Need some help on a cultural awareness lesson. I gave my 2nd years the prologue to Almost French to read for a couple weeks’ time and now I’m planning the class for it. As part of the lesson I’d like to split them into small groups and give them a common situation and this task:

1) Think about your expectations for the situation. How/when do you expect to interact with other people? What procedures will be followed?
2) How could these expectations and procedures differ in another culture?

So here is my list of potential situations to give them:

- swimming pool
- doctor’s office
- eating dinner at a new friend’s house
- eating at a restaurant
- a day in high school
- buying groceries

The last two seem like they might be too long. Any ideas?

1) My directeur d’etudes

2) The youngish dude at Bouyges Telecom (who also not-so-helpfully informed me that it’s really best to just leave my iPhone in France because the charges a l’etranger are fou)

Is this normal? Directeur d’etudes also did the bise (a la poitevin, just once) which surprised me.

I’ve been slowly realizing since this last return to France that I’m still afraid of strangers in France. They make me nervous. I don’t know how to talk to them, I don’t know how to not make them mad, my French gets all messed up and people start telling me what croissants are.

I thought I’d gotten the hang of it. I think I’ve definitely gotten the hang of talking to your average office worker, like the woman at the MGEN. With the less friendly ones, it’s mostly just wait till the end of the conversation when they will suddenly be all smiles and thank yous and have a nice days. (Actually, the people at the MGEN have always been pretty nice.)

So, I thought these were generally the rules: Don’t expect a stranger (such as the cashier) to smile at you and make small talk, in fact, expect them sometimes to even just completely ignore you except for the mandatory “bon soir” and “au revoir.” Don’t be a weird anglo-saxon* and make their day more complicated. And if you play it right, you’ll probably get a smile at the end of the transaction. Right?

But more and more I feel like I screw up these simple interactions in inexplicable ways. My roommate Marie seems to bring out the best in everyone. She’s ready with a joke no matter who she’s talking to and they always respond positively like it’s the most normal thing in the world to be joking around with a stranger. I can’t pull this off even when I know it’s completely kosher, like when the German train in front of you catches fire and you’re all stuck for about three hours. I think a normal French person would have a hey-dey joking around with strangers in that situation.

On the other hand, I think I’ve always been awkward with people I don’t know. Like when you’re little and you want to buy an ice cream cone and you ask your mom to do it for you and she gives you the money and all of the sudden it’s you who has to go talk to the stranger and you almost curl up into fetal position right there. I think there’s a part of me that’s still like that. It’s just less obvious in the States because people are so freaking friendly. Especially in Austin. I was so stunned at the difference when I moved to Austin and strangers were all of the sudden asking me ordinary questions and having ordinary conversations with no uneasiness on either side.

I dunno, this is the beginning of my third year here. I’m not sure I’ll ever be good at talking to des inconnus.

*An important note: technically speaking, I am not anglo-saxon. Just to be clear on that count. I’m only anglo-saxon in the deluded French sense where they’ve somehow forgotten that the Normans conquered the Saxons a long time ago and mixed everything up. (Sub-note: Am not Norman Irish either. Am Gaelic Irish. At least, the Fitzpatrick name is. I’m sure none of you really care about this.)

I am finishing up my masters report and just about have marre of it. I’m getting ten more pages of revisions from my advisor tomorrow and that is the last round. Then I have to write the acknowledgements, give the abstract another read, send it for a formatting check, and send it to my second reader (my department head) by Monday. Fortunately my advisor is Canadian and doesn’t care about American Thanksgiving next week, and I think my department head told us last year in class that she goes out for Chinese food on Thanksgiving.

I also have to choose a title. My advisor likes “Knowledge of Anglicisms of French Learners at the University Level,” which is what I had on my IRB application, so I probably will go with some form of that. But I like colons. And I like the adorable errors my subjects made in my study. So, if I were to change it to “Fill-in-here with subject-made error”: Knowledge of Anglicisms of French Learners at the University Level, which one do you think is the best among these options?

1) The Bulls have won thanks to an amazing coaching. (A bit long, I think.)
2) Who wants a chewing gum?
3) I want to play basket.
4) First, let’s make a brainstorming. (Am leaning toward this one.)

I think I might have to buy a new computer. Here’s why:

1) My superdrive no longer reads any sort of disk. It tries for a few minutes and then spits them out. As recently as August it was still recognizing disks, since clearly I was able to install Snow Leopard. It couldn’t really read DVDs (it imagined they were scratched up) but it could at least recognize that I had put a DVD in the drive and not a piece of toast.

(I told one of my students last week that I would burn him a copy of David Sedaris’ Me Talk Pretty One Day and now I can’t! Blurg. Also can’t play the Benabar and Renan Luce CDs I bought yesterday. This is bumming me out.)

2) The wireless card has been wack for about a year now. It doesn’t like protected networks if someone else is on the network. And the past two days I haven’t been able to get on our network even if no one else is on it. This is okay because I can use our neighbors’ unprotected network (for now… it’s been having a little troule connecting to that too) but it means there’s no internet for me up in my bedroom.

3) It’s gotten pretty freakin slow. I’m repairing permissions today and updating the software so that might help. Otherwise I think a RAM update might be in order.

4) This computer is 2.5 years old. I’ve replaced the hard drive twice and the microphone has never worked.

Am I forgetting anything? The logic board still works clearly. But for a new superdrive I’ve read it could cost up to $200 (I could buy an external one for much less I think), who knows what’s wrong with the wireless card (it could even be software), and I think those run about $90. I could probably sell this thing on e-bay for $300. Buying a MacBook Pro in the States over Christmas would cost me 800 euros if this exchange rate keeps up. How much money and time is worth investing in this thing? How much time would I actually gain?

In any case I have to wait six weeks to decide because I’m not paying 1050 euros for a computer when I could pay 800. Plus I want it in English with an American keyboard. Certain things on this computer are still in French from when I did the first hard drive replacement in Reims at the Apple retailer there.

On all other counts I do love this computer. But next time I won’t buy the cheapest thing possible.

I finally went to a training session on how to use the university’s new online platform and now we finally have an online platform up and running for our first-year classes. I kind of want to go nuts editing with it but I don’t have much to add for the moment. It just opens up so many possibilities, for having them watch videos at home etc. I could even make them have a discussion, though I didn’t much enjoy that myself in grad school. Not to mention, now they can turn their homework in in simple text form online instead of e-mailing me a mess of .pdfs, .odts, .docs, .docxs (which my Mac can read but not my computer at school), and some other strange things I had never seen before.

V. tempting to just start adding things left and right.

Today is the anniversary of the armistice for which there are so many roads named in France and so I don’t work. I think maybe jour fériés are all about the night before. Normally I would have had to get up at 6:15 to go teach at 8 am. Instead, last night I went out with my roommates’ friends and got home at 4 am. We ended up walking home because everyone who had a car had left centre ville before us. It’s a forty-five minute walk which is bearable when you’re not alone. But I hope I won’t ever really have to do it all by myself.

Today it’s very gray out, there’s no one around (Julien and Marie have both taken part or all of this week for vacation) except me and Alexis, and I’ve already vacuumed and mopped the living room. So now I have to actually get some boulot done. I’m touching up my masters report to send off to my advisor and I need to give grades for my heures supp students whom I’m now done with hurrah. Heures supp students always turn out to be problematic in some way. I think it’s because I have them for such a short period of time. And that they always turn out to be a liiiiiiittle bit lazy. What is that about?

I’ve ordered boots from Beryl because they didn’t have my size. They should be here tomorrow. Am excited. Also have discovered the problem with iPhone + winter: gloves! I need to buy some where the fingers flip off.

I think I’ve decided to bring my violin back after Christmas. If I’m going to stay here two years I’m going to need to find a way to play it. I might just go ask at the conservatoire if they have any groups that do NOT meet on Tuesday nights 8:30-10:30 which is after the buses stop running and also the evening before I teach at 8 am.

It’s fun (maybe more like surreal) sometimes to think about the different trajectories my life might have taken had I made different choices. The only reason I came to France after college was because I didn’t study abroad in college. If I had studied abroad, would I have been dying to come back? Or would I have been happy staying in the U.S.? And then, I really only thought I was coming to France for a year. Dating my French ex first put the idea in my head of staying. What if J and I had never dated? What if I hadn’t fallen in love with France? Would I be working in publishing in New York like I had planned? Or would it all have sooner or later somehow have led me to teaching languages? I’m listening to a song I listened to a lot at the end of my assistant year and it’s put me back in that mindset when all of the sudden France was possibly a longer-term thing than seven months, and my life since and now has all more or less been a result of that change.

Bar le Duc was very pretty in April, and I was spending a lot of time going to Nancy and back and crashing at Chelsey’s and the not-yet-ex’s. Chelsey and I drank a lot of creme peche with Zandra and woke up in the morning hungover and made mishmashes of veggies with scrambled eggs to our hearts’ content. They were really good times. I think I might still be trying to find my way back up to that high.

Today I’m supposed to be working only on my masters report. But I really don’t have much left (conclusion, formatting, editing) so I’m going to blog for a little bit instead of plowing on through.

Last night Marie and I went to see Bénabar. (For those of you not familiar, look here or here.) Apparently the salle in Poitiers is known to have sort of terrible acoustics and they weren’t great but the concert was really good. There were nine musicians—violinist, clarinetist, brass, guitars, etc. Bénabar jumps around a LOT and did a lot of funny things in between the songs—it wasn’t just one song after another. It was really funny. He didn’t sing much off of his new album which is good because I don’t know any of the songs though I mean to buy it soon (along with Renan Luce and Tegan & Sara). Anyway, win for Bénabar, will definitely go see him again in the future if I ever get the chance.

Otherwise, not much de nouveau. Got my new orthotics and ordered some boots to go with them toute de suite because I am cold here. I think it’s because we haven’t turned on the heat yet. Am supposed to send my finished draft of my masters report to my advisor by the end of the week. Wednesday is a holiday so I think I’ll be able to get it done.

And the iPhone is still awesome. I’m back on Twitter and actually using it. Add me if you’re on it too, my pseudo is eyelean.

I guess I didn’t post about anything but the iPhone (still very exciting—have been skyping people from it). I went down to Avignon last week and it was lots of fun. Z and I sort of meant to go to Aix or maybe Orange one day but we kept being too lazy. We cooked good food, we ate a picnic on the island, we walked around lots, and we went to Sarah’s awesome Halloween party and met awesome people.

The train ride on the way back was le bordel, pardon my French. I’m sure it was because it was the last day of the vacances but it’s possible there were storms too or something. I took the train direct from Avignon to St Pierre des Corps that I didn’t have to switch in Paris (Lyon –> Montparnasse), but it turns out it’s not very direct. It goes to Lyon. Then to Massy TGV. Then to StPdCorps. Here’s what that looks like:

And then I had the 40-minute trip to Poitiers. Anyway we left Avignon 15 minutes late and arrived in St P des Corps 40 minutes late, so I missed my connection. The next connection was only a half hour later, but everything was so screwed up that they held us there (with a big platform mix-up so that they announced several times on the train that it was going to Poitiers and not Tours) while they let the TGVs get out. I got home an hour and a half late. I got one of those envelopes to send in so maybe I’ll get some money back.

So now I’m back doing things like practice TOEICs and watching The Office in class. I’ve done the Office in class before and I can just about not stand to watch the English version anymore. I’ve just watched it too many times and David Brent makes me too uncomfortable.

I’m also trying to finish off my report in the next couple of weeks but I don’t think it’ll be too hard.

And that’s what’s up. That and the iPhone.