Bisous

Unexpected

2012-01-25T23:14:00.000-08:00

This blogpost for one…

Also, thelovliness of Hong Kong. I spent myglorious weeks at home over Christmas doing many things. One of them was to mentally gear myself upfor sprawling Asian mega-cities.

I’m not abig city gal. Paris, of course, has partof my heart. And I do have a certainsoft spot for Chicago as well. But otherthan that... I’d rather be with the bugs and the birds – out aways somewhere.

And so, I expectedto dislike Hong Kong. So many people,buildings, cars, chaos. Even though allthose things were present to some extent, the city still managed to charm mysocks off. It’s shockingly calm. I swear I never heard a car honk or a sirensound (the sound-track of D.C., Paris, New York, you-name-it). The public transportation system isbrilliantly engineered and a breeze to navigate. The city is full of green spaces, waterviews, quaint cafes, and tiny art galleries. And it has one of the most beautiful night-time skylines I’ve everseen. Just lovely.

I’llfess-up here to the fact that I may have had a different experience of HongKong than the average Joe. Lauren and Iarrived without a guide book, any plans, and really no idea what there was tosee or do. Our only committment was alunch rendez-vous with one of Lauren’s aunt’s former colleagues who’s from HongKong. During the scrumptious lunch ofsauteed pea shoots and other dishes I can’t name, Martin asked us what ourplans in Hong Kong were. We said we werehoping he’d have some advice. He said hewasn’t using his personal driver the next day, so how about we just make anitenerary with his assistant. We said okthat sounds fine. Just kidding. We said REALLY?!! That would beamazing!! And began giggling like schoolgirls.

It wasamazing. Thanks to Martin’s unreservedgenerosity, we got to see places on Hong Kong island that we would have nevergotten the chance to see otherwise. Wevisited several breathtaking beaches whose horizons were dotted with mistyislands.

We went toa rambling market that was filled with trinkets, art, knock-offs, books,watches, dragons, jade, and scarves.

We atelunch at a small cafe and walked along this beautiful pier.

We visitedan old, cozy temple by the sea (thereby starting an“oops-I-just-took-270-photos-of-this-temple” trend).

We finishedthe day at a vegetarian cafe in Hong Kong’s dazzelingly charming SoHo afterwandering around the too-cute boutiques and even a night-time produce market.

And, if theday weren’t spectacular enough, we accidently ended up at the harbor for thenightly Lights Show. On a scale of 1-10it was cheesy (family joke), but fun. Lauren took a short video that really does it way more justice than thisphoto.

Hong Kongwas the perfect christening for the second half of this trip. After a difficult goodbye to Adam and myfamily and friends, it reminded me of why I love to travel. Hong Kong was so different from what Iexpected. It surprised me. It captivated me. It changed the way I imagine Beijing, Shanghai,even China in general. And, it made meexcited for all the adventures and imagination-altering experiences to come.

Nice photo. Unfortunate framing.

Fin.

2011-10-16T19:17:00.000-07:00

I have never had the experience, at home or abroad, of walking along picturing the root structure of every weed that lines the sidewalk. After spending the last week and a half weeding an entire organic operation, I have developed a fondness for dandilions (very satisfying main root to remove) and a deep-rooted (haha) hatred for clover. Clover is sneaky. With all of those connected, hair-thin roots, I have a hard time believing it's ever brought anyone luck.

That said, there is something quite fulfilling about ending a day with grimy fingernails. Compared to applying to graduate school (which seems like a never-ending process), it's soothing to look at plot of well-turned soil and think that you have single-handedly made possible the lives of a thousand quinoa seedlings.

Incredibly beautiful quinoa plant.

Steamy, well-weeded greenhouse.

The setting made the days satisfying as well. Mawenko (the name of the farm we were at) perches on the coast of Chiloe, an island off the coast of southern Chile. Our hosts, Nelson and Venecia and their two too-cute children, had a beautiful house for volunteers.

The living room of the volunteer house.

View from the table pictured above.

On several mornings, we even got to see dolphins jumping around in the bay. The only downside of the house was the teeeeeeny wood stove that was meant to heat the entire building. It's the beginning of spring here. Mornings and evenings are downright cold. Lauren spend an un-godly amount of time coaxing our capricious stove into flame.

Looks friendly but isn't.

We got to spend a good bit of time with the family during meal times, but we also got to spend most of the evenings on our own in this cottage. It was a relaxing balance. After busing around from place to place for a while, it's nice to be in a place long enough to unpack and put some things on a shelf. On a particulary rainy day, we even got to make a mosaic for the volunteers' cottage as our "work" for the day.

Aine and Caur in fine-form. The hammoc in the volunteers' cottage was an endless source of entertainment.

And I just realized that I don't actually have the mosaic pictures as they're on Lauren's camera. You can check our her blog for a peak: www.wanderyear.blogspot.com.

On our day off, we rode with Nelson to a nearby town and artisan market. He told us a lot about the history of the island as we bounced along nodding and saying "Si, claro." I think we might have been the least linguistically prepared volunteers they have ever had. But they were both incredibly patient with our nods and ridiculous comments. Venecia spent a good while one afternoon talking about the state of agriculture and the food industry in Chile. She asked (mostly to be polite as she already knew how limited our Spanish is) what it was like in the U.S. I was dying to enter into a conversation with her, but somehow ended up pantomiming "Happy Meal" in an effort to explain the marketing that's directed toward children. "We have happy food, to the children, with small cowboy or doll!" (how I know those two words and not the general word for "toy" is beyond me). Anyhow, back to the market. Thank goodness we only had about 45 minutes. Any knitter would have gone crazy. I think I officially have an entire sheep in my pack. U.S. Customs loves when you try to bring farm animals back in the the states.

Me gazing longingly at wool rugs.

One our way back to Puerto Montt from the farm, we spent a day in Castro, the capitol of Chiloe. We had some lovely coffees and treats out and enjoyed a sunny amble around town. It was a nice day of transition between farm life and the next adventure.

In front (and slightly blocking) the picturesque, waterfront houses in Castro.

That's better.

I'm currently writing this from a quaint hostel in Puerto Natales, the gateway city to Torres del Paine National Park. Lauren and I leave tomorrow morning for a week-long backpacking trip through some of the world's most stunning scenery. It's time to pack up the netbook, set grad school work aside, and revel in mountains and glaciers (and day-dream about the shockingly easy boat ride to Antartica).

2011-10-01T07:11:00.000-07:00

So, what should you do when things don’t happen as expected with your travel plans? Go to Argentina!

It worked so well the first time, and this time (aside from another ridiculous border crossing) it turned out fabulously as well. We took yet another epic bus ride up and over the Andes during which I took entirely too many photos.

Our first destination was Bariloche, the chocolate capitol of Argentina. Yes, that’s right. From vineyards to chocolate fountains. We indulged in some incredible truffles (and bars and gelatto...)while enjoying the Switzerland-esque mountain lake view.

We then took a bus an hour or so south to a little hippie town called El Bolson. We stayed with an adorable family and actually ended up running their hostel for a day so they could run errands. Definitely adding that one to the CV: ran a hostel in Argentina.

On our last day in El Bolson, we went to the craft market and made a series of bad budget decisions that ended with Lauren and I each having GIANT woolen ponchos and pretty sterling rings. We also had some of the most delicious empanadas and french fries ever.

Right now, back in the grandmother’s house in Puerto Montt, Chile, I’m happy with my purchases. This poncho is snuggly and warm, and I hope the ring – whose center stone is the national stone of Argentina – will always remind me to be flexible and breezy (or at least flexible and breezy enough to remember to run to Argentina when things get bad!).
After all of these spontaneous travel changes and snafoos, it seems that we’ve finally gotten a good turn. We heard back from an organic farm/commune on the island of Chiloe here in Chile. It was my first choice farm from the beginning. I had emailed them back in June, but they’d told me that they were booked during our time here. I re-emailed them when our other farm failed. We heard back that they could have us beginning October 1. Lauren and I had to fill out a rather extensive form in Spanish about our world views, how we contribute to a healthy community, and what kind of meditation and art we practice. Somehow, despite our clunky, ridiculous Spanish, they accepted us.
I’m so pleased to get to have a farm experience. From all of our communication with this family, it sounds like we’re in for a very calm, whole, stimulating, artistic time. There may even be yoga involved. And greenhouse strawberrries. There might even be (enter fulfillment of childhood dream)...... PENGUINS!

2011-09-24T16:09:00.000-07:00

How (not) to apply to grad school from South America, and other misadventures

I wrote a poem some time ago about how much I distrust and dislike our culture’s dependence on technology. Big Brother must have been watching me scribble away from the built-in camera on my Mac. He is now determined to make me pay the karmic price for saying, “What’s ‘tweet’??” and “I hate Facebook.”

So, hear me Microsoft Melusina, Facebook Fiend, P.C. Posidon, “The Cloud.” Mea culpa! Lo siento! Je suis desolee! Entschuldigung! I’m sorry! Please just let my computer survive and connect to the internet long enough to apply to grad school.

You may remember that the last time I took a computer abroad, a two-year-old projectile vomited on it. (For the full account – which I’m sure you want after such a lovely brief description – click here: http://troisbisous.blogspot.com/2009/09/small-preface-au-cas-ou.html). This time wasn’t quite as dramatic. Lauren and I were simply moving to the last shaded corner in the courtyard of our hotel in Mendoza when a loop of my power cord caught on the arm of a lawn chair and jerked my netbook right out of my arms. It thunked the slate patio and continued to work juuuuust long enough for Lauren and I to laugh about what a disaster it would have been if it had broken. Ha. Ha.

Fortunately – the luck in the unluck – not only was the manager of our hostel a computer technician, but his entire family was as well. I sent my Acer off with a random Tio who brought it back to me the next morning with a new 500 GB hard-drive (hello thousands of trip photos, hello). Everything’s dandy except that the entire thing is in Spanish. Windows, spell check, Skype, EVERYTHING. It’s also taken to making mystical Peruvian-esque noises whenever I do something it doesn’t like. But, it works. It’s still a capricious bugger when it comes to Wi-Fi, but it works. I just need to remember to pass everything through Lauren’s computer for spellcheck before submitting grad school applications. Helo, my nme is Briann Carpeter and I am a perfec candidat fore your vary selectiv programm. I’m smrt and I writ pomes.

Other than that rather significant blotch on the radar, Mendoza was ideal. Plenty of sunshine and wine, some of the world’s friendliest people, and an odd cat to distract us when personal statements got too boring.

The courtyard at the hostel in Mendoza.

On our second-to-last day in Mendoza, we went on a vineyard tour. Neither Lauren nor I claim to be a wine connaisseur in any way, so it was amusing when the first guide asked us if we had ever been on a vineyard tour/wine tasting. We smiled, said, “Oh, some.” He said, “Where?” “Hmmm, well, Bordeaux, Southern Germany, Napa, Sonoma, Virginia, New Zealand, Tuscany....” At this point we realized how ridiculous we sounded, so we finished with a sound “Queremos vino...mucho.” Well, said. Well, said.

We got to visit some really lovely vineyards and try some wonderful wines. At the second vineyard – an organic one that does nearly all of the work, including labling, by hand – we also got to try olives and this quince gelee that was unbelievably good. It tasted fruity and floral-sweet and had the texture of something half-way between preserves and fruit leather. You’re supposed to eat it with cheese, but I think I could have chomped down the entire brick allll by itself.

Lauren and I enjoy our first taste of Bonarda.

The charming organic winery.

Vineyards with the hazy Andes in the background.

We (sadly) left Mendoza for Santiago, where we stayed for a day (our one destination was a famous gelatto cafe) before heading south to Puerto Montt. Upon arrival in Puerto Montt we began following some very vague directions to the organic vegetable and goat farm. We got on a packed bus full of Chileans who clearly thought we were getting on the wrong bus. It was the kind of bus that doesn’t stop unless you ask it to. Lauren had to repeat “Kilometre 30, por favor!” about a million times before the bus got it. He dropped us off at Kilometre 30 in front of a small sign that said “Pte. Metri.” We took some happy-giddy pictures of our new home and began to imagine all the exciting scrambles we could have along the coastline.

Our directions told us to “go over the bridge and head up a hill toward some houses.” Which we did. In both directions. Several times. With all of our luggage. Finally we decided to head back down the hillside to La Universidad de los Lagos (I read online that they study fish migration) to ask for directions. A very kind man came out to greet us. He only spoke Spanish. “Somos perditas. Claro.” I said. (We’re lost. Obviously.) “Buscamos una granja.” (We look for a farm.) “La granja de Matias Doggenweiler, un Allemange.” (The farm of Matias Doggenweiler, a Gireman – which is what my made-up word for “German” probably sounded like.) “Sabez?” (You know?)

Miracle upon miracle, he did know. And where was the farm?? Only straight back up the hill we’d just hiked down. So, we made our way back up, found the sign, and traipsed around the property for a good 30 minutes look for...well... a farm, a farmhouse, farmers. Instead we made some nice animal friends and found several run-down greenhouses and storage sheds. The absence of any sort of welcome gave us a weird vibe. We decided to can it. Even if there were nice farmers around the corner, it didn’t seem like a place we’d want to be, especially for three weeks. We spent a couple minutes contemplating stealing the farm cat, decided against it, and hit the road.

We hiked a couple miles back to this little kiosk where we bought a Coke and some potato chips, pulled out our guide book, and re-stratagized. We took what was possibly a school bus back to Puerto Montt where we decided to stay for a day or two to regroup and figure out our next step (and shower.)

So here we sit, in a gorgeous room on the tenth floor overlooking the bay (thank you Mr. Eriks for those Holiday Inn points!!!). The sea gulls swoop incredibly close to our window. We’ve seen not one, not two, but three rainbows since noon. Our ‘clean’ clothes are drying on every available surface. The sun is setting and we’re about to open a bottle of cab. Maybe it’s just one of those times where you have to take an overnight bus, hike up a couple hills, and wander around in the rain before you get to someplace you didn’t expect to go, but can’t imagine having missed.

2011-09-14T12:07:00.000-07:00

Ta-ta Bogota

Preparing for the expected before a trip like this is hard work enough. My clothes will start stinking, my socks will get fusty, I will often have to have wet hair. I will sleep in a cold tent, eat dehydrated food, and probably get some dizzying gastro-intestinal illness even if I take all the right precautions.

I think I spent so much time before leaving repeating things like that to myself, that I rather forgot prepare for the unexpected. (As if you ever really can...) (Also, mom, this is not the set up for anything epic, dangerous, or terrible).

In all of my preparation for this trip, I have been thinking SOUTH America. In theory, I knew I was heading to spring, but that was difficult to imagine in the 100+ degree heat in DC. When I think South America, I think sunshine, Latin beats, the Amazon. Probably true in coastal places, probably true in Bogota in the summer. Not true right now. When Lauren and I arrived at the hostel, it was barely 60 degrees and none of the buildings have central heat (or heaters of any sort). There was a fire place in one of the main rooms, but the wood was in short supply. I pretty sure we burnt an old set of bunk beds one night...

As most of you know from my near-constant harping, I am trying to finish graduate school applications during the first part of this trip. Lauren and I were very intentional about booking only hostels and hotels with wireless internet. So, when my computer refused to recognize the signal in our hostel in Bogota, I was devastated. (Though, if I had slept more on the plane, I may have been slightly less dramatic about it.) Much of what I have to do doesn't require the internet, but a lot of it does. Blogging, for one thing :)

The deal-sealer though, was the lack of heat. 62 is pleasant when you're walking around the city, hiking, or doing jumping jacks. It is less pleasant when you are sitting still five feet away from a socket for hours. I'm sure it sounds silly, dramatic, wimpy to be saying this, but apparently being warm is an important component to productivity.

Lauren and I - trying on our ultra-flexible, boho travel spirits - had emotional breakdowns. And then regrouped and decided we needed a more relaxing, warmer, less rainy environment to work in. We re-booked our flight to Santiago and left mountainous Bogota for the "semi-desert" climate of Mendoza, Argentina. In addition to being warm and sunny, Mendoza is also the wine-growing capitol of Argentina. If you have ever had a glass of Malbec, you know the delight. If you haven't, wire the cash and I'll ship you some :)

Miracle upon miracle, the internet works on my computer here. We have a lovely room with a desk and our own bathroom. The door opens onto the back terrace that has tables and chairs and a awning of blooming wisteria. If you plucked me up and plopped me here, I'd probably think I was somewhere in northern Italy.

The sun is glorious, the good wine cheap, and the rocking personal statements forthcoming.

I hope this update finds you all well. I'll leave you with some pictures of Bogota from the one nice day we had. It is really quite lovely in the sun. On the sunny day, Lauren and I took a cable car up to a beautiful church on one of the mountains overlooking Bogota. The view was stunning. She brought here pocket-sized camera and has some pictures up on her blog:

wanderyear.blogspot.com

The view from the front door of our hostel.

View from the courtyard of the upper balcony of the hostel.

The really pretty, tiled bathroom.

Courtyard.

Hostel puppy!

2011-09-05T07:07:00.000-07:00

And...we're off!! Lauren and I leave on our around-the-world adventure at 1:00am on Thursday, September 8th. As many of you know, we've been scheming since college. The destinations have changed along the way, but the end goal has stayed the same: have an epic adventure (and try to learn some Spanish along the way!). With graduate school looming (hopefully!) on the horizon, it's either now or never.

As soon as I know what blog she'll be updating, I'll post that link here. Twice the fun! I think the internet situation will be favorable for the first half of the trip, so the updates should be (relatively) frequent.

Here's the skeleton itinerary:

Bogota, Colombia (two week retreat to work on grad school applications...haha)

Chile

Peru

Home for Christmas!

Hong Kong (two day stop-over)

Thailand

Cambodia

India

Nepal

United Arab Emirates (one day stop-over)

We've got various volunteer gigs mapped out along the way. We'll be volunteering on an organic farm in southern Chile where we'll help with the spring planting and learn how to make goat cheese! Then we'll be off to hike in Patagonia after which we'll make our way up to Huaraz, Peru. Huaraz is at the base of the Andes (ie: more hiking and even MORE pictures of mountains). We'll be volunteering with an organization that tutors/teaches some of the poorest children in the city. We'll head home for Christmas mid-December and take off again on January 2nd, 2012 for Leg II. (More on Leg II later when Leg II seems a little more like an eminent reality and a little less like an interesting idea).

For the past several days, I haven't gone anywhere without my multi-topic to-do list. It's sitting here on the counter giving me the Evil Eye. Apparently it thinks that I should be doing things like "pack" and "make copies of passport" instead of updating my blog... pshaw!

Crunch time is crazy.

I'll be writing the next post while looking out at the mountains with a steaming cup of Colombian coffee in hand. Oh, and I think our room has a fireplace :)

Thanks for coming along for the ride! Please send emails or comments along the way... it's so good to hear from folks when you're far away.

2010-04-16T09:46:00.000-07:00

I know Easter was a couple weeks ago, but this short vignette is prompted by a lovely birthday package that I received a few days ago from dear American friend. She sent me a whole collection of little treats from home, including (for purely cultural reasons, she assured me) a package of orange Peeps.

Peeps, rather like Jello, inspire some interesting questions. For starters, "What are they?" Or, "Who actually eats them?" My sister and I never liked them, but we did like putting them in the microwave and watching them magically blow up.

My mom likes roasting Peeps over our fire pit in the back yard. She claims the colored sugar coating caramelizes just like crème brûlée . Well, as you all know, I've spent too much time in France to let that kind of analogy slip by without a giant internal groan... Peeps like crème brûlée?? But, I suppose burnt sugar is burnt sugar. The idea of a burnt, gooey Peep maybe sandwiched between two graham cracker halves with some melty dark chocolate is much more appealing than the irregularly-shaped, oddly-colored, puffy sugar chicken could ever be on its own.

When Yves saw the package of orange Peeps, he (surprisingly) didn't have to be told what they were. He knew he'd found candy and instantly started begging to try them. I said, like any good American-pretending-to-be-French-pretending-to-be-a-mom would say, "After you eat your dinner."

The after-dinner conversation that ensued had me in tears. (If you find the following dialogue even moderately funny or are curious about the "chocolate bells" bit, you should check out David Sedaris's story about explaining Easter in beginner French in Me Talk Pretty One Day.)

So, without further ado... Yves and Samira on Peeps:

Yves: "Are they supposed to have a taste?"

Samira: "What is this? Cheese?"

Yves: "There isn't anything inside. It tastes like air."

Samira: "I don't like this. ... Look I ate it's little foot!!"

Yves: "Do you really eat these?"

Me: "The Easter Bunny brings them to a lot of children in the United States."

Yves: "But you live in France."

Me: "No. I lived in France for two years, but I lived the whole rest of my life in the United States."

Yves: "Your whole life?? Could the Easter Bunny find you to bring you these when you lived in France?"

Me: "There actually isn't an Easter Bunny in France. Chocolate clocks fly in from Rome in Italy with the Easter candy."

Yves: "That's silly. ... I don't want any more of this. Well, maybe the chocolate eyes..."

Samira: "Brianne, breeeeanne."

Me: "Yes, Samira?"

Samira: "This is yucky." (spits slobbery peepgoo out of mouth)

Yves: "Can I have an apple instead?"

Yes. Yes, you can have an apple instead.

2010-02-27T08:55:00.000-08:00

“What are you guys talking about?” I asked, a bit confused about the musical pantomiming.

“Luzi’s cello.”

“Oooh, that makes sense. I thought you were talking about Jello.”

“What?”

“You know, Jello.”

They didn’t know.

“Billy Cosby? J-E-L-L-O! It’s aaaaaliiiiiiive!?”

No. Now I looked like the crazy one.

“What are you talking about? What’s Jello?” Diel asked.

What is Jello? Well. If you’ve never eaten at a hospital or summer camp in the US and haven’t grown up with wobbling, green, cottage-cheese and canned fruit cocktail-filled, church-pot-luck “salads,” or rubbery, animal-shaped, unnaturally-colored jigglers, that is a very difficult question to answer.

“It’s this gelatin-based, fake fruit-flavored ‘food’ ...”

“How do you eat it?”

“Oh, um, mixed with fruit, or cut into cubes or (and this is where it all began) as Jello shots made with alcohol instead of water. It kind of tastes like a semi-solid, alcoholic gummy bear. You know, people make them for parties and stuff.”

...

The idea spiraled from me bringing back a box of Jello so they could all try a Jello shot to us throwing a full-out, college-style, American Party. I would stock up on authentic supplies while I was home for Christmas, and they would all come dressed-up as “Americans.”

...

I’ve spent most of the past two years in France and Switzerland trying to overcome the general perceptions of Americans. Some of us love to travel, can speak other languages, are interested in hearing about you and your culture, don’t wear flip flops in public, and didn’t like Bush either etc. Well, two steps forward, one step back. The unofficial subtitle for the event was, “American Party: Come so Brianne can confirm every stereotype you’ve ever had.”

I was concerned when I went home for Christmas that I might not be able to find Fourth of July decorations in the middle of December, but Dollar General pulled through in all of its out-of-season, kitsch splendor. For the meager sum of eight dollars, I got party supplies beyond what I could have hoped for: two Giant, plastic American flags; red, white and blue bunting; a set of “God Bless America” luminaries; and (personal favorite) USA! temporary tattoos. A short stop at Meijer for Jello, brownies and chocolate chips and the state-side preparation was complete.

...

Here in Switzerland, they say the year has five seasons: Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter and Fasnacht. I suppose the best translation for Fasnacht is “Carnival” in the historical sense, not in the ferris wheel, corn dog sense. It’s a week-long party where everyone dresses up, throws confetti, drinks too much coffee Schnapps, and dances in the streets until the wee hours of the morning. It’s rather like Halloween on steroids for adults meets Mardis Gras meets Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade meets high school marching band. Now you all have a very clear picture in your imaginations, right??

From what I’ve been able to gather from various sources (ie: friends and wikipedia), Fasnacht is a celebration that has its origins in several cultural traditions and historical events. In the mid-fifteenth century on March 6th, what is now the central part of Switzerland decisively defeated and kicked out the Austrians. When you’re Catholic, an event of such magnitude deserves a Huge Party. When you’re Catholic, that Huge Party can’t be near as much fun if it takes place during Lent. So, they decided to move the celebration to the first Thursday of the weekend before Lent. So far so good. But why the dressing-up and why the brass band music?

Apparently over the course of the centuries, the Celtic tradition of dressing-up and dancing to chase out the winter spirits so that the spring spirits can come made its way south and the traditions fuzed. (There is also some story in Luzern about a man named “Friechli” or something who comes on a boat with his family to official start the festival and is occasionally stolen by other towns and the Luzerners have to go find him and get him back... this part remains a bit fuzzy to me).

Anyhow, you must be wondering what this has to do with the American Party, and the answer is, Timing. We decided to have the party on the weekend before Fasnacht so as to align with the seasonal, festive, dress-up mood. Considering the great success of the party, I’d say it was a good choice.

...

So, for your viewing pleasure, here are some photo highlights of the two events (The American Party and Fasnacht).

What happens when you tell people to come dressed up as Americans:

cowboys...

gangsters...

sorority girl, Obama, Dr. Yang

Real Americans...

The Blues Brothers...

Jane Fonda helping Tourist work-off that burger-belly...

and yes, Elvis.

YMCA

Jello shots anyone?? (Notice Leah's face in

the background... that was the general reaction)

haha

Explaining the rules of Beer Pong.

Proceeding to win Beer Pong. (Teammate Pascal's

first words on arrival: "Hawaii is part of America too.")

Temporary tattoos!

Fasnacht

Watching the parade from the balcony of Diel and Luzi's new apartment.

Yves, Samira and Diel.

Confetti!

Michi and I

Diel and I

And then in the Evening...

The streets of Luzern PACKED with people dressed-up

dancing and singing and drinking coffee Schnapps.

In the crowd.

This time I went as a Gypsy. The point on Fasnacht is not

necessarily to dress up as something, but just to disguise yourself

in general (and with enough layers to keep you warm

in the sub-zero temperatures).

Best costumes ever. Lighthouses with a matching beach-decorated

"wagali" or "little wagon" filled with thermoses full of our night's

supply of coffee Schnapps.

A spectacularly disgusting tradition. In addition to coffee Schnapps

you can also have "holdrio" or rose-hip-hybiscus tea with Schnapps.

When you finish your tea, you're supposed to fling your teabag at the

ceiling hard enough that it sticks. Diel and I succeeded.

Ahhh. What a fun year.

2010-01-30T07:12:00.000-08:00

Winter was not a part of most of my childhood. My young interactions with snow boil down to a handful of family fables. When I was three and we were living in Phoenix, the seemingly impossible happened: it snowed. Well, that's what the Arizonians said anyways. My Michigander parents say "it flurried." I looked up into the sky, so the story goes, with wide eyes and said to my mom pensively, "oh, so this is what mits are for."

A couple years later we drove from our new location in Houston, Texas to Michigan for Christmas. I remember my grandfather pushing me down a hill on what I thought was a giant, plastic frisbee. My parents remember taking me tubing. You have very little directional control when you fling yourself down a snow-covered hill on an oversized rubber doughnut. Apparently my mom and I took out a rather oversized lady right at the knees... (Dad, I have a vague memory of seeing this once on a family video??)

Several winters later, in North Carolina, we rather exceptionally got about 4 inches of snow. The grocery store ran out of milk and bread and school was canceled for days. I remember watching two of my dad's students try to pat together a snowman in our front yard. The poor dears had never seen the make-a-snowball-and-roll-it-til-it-gets-big technique and their attempt look more like a burial mound for Frosty than the jolly bon homme himself. My mom opened the front door and gave them directions... and a carrot.

I didn't fall in love with winter until we moved to Michigan when I was seventeen. Granted, I've never had a driveway to shovel or a school-path side walk to clear before 7am, but I'm unconvinced that these tasks would change my mind. I love winter. I love making soups and stews, drinking huge mugs of milky tea, watching snow fall, seeing sun glint of ice sickle daggers slowly dripping toward the ground. Before I start sounding over-the-top, I will say that I absolutely hate having wet feet (or wet anything for that matter) and I really dislike the mushy end of winter that seems to span all of March, April and sometimes part of May in Michigan. BUT, for me at least, the glinty, snowy height of January and February are only eclipsed in beauty by crisp, colorful, produced-laden autumn.

The only time I saw snow last year was when Lauren and I ingeniously decided to go to Poland... in February. We caught an inexpensive Easy Jet flight from Paris to Krakow and were too cheap to check any bags. I wore three sweaters, a wool vest and my winter coat on the plane. I think I was most thankful for the wool vest the day that Lauren and I misread the scale on our map of Warsaw and walked over three hours across the city just to see this "spectacular-can't-miss-it" (or so our Let's Go Easter Europe guide claimed) floating palace. You would think that two college graduates from the Midwest would have the foresight to realize that, in the snow, the "floating" palace would look much more like a palace in the middle of a corn field.

Anyhow, all of this to say that this winter in Switzerland certainly makes up for last year's total lack of winter (and almost makes up for an entire childhood without winter!). Some days when I step out my front door, I wonder whether or not I've had to rummage through the back of a magic wardrobe to get where I've landed.

The spectacular thing about winter here is how active of a season it is. Nearly every winter sport you can imagine is accessible by bus or train in under an hour. What's more, at this elevation the temperature rarely drops below 25 F (that's -4 C for all you European folks reading this ;), which means that you can actually get outside and do things instead of scurrying from car to building to car. So, I thought I'd take you all on a wee tour of some of my winter excursions since getting back here after the holidays.

Three days after I got back, my dear friend Lauren Berka came to visit for ten days. She's currently in grad school in... Phoenix, so it seemed appropriate to pack enough winter into her ten days here to last her until the end of February, which is when we all want winter to end anyways. Our first adventure was with this lovely group of women:

We went on a group snow-shoeing trek on a nearby mountain. And, if that in and of itself weren't Swiss enough, the package also included a gluhwein (hot, mulled red wine) stop with a bonfire AND a fondue dinner. We were all a bit bummed in the morning when we woke to clouds and snow. No sunshine, no vista views. But the complete silence in the forest made up for it. Well, OK, and the fact that, since it was impossible to see much more than twenty feet in any direction, my imagination pulled up a National Geographic narrator who filled in the details of our team's blizzard trek across the Antarctic that our guide was leaving out. haha :) Look how beautiful it was:

It seems the winter-adventure-syndrome got into our bones because a couple days later when we were looking at the weather forecast for the top of Mt. Pilatus, we discovered that, in addition to stunning gondola rides, Pilatus also offers a 6 kilometer (3 mile!). The run basically begins at the tree line and twists and turns all the way down the mountain. My original thought, "Oh! This will be so fun!" quickly turned to "Shit! How do you control these things!" I've been sledding plenty of times, but the runs have always been short enough (and straight enough) that you barely even have time to pick up speed before you reach the bottom. Not so with a 3 mile continuous run. Not so. And, to top things off, the sleds were the for-real deal: wooden with metal runners. In short, the kind you only ever see as decorations at Santa Land in the mall or on vintage, 19th century Christmas cards. Turns out, there's a very good reason that sleds have evolved since the 1850's: safety. I don't think I've done something that's terrified me so much, given me so many bruises and yet been so much fun.

Well, it's getting exceptionally late here and I should go to bed. But I still want to share a few more pictures from the hike I went on this morning. An unbelievable ten minute bus ride away from my door...

I wish I could transport you all here for this wonderland. (I also wish I could figure out how to make this underlining go away....)

2009-10-27T01:55:00.000-07:00

Why the Italian part of Switzerland isn't actually Italy:

1. The buses and trains are on time.

2. The Swiss flag is flying everywhere.

3. Shops only close for an hour at lunch time.

4. Everyone speaks 4 languages. ( Servers first speak in Italian, then hear Remo's accent and switch to German, then hear us talking together and switch to English, then hear me babbling some anecdote about Yves in French and switch to French. By the end of just a short weekend, I was saying things like, Buongiorno, je voudrais un cafe creme, bitte. I found this incredible amusing, but all the Swiss act quite blase.)

Ok, photo tour!

2009-10-16T04:33:00.001-07:00

Last year in France, one of the things I missed most was the change of seasons. Located east of the icy Atlantic and south of the English Channel, Nantes has about the same weather patterns as London. When we were little, my sister and I had coordinating (not matching mind you, there's a big difference between matching and coordinating when you're 9 and 4) mauve and purple London Fog jackets. "Nantes Fog" certainly doesn't have the same lovely assonance and isn't backed by the same inveterate stereotype, but you get the picture.

A significant portion of the city was destroyed during Allied air raids in World War II. The once-ornate buildings were reconstructed in a more ascetic fashion. They are almost all grey. The sidewalks are also grey and very narrow (and most likely covered in dog shit, which makes spring especially fragrant). The streets are grey. And, in most of November, December, January and February, the sky is grey. On a bad day in January, I think I suggested living in Nantes was like living in a humid, freezing-cold, grey box filled with poop. Like I said, it was a bad day.

So, that (slightly vulgar, sorry Mom!) rabbit trail all to say that this year I'm welcoming the change in seasons like golden retriever greets its master (or anyone really... Yes Lauren, especially Bailey). After last fall in Nantes, I had mistakenly relegated lovely, apple-filled days to autumn in Michigan. It is true that fall is home to the only cultural tradition we (we Americans, that is :) can proudly claim as ours: Thanksgiving. When separated from the fallacious fable we're told in grade school, it's a holiday worth celebrating. Not only do we gather as families around in-season, North-American food - one of the only instances of true "American" food culture.. check out Barbara Kindsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle - we also have managed to keep the day (mostly) non-consumer based.

This year however, I've come to discover that autumn in fact does not belong to the Mid-West. Here, just as in Holland on crisp Wednesday mornings, the market is spilling over with gourds, apples, pumpkins and - my new favorite - fresh-pressed, unpasteurized apple-pear juice.

Once a friend wrote me and asked - vu my rather transient childhood and, so far, adulthood - when I feel most “at home,” aside from being with family. I thought about the response for a long time. Actually, I still think about it. It’s a very curious question to me (and one that I’ll keep myself from rambling off on here, at least for today). I ended up telling him that I feel most at home when I am lost in laughter with someone. That pure feeling of complicity and connection makes me know that I am in a place, and, more importantly, that I am sharing being in a place with someone.

Perhaps it’s due to the paucity of such kindred folk this year that I’ve come to realize the feeling of connection I have to the seasons. Fall feels like a dear friend come to visit. Up to my elbows in cinnamon and apple peals I feel... at home.

Last night the air was full of wood-smoke and crispness. Leaves scraped across sidewalks. Sheep baaahed and jangled their bells as I walked passed their pastures (Ok, so maybe that last detail is specific to Switzerland...) and I felt snug in the rhythm of the year.

(Is it cheating that I’m writing this from Starbucks with a soy chai-tea latte?)

Here, look how lovely.

But wait, some shameless plugs first! :) My artsy-minded pals from university and I have started a literary journal (we’re currently accepting submissions!) and blog (they are all fabulous writers). You can check it out at www.swsalps.com. Also, I now have my own website where I have posted/will be posting various creative works (mostly poetry) and occasional recipes. So if you’re my mom, or if you still have free time after reading my epic blog posts, you can visit www.briannecarpenter.wordpress.com.

Ok, and now some autumn.

Visiting Verena in Germany.

Fall berries!

Yves and I in our "cool" hats.

Samira and I eating ice cream.

Luzern's famous Tower Bridge.

HUGE wild mushroom Ida claims is edible.

Apple butter time!Gourds galore! (and yummy squash too!)

2009-09-26T05:33:00.000-07:00

(A small preface au cas ou... After spending three lovely months at home this summer with my friends and family, I have made my way back to Europe. I’m living in Luzern, Switzerland, working as an au pair (in French! poor kids might end up saying some funny things), learning German, hiking, writing, reading, preparing for the GRE and, most recently, wild mushroom hunting and apple canning.)

Here is my explanation as to why you may think I’ve fallen off the summit of Mt. Pilatus, vanished from the face of the earth or moved to a much more remote country than Switzerland:

I suppose the morning should have been some indication of how the day was going to go. Six-thirty was blue and sunny but by seven I couldn't see the top of Mt. Pilatus anymore as I peaked through the shutters in the living room. When clouds move in from over the mountain, you can bet your Wellies that it's going to rain. I usually get up about 40 minutes before I wake up Yves and Samira so that I'll have enough time to make a peppermint tea, gather enough calm to coax unwilling limbs into sleeves and pants and make (yet again) a convincing argument for breakfast.

I like to wake Samira up first because she still snuggles her way out of dreams whereas Yves balls into a hedgehog, quills out and pointed toward me. This morning she was already awake when I crept into her room and she gave me the biggest smile she could manage with a pacifier in her mouth. I prattled to her in what sounded to me like soothing French (I might just sound ridiculous... Hello hello. It's wonderful the day coming, little heart. How was your sleep? Nice! Lovely!) as I lifted her out of her crib. She lay her head on my should and I felt warm all over. Then I realized that the warmth was strangely localized and had begun running down my leg. Her diaper was bursting with the previous night's too-much iced tea. So, for the first time that day (I hope my English professors reading this delight in my subtle foreshadowing...), I changed clothes and took my second shower.

From that point on, the day was a Wednesday. We all arrived where we needed to be on time. I picked up Yves from kindergarden at noon after I got out of German class. Wednesday is our day to play together all afternoon. And though it makes me feel terrible and makes me fear ever ever being a mother, six straight hours of just the two of us together can get pretty, well, long. While I was making lunch, all of the clouds vanished and I thought, Super! We can go outside and play this afternoon instead of staying cooped up in the apartment. But, after lunch, Yves didn't want to go outside. Certainly not. This is what he said in French.

It ended up being a good call on his part, as shortly after he so vehemently declared his preference it started to pour. The apartment turned cool and grey. Everything gave into sleepiness...except Yves. We stacked stuffed animals in towers, zoomed trains across the floor and built a lego mansion with every single lego he has (many). Wow, we'd been playing for hours and it was almost time for Nicole to get home, to start making dinner, to....not it wasn't. Somehow the grey made time sleepy as well. It was creeping along like a nocturnal animal tossed into an Alaskan summer. Yves and I were both a little bored and stir-crazy, but it had stopped raining so in a most exciting French I said, Let's go outside! Yves declined. I changed my approach. We're going outside! Yves put on one shoe and ran around the apartment shouting and refusing to put on his second shoe. Actually, to be fair he agreed to put on a second shoe and came smirking out with one sneaker and one of his mom's high heels. I ended up manually depositing him straight into his galoshes. Needless to say, we weren't to thrilled with each other as we left the apartment.

We headed across the street to the playground, but what little boy needs soggy wood-chips and a sopping swing when rain has collected in all a sidewalk's dents and crevices? Yves found a mammoth puddle and as he darted through it, gave me the arent-you-going-to-stop-me eye. I, however, thought it was a great idea. I told him he was free to get as wet as he liked as long as he payed attention not to splash the people passing by. He hopped and laughed and dashed and shouted and splashed and flung and slapped and scgoushed. It was delightful. And, not only was it delightful for me, but it brought delight into the days of almost every person who passed. I think we looked at him not necessarily with envy (it was rather chilly to be getting wet) but with a sense rightness, of wonderful contentment that someone was so fully enjoying a moment. I felt like a distant third person narrator beside my tree watching the change brush over peoples' faces as their eyes moved from some point in front of them to Yves' sopping zebra striped shirt. I hope to remember that moments like these hold hands with hours of mounting boredom in a closed house.

I had a few precious hours to myself that evening. I had been planning on leaving the apartment and nesting in a cafe somewhere with my laptop to work on a massive (and overly hopeful/ borderline obsessive) GRE Literuature Subject Test study scheme. But the prospect of perhaps getting wet feet won out and I took to my bedroom instead. I had earbudded myself to Beethoven's 4th was trying to summarize some 18th century epistolary novel I'd never read when my door opened a crack and Yves asked if he could come in. Sure, I said, mentally berating myself for not having gone to some interruption-free zone. But Yves hurled me from regret to guilt in under three seconds: Can we look at the pictures of your family? He crawled into bed beside me and just as I was pulling up the folder, Samira padded in and patted the bed with her dimpled, still-baby hands. I lifted her up and she doughed into my other side. I would point at a face and she would squeal from behind her Nookey Mutter! and Yves would bashfully say, ta mere. Their dad called and Nicole came in with the phone, put her hand over her heart, and said, Sorry, they can't talk right now. They're busy. As she left the room, Samira projectile-vomited right into my lap and my laptop. The screen instantly went dead, Samira started wailing, Yves started crying and I sat in a pool of another woman's child's vomit wondering that such a serene moment could turn catastrophic in an instant. I wanted to cry too. Loneliness would be worse without pictures and email and occasional Skype conversations. And, how much work had I lost? How many half scrawled poems?

But, it was too ridiculous to cry. I ended up in a fit of laugh-sobs after which I showered and, unlike a real mother, left the house to have a glass of wine. I was already thinking about telling the story, about how I would describe this tranquil scene and then say laughingly, Ha ha, but theeeeeeen... In my mind the reality of the "after" had surpassed the reality of the "before." The more I thought about it, the more my inclination to spin the story this way frightened me. Those soft moments, why do we cancel them out? Why is the story about disaster? Why are most stories a person hears in a day about disasters? I don't mean to belittle the truly terrible (a category into which the loss of a replaceable electron device does not fall), but the puddles are just as real as the gray hours in a small space. I'd rather tell of puddles.

So after various rigamaroles with insurance agencies, trans-Atlantic import taxes and blahdiblah, I’m finally re-equipped and back in action. Remo happens to be a software writer so he was able (magically, or so it seemed to me) to save my hard drive and my, er, rams. I’m terribly behind on my study schedule, but I hope to add little updates here and there.

Hope the farmers’ markets are overflowing with decorative gourds where you are....

küessli!

2009-05-13T01:03:00.000-07:00

The day after Lauren left (last Wednesday witnessed our very (melo)dramatic parting at the train station), I hopped on a train to Paris to meet up with my friend Julie and her boyfriend Mathieu. We had a picnic dinner in her tiiiiiiiny Parisian apartment and then got in the car and drove to her parents' house in Normandy for the weekend. Her parents have spent the last month organizing une rallye: imagine The Amazing Race meets family reunion meets Fourth of July barbeque.

(side note: this post might not be too coherent as this is what I'm doing on the side...)

(I think I mentioned in my last post that I'm currently living with one of the teachers I work with - Pascale - and her family. Pictured above: Ceasar and Zoe who find my computer enormously amusing.)

Anyhow, Julie, Mathieu and I arrived in Normandy a day before the rest of the gang to help prepare a bit. This was our contribution:

tiramisu (and, not picured, mousse au chocolat) for 40. (Don't worry, I've got the recipe!)

Both sides of Julie's family came from all over France. While family members got to stay in hotels and B&B's, we les jeunes set up tents in Julie's back yard. The next morning formed a massive assembly line and successfully made 120 sandwiches in less than 30 minutes.

After packing up the picnic lunches, we all assembled outside for the start of the scavenger hunt. Each team of six got a map of the route through the forest, a sheet of photos to reproduce and a set of questionnaires. I had a blast romping through the forrest, but when it came to the questionnaire (French trivia, French plays on words, French measurements, French history...) I probably should have been on the kids' team. I didn't even know the answer to the one question intended for me: What are the names of Obama's daughters? I could only remember Sasha....evidence I think of how much of a bubble I've been living in this year!

After the scavenger hunt we ate our picnic and then went on a bike/train-track excursion. The "bikes" have two pedaling seats and four stationary seats and the wheels run along an old train track that meanders through the forrest and crosses bridges over rivers.

And, if that was adventurous enough...

For those of us with more daring spirits, Julie's parents even organized a paragliding outing! Ever since my dad and I were foiled by the disappearing wind on the coast of Peru a year ago, I've been dying to try it. Lauren and I were going to go on our vacation in Switzerland as well, but the weather put its foot down again: clouds clouds clouds. The time the sky was as blue as the Mediterranean and the view below was stunning. Though Normandy is not the Swiss Alps nor the jagged cliff-lined coast of Lima, this time of year the fields are filled with blooming colza flowers (bright yellow) and dotted here and there with tiny, old villages and churches (especially tiny at 200 meters!). I thought I would be at least a little afraid, but it was actually one of the most zen experiences of my life, a combination between floating and flying, all you hear is air. Look how excited I was when I landed! Ok, well, Blogger is refusing to let me add any more pictures at the moment (Laureeeeeeeeen, I need technical support!)

Anyhow, the weekend was lovely. Julie's parents were generous beyond belief and, of course, it's always a treat to get to spend quality time with dear friends.

From here on out I'm barreling toward the end at top speed. I've gone back to organizing my life with a calendar as there are so many people to see and places to eat. This weekend I'm heading to Germany to see Verena and then spending the next week in Switzerland, then it's back to Nantes for 5 short days before Paris then the South of France then HOME.

I can't wait to see all your luminous faces and I especially can't wait for hugs.

2009-04-26T13:16:00.000-07:00

Recently one of my least proactive friends reprimanded me (through Lauren on gchat) for how little I update my blog. This is a person who, after accidentally leaving his backpack full of his things at the Grand Rapids airport, refused to call claiming it was lost forever, gone. Needless to say, his teasing hit its mark (well, that and the fact that Lauren included a hyperlink on her post to my "post" so her friends and family could see more pictures) (and, of course, I actually do want to tell you all about my fabulous recent vacation). So, here we go....

Well, I'm going to start by backing up just a tad. When Lauren and I got back at the end of February from our two week winter vacation, we were dreading what a loooooong month March was going to be. We were looking ahead at 5 straight weeks of "work" with no vacation and on top of that, packing up and moving out of our darling apartment. But, March was full of sunshine and the time flew by as we played outside, sat at cafes philosophizing, sat in our windowsills sipping wine. Suddenly the end of the month was upon us, and in the span of a long weekend we packed, cleaned, packed, cleaned, organized, and moved out of our little place and back in with our friend Julie where we started the year (Most Generous Friend Award!!). The next day we left on a two week vacation that turned out to be one of the most beautiful, adventurous, and utterly goofy two weeks I've ever spent!

To start vacation off with a B-A-N-G, Lauren and I and our two Kiwi friends Juliette and Dmitriy went to Euro-Disney where we spent the day frolicking around like little kids and laughing at the goofy translations on some of the rides!!

After Disney, Lauren and I headed to the south of France for a week. Neither of us had ever been and both of us would have kicked ourselves in the seat if we lived in France for the second time without going. We started off by exploring a handful of costal villages around Nice (our base city which is sprawling and, in fact, not very nice) like this one:
And this one:

The beach was actually made of small pebbles that Lauren and I spent almost two hours digging around in collecting sea glass much to the amusement of the other sunbathers and much to the envy of passing children.

After two days bopping around Nice, we boarded a ferry and headed south to the island of Corsica (just north of the Italian island Sardinia). In my imagination, the ferry looked something like the flat 6-car raft that nudges its way across Lake Charlevoix attached to a chain, so needless to say I was rather flabbergasted when we ended up on a this:

If the cruise ship crossing was a surprise, the landscape that awaited me on the island was speach-stealing (hmmm, not actually a phrase we use in the English language??). The island had alp-like snow covered peaks, vineyards, sloping hills and valleys, brightly colored Mediterranean-style villages, jagged chalk cliffs, and cerulean water lapping on white sand beaches. I am still stunned. We arrived in the port town Ajaccio and took the bus early the next morning to the picturesque city of Bonifacio where we spent the next couple of days (including my birthday... which just means that pretty much all birthdays from here on out are going to be pretty anti-climatic).

Here you might think that it can’t possible get any better....but it does!! From Bonifacia, we decided to take a boat trip to a tiny island/nature reserve just off the coast. Normaly the boat drops you off on the island to explore for about an hour, and, if you want, you can wait for the second boat later in the afternoon and spend 5 hours on the island. Because the morning we went was a bit blustery, everyone but us and two friends we’d made at the campsite decided to leave. So, to sum it up, we spent the entire day on a private island scampering over rock formations, peering into tide pools, taking pictures of wild flowers, and swimming in water cold enough to keep a popsicle from melting...

At the end of our stay in Bonifacio, we headed back to Ajaccio for a day and night before returning to mainland France on the ferry/cruise-ship. We were returning with the friends we had made at the campsite (two students: a guy from Columbia and a woman from Brazil) and we were supposed to take the early bus at 6am. But, instead of a bus, a little shuttle thing came and picked us up and then proceeded to drop us off on the side of the road about 10 minutes outside of town promising that a bus would come along to get us in a little while. As a semi-joke, our Columbian friend stuck out his thumb and before we knew it, we were climbing into the van of a half-American half-French wine maker who drove us all to Ajaccio while discussing the differences between French and American wine and wine-making processes. Lauren and I ended up finding his wine in a local food market where we also bought a delicious all-Corsican picnic to have on the “terrace” of our hotel.

During the second week of vacations, things took a turn for the, er, ridiculous. With our Kiwi friends, we rented a chateau (castle) complete with canopy beds, spiral stair cases, and a knight in shining armor.

The castle is in the middle of French farmland, so we spent our days cooking with fresh eggs from the neighbors

playing lawn ball

practicing our archery skills

visiting the French version of Medieval Times (an experience so bizarre that it merits its own blog post)

and of course filming a mocumentary of the history of the castle complete with medieval weapons (hatchet, sword, giant pan, log) and a narrated text translated into English by the previous French owner of the castle with the most hilarious structural and grammatical errors ever. (if you know what’s good for you, you should probably avoid ever bringing this up again in order to avoid sitting through it multiple times while Lauren and I laugh at and explain every inside joke...)

Well, whew, this has gotten unreasonably long... but the vacation was so extraordinary that I feel like even this hasn’t done it justice. It’s hard for me to imagine a better vacation than one that combines stunning landscapes, delicious food, good friends, and of course extreme goofiness!

Now things are starting to wind to a close. Lauren leaves to go back home in just one week and I only have one month left of work (with two three-day weekends and one week off...what is the official benefit again of extending my contract??). I’ve got lots of fun week-end trips planned for May and the first week of June I’m going back to the south of France with some British friends...then it’s back to sweet Michigan for a summer full of friends, family and fun!

2009-03-02T09:50:00.000-08:00

Well, the time since I last wrote has been filled with a whirlwind of visits, vacations, and several existential crises. Most of you have probably forgotten that I even have a blog, some of you may miss it (blood relations), but all of you should really be glad that I haven't kept you up to date. In the span of 8 weeks, Lauren and I have gone from moving to South America, to China, to South Korea, to the US, to New Zealand, to India.... and the delicious thing is, we actually believed we had decided For Sure each time. I'll refer you to Lauren's blog so you can hear about her plans from her: www.interestinglyno.blogspot.com (also a useful link since she updates her blog much more frequently than I do and usually adds more pictures!)

So, briefly, here are my plans for the coming year (I still think and write in terms of academic years, so don't be confused :) Originally my contract in France was supposed to be over at the end of April, but my schools asked me to stay for another month to help the students prepare for their oral exams. I'll be leaving France for the US in the beginning of June. Summer plans include: US roadtrip to see friend Allison in Seattle complete with national parks stops and books on tape; numerous weekend trips to Holland to see friends, mentors, professors; some time Up North (for my non-Michiganian followers, that means in the northern part of Michigan, usually in a cabin/cottage on some lake); camping trip with my sis; summer camp with my mom (as volunteers. haha, gotcha!); loads of family time and maybe taking the GRE. I'll be heading back to Europe sometime in August to start a job as an au pair

in Switzerland!

I'll be living in charming Luzern

surrounded by the Swiss Alps

(but unfortunately not by the SWS:ALPS)

The family I'm working for is paying for me to take intensive German classes

(This is how excited I am about that. Also - less obviously perhaps - the picture was taken in Germany)

and they want me to speak only French with their children!

(Look how qualified I am!)

So, there's the whirl-wind tour. I am looking forward to seeing many of you this summer and catching-up/filling-in in more detail.

Also, I'm hoping to put up pictures (and anecdotes) from mine and Lauren's recent vacation to Poland soon! But for now, it's getting way past my adult bedtime (10:30-11pm) and I have to teach class for a whole entire hour tomorrow morning, so I had better get my rest ;)

Bisous to all!

2008-12-22T03:28:00.000-08:00

Joyeux Noel to all from the sprawling Hampster Cage that is Charles de Gaulle Airport. For some reason, my friend Lisa from Arizona who is coming to visit me for the holidays, got routed through Midwest Winter Wonderland (ie: Detroit). Her plane is indefinitely delayed, so here I sit listening to repeating announcements about unattended luggage getting exploded, getting sniffed by the occasional customs dog accompanied by armed customs agent, and watching frazzled travelers gripe at their even more frazzled children. I'm secretly waiting for John Candy and his polka band to show up and offer me a spot on their private Atlantic Barge (because that's the oceanic equivalent of an unheated van, right??)

Mrs. Mary Elizabeth Kirkpatrick, Mrs. Mary Elizabet Kirkpatrick is kindly invited to got sit the visitor desk gate 3. Mrs. Mary Elizabth Kirkpatrick.

(This lady is apparently no where to be found).

Anyhow, I think I have about 3.4 minutes left on this internet connection. What I really want to say is Merry Christmas to you all! And Happy New Year! Though I do so wish I could be hugging you all in person, I am happy to get the chance to spend Christmas in France. (aaah, getting passed by fatigued soldiers with automatic weapons!! jeeze Louise, France). Hopefully Lisa will be here soon, so we can head off downtown to see all of the fabulous lights lining the Champs Elyesee and of course the twinkling Eiffel Tower. We'll be spending Christmas day in Nantes, and I've successfully gathered all of the people I could find who would have otherwise been alone for Christmas and having them over on the 25th. Then on the 26th we'll be going to my host family's house on the beach for a full day of festive French family fun.

I hope you all cherish being where you are and with whom you are.

Very Merriest,

Brianne

2008-12-05T03:21:00.000-08:00

The absence of Thanksgiving combined with the nearly tropical weather in Nantes has my normally way-too-Christmasy spirit confused. This years’ “Christmas decorations” have me even more muddled. The city started putting up huge light fixtures about two weeks ago, but saved the grand reveal until the 28th of November (almost the first of December). When unlit, they look quite like feathery angle wings. I had high hopes. In my imagination, they’d light up all gold and twinkly, maybe with some flecks of red here and there. I thought, “Maybe if I focus on the lights, I’ll forget that I’m wearing capris.” So, I went downtown this weekend with my child-spirit on my shirtsleeves only to find the center turned into some Hope College Halloween party. The lights are ORANGE and BLUE. And, if that isn’t bad enough, big light bulbs, which are sprinkled amongst the tiny twinklers, flash intermittently with the enthusiasm of Princess Diana’s paparazzi. Some light posts have two “angle wings” attached to them that, when lit, look like evil winking demon faces with horns. Happy Holidays!

“Well,” I thought, “so the decorations are ridiculous. But at least there’s an outside Christmas market that is sure to feel deliciously festive!” I went to the market expecting Germany: stalls of handmade decorations and toys, spiced wine, old ladies selling home-made gingerbread. From afar it looked promising: raw pine stalls trimmed with garland and twinkling white lights. But, surprise! Imagine the love child of Centennial Park’s annual Midwest craft show and a rest stop gift shop somewhere in New Mexico and you’ve got it. If anyone wants a resin fairy, a miniature Buddha head fountain, a fish tank shaped like a house, a sand painting that recasts itself every time you turn it over, or a miniature ceramic sheep, just let me know. I’d be happy to make your Christmas wish come true. If the merchandise isn’t random enough, the music and the people advertising various things fill in the gaps. When I first arrived Justin Timberlake’s voice filled the air with gender confusion, but it was soon replaced by an upbeat-translated version of “Jingle Bells” that went something like this…. “Dingle dong, dingle dong, tous les dingle dong.” Then a person trapped inside a giant clear plastic beach ball wearing glowing pink and green alien suit rolled in front of me advertising some concert. I’ll have to make sure not to miss that one.

Bound and determined to have my holly jolly Christmas one way or another, I decided that what I really needed was a Christmas tree. That way at least the holiday spirit would fill my apartment, even if it wasn’t filling the streets. Thankfully an IKEA advertisement stopped me from sneaking stealth-style in to my neighbors’ garden in the middle of the night and hacking of the top four feet of one of their bushes with a butter knife. This year, IKEA is selling real Christmas trees for 20 euro and if you bring the tree back after the holiday, you get back 17 euro as store credit, the other three get donated to some charity, and the trees get composted. This way you get to pretend that you’re not the typical Christmas consumer. The trees arrived December 1st, so after I got out of class, I hopped onto the tram that leaves the French-looking part of Nantes and heads to a sprawling shopping complex that could be anywhere suburbia USA. I spent the tram ride repeating to myself, “mixing bowl, towel, decorations, christmas tree. mixing bowl, towel, decorations, christmas tree,” but - this happens every time - as soon as I crossed the border from sanity into the insanity that is the IKEA display floor-set maze (family, do you remember the Amazing Maize Maze??…) I instantly forgot why I had come and what I was looking for. Did I come to buy a set of decorative pillows? Did I come to buy an alphabetical laundry organizer? No, I know, I came for this oven mitt that also looks like a hedgehog puppet! By the time I made it to the part of the store where you can actually buy things, I was totally frazzled. I think I stood in front of one of the kitchen displays for about seven minutes trying to determine whether or not I needed a tart pan...and the miserable thing about IKEA is that, somehow, the combination of fluorescent lighting, high ceilings and random Swedish vocabulary words incapacitates any decision-making ability you might possess. I finally made it to the special Christmas display and the giant pile of pines wrapped in what appeared to be white fishnet pantyhose. With their needles poking out, they looked like a pile of French women’s legs in wintertime. (I present this stereotype only to avoid making you feel uncomfortable by saying that they looked like my legs in wintertime.) While this type of tree-packaging is practical for transportation, it keeps you from determining the shape of the tree. Since I couldn’t bear the thought of getting home, unwrapping my tree, and finding that I’d gotten stuck with a true Charlie Brown, I ended up choosing a tree that someone had already completely unwrapped because it was leaps and branches better than the rest.

If my tree and I got in a fight in a dark alley, I’m not sure who would win...I’ve got a good 8 inches on it, but its girth easily octuples mine. I left IKEA with one bag on each shoulder and my tree precariously balanced in my arms. The entrance to IKEA is about 4 blocks and 5 intersections away from the nearest tram stop. During this brief jaunt I learned that, the next time I’m in a dumpy self-depreciating mood, I need just walk around carrying a giant plant. Some women try to attract men’s attention by wearing high heels or short skirts or lots of shadowy eye makeup, but, as it turns out, what men are really attracted to is trees (maybe someday I’ll do a “study” to see if this pertains to all men or just French men). Me and my tree, we got waved at, honked at, whistled at, yelled at. “Beau sapin!” (“Nice tree!” Well, technically “nice evergreen of the sap producing variety,” but that doesn’t seem integral to the translation). All of this attention had me anticipating an eventful and hilarious ride home, but most of the tram passengers we encountered insisted on being ridiculously French. Apart from the woman who asked me if Christmas trees are expensive in Nantes, a woman who stroked some lower branches and said it smelled good, a homeless couple who said they’d never had a real tree, and a man who backed into it and proceeded to apologize (to me or the tree, I wasn’t sure. I was in such a jovial mood that I wanted to pretend to asked the tree if it was ok and then assure the man that he hadn’t offended/hurt it, but by the time I’d mustered up my French wit, he had already replaced his earbuds) the ride was typically uneventful, which made it even more hilarious. There I was, crammed into the back end of the tram with a giant live tree for goodness sake ready to share an “isn’t this quaint” smile with anyone who acknowledged me, but the other passengers would get on, give me one glance and say with their eyes, “What? Zo you are on zee tram wiz a sapin? Ziss ees very normal. I am French. I am shocked by nozing. Ze laces of my shoes ees just as interesting.”

One of the major, or at least most noticeable, differences between French and American culture is the way in which people create personal space in public situations. In the US, we establish distance and decrease tension between ourselves and others by speaking. If you’re in a crowded waiting room at the orthopedics office or in a post-Thanksgiving Khols’ line, you’d probably small talk with the person next to you. You’re more comfortable if the people around you aren’t “strangers.” It’s not that you are really all that interested in the details of how wee Harvard broke his tibia skim boarding backwards at the DeVooker side family barbeque on Lake Michigan, but you’re more at ease being around people you don’t know if you have the impression that you do. It’s basically the opposite here in France. Speaking to someone you don’t know adds tension to almost any situation. Conversation invades privacy rather than creating it. This difference is probably responsible for roughly 86% of the stereotypes about French people. The other 14% - such as men wearing scarves, 14 year olds riding around on mopeds, people walking about with baguettes, and the superiority of cheese and wine - is mostly true.

Anyhow, me and my tree, we finally made it to 3, rue du 3eme Dragons, and it suddenly looked a whole lot bigger in my 55 square meter apartment than it did in the hangar sized IKEA warehouse. For the last seven or so years - ever since my mom watched an especially heart-wrenching episode of Rescue 911 - our Christmas tree has come out of a box. Thanks to Dad Inc., who color-coded the various length branches with my sister’s and my leftover multicolored fingernail polish from the late 90’s, setting up the tree is a pretty simple affair. Having forgotten that real trees don’t come with snap-on intersecting plastic feet, I failed to buy any sort of tree stand at IKEA. The poor thing looked thirsty and I didn’t like the idea of scraping sap of my hardwood floors, so I declared that it was time to get creative. By this I mean that I literally say out loud to myself, “Ok, Brianne. Get creative.” The end solution to my tree stand experiments involves one plastic IKEA trash can, three wine bottles filled with water, and one rotisserie chicken attachment to a small oven (what would we have done if we weren’t vegetarians?!). It’s been four days and the tree is still standing…

Lauren and I decided to make a whole evening out of decorating the tree. We had an American friend and a New Zealander over for a make-shift Christmas dinner (fyi: turns out green bean casserole’s “French onions” are in no way French. I tried to make the delicious crunchy topping by battering and panfrying dehydrated onion flakes, which, unsurprisingly, didn’t come out quite right). We then spent hours decorating the tree with homemade popcorn garlands (tedious), paper snowflakes (also tedious), some random Santa’s from my host family, a handful of red and blue balls that we decorated with paint pens, and a bunch of the mini candy canes that my mom sent me in a Christmas package. I had my heart set on white lights, but the only ones they had at the store were rainbow colored. Lauren and I convinced ourselves that rainbow lights were better than no lights. I plugged them in when we got home and by the second second of our “Oooooooh” they had started flashing. No way. When I read the back of the box, I found that I had indeed accidently bought flashing lights but, the box assured me, of the non-musical nature...what?! I can hardly imagine anything more annoying than a Christmas tree whose snow-cone colors blink on and off to the tempo of “Dingle dong, Dingle dong.” In the end, without lights, the tree looks like a real life model of the cover to an American Girl Doll’s book called “Kirstin Saves Christmas.” I absolutely love it! The only down side is that we had to unwrap the candy canes in order to tie them to the tree, and now, since Nantes is about as humid as Houston, TX, instead of scraping sap of the wood floors, I have to wipe up pink peppermint puddles. The candy canes are literally melting off the tree. No more pretty red and white stripes. At the moment, they’re all solid pink and, judging by the sugar pools each morning, I anticipate they’ll have gone completely white by the 15th.

If you’ve made it this far, I congratulate you. I also add my apologies for having just read David Sedaris’ Holidays on Ice (Thanks Jeremy!) and therefore having tried to match his wit, tone, and humor. I guess you can be thankful at least that I didn’t just finish one of the farmer-peasant episodes in Anna Karenina….

I miss you all, and I miss the land of snowflakes and 24 hour Christmas carols (except for the 6-9 pm segment that’s hosted by Delilah…)

2008-11-26T06:52:00.000-08:00

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Between the presidential elections and the plethora of specifically American holidays since my arrival in France, I've never been at a loss for material for my classes. I've been teaching classes on Thanksgiving all week, and by "teaching classes" I mean playing bingo and talking about what we have to be thankful for. Considering my students' level of English (and maturity) I've avoided Thanksgiving vocabulary words like "colonization," "small pox," and "genocide," preferring to stick instead to words like "pumpkin pie" and "cranberry sauce" (which, for the French, may actually be more inconceivable...)

How would you answer the nearly existential question, "What is a cranberry?"

How would you convince a person from a country lauded for its fine cuisine that, indeed, a pie made of squash and cinnamon and cream is delicious?

The lessons have been some of the most fun that I've taught so far. I start class by showing them some pictures that I took last Thanksgiving of all of the traditional dishes. The video clip I have of Thanksgiving a couple years ago with some of my extended family around a Huge table yelling "Happy Thanksgiving" has been the big hit. My girls today said: "Oh! It's just like Little House on the Prairie!" and "Mademoiselle, you really do that? You're sure that your family isn't acting? It's just sooo cute!"

Then I have them push all of the tables together to make one big table and I hand out slips of paper with names of my family members on them. Much to Lauren's dismay, I've taken all of our empty tupperware dishes, the salt and pepper shakers, our decorative gourds, pie pans, cake pans, the ladle, etc., and labeled them with the names of different dishes. We all sit down at the table and play act Thanksgiving dinner chez Brianne. "Sandi, uuuu, Mum, can yoo please pass zee gravy?" "Yes, of couse! 'ere you go." "Zank you" 'You're welcome" ... Everyone speaks, everyone laughs, and, somehow magically, pretending to be a family makes everyone less shy and more willing to participate. At first they're all shocked when I begin rearranging the classroom, when I ask them to sit in a circle facing each other, when I join them. It's as if, by disrupting the physical organization of the classroom, the French magisterial mentality gets broken too.

For the last fifteen minutes of class, we go around the table and each person says one thing that she or he is thankful for. Responses include: family, friends, having enough to eat, Barack Obama, and..... dolloping whip cream on my day ....
"I am sankful for zat Brianne comes to France." :)

Of course, what they actually mean by that is that they're thankful that they didn't have to do any real work for a whole class period....but my ego would rather bask in the warmth of being liked (undeniably one of my biggest faults)! It is encouraging though to see students who normally sit with their arms folded, eyes rolled, and cell phones out actually excited to participate.
Technically (so they tell me) my 'job' is to improve my students' conversational English, but I feel successful if I've made them think (if even for a fleeting second) "hey, English is fun."

So, this Thanksgiving, I'm thankful for a year of fun and rest. I'm thankful to be in France with good friends and loads of Christmas decorations (hey, since there isn't any Thanksgiving to mark the transition to Christmas, they're allowed to be out here!) And, I'm thankful for you (since you are most likely a family member or close friend ;)

I hope you all bask in togetherness, gravy, and afternoon naps.

2008-11-07T07:13:00.000-08:00

I really wanted to take you all on a photo tour, but, of course, this server won't let me upload photos. Although your first reaction might be disappointment, you might reconsider when you find out that I took over 500 pictures in Switzerland... The narration to half the would-be slide show goes something like, "Here's a beautiful fall tree next to a beautiful turquoise river with the Alps in the background" .... "Here's the beautiful orange tree from the left" .... "Here's the tree from the right with a boat in the foreground" .... "Here's a leaf from the tree floating in the river by the boat" .... "Here's a self-portrait of me with the tree and the boat and the mountains" etc etc. You know it's bad when you suspect that you would lose the attention of your own parents!

I've been bad again and I can't possible cover all that's happened since the last time I posted. A brief re-cap: paperwork, teaching, vacation. Lauren and I just returned from the first of our four paid vacations :) We spent a week and a half traveling through Switzerland and it was absolutely stunning. A country full of mountains where in autumn you can go back and forth between gorgeous fall and North Pole Narnia, famous for chocolate and cheese, where the people (at least in the French part) speak French but are organized more like Germany ... yes please. It also a country where scientists have constructed a massive proton accelerator in hopes of capturing on film what exactly happens when two isolate protons smash into each other at ridiculous speeds, a side effect of which could be the accidental creation of a "minor" black hole. Haha. But, I think I'd still move there in a heartbeat if anyone gave me an opportunity, or lots and lots of Swiss Francs.

Lauren and I traveled with CouchSurfing (which sounds really sketchy utnil you try it). It's basically a website like Facebook where you can contact people who live in the area where you want to go and stay with them for free. Obviously it's great for the budget, but the real reason I love it is because of the cultural exchange. As a tourist, you rarely get the opportunity to see a place from the perspective of someone who lives there, which is what couchsurfing allows you to do. This time Lauren and I had a fabulous host in Luzern, Remo, who took us to meet his mom in the village where he's from and then drove us above the clouds so we could actually see the mountains. And, in St. Gallen, we stayed in a sweet converted farm-house with Sebastian and his family. We went hiking to a nearby mountain and we got to meet his darling Grandparents who live just up the hill from his family.

It was a super trip...but I do laugh when I realize that basically I took a vacation from vacation. Sigh. I will never be able to do "real life" after this.

Sorry for the abrupt ending, but the cafe where I'm using the internet is closing so I have to run! Hopefully I'll be able to put up some picture sometime soon and also write about what my day to day life is like!

bisous to you all!

2008-10-08T07:14:00.000-07:00

I thought I was a pro at moving. I’ve unpacked and repacked so many times, that, on several occasions, it may have made more sense to just leave things in their boxes. I can swaddle dishes in newspaper, label boxes, have yard sales, and ride 12 straight hours in U-haul without batting an eye, but, when it comes to logistics, my “expertise” dwindles. I have moved many times, but (thanks Mom and Dad!) I realize now that I was just along for the ride. In the week and a half since my last post, I have rented a miniature moving truck, opened a bank account, taken out a home insurance policy (which, incidentally, covers me up to 100,000,000 euros anywhere...in the words of the bank clerk who helped me you could, say, go to a party and accidently burn down at least 10 houses and this is fine) switched the gas and electric bill into mine and Lauren’s names (okay, okay, Lauren actually did this), signed two work contracts, had a meeting at the prefecture to get the equivalent of a green card, filled out a federal housing aid form, filled out an immigration health form, etc., etc.

And, obviously, all of these things had to be done IN FRENCH! Here’s a simulation:

Go to your files and get your lease, mortgage or an insurance policy. Count the repeating words that have more than three syllables and cross out 2/3 of them. Then, scribble out every legalese phrase, and, should you find any acronyms, make sure to black out the words for which they stand and leave only the acronym. Read…..and, in my case, sign :)

To all the adults out there, I’m wondering, does bureaucracy ever stop feeling like a board game and start feeling like real life? Lauren and I keep vacillating between severe annoyance and incredible amusement. Before I come back for this meeting in December, I have to have my birth certificate shipped to France, translated into French by a certified translator, stamped by the rectorat of my town, signed by the head of each of my schools, sealed in a blue envelope that measures no more than 7.84 centimeters, and stamped with the right half of my left thumb print? Right.

Because of all the paperwork, I won’t be receiving my salary for the first three months until December, I won’t be receiving my green card until probably February...which means that I can’t receive my housing aid or my medical insurance until then as well. To really top it all off, it may actually be kind-of, sort-of, maybe a bit illegal for me to leave the country before I get my green card, which is really ridiculous because as an American I can travel freely in the EU for I think 4-6 months without ever needing any kind of visa. In this case, being more legal might cause more problems than being illegal.

My, I’m afraid that this all sounds like too much whining…I really just want you to share in the humor of all of this ridiculous absurdity! Aside from the paperwork, everything seems almost too good to be true. Between my host family and Julie’s parents, our apartment has been completely furnished and decorated for free. Mr. Ouvrard drove the moving truck to Clisson (thankfully since me + Lauren + moving truck + tiny windy French roads + round abouts = an adventure I’m not ready for) and my host sister picked Lauren and I up at Ikea so we didn’t have to try to haul pots and pans and bedding and a coffee table back in the tram. Without the friendship and help of the people that I already know and love in Nantes, this would be a completely different experience. Thanks to them, we have the most charmingly eclectic apartment anyone has ever seen! It’s a sort of fusion style of French-great-grandmother meets Ikea in which the color scheme ranges from purple to lime green to yellow to pink to bright red to forest green to cream…. The response to the question “Do you think this will go with the living room?” is inevitably, “Yes.” Somehow it’s really all come together. It actually doesn’t look like the Salvation Army floor display. It’s quirky chic: a possible result of setting the Design on a Dime team loose at the Antiques Roadshow. I wish you could all come see it.

In addition to being busy with paper work, moving, unpacking, and decorating, in the last week and a half I’ve also been to both of my schools, a 9 hour language assistant orientation, and an island with a giant mechanical elephant. My job, though it’s only 12 hours a week, is going to be challenging. The middle school where I work is one of the top-five at risk schools in Nantes. The students come from rough backgrounds and the classes seem to reflect the current racial/cultural tension in France. Although I’ve never worked in the inner-city in the US, I think my experience in the middle school will be quite similar to the experiences that my friends doing Americorps and Teach for America are having/ have had. Needless to say, I don’t feel quite prepared to manage a classroom full of rowdy, at-risk 13 year olds in my second language. But, I’ll only be in charge of smaller groups (10-15 students) and, though they’re rowdy, the students are curious. Thankfully I wear high heels and dress like I’m 35, so at least they’ll take me seriously :) I start in the classroom next week. I’m sure there are more details and plenty of stories to come.

Last Friday was the orientation for all of the English assistants in this region. It was a long, boring, inefficient day...but I did get the chance to mingle my mind numb. Lauren and I made a handful of friends, some of whom stayed the night at our place. (Crazy side note: One of them, Claire, is from Charlotte and she goes to Forest Hills! Neither of us remembers ever meeting the other, but we went to youth group together, went on the same skiing trip, and know a several of the same people! She saw Bethany Chadwick the Monday before she left. What a small world.) So, between the English assistants, the Spanish assistants that I met a week ago, Julie and her friends, and the friends of my French friends in Holland….Lauren and I seem like social butterflies on the weekends. I think I’m going to be much less bored than I had anticipated. (Though I have almost finished The Brothers Karamozov).

This is getting long, whew. If I lost you in the middle, at least scroll down and look at the pics. They’re a trip. To zip everything up into a snack-size summary, it’s been a rather hectic week, but I’ll soon be settled into a routine. I’m living in a great space, a lovely town, surrounded by a couple dear friends and lots of fun acquaintances. I’ve been cooking meals with fabulous ingredients, drinking great wine, reading great literature….and wondering how this can possibly be real life.

2008-10-08T07:09:00.001-07:00

2008-10-08T06:53:00.000-07:00

APARTMENT ROUND TWO: DECORATIONS FROM 17th CENTURY FRANCE

Just thought I'd start it off with a personal fav. Anyone care for a scone and a cup of tea?

Breakfast nook! The best part is that yellow thing...it's the base to a French postal drop box! Lauren and I are going to try to put a fish on it.

2008-10-08T06:50:00.000-07:00

Kitchen curtains.

2008-10-08T06:26:00.000-07:00

La Cuisine!!! Et du vin!!

Nook where we try to tie together the pink/yellow/green of the living room with the RED of the kitchen.

Louis XV chair + re-done replica Louis XVI chair + Ikea table + antique French grandmother fruit bowl + real fruit = a tad too pretentious for poverty wages??

Our "living room" aka Le salon since it's too formal to be called anything in English...

Baaaahhhh! My bedroom!!!

2008-09-27T14:46:00.000-07:00

So, Lauren and I aren't living in a closet this year!!

We've been searching full-time for an apartment for two weeks, and we finally got lucky. Here are the photos we took today after signing the papers. The best part of all is our address:

3, rue du 3eme Dragons

44000 Nantes

FRANCE

Yes, that is 3 Street of the 3rd Dragon. It's so fun to write... You should try it on an envelope.

Me in front of the deliciously green door to our building.

Our apartment is on the second floor (first floor in France because they don't begin counting until after the ground floor). This is the door to the apartment that opens into the stairway.

Basically what you see coming into the apartment. The grey tile is the entryway, the blue is the bathroom and the wood is the living room / kitchen.

A very excited me in our kitchen! The landlord is going to install an oven, stove, dishwasher and refrigerator next week. In France, this type of kitchen is called cuisine a l'americaine...it opens into the living room.

Corner of the living room (the kitchen is behind me). The open door goes into my room, the other into the tiled entry way.

My room! Wood floors and a great view of the neighbor's garden :)

Cute little blue-tiled bathroom

Lauren's room

What, these 12 keys for our little apartment??

2008-09-24T07:33:00.000-07:00

This update is a bit like a cookbook without pictures........boring. So far, I haven't taken any dazzling photos, and, if I had, it wouldn't really matter anyhow since the cord that transfers pictures from my camera to my computer is wedged between my sleeping bag and my Sam's-Club-size bottles of shampoo at the base of my 45lb back pack.

Lauren and I have nearly overtaken Julie's living room with half-unpacked haphazard bags. The arrangement of my belongings is a testament to the state of mind I must have been in when I left: my underwear are in the unreachable bottom of my rolly beneath all of my winter sweaters while my gluestick, gingerbread man cookie cutter, and peppercorn grinder (I honestly don't even remember putting this one in...) are conveniently nestled in my carry-on. Moving out of Julie's apartment is going to seem just as epic as moving across the Atlantic.

Finding an apartment here is just about as easy as finding a restaurant that serves tater-tot casserole. It's a frenzy and I've the feeling that my accent along with the conspicuous lack of properly conjugated verbs in my sentences somehow lends me a less competitive air. Apartments get rented within hours of being posted online. Last week I became an expert at leaving the following voice mail: "Bonjour. I am just coming from seeing the announcement you made on France Wooooest. This announcement interests me very much. I am named Brian Carpentier and you could please contact me on my portable phone the number of which is zero siiix, forty feeve, seventin, fiffy eight, fiffy. Thank you very much. Au revoir!"

I've only had 2 people return my calls.

Although it's much funnier to blame it on my accent/grammar/etc., the truth of the matter seems to be that once an apartment in rented, the landlord no longer sees the need of contacting anyone who inquires. (Nor does he/she see the need to take the announcement offline). When I call and actually get a real person (after I stop stammering from shock), they usually say, "My deepest regrests, Madame. It is already rented. Au revoir!"

Thank goodness for Julie. Lauren and I are having a blast staying with her and, somehow, the bazaar we've made of her little living room doesn't seem to frazzle her one bit.

Tonight it hopefully looks like our lodging situation will be resolved. We are going to visit two promising-sounding apartments that are near the city center, and, if neither works, we will accept the apartment offered to us by a local high school. Many high schools in France provide seriously (yes Mom, seriously) subsidized housing for teacher and school employees. Neither the middle school that I will be working at nor the high school currently have anything available, but Pascale's (my teacher contact) husband (who is the headmaster of another local high school) was able to pull some strings. The high school that has housing available is pretty far away from down town, but it's right on a tram line so the commute would be easy and fast (less than 15 minutes). The major pluses are that the apartment is very clean, fully furnished (including bedding, dishes, cleaning supplies, etc.) and only costs 270 euro/mo. total, all charges included (water, heat, etc.). Divided by two, that's pretty enticing. Snack money and travels money have always been among my top priorities :)

Anyhow, as soon as we get a place and settle in, I'll put up pictures and give you all the tour.

Though it may not sound like I've been doing anything other than search for housing, I've actually been relatively busy seeing/meeting people as well. Lauren and I went to diner at my host family's house. It was just great to see them again. My host sisters made me my favorite chocolate cake and we all stayed up talking until half past eleven! They've had an eventful year (marriages, family deaths, moving, etc) but things have settled down now. They bought a house in a charming ocean village not far from Nantes and have already invited Lauren and I to spend many weekends there.

This weekend I met one of the teachers with whom I will be working and her family: Pascale, Jean-Luc and their three darling children. They live in a beautiful quiet village north of Nantes in a gorgeous house that sits on the back of Pascale's mother's property. I felt like I had stepped into a novel. The children ran about between their house and their grandmother's house, hiding in grape vines, picking raspberries and speaking French while Pascale and I sat on the porch in the sun sipping glasses of white wine (actually, the two youngest children ran round while the oldest, Alice 11, sat next to me sipping an miniature coke. Later, she asked me what my favorite color was and made me a little beaded bracelet. Precious).

Oh France, you just kill me.

Pascale and Jean-Luc are open, generous, quick to laugh, inquisitive. I've fallen among friends instead of staunch colleagues as I had dreadfully half anticipated.

Well, it's about time to got look at apartments, and I think I'll have a little snack before I go. Ha, before I forget, I think my favorite thing so far since being here was my trip to the grocery store. Holy Cheeses. So many different kinds of cheese and wine and cookies and chocolate...and all so cheap! Even after the conversion rate! You can buy a good bottle of French wine and an entire wheel of camembert for 6 euro!

It's good to be back.

2007-04-25T08:32:00.000-07:00

And appropriate end to the photo tour and a lovely vacation, sunset over the river in Florence. Sighhhhh.

Me and my Grandma Ginger in front of the famous Pont Evecio (probably spelled wrong). We enjoyed out wine, classy-bum style, and then went to Cafe Nella's (a little family owned cafe that my Grandma found on a previous trip to Florence) and had delicious, scrumptious food.

Papa John and I at sunset on a bridge over the canal in Florence. Together we hiked to the top of the tallest thing in every city we visited.

The skyline of Florence with the bell tower of the Duomo (decorated in white, pink, and green marble) and me. Taken by the week's official photographer and glass-door-breaker, my Papa John.

A market in Parma with more types of tomatoes than I knew existed!

On the hill of the church in Barga, the little village in Tuscany where my great-grandmother was born.

Me and my Grandma Ginger and Mr. adorably after all the young girls!

The first legal drink anywhere in the world...unfortunately drunk in Italy where people start drinking wine around the age of 11.

Another stunning view of one of the five villages (Vernazza I think). We hiked along the jagged coastline through vineyards and groves of lemon trees to get here, and voila, this view greeted us at the end.

I just love this picture. Also, I think the delicious swordfish I had for my birthday may have been caught by this local fisherman ;)

2007-04-25T06:19:00.000-07:00

Ciao!

That along with 'one chocolate gelato please' is, sadly, after two weeks the extent of my Italian. Oh and 'how you are beautiful, beautiful like the earth'...said to me repeatedly by an adorably old cheek-pinching owner of one of the hotels i stayed at.

So, two weeks in Italy (the itenary for those interested: Milan, Lake Como, Cinque Terre, La Spezia, Parma, Lucca, Barga, Florence, Sienna) followed by a two day stint in Paris and a lovely relaxing weekend in Le Mans at Julie's house with her family. And now it's welcome back to the end of the semester, complete with all of the exams, papers, general anxiety, and the usual airborn spring irritant antisness, which is making all of us itch for coming travels...and coming home.

Anyhow, Italy. I think the best thing (unless you want to jump on a plane and fly to France and spend approximately 49.8 hours looking at photos and hearing every funny story aaand tedious detail explained) is to take you all on a whilrwind tour of my trip with pictures and comments. How original! I make no garauntee for the comments, but really, the photos are truly stunning.

(I haven't learned my lesson with this blog yet..so the pictures are in backwards chronological order...if it really matters)

Lauren, me and Julie enjoying a perfect moment.

Manarola at sunset the first night.

The view from the harbor in Manarola, the village where we staying in the Cinque Terre. This is really the color of the Mediterranean Sea, I promise that I didn't use any of my camera's super cool color functions!

Lake Como (30 minutes north of Milan). I took a ferry and hopped from village to village, eating gelato and imagining that every quaint building with a view of the Alps and the lake was a former residence of Hemingway (and tons of other authors and poets who found their inspiration here...not suprising.)

Me on top of the Duomo in Milan. Massively dominating the center of the city, it is the third largest cathedral in the world.

In Milan at a soccer match (crazy!) with Julie's appartment-mate Alessandro, the charmingly quirky screenwriter. Unlike Americans who guzzel beer at sporting events, Italians drink these little espresso-liquor shots. mmmm.

A "to-be-continued-hopefully" blog...I have to dash to grammar class!
(and the weeefeee has stopped working at the house, making things much more complicated...)

bisous
brianne

2007-03-29T02:38:00.000-07:00

Hello All!

Just a brief post including my plans for the next two weeks and a very funny story.

I am leaving Saturday afternoon for...ITALY! Spring vacation is two weeks long here so I will be spending the first 5 days with my dear friend Julie who lives in Milan. We are going to take a day trip to Lake Como in the Italian Alps. Then, for Easter (and my birthday) weekend, Lauren (my friend in London) and my Julie here with me in Nantes are both flying to Italy. The 4 of us are going to Cinque Terre (look up pictures on line, it's gorgeous)...five little villages built into the cliffs on the Italian coast line, connected by hiking trails (no cars allowed). After our relaxing weekend, I will be heading south to meet my Grandma Ginger and Papa John in La Spezia. We are planning to visit the village of my great-great grandmother in Tuscany...and then onto Florence for a couple of days. I will put up pictures and stories when I return!

Ok, and for the funny story before I have to go pack...
As you all should know, the presidential elections in France are this spring. Nearly every other conversation I have concerns politics. There are 2-3 major contenders: Segolene Royal of the socialist party (the major liberal party in France), Nicolas Sarkozy head of the UMP (Union for a Popular Movement, the major conservative party in France), and pulling suprisingly into the competetion more recently, Francois Bayrou (a used-to-be-UMP-member dissenchanted with the battle between the major political parties pulling a middle ground ticket). My conservative Catholic family is fanatic about Sarkozy. Two weekends ago, Sarkozy's campaign tour brought him to the Zenith (a huge stadium) in Nantes. Exstatic, my family reserved places and invited me to join...a once in a life-time opportunity that I jumped on! I sat in the student section at the Zenith with a giant SARKOZY poster and a French flag...cheering crazily on signal regardless of whether or not I understood what was going on. (note for all of my French friends: I was enjoying the experience...not necessarily agreeing with the politics). I sat next to my host sister Anne-Edith and she explained each of the political figures that spoke before Sarko etc. Welllll, on of those political figures was Francois Pinte who is running for Mayor of Nantes. He was a dynamic speaker, very engergetic. Then Sarko spoke, we all went nuts and finished by standing and singing the Marseillaise (the French national anthem).
jumping forward two weeks...

Last weekend downtown Nantes was packed for the annual spring side-walk sale. I was navigating my way through masses of people toward my lunch rendez vous point on the steps of the theater, where, upon arriving, I find Sam talking to this man in a suite. He introduces me, "M Pinte, I present you to Brianne", "Brianne, Francois Pinte." I say "hi" confusedly, and proceed to mention that M Pinte looks familiar to me.
"You probably saw him and the Sarko rally," Sam says.
"Oh, that's it! You really livened up the audience at the Zenith!" I exclaimed. ( a compliment avoiding any political affiliation).

Suddenly, his camera man appears from behind and says,
"That's perfect with your accent! We are going to be so multicultural on our web-site!"

so, here I am, the new poster young person with a cute accent encouraging all Nantais to vote Francois Pinte for the 2007 elections: http://www.francoispinte.fr/videos.php3
(I follow the secretary general of the UMP! click on the link beneath the video box that says "micro trottoir: reaction au discours du Zenith")

Hahaha!

Happy Easter to all,
bisous,
Brianne

2007-03-19T13:44:00.000-07:00

It was 8:30, which according to Nantais public transportation, is late. With only one remaining gold earring, completely soaked feet from getting caught on the beach in a thunderstorm and a bursting bladder from the cups of coffee intended to counter-act cold sandy sogginess, I couldn't wait to get off the tour bus and into bus 23, direction free bathroom and dry socks.

Unfortunately, when the clocks chime 8:30, all of the public transportation buses turn into pumpkins or something and only one bus runs, on the hour 30 just until midnight, to the northwest corner of the city. Having missed the 8:30 bus by about 3 minutes, I was exasperatedly preparing to sit outside on a cold metal bench for the 9:30 bus when my friend Cassie (who lives close to the city center) offered let me borrow her brand new bike. What fun! I thought. I hoped on and had just begun reflecting on how I love bikes and how all I needed to complete the image of Frenchness was a baguette strapped to the back...when it started to pour rain. Of course.

About 50 meters after the beginning of the torrential downpour, I heard the most lovely noise. "ptt!! sssssssss sssssssssss sssssssssss." In seconds the front tire had gone from bouncy brand new to flabby unpeddal-able-ness. Of couse.

But, what luck!, just at that minute bus 23 pulled up to the stop several meters in front of me. I had caught up to it! I started peddaling madly and the front tire that was refusing to turn punctuated its rebellion by getting stuck in the cobble stone side walk. I crashed off the bike onto the wet rocks. Of course.

Determined, I jumped up from my spill, grabbed the bike by its handlebars, and sprinted toward the bus stop. I arrived just as the bus was pulling away but the bus driver saw me, and in a moment of compassion (or maybe concern at the look on my face), stopped the bus. "Thank you sir" I exclaimed. He looked at me - soaked, limping and panting me - and said, "Bikes are not allowed on the bus." Of course.

"But wait, sir please," and here my near hysteria and lack of vocabulary for mechanical bicycle terms produced the following explanation, "Please, you see, I can not ride this bike! So, which, I can not go home...there was a, there was a"
"There was a what?"
"A thing that broke this part here, you see!" I cried hitting the front tire with my fist to show its uselessness (and mentally kicking myself for not being able to think of the words for "sharp object that slashed a hole into the tire").

The combination of my desperation, my ridiculous explanation and the rivulets of rain streaming down my face must have touched him.
"Alright," he said. "But just this one time. You recognize that I am being very very generous."
"Yes! thank you so much!"

I telephoned Cassie, who didn't know whether to pity me or laugh, and told her that I would get the tire fixed as soon as possible. It was Friday evening. My host mom informed me that the bicycle repair man would not be open until Tuesday. Of course.

Tuesday morning dawned crisp and clear. The bike, of course, did not fit in the trunk of the family car so I had to walk it to the bicycle repair shop about 1.5 miles away. .5 miles into the journey it began to rain. Of course.

I dropped the bike off at the shop and the repair man said to come back the next afternoon to pick it up. So, the next afternoon, I walked the 1.5 miles back to the bike garage, found out the tiny shard of glass had caused a $35 repair, and handed over my credit card frusterated but thankful that the ordeal was over. But, of course, my credit card didn't work because it's not thumb print equipped like the European cards. I had to walk back to my house to get cash and then back to the shop. I paid, hopped on the bike, and got lost on my way to the city center. When I finally arrived, I found only one of my red leather thinsulate lined driving gloves in my coat pocket where I had put them. Of course.

I locked up the bike and in my amused exasperation, called my dad to relay the story. I vented on my way from center city to the IES building. I finished the story just as I was rounding the corner to the entry stairs when my dad said, "Well, I guess all that has to happen next is for you to fall into a hole or something...watch out!"

Marked off in yellow caution tape at the base of the stairwell was a 10 foot deep hole (dug for plumbing repair)!!

Thankfully, I did not fall in.

This weekend I had a positive experience with bicycles.

We (about 20 IES students) rented bikes for 1 euro and explored the trials that run all along the river in Nantes. The weather was mild and the endorphins from exercising put everyone in fantastic moods...which were only increased by our stop at the end of the trip (see below)

Gelato. And the best part, for people like me who enter ice cream shops and suddenly realize that philosophical questions about religion pale in comparison with the difficulty of committing to nutella over tiramisu or mango or mint or cafe caramel...., is that at Amora you can actually choose as many flavors as you want. Pure pure happiness!

So, the moral of the post is: One can only experience the best italian gelato in the world by moving beyond frustrations and calamities of the past.

bisous,
Brianne

2007-03-05T09:10:00.000-08:00

"A child may ask, 'What is the world's story about?' And a grown man or woman may wonder, 'What way will the world go? How does it end and, while we're at it, what's the story about?'

I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one, that has frightened and inspired us, so that we live in a Pearl White serial of continuing though and wonder. Humans are caught-in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too- in a net of good and evil."

~John Steinbeck~

"Peace is not a gift from God to man, but a gift from man to himself"

~Elie Wiesel~

Below: The American Memorial at Omaha Beach remembering the sacrafice of 9,400 soldiers. Near by, a German memorial honors the sacrafice of the thousands of young men who gave their lives on the same day.

Below: Omaha Beach, one of the many shorelines of debarkement of the American troops (Canadian and British troops as well) on D-day . In the distance you can see Point du Hoc, the strategic German stronghold built on top of a cliff that juts into the sea . On D-Day, a troop of 225 American soldiers stormed the German stronghold, climbing up the cliffs on rope ladders. Reinforcement did not arrive until 2 days later. 90 American soldiers were left.

Below: One of many huge wounds in the earth from American bombs dropped before D-day.

Below: Twisted remains of a cable.

Normandy was heavy with the weight of humanity and humanity's actions, with questions of right and wrong, freedom and captivity, sacrafice, love, death. Pondering is useful but dwelling can be destructive...so I will end with pictures of springtime and sunshine (and new life for those of you who haven't caught the analogy ;)

It was a lovely sunny morning, so I took advantage of the blue skies and my 4 hour break between classes to stroll through Le Jardin des plantes (The Garden/Park of plants). So, here is a little spring-time for all of you.

The castle (le chateau) in Nantes. After three years of renovation, it opened last weekend. What a beautiful morning.

2007-02-28T13:45:00.000-08:00

wooohooo. Wifi has come to my house in France!
(this is indeed what I am offering as an explanation of my uncommunicativeness ;)

So, this post should mark the new era of the 'nearly a post a week' phase.
Oh, and by the way, wifi when pronounced with a French accent is hilarious. My family kept telling me excitedly that we were getting weeeefeeee at the house...I think they were disappointed because it took several minutes for my enthusiasm to register!

Much has happened since my last post in (yeeks! December??). I will do my best to bring you up to speed with as little droning and as much vivacity as possible.

For those of you who may be confused (and justifiably so) about my current location, I am in Nantes, Frances, roughly two.5 hours SW of Paris and 35ish minutes from the coast.

I live behind the top-right royal blue shutter of the pink house on 5, rue Montbazon with la famille Gaumain...a lovely, auburn-headed, energetic bunch.

My papa is either a psychologist, psychiatrist, physical therapist, or physio-therapist...the night they told me I was really tired and all of these words sound the same. I am currently gleaning clues from comments made at the dinner table and else-where. The most recent escapade papa told was about a crazy woman with a back problem. Very conclusive.

My maman is an artist, a maman, and a one-day-a-week elementary school art teacher. The warm aura of her artistic organized chaos is evident in the decoration of the house, the preparation of meals, and our frantic-funny conversations. We paint together every Thursday afternoon.

Jean-baptiste and Francois-Xavier (no, not Catholic saints or sword brandishing warriors) the two eldest brothers no longer live in the house. JB (we do not really call him this;) lives in Nantes with his wife and two oh-sooo-darling daughters, Blanche 18mo and Alenoir 2mo. Fix (his actual nick-name as Francois-Xavier is a mouthful) lives in Paris but his fiancee lives here in Nantes so he comes home every weekend.

The three daughters at the house, Anne-Edith (22), Marie-Camille (19), and Louise-Marie (15) are responsible for more than half of my improvement in French and roughly 70% of my laughter. For example, last night (during dinner) Louise-Marie and Marie-Camille were arguing about the rules of rugby. To clear up the confusion, Louise-Marie grabbed me, Anne-Edith and the remaining half-baguette and the three of us plus our make-shift ball acted out the complicated play for Marie-Camille. Then we ate the baguette with cheese for dessert.

Wow, this is already more long-winded than my intention!

Boring but necessary paragraph: My daily life in Nantes consists of alot of walking mixed with alot of bus taking, usually some sort of flakey buttery pastry, 2-3 classes at the university, and dinner with my family. In general, life is much less frantic than at home but (not complaining just stating ;) it is sometimes tricky to balance school-work (which takes more than double the time because it's all in French), enjoying France, traveling, and planning for next year (housing, applications for scholarships and grad school etc).

So, traveling...
(my English profs should be proud of that classy transition)
Last week was France's winter vacation which I took full advantage of by traveling to Ireland and London with my friend Lauren who is studying this semester in London. I figure your attention span may be running short, so I'm adding pictures to bribe you to keep going! Or, I was going to add pictures to keep you going but they aren't uploading at the moment!

Humph, well I'll try again later. I'll just say that Ireland was as sheepy and rolling-green-hilly and delicious-stout-beery as one would imagine. We visited Dublin (and of course the Guiness factory), Cork and Kilarney (in the south). Shockingly, we had mostly sunny blue skies which I had previously thought was impossible for Ireland in February (this assumption was confirmed by every Irish person we met who was as dazed and giddy as we were!). In Kilarney, a quaint town close to some of the national parks, we rented bicycles and spent an idyllic day gliding through stunning countryside and whirling Sound of Music style in the mountains (ok, that was actually just me).
London was just as fantastic but in a much (ouch) more expensive and much less countrysidey way. It was the perfect combination of seeing out-of-the-way places that Lauren loves and seeing all of the things one must try to see while in London, including but not limited to: the national gallery, trafalgar square, the british museum, the tate modern art museum, buckingham palace (here I was disappointed because I thought buckingham palace was windsor, and was quite confused at the rather drab and official looking building that I was expecting to be a castle!), tower bridge, big ben and parliment, westminster abbey, a show (ironically we saw Chicago!), hyde park, high tea at the orangery in kensington gardens, and etc. Thankfully, the museums in London are free...that way one can afford to spend 3 pounds* on a latte.

*3 pounds = 6.08 dollars**

** and you thought starbucks was expensive

Well friends and family, I've got to run. We are having a pic-nic at the castle this afternoon, hats and your favorite chocolate required.
But don't think it's all pic-nic's and castles...I have a grammar class afterwards where we are covering the most obscure of the 16 French verb tenses!

bisous,
Brianne

FYI: the post starts to get really confusing below.... I had major problems with uploading pictures and formatting etc. So, directly below you will find a comentary of the pictures that follow in a thrid post. (at the beginning of the comentary, I say 'see the pictures above'. what I really mean is 'see the pictures below'.) You'll probably only want to navigate the following mess if you're family ;)

2007-02-28T13:34:00.000-08:00

The formatting is driving me nuts! I appologize for how inconvenient this is, but really, I've been re-arranging for hours! next time i'm sticking to pictures in the center of the page!

So in order of the pictures of the post above:
1. A beautiful cathedral right next to the writer's museum in Dublin....mostly this picture is just to prove the unbelievable blueness of the sky!

2. The colorful river-front in down town Dublin.

3. Me gazing at the green pastures and puffy clouds of our beautiful bus ride from Dublin to Kilarney.

4. Old cathedral and grave yard that we passed on our bike ride in Kilarney.

5. Me twirling at our pic-nic spot.

6. The national park and castle near Kilarney (we took our bikes!)

7. (out of order) Me standing in front of what London claims is 'buckingham palace', ha!

8. Back to Kilarney...a picture showing its sheepy-ness.

9. The awesome slides at the tate modern art museum in London.

10. High tea at the orangery in Kensington gardens...complete with raspberry jam and clotted cream.

11. More blue skies and Big Ben.

12. Back to Dublin...Lauren and I doubtfully contemplating our HUGE pints of Guiness that came with our factory tour.

13. Lauren and I drinking something we're a bit more comfortable with :)

Again, sorry about the formatting. I can assure you that it's probably driving me nuts more than you!!

Bisous,
Brianne

2007-02-28T12:35:00.000-08:00

2007-01-01T14:07:00.000-08:00

I tried to find a “bashful” looking font, but to no avail. It has been too long, I know.

I have been doing a lot of traveling, pondering, processing, and eating (I often laughingly explain to Verena’s family that I am not usually quite this polite and that I do have opinions….but at the moment every piece of bread, type of cheese, and glass of juice is, to me, just as delicious as I keep exclaiming).

I suppose we should take a brief catch-up tour of the past 5 weeks. Don’t worry, you won’t get bored…there will be pictures ;)

“Normally,” I love the period between Thanksgiving and Christmas. I adore the jovial anticipation in the brisk air, the glowing lights and faces, the jingling music,…the delicious predictability of being with the same loved people, eating the same loved food, using the same loved decorations. Usually the interim time between two major periods or events is awkward (ie. adolescence), but the space between Thanksgiving and Christmas is a perfectly full and lovely space. It is my favorite. I think someone said that it is the most wonderful time of the year ;)

But this year, the 5 weeks between the two holidays have spanned 4 countries, 3 languages, and 2 continents for me. I have gone from the Muslim desert region of Northern Cameroon to Christmas winter wonderland in Germany (separated by two long bus rides, one long flight, a two day stay in Paris, and a 3 hour train lay-over in Switzerland where, yes dad, I left the station and walked around Basil dragging my rolling duffel just to be able to say that I’ve been there ;)

Soooo, I’ll spare all of you the long bus rides and flights and train trips and catch you up with me through pictures….

A Thanksgiving dinner to remind that the holiday is actually not about food but about being thankful!

The red door that you can barely see at the end of this alley-way is the door to my house in Ngaoundere (the town in the North where I did my research). The many topographical differences between the North and the West (where Dschang is and where the other pictures I posted were taken) are apparent in just this one picture. The dirt is dry and tan and deserty and the neighborhoods are mazes of narrow walled paths like this one. It really looks like a different country.

My ‘mom’ Mairamou, my brother Nasser and his favorite stuffed animal, me, my brother Douda. Mairamou and Nasser have the same mother and father while Douda is the son of the father’s second wife. Polygamy is legal and widely practiced in Cameroon, especially in the Northern Muslim areas. In Islam, a man can have up to 4 wives. While my ‘mom’ hopes that her husband will not marry another woman, the two wives of a chief I stayed with in a rural village said that they liked being co-spouses because they could share all of their work and keep each other company. Interesting. Anyhow, Nasser and Douda came over almost every day for dinner and the four of us would usually spend the evenings laughing about Nasser’s truck-driving stories and Douda market-vending tales.

Mairamou at her sewing machine in our cement courtyard. Life in Ngaoundere is always this colorful.

Mairamou’s husband Yaya Ismaila and Soreiya who is the youngest of 3 children and who, at 21 months, already has a spit-fire personality that I adore. I had my only successful Fulfulde conversations with Soreiya as our vocabularies are at about the same level…. “Hello” “Good-bye” “I’m sleepy” “Eat it” “Take this” “Stand up” “Sit down” “Stop that” “You’re back!” etc.

The most joyful person and the best hug-giver in the world, my grandmother (Mairamou’s mom). Both Soreiya and the cat Garcon-neither of whom like to demonstrate affection-run and jump into grandma’s lap when she arrives.

Me making ‘couscous’-corn flour mixed with boiling water and kneaded into playdough- the staple carbohydrate of the North. (Actually, my ‘mom’ was turning the couscous and said, ‘hey, you should have a picture of you doing this to show your family.’ So she sat me down, posed me with the paddle, snapped the picture laughing at my unsuccessful attempts to even move the gooey mass, and quickly took over again to save the bottom from burning and keep lumps from forming. Couscous is not exactly delicious, but lumpy couscous, as you might imagine, is worse.)

Dinner time. A cloth is laid down and everyone eats on the floor with their fingers. The men eat separately from the women (Yaya has his own living room)…except for Douda and Nasser, Mairamou’s brothers. She likes them to eat with her to keep her company.

Bobo (Yaya’s youngest brother who lives with the family so that he can attend school), Abdoul the oldest child, and Soreiya. The kiddo’s eat outside….they, unlike me, love couscous-the white mass in the bowl- with gumbo sauce-the greenish mass. Gumbo sauce is made with some type of greenery and ground ocra which is a thickening agent that gives the previously manageable green sauce the texture of snot. If you can get past the sliminess it actually tastes pretty good.

Yay! Me making something I know how to make! Chocolate chip cookies. Although most Cameroonians put 4-5 sugar cubes into one cup of tea, they don’t really prepare sugary foods. Everyone thought I was crazy for drinking my tea black and they all thought the cookies were too sweet….I thought they were delicious. Interesting how people can be accustomed to certain forms of sweetness but not others.

Yaya owns and runs the neighborhood store. He sells everything from shampoo to rice and the tiny store-front is always crowded. He is from a very poor village family and began selling small items from a tray on his head when he was 13 and there wasn’t enough money for him to continue with school. He saved enough money to buy a cart (to increase his sales) and a bicycle. He became an avid cyclist and entered a national race where he came in first place and won a prize of $100. A wealthy man in the audience was so impressed with his story that he doubled the prize money. Yaya used this money as collateral to begin his own store which has now grown to a very profitable business with three full-time employees and sometimes up to 8 part-time helpers.

This is the henna design that my ‘mom’ drew on my hand for Ramadan. For all special occasions (religious holidays, weddings, births, etc) women draw beautifully intricate designs on their hands and the soles of their feet. The design lasted for about 2 weeks…except on my finger-nails where the tips are still a strange orange color…faintly resembling the bizarre manicures that were popular when I was in middle school.

Me and my girls.

Chatouiller. Ngilkam. I can say “tickle me” in three languages.

This is how everyone carries their children. Sometimes Soreiya and I would go shopping like this which we both thought was awfully fun.

Hapsatou, me and Raissatou in the women’s literacy classroom where I taught and did my research. I think we were working on pronouncing the difference between the words ‘three’ and ‘tree’ in English….which is why Hapsatou is laughing. She was sure that I was say the same word over and over.

A picture from the classroom for which the women created a project proposal themselves. If you are interested, let me know and I’ll send you my paper.

This is the palace of the Lamido of Ngaoundere. The Lamido is the traditional religious and political leader in the Muslim regions.

The mosque in front of the Lamido’s palace and right next to the literacy classroom. Everyday around 3:30 the call to prayer would sound from the speakers at the top of the tower. Mamoudou (the male teacher) would leave the classroom to pray in the mosque and the women would roll out a plastic mat, take off their shoes and put up their scarves to pray in the classroom as, in Islam, women are not allowed to enter mosques.

Where I was the evening of December 16^th…..

and where I was on the evening of December 18^th. I spent 2 days in Paris with Devon (above) and Emily (not shown ;), my friends from the trip. We spent most of the time eating pastries, marveling at Christmas decorations, and remembering what it is like to be cold.

Shopping district downtown Paris one week before Christmas…I felt like (and probably acted like) a little kid mesmerized by the window display of singing dancing teapots and ooohing and aaaahing at the twinkling lights.

A lovely gingerbread shop complete with darling old lady in Freiburg’s quaint Christmas market.

In Germany, it can’t really be Christmas without a Christmas market bratwurst.

This is Freiburg, the town where Verena goes to university. We climbed a gazillion winding stairs to the top of the cathedral’s bell tower in this picture. We lost track of time and both nearly had heart attacks at the turning of the hour.

Verena and I decorating the Christmas tree. We are happy here because we don’t know yet that the lights that we are so meticulously placing don’t actually work. We put the lights on three times, went to the hardware store twice, and to top it all off, ended up having to tie the tree to the door frame because it fell over in the middle of the night.

Well, that should bring everyone nearly up to date with the goings-on in my life. I hope you have all had beautiful and restful and joyful Christmases.

Happy New Year!

Bisous,

Brianne

oh, and, I received my Christmas away from home DVD yesterday. I laughed and cried and laughed. Thank you all for contributing and for reminding me that although I’m far away, I’m not forgotten!

2006-11-25T07:12:00.000-08:00

Yay, finally...it's taken the cyber 23 minutes to pull up this page!!

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Although I didn't get to celebrate with turkey and pumpkin pie, I did have 'thanksgiving dinner' with a group of peace corps volunteers from the Adamaoua province. As an appatizer, we had melted velveta (from someone's care package from home...i forgot how delicious salt processed cheese food is!) and bread. And, for the main course, we had spaghetti while listening to Christmas music. Finally, (and i think better than any pumpkin or apple or pecan pie i've ever had) we had between 9 of us...and 8 inch circular brownie. It was chewy and gooey and chocolately, and pretty much the best thing ever!

And, on top of my fabulous thanksgiving celebration, I recieved some really good news on the actual day of thanksgiving. So good in fact, that I called my family waking them up at 5 am!
I found out from IES (the program that I will be studying in France with) that I am recieving the Cross Cultural scholarship for my time in France...for the amount of $3,000. (the people in the cyber must have thought i was crazy...sitting in front of my computer beaming and balling at the same time!) The scholarship really makes all the difference in the world for my next semester. What a blessing.

Also, I realized that I should update all of you on what I'm actually doing right now! It is the period (as i believe i said before) of the independent project. I am studying women's literacy in Ngaoundere. (hmmm, i feel like i've said this a million times and maybe i actually already have written it....so sorry if i'm repeating myself!). For religious, cultural, and even geographical reasons, women's literacy rates in the north are much much lower than in the rest of the country. And, as it is, only about 60% of Cameroonian women are literate. Anyways, I've been working with and organisation of women who come together 4 days a week to learn to read and write and speak french. They are strong, shy, beautiful, smart, and determined women. At their request, I begin the class each day with a 30 minute English lesson. (by they way, 'th' is absolutely impossible for anyone to pronounce...and it's in so many words!) Some days I feel incredibly busy, and other days it seems as if I do nothing. Some days I find all of the information I'm looking for, and other days I spend hours wait for people to show up. But, I love the freedom of my schedule. I get to spend lots of time with my family...and yesterday I finished Crime and Punishment (which I only started a week and a half ago!). It is really amazing that I only have 3 weeks left in Cameroon. (also rather bizarre that Christmas i a month from today and I have yet to see a single santa, or tree, or stocking...)

I've spent all day today writing a very detailed outline for my paper... which is why my writing has gone to mush and this is a very rambly post!

I hope you all had a wonderful and relaxing thanksgiving with friends and family.

bisous
brianne

2006-11-08T05:07:00.000-08:00

Finally, internet that works and time to write a post. :)

Just because I know everyone must be curious, my chiquita banana costume was a hit...especially with the cameroonian passengers next door to whom I had to describe (in French with a bunch of 7 bananas tied to my head) the very obscure American holiday where people disguise themselves as other things so that, at each house door, other people may scare them and give them candy, but to get the candy one must say "trick or treat" which means, ummm, make me afraid or give me candy!! You see, I am the girl that sells bananas in advertisements in the United States and she, that one down there in the orange fabric with a green teeshirt tied to her head, she is a (at this point i realized that i didn't know the word for pumpkin), a melon...which is the national vegetable of the holiday. If you have ever read "me talk pretty one day", this experience was David Sedaris funny.

Anyways, I am sitting here in downtown Yaounde, the capital city of Cameroon. A city of about 1.5 million people, it looks strangely like the love child of semi-rural Africa with 1970's Chicago. Like Chicago, the taxis are yellow...unlike Chicago, 5 is the normal number of passengers for the tiny back seat. If you have ever traveled anywhere outside of the US, you can probably understand the hilariously ridiculous state of traffic here. We were stopped up the other day by a herd of goats crossing the road downtown in front of the Hilton.

This is the end of my week in the capital. It has been busy and adventurous and fun. Of course you'll all be interested to know that Yaounde, although it does not have a McDonalds, does have nearly-French bakeries, fabulous gelatto, a fairly large community of random ex-pats, and a grocery store where you can buy coco crispies for 20 dollars. I won't bore you by recounting my week in food...but I am known by name by the bakery/gelatto security guards...in part because it's best to be as nice as possible when turning down mulitiple confessions of undying devotion!

On an actual academic note, my brief stay in Yaounde has been one of the most learning packed weeks of the semester. As a group we have gotten to meet and have conversations with the American ambassador to Cameroon, the head of the World Bank in Cameroon, the head of WWF (world wildlife fund) for Central Africa, the only woman Supreme Court justice, one of the heads of the Peace Corps Headquarters, and the heads of some national NGOs for protection of human rights, the environment, etc. For the most part, it has been just as fascinating as it sounds.

I'll end with a little anecdote that I at least find....adventurously amusing??
From all of my verbal frustration this summer, most of you probably know about my visa situation. I need a French visa to spend next semester in France, and it took me nearly 4 months this summer to finally determine that the only option was for me to get my French visa in Cameroon...not ideal, but better than shelling out for a second round trip plane ticket to Europe. The French Embassy is here in Yaounde, finally the time for all of my emails and photocopying and paperwork-organizing to hopefully work out. The adventure begins:
First, it takes a whole day of contacting people to actually find the Embassy's number.
Then I try to call from my cell phone and it doesn't work, so I take a taxi to the Embassy during lunch and of course the embassy (being FRENCH), is close for 2.5 hours every afternoon. I sweet talk the security guard into giving me a different phone number that might work with my cell phone. I actually get ahold of someone 3 hours later, who curtly informs me that she does not do visas and that I must call the visa section by a fixed line. "Fixed line??" This, I find out, does not mean land line, but is actually some sort of weird and very expensive exclusive phone service type thing. So, I finally (after asking a million people) find one of these fixed line's and call the embassy. 8 dollars, 5 minutes, and some slight confusion where I mixed up French numbers and told the lady i was born in 1996 later, I secured a visa appointment for Monday morning at the French Consulat. Monday morning I leave the hotel extra early to find that, unfortunately yet unsuprisingly, no one knows what or where the french consulat is. I ask 3 separate business looking men, and each points me in an entirely different direction. So, I decide my best option is just to go back to the French Embassy and ask there. Luckily (I do believe this was the only actually lucky part of the experience), the French Consulat is actually part of the Embassy! I am early for my appointment and marveling at my good luck. Explaining my situation is a bit tricky as it's not everyday and American student tries to get a French visa at the Embassy in Cameroon (shocking), but all goes well, I am approved for processing, and all I have to do is pay. I hand over the 100 euros, to which the French lady shakes her head and informs me that they only accept CFA. What!? So, I take a taxi back to down town to look for an ATM. Cameroonians don't use ATM, so no one knows where to find one. One man in the grocery store actually thought I was asking for a man named ATM, so he could give me some money! I chose the grocery store hoping to spot an ex-pat and voila! two young American guys in the candy aisle. I ask them, they give me directions that actually work, I get the money, take a taxi back to the Embassy, wait in line AGAIN, pay and find out that I have to come back Wednesday to pick it up. So, that's where I'm heading to now in about 15 minutes...we'll just see what happens!

as always, it is wonderfully renewing to hear from you all.

gros bisous
brianne

2006-10-30T03:43:00.000-08:00

i'm racing agianst my 22 minutes remaining at the cyber...so this is going to be brief!

i have spent the last week traveling with the group the the extreme north. actually, i think we may have spent more time in the bus than at the places we visited! the highlight of the hot dusty cramped and bumpy adventure was the village of Rhumseki. "touristy", at least for rural
Cameroon, Rhumseki is nestled in a valley between these amazing rock formations which, according to Emily (who got an A in "intro to geology"), are the left-over cores of volcanoes. Apparently the inner rock is much harder than the outer...the outer erodes away leaving giant jagged pillars.

Our 'tour guide', the 16 year old that lead us on a hike, told us the most interesting story.
Picture in your mind first an absolutely enormous rock pillar jutting out of a relatively flat area. See it?
Ok, so, if a woman in the village is having fertility problems, she must go, with the traditional doctor, to this 'mountain' and walk around it's base with a basket of eggs on her head. If none of them break, she will be cured of her infertility.
Hope you're smiling.

The traditional doctor in the village also tells futures...but he uses crabs instead of sand. You pose your questiong and he picks up the crab, asks it the question, shows you to it (by holding the crab in your face...so the crab knows it's you) and then places it in a basin with little wooden objects that represent different things. The crab scurries around and knocks some over and then gets picked up by the doctor. The doctor holds the crab to his hear and listens to your future, interprets the knocked over objects...and sends you on your way. The strangest part actually, is that Rhumseki is in the driest region of the country, and I have no idea where the crabs came from.

Also, we caught the end of mango season in the extreme north. i've never tasted anything like them!

Tomorrow we are leaving Ngaoundere for Yaounde, the capitol. Thankfully, we will be traveling by train and not bus...although the train promises to be just as much of an adventure! We have all come up with cameroonian themed halloween costumes and are going to trick or treat in each other's sleeper cars! I'm sure that all of the cameroonians will think we're crazy. I'm wearing the dress my family made for me and tying a pineapple to my head and going as miss chiquita banana!

miss you all!
bisous
brianne

2006-10-19T08:46:00.000-07:00

hi everyone!

i am not a big fan of catch-up journaling or catch-up blogging for that matter. But it has been so long since I've had the opportunity to post, that I believe an up-to-speed post is in order. I'll try to make it as intertaining as possible!

Things that have happened (in attempted order) since my last post:
1. I left Dschang at 530 on morning with 3 kisses on the cheeks from each family memeber, with 1 backpack nearly the same size as me, with 1 heart shaped cake from my sisters, and with 15 americans and 3 cameroonians in a 1970something vw bus. We bounced and jolted on a red clay road for 9 hours until we reached Banyo...where we thankfully stopped for a day to recouperate! The second day of off roading in the beat up van last from 4:30 am until 10 pm. Imagine a cracked leather bench seat, four students across, sweaty legs sticking together, and enough red dust blowing in the windows that i actually commented on how tan and pretty everyone looked before realizing that it was just a- very nice and even- layer of dirt!

2. On the bus voyage adventure we saw: a huge posionous snake, monkeys in a tree, a tarantula, and an owl. We also accidently peed right next to someone's corn field and got chased out - pulling our pants up- by some crazy ladies yelling in french that "would we pee on our own food??!!"

3. We are now in Ngaoundere...the capitol of the Amadowa province in the northern part of Cameroon. And, it is like being in a completely different country. The people are predominantly muslim, and the buildings, clothing, and interactions reflect this. It is the last week of Ramadan right now as well. My new maman gets up at three am to make breakfast so that the family can eat before the sun rises and then we feast at about six at night when the sun sets. The streets beside the mosques are nearly always packed with robbed men, and women, listening to the Koran, which is read over loud speaker 24 hours a day during Ramadan. Excitingly, I will be here for the end of Ramadan which everyone celebrates with a three day party! My maman, who by the way is 23, started jumping up and down when I told here that I was staning for the fete. In addition to the religious and cultural differences (which i've really barely touched on), the dirt is tan here and there are lots and lots of cows... which means milk and ice cream!! Also, did i mention that there is ice cream here?

I have to head home soon, but I want to end with this story.

Imagine a dusty bus ride to the outskirts of town, well past the outskirts into the fields, arriving at the clay brick compound of one of the areas traditional doctors. We are here to learn about traditional medicine...did you know that heat can cause malaria and too much studying will make you crazy? We all ask tons of questions....but the traditional doctor (this is astrology and traditional herbs and such...not witch craft) insists on giving us an example. He bring out the Egyptian sand and we each take a turn placing our sweaty palms in the center. Sitting cross legged in front of him marveling at the bizzare nature of the situation, I discover that: "hmmm, you have many plans, but you will get married sooner that you think. For sure within the next ten years and you husband will be someone who works with money. For example, a banker. Oh, and there is a girl. Yes, your first child will be a girl." Quite the opaque future... bankers beware!!

i really wish that I had the time and ability to share all of my stories with you. hopefully, this will satiate your curiosity for now! Keep writing...i love hearing that there is actaully a season besides summer in other parts of the world.

bisous
brianne

2006-10-03T09:30:00.000-07:00

ok, please tell me how much you love the pictures....

because i've been here at the internet cafe forever!! they actually are in order from bottom to top because of the way the site loaded them.

hopefully seeing the beautiful faces, my favorite places, and the stunning countryside will help you imagine my life here.

Enjoy!!

2006-10-03T09:15:00.000-07:00

Another view of Dschang from the SIT office. The dark area that looks like a rainstorm is actually a mountain range. It is so beautiful here...hardly captured by these pictures.
This is a picture of Dschang taken from the SIT office which occupies the third floor of one of the few three story building in the city. The street is lined with tailor shops, 'grocery' stores, clothing boutiques, hair salons, etc.

2006-10-03T08:58:00.000-07:00

Perhaps my favorite picture so far! In the foreground my 7 year old sister Raissa and Eugene my 14 year old sister next to me. This picture was taken during the nightly power outage...we really didn't have much else to do, so my camera serves as constant amusement. "Film me! Show me!" It's great.
Me and Jen at Cafe UCCAO...the local JP's! The cafe serves only 100% Cameroonian coffee and a random assortment of dishes depending on what the owners wife bought in the moring. The coffee is espresso strenght and comes in a mini mismatched tea cup with two sugar cubes. Also in this picture...my fabulous micro braids with extentions!

2006-10-03T08:37:00.000-07:00

This is my aunt Colette selling beignets (see the post about beignets :) and assorted biscuits and candies. She wraps all of the goods up in that plastic tarp (in the right hand corner) and carries it all on her head to this spot on the side of the road every morning.
Just to make everyone smile...me in front of my house with my breakfast... half a baguette stuffed with avacado and scallions or a palm oil soaked omelette. Yummy!

2006-10-03T08:16:00.000-07:00

My house, my Camerounian home. This is where I live with 2 sisters, 2 brothers, papa, maman, an aunt, and inevitably someone's cousin or friend. Nearly everything here is painted this color of tealish blue or peptobismal pink. I don't know why. The line through the picture is for drying clothes and the big bowl catches rain water.
This is a picture of a petit magasin, or little shop. The streets here are lined with store fronts that look like this, selling grains, fruits, dried fish, used shoes, you name it.

2006-10-03T08:03:00.000-07:00

Hahaa, this is the University of Dschang and the cow of the University of Dschang that is free to roam, eat trash, and frequently interrupt class. Our class room is the door on the far left.
Me and my darling little brother Junior. He is three and as cute as he looks. Well, actually maybe even cuter since he speaks French! Every day when I get home from class, he comes running up the dirt road shouting my name and then bearhugging my knees.

2006-10-03T07:42:00.000-07:00

Here is the only picture I have so far of the entire group. Christiane, the director is on the far right... and in the middle is the head chief of Fongo Tongo wearing lion furs... yep, he's the one who thinks I'm a good dancer!
Yay! After about eight hours of waiting, I'm actually getting to put some pictures up for you guys! This is the waterfall Mamy Water that we visited in Fongo Tongo during our first week here. The topography here is unbelievable, lush and unspoiled in many places. I hope that this series of pics will give everyone at least a little idea of what my life looks like here.

2006-09-29T02:51:00.000-07:00

This is just a little blog of amusing events from yesterday. I suppose I'll go in order...

Emily and Rachel and I went to lunch at Cafe Delices, a quaint little cafe where the lady who takes the orders and makes the food also has her little baby tied to her back. As a side not, I had an incredible plate of carrots and avacados!! During the meal, one of the construction workers working on the drainage system for the street outside popped into the cafe to talk to us in English. He proceeded to give us a history lesson of our own country with included colombus colonizing the country and all of the "red indians". yikes! Conceptions of America and of Americans here are, well, interesting and varried....conceptions of political correctness do not really exist. Anyhow, after lunch we watched a Cameroonian film at the SIT office, but a huge thunder storm came through about half way throught the film and the power was cut. We napped until it came back on (about half and hour), finished the somewhat boring film, and then...guess what we found in the SIT office??? SEASON SEVEN OF FRIENDS!!! (including the Holiday Armadillo episode!!) We treated ourselves to one episode, and it was honestly like having real friends come visit us. Every joke was funny and it just seemed so comfortable, so normal...I almost expected to walk out the door of the office into Holland and not Dschang. It was a great break for us all to have Ross and Phoebe and Chandler come to the SIT office :) After watching Friends, I went to the tailor's to give him all of my fabric and my designs. Everyone has gone overboard buying fabric here. It is absolutely gorgeous and inexpensive (until you buy tons of it!). But the best thing is that you can get anything you want made. I sat down with my sketch book and designed dress and skirts and some presents and all I had to do was show my designs and explain my ideas to the tailor. His little shop is on the same street as the SIT office. It is basically the size of two ajoined walk in closets with a sewing machine from about the 1940's. He takes your measurments as you try to find the french vocabulary for "gathered" and "pleated" and "strapless". I pretty much explained my ideas with hand motions joined by french conecting words. "You know, like -twirling motion to imitate a full skirt- yes like this but only so far down -point just below the knees- yes like this. It is very beautiful the idea, yes? Oh, and please can the red thing -motion to tie bow behing back like sash- be just above -point to hips- but below the smallest part here -point to waist-" Such fun!
I left the tailors for home and the power got cut again, this time for the whole night. So, Eugene (my darling 14 year old sister) and I sat on the front porch doing our homework. Well, actually it turned into me writing out the lyrics to Shakira's "hips don't lie" so she can learn how to sing it. In the midst of our laughter, my aunt came out with Junior (my three year old brother who is the constant amusement of the family). She was laughing so hard that she couldn't even speak as she pulled down Junior's pants. Junior had proudly gotten himself dressed that morning, complete with 5 pairs of underwear! And to complete the wonderful evening, we had mashed potatoes with beans in them (a dish that is common for this region and really good!) for dinner and, as there was no power, we went to bed at about 9. Oh, to note, everyone is blown away by the tiny lithium light that I brought. My family came up with the idea that you could buy 4, put them in the corners of the room and put big rocks on them (to keep them on) when the power goes out. In this way you could light the room more effectively than with the lantern. My mini light is affectionaly called the "bebe torche" or baby flashlight by all.

Hope this post makes you smile!

2006-09-26T04:40:00.000-07:00

oh....only five minutes left! Anyhow, the converstation was extremely interesting and thought provoking. And, who gets the chance to really meet and talk with such important members of soceity? We are studying Cameroons developmental problems and speaking with the leaders that are at the forefront of the movements we discuss in class. The complexity the we are beginning to encounter is astounding.

And, on a lighter note, we (the fourteen girls of the trip) have discovered that the best way to discourage a man who keeps suggesting marriage is to say that our father demands the price of 150 cows to be brought to him in the United States. The young man realizes that he can not pay this price, yet does not feel that he has been snubbed, and the conversation can continue normally!

I should, barring power outages and such, have time for more stories this week. I would love to hear news from all!

bisous
brianne

2006-09-26T04:25:00.000-07:00

Last week we had class every day from eight in the morning until seven at night and I was sick with a cold (not serious but just tiring and annoying). I tried to post yesterday but was stopped first by a frozen computer and then by two power outages and therefore lost the first half of three posts! I gave up and went home to make my papa chocolate chip banana pancakes for his birthday. There wasn't any power in the whole town last night so I successfully made pancakes by lantern light and without baking pouder and with a smashed chocolate bar instead of chocolate chips. They were delicious!!

Anyhow, I promised that this blog wouldn't be only about food. This past weekend our group traveled to BAmenda which is in the anglophone part of the country (the western part). The sprawling tin roofs of the city are surrounded by a mountain landscape that is dotted with waterfalls. Stunning. It is impossible really to use words for the weekend as, at this point, my head is still churning with thoughts and questions. Most interestingly, we visited the fondom of the BAfut people. A tour of paradoxes, our guide (dressed in a navy suit) was one of the fon's 47 wives. She spoke to us of the importance of maintaining tradition as we meandered through a museum built by the Germans, the same people who colonized the tribe. We also met the chief (fon) of the Bafut> he was sitting on the worn stone foundation of the oldest building in WEstern AFrica (kept intact by a fire that has gone out for 600 years and which also serves to preseve the building and appease the ancestors) holding his cell phone in his hands and speaking to us in English. Hopefully this brief picture highlights the complex relationship between tradition and modernity, the constant battle and unending questions.

Along with meeting his majesty, we also had the honor of having lunch at the house of the leader of the main opposition political party in Cameroon, John Fru Ndi. He actually won the presidential elections of 1992 but they were overturned by the "democratic" government.

2006-09-16T05:07:00.000-07:00

Beignets....pronounced benyays.
My papa works for the university of Dschang, a good job but one which must feed 9 mouths. Here the women contribute as much as the men, if not more. Traditionally, the women cultivate the familys land (pretty much a huge huge garden), but my family lives in a very compact residential neighborhood. So, to supplement the family income, my maman and aunt make and sell beignets. There are two kinds; one is like a doughnut (flour and sugar and yeast) and the other is made from bananas and a half and half mixture of maize flour and white flour. Each night my aunt peels about 70 bananas into a huge wooden bowl and then smashes them with a 'pillon' or a large wooden bat like smashing utensil. To make the corn flour she also must remove the kernels from the cob (and this takes alot of cobs!) and let them soak in hot water overnight. She pours the already soaked kernels into a bag and carries it on her head to the neighborhood market half a mile away to have it ground into flour, which depending on whether the machine decides to work or not, may take about an hour. She carries the flour home and mixes it with the white flour and then mixes the batter together (in an even 'huger' wooden bowl) by hand. Actually I should say 'by back' because its truly and aerobic workout....like performing the job of an industrial blender! The batter then sits overnight with the yeast to rise and my maman and papa rise at 3 30 in the morning to start frying the beignets in palm oil. Each batch of batter makes approx 600 beignets, which are then sold for 10CFA apiece. So, if nearly every beignet is sold, my maman and aunt make about 20 dollars a day, a very significant contribution but for an unbelievable amount of work. For the time Im with my family, Ive taken on the job of banana smasher, teasing my brother that my aim is to become stronger than him (the size of my upper arms seems to be a culturally universal source of humour!). And, tomorrow morning I am rising at 3 30 with my maman to observe and hopefully help with the process. So, life is difficult, but it is also filled with laughter and teasing and...the most recent source of amusement...pipecleaners! I brought two bags of the fuzzy wires and broke them out last night. My family had never seen them, and I will end by saying that when I got up this morning, all of my little siblings were still sporting bent neon furry glasses!! (when asked, my 3 year old brother explained to me that he can see the television better with them:)
I love hearing from everyone, so thanks
bisous
Brianne

2006-09-14T07:59:00.000-07:00

La nouriture...or, due to popular demand, what I am eating.
First we shall begin with a small history lesson. The currency in Cameroun is the FCFA, or Camerounian franc as the country is a former colony of France. (in addition to the residual name of the currency, there is also the residual morning French baguette for breakfast. There is a small section of West Cameroun that, when the country was taken from Germany and divided after WWI, remained under British control. There is still a great internal division between the english speaking and the french speaking people in Cameroun and this division can be seen even in the bread that is eaten for breakfast; the anglophone population eats a british style loaf while the francophone population virtually survives on the baguette.) Back to the franc...before 1994 the ration was approximately 1 French franc: 50 FCFA. But, in 94 the currency was devalued and the ratio became 1:100. It has been increasing ever since and with the strength of the euro the current ratio is now 1 euro: 650 CFA. Due to the (rising) weakness of the CFA it is nearly impossible for the country to import much of anything and most products, including food, are made/produced locally. Quite a long winded explanation to say that there is virtually no variety and we eat about the same thing every day. Bananas, papayas, avacados, tomatoes, plantains, prunish things, and really sour green oranges are abundant, but most the diet is ALL carbs (good thing youre not coming to visit me here dad!). The most shocking thing i suppose was the fish head in my rice last night, but I covered its eyes with my spoon and we were fine. It is impossible to find anything familiar here. I have found one bakery that has imported pinapple yougurt that tastes sooooo good (there is no other dairy at all). And yesterday we found a restaurant that has...it so wonderful that youll never guess...CHICKEN! Comparatively, its very expensive: a normal lunch costs around 350 to 600 CFA, ie. 60 cents to about a dollar and the chicken costs 2000CFA or about 4 dollars. Oh, it also comes with plantain frites that are fantastic...and Mama Titi herself serves them to you in a small peptobismal pink dining room with a tv that blares american gangsta rap music videos...it really doesnt get much more eclectic than that! And in addition to Mama Titis, there is the UNCAU cafe which serves real Camerounian coffee in mini mismatched tea cups with two sugar cubes and little party spoons. You can also order omlets there at a rate of 15 cents per egg, the same price as a cup of coffee. It is the Camerounian version of JPs and, needless to say, is probably our favorite spot. And, on the food note, I should probably head home and attempt to help with dinner...mostly Im there for amusement but I do snap the green beans!
Think of me today if you eat cheese or drink milk ;)
bisous
Brianne

2006-09-12T08:33:00.000-07:00

Welcome to Cameroon, where nothing ever works but everything always works out! ...a saying that one of last years students left... Yes, i am here. currently im sitting in an internet cafe near my house in dschang. the city is nestled in beautiful verdant mountains. its a postcard view from nearly everywhere. so much to recount and so little time...and a very frusterating french keyboard! the group that i am with is fantastic and energetic and diverse and very caring. we spent the first week in fongo tongo, a rural village near dschang when its dry, but far away if its raining...i am now an expert bus pusher. in our week of seclusion, we formed a very tight group bond which makes it muich easier to navigate this new life with friends. in fongo tongo we hiked through the rain forest to visit some fam,ous waterfalls and we were welcomed by the grand chief of the region...which has only ever happed one other time in the programs 15 year history. he welco,ed us with a traditional dance ceremony... and believe it or not, he honored my dancing by kissing a bill and placing it on my forehead as i danced by him!!!! it is a traditional thing to do, but anyone who has seen my dance moves will probably wonder why he chose me! probably more of a blonde hair thing and less of a rhythm thing. anyhow, we moved to dschang 3 days ago. i am living with the family njoko in foto which is about a 15 minute walk away fro, the university. ...for the moms...julia and rachel live in the same neighborhood and we all walk together. i have 3 sisters, 2 brothers, maman and papa, and an aunt...and anyone else who happens to stop by, which is all the time here! i love the daily challenge of living life in french and discovering a new culture. my papa works at the university and my maman gets up at 330 every morning to make banyos, kinda like donuts sortof, and then delivers them to stores around the town where they are sold. my papa gets up and helps her every morning...which is an amazing dynamic in this very gender divided soceity. i am the 7th student that my family has had, thus they are all used to being patient and being stared at all the time! the two oldest sisters, carrine and eugenne 16 and 14, are wonderful. i love talking with them and they with me. my papa loves to learn and engage me in very interesting conversations such as gender division, global warming, and global perception of developing countries. i love it and am very very amazed that my french can navigate such topics, albeit rather choppily! oooh, i have much to tell, but i need to head home to help with dinner. as this internet cafe is quite close to my house, my posts should be more frequent for the next month. i would love to hear from all, either by comments on this blog or by email ...brianne.carpenter@hope.edu, or by snail mail...an accurate adj here... if youre ambitious. know that i am well and happy! bisous, brianne

2006-08-21T18:01:00.000-07:00

I love real mail. So, if you are so inclined, you can send letters to:

Brianne Carpenter
c/o The School for International Training
BP 441
Dschang, Cameroon

It will arrive (hopefully!) within 2-4 weeks.

2006-08-02T18:00:00.000-07:00

Just in case you were wondering where Cameroon is.

2006-08-02T16:21:00.000-07:00

Appropriatly, I am going to begin this blog with a mini French lesson.

trois-three
bisou(s)-a kiss placed on the cheek as a friendly greeting

Trois bisous. That's one for each cheek and an extra.

So everytime you type in the address or click on the little blue hyperlink, think of it as my little warm greeting to you.

In lieue of a droning, overwhelming mass email, I have decided to post my adventures, thoughts, pictures, and misadventures online. Bear with me as my reasons may aquire an info-mercial-like aroma, but....you can check up on me whenever you'd like!

it's much more colorful (polka-dots, brown font, etc)

it won't clog your email account with large picture files

and I promise that it will not take the form of an excruciatingly
long prose account of a week's worth of train rides and meals

In toto, this format will be easier for me to update, and it enables me to be creative (which is, perhaps, my favorite thing-at least it's in the running- along with ice cream, the eddie bauer "just too marvelous jazz cd", and the smell of the james brandis oil painting art studio in saugatuck.)

So, here's the timeline:
I will be in Holland frantically working (my three jobs) until August 20.
From August 20 until September 3, I will be in Midland with my family taking care of last
minute details and packing....somehow for the entire year.
My flight for Cameroon leaves the morning of September 3. I will meet up with the 14 other
student participants at the airport in New York. We will travel as a group from
New York to Paris, and from Paris to Douala, Cameroon.
The semester in Cameroon will involve extensive group travel, including stays in both rural
villages and urban cities....more on this to come.
I will leave Cameroon on December 18, fly to Paris, and train to Germany where I will spend
the holidays with my (German) friend Verena and her family.
My semester in Nantes begins in early January and continues through late May, which leaves
about a month for my family to visit, etc.
I will return to the US on July 2, 2007.

Please post comments, questions, ponderings... throughout the semester as I will cherish hearing from you.
And, yes, I am unbelievably excited!

bisous,
Brianne