Only 2 Weeks?

I've only been here 2 weeks, but I feel like I have seen and done a million and one things. Everyone told me I needed to blog when I came to France, so here I go. I don’t know exactly how much people care and want to know specific details, but I’ll give you lots and you can pick and choose how much you want to read. This post is going to be really really long. i’ve been working on it a little bit each night after finishing my homework, so the dates will be off, like if i say “today” because that was the day i wrote that part of the post, but i trust you guys to figure out. I have lots of intelligent friends and I’m sure you guys can handle it. Also, things are not really going to be grouped, like by school stuff and other stuff or anything like that. basically how this is working right now, is when i get an idea about something to blog about, i put it in my planner, put it on a list and then i get to each item on the list in order. So here we go...

Today, I had my first real day of EPS(P.E.). It is so different than our P.E. in the U.S. Because of the lack of athletic facilities at the school, the whole P.E. class met in the courtyard and then we walked out the doors of the school, sports clothes in hand. Waiting for us a short distance away was a full-on charter bus(complete with seatbelts.) They also sometimes use charter buses for city buses here. And something else cool about these buses is that they have a middle door. I mean, most city buses have a front door and a middle door where people can get off, but the nice charter buses have middle doors too. It makes unloading a bus full of people way easier. Anyway, so the whole P.E. class loaded on to the charter bus and we drove off. It was about a 7 minute drive to the place we were going. Along the way, we passed a giant silver soccer stadium. I think the nicest stadium we have back home is the football stadium at sac state, and it’s not that great. When we got to our building, we got off the bus and the girls went in one door and the boys went in another door. The “locker room” was just a tiny little room with some benches and hooks, but there were about 4 rooms, so at least we didn’t have to share with the elementary school kids who were there, too. Once we had changed, we walked out into what basically looked like a gigantic empty warehouse. It was partitioned into 3 sections with nets. The 1st section had 2 volleyball courts, the second section had a soccer goal at each end, and the 3rd section had a lot of empty space and some shabby gymnastics equipment. There were elementary school kids playing frisbee in the middle section, so we went to the far section. There were nine ping pong tables that we set up and we rallied for a bit. However, there was a minor problem with my table. We had a net, but we didn’t have anything to hold the net up. so we just laid it across the table. But it was still pretty fun. Then we had to play matches and report our scores to the teacher. We couldn’t exactly do that with a completely nonfunctional net, so we ended up having 2 people hold the net up while 2 people played each other. It worked pretty well, but if the net-holders got lazy, you could get away with hitting a shot too low and still having it go over. I won my two matches, playing against my friends. Yay me, right? Well, the problem was, then the teacher told us to stand here if you won all your matches, here if you won 1 match, here if you lost all your matches, ect. So now i was playing against people who had their own paddles in special bags and play ping pong all the time. The good thing was that we got to be at a table with a real net, so that was a bit better. I squeezed out a victory 11-9 in my first game, but in my second game there, i lost 11-0. it was very embarrassing, but this boy was really, really good. After that, we put our ping pong tables away, changed back into our school clothes, and got back on the bus. And that’s the story of my first real 2 hours of EPS.

Take a moment to think about any stereotypes you think people from other countries might have about the United States. Some of the ones I have heard so far are pretty funny. The first day of my DNL class (history class taught in english), the teacher talked about the format of the class, and then for the last 20 minutes she just asked random people questions. She asked one boy “What does American Culture mean to you?”
Any guesses on his answer? “McDonald’s.” And then the teacher said “Really, that’s all, McDonald’s?” And he said, “Ummm, Subway, KFC, and Taco Bell.” At that point, the teacher just gave up on him, but I was having a total fit of the silent giggles. The whole rest of the class was too busy being worried that she was going to call on them next so they couldn’t really laugh, but I was having a good time. Its kind of mean, but it was nice to have the French kids be the ones worrying and struggling to get the words out of their mouths, rather than it being me having to introduce myself to my class and being so nervous that I could barely get the words, “Umm, je m’appelle Julia Butterfield” out. But it has definitely gotten better. I have started to get over being so self-conscious about the way I sound when i speak french, and I have stopped trying to think so so hard about every word I say, but I just try to talk a lot and tell silly stories to my friends without pausing to much. I remember how much better my writing became in 8th grade when I had to write tons of essays in English class, so I figure the french grammar will come or it won’t, but I should be practicing speaking so I can work on my accent and get more comfortable with just talking. Anyway, I tend to start rambling in my blog, sorry about that. Back to stereotypes. The other one I have heard was “Do Americans carry weapons around all the time?” And I was like, “No. Why would you think that.” And the person said that weapons are banned in France, except for hunting and stuff, so they think that it’s kind of weird that people can have weapons. Well, what can we do about it? Our founding fathers were very upset with England when writing the Bill of Rights and insisted we have the right to bear arms. It’s an amendment with a history and I think it is an important part of our culture(more so than McDonalds, although I have to admit that fast food really is becoming too big a part of our culture.) And here is another thing I heard today. Someone said they thought that on American world maps, America was in the center with europe on the right and japan and china on the left. Because we thought we were so important we should be in the middle. There actually was a map like that in my history book today, and it was really weird to see it and I couldn’t find china at first. I thought they had just chopped china, russia and japan off the map.

Next...I got my first graded assignment back today. It was my dissection of a mouse and chart that I had to do about the mouse. My partner and I got a 10/10. That was pretty exciting, but I have to admit that I didn’t really know what I was doing. If it weren’t for Pauline, I would probably still be sitting at the bio lab table with a dead mouse in front of me with no idea of what to do. I have my first “test” tomorrow for SVT(bio), so I will see how well I do. It’s not about the grades, but it will be interesting to see how I do. I did study a little bit to memorize the diagram we have to know. The problem is that I know it in English but i’m not sure if I can tell it to a teacher in French. We shall see.

And now TV preferences. I’m not sure if it is really fair to make any generalizations based on a very small group of people, but I thought you guys might like to know about French TV. First of all, there is a lot of American TV. That’s another thing someone said in DNL when asked what American culture meant to them...Hollywood. So yeah, my brother Alexis and I watched the Simpsons one night. That was quite weird because all the dialogue was in French, but there were some songs during the episode and the songs were still in English. And Matthis likes to watch cartoons. Most of the time he watches French cartoons, but he watches some American ones too. We watched Inspector Gadget tonight. And I watched one “soap opera” i guess you would call it, because it was on my host family’s TV, but it was a bit strange. I was talking with my friends at lunch at school and they said that most of the French series stink and they all like the American shows better. Friends, Vampire Diaries, and Glee were their top picks. I asked about reality TV and they said that they thought most French people prefer planned shows to reality, but it was their impression that Americans really like reality TV. I think that they might be right about Americans liking reality TV because there sure are a lot of American reality TV shows. But I have already found one counterexample to their statement that French people don’t really like reality TV that much. My host family. Every friday night, they gather in front of the TV together and eat dinner and watch French Survivor, which is called Koh Lanta. I’m pretty sure it is exactly the same. We watched the season opener last Friday, and it was the same format. Meet the contestants, find out the teams, reward challenge, elimination challenge, lots of plotting and backstabbing, and then Tribal Council. My host family was excited because there is a contestant from their region. So yeah, obviously they like reality TV. And tonight, there was a debate between presidential candidates because the elections are coming up here. 

I think I said in my last post that Lucas was going to teach me how to do a rubix cube. Well, he did. I can now do a rubix cube in under three minutes. He can do it blindfolded, but I’m just a beginner and I’m pretty proud of my 2.36. I also play ping pong with my host brothers. They have this really cool net that they can put on their dining room table. It looks like to music speakers side by side and then you pull the “speakers” apart and a net starts coming out. So you can pull as far as you need and then there are clips that attach it to the table. It is super cool because their table is a little bit narrower but a little longer than a real ping pong table, but the net still works. I have a picture of us playing ping pong.

I had my first French chocolate croissant today. Lucas showed me how to walk home from school in case there is a problem with the bus, and on the way, we stopped at the bakery and got a “pain au chocolat”(chocolate croissant) each. And they were only .90 euros each. They were so so amazing. Good french chocolate and pastry so flaky it practically fell apart in your mouth. I take the bus home from school now, but I can also walk if I decide to. It is about 1.3 miles to walk, and I pass three bakeries. That could be very dangerous for me. I think my pocket money might find its way into those bakeries and then right down to my waist. I’d better keep exercising. Right now I’m just going to the track and running a couple of miles every few days, but tomorrow I get to go to my first basketball practice. Lucas has a female friend who plays basketball in Valenciennes and I am going to go to her practice tomorrow to try it out. It is a bit crazy to me that people eat a lot of food here, but there is hardly an overweight person at my school. A lot of the students eat at the cafeteria and they give us a lot of actually pretty decent food and most people eat just about all of it. And though most people only do an activity once or twice a week, most people are so skinny. It’s not fair! 

Another very different thing about France is how much they love roundabouts. I think I have only seen two stoplights in the whole town. Every big intersection has a roundabout. Maybe those work for the cars, but they aren’t great for pedestrians. You never know where a car is going to decide to come out so it is very hard to decide when to start walking. However, on the few stoplights that they have, the walk symbol is so cute. There is a green man in walking position for go and then a line down the middle and a red man just standing for dont walk(instead of our stupid hand). But, they don’t have any countdowns on their pedestrian lights, so that can be a bit frustrating.

Next, a very exciting topic: bathrooms. No, I have not yet seen a bidet. For those of you who don’t know, bidet are a type of fountain in toilets that sort of give a preliminary wash before the use of toilet paper. I think it is a pretty common stereotype that people back home think there are going to be bidets in practically every bathroom in France. Not true. And for everyone that goes to Rio and thinks the bathroom at our school stink, you should see the bathrooms at my school. They are ridiculous. You think it’s bad that our bathrooms at Rio don’t have toilet seat covers. The toilets at my school here don’t even have seats. Seriously, it is like someone took the seats away and just left the bottom part. And then there is no toilet paper in the stalls. There are two dispensers outside the stalls and you have to remember to grab some toilet paper before you go into your stall because if you forgot, too bad. It’s too late. And it really stinks for newbies like me who don’t know what to do and get stranded the first time they use the bathroom. To be honest, the first day I thought they just didn’t use toilet paper here and i made a note in my planner to put a roll of toilet paper in my backpack so that at least i could have some. And then the bathrooms at home are so funny. The toilet is in a separate room from the sink. In my host family’s house, they have 2.5 bathrooms, and in the USA that would mean they have 2 full bathrooms with showers and one without. Here, that means they have 3 toilets(rooms with just a toilet) and 2 rooms with a sink and a shower. So when i use the toilet on the bottom floor, I have to climb the stairs to use the room with the sink on the second floor in order to wash my hands.

And, on that note I’ll move on to the way they number floors here. Back home, If someone said they lived on the second floor of an apartment building, that would mean you would enter the building and climb one flight of stairs to the second floor. Here, the second floor is the third floor. The “lobby” level is floor 0 and the second floor is the 1st floor and so on. I was joking at school with one of my friends about how i was getting exercise by climbing the stairs in our 3 story school, and she said that middle school was worse because the building had a 3 floor. And I was like, wait our school has 3 floors, before i remembered that according to them our school only has up to a second floor.

Here’s another funny thing about my french friends. They like to complain about the homework even when there isn’t very much. They especially complain about the history homework, and it is true that he assigns much more than any of the other teachers, but still...he assigned for us to answer 7 questions based on 2 pages of the textbook. and we had one night to do that, and then we had to do the same thing for the next night but about 2 different pages. That was it, and they thought it was crazy. True, it took me about 2 and a half hours to do, but i was having to translate like half of the words on the textbook pages. By the time I finished, I estimated that if I had been doing it in English it would have taken at most 30 minutes. And for physics, we had a week to do 3 exercises. It is just a very different expectation of how much homework is acceptable. Since school is so long, it seems to me that most people expect to not have much homework. I think that that is a pretty fair expectation but it is still funny to hear them complain about such small amounts of homework. 

Some more about school...The students write their names differently on papers here. They write their last name first, in all capitals, and then they write their first name. And when they write the date, they switch the month and the day. Like for today 9/16/2011, they would write it as 16/09/2011. So they were a bit confused when on the ten-year anniversary of september 11th, people on TV kept talking about “9/11”. And my host brother was explaining to us that Americans write the date “backward” with the month first. And they use this weird paper. It is sort of like graph paper, but not exactly. There are lots and lots of really thin horizontal lines and every fifth line is a bold line. So you are supposed to write on the bold lines. But there are also a bunch of vertical lines that create squares with the bold horizontal lines. I’ll attach a picture. And a lot of the paper comes as 2 sheets connected. Another weird thing for me is that they use pens for absolutely everything. And they write really nicely and use rulers to underline things, instead of just drawing a sloppy line. Like in their history notes, when the teacher is lecturing and we are taking notes, everyone is using a pen and has a whiteout pen at the ready in case they make a mistake. My notes look like a total mess comparatively because in addition to my already sloppy handwriting, I have to work very hard to keep up so there is no way i have time to wait for white out to dry. I just scratch things out and use arrows and stuff. But hey, they are my notes and I’m here to learn how to speak french, not how to take fancy, perfect notes.

My school here does do something really really cool though. I’m in Première Sciences so i don’t know how it works in the other subjects but our labs are so cool. Tuesday afternoon is lab and we have 3 hours for our SVT and Physics/Chemistry. And we split the class in half and switch after an hour and a half. It is so nice because it means we actually get some personal time with the teacher. Like when I didn’t understand a concept they had studied last year in physics, the teacher came over and spent a good 10 minutes giving me a full explanation and demonstration. He probably wouldn’t have been able to do that if he had had a full class of 30 students in the room.

Another thing I have noticed is that practically everything we do in school here is document-based. In the history textbook, there is usually about 1 paragraph that gives a general explanation of the topic on the page and then there are about 5 or 6 documents to look at. Excerpts from speeches, diagrams, maps, tables, ect. And then there are questions that really ask you to dig deeply into the documents and figure them out, rather than just regurgitating the information on the page. It’s harder, but it’s pretty cool when you figure out that a simple photo of a brazilian city is showing the spread of capitalism, an urbanization based on tourism, and a spread of the american urban model. And in SVT, instead of just learning about normal things, we look at studies and unusual cases and then compare what we see on those documents to the “normal stuff”. For example, today in SVT we talked about puberty, and instead of just looking at what usually happens when kids hit puberty, we looked at the anomalies, like women  who actually have the genotype XY and develop differently. It is a really different way to study science to look at lots of abnormal cases and then compare them to the usual and then have to try to figure out why those abnormal cases might have occurred. I really like it. It’s like a puzzle(or course it is more of a puzzle for me because I first have to figure out what the words mean too, but my classmates are really helpful.)

Some friends took me on a little tour of the town today, since we can walk from school. We walked around, and I’m pretty sure we passed 5 bakeries. I bought a chocolate croissant at one of them(2 in one week, oh no, this is bad.) There was one corner with a bakery on three of the four corners. And they took me to the mall but all we did there was go to the grocery store. Yep, a grocery store inside of a mall. And they did have skippy peanut butter, which I’m sure I will start to miss soon, but it was really expensive and sold in these very small containers. And we went to a 4 story book store and I bought a nice dictionary. On the third floor, they have some television series for sale, and there was House, Glee, How I met your mother, and several other american series. I asked my friends why there was only french series on display, and they said that the french TV series are really that bad. No one wants to buy them. And they told me that if I started to get homesick, I should come to the bookstore(which is actually called a librarie in french. library is bibliotheque) and I can read the american newspapers and magazines. There was a nice magazine with Kristen Bell and Robert Pattinson on the cover, and another one with Ryan Reynolds on the cover. So if I need to get my fill of trashy american paparazzi news, I now know where to go.

Ok, that’s all I have for now. I’m sure more things will come to me soon, but for right now, all of my ideas have been transformed into the above text. Pictures will come a bit later.