Fox en France Ep.11: Poutine on the Ritz

Friday 4^th – Sunday 6^th Nov

After an anticlimactic return to work after the holidays (one hour of exam supervision then being told I was no longer needed for the day), Friday meant back to Saint-Brieuc (home-from-home here. My home-from-home-from-home?), and a night in with friends, wine and some chocolate. Reward after a long, hard, sixty minute week at work. 

Joel samples the vino

Saturday was a flurry of lesson plans and so much tea I may as well have had a keg (does that work? Is that a thing? Get in touch), before we trudged out through slippery leaf-clad pavements to a food and wine festival. This was truly something special, despite our initial doubts as we entered the building; only the first stall was in view and it was full of dubious-looking kitchen equipment. “Sorry, but… Where’s the wine?” someone whispered, worried that our plans of a delightful evening out were going to be severely trampled by three hours of surveying sub-par colanders and carving knives.

But the wine was just round the corner, it turned out, and in no limited supply. Early on it dawned on us that traditional buckets in which to pour excess drink were nowhere to be found, so our fate was sealed as soon as the liquid hit our glasses. And stall-owners, rightfully guarding the Divine Quality of their produce, completely refused to serve us at all until the smallest drops of whatever we’d previously tasted were gone, so as not to disrupt the flavour. More top quality advice: you have not been berated until you’ve been berated by a small, angry, wine-selling Frenchman with a goatee ("No, drink it all!”). The group marching round together after copious glasses of wine was enough to create a scene anyway, but shortly word somehow “got out” (we were quite the celebrity buzz, within that marquee) that we were “all foreign” and stallholders couldn’t believe (or understand why) there were eight of us from across the world here to taste their wines. Then it all got rather overwhelming as tumblers and shot glasses were thrown at us from all angles by beaming stallholders: champagne, cognac, mushroom liqueur (really), passionfruit-something-or-other, cured ham and lots of cheese. Would rate the evening highly, although the stuffed wild boar on the sausage table could be considered a little much.

Genuine shots of mushroom

SO:

Clouds: If someone is friendly and convincing enough, they can quite easily convince a group of tourists to buy two bottles of their finest passionfruit-something-or-other.

Silver linings: It tasted very, very good.

Monday 7^th – Monday 14^th Nov

An entire week seems like quite a feat to write about, but some of it is predictable and has been written thousands of times already by thousands of people so it won’t take long to read and absorb:

I watched the election results on Tuesday. I watched it with American friends, and with baited breath. I do not support Donald Trump nor his views nor his actions. He won. People handed him power. It sucked.

It really really, really sucked and seemed to slow the world down a little for the next few days. This, combined with the single hour of poor-quality sleep I managed to steal that night, and the fact that I live alone and had no one to wail at in person after Wednesday, meant the end of the week felt pretty bleak. And then – call this either bad luck, or perhaps rather a very clear cut consequence of the above circumstances – two months’ worth of escaped homesickness rushed in at once and hit me with force comparative to my kitchen cupboard the other week when I left it open and then walked into it. With lessons cancelled left, right and centre (more variation than Western politics, at least) I was beyond grateful when a couple of pals pitched up on Saturday night and we repeated our wine-chocolate-film ritual with marvelous healing effects. Who knew that living alone is actually not at all peachy when you feel like the end of the world is nigh?! Someone should note this stuff down.

The rank remains of our Democrat/Republican punch bowls. I remembered I'm allergic to ("Republican") grapefruit and my lips swelled up. Omen? 

I should have hung on, though, to the buried but significant knowledge that teaching – talking to young people – can almost always perk you up and haul you out of even the deepest, bleakest wallowing session. Today’s lessons have made me laugh out loud until I couldn’t speak as the terminale class began their “Swinging Sixties” topic. After a guessing game of sixties icons (and one absolutely unmentionable attempt at pronouncing “Quant”), and the realisation that two of them had genuinely never heard of JFK, we moved on to a “Guess who?” game. I sat on a chair in the corner – I didn’t need to hover intimidatingly; how could it go wrong? – while they took turns in guessing which ‘60s icon they had been assigned on the board behind them by a peer. I settled in comfortably, feeling smugly assured that this would be the lighthearted, calming end to the day we all needed.

…Seven minutes passed. Madness descended. Hillary Clinton had been mistakenly called a man, there seemed to be doubts that Clint Eastwood was human, Vladimir Putin had been spelt “poutine” (as in the Canadian delicacy), someone had written my name on the board… I don’t know quite when it went awry. 

The moral of the story is - be prepared. One minute there’s blank silence and tentative squeaks of, “Errrrr… I am an actor?”, and the next you’re having to request if we could possibly stop making each other fascist world leaders and/or Kardashians (the original “sixties” theme completely dropped). As an awe-inspiring finale of creativity, one girl even assigned a friend his own name – cue confusion and partial philosophical meltdown at Monday’s close: “I am human?!... Attend! Attend! I am... ME?!” Good. Grief.

SO:

Clouds: A heavy, grey cloud this time, I feel, and one I can’t ignore: I am worried about the USA. 

Silver linings: Small scale remedies in the face of world-wide tragedies: thankful for friends who are at the end of a Skype or phone call when a Trump-shaped shadow is looming, and those who drove for miles to harmonise and cry over Skylar Astin, huddled under a duvet on my sofa. Try to tell me your Saturday topped that. Plus some very successful lessons, much hilarity, and some real progress in learning the names of my 120 students. ...No longer having to shout "VALENTIN!" or "MANON!" just because it's likely there will be one in the vicinity.

Calm