Le Gros Gateau Américain

Saturday was my most brother's 14th birthday. For his birthday, he asked my to make him "un gros gateau américain" I wasn't entirely sure what this meant, but I eventually figured out that he meant a layer cake. I was honored at this prospect, but also a little nervous because there seemed to be a lot of expectation riding on the whole thing and because, people seem to expect you'll be good at these sort of things just by virtue of being "American". On top of that, there was the whole problem that the U.S. likes to invent it own esoteric systems of measurement that the rest of the world refuses to follow.
Anyhow, I found a promising-looking recipe for a coconut layer cake that seemed to have ingredients that could be found in France (this is the other thing; there are lots of seemingly normal things--like cream cheese, which you just can't find) and I decided to go for it. I had some issues making conversions and whatnot, but for the most part things went pretty well until I came to the frosting. I have made buttercream frosting and watched my mother make buttercream frosting since I was a child. I know how to make it. And yet, when I tried to do it here it just became a sticky, thick mess. I have no idea what happened (I just looked up a recipe and I did pretty much what was described--maybe French butter is just weird, or it object to being treated in such a degrading manner). I was at a loss until I remember that the English teacher at the middle school had actually given a pot of icing that she had bought in the UK. She saved the day. Thank you Madame Bouttier, else I would have had to give them a cake that without any frosting on the outside. I don't think Théo would have been very happy.
Anyhow, despite that minor hang-up, the cake ended up being quite the success, and although to me it looked good but not great, they were all very impressed with how tall it was and how it had the coconut cream on the inside. I ended up being quite proud of myself.

This is a good thing because last week I did a lesson on Thanksgiving at the middle school and I made them a pumpkin pie and for the most part the students found it way too weird I spent the day listening to comment like "beeerrrk!' (French for yuck!) and "mais c'est quoi ça?"? It's good to know that when I cook something more "normal", it can be appreciated.

I have been letting my hair grow out and yesterday I finally got sick of how shaggy my bangs were getting and I decided that I had to get it cut (just a trim though--I decided that I'm trying to let it grow out). Nonetheless I was still nervous at the prospect of getting my hair cut in France. There are several reasons for this. First and foremost is that there is a whole set of vocabulary that goes along with hair-cutting that I do not know in French like "just a trim", "not too many layers", "bangs", and "dear GOD, STOP!" (just kidding, I know that last one.) I was a little nervous about accurately conveying what exactly I wanted done to my head.

 The second thing that made me nervous was the fact that, no matter what happened, I knew I was going to get a French hair cut. Some of you may not understand what I mean by this. This can be resolved simply by coming to visit me. You will immediately notice upon arrival that most French women have heavily layered hair that in some cases is so layered that they could be considered mullets. There is a girl on my handball team who looks like she got her hair cut by someone who is a little to into The Labyrinth-era David Bowie. I was nervous about the layers, but I knew it was inevitable.

So, fearing the worst, I went to the hair salon. The lady was very nice, but I think she thought I was a little odd because I had trouble talking because I was so nervous and for some reason I have been having a bad-French day. The end result isn't so bad. I didn't lose that much length, my bangs are even. I do have, however, a lot of layers. Sigh... I knew it was inevitable though and perhaps now I will blend in more with the native population and I will finally be able to convince them that I am one of them...

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving. This makes me a little sad--I miss you guys. Who wants to send me a full Thanksgiving meal in the mail? Who wants to mail themselves with it so I can have someone to eat it with?

Kitty Birth Control?

So the title of this blog is actually from a post I started to write a while ago, and then I got distracted for about a week and forgot to post anything. It's hard to stay updated when I still don't have internet in a my house (in typical French fashion, in order to get internet in your house in France you must go talk to a company and then wait till they mail you a mysterious internet "box" which may take any number of weeks to show up--in this case, many).

Anyhow, back to kitty birth control.
Did anyone else know that it existed? Because I sure didn't.
I found out about said birth control a week ago, when I was at a French Lingerie Party. For those of you who just got excited and imagine a bunch of people wandering around in lacey bras and panties, I am sorry to disappoint. I mean a party like a tupperware party, where someone comes to someone's house and shows you lots of different models and you get to buy one. In this case, I went to said FLP (french lingerie party) with my host mom--the party was being hosted by a co-worker of hers. I was probably the youngest person there by about 15 years. It was excellent--looking at a bunch lacey panties with a bunch of older women is a lot more fun than it sounds (unless you think it sounds really fun, in which case, you're exactly right).

Anyhow back to kitty birth control.
Does anyone else think it sounds absurd and superfluous? I just instinctively feel that most house pets should be fixed by default. Does this make me some sort of anti-kitty reproductive rights advocate?

On top of the kitty birth control, I went to another frisbee tournament this weekend. I feel pretty much the same about about the ultimate in France as I did before, so I won't bore you guys by repeating myself. I would like someone to come over here and explain the ho-stack and the dump. I can't do it because I am in this little backwater and not very good at explaining. But someone needs to do it. Nonetheless, I like ultimate, and running around and I managed not to be too irritable, so I'll chalk this weekend up as positive-ish.

I have had this stack of forms piling up on my desk for a while that are all requiring various missing, hard-to-locate, or mysterious documents that I don't really want to deal with, but on Monday I decided it was time. I bravely took what I thought was my securité sociale form to school with the thought of seeing if I could get the sécretariat to help me out. As I walked in to the teacher's lounge there was, as if by magic, a desk set up with 2 representatives from securité sociale sitting at it. As I walked in one of them walked up to me and started asking me questions, and I explained that I had a form that seemed impossible to fill out. I showed her the form and she promptly said "ahh!! but madame, this is the wrong form" (YES! Go French Bureaucracy!). What was uncanny though, was that because I had come to the school with the intent of trying to figure the whole mess with me, I had actually managed to bring a: copy of my password, visa, attestation de travail, and RIB. What is even more amazing was that these were the exact documents that she needed to complete my social security form. So in a strange alignment of fate, I actually managed to submit all the right documents to the right person without having to try at least three time beforehand. That is, I think that is what happened. It's entirely possible that I'll get a letter in a week asking for something like the birth and death certificates of all of my great grandparents.

I also decided to sign up for a mutuelle. In France, when you get just the basic health insurance they pay for 70% of health insurance costs but the don't cover other stuff like eye care. When you sign up for the mutelle, they pay for everything and you get a discount on contacts and glasses and you don't have to pay for birth control. Because I still have no idea what I am doing next year, I thought this might be a good idea so that I could get a year's worth of contacts while I still could. Also, now that I know I can do anything and not have to pay to be fixed, I feel like I have to have something drastic happen to me to make it worth it--NOW is my chance to have cancer! (ok maybe not--but at least a broken bone? come on!).

Anyhow, that is pretty much what has been happening to me. Teaching is going well, except that I think I have a class that hates my guts because I missed their class from 4-5 on Friday due to a miscommunication. I feel pretty stupid about that. Hopefully they'll forget sometime in the next month?

Did I mentioned how weird I find kitty birth control?

Greedy Crepes

This last week I went to Paris, where I saw this menu. It made me laugh--it's a bad translation of the word "gourmande", which refers to someone who appreciates food a lot. But I like the idea of greedy crepes that don't share their candy with you. Maybe I'll create a graphic novel.

Paris was fun. Probably too much fun because I still had to come back and teach classes on Friday and I wasn't in the mood to do lesson planning, and therefore didn't do it very well--mistake! Turns out having a good lesson plan and back up plans in case technology fails is essential. I had two of my worst class experiences so far. Oops. My bad. Looks like I'll be planning more seriously from now on...

Paris is a cool city. This is undeniable. Because I lived there for a year, I have seen most of the major sites, but going to the city is like visiting an old friend. There is always something new and exciting to see and wandering around and exploring is probably my favorite thing to do--and that never gets old. Anyhow, I didn't take the typical, 3-days-in-Paris tourist approach, but it was a nice change of pace and a fun trip nonetheless.

I stayed with a friend of mine named Gerry, who plays on the Paris ultimate team that I've been playing with--he had a little apartment in the 10th by Gare de L'Est that had a little inset wall bed (it was more of couch, because it was short, but I'm calling it a bed). It was a cozy little bed in a great location and he was a great host, so it worked out pretty well.

I don't want to write just a laundry list of what I did, so instead I think I'll just tell you the highlights of the trip and hopefully that will be interesting.

The first day, I arrived in Paris in the morning and made my way to Gerry's house to drop off my stuff. The 10th is a multiethnic district, and he happens to live near an Indian quarter. He mentioned this to me and I got very excited about having and Indian meal. I love French food, but it tends to severely lack vegetables and a spice, and Indian food has a lot of both. Anyhow, he took me to a local vegetarian Indian restaurant and I pigged out. It was amazing and it was a very good start to my visit, minus the fact that I got curry on the sleeve of my white shirt (this always happens when I am wearing white. Grrr)

I have a friend named Alan, who is one of the assistants from the Laval who also was in Paris at the same time, so I met up with him and we went for a walk around the Seine. We were by the Pompidou center, and the first thing we saw was one of those street performers that are always in public spaces. This guy probably had the greatest act I have ever seen. He was a dubious looking old man with a strange accent and crumpled clothing. And all he did was eat things. And by "things" I mean stuff that one should really not eat, such as razorblades, lit cigarettes, and lit matches. The entire time he was doing this, he was narrating the whole adventure in a crazy-old-man kind of way. It was probably the greatest thing I have ever seen.

After that, I remembered this great hot chocolate place that I used to go to when I lived there and I suggested that we get some hot chocolate, and we decided to go there and get a cup. The hot chocolate shop was in a district just north of the Tuileries, which is terribly fancy and chic. This means that you get to walk by all these incredibly expensive hotels and admire the interiors from the windows. We were walking by one such hotel and this group of people walked out--I didn't notice anything, but the Alan (who is Scottish), whispered to me "wait. That's Robbie Williams" (for those of you who don't know, because I only had a vague idea, Robbie Williams is a British pop singer who is incredibly popular in Britain and Europe and may have had a hit or two in the U.S., but is not as well known) and he yelled "Hey! Robbie!" to which Robbie turned around, and flashed us a dazzling smile before getting into a large black luxury vehicle. It's funny how chance encounters happen like that, although I think I would have been more excited about the whole thing if I had a better idea of who he was. If Alan hadn't been there, I wouldn't have recognized him. (This makes me believe that I have seen lots and lots of really famous people, and have failed to recognize them in my ignorance).

That evening, I went to ah Ah Ouh Puc mixed practice. European ultimate is different than US ultimate. And by "different" I mean "less organised and more cluster-fuck-y (yes, that is a word)", which is something I'm just going to have to get used to, but sometimes, I get frustrated and I want to just say to everyone "there is a place where only one person cuts at a time and no one cuts each other off, and the dump happens not at stall 9 and swings happen, and it is beautiful. This magical land is called the United States" (once again, sorry to you non-frisbee folk). Still, it is nice to be playing ultimate, and the knee is doing ok (still hurts a little occaisionally, but not in an alarming way). So that is nice.

The next day I went to the one big museum that I never managed to go to when I lived in Paris, the Musée Quai Branly. It is the non-Western art museum and it is pretty awesome. They had a special exhibit on Tenochticlan, which was really cool--it had frescoes from the site as well lots of sculptures and pottery and it was very well explained. My favorite thing was this chicken:It's just so stylish. Those Mixtecs (I think...) were pretty cool.

There is one very important very reason that I am glad that to be not actually living in Paris this time around and only just visiting it occasionally. It is phenomenally expensive, and there is constant temptation and too much to buy. Needless to say, I did go on a small shopping expedition, in which I managed to escape after only buying a skirt and shirt--this was incredibly hard, believe me.

When I was going back to Gerry's apartment that evening, he called to tell me that he wasn't in his apartment, but in that of a neighbor's because he is part of the equivalent of a CSA (community supported agriculture) in Paris, and he shares his share with a couple that lives on the first floor of his building. Anyhow, I went down to the couple's apartment to help with some translation (Gerry is somewhat new to French), and I got to see one of the coolest and most French apartments I have ever seen.
It was crammed full of newspapers and books and it was one of those apartments that is much bigger than it looks. It had a window that looked onto a lower rooftop and they had turned the rooftop into a glorious little garden. It was awesome. The guy who lived there (I didn't meet the woman), was pretty cool too. He was wonderfully warm and welcoming. We were chatting, and at one point he mentioned that he had a blog, and I asked him what it was about. It turns out that he does mail art, which is what it sounds like. It's a network of people who mail pieces of art (usually painted or collage postcards) to each other. The idea is that if you mail something to someone, they will mail you something back; it's an exchange. He showed cool stuff that he received and the stuff he sends and he gave us his address so that we could try and mail him something. Despite my lack of artistic skill, I think I'm going to try. If anyone is interested, here is his blog, and his address is:
Jacky Charmouan
7bis passage de la ferme Saint Lazare
75010 Paris
FRANCE
if you want to send him some art--it might be interesting (Sally, you should try)!

Besides these adventures, I spent my time walking around--I visited Monmartre, and the Rue St. Honoré, and various other districts. I also went to a women's practice on Wednesday--I had forgotten how much I like playing womens and it made me miss Scorch a little...

Paris is an awesome place. I will always love going there. For the moment though, I am happy to be in my little town in the middle of nowhere--I think I may be starting to make some French (!!) friends and as always, very much love my living situation. I will continue to miss peanut butter and burritos though (peanut butter burritos, not so much).

And to finish, here is an awesome shot of the Seine: