France: The avocados are ripe and the lawyers are dead

Last week seemed to be a constant stream of those “studying Spanish literature did not set me up for the Spanish real-world” realizations, after A.) struggling to understand the Internet technician’s over-the-phone instructions on how to fix our faulty router and having to decide whether it would just be easier to incur the 50 euro fee of being transferred to an English-speaking technician and B.) failing to explain myself (I was late for class and whoever was in the women’s room was taking FOREVER) appropriately to an elderly man in the men's room, who had entered unannounced while I was finishing my business, and who began simultaneously peeing and scolding me for having blurred the bathroom gender line (In my defense, the men’s bathroom was empty when I first entered, and in many a sociology class we have discussed the concept of gender as a spectrum rather than a dichotomy.)

Anyway, having recently resolved to give up on learning more Spanish and instead stick to hanging out solely with my group of American expats and broken English-speaking 7th graders, my confidence in my Spanish speaking abilities has now been renewed! Nothing like a weekend in a country where you know not a lick of the language—beyond the universally known and overly recited lyric from a certain, sexually explicit Moulin Rouge song—to remind you that learning a second language is an arduous process indeed. This weekend in France, I found myself back at square one. After four days of wandering the streets and subways of Paris (no run-ins with Owen Wilson or Hemingway), and trying to establish lines of basic communication with Kim’s ex-boyfriend’s non-English speaking best friend, I am grateful to be back in Spain ordering tortilla and water from the tap once again with zero difficulty. Not to say that attempting to learn French for a weekend wasn’t entertaining:

My roomie Nicole has become recently quite intent on learning French, and as a first act of commitment toward achieving this goal, purchased a French dictionary a couple weeks before leaving for France. Apparently more nostalgic for the rush of midterm cramming than we thought, we buried our heads in said dictionary for the whopping 1.5 hour flight to Paris, laboring over the (what would turn out to be very wrong) pronunciation of phrases such as, “Where is the subway stop?” and “No, I do not have a cigarette.” We very quickly learned that our preliminary efforts were somewhat in vain, as a great number of people in Paris, in addition to hordes of American and British exchange students, speak English. Or, they understand charismatic hand gesturing and displays of charades better than they do our (overly dramatic) attempts at a French accent. Also, in many cases the French accent was flat out wrong. Apparently Nicole’s attempted pronunciation of “the avocados are ripe” was actually more along the lines of “the lawyers are dead.” Who knew?

So we decided on perpetuating the stereotype that Americans speak nothing but English. That is, for our 2 days in Paris, until we traveled southeast to the town of Besancon to meet up with Kim and her French ex-boyfriend (Ali) and a crew of his non English-speaking friends. More on that in a minute. I will now both boast and complain about Paris.

If Valentine’s Day is a slap in the face to singles of the world, Paris is a blow to the gut. While I allowed myself to think that the bridge across from the Louvre, the one where couples cornily attach (often heart-shaped) padlocks engraved with their names to the chain links in the fence, and then toss the keys into the waters of the Seine below, as a symbol of commitment of their everlasting fidelity, was tres adorable; I won’t say that I didn’t secretly will the toddler I saw trying to guess the combinations of various padlocks, into unlocking one of them. Paris could use a dose of heartbreak to balance out the rampant and very public displays of affection that are probably not hindered by its conveniently cuddly-cold weather.

Side-note: I have also resolved that my next move will be to a cold climate. Scarves and pea coats have on guys what we will call the “tuxedo effect,” in that it is impossible for a dude not to look handsome in said getup. Paris is like an interminable wedding. On the subway, in the streets, in cafes: dressed-for-the-cold guys are just begging to be photographed and placed into the pages of a wedding album. Books and reading glasses are not props. Unfortunately, neither are the cigarettes.

But really, Paris was awesome. I can see why people fall in love with the city. Felt like Buenos Aires but…less polluted and lesser chance of stepping in dog poop. Nicole and I did all the required, surface-level, touristy stuff in our 40-hour stint in Paris (day-long museum visits to be saved for subsequent, longer returns). Won’t bore you with the list, you probably know it well. Although I must say, our 2.5 hour night-visit to the Eiffel Tower had the potential to be very romantic, though in reality it mainly consisted of me apologizing to Nicole that I wasn’t her boyfriend (who she has resolved to make adorn a scarf and pea coat when she gets home).


While visiting all the necessary landmarks ranked high on our list, we are not ashamed to say that eating as much French food as possible during our stay ranked higher. We’ve been skimping on meals in Santander, but Paris would be the place to splurge. It took a single meal of escargot and fondue, followed by crème brulee and chocolate mousse, to realize that our budgets would be better fit for purchasing croissants and crepes from street vendors for the rest of our stay. And so it was. And now I will be eating broccoli and oatmeal for a week straight to counterbalance the effects of that.

On to Besancon.

If you start at Paris, and travel southeast on a bullet train at a speed of 320 km/h for 2 hours and 37 minutes, where do you end up? Just west of the Swiss border, in a town called Besancon.

Besancon is beautiful, fall-colored, and old as rocks. It sits on the Doubs River, which apparently Julius Caesar recognized as being of strategic importance back in his day, before years had even 3 digits. Besancon is known also for a huge citadel, which has been named a UNESCO World Heritage Site and has a zoo at the top whose inhabitants even seem cast under the romantic spells of distant Parisian winds—the lions reenacted for us perfectly the reunion between Simba and Nala after years apart. We crooned.

I think what I will remember about Besancon, though, is a smelly, overpriced club where Nicole and I attempted to put a pre-game’s learning worth of French conversation into use.

We felt confident before leaving for the club. We had been in the company of several native French speakers for the past few hours, who had helped us perfect some phrases that might be of use. I could number them on one hand:

1. I am from the United States.
2. How old are you?
3. Filet mignon.
4. I am a little bit drunk.
5. Black and yellow black and yellow black and yellow black and yellow.

Well-armed with the above phrases, in addition to some refreshed elementary school ballet vocabulary, we felt certain we would reign in only the most eligible, scarf-clad French bachelors that evening. We even went to the lengths of writing down the address of where we were staying, “17 Rue Grande,” on our wrists, in case flirtation at the bar necessitated our separation…not having yet mastered the “directions home” unit in French, we would just have to show our wrist to a cab driver in order to arrive safely home.

Turns out that…the only people we showed our wrists to were high school boys. Pointing animatedly to the “17” part of the address, strategically covering up the rest, was our unfortunately lame response to the question, “How old are you?” You see, in attempts to escape the awful smell and terrible music of the section of the club that was, what we will say, age-appropriate, Nicole and I had accidentally wandered into the middle of a high school prom. Telling (gesticulating to) people that we were 17 was a desperate disguise for, for the first time in our lives, feeling like cougars.

We spent the next day touring the Citadel and the streets of Besancon, before then venturing on to a 3-hour and 80-euros stint in Geneva, before flying home to Spain. So odd that a 1.5 hour flight drops you in a land where culture and customs are a world apart. What a welcome rush it was to hear Spanish spoken over the intercom in the Bilbao airport! Even the transit to Spain was a welcome relief…I was all ears and smiles during the presentation on emergency evacuations. I now feel fluent in Spanish, by comparison with my knowledge of French. Bring it on, fast-talking internet repairmen and angry male bathroom frequenters!

Guess I'm a teacher now...

It appears that life in the “club and bar district” of Santander has caught up with me. I find myself in bed with a raucous cough on a national holiday, when I should be out and about celebrating a day of no work, but instead have a box of Kleenex by my side, wondering if my nasal projections will ever return to their normal (colorless) color. But somehow I find this state worthy of celebration—a day of rest is long overdue, a feeling shared by the tall, dust-collecting pile of neglected movies, books (well, a Kindle), and introductory guitar music by my bed.

It’s pretty simple: I get sick when I am sleep deprived. Four months ago, “when I was in college,” my lifestyle worked well with this equation—if attending a 9am class would mean sacrificing three hours of quality sleep, alarm clock settings could be (too) easily adjusted. But now that reality is in check. I am no longer a selfish, sweatpants-clad, attend-class-at-my-will student who can afford to only feign paying attention, really just wondering how long I can fool my professor into thinking that my staring out the window at the sun frequenters not imprisoned in the dark lecture hall was really my method of pondering a difficult academic question.

I am instead, and so suddenly, a great purveyor of knowledge, who needs to be alert at all times in the classroom setting, and whose absence at school for even one day would go noted with distress by the throngs of bushy-haired, bright-eyed Spanish students who eagerly await my arrival each day, on their best behavior, minds primed to receive and pencils prepped to annotate the wisdom that spews from my all-knowing mouth.

Except that the students in fact do not display, ever, what would be generally accepted as even good behavior, and that little to no actual knowledge actually spews from my mouth. I refer specifically to one class of students, who are our equivalent of high school freshmen, and who find farts in class and flirting with their neighbors understandably more entertaining than listening to “An Introduction to the United Nations” in a language not their own. This doesn’t anger me at all, I totally get it—not that many years separate us—but it does strike a nerve with the teacher whose class this actually is, to whom I’m technically an assistant English teacher. What has, up to this point, typically ensued the out-of-place snicker or chortle in class has been a quickly escalating yelling match between students and teacher of a caliber I have never witnessed in an academic setting. What often results is that one or two kids will get kicked out of class, the others will try to suppress their laughter, but then one or two will catch my eye, and I will realize a moment too late that I have forgotten to match the expression of sternness and discipline of their Real Teacher, and have instead let a smile or poorly suppressed snicker escape what should have been my tightly drawn lips, which will cause them to chortle more loudly, and the Real Teacher to in turn to anger more, not realizing I am now an instigator as well, with the result being that the bell sounds before we complete even 1/5 of the material I had intended to cover, and the Real Teacher assigns them for homework essay topics like “The Meaning of Respect,” and I wonder whether my presence in class that day was truly that necessary.

Discipline issues in this particular class aside, I am digging this whole teaching thing. It feels natural. I feel like I have more control and influence over the other grade levels, and have developed especially an affinity for the “segundos” (8th graders) with whom I have the most class periods. They are technically in the bilingual program at their school, but I quickly learned that “bilingual” is a very relative term, meaning that I often feel like a very bright headlight shining into the eyes of several dozen petrified deer. In just two weeks though, they seem to have become more comfortable talking out loud in English—I quickly learned that games with candy rewards are the way to get them speaking—and it’s rewarding to think that maaaaaybe I am instilling in each of them a little bit of confidence in their abilities. The seniors/12th grade equivalents are equally awesome—I have 10 of them on my own, once a week, for conversation practice. They initially seemed limited in vocab, but now that I have learned that the boys (there are 7 of them) in this group are indeed capable of asking more than “Do you have a boyfriend?” in English, we have moved on to some cool conversation topics. Last week we debated smoking legislation in Spain. (I was shocked to discover that many of them were upset with Spain’s decision, this past spring, to outlaw smoking in pubs and clubs!)

Teaching is taxing, though. Lesson planning requires an output of creative energy and critical thought unlike that which I had imagined. Teachers have homework too! (Even if they do it at the last minute—more on “teachers lounge” culture later). My new theory is that teachers give students homework purely as retribution for having to prepare lessons. It is funny, though, being on the other side of things. Like, I somehow don’t feel like I should have a cubby for my materials in the teacher’s lounge, or a key to the faculty bathroom (the one with toilet paper and soap). I am supposedly on the same authority level as those who confiscate cell phones used covertly in the hallways. I go to the café across the street with other teachers for coffee breaks, where the Argentine owner Sebastian already knows my order by heart. And I attend weekly staff meetings, where Spanish flies around the room so rapidly that I understand hardly anything, and realize that I have a lot more learning to do, and find myself staring out the window, feeling like a student again, and wondering if I’m convincingly fooling my teachers into thinking that I’m just pondering the answers to their questions I don’t fully understand.

In other news....shout out to Kacey Burr! Happy Birthday, amor!!! (pic from San Sebastian)