This is France.

When I was writing my blog in Belgium, I focused a lot on observations; it was my first time living in another country and a lot of things were new (and strange) to me. This time around, I've got a better idea of what's going on. Eating bread and salami for breakfast doesn't faze me anymore, I always carry cash, I know that if I order a ham sandwich at a restaurant that it's just going to be bread, butter, and ham -- and I know how to ask if I want them to throw some vegetables on there too. Some things seem to be pretty consistent in this region of Europe, and I've heard that the north of France is fairly culturally similar to Belgium, so that's easy enough. As I get to know this country more, though, I'm still discovering things that are at turns amusing, distressing, and just a little odd.

• France loves paperwork. I have never in my life encountered a more bureaucratic country. I was even expecting this, and it still surprised me. Putting aside the mountain of paperwork that had to be completed in order to validate my visa, including copies of every document from my passport to my bank account information to my 7th grade report card (kidding, sort of), I had to bring a passport photo and a proof of habitation just to get a bus pass. Most French people are used to this and accept it with a smile, but I'm pretty sure that's just a mask for their pure and unmitigated sadness. I want to put my arm around their shoulders and tell them it doesn't have to be this way, but apparently it does, so that just leaves me in the printing room at school, making copy after copy after copy. 

• There are a whole lot of animals in shop windows. I mean, not real ones, usually (although no fewer than five floppy-eared dogs stared me down from behind windows on my walk from the school to the train station yesterday, and I have seen a lot of cats sitting in windows as well), but fake animals incorporated one way or another into store displays. I present Exhibits A, B, C, D, E, and F:

I guess it's working, though, because I am way more interested in animals wearing people clothing than in people wearing people clothing.

• Speaking of animals, no one picks up after their own. For everyone's sake, I have no pictures of this, so you'll have to take my word for it, but I have to constantly look at the ground while walking here (especially in the smaller towns), or I will be in trouble. I'm fairly certain you're required by law to pick up after your dogs, so I suppose it's just not enforced and no one really seems to care, for some reason. But I care a lot.

• Tiny doors. I don't know if it's really possible to tell from the picture how small these doors are, but I would estimate about half the width of a standard door. (This is not true of all or even most houses. Just something I've noticed on my walk to the school in the morning.)

• There are a lot of cemeteries. I suppose when you've been a country as long as France has, you do tend to accumulate a lot of dead people, but I'm still surprised whenever I'm driving through the countryside up north and it's just cemetery after cemetery. And almost as if they're acknowledging the fact, there are also quite a few shops for various gravesite and mortuary materials: coffins, headstones, urns, etc. So that's fun. 

Of course, several of these are World War I cemeteries, as the north was a pretty active battleground. There's even a German/French World War I cemetery in Montdidier, the little village where I teach.

And in a sea of crosses, one or two Jewish graves as well:

I took those pictures back in early October, but here's one I took just yesterday:

Seasons are fun, right? Too bad we don't really have them back home.

Here are some bonus fall pictures, just for fun:

Gradient tree!

• I think we can agree that some stereotypes are founded in truth. Well let me confirm right now, an impressively large portion of the French population smokes. For those who hate all the restrictions on smoking we have in the US, France is the place to be; there are few restrictions, and where they do exist, they're largely ignored. For those who aren't such a fan, and those with respiratory problems, best not linger in this country for too long. People will smoke where they're not supposed to and they will unapologetically blow the smoke in your face. And it's not just the adults! Take a look at this picture I took outside the high school the other day:

This was not at the end of the school day; this was just a five-minute break between classes. All of those students standing around are smoking, most of them between the ages of 14 and 17, and the crowd is even larger before and after school, and at lunch. 

It's not like teenagers smoking is any sort of shocking phenomenon, but the sheer number of them is a bit surprising, as is the fact that no one really cares. Teachers smoke alongside the students, and it's not rare to see a 14- or 15-year old girl walking through the halls with an unlit cigarette dangling from her mouth because she just cannot wait to get outside to light up. Parents will share their cigarettes with children younger than this as well. I understand it's a cultural thing, but it's still a bit jarring for someone of my era coming from the US to see things like this. It also just doesn't seem like great parenting, but maybe I'm just being judgmental. 

All in all, France is...well, it's very French. Certain things are great, like baguettes for 58 cents and the prevalence of good pastries. And certain things are less great, like the chill that has settled deep into my California bones that I'm afraid might never leave, and paying €15 for a tube of mascara I pay $6 for at home.

Luckily I've got Belgium right across the border for those times when I need to escape to more familiar surroundings, and the fact that I now feel that way about Belgium gives me a bit of hope that I may get there with France too. 

Getting Settled

I'm trying to avoid giving a play-by-play of all the time I have spent NOT updating my blog, but I do have to do a bit of catching up. So the next couple entries will probably be that.

I work at a high school in a little town called Montdidier, deep in the French countryside (finally, the famous campagne from years of French vocabulary lists is relevant). The school had a free room set aside for me right on campus, but the previous assistant (who has been awesomely helpful - thank you, Aoife) had advised had me not to take it and to live in the bigger city of Amiens instead and commute into Montdidier to work. Still, I thought it might be a good idea to live in the room just for a month or two, until I started getting paid and could afford something else. That seemingly solid plan started to crumble almost as soon as I arrived in town. A typical conversation with every teacher I met went something like this:

"Welcome! Where are you living?"
"I'm staying in the free room here at the school."
"Have...have you seen the room?"
"Um, not yet, but it's just for a month or so."
"I see. Well, good luck."

Except, you know, in French. Mostly. And then that teacher and whatever teacher had made the introduction would give each other a look that clearly indicated my plan was not a good one. Which made a lot more sense when I did finally see the room, and when I got to know the town a bit better over the next couple of days.

The room itself was...well, it was clean. It did have that going for it. Other than that, picture a dorm room, but colder and less welcoming, and with plastic and aluminum furniture, and linoleum floors. The "kitchen" downstairs in the building was actually just a hot plate and a microwave. Perhaps the most inconvenient thing, though, was that there was no wifi in the room. There was no accessible wifi anywhere in town, actually, except for in the main school building (which is, of course, closed on nights and weekends), and in the McDonald's, twenty minutes away on foot. I know, I know, I'm probably too dependent on the internet, but internet is the only way that I can conveniently and affordably communicate with my family, not to mention do research for lesson planning, write blog entries, or read emails.

There are also only about 8000 people in the town, and absolutely nothing to do. It's not even easy to get around or leave the town, as there are no buses and the train station is a half hour walk away from the school. I anticipated a very lonely (and incredibly inconvenient) couple of months were I to stay. SO. I actually ended up moving after that first weekend. I now live in Amiens (the "big" city in the area), in the same house where last year's English assistant lived. There are four of us in the house and only one bathroom, but there is wifi, there is a washing machine, and I am only a short bus ride away from the train station, a grocery store, and friends. So I am happy.

And actually, I had a feeling it would all work out when Tom and I went to see the house for the first time. See, for years, Andrew has been "speaking French" with one of the few sentences he could recall from high school. Over and over, for probably seven or eight years, he's been asking me: Où est la bibliothèque? Where is the library? And as we turned onto my new street, the first thing I saw was this sign:

So, Andrew, to finally answer your question, the bibliothèque is here. Or at least a bibliothèque is here. Close enough.

(In case anyone feels like sending me a letter or a postcard, or just spying on my neighborhood via Google Maps, my address is 13 Rue de Mercey, 80090 Amiens.)

When I went back to the school to actually start work on October 1st, all of the teachers asked me how I was faring in my little room in Montdidier. When I told them I'd already moved to Amiens, they all looked relieved and told me that that was probably a wise decision. I tend to agree.

And that's all for now! But I might write another entry immediately after this one.