve got a lovely little fridge, bed frames, kitchen table, and Françoise has even picked up and restored a big toaster oven (though it's still in the trunk of her car); but there are no mattresses yet because the professor who loaned them in the past took them when he moved away, and the TV gathering dust in the closet definitely looks like it could date back to the French Revolution.

The mattresses are the real problem item right now, though… I’m sleeping on a temporary camping pad, and I have no idea what we’re going to use for Fanny, the German assistant, when she gets here. She actually came by the school today (Tuesday), but upon learning there was no mattress and that the heat won’t be turned on til Friday, she decided to stay with her friends in Firminy until later in the week.

All of the apartment’s utilities are tied to the school, which in some ways is nice: I don't have to worry about water, gas, and electricity, since they are included in my rent. But since the Lycée du Forez is éco-responsable, they don’t turn heat on until October, no matter how cold it gets. And it has certainly gotten chilly, in the low 40’s at night. Even during the day it’s only getting up into the high 50’s and low 60's, and everyone’s all bundled up going to and from classes. Last night was pretty rough, though. Like the students and teachers in the school, I’m pretty much in a scarf and light jacket all day, even to go to sleep. The bedding has just a basic blanket, so I piled a couple sweaters, a big scarf, and my heavy winter coat on top, put on mittens, and tried to sleep. I should have listened to Adam Shirley and taken the time to go find wool socks. Or thermal underwear. Oh, what I wouldn’t give for an electric blanket. It’s supposed to get a little bit better when the heat comes on, but a letter left by the last assistant tells me that it’s still pretty cold in here even when the radiators are functioning, and to prepare myself for some nice sub-zero weather in winter.

Hopefully he’s over-exaggerating, though! This is also the past assistant who told me Feurs was a drab town with nothing to do unless you’re into drinking with old Turkish men and betting on horse races, but so far I actually like it a lot. Yesterday (Monday) I made an expedition into town – about a 7 - 10 minute walk from the school – and was surprised to learn that everything was closed. Apparently nothing is open on either Sundays or Mondays in Feurs, but it was nice to get an opportunity to take some pictures without an excessive amount of people crowding them and to peer in some store windows when I otherwise would have gotten weird looks for doing so. It’s got an SFR office (phone company

), several banks (including BNP, which has a no-teller-fees deal with Bank of America, so that’s who I think I’m going to go with), a cinema, a pretty church (Notre-Dame de Feurs, shown on the left), and a somewhat absurd number of bakeries. There’s almost one on every block, sometimes two or

three within sight at a time.

This whole extended-weekend business did make it rather

difficult for me to eat last night (Monday) though, since all the stores are closed and the big supermarket, Carrefour, is too far away to walk to (and probably closed anyway).

I figured a few restaurants had to be open and that I’d rather spend a few euros more than I’d like than go hungry, so I walked back downtown that evening. But even finding an open restaurant proved to be

difficult! Across from the cinema is a little brasserie/bar/café called Le Théâtre, and when I saw a few other people seated there I decided to go in. But after trying to order the tagliatelles bolognaise shown on the menu in the picture, I was quickly informed that that’s tomorrow’s lunch menu. Sorry, no dinner here. Didn’t you know that’s the lunch menu? Everyone knows that we only serve lunch! By this time the two other ladies drinking coffee had gone, and the interior of the café was filling up with grizzled-looking old guys. I have a feeling they had a good chuckle when I left after paying for my Coke and asking for directions to whatever restaurant might actually be serving food that night.

Le Comptoir à Pizzas is where I wound up, and it’s much more modern and trendy than it appears from the outside. I had a mushroom and olive pizza with mozzarella, emmental, and goat cheese, and it was the most delicious thing in the world. Of course by that point in the evening I could have gnawed my arm off and found it to be scrumptious, so perhaps that’s not saying much. Except it still is, because a pizza with goat cheese on it is always a thing of splendor, and I have yet to find a pizza in this country that I haven’t thoroughly enjoyed. I also ordered a glass of house red wine (Côtes du Rhône) for a very reasonable 2,30 €, and it tasted much smoother and richer than its budget price. There aren’t any wineries in or right around Feurs, but there are some in nearby towns on the bus route that comes through Feurs, so hopefully there will be a wine-tasting expedition at some point during my stay here.

I managed to survive the cold last night, thanks in part to the magical discovery of a space heater when I had my nightly “it’s 3:00am, time to be wide awake now” moment, though I’m not actually sure I had managed to sleep yet by then. I’ve had it running in my bedroom, keeping the door closed to keep the heat in, and it’s so incredibly nice to walk in there. Once again though, I don’t know what we’re going to do when Fanny gets here for real… but that’s not for another day or two, so tonight I am determined to sleep well!

As compared to bleak Monday in Feurs, Tuesday is a bustling market day. The town is overtaken completely by tents with merchants selling clothes, bags, shoes, hats, fabrics, and other strange odds and ends. There’s one big parking lot reserved for the farmer’s market, and that’s what I was most excited about. I had accompanied Caroline to the marché in Boulogne and learned from her a bit the ropes of learning which fruit/veggie stands are the best to go for, and to always buy your meat from the weekly market rather than from a charcuterie or boulangerie (where you’ll definitely pay too much) or from the supermarché (where the quality is not as high). I limited my purchases to some fruit, probably too much cheese -- if there is such a concept as “too much cheese ”-- and only bought a little salami at the market’s meat section since I don’t yet have a way to cook anything else. I also went by a bakery and picked up a baguette, and those basic ingredients have comprised my lunch and dinner today.

I also went by SFR and got a phone! It’s a super-cheapo reloadable little thing, but it does the job. They told me that I will definitely be able to get internet service at my apartment from them as soon as I get a French bank account, so that is a very exciting prospect. Their “neufbox” combines high speed internet, a phone line that allows calls to landlines in the US, and TV with 150 channels for only 29 € a month. It doesn’t even require a contract, so we can walk away easily in 7 months. I’d say that’s pretty dang sweet, considering Joanna and I were paying between $50 and $60 a month for internet alone last year. So between Fanny and I, TV, internet, and phone should only be 15 € per month for each of us. Awesome. My only qualm is that last year’s assistant told me that their neufbox inexplicably stopped working after four months and they never got it fixed, but I’m hoping we won’t have a problem with it.

I had wanted to go run errands with Françoise at some point, but I didn’t know that she only had classes until 11am today. So when I got back from the market around 12:30, she was already gone for the day. She doesn’t teach at all on Wednesdays, so I am oven-less until Thursday! Even if it meant not going to Carrefour for a bigger shopping expedition, though, I’m still glad I got to see Feurs’ market today.

Last Tuesday was the last time I went running, and when I realized that this morning, I was determined to not let a whole week go by without a run. I spent way too much time this afternoon in the computer lab trying to format this silly blog; it’s more of a pain in the butt to copy the blog (and especially the pictures! I’ve been so spoiled on fast, reliable internet…) from Word to blogspot than I’d thought. Also, switching back and forth from my computer’s American keyboard to the school’s French one is messing with my head; just as soon as I get used to one way of typing, I’m switching to the other and making silly typos even on my own computer. Maybe I should just cave in and switch it to the French way for the time being.

After computering the afternoon away, it was nearly evening and getting colder by the time I finally got out to run. The Loire River runs right by Feurs, and I’ve heard there are some trails that make about a 15km loop next to the river. I headed west out of town to try and find them, but sadly without success (probably for the best anyway, since it’s been raining a lot and they’re probably all muddy right now). I’ll have to ask around to see if there’s some sort of entrance that I missed. Instead, I ran down a narrow little country road for a ways and was nearly bowled over by all these zippy little Peugeots and Renaults zooming by. I guess people aren’t used to runners much here, because even though I kept to the very edge of the road, so did they. Perhaps I should have reached out and hitched a ride. But on the way back in to town, I spotted a little supermarket (with the strange name of “Simply”) that I hadn’t noticed before and went over to check it out. I’d brought a couple euros with me just in case I came across a store, and I’m glad I did… except that I ran up at 7:25, and the store closes at 7:30. Oh, small towns. They let me in, but I just had time to grab some juice and a bottle of water before being hustled out. Still, I’m glad to know that there’s something more accessible than Carrefour, and I’ll probably go back and check it out tomorrow.

I’ve finally caught up with the week! Of course this will be somewhat outdated by the time I post it tomorrow, but oh well. Bonne nuit!

De Paris à Montrond-les-Bains (no, not Feurs)

September 28, 2010 – 10:00pm

Sunday morning, Caroline drove me over to the Gare de Lyon and saved me the trouble of another pricey taxi ride through Paris; she would have picked me up from the airport on Friday except her mother needed the car for work. Having never taken a train in France and certainly never by myself, the train station was very confusing at first, but I was in no hurry and had plenty of time to figure things out and get a nice (if unintentional) workout in the process. After lugging 100 pounds’ worth of suitcase up and down escalators trying to figure out which voie (track) the train would come to and accosting a few unhelpful train station employees, I finally figured out that they don’t post that information until about 15 minutes before the train arrives. The first-class upgrade was definitely nice, though; huge seats with plenty of legroom made for a nice ride down to Saint-Etienne, even if it was a little overcast.

I had to change trains at St-Etienne Chateaucreux, which was a much less intimidating train station than its Parisian counterpart. It’s under construction right now though, and the elevator to take me over to the farthest voie was unfortunately out of commission. Faced with the prospect of carrying my suitcases up and down two sets of stairs, I must have been a pretty pathetic sight at the top of that first set of stairs, and thankfully a really nice security guard offered to carry my 70-pound monster of a suitcase across the station and up the stairs to Voie E for me. I was still an hour early for my train, but I found that waiting out in the cold for a bit was well worth having had some help with the bags. At the time, a bit of cold air felt like a nice break from Georgia’s overbearing summer heat… oh how silly I was.

The original plan had been to meet my contact at Feurs, but since she she lives closer to Montrond-les-Bains (the stop before Feurs), that’s where I descended. Actually, I almost didn’t descend; between heaving the suitcases down the couple steps from the seating area to the doors and then not realizing the doors weren’t going to open by themselves, I almost missed the stop. It was only after standing there like an idiot for a few moments that I realized I had to push the button to open them up, and the train had started rolling (albeit slowly) by the time I was pulling off my second suitcase. As I was the only one getting off the train at Montrond-les-Feurs, I was evidently easy to spot by Françoise, and we loaded up my bags and drove to her house.

I’m really glad I got the chance to spend a night at Françoise and her family’s house not only because it saved me the hassle of a hotel, but their house itself is a gorgeous converted and renovated farmhouse. The first sensation I had upon walking in was of being in a giant aged oak wine barrel, except one filled with adorable little French children. Françoise and her husband have three kids from the ages of 6 to 12, so it was especially generous of them to take me in for the night. I learned to play a card game called “Sept Familles”, a French version of Go Fish, with Lana, the heart-meltingly cute if rambunctious six-year-old. I felt kind of bad for beating her at it, but her reactions to losing points – T’es dégolasse! (You’re disgusting!) and Tu regardes mes cartes! (You’re looking at my cards!) – said while still grinning and hiding behind her cards – wouldn’t let me allow her to win. Françoise cooked meat lasagna for dinner, and then instead of the usual French practice of having yogurt for dessert, we had a strawberry and white chocolate cake with almond ganache from a local patisserie instead. The kids reacted to it like it was a special occasion thing, so if it’s because I was there, then I have even more reason to thank Françoise and Jerôme for their hospitality. Also, it was pretty freaking delicious.

I got up at 6:00 the next morning (Monday) in order to be ready to have breakfast at 6:50 and head to the school and my new apartment by 7:30. It’s taking me a little longer than usual to get used to the time change, so between not being able to fall asleep at midnight like I should have and then still waking up at 3:00am feeling wide awake for the third night in a row (I guess my body still thinks it’s just an early evening nap?), I’ve been in a little bit of a fog. Hopefully soon this fatigue will catch up with me and I’ll be too tired to wake up in the middle of the night.

Contact Info in France

Finally bit the bullet and bought a phone today, so I can finally post a comprehensive list of ways to get in touch with me in France.

Mailing address:

Emily MYERS

Lycée du Forez

10 route de Civens

42110 FEURS

France

Phone: 011 + 33 + 6 46 61 90 64

Email: emily9987@gmail.com

Skype: elmyers9

Use it! Hit me up, especially since I can't get on Facebook for the foreseeable future.

Arrival in France & Weekend à Paris

Five days after taking off from Atlanta, I finally have enough time and charge on my computer to write an update. It’s going to be outdated by a day since I can’t post it until tomorrow morning when the school opens up and I can sneak onto Blogspot and paste this in. They’re pretty strict about censoring just about any useful or fun website – in addition to the obvious ones like Facebook and Twitter, they also blocked the train company and phone/internet service providers’ websites, which is just a bit inconvenient for me. Why they want to stop students from booking trains and looking at cell phone and internet options, I couldn’t say… but hey, at least Gmail and Blogspot work! I guess I can’t be too fussy.

The plane ride over went fairly smoothly, except I hadn’t realized until right before it was time to go that the itinerary included a change of airports in New York from La Guardia to JFK, which in turn meant having to reclaim my baggage and then re-check it at JFK. I was starting to feel a little grumbly about StudentUniverse’s devious ways of forcing you to make up for your cheap ticket until I got to the check-in counter at JFK and realized that booking through them meant that my second bag was free, though American Airlines usually makes you pay $50 for checking an additional bag. So I’d say that more than made up for the slight inconvenience and $13 shuttle between airports, and StudentUniverse thus redeemed itself. Of course I did still have to pay $50 for my giant monster overweight bag, but I guess that’s to be expected when you’ve got 7 months’ worth of heavy winter clothes and boots all crammed together. Or maybe I just overpacked. I probably did.

I arrived in Paris around noon after approximately zero hours of sleep. I tried to doze off a couple of times, but it just wasn’t going to happen, especially since I had gotten thoroughly sucked into George R. R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones.

Since my friend Caroline lives on just about the exact opposite side of Paris from Charles de Gaulle airport, I decided to splurge on a taxi rather than trying to drag 100 pounds of unwieldy suitcases across town via public transportation. It would have involved taking the RER train down from the airport to change over to the Métro and then changing lines again at least once or twice, indubitably annoying the crap out of countless Parisians and myself, in order to get to the line that would take me closest to Caroline’s house, and then I’d still have to remember how to get to her place from the stop while lugging the suitcases across cobblestones for several blocks. Yet despite the obvious drawbacks of the public transportation option, that 50 € taxi ride still smarts. This would probably have been much easier if I’d had Caroline’s phone number (though I guess not all that much easier, since I didn’t have a functioning phone with which to call her), but all I had to go on was her address. Thankfully Caroline had been looking out the window for my arrival, since otherwise I might have been stuck outside the gate for who knows how long!

We took just enough time to go up and drop off my suitcases beforetaking off with her father, Gérard, to a nearby Italian restaurant called Veni’s. Caroline also brought her new puppy, a two-year-old Shih Tzu (like Toulouse!) called Chéli, along with us to the restaurant. When he’s not behaving himself with great composure in public (which he actually does admirably), his favorite thing to play with is 1.5 liter bottles of Coke, which it’s funny to see him tear after and viciously attack, since they’re about as big as he is.

Ok, enough digressing about les petits chiens adorables. After a sleepless night and airplane food, I was fairly ravenous and ordered a four cheese pasta that was a perfect blend of gorgonzola, parmesan, chèvre, brie, and penne. Dessert was the fabled chocolat liégeois, and it was every bit as tantalizing as I remembered. For someone who’s not normally a big fan of chocolate ice cream, I sure can tear one of those apart.

After lunch, Caroline and I did some strolling around Boulogne and then took Chéli for a long walk in the Bois de Boulogne, which is a surprisingly large little forest at 2,000 acres, especially considering it's right in the middle of Paris. Caroline had agreed to babysit that evening for someone in the apartment building, so I came with her. I confess I wasn’t much of a help by that point, though, as I could hardly keep myself awake. Despite the tiredness, I only slept for a couple hours before waking up in the middle of the night feeling completely alert. I managed to read myself back to sleep after trying to doze for a while, but apparently my body’s not having the easiest time adjusting to the time change.

Saturday was a day for errands. We made another run by the phone store, where I was trying to decide between getting a basic pay-as-you-go phone or something more internet-capable, since I had a rather accurate premonition that my internet situation here in Feurs would be somewhat sketchy. In the end I decided to wait, since even if I had wanted a smartphone, it would require me to provide a RIB, which is a kind of personal identification or routing number you can only have once you’ve established a French bank account… which you can only do once you’ve got established residency or a bill – like a cell phone bill… -- to prove you’re worthy of the high and mighty French banking system. One requires the other (gotta love all that French red tape), and since I didn’t yet know my address I thought it prudent to wait. I’ve since decided against going the smartphone route primarily because it’s just too expensive and I really don’t need anything fancier than text messages and phone calls (side note: it’s free to receive a phone call in France, no matter where it’s from!). A second convincing factor is that in order to get a phone with 3G at any kind of reasonable price, it would require signing a two-year contract that is apparently somewhat impossible to break. Since I’m only here for seven months, it just seems like a silly thing to get myself embroiled in when it’s something I don’t need anyway.

Another stop we made was to the SNCF store, which is the company that runs train bookings in France. This was a much more encouraging venture. I had bought tickets ahead in US for $302, which covered my initial trip down to Feurs and round trip to Paris and back when Brooke and Josh visit next month. After talking with an agent there, she got it down to $227 while upgrading me to first class. I also bought the age 12-25 rail pass that guarantees 25% to 50% off ticket prices and still got change back from my initial purchase. It was a good feeling!

Caroline cooked and invited some friends over for dinner on Saturday night with a plan to go out dancing afterwards. This meal was another shining example of the stark contrast between French bureaucratic inefficiency and their stunning brilliance in the realm of dining. Dinner begins with a fresh green salad with oil and vinegar dressing, but no side plate is used. Why waste a small plate or bowl when you can just use some bread to wipe up the dressing and re-use the same plate for your main dish? I love that it’s not rude here to use bread to sop up sauces and dressings like it is in the US. In fact, it’s wasteful not to. The main course was a quiche au jambon that Caroline made, and it was delicious. Not as delicious, however, as the amazing chocolate cake we had for dessert that she’d made from scratch that morning. I watched this cake rise from a soupy-looking half-filled baking tin to a marvelously fluffy pillow, and then sink back down to a splendidly dense and moist cake. Must get recipe…

Dinner had started around 8:00 and was wrapping up around 10:00, at which point I thought we’d head to the nightclub (“boîte de nuit” in French) that Caroline had in mind. What I neglected to account for was that Paris is a far cry from Athens; instead of closing at 2:00am, most places are only getting rolling by then. So to pass the time, we played cards until it was a sufficiently respectably late hour to go out on the town. Even at midnight, though, the club we went to was still pretty empty. From what I can tell by this one club experience, it’s best to go out with a huge group, since there’s a steep price of entry: either you buy a 750mL bottle of liquor for the exorbitant price of 115 € for something of Jack Daniels caliber that includes the price of entry for however many are contributing to it, or you each pay the 15 € cover that includes no drinks, and then it’s mandatory to check your coat for another 2 € (wouldn’t want anyone wearing too many clothes in the club, after all). Even with the jet lag advantage of being able to stay up later than my usual lame yawning-by-midnight self, I was still very tired. It also didn’t help that none of us were dancing, since the music the DJ was playing was entirely too soft rock for the taste of Caroline and her friends; we made our departure when a remix of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony as weak house music came on. I actually kind of like the idea of mixing those two styles, but this one was done exceedingly poorly.

The one redeeming feature of the club – and apparently this is true of many French nightclubs – is that it was in the basement of an old building, so it had a rather crypt-like appearance. The reason these crypt-style clubs are so popular is that being underground and covered by stone walls and ceilings, much of the sound that might otherwise disturb the people living and working above the clubs is muffled. I guess it was around 1:30 when we left, since we wanted to make it back to Boulogne before the Métro stopped running. Caro told me that in Paris you either have the choice of going home before 2:00 or making the commitment to stay out partying til 5:00, when the Métro starts running again in the morning (though there’s also the expensive option of taking a taxi).

I’ll close this with a photo of the view from Caroline’s apartment at sunset that I took Saturday evening. I’d hoped to get around to describing my trip to and first day in Feurs tonight, but it’s 1:00am and I think I’ve already written enough here to give a whopper of a headache to whoever bothers to read all this Parisian drivel : )

Sorry the pictures are so small! I had wanted to post a few more, but the school's internet connection can only handle so much. One day in the perhaps imaginary future when I've got my own internet set up, I'll be able to get on Facebook and post a bunch of pictures there and update these. Hopefully in the next day or two I'll have made another obnoxiously long post on Feurs!