Weekend update

I wish I had taken a picture from our house on Thursday night. It would have shown John on Skype, talking on to Franck (one of the owners of this house), who was on his computer in Canada and who then did a conference call with his father at his computer in a house in our little village, who was (thankfully!) talking on his phone to Monsieur France Telecom about our telephone and internet woes. It was an impressive feat of technology – trying to solve our technological problem.

Apparently, it is a problem with the line to the house, and France Telecom will need to fix it. Now, we’ve only been here two weeks, but already I know enough to not hold my breath that France Telecom will be able to do that any time soon (I figure if you set the bar of expectations VERY low, you can only be pleasantly surprised). And I am so grateful to Laura and Franck for arranging a native French speaker to talk to French Telecom on our behalf. I am feeling pretty OK about my language skills for most conversations (and am remembering so much more French every day), but the telephone is SO hard. So three cheers to Franck's father!

And no one knows why we still can get Skype when we can’t get a dial tone on the phone or a regular internet connection – but we do seem to have Skype (lisnjohn1) if you need to reach us urgently, and a French cell phone if the schools need to reach us. I figure it’s a bit of a safety net to keep us connected to the world, and I'm not going to complain about it even if no one understands why we are getting it.

In the meantime, Franck and Laura have hooked us up with an internet connection at another location, where John or I go (briefly) once or twice a day to check in with the outside world.  It’s working for now – and one unintended consequence is that instead of turning to my usual daily must-reads (The New York Times online, The Globe and Mail online, etc.), I have looked instead to the many wonderful books in this house and started devouring those.

Oh yeah, books! I remember you! First I enjoyed a fluffy and fun read called Entre Nous about finding your inner French girl (full of lots of useful tips including how you can’t really buy coffee to go in France (no kidding!), advising buying fewer items of clothing but the best quality you can afford, and extolling the virtues of sayin "no" (or "non") from time to time). Then, I picked up the wonderful writing guide/inspirational tome by Anne Lamott called Bird by Bird. You know how there are books you need to read at a certain place and time? Well, this is one of those books. She strikes just the right note of teacher/friend/editor/fellow writer sharing the lessons learned... and it was just the bit of inspiration I needed – the kick in the pants to get back in the habit of writing *something* every day. We’ll see how long her pep talk lasts – and feel free to email me and encourage (harass?) me as I try to get back into the world of writing again.

The kids had a good end of the school week, although we had more snow which meant that the bus for Jack was cancelled Friday (he had taken it for the first time on Thursday and loved it) and that the kids are not properly shod for the moment. I had considered long and hard what winter wear to bring and, it seems, I made the wrong call on this one. France is generally more temperate than Canada (I can't help laughing a little as a write that -- most places in the woirld are a bit more temperate than Canada!) and often there are winters with very little snow. This, however, appears NOT to be one of those winters. So we have been putting the kids in lots of layers (which works) and sending them to school in their rain boots and two pairs of socks (which mostly works, sort of). I know I could go buy new snow boots – but what if it doesn’t snow again?

We braved the snow and bad roads to go to check email briefly Saturday morning and then (more importantly) to head to the Beaune market. At several points I thought we should turn around and go home – the roads were quite slick and it was looking worse by the minute. But when we arrived at the market, I swear you could almost hear the harps of heaven strum and the angels sing as the grey skies broke and the sun and blue skies cascaded down on all the market goers! Clearly we were meant to be there -- and we had a wonderful outing. The kids and John returned to the carousel (bien sur) and I did a quick tour to pick up a few things we needed. It wasn’t as big of a haul as last week, but still pretty good considering how little time I actually spent there (we wanted to get home as we didn't think the blue skies would last long -- and they didn't).

 

 

Pictured above, you can see the haul: six apples, eight pears, four avocados, four containers of strawberries (on special this week because the vendor wanted to go home), tapenade, walnuts, hazelnuts, dried apricots, dried strawberries, olives, a new cheese of the week (again, I didn’t catch the name... I need to bring a pen next week!), salami dried with goat cheese (DELICIOUS!), a quarter of a roasted turkey and some French beans, a Florentine baguette, the most delicious tomatoes I have ever had in January (grown in a nursery in the south of France), an umbrella, and local honey. Pas mal, n’est pas?

(Oh, and Katie and Livie are in tank tops because we were doing their laundry and pretty much EVERYTHING else was dirty.)

And a few other observations from the week:

* We passed by a high school at some kind of morning break and were surprised (although perhaps we shouldn’t have been) at the number of students smoking. Crowds of teenagers, all wearing black and grey jackets, of course, but also school backpacks, were huddled in the cold, smoking, smoking, smoking. It feels like the U.S. and Canada are quite different in this area... even when I was in high school (way back then), you wouldn’t have seen this kind of number of students with cigarettes. I wonder if they are taxed as heavily here? It would be interesting to find out if there have been any changes in who smokes (and how much they smoke) over the last few decades.

* Like in Lethbridge, it is not always easy to get details out of Jack about his day. But we did manage to ask just the right question the other night to elicit a response about the behavior of kids at school. He said the kids are wilder on the playground but calmer in the classroom. He said he’s been a little surprised at some things – seeing kids (boys and girls) throw snowballs at each other, fight, kick, wrestle, pull hair, etc. – but all of the kids involved seem to *want* to be wrestling/fighting/throwing snowballs, etc., and no one seems to be upset about it. He said none of it’s been directed at him, either, and that he’s been happy to be playing tag, hopscotch and other games with boys and girls. He added that the students are unsupervised for most of their breaks. The flip side is that he said things in the classroom are very, very calm. There has been only one time where one student was acting out in a way that Jack noticed this last week and where the teacher had to raise her voice a bit. His own classrooms in Lethbridge have been pretty calm, I think (when considering have twenty children together in a confined space), so for him to comment on this is pretty telling, I think.

* On Thursday, when I was waiting for Jack to catch the bus, I was talking to a girl in his class. She told me (unprompted... I had only asked how old she was and hearing she was almost eight, asked if she knew Jack) that Jack is a quick learner and hard worker... that there is something he doesn’t understand one day, and then he does the next. Bravo, Jack!

* We pushed our luck a bit with Kate and Liv and had them try heading back to preschool for an afternoon on Thursday. The afternoon program sounded wonderful – lots of time spent reading books and painting and playing. While they were fine, they were SO tired when we picked them up.  So for now, we will have them go only in the mornings. They both are having so much fun there. We are feeling VERY lucky about how well it’s all going for all three kids at school.

* On Monday, I will get to accompany Kate and Liv on a field trip to Dijon. In the morning, the class will go to the museum. They will have a picnic lunch, and then see some kind of puppet show (I *think*... I could be completely wrong about all of it, too!). They are very excited about this, and I am excited to get back to Dijon.

*  Speaking of the beautiful city to our north -- I have exchanged emails with the Harmels, the family I lived with in Dijon in 1993, and am going to try to get together with their daughters (who have many children) this week and with them in a few weeks (they have been travelling quite a bit lately). I am so excited to see them -- I look back at my time in Dijon and so many of the wonderful memories took place at their apartment, at the kitchen table with Christine, as I learned about France, French, and more.

* Two of the kids (Jack and Kate) have picked up the cold I heard actively in both classrooms when we went to visit our first week here. Sigh. I know it's inevitable (between travel, weird sleeping schedules, and new germs they haven't encountered before), but I don't like it anyway! Kate had a rough night but seems to be a lot better this morning. Jack had a rough night and seems to be about the same today. Neither has a fever,  headaches, or body aches, and Jack's doesn't sound like it's tranformed into his asthma cough (and he says it doesn't feel like his asthma cough)... so I am hoping it's just a regular old cold.  Fingers crossed for their quick recovery!

And I think that's about it. Sorry for such a long post... and apologies, too, if you email and we don't reply right away... we are mostly just checking in and making some travel plans (Jay and Judy are coming to visit next week!), and hoping for the best for France Telecom to fix the phones.