In general March has been one of those months that has flown by. I have seen lots of people, travelled lots of places, and not done a whole lot of teaching (strikes+students in a slump means that things have been going slowly). I have also spent a lot of time worrying about what I will be doing after this experience is over... I still don't know.
I think the underlying theme in all my experiences this month has been a general revelation at how nice people can be.
During my last post I mentioned that I had already had some trouble with traveling during my last vacation. I also mentioned that I hoped that they would get better. To put it simply: they didn't. When I went to take my flight from Paris to Madrid, my flight was delayed by 3 hours because of a French air traffic controller strike (I guess it wouldn't really have been a true stay in France if I hadn't been hampered by one strike or the other right). This meant that I also missed my connecting flight from Madrid to Tenerife and because I was flying RyanAir, I was going to have to buy a new ticket. All in all, I was in quite a state at the Madrid airport, because I either had to buy another ticket, or I had to wait around in Madrid until my return flight four days later. On top of this, my French may be pretty good, but it is at the expense of neglecting my Spanish... the thought of having to navigate this felt simply overwhelming.
I was standing in the RyanAir line, talking rather hysterically on the phone with my dad and trying to explain the situation and when I hung up the phone, a girl who was standing in front of me in line happened to glance at my ticket (probably because I was making a bit of a scene). "Oh! We're going to the same place!", she said. It then turned out that we were even going to the same tournament, and so she offered to help figure out how where we should buy new tickets and generally hang out together (it turned out that she was French, but that she had studied abroad in Tenerife and spoke Spanish). We ended up having to buy a ticket for the next morning and spent most of the rest of the day together, and it was as if we'd been friends for quite a while. The next morning, we took our flight and arrived in Tenerife and she offered to show me around the island and I gladly accepted. Without Christelle, I would never have seen any of the volcano that crowns the island, and I would have missed out on a lot. I think my whole experience of Tenerife would have been quite different. I couldn't believe how helpful she had been to a complete stranger.On top of this, there is, of course, the constant example of how wonderful my host family is. Right when I got back from Tenerife, Josh came out and visited me for a week, and not only did they have no problem with him staying in the house, they also figured out what we were going to do during the week.
I was having tea with Nathy, and she said to me, "Nell, you have Wednesdays off, right?"
I replied that I usually do.
"Well," she said, "On Wednesday, you will take the car and show Josh Mont St. Michel--it's not that far away and he would really like it".
I replied that that was a wonderful idea and informed Josh that the family had decided that we would be headed to Mont St. Michel on Wednesday (For those of you who don't know, Mont St. Michel is a big rocky hill that is an island at high tide and accessible by land at low tide. Somewhere in the 11th century or so, someone thought this would be a good idea to put and abbey. It is quite pretty). It ended up be a great trip, and we never would have gone if they had offered, because I never would have asked to borrow the car to go so far away. It was really wonderful of them.
On top of that, my parents came and visited me a week after Josh left, and my host family welcomed them with a meal of French pork products. I don't think my parents could have been happier (I'm not joking).
Of course, sometimes people are just nice off the bat. Sometimes you need to know how to work the system, how to approach them with the right tone. I feel like this is something I have gotten much better at doing in French this year, and I would consider the following experience my magnum opus in this domain.
Because my parents were in town, I managed to get my Tuesday cleared. Normally I have Wednesdays off, but I have gotten this job doing discussion session with French teachers who teach other subjects in English, and I had to do one on Wednesday. The problem was that we had decided to see Mont St. Michel (again) and St. Malo on Tuesday and I had to be in Sablé-sur-Sarthe on Wednesday at 9 for my discussion session. We blythely went on to Mont St. Michel and continued on to St. Malo and had a wonderful time at both places (including nearly being washed away by the tide!). My parents are big admirers of French food, and one of their goals was to have as many excellent meals as possible; we therefore decided that staying in St. Malo for dinner was the best option because they had the best restaurants. What ensued was an excellent meal, at the end of which my parents decided that it would be best to continue on to Sablé that night. It was, at the time about 9:15. It takes about 2 and a half hours to get to Sablé. I was pretty certain that most things in rural France close at the latest around 10:30, so I knew that we had to start calling hotels to ensure that we didn't have to sleep in the car.
As we head off, I started to call hotels. To start off with, there weren't that many in the town. The first three were either closed or not actually hotels, so when I called the fourth one, I was starting to feel a wee bit nervous. When a man answered saying "Hotel Marmotte, how may I help you?" I felt immensely relieved.
"Yes," I said "I'd like to make a reservation for tonight, for three people"
"I'm sorry m'am, we don't have any rooms for three people"
The first rule that I have learned in negotiating deals with French people is that nothing is impossible (I have taken a leaf out of the book of the guy in my last entry).
"Ah," I replied, "Well we must absolutely be in Sablé tonight. Do you not have anything? Not even a roll-away bed?"
"No"
"Could we rent two rooms perhaps?"
This had obviously not occurred to the man. "Yes, I can rent you two rooms" he said (I gave a fist-pump in celebration), "but Madame, when will you be arriving?"
I had an idea of what was coming. I looked at the clock. It was 9:30. We still had a good 2+ hours to go. "In around an hour, an hour and a half" I said, with some authority.
"Well, Madame, you should know that we close at 10:30"
"Oh, well, it'll be a close shave for us to arrive then--is there nothing you can do?"
"I'll tell you what," he said, "call us again if you're not going to arrive by 10:30, and we'll give you the entrance code"
And with that, he took my reservation (double fist pump!). The first half of my task was done.
At around 10:15, I called back. A different woman answered the phone.
"Hello," I said, "I have a reservation for McCallum and we're not going to be able to arrive on time. Those were the magic words (rather, "reservation" was the magic word). She happily informed us where we were going to find our keys for the next morning.
I sometimes feel like figuring things like this out in France is like a cryptic crossword. Once you have one key word. Everything else falls into place.
As one last example, my mom and I went into a wine cellar to buy some bottles of wine. And my mom, being the wonderful chatty person she is, manages to strike up a conversation the man selling us the wine. We chatted about everything. French politics (Sarkozy), American politics (health care), French people (uninterested in the world), Americans (overconsumeristic) etc. He gave me recommendations for the region. I'd say we ended up being there for about an hour. In the end, he ended up giving us a nice bottle of white wine for free, just because he enjoyed the company. People can be quite generous.
And French people get a bad reputation. I can see where it comes from (the aren't immediately as warm as Americans--a behavior that they view as "fake"), but I have met just as many happy and generous people here as I have in the US. And I would have missed out on a volcano and delicious bottle of wine and so many other thing if it wasn't for them.
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