Maps- They're Useful!

            WOW I HAVE ZERO ATTENTION SPAN.  I totally gave up/forgot I was writing in that last post.  I thought about putting on a nice little ending there and pretending like I had completed it, but that would be dishonest (and require more writing than I already have to do!).  Anyways, I keep putting off blogging because I have so much to blog about now, not having internet and all for the first two weeks I have been here.  What happens when you put off blogging?  More shit happens and then you have to write more.  That habit is stopping now, thank you very much!

            So as many of you know, the French are funny people- at least to Anglophones (people who natively speak English y’all).  They are really lovely people.  They will be your friends forever and give you little air cheek kisses and make you crepes and junk.  They may however at the same time drive you stark-raving mad.  For instance, after my arrival Martine, my coordinatrice, picked me up from the train station which was awesome since I don’t really know where I am or where I should be going.  This was super nice of her. She also brought me some stuff, yay!  However, a map of the town or my giant campus were not what was a part of my welcome package nor considered the most important things I would need in my first few days here. To get me through my first few days in Amiens I received: a comforter and sheet (super necessary since I am living in the dorms), biscuits (I count these as necessary because I was friggin’ starving when I got here), an electric tea kettle (eh, ok, nice to have), coffee and tea (again nice to have but not necessary in my transitioning to Amiens).  To reiterate, I DO NOT HAVE A MAP.  I am also super dazed from traveling.  Martine seems eager to leave and after showing me where I live and getting keys for me, she asks if I need anything else.  I ask her where I can find a supermarket.  Martine speaks really fast in both English and in French and if I take more than a millisecond to process what she’s saying she’s already trying to clarify for me or is asking if I understand while looking at me like I’m a lost puppy.  Her directions went something like this “Go out the other entrance and go the opposite direction we came in at.  It’s on the corner.”  Ok cool.  I don’t ask for further clarification because I figure I am a smart person and I can find it.  I just want her to stop looking at me like I ride the short bus. 

            After my much needed shower (which is impossible to temperature control- there is only ONE button you keep pressing until it’s kind of warm and it runs for about 20 seconds each time it’s pressed) I am off on my first adventure en France.  I have my book bag (no store-supplied shopping bags here!), my walking shoes, and vague instructions- I’m off!  I go out the only entrance I know, and walk away from the direction we drove up in.  I walk for about 15 minutes and I have no luck.  I walk back.  I walk down a road I happen see a billboard at the end of. What luck!  It’s says something about the market I am looking for.  I start to follow where the arrow is pointing…. and there are no more arrows after that!  (Apparently in France when they are directing you, they only again vaguely point you in the direction you want to go, no further instruction should be necessary.) I walk back up to make sure I hadn’t in my jet-lagged stupor wandered down the wrong road.  Alas, I had been on the supposedly right road.  I wander up and across the main road that the school is on because I see a Carrefour sign (which is essentially French Wal-Mart- I was desperate!) and start walking that way.  Signs here tell you in minutes how long it is to drive there and/or kilometers (obviously).  Neither of which are really helpful to me because I am on foot and the American educational system is really lax on kids knowing metric.  That evening I erred on “cities are more walk-able here!” side and kept on trucking.  But again, there were no further signs of instruction after the first one.  I walk back.  I head down the road with the billboard again and keep going, and going, and going.  I was like the little determined Energizer bunny.  I remember that it’s supposed to be at a place called the “Vallee des Vignes” or something and I start seeing medical buildings with that on them.  I follow those.  I end up wandering through a medical park.  STILL NO GROCERY STORE.  At this point I had been wandering over two hours looking for a grocery store that is supposed to be ten minutes from my school.  I give up.  I wander back towards a pizza place I saw across from my school.  Yup, the first night I was in France, I had pizza. 

            Now, I am not great at French, and I will admit that.  I have however mastered a few things, with ordering food being one of them.  This however made zero difference at “Allo Mario’s!”  I walked in and it was busy and there were giant stacks of pizza boxes covering just about half of this tiny take-out restaurant, and two other couples waiting on pizza.  There is a big lit up sign with their specialités, and hot-dog!  They have paninis, and they’re cheap, perfect!  But wait, you might say, didn’t you have pizza?  Yes, yes I did have pizza, I am getting to that.  I walked up to the sweaty, bald man at the counter furiously taking phone orders and waited for a break in the calls to place my own.  He looked up at me and in perfect French I said “Je voudrais le Chicken Panini” (I said “chicken” because that’s what it was called on the menu- I’m not that bad at French!)  He looked at me like I had grown a second head.  “Comment?” My flabby, French pizza cashier asked.  “I would like a Chicken Panini,” I said, again, in French.  “Le poulet?” “Oui, je veux le poulet, s’il vous plait,” (Yes, I want the chicken, please).  He then points to the three different sized pizza boxes he has stacked on the counter.  I knew this was going awry.  He tells me that the middle one is cheaper and I am so hungry and tired I just agree.  Ten minutes later out came my chicken pizza.  I tried to tell him I had asked for the sandwich (which is just goddamned “le sandwich” in French, this vocabulary was not difficult) and finally dough-making/tossing dude beside him tells me they only do that at lunch.  Super-duper.  I would have asked for the vegetarian had I known I was ordering pizza!  I sigh and take my pizza home. It was pretty good, although it had crème-fraiche on it and that was kind of weird.  I had to throw most of it out too due to my lack of frigo situation.

So yeah, I really needed a map- but I had my caffeine in the morning!

I'm in France!!!

            So this is literally the first moment that I have had a break since I got here!  This last week has really been hectic.  From the moment I got off the plane last Wednesday I have just been rushing to something or other. 

            The trip to Amiens from Paris got me back into the swing of things transit-wise here which can be confusing for foreigners.  I had to buy a train ticket from the airport to get to Amiens, which involved me standing in the wrong line at first, but I met two other assistants that were working in different cities so I got to chat with them and have some people with whom to navigate Charles de Gaulle (and get in the correct line!). My train departure time quickly approached so after making a quick call to my contact person, Martine, about when I should be in Amiens, I was heading down to the voies (platforms) to catch my train. 

            Oh, the trains in France.  So the way you are supposed to take the train is that you buy your ticket (duh) but then you have to “composter” your ticket before you get on which means that you have to have this little machine punch a hole in it (and I totally forgot to do this in my rush), then you have to find this lit up picture of the train on the voie to figure out about where your car will stop so you can get on the train in the right place.  I sort of remembered how to do this from when I studied abroad here four years ago but it was pretty fuzzy so I was kind of nervous and it didn’t help that I gave myself a whopping 10 minutes to remember what to do on the voie.  However I found a very nice Belgian girl who helped me out.  Well she didn’t know where to stand either, but she alleviated my fear about getting on in the wrong place, which I still managed to do somehow after being told by her mom about where I should be (I was overly concerned about how to get my bags on since they were huge).  I ended up walking back through a few cars to my seat which ended up being next to the Belgian girl again.  Her name was Alexandra and she was really nice and we talked about where we were coming from since we were both coming from the airport.  I told her about my assistant job and living in France again and she said she was coming back from Cuba from an internship.  Her internship had to be cut short though because she was sick and they put her in the hospital for two weeks and wouldn’t let her out (!!).  She wasn’t sure why they wouldn’t release her because her Spanish isn’t that great and they wouldn’t tell her Cuban fiancé what was wrong either because he technically wasn’t her husband.  Her parents ended up having to come and get her and the hospital finally released her to them. I was pretty shocked by this story and she then relayed that was why she was engaged so young- so that her fiancé could leave Cuba.  I wanted to chat more with her but my stop arrived in a scant thirty minutes but she invited me to come visit her in Bruges and in Brussels so I can’t wait to have some free time to see her and Belgium.

            After the train which had taken 20 minutes to go twice as far as the bus needed to go, I was on a bus for an hour from Picardie to Amiens.  Well it was an hour after we  I am not sure why I had to do this because there is a train station in Amiens, but my general motto in France is “pourquoi pas” or “why not”.  Often I don’t know why things are done the way they are done and they tend to be counterintuitive to my American sensibilities, but I have learned to accept that that’s just they way it’s going to happen and “pourquoi pas”- things can be done in other ways even if they don’t make total sense.  I also met another assistant on the bus to Amiens.  His name was José and he was going to be a Spanish assistant at another school in Amiens.  It was nice to have a fellow foreigner to hang out with and assuage my anxiety about not knowing what exactly to expect when I got here. 

            Martine was gracious enough to meet me at the bus stop and take me back to the school.  As we drove to school I realized how adorable Amiens is.  The city buildings are monstrous and stately while the houses are candy-colored, tiny, and lined up along cobblestone roads along the Somme river that sleepily flows through Amiens.  Across the river is the St. Leu quarter- the oldest part of town.  You can also see the Le Notre Dame Cathedral d’Amiens from just about any point in centre ville- it’s apparently the largest in the world!

            Arriving at school I was stunned to see such a large campus.  There are actually three schools on my campus- Edouard Gand, Edouard Branly, and my school, Louis-Thuillier.  It’s as big as a college campus.  I had a hard time finding my way to and from my dorm that first night.  Ah!  Martine told me when I arrived that I had dorm accommodations and I was thrilled to know that I wouldn’t have to traipse around Amiens looking for an apartment and then attempt to rent one with my barely passable français.  The accommodations are hardly anything to brag about though.  They are in one of the buildings that has yet to see the reconstruction being done currently everywhere else on campus, the furthest from both entrances, and no kitchen or internet.  I have a bed, desk, sink, and wardrobe in my room and down the hall there are showers and toilets.  I live with two other assistants- Gwenola (Guh-ven-oh-lah), the German assistant, and Marilyn, the Spanish assistant from Costa Rica.  They are both very sweet.  It is all French all the time just about in my little dorm set up- Gwenola knows some English and Marilyn knows none, so it is excellent practice for my French, but it is also nice that if I am really lost usually Gwenola can explain pretty well in English.  We live in a six bedroom hall and we are only using three rooms so we turned the other rooms into a laundry room (I can’t find a dryer on campus so we hang our wet laundry up here), a kitchen as we have been promised a frigo (fridge) and a micro-onde (microwave), and a common room- which I need to have the cleaning ladies unlock again because we were also promised a TV and would like to put it in there.  Right now though our kitchen only consists of an electric kettle, an extra desk being used as the table, and a wardrobe as a pantry.  I need to find out who I bug for the frigo and micro-onde- I am really tired of eating overly processed (but shelf stable) food!