Adventures

Did i mean to do that?

Well, four electronic applications for graduate programs have been sent. I am applying to the History program at Glasgow, the Medieval History programs at St Andrews and Durham, and teacher training programs at Glasgow, Durham, and Reading via a clearinghouse (1 application for all of them). Kathryn told me she has already had a reference request from St Andrews!

I may fill out the paper application for Reading's Medieval History program, but it seems so low-tech. I actually haven't even read it yet.

And so it goes.

1. François gleefully rubbed his hands together and said, "I have succeeded!" when i told him about one of my students saying he was afraid of him. He then looked at a list of possible students to try to figure out who it was. He is sure he knows.


2. I just heard U2's "With or Without You" on my iPod, and it struck me that Bono's voice has really aged in 20 years.


3. I am about to reveal a dark secret... I am applying to grad school. This revelation should tell me how many people are actually reading this blog.

Not much happenin’

I haven't written for a while, because there hasn't been much going on. Let's see...

I finally met Glenn, the lycée assistant this week. He's a nice guy from LA on his second year as an assistant. We walked around the market on Wednesday morning and hung out for a little bit in his lycée apartment.

On Monday, after having lunch with Claire at Quick Burger (ack!), i walked around Le Havre's shopping district trying to remember what i needed to buy. I took the 4:15 bus back to Lillebonne, and it was crammed with kids coming home from school.

Last Sunday i had lunch at Pascale's house with François and Caroline. François showed me his stamp collection, which is extensive (putting it mildly). I think he was surprised that i was interested to see it. If you feel like making a French math teacher happy, you can save your stamps and send them to me for him. He doesn't care if they're special stamps or not; he has thousands of queen's head stamps (he says they're all slightly different, because there are 6 different stamp printers in Britain. I'm taking his word for it).

I should have an insurance adjuster coming to look at my kitchen wall sometime soon. They called me yesterday, but i was napping. It took me a few minutes to figure out who the heck was calling me, until the nice man repeated the word "assurance" for me. I stumblingly apologized and told him i speak English, which i don't normally just blurt out like that (sleepiness). He then asked if i would like to talk to the person in his office who speaks English? When i replied in the affirmative, he said someone would call me back. No one has called yet.

That's about it, i think. School is pretty boring right now, so i don't have any good stories to tell. One mildly funny thing happened this morning. I was talking to Dominique's 3eme class about fears (practicing "I am afraid of ____" and "What are you afraid of?"). I asked for things they were afraid of, and one of the boys in the back said, "Mr. Brossard". That's François, and i can't imagine anyone being afraid of him. I'll have to tell him about it tomorrow.

The newest household crisis

While Janette & Scott were here, i started noticing strange, isolated puddles of water on my kitchen floor. The first one actually seemed to have come from the washing machine (oh no!), but closer inspection exonerated the machine and its pipes from suspicion. The second one was completely isolated in the middle of the kitchen. The third, on Tuesday, came from under the dryer. Now, i was pretty sure the dryer wasn't leaking, so i looked around a little more closely for the answer. I found it in the form of water bubbles between the wallpaper and the wall of my kitchen. The wall behind the dryer was WET! So, i took myself very quickly to the real estate agent's office to report the problem (after taking time to look up the French word for leak: fuite). After some difficult conversation and a demonstration on the wall of their office, the agent said she would talk to my upstairs neighbor and find out what the problem was. It turns out he had reported a leak around his bathtub towards the end of last week. She promised to call me and let me know the outcome.

I awaited this call with a little trepidation, because, my French skills being what they are, telephone conversations are very difficult. Would i understand her if she told me the wall was going to collapse and i needed to get out immediately? The call came that evening, and she told me my neighbor would be coming round with some insurance papers for me to sign. OK, no problem.

My neighbor did indeed show up with papers, and i dutifully signed them without knowing what the hell they were or if they said i was taking full responsibility for the damaged wall. He went away.

Yesterday, he came back with my copy of the completed paperwork. I thanked him, closed the door, and then wondered what on earth i was supposed to do now.

Dominique, as usual, came to my rescue. She explained that the papers said my neighbor's insurance company is responsible for the damage, and i just needed to send them to my insurance company. The insurance company or the real estate agency will arrange for repairs, and i shouldn't need to worry about any of it. We'll see. I just wish the damage had been on a different wall, one of the ones with uglier paper.

This doesn't look dangerous at all, does it? That's my dryer plug in the outlet.

Last weekend

I just got home from my last class of the week, so it's a good time to start blogging again.

Last weekend, Janette & Scott, my aunt and uncle, came to visit me. We hadn't seen each other in about 10 years, so i wasn't sure what to expect. What i got was a fun weekend with two people who know more about Normandy than i do (which isn't much, thinking about it). They had all their own ideas about where to go, so i didn't have to entertain them at all.

They arrived on Friday afternoon, and i took them on a jogging tour of Lillebonne before it got dark. We were actually just walking, but Scott was complaining later on about how fast we were going (big baby). They were suitably impressed with the Roman amphitheatre, but what really bowled them over was the number of boulangeries and charcuteries. Oh, and the lack of real restaurants.

Janette & Scott stayed at La P'tite Auberge, a perfectly serviceable hotel that seems to only have 4 people on staff (at the most). What it did have, however, was a restaurant with a remarkably varied menu. We ate there on Saturday night. Janette had what we decided was ostrich (the menu said "autruche", and when i asked what kind of animal it was, the waiter said a few things that amounted (in my mind) to something like "a big game bird." I thought about it afterwards and realized i would probably be hard pressed to tell someone what an ostrich is in English, so i'm not surprised my half-baked translating skills weren't up to the task.

Saturday we went to the shop at a calvadoserie in Pont l'Evêque, because Scott needed some calvados. We managed to witness the Remembrance Day parade in Pont l'Evêque, which consisted mostly of pompiers (firefighters) in shiny helmets. From there we went on to Deauville, a trendy beach resort that wasn't terribly pretty on a cloudy, wintry day. Our next stop was Honfleur, a town famous for the sheer number of impressionist painters that spent time there. Janette & Scott had vacationed in Honfleur this past summer, so they were quite familiar with the town. We ate a huge lunch at a restaurant named Le Hamelin. They have apartments for rent, too, if you're looking for somewhere to stay. In the afternoon we browsed around the Boudin Museum, a small place that holds the works of many different artists, not just Eugène Boudin. There's even a small exhibit of traditional fashion that has some of the ridiculously ridiculous lace headdresses that women used to wear in Normandy and Brittany.

(Like this one: )

I got a picture of a lace pillow:

And a little carved lacemaker:

On Sunday, Scott wasn't feeling up to traipsing around, so Janette and i ditched him at my apartment and headed to Etretat. It was a beautiful day, but very blustery, so we ended up pretty windburnt at the top of the cliffs. It was the kind of wind that could blow you over, but that didn't stop brave/stupid people from going out onto tiny outcroppings to take pictures. I could only get Janette to go this close to the edge:

After a cup of hot chocolate in a cafe, we continued on to Fécamp, where we sat on the promenade and watched the rough sea for a little while. We also went to the shop at the Benedictine distillery, but neither of us actually wanted to buy anything.

Janette & Scott left on Monday morning after a breakfast of croissants and chocolatines (bien sur). It's about a 5-hour drive to the tunnel, they said, so they had a long day of travel ahead of them.

I really enjoyed the weekend with the two of them (and not just because they brought me a vacuum cleaner, a microwave, and two aged bottles of wine). It was nice to reconnect with family i haven't seen in a long time and to get a different perspective on what it's like to be part of this family.