Poisson d'avril

Happy April Fool's Day! But in Frace April Fool's is called poisson d'avril and the trick they play is to paste a fish on your back. This is one tradition I wouldn't mind participating in. I wonder if I'll get a poisson d'avril, I only have two classes today.


***
The fish you see above was my lunch on Wednesday. My room mate Katherine works at a lycée where students train to be waiters, cooks, and pastry chefs, among other things. On Wednesdays the school opens a restaurant, and Katherine was lucky enough to be able to get us a reservation.

We were served the four course meal. We started with a salad with duck, and next came our main course (above). A whole fish, head and all. I was a little less surprised as when Peter and I had been to Paris, where we were each served two fish au beurre blanc (Julia Child is right, it's more than deliciuos!). Next was the cheese course followed by the largest desert; not only did we get fruit salad, but we got a madeleine aux poire (pear cake). We definitely had food babies by the time our coffees arrived, but it was so good that it was worth it.

Vancouver

Isn't this photo of Vancouver just amazing? While I'm loving my time in France, it has started to dawn on me that my time here is almost over; I have a mere three weeks of teaching left.

While I'm in no rush to get back to Vancouver, there are things I'm looking forward to doing, like having a drink on Chill Winston's amazing patio in Gastown and eating nachos at Foundation. I'm also interested to see how much the city has changed since I've been away.

Friends back home, what, if anything has changed about the city?

(Photo by NASA via Design*Sponge's Vancouver City Guide)

Crottes de chiens

After more than six months of informal research, conducted in French towns such as Lyon, Dijon, Toulouse, and Paris, I can safely say that Saint Étienne is literally the shittiest town in France, if not all of Europe.


A sanitary bag dispenser in Toulouse. Note that it is empty and unreplenished.


It's a well known fact that neglect to pick up after one's canine is a French national trait. And I get it. Dog shit is gross, but cleaning it up is part of the social contract one enters when one becomes a dog owner.

According to Jean-Benoît Nadeau and Julie Barlow, authors of Sixty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong:

In all, 200,0000 Parisian canines leave ten tons of excrement behind them every day. . . . The city of Paris . . . spends seventy million francs (five million pounds) per year on a brigade of seventy motocrottes (motorcycles that streak through the streets sucking up dog droppings with vacuum cleaners). But the efforts to rid the streets of excrement is futile, thanks to Parisian dog owners' enduring lack of civility (143).

Disconcertingly, however, when I was in Paris, I hardly even noticed les crottes de chiens. SaintÉ, however, is full of these canine landmines which make being a pedestrian in this town hazardous.

As Nadeau and Barlow note, "In an average year, six-hundred people break a limb slipping on dog droppings or trying to remove the mess from the soles of their shoes" (143).

One last observation on the shittiness of this town: I've noticed that the size of dog I most often see (small ones) does not correspond to the size of the landmines I dodge. Does this mean big dog owners only walk their dogs between nightfall and dawn out of shame that their fellow citoyens would see their lack of civility?

crotte de chien (crot duh she(n)): politely put, dog poop

Sympa

As I have mentioned before, when people ask me about the difference between Canadian or Québecois French and French as spoken in France, I liken it to the difference between British and North American English: different accents and some different words or expressions.

One new expression I immediately encountered upon arrival in SaintÉ was "sympa," but immediately caught onto its meaning.

sympa (sim-pah): cool

Sympa is short for sympathique and translates as "cool," (or "nice," or "kind," depending on the context).




Le Sympa, a restaurant in SaintÉ I've never been to, although I'm sure it's très sympa.


For example, when I returned from Belgium the night before school resumed, I was starving. When I got home, my room mates had left a note on my bedroom door welcoming me back and letting me know I could help myself to the beef stew they had made for dinner. What's more, my room mate Andrenne had bought me an African Violet for my room.

As this anecdote illustrates, my room mates are très sympa, for which I am fortunate.

They Say It's My Birthday

So I thought I'd list 24 things I'm greateful for on this twenty-fourth anniversaire of mine:

1. My health.
2. The health of my friends and loved ones, especially my maman. I'm sure I've given her a few extra grey hairs lately.
3. My boyfriend who has been so supportive of me this year I've been abroad.
4. To have a loving and supportive family.
5. My friends and loved ones back home, pure and simple.
6. That I am living abroad in France.
7. That because of this, I have been able to travel throughout France and Europe.
8. The friends I've made on this year abroad.
9. That I am not as stressed as I was this time last year when completing my undergraduate Honours thesis.
10. That I defended my thesis and received an A.
11. That by all accounts, I have a bright future ahead of me. 
12. To be able to eat so many delicious and affordable French cheeses.
13. And to be able to drink delicious and affordable wine along with these cheeses.
14. To have discovered Malbec Sec, my new favourite white wine.
15. To simply even have delicious food to eat every day.
16. My cats.
17. Flowers, they're beautiful.  (Like the ones above, which I indulged myself for my birthday and bought at the market yesterday).
18. To be able to take long walks.
19. Fresh air.
20. To have grown up in beautiful Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
21. Music.
22. Dancing.
23. Laughter.
24. And you, dear reader!

 Update: As it's my first birthday abroad, my dad sent me birthday wishes to make it a good one, and short anecdote about my neighbour back home, a World War II air force veteran, who celebrated his 19th birthday in Italy.  Thank God the circumstances of my birthday abroad are different--even if the classroom can sometimes be a battle.

Les trains

When I started this blog about my year living in France and travels throughout Europe, a question I asked myself was whether to write in English or French. I decided on the former as most of my readership reads English. While I am bilingual, the aspect I most want to improve on is my written French. I've therefore decided to do a series of posts in French.

I originally wrote this entry in my travel journal on the train to Lyon en route to Belgium on October 27, 2010.

En attendant mon train sur le bord du quai comme le soleil se levait, j'ai pensé à comment impressionant sont les réseaux de chemins de fer de la France et de l'Europe. C'est un avantage de l'Europe qui rend le voyage plus facile qu'en Amérique du Nord. En Amérique du Nord je ne pense pas qu'on peut voyager comme ça aussi facilement, ou du moins pas aussi abordablement. Comment les européens font-ils s'ils viennent en Amérique du Nord en voyage? Est-ce qu'ils font une grande tournée comme le font les gens de l'Amérique du Nord quand ils vont en Europe?

Read my English translation after the jump:

IAmterdam

As I mentioned, it was my friend Stefan's photos of Amsterdam's quaint "off-kilter charm" (his words) that made me want to visit the city so badly. I found Amsterdam's canals, bridges and architecture so alluring, I absolutely had to go for a walk along them while I had the chance, living in Europe.

We stayed on a canal boat! This was a serendipitous find, as when planning out trip in January, we had no idea you could stay on a canal boat. But as soon as we discovered we could stay on a boat, we had to. Staying on a canal boat was an awesome experience as canal boats are such a part of the city. Not only was the boat quiet (booking a hostel in Amsterdam, we were worried about the quality of sleep we would get staying in a dorm with potheads), but the Oosterdock was centrally located and we were able to walk everywhere. My only complaint was the plumbing; it was difficult to regulate the hot and cold water in the showers--but that's why they call it a Dutch shower, right? Overall, when planning a trip to Amsterdam, I highly recommend staying on a canal boat.

We flew into Amsterdam from Geneva, and arrived into the city just as dusk was beginning to fall. After checking in, Jacky and I meandered in the general direction of the Nieumarkt, where we were told there were lots of food options (it was 8:00pm by that time, and the Dutch eat much earlier than the French). Suddenly we ended up in the Red Light District. I was a bit surprised, not at the prostitution, but that it was so easy to stumble into; I would have thought it would have been harder to find. Nevertheless, as the men were looking at the women in the windows, I was mesmerized by all the swans swimming in the Red Light District canal (over the next few days of our stay we noticed they seemed to only swim in that particular canal).

For dinner, we ended up going to Dwaze Zaken, a cool café and had veggie lasagnas with chickpeas in it (a delicious idea I'm totally adopting!). And as the rhyme goes, it was so nice, we went back twice. We returned the next night for a cheese fondue dinner and the jazz show that we had seen announced.

A word on nomenclature in Amsterdam. I had totally been ignorant of the difference between a café and a coffee shop as cannabis was not my motive for visiting Amsterdam. In Amsterdam, a café is a restaurant/bar, whereas a coffee shop is an establishment where one can buy and consume marijuana. Then there's the Starbucks-esque coffee chain, Coffee House. Apparently, many a confused tourist wander into the wrong kind of coffee establishment. Fortunately we did not, as Jacky was aware of the differences.

There is so much more to Amsterdam than pot and prostitution (which, oddly, very few locals partake in, but seem to encourage tourists to). Our first day we did a great walking tour of the city. We learned that the reason for Amsterdam's crooked charm is that that the foundations of many of the seventeenth century townhouses were made from tree trunks plunged deep into the mud. With time, a pocket of air forms and rots the logs, shifting the house any which way. As such, Amsterdam homeowners have to get their doors and windows custom fitted, as well as repair their homes' foundations.

Amsterdam is also a city of amazing museums. While we were there were went to the Van Gogh Museum. The museum traced his development as an artist, his influences and well as contextualized him within the Impressionist movement and among his contemporaries. There was also a really interesting temporary Picasso exhibit charting his first years in Paris from 1900 to 1907, ending with sketches of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.

We also visited the Rijksmuseum, which could probably be compared to the Dutch version of the Louvre. It is a huge, beautiful building (currently under renovation). I had read that it has a collection of more than 20,000 pieces, so I thought it would be an overwhelming visit, like when you try to see everything in the Louvre. Instead, it was really well curated. There were fifteen rooms, starting with an explanation of the the Dutch Golden Age and ending with Rembrandt and the Dutch Golden Age painters.

Amsterdam is a lovely city. If I went again, I would definitely go in spring as we unfortunately we missed the tulips.

Broadcasting Note

I've been sick, but I'm better now. I listed all the ideas I've had for posts so my goal for the rest of the month is to get caught up on them.

(image from Wikipedia)

Where Am I? Amsterdam!

You guessed it! I was in Amsterdam!

Three years ago, my friend Stefan lived in Stuttgart, Germany for eight months while working on co-op for Bosch, during which time he travelled all over Europe. His photos of Amsterdam's, as he described it, "off-kilter" charm is what made me want to go so badly.

Well thank you and congratulations Stefan! You are the lucky winner of the Amsterdam postcard challenge. Email me your mailing address and I'll send your postcard!

Thanks for everyone who played!

Where Am I? Postcard Challenge #7

This morning I am leaving on the second trip I am taking during this break. I am super excited for this trip. When I raided the library's travel section last summer before leaving, this city was at the top of my list of places to go. Here are the clues for this seventh postcard challenge:

1. Its 165 canals measure a total 75.5km in length and are crossed by 1,281 bridges.

2. The headquarters of the world's first multinational corporation were located here.
Bonus: Can you name the company?

3. This small state was a power to contend with during its Golden Age. Bonus: When was it?

Where am I going? If you think you know, leave your answer in the comments below. I will get back in the wee hours of March 7th and will draw the lucky winner later that morning. You therefore have until 6:00am Central European Time (CET) on March 7, 2010 to submit your answer.

Good luck!