Blogs from Nord-Pas de Calais, France, Europe - page 29

The other night, I was eating dinner with a group of French friends. About halfway through dinner, for some reason we were talking about animal noises and the differences between them in English and French. It was late, we were quite tired, and it was positively hysterical. I had tears streaming down my face as my friends, who are all quite intelligent people, competed for who could make the best sheep/goat/cow/horse/chicken noise. All of us were fighting stomach cramps and gasping for breath from laughing so hard. Then we switched to talking about the verbs used to describe the noises instead of the noises themselves (bleat, whinny, moo, bark, etc.), and we got into a fight about one somehow. From there, an entire discussion came up about the subjunctive tense. We talked (and argued) about verb ... read more

I would like to apologize for the lack of entries and for the inferior quality of the past few entries in this blog. I really have been extremely ill for the past several weeks, and it just got a lot worse three weeks ago and FINALLY started going back up here last week. I went to a free clinic and got some medicine. I didn’t know that there was a free clinic in Lille. It isn’t like in the States, where poor people cannot afford insurance and, therefore, don’t have it. If you’re a French citizen, you have insurance, and almost everything is paid for, so it’s different. So who goes to the free clinics? Yours truly - immigrants, whether temporary or permanent. They still suck - it takes forever, it’s crowded… some things are universal. ... read more

So I taught for the first time today. I have eight different classes, all between the ages of 8 and 10, and either in CE2 or CM1. CE2 (that’s the name of the “grade”) children have never had English before, so I am their first-ever exposure to it. CM1 kids have only had the same twice-a-week English classes that I am giving them last year with the previous assistant. We played a game to introduce ourselves and give our ages, and we went over colors. I also talked to them (in French) about myself and where I come from. I showed them the States and where Ohio and Pennsylvania are located. I also tried to explain how much bigger the US is than France. Yes, I gave them a couple numbers, but I mostly used the ... read more

"The self-made man." "Every man for himself." These are very American expressions and ideas - more than you'd think, even. Let me set the scene. Last Thursday, the SNCF went on strike. The SNCF is the Société Générale des Chemins de Fer - or the company that controls almost every single train in France. They were on strike to protest against two things: (1) the potential change in their retirement setup; and (2) the talk of shifting more of the weight of cargo transport to trucks rather than trains. I don't pretend to know how much of this is true or what the details are - I just know the version(s) I got from the signs, yelling, and flyers I saw. The point, though, was that not a single train ran for the vast majority of ... read more

SDF = Sans Domicile Fixe = Homeless. Like in any city, there are many SDF in Lille (little grammatical note: the French do not put an "s" after acronyms or last names even when plural). One woman sleeps right outside the Résidence Béthanie. She is doing better than she was - she now has two new blankets and a new batch of cardboard. There are SDF (so dehumanizing, acronyms to describe people, don't you think?) on all the big streets and in the train and metro stations. It's something that I am not used to, since I have never lived in the city. And I feel bad not being able to give anything since I'm so poor myself right now. I also wonder, though, about how help for the SDF works over here. I wonder if ... read more