santa-shaped ice cubes

okay, this is shameful. i haven't updated my blog since march, when i was in france. unfortunately, i am no longer in france. fortunately, i am procrastinating, so here goes a holiday-themed story, inspired by a picture i found this morning: 

i am currently sitting at my desk in middlebury, vermont, where the november weather is finally starting to arrive. by this, i mean i'm wearing ll bean's wicked good slippers that make me look rather like peter pan or an elf at the north pole without the red and green restive ensemble. (i will take a moment now to say that both slippers are for the left foot, as my sister and i both have a pair - a fact that robin will probably vehemently deny via text two minutes after i post this - and when i left for school, i could only find two out of four of the slippers. what are the chances that they are both for left feet? my high school stats teacher could tell you.) also, two sweatshirts, and trying not to sneakily indulge in leftover halloween candy that i'm trying to make last until thanksgiving break. there are approximately four apples snitched from the dining hall at various points throughout the weekend, but reese's peanut butter cups are just that much more appealing.  regardless. it is most definitely fall, for i wear leather gloves when i ride my bike to work in the mornings so that i don't spend half my shift typing with ice cubes that used to be fingers, and my summer shorts tan is officially faded, which might be the only upside to the transition into fall. i wear less freckles and more tights with my sundresses, and the looming tension of midterms and end-of-the-semester workloads can easily be overturned with thoughts of thanksgiving turkeys and food comas and my mom's collection of tiny santas that take up residence on the shelf on the porch, so whenever you drop your keys into the basket you inadvertently cause st nick or father christmas or pere noel to rapidly faceplant to the ground, during which you 1. decide if he's breakable 2. really really hope that he's not 3. hope that the kitten arrives at that exact moment to save the day and snatch up father christmas like she snatches up the last of your sanity when you're trying to type and she sits on the keyboard, as if to say "thesis? what thesis? i'm more important." 4. while trying to sort out these rapidfire thoughts and failing and flailing, avoiding knocking over the other forty-seven santas just waiting to plunge to their imminent death. why, you might ask, is this so important, if there are forty-seven other jolly santas smiling back at you, as if to say "knock us over, we dare you" ? last year, my sister was washing dishes (actually that is probably not a factual statement - it is far more likely she was eating some strange combination of pasta and barbecue sauce over the sink) and knocked over a miniature snowman who was standing surveillance by the soap dispenser.  now, there are far fewer snowmen than there are santas, so the repercussions are brutal.  after attempting and failing to blame the snowman homicide on the kitten, she received a giant bag of coal on christmas day, her sentence for "killing christmas." harsh, you might say, after only an isolated incident. BUT NO. my sister has a gruesome history of "killing christmas" singlehandedly, and she is reminded of her acts every year, when we put out porcelain mugs in the shape of santa heads. this is a terrible description of what are otherwise rather cute, smiling, grandfather-like mugs, and i apologize and have just now come to the realization that i will never be an announcer on the home shopping network or jewelry television. damn. there goes another career option. my failure to describe these mugs is rectified by a photograph, the one attached above.  these mugs have been in our family for years and years and years and years, and we were to never touch them, under any circumstances because they were very fragile. so there they sit, six in a row, like festive ducklings just DARING us to touch them. one day, when i am six years old and my sister is the ripe old age of five, parents nowhere in sight, for they would have surely put a stop to this idea before we even spoke a word, my sister has a stroke of brilliance and decides that the absolute coolest thing we could possibly do on this particular afternoon is to make santa-shaped ice cubes. GENIUS. there has never been a better idea in the history of the universe. giggling like mad scientists on the brink of a very exciting discovery, we carefully pull one mug out of the lineup and rearrange the others as if to hide the fact that we kidnapped one santa, and fill the mug with tap water, placing it in the freezer and shutting the door slowly, slowly, to make sure santa stays put.  for approximately two minutes, we loiter guiltily around the fridge, whistling to ourselves and pacing in circles, the epitome of faked innocence, as we ponder the eventually GLORIOUS outcome of santa-shaped ice. we then promptly lose interest, for naps or dust or watching squirrels out the window or anything is infinitely more exciting than thinking about water turn into ice.  a few hours later, a yell comes from the kitchen, as my dad opens the freezer in search of some ice cream and discovers the ultimate disappointment - worse than freezerburned mint chocolate chip - a broken santa mug, squeezed in between the ice packs and eggo waffles, its pieces fused together, stuck onto the head-shaped ice cube, our ultimate goal. my sister's eyes widen dramatically, as do mine (the pair of us should have probably been in cutesy holiday hallmark commercials or a made-for-tv movie remarkably less violent than "you'll shoot your eye out, kid!", for if we were, we would be in hollywood at this very moment, rather than at school, blatantly procrastinating schoolwork by reminiscing childhood stories) and we promptly burst into tears, for how are we supposed to know that water expands when it turns into ice, effectively shattering a precious family heirloom mug as well as any possibility of getting twin ponies for christmas that year.  after some yelling and some scientific explaining and some tearful promises to never use antiques as an ice cube tray, i don't care about the fun shapes you can make, the ice cube debacle is over. until next christmas and the christmas after that, and the christmas after that, when we pull out the santa mugs, five instead of six, and say "remember when...?" just as mistletoe and quoting national lampoon's christmas vacation word for word and the forty-seven mini santa statues will forever be a required part of the holiday season, so will the inevitable science lesson on how to make ice, every single time we bring out the santa mugs, always five instead of six.

week-end à poitiers entre amies

i don't know if i believe in chance. in serendipity, in everything happens for a reason and that reason will always turn out to be good. because that philosophy is the basis for ninety-nine percent of terrible hollywood movies most of which starring jennifer lopez. that philosophy also holds little comfort for me when i find myself running out the door of the apartment in the morning, rushing to catch the tram, and smearing dog mess all over my flats. what, pray tell, is the reason for that? to remind me of how nice these shoes once were? not terribly satisfying. but sometimes, chance is good. example: one night in october, i meet a friend from middlebury at a bar for a party for international students. it is a small bar, and bordeaux is a big place, with lots of international students trekking through the tricky world of french prepositions and verb tenses and slang. so there was little room for us to sit. we resort to outside, as it is still warm enough to sit outside at night with a drink, if there were any tables. we hunt around, offering hopeful smiles as we ruthlessly try to steal chairs. then, we come across a table of girls, who offer us two seats with them no problem, with absolutely no thoughts as to the fact that we are not harmless american students but instead crazy axe murderers who take chairs and then attack, as the theme song from deliverance plays. turns out they are french, go to the same university as i do, and are very, very nice. the requisite phone number exchange begins (this is always a bit of a hassle, for when i give someone my phone number i have to look it up on my phone first (how lame is that? i have my own number as a contact under "moi" at first it was to make believe that i had more contacts in my address book other than my host family and the fire station, but it very quickly became absolutely necessary because to this day i still cannot rattle off my phone number without second-guessing myself) and then type my name out, which usually ends up with them calling me and me having many unregistered numbers in the missed calls list because i am terribly bad with names. seriously. i didn't think i was awful before, but then i looked at my address book, filled with "guy in translation class" "girl met at cinema" "i have no idea who this is" and it really is shameful.) so i have these girls in my phone under aliases for a few weeks, as i try to sort out names and numbers and facebook profiles and whenever i see them on campus i pull a "hi, you!" knowing that i know them and we might actually be considered friends, but the alphabet soup that is their names just isn't working for me.

i can happily say that this time has passed. i now know everyone's names, phone numbers, etc. etc. we have dinner parties, celebrate birthdays and crepe days (france has the BEST HOLIDAYS) and wander around bordeaux looking for a non-full bar on a thursday night (impossible.), in short, i have friends in bordeaux : ) one day, they propose that we spend a weekend in poitiers, where two of the girls are from. i respond YES YES YES right away before they changed their minds because can you think of anything better than a clueless american being invited home for the weekend by classy french friends? i cannot. we book our tickets and i pack my bag approximately two minutes before leaving for the train station, because as i have become accustomed to packing my life away for days at a time in my backpack (see: amsterdam, prague, ireland) a weekend is cake. i sleep perfectly on the train until the controller decides that my ticket and student discount card, displayed carefully on my tray table so that he doesn't have to wake me up to check them, aren't good enough, wakes me up to make sure i am the same person sleeping as awake, and doesn't even look at my ticket. i can't go back to sleep, for precious napping moments have already been lost, as well as the elusive sleeping position that is sitting upright in second class on the tgv sharing an armrest with your neighbor, but no matter because we have reached poitiers! there are six of us, two americans, three french, and one german, and we dump our luggage in one of the girl's mom's tiny car. we tour the city, playing the tourists that we cannot in bordeaux, snapping pictures of sunlight on old buildings and creeping inside churches to take pictures of things that look like faces. (okay, so that's just me - everyone else takes pictures of the architecture... whoops. i am the black sheep of my french family of architects.) we go bowling, which i haven't done in years and which becomes painfully apparent very soon. in france, the shoes are the same, unfortunately, but the concept of bumpers is not, as in they DO NOT EXIST. uh oh. furthermore, it is old-school candlestick bowling, meaning the balls are different sizes and you have to put your fingers in the right holes and not get your thumb stuck in the wrong one... needless to say, my bowling abilities extend to wii bowling and in real life are comparable to my golf abilities, meaning that i am terrible. sometimes i get lucky and hit a few pins, but i have no recollection of what i did to make that happen, so the next ball rolls sadly into the gutter, as if to mock me. is it just me or do they move very slow in the gutter, as if to say "we know you're terrible at bowling, let us serve as a torturously drawn-out reminder of how you just failed miserably" thankfully, as everything must come to an end, so did my last chance at french bowling. by this point, we are all beyond starving, having subsisted on subpar campus sandwiches at noon. (tiny sidenote: sandwiches in france are quite possibly the most disappointing things that have ever happened to the concept of bread and lunchtime in general. in france, it is perfectly acceptable - no, rather enthusiastically agreed upon - that ham or cheese plus butter on a terrible excuse for a baguette equals a sandwich. i disagree. i am a proud owner of a frequent buyer's card at noonie's deli at middlebury, and my sister and i have been known to make hasty me & ollies runs just before closing time, both establishments in which a sandwich is actually a sandwich, with lettuce and tomato and cheese and good bread and yummm. so i might be biased. but you would think that in france, where food reigns supreme and gastronomy is taught before learning how to read and cuisine just made it onto the oh so important list of cultural patrimony by UNESCO, one could find a decent sandwich. not the case.) 

anyway, we are all ravenous, as the disappointing bowling tournament did not leave me with a shining sense of personal and nutritional fulfillment, and it is well into the realm of dinnertime. we arrive at my friend's house, where we are heartily welcomed by her family, and by the dining room table set for TWELVE. we get put to work, making tartines, which are little pieces of bread with paté or cheese eaten with the aperitif, in this case champagne, before dinner. why we merit champagne, i haven't a clue in the slightest, but i don't bother crushing their illusions of us with reality, so i sit down, shut up, and eat paté. dinner is served, with foie gras and then duck and green beans and roasted apples and then cheese and then dessert, which was pear sorbet and a macaron (the paris kind) and a chocolate and pear charlotte, which is an upside down cake-ish thing that tastes delicious. paris macarons (the little round things that look like mini hamburgers in all different colors and flavors) are different from poitiers macarons, which are basically just butter and sugar and that's it. i love them both, even if now the paris ones seem kind of pretentious, especially if they're in rainbow color order. but i will eat them regardless. the dinner is glorious, and we talk and eat and drink wine and somehow orange inflatable couches become a topic of conversation and i end up flinging cheese across the table WHOOPS. somehow it becomes 2am, and with grand plans to go to the futuroscope the next day, we troop off to bed with full bellies and we rationalise that our amount of giggling has equalled out the calories we consumed, a blatant lie that everyone wholeheartedly believes. the next morning, also known as later that day, we are up before the sun (lie, but it felt like it) at 8am to be at the futuroscope for 945. the family pet, a rabbit named lily, was the morning entertainment, for we were too tired to make weak conversation over croissants. breakfast in france is almost as good as dinner, for there was tea, hot chocolate, coffee, croissants, brioche, chocolatines (apparently in poitiers they are called pains au chocolat, but since i am from the south of france, we call them chocolatines) and jam, and sandwiches for the day ahead. 

we pile in the borrowed minivan, whose driver side window goes down but doesn't go up, a fun fact we learned paying tolls on sunday and marine's dad wrestled with the car door against the toll machine, and whose backseat made a noise that was "tout à fait normal" (another blatant lie) and arrive at futuroscope! the closest equivalent i come up with is disney world, mixed with the museum of science in boston. it's france's most famous/biggest? i think? amusement park, but there are no roller coasters or spinning teacups or poor souls sweltering under mickey mouse suits, but instead huge imax movie screens about the louisiana bayou and the ocean floor and birds but also interactive "rides" where you strap into seat that moves, as if you're on a roller coaster but not really, because you are still sitting in front of a screen that makes you feel like you are a tiny wizardy thing in a field of giant poppies or you are dancing with robots while "staying alive" plays in the background, or you are taking an interactive tour of the region, guided by an allergic tree who sneezes every two seconds and a stream of water hits you in the face. the last time i went to disney world, i was very very small and all i remember is a picture of me and my sister sitting side by side in a wheelchair, fast asleep, with matching tie dyed mickey mouse dresses (very chic), so i don't recall much, but the LINES for the rides are absolutely ridiculous. there are marquees at the doors of each ride telling you the approximate wait time (usually 1 hour, 3 minutes, but we celebrate when it turns to 57 minutes) and silly me, i thought we were moving. at futuroscope, the lines are designed in such a way that you are constantly moving within a labyrinth back and forth, so you don't get the impression that you've been waiting 1 hour 3 minutes for a 4 minute ride. when we finally make it through the doors of the biggest ride, i think we are home free! but no. they actually have attractions like backstage videos and entire rooms devoted to waiting in line, to keep you busy so you don't realize you spend the majority of the day standing in an aisle. clever. but by the end of the day, we definitely catch on. the whole line-waiting business becomes rather tedious, because we are rather tired and rather hungry, despite all the "i'm thinking of a person..." games we play. we stay for the sound and light show (a phenomenon i thought only existed in my high school textbook under the amusement park vocabulary section) which i get the impression is rather popular in france, and we trudge home for tea before bed, as i am falling asleep on the sofa and mistakenly tell marine's dad to wake me up at 730am, an error that was GRATEFULLY not taken seriously. we have a grasse matinée also known as sleep in, which everyone praises because we don't wake up till 1030, but i don't understand, for 1030 is normal waking hours and i consider noon, rather, as a grasse matinée... 

today is sunday, and we skip breakfast in favor of lunch and many many pastries. marine's mom makes two different pies and there are two giant boxes of pastries (i now consider my life complete, as i have eaten a coffee eclair and will never go back to sub-par desserts again) and we once again set off in the van to see a castle. the soundtrack to the voyage is billy joel, lots of country, some spanish music, and abba, a lovely compilation left by the owner of the van for our listening pleasure. the castle is gorgeous, in a sleepy little town closed, obviously, because it's sunday. we listen to the guide, and i get the giggles as my friends are making quick little comments about everything she says; she clearly thinks that the group of us is not mature enough to enter her castle, in comparison with the little boy who is in our group, who rattles off stats about king louis 13 and king louis 14 as if they were on the back of a baseball card. we set back off for poitiers to catch our 7pm train back to bordeaux and back to real life, and we wait at the train station with the girls' parents, feeling very much like it is the first day of kindergarten, being shipped off as the parents wave goodbye. little do we know that this train ride will prove to be interesting. we are spread out amongst the cars, but i am with two others and also dinner, so all is good. suddenly, ten minutes out of poitiers, the train stops. relatively normal, no big deal. for a few minutes. but this is longer than a few. suddenly, the conductor crackles over the loudspeaker to tell us many thing, notably that the power has gone out, we are now running on emergency batteries, the emergency lights will soon shut off as will the heat, and he has no idea when it will be repaired. goooooooood. at least we have many sandwiches. we eat the sandwiches, and i roll my tinfoil into a little ball and put it in the trash receptacle, which for some very ridiculous reason has a hole in the bottom, so my wrapper falls out, rolls down the aisle, and hits the conductor's shoe as he's walking through the cars. i burst out laughing and so does the guy beside me, for we are the only two who see it happen. thus begins the epic case of the giggles that we get, including the poor guy beside me, who probably did not choose his seat next to a hyperventilating red-faced me who cannot stop laughing. everything is funny, even that which is tragic (the giant tupperware container full of pastries falls face-down on the floor - i have never seen a sadder sight) and when the power is restored an hour and forty minutes later, we are clutching our stomachs and catching our breath, still unable to stop laughing. typical, at least for me. we continue on to bordeaux, thinking that 1. i have the worst luck with transportation 2. what a shame the eclair is on the carpet and 3. how did i ever manage to make such good friends? clearly they are going to wake up and realize one day that i am still just a clueless american, but until then, we will laugh and sing billy joel in the car and share pointless inside jokes that are still funny days later. or maybe they will just keep me around to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches until eternity.

marine, marlène, sara, kathlyn, gwladys and me in front of chateau azay-le-rideau

finalement!!

the fact that the last time i updated my blog was the end of september is SHAMEFUL. my new year's resolution was to start writing again, so here goes a smorgasbord of my life since september...

les grèves:

during my very first week in france, i wake up in the morning to discover sacha and jean-louis having breakfast in the middle of the day, because sacha doesn't have school that day (or ever). apparently, there is a strike, and his elementary school teacher is marching in the manifestations, so no classes, all cartoons. jean-louis explains that the strike is about retirement ages, but he doesn't seem too worried, and i really have to go to the bank, so i shrug it off and head out the door. the main street, cours victor hugo, is completely blocked off as hundreds of bordelais brave the rain to fight for their right to play shuffleboard well into old age. (does shuffleboard exist in france? bocce is really popular except it differs from the american version in that one must skillfully avoid dog mess in the path as well.) after that, i don't really think of the strikes much, as they occur every couple of weeks and don't affect my daily life, save the tram schedule becoming a bit warped. but now the french are les grèvistes par excellence, because sarkozy is only listening to his financial ministry friends and not to the people. can you say french revolution part 2? 

anyway, one day i decide to follow the protesters, that night at dinner i tell nathalie, and she bursts out laughing. she runs to turn on the television and i ask her why. she can hardly talk for laughing, and in between breaths she tells me that sans doute, i will make the bordeaux evening news as a blonde american student marching with every union in france.  for some reason, i get emails from the student union at bordeaux 3. i think it was the first day of orientation, when i had to be at the university for 8am to sit in a giant amphitheatre with every other foreign exchange student that spoke very little french.  i signed a paper for a student bookswap, so we wouldn't have to pay the bookstore prices. good idea, yes? at middlebury, this is a wonderful idea. we get about 1% back for what we paid, so if we can stick it to the man, as much as we can in a small liberal arts university in the middle of vermont, we do so.  in france, book swap is synonymous with communism.  i am now on the email list for the student communist groups, to which i have tried multiple times to unsubscribe, but am always told that someday, i might change my mind. this also, undoubtedly, blacklists me in the united states à la the days of mccarthyism. it will go on my permanent record, along with the times i got kicked out of a public library or didn't pay for parking at the beach. regardless. i am a bit offended, actually, when this list that i can never escape never tells me about the fact that the university will be blockaded in protest.  excuse me? what? i don't actually know what blockaded means. i've studied may 1968 in paris, i've seen the pictures, yes. but blockades are a tactic used in the times before facebook and causes and celebrities who become goodwill ambassadors.  blockades do not belong at the university.  i brave the crowds at la victoire and fight my way onto the tram against the masses like it's the fourth of july at hampton beach and the tide is coming in. the tram is stopped every two seconds for the parades of strikers, but like a good student who participates in activities (read: i paid the 10 euro sports and activities fee and i INTEND to make it worth it, bordeaux 3...) i press on for the very important task of my yoga class.

yoga. in english: i either start cracking up laughing because the professor compares us to the forests surrounding campus, or i feel like i'm in labor as i'm trying to hold my breath in the left nostril and exhale in the right, or i end up slowly sliding away from whatever pose i'm supposed to be in and just hope that she doesn't use me as an example of chi gone terribly terribly wrong. in french, yoga is a task rivaling reading ancient greek literature in the dark while climbing mount kilamanjaro, without sherpas. the goal in yoga, first and foremost, is to relax. unless of course you're in hot yoga, in which case the goal is to sweat youself to death and pass out while standing on one foot wearing spandex. when yoga is in french, i cannot relax. instead, i am trying to understand the instructor, who has a strange accent, as if she learned french in a kajikistan military camp and then flew into bordeaux. she also thinks she's hilarious, and makes these little jokes to herself out loud and giggles incessantly, which i get approximately five minutes after, when it's no longer appropriate to laugh. i'm also trying to keep track of my breathing as well as the vocabulary for body parts that i never learned because bellybutton is a useless word. i also have no idea what i'm doing in terms of the poses, because they change every week, and even though i try to hide myself in the back, making it virtually undetectable that instead of meditating i am surreptitiously watching everyone around me to make sure i'm doing it right, because i am suave and graceful (i can't even believe i just typed such a heinous, boldfaced lie), there is a giant mirror facing us so we can better form our postures, read: watch the flamingo in the back as she tips over. 

the good thing about yoga is that it is unaffected by the strikes. (i think if my professor's hair caught fire, she would also be unaffected, and make a joke about how her hair is particularly luminous today, a comment i will only understand after she is completely bald and resembles the dalai lama) because as i walk out of yoga, i see a most curious thing: all the academic buildings are empty, because there are chairs and desks stacked ten feet tall from the inside, blocking every entrance to the university. there are times in my life where i start laughing uncontrollably, because this is very obviously not real life (david at the dentist?). this is one of those times. except this time, it is real life, and after trying all the doors to the building and finding them all blockaded, i give up. (question: what in the world would provoke college students to get up very very early in the morning, sneak onto campus, and stack heavy things in front of multiple doors? answer: the terrifying prospect of having to work past 60, or if their effort in class is in any way indicative, the terrifying prospect of doing work at all) after coming all the way from my apartment in the center of bordeaux, to pessac, the suburb where the university is, i am 1. irritated for making the trip 2. excited at the prospect of a free day, the hopes of which are quickly dashed as i realise nothing is open because of the strikes, and 3. strangely relaxed, because of the yoga. i find that this curious mix of sentiments often sums up my life in france; for there are always little things (or big, blockaded things) that go wrong, or are so vastly different from life in the states that they annoy me, but somehow, nothing seems too insurmountable or complicated, for i am in france, and why waste my time getting frustrated when i can go for a run along the river? or drink mint tea next to a giant cathedral in the quartier st. michel? or find a boulangerie and wander the cobblestoned streets (always mindful of dog mess) munching on a baguette that will surely spoil my dinner? if i have learned one thing in france, it is that everything eventually works out. nothing stays the same for very long, so there's no use stressing about it when everything turns out right in the end. tout va bien.