I just got back (about an hour ago) from a short weekend in Nancy with Laura. It was really nice. Today I watched her do her laundry and we wasted time in the park and in a bookstore, where I bought L’histoire de France pour les Nuls (a goal of mine since publishing camp). I don’t work this week so I’m thinking of going to see M in Bar le Duc. My French bank card isn’t working so I have to sort that out.

So what’s the rule on when you capitalize in French after an apostrophe and when you don’t?

So the little brother of someone I went to elementary (and junior high, and high) school with is now 17 and has a band.

myspace

Meredith told me to listen to it and I like it! (So you should go listen, Mom, it’s Mark Shell singing.)

I have internet! The people at FT were most helpful. Turns out I had to connect by ethernet the first time (in case anyone’s wondering, yeah, I know you weren’t). Now I can set up the tv!

As yet no internet chez moi (not a surprise, it usually takes a week) but I have time to waste so I’m posting anyway. Things are fine here. I got here last Thursday and the plane and everything went according to plan. There was lots of stuff to do the minute I arrived but I was on my second wind so it was okay. The prof I work with had stuff left over from past lecteurs, so I immediately had a microwave and a toaster oven. I switched my bank account over to Reims from Bar le Duc which was pretty easy and then got insured. Saturday the prof + her husband took me to Cora to buyu tons of stuff and to FT to order internet/tv/telephone. I’m pretty excited about it. I added unlimited international calls, yay. That should all start working this weekend, but I set up the livebox and keep hoping that the correct lights will start blinking and the internet will kick in early.

Anyway so I went to Nancy Saturday night where M and J met me (with flowers, that I left in Bar le Duc =() where we hung out with people at Cedric and Rebekka’s and then J and I drove back to Bar le Duc. It was really weird to be back. I guess I thought this stuff ceased to exist over the summer. Nothing’s changed although Cedric says they cut the budget for assistants at the lycee so there are no assistants this year. Anyway J drove me back Monday so he could drop off his CV at places on Tuesday and I finally watched Pulp Fiction, but in French. Then he left Tuesday and I started teaching (only the first-years so far). The kids seem really nice. I teach them again tomorrow and then I have a week off. Not sure what to do with myself. I went to the sous-prefecture for my cds appointment today and they’re not too backed up, I got one for the end of October, Halloween actually. Also there’s not too much paperwork for it, yay, and everything I need I already have.

So I have a little video I took of the studio but this computer doesn’t seem to have the bandwidth to upload it, or something, I don’t really know what that word means. So it’s stuck in upload-dom. Oo wait there it goes! all right here it is:

Video of the apartment

Edit: This may take a loooong time to load.

Hope it works. Apparently the university is an “espace wifi” so we’ll see if I can get on the internet there tomorrow before class. I swear I don’t ALWAYS think about internet. That’s all for now.

I will post when I have time on the internet!

I’m leaving tomorrow! I can’t believe it! The obligatory mix of nervousness and reluctance and excitement is hanging around as usual but this time I think the excitement is winning out. And I’m astonished by the powers of my new suitcase. Everything fits, and it’s still pretty light. I’m pretty sure it has managed to break free from the laws of physics or something. So! here’s the plan.

Tomorrow Dad and I are leaving around 9 (I will say goodbye to Boris) to drive to IAH, where I will check in, then hopefully we will eat lunch somewhere, in or out of the airport, then we will say goodbye (sad), then my plane will take off at 1:50. I’ll land in Dallas around an hour later, sit for two hours, and then my other plane will take off. I will sit on that plane for 9 hours and 30 minutes. Fun! I packed gorp. (My mom had the ingredients hidden in all sorts of clever places. The dark chocolate M&Ms were in the freezer. The chocolate-covered raisins were in a regular raisins tin. I’ve sworn Boris to secrecy. Don’t tell Dad.)

Then I’ll arrive at CDG at 9:40 Thursday morning. Weird. This next part is amazing–I’ll go down to the CDG TGV station, buy a new 12-25 card, and then sit and wait for my train, which will take THIRTY minutes to arrive at the Champagne-Ardenne TGV station. It’s like magic. And I mean, the magic is necessary to make up for Zandra not being there to meet me with an orange ribbon on her suitcase. Then my new boss will pick me up.

There may or may not be internet at the CROUS building, but it’s Reims, so there’s a wifi McDonalds down the street where I can e-mail my parents to tell them I’m alive. There also may or may not be bedding in the CROUS apartment. So I may have to buy some. Also I have to get a new SIM card for my phone. Wild times in general.

But right now I’m just eating lunch (homemade bread and homemade pesto) and Boris is sleeping on the little step to the backdoor, oh he’s awake now. I’m pretty much done packing so I’m trying not to be too contemplative of my summer. It was long! I don’t think I’ve spent this much time at home since the summer after my freshman year of college. Dad and I are going for barbeque tonight. I guess I don’t really need to miss things too much since I’ll be back for Christmas.

I got my visa! The consulate had magically received (today, I think) the piece of paper that I needed from the ANAEM to get my visa. The woman asked me to pay but I told her I thought it was free so she called around and I didn’t have to pay ($135). Big sigh of relief.

I ate lunch afterward with Lisa L and then she showed me her new house. It’s very nice. Her kitties were nice too.

little section on assistants and lecteurs and it looks a lot more familiar, so I’m much less worried about tomorrow. Mom went back to San Antonio for the week so if all goes well tomorrow, I’ve seen her for the last time till Christmas, which is not really so daunting. I hope to buy my ticket home for Xmas (from lastminute.com’s French site, it’s super cheap) as soon as I get paid in euros for September. Yeah, all this work I did in September. It consisted mostly of angst. Lots of angst. I felt like a teenager again. I went in for a massage and the woman said I was tense. I didn’t tell her the story. But then I suspect they always say that.

So I’m mostly packed. I went to Radio Shack for a new adaptor today, since the other one wandered off on its own adventure, and this new one is “universal.” Very useful for that hairdryer I bought in Japan. I kid. I had to walk through Dillard’s to get to Radio Shack so I ended up buying new underwear, which I think is a defendable (defensible?) purchase.

My mom and I went to the BV Embroiderers’ Guild’s 30th Anniversary lunch yesterday at the Kyle House. It was a very nice way to wrap up three and a half months spent in Texas (minus one in Colorado). I’d never been to the Kyle House but apparently people get married there and stuff. The food was really good. The embroidery was really cool. The people were fun to talk to. I gained a set of plastic pearls. All around a good time. Then we went to the Bryan Library where I made copies and took out more travel books. It’s becoming an addiction. So I’ve been reading about Prague and Poland some more.

Well I’ll try to remember to update tomorrow when/if I get the visa. Oh and the TGV Est has a really convenient line running from CDG directly to Champagne-Ardenne TGV so I won’t have to deal with Paris. Huzzah!

No original copies of my documents in the mail today. I guess I’ll be hedging my bets on Monday at the consulate with faxed and e-mailed copies. How nice things would be if it were possible to talk to people at the Houston consulate or if my employers had figured out that they should send my stuff by faster mail. The real problems here are that

1) I never really figured out what process to use as a lectrice at the Houston Consulate. There is no specific information on the website about us, and there is no way to contact with the Houston Consulate (I tried like 8 different ways) to find out. The Chicago consulate has something for us but it makes no sense at all based on how I was hired (which I think is the normal way that lecteurs are hired).
2) What we’re doing isn’t even really in line with the instructions on the HC website for a normal “work visa.” The website says that the immigration offices in France should send these documents directly to the consulate, so I don’t know why we’re doing it this way, and I don’t know if the Houston Consulate will care that we are. I feel like they shouldn’t, because the documents I have are both from the ANAEM and the DTEFP. So all bases should be covered…
3) IF they accept copies and not originals.

Basically I feel like I’m working on this in the dark. It’s hard to get excited about leaving when you aren’t ever sure that it’s going to happen. I’m a weird combination of really irritated about all this and kind of apathetic. I mean, who knows if I should be irritated or not? NO ONE WILL TELL ME. I hate this. I want it to be Monday NOW so that I know if I have to shell out $175 to change my ticket AGAIN, which I will not be happy about, since it would have cost only $40-ish to send this stuff by 2-day international mail.

Anyway, I should know by Monday at noon. I’m probably getting worked up for nothing. If all goes well, I’ll see my mom for the last time (till Xmas) tomorrow evening when she heads back to San Antonio.

I dunno what it was I had against Lonely Planet books (maybe it was just my undying love for Let’s Go) but Lonely Planet Africa (from whenever, post-2000, I’m too lazy to look up the date and why isn’t it on the cover? Let’s Go 1 Lonely Planet 0) is awesome. Okay that sentence got slightly self-contradictory due to parenthicals. I apologize. The point is I’m having a blast reading about where I can sleep AND get a hot shower in Morocco and Tunisia and about where to never travel in Africa, at least not till [fill in here] war is over. I’m really tempted to just keep this book but it’s on my dad’s library card so I think he would have something to say about that. Plus I guess I don’t REALLY believe in stealing from public libraries (which btw don’t exist in France, U.S. 1 France 0–umm I guess the scoring is actually more complicated than that). And let me just say that I am categorically opposed to parentheses-within-parentheses. Though not, apparently, opposed to jumping back and forth nonsensicaly between parentheticals and non-parentheticals. Hey, who went to publishing camp and became a punctuation nerd? Oh wait, I was always a punctuation nerd.

Well now, that paragraph went off on an unforeseeable direction. So, Lonely Planet Africa is fascinating and seemingly useful. I’ve discovered that the three African countries (besides the southeast which is not a whole lot closer to France than to the US) that I’d want to travel to are Tunisia, Morocco, and Senegal. Sadly, because of war/boundary issues there is no way to travel between these three countries so maybe I’ll just stick to Morocco. Malavika is already prepared to be bullied into going there with me.

My small bag must be approaching fifty pounds. I almost stubbed my toe on it last night, and small bags shouldn’t be able to stub toes. I need to go shopping this weekend and buy
1) Replacement adaptor (I will find the renegade one some day, I swear)
2) Clinique make-up (is it just me or is that stuff more expensive in France? in any case I’m almost out)
3) huge bottle of baby aspirin (I dropped my daily dosage for headaches and I mean Oprah says it’s healthy to take one baby aspirin a day so how can it be wrong?)
and surprisingly I think that’s it.

Let me just say I don’t think this post would have so many parentheses if I had more to do right now. Also let me add for my general readership (Laurel and Mom) that if you see a time stamp that doesn’t make any sense (5am) it’s because I never changed back from GMT+1 when I was in denial in June and I forgot to change it manually for that post. I mean seriously, I don’t stay up even till 11:30 here.