Advertisement
Published: October 10th 2009
We had planned to go to St-Quentin today, but that didn't work out very well. We decided to stay in Douai and explore our new town a bit. Saturday is market day, and our little town has TWO markets. We crossed the canal and headed over to the food market (the other one is a bit more like a flea market, and after the braderie last week, we decided to take a break from sifting through junk). The market sells all sorts of food, from cheese to meat to fresh produce. You can also get flowers, spices, and homemade jellies and bread. We wandered around buying fruit and eyeing the cute man selling apples. It would be so much more fun to explore the market if we had a kitchen and could cook. Hopefully we can use the communal kitchen next weekend and get Lucy's pots and pans out of storage.
We wanted to return to the gigantic Auchan (a hypermarché, kind of like Wal-Mart...it sells just about everything), but alas, we failed. There is apparently more than one Auchan in the area, and everyone told us to go to the wrong one. We were quite disappointed because the one
we were trying to go to had a Sephora and H&M in the same mall...this one was just surrounded by low-income high rises. Perhap we can find the other one next weekend. We still managed to get the needed items (tea kettle, cereal, incredibly expensive laundry detergent) and spent the rest of the afternoon in Douai centre shopping. We can't eat iin the dining hall on the weekend and almost everything is closed on Sundays, so we need to plan out food to eat for the two days that isn't too terribly expensive and can be eaten without requiring refrigeration or any sort of preparation. It's basically like high-class camping without the smores.
Since we're giving Douai the benefit of the doubt this weekend, we went out to experience the nightlife. We met up with Martina, the German assistant, and headed across the canal to a bar. Turns out it's an Irish pub (with no actual Irish people anywhere to be found) that had a special acoustic concert that night. The singer, Didier something or other, was so drunk that we could not understand a single word he said or sang. We often couldn't even tell if he was
singing in French or English. Some of the French students we've met showed up to hang out, and it ended up being quite the nice evening. And the wine is only 2 euros a glass!
In other news, I finished my first week of observing classes. I have three primary schools, and they're all quite a ways out of the city. I spend a lot of my time traveling from Douai and in between schools and having lunch. Lunch in France is a two hour break! The teachers I work with are all quite nice, and I get to speak a lot of French with them during our incredibly long lunches. The students are rather poorly behaved, but they're cute. We've spent this week pretty much having question and answer sessions about me and life in America. Turns out kids really do ask the darnedest questions.
One kid asked me what I eat. I said food, and he just stared at me (apparently they're not used to humor in the classroom). When I explained that I do not, in fact, eat hamburgers, but rather fruits, vegetables, pasta, and chicken, he was shocked to find out we eat
the same food. A favorite question has been how I got to France. I told them I swam, and I think one boy actually believed me. I need to remember to not joke around. One class asked if I had any American money on me (I did, just for this reason) and they passed around my one and five dollar bills and couple of coins like it was worth a million bucks. One boy pointed out that there are many faces on the money and asked if my face was on one of the bills back home. A girl asked me if I have a lover...not boyfriend, but lover. Several of the boys have been asking if I'm married and then rush back to share the news with the other little boys gathered together. Hopefully they do not start writing me love letters like Sarah's students. They also seem to think that Cleveland, Ohio is overflowing with celebrities that I run into on a daily basis. They looked absolutely crushed when I told them I had never met Michael Jackson.
Perhaps the most ridiculous experience I've had so far was when one teacher decided to give an impromptu American
history lesson. She asked me to explain the American flag, so I said the red stands for blood. She then proceeded to tell the students that there was a lot of blood in American history, like when the cowboys killed a lot of Indians and when the Americans went over to Africa to steal slaves. Also, although slavery has since been abolished in the US, apartheid still exists. She also said the colonists in the first 13 colonies were mostly French and Spanish. I'm going to have to have a chat with her and insist that I talk about American history from now on... Oh, when I said the blue in the flag stands for loyalty (she put me on the spot, and I didn't know what exactly the blue stood for), she heard "royalty" and asked the kids if the US has a king. Just as I was opening my mouth to correct her, the only black student in the school stood up and shouted out, "No! Barack Obama is their president!" It was just too late to backtrack at that point. Hopefully these kids don't pay much attention to their teacher and therefore won't grow up thinking that
apartheid exists in America or that there is a king.
This week, I'm doing more observing (though it is terribly boring). I am working with one teacher to make pancakes with maple syrup because we're on the Canada chapter of the English book, which makes it seem like all Canadians live in log cabins and chop wood and burn fires to heat the house. I can't wait until we get to the USA chapter, which shows pictures of mobile homes and includes a "Make Your Own Pueblo Indian headband" activity. And yes, this book is apparently approved by the French Ministry of Education and adheres to the European Union standards of language education.
Our trip to Cologne has fallen through, so hopefully we'll be doing something fun this coming weekend in its place. We are also supposed to be getting a mini fridge! Yay! And that's about it for the exciting news in my life. 😊
Also, I am very grateful to Katie for letting me use some of her fabulous photos in my blog. She is a much better photographer than I ever will be!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.065s; Tpl: 0.013s; cc: 11; qc: 32; dbt: 0.0372s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
HeartandSeoul
Katie Lang
I thought that the blue stood for freedom? (as in from the Brits, not OMGFREEDOMFRIES)