I was back on Strange Maps today and found this excellent thing:

My favorite part is the “rainy area.”

I finally got my money from my French bank account and paid off my massive (well, to me) credit card bill from my plane ticket home. It feels so good. Although it would feel better if the dollar had wait just a LITTLE bit longer to rise.

We sort of have internet in the house but it’s pretty spotty. We’re sharing with the guys next door while we decide if we’re going to try to sort out the AT&T mess. It’s funny, I’ve heard so many nightmare stories about starting internet in France, and yet I never had any problems there. (I know I was lucky.) And yet I get back to the States and it’s kind of a royal mess.

may just be the coolest thing ever. It’s affirming all my frustrations with teaching pronunciation to French students English in France. Not that I tried that much. It was something I started with my students last year because I was tired of their not realizing they were skipping their h’s and saying things they didn’t mean to say. I thought, well, it helped me to know that [y] (tu) was different from [u] (tout) so why not at least give them the chance to realize that sheet and shit don’t sound the same? And that it might matter one day which one they say? It also goaded me in general that (as far as I could tell) their teachers had never bothered to point out these distinctions and to impart to their students how important they are.

So I spent three days (scattered throughout the year) on three different things that bothered me in their pronunciation and which I suspected their previous teachers had never explained to them. I made three lists of minimal pairs (one for h, one for th, and one for ee/i–sorry no IPA on here) and made them guess which word the person on their team was saying. But secretly I wondered if there was really any reason to do this, and if it actually helped them, since maybe I could have been the only person in the history of foreign-language learning who learns that way. But no! Anyway I’m not going to quote anything here since that seems questionable and quite possibly boring to everyone but me, but the article I kept writing exclamation points in was from Rodney H. Jones, called “Beyond ‘Listen and Repeat,’” from System, and it makes me feel pretty good about the seemingly random crap I threw at my students last year.

In related news, I AM still kind of resenting La Poste’s loss of my phonetics book. Bitches and hos.

We did go to Barton Springs yesterday and it was COLD. But still cool.

I forgot to mention that I finally got my new drivers license (which I’ve been in the process of renewing since, um, June 16th) and it’s all horizontal and grown-up.

Classes start tomorrow. Weird. I dunno what it’ll be like to be a student again or what kind of rhythm I’ll have. I hope it’s not too much of a shock considering the excessive free time I’ve had over the past two years. Tonight am going to eat dinner at the other FLE (actual FLE as in not ESL) student’s house where I hear there are francophones.

Hope these posts haven’t gotten too boring…

I’m in a coffee shop and it’s raining and it won’t stop. There’s supposed to be a twenty-minute limit on storms here. For serious. I’m on my bike so I can’t really leave till it’s over.

No internet at the house till Friday in all likelihood. Also my phone is being really finicky, I think I might have to cave and get a new one. It worked just long enough for me to get a text message but not for me to respond to it. And now I can’t go back to the house where I know it works because it’s raining. Also, housemate and I were going to go to Barton Springs this afternoon and unless it gets sunny again I don’t really see that happening.

Am slightly cranky about this situation, if you can’t tell.

A. So I was super bored and jacked up on coffee (okay it really doesn’t take much since I never drink it) last night and I didn’t have internet so that’s when I wrote that last post and that’s why it’s a bit different from normal.

B. The French Post lost my books. I got my books in the mail today only they weren’t in there. The box was taped up and suspiciously light. All that was in there was my binder of teaching materials from the past two years (which is good, because that was not replaceable). So somewhere along the way they lost:

1) L’Histoire de la France pour les Nuls
2) A Course in Phonetics by Peter Ladefoged
3) Cultural Misunderstandings (how ironic)
4) French or Foe (again)
5) Les Français by Laurence Wylie and Jean-François Briere (my copy did not have that cover though)
5) And the French cookbook that my boss gave me the last day I saw her.

There was a letter from USPS in Saint Paul saying what had happened in very vague terms, and that if I was “unsatisfied” (duh) with the “condition” (read: absence) of the “contents” (what contents?) of my package I should contact them with a list of what was missing.

Dammit! I paid 76 euros to lose that shit!

C. I wimped out and am in CS for the weekend where there are people and dogs and internet.

A few people have been nice enough to ask me this and I can’t for the life of me figure out what to tell them. I guess people are just interested and the interest is a real compliment. It means they assume that I’m still sane and that I have a reason that they can understand. But it’s hard to explain if you’ve never felt that way about a place.

I miss a lot of small, daily, barely noticeable things. And then I miss the bigger sense of accomplishment that I had from living there.

I miss the unspoken social rules between people and the comfort of knowing them. Something said without a smile isn’t necessarily unfriendly. If you respond correctly, at the end of the conversation you’re usually rewarded with one and it comes as a compliment.

I miss, stupid as this sounds, asking where the bathroom is in French. It was the only thing, I think, that I always had to say in French in France. Wherever I was, whoever I was with, I was never in an establishment where I would have dared to speak English to a stranger, and I almost always needed a bathroom.

I miss the closeness of the streets and the buildings, and the smallness of the rooms and the cars. It was like we had learned to use the space around us, and what’s more, we had done it, for the most part, years ago. I miss the ordinary buildings, sometimes full of shitty apartments, that were extravagantly old. I miss the dull, ugly garage doors that led the way into beautiful or simply cozy apartment buildings. I always felt like I had been let in on a secret when I got to enter one. I miss the way I could arrive everywhere by walking and never walk through empty lots, even in Bar le Duc.

I miss the escapes into the countryside, where there was more space but the same rules seemed to hold. Every house seemed to be old and every family who owned one was in the process of renovating it. Houses seemed to hide themselves, behind gardens, or down tiny roads, as if waiting to be discovered, and they were always worth discovering. I miss the white lines in the middle of the roads, and how they hardly ever had a shoulder, and the signs that announced the city limits by crossing out the name of the town.

I miss the feeling that no one, once known, was allowed to be transient, and I got very used to that. I expect all of these people to come back into my life at some point and I don’t care when, as long as they know they are welcome and that I expect them. And that doesn’t seem strange to them.

I miss the sense of a world slowly opening up and letting me in, and my feeling that I deserved it. I built a life for myself among things and people that were incredibly new to me, and I want to have the opportunity for that to grow old. Everything daily feels special there because it’s a familiarity that I’ve earned.

In the end I don’t think I can explain, I can just keep trying. There do exist people who aren’t as confused by it, who don’t require much of an explanation, and, as you’d expect, they’re mostly French. I don’t know if it’s just homeland bias, though. I think they have a culture full of people who long to live in the one place they love best. It’s almost always the region where they grew up, so of course I am not quite normal. But I don’t flabbergast them the way I do some Americans. They don’t assume that I hate the States. I think they would respond the same way if I felt that way about Texas and not France. They just accept that I love France because places are meant to be loved.

1) the trains
2) living so close to the train station
3) living so close to the center of town
4) how it wasn’t hot

Yeah they thought it got hot but it was a big joke. And I mean I CAN ride my bike around here, it’s just that I’m a big ball of sweat by the time I reach my destination. I shouldn’t complain though, Austin is really good about bike lanes and I see tons of other bikers out braving the heat. I’m clearly just a wimp.

And umm that’s mostly what I wanted to say for now.

I’ve got a 3-day pass for ACL!

I love my new room I just wish there was internet in it. But then, the lack of it is probably getting me out of the house more. I got my UT ID card this afternoon. I was gross from biking around all afternoon in the heat (have I mentioned it’s hot here? like not that bad, 90 degrees, that is not that bad till you’re on a bike all afternoon).

I’m back at JP’s Java and they have put Ryan Adams songs on a loop. I don’t think they’re all from the same album. Right now we’re on Gold but earlier I’m pretty sure we were on the last Whiskeytown album.