introductions

I like Sundays because they are the quiet days I have to myself, it’s a nice break from the rest of the week. The days are busy here and I like them that way, but as a result, I really enjoy my day of rest. Yesterday I went to St. Jean, a nearby church, for mass with a few friends. Unlike St. Bernadette, St. Jean is a very old, very traditional church with high stone walls and elaborate stained-glass windows. It’s beautiful and not too crowded. Angers is a pretty conservative, religious town as far as France goes, but there are so many churches within walking distance that while a lot of people go to mass, none of the churches are ever very crowded.

Other than my frustrating post office excursions, it’s been a pretty good week. Monday night I ate dinner with my host parents again. I nearly leapt out of my chair in excitement when I saw the steaming plate of vegetables for the first course, I’ve been a little veggie deprived lately. That is to say, they are somewhat expensive and difficult to prepare in my salle de bain-cuisine. I’ll get salads when I go out for lunch, but the bounty of North Dining Hall has left me pining for my nightly helping of steamed broccoli, grilled zucchini, and fresh(ish) carrots. I must have inhaled my vegetables when eating with the Laportes because they spent all of dinner encouraging me to have another helping, which I did several times. We also ate crusted chicken, bread, cheese, cookies, and cake. They gave me the rest of the evening’s baguette, which was perfect with some cheese the next day as part of both breakfast and lunch.

Tuesday night they invited me, along with Isabel and Shelle for dessert. Shelle is an American student also studying at CIDEF; she lives with the Laportes’ daughter and her family just a few blocks away. We had a great time. The five of us sat together in the living room for champagne, followed by two different kinds of cake (a chocolate ice cream cake and a creamy lemon cake), and hot chocolate. While the Laportes told us we could speak some English if we wanted to, we managed to the evening’s conversation almost exclusively in French. While we spent a lot of the evening talking about classes, student life, and our families, somewhere between the second piece of cake and hot chocolate, the conversation deepened as my host parents began sharing stories of their youth, living in occupied France around the end of WWII. I knew my host mom was from Normandy, but I hadn’t realized that she had lived through the Normandy Invasion. She was young at the time, but her home was situated in between the German front lines and the American front lines and she remembers fleeing with her parents and younger brother to Mont St. Michel to escape the immediate danger. My host dad was a little too young to join the army during the war, but after the war, while there were still many American troops stationed in France, he became friendly with them. They would take him out the bars because he could get them cheaper prices on beer. In exchange, they taught him key phrases in English, such as, “Do you have a cigarette?” and “You look beautiful tonight, my darling,” which my host dad recounted for us one by one with his charming grin and heavy French accent. All in all, the evening was superb.

Actually, before we arrived for dessert, Isabel and I had gone to the Anglophone Library. I’m not sure how frequently it happens, I wanna say once a month, but the library organizes a night of board games to bring together native English speakers and French people learning English. For 3euros you can spend the evening with old friends, new friends, board games, and pizza. Isabel and I arrived a little late, so we were the squeezed into an intense game of Pictionary with some friends from school, the director of events for the library, and two classy French people. I’ve enjoyed Pictionary in the past, but Tuesday was the most fun I’ve had playing board games in a long, long time. Because we had plans with my family, Isabel and I also had to leave early, grabbing steaming hot pizza and cramming it into our mouths as we rushed through the streets of Angers.

Friday night I went with some friends to see The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. One of the theaters in Angers, 400 Coups, shows films in their original language with French subtitles. I had been looking forward to seeing the film for a long time, and while it was well made and I liked it, I was also disappointed by it. This is probably simply because I’d put it off and built it up in my head for so long. Again, the film was good, it was the first time I’d seen a movie in about a month, but I didn’t leave the theater feeling satisfied. Instead I was creeped out by the relationship between Brad Pitt’s character and Cate Blanchett’s. I didn’t like her character very much and that detracted from the experience for me.

Then Saturday Isabel and I perused the local market at Place de Lafayette, before making our way to the largest open-air market in Angers on Boulevard Foch (pronounced: f-oh-sh), the biggest street in town. I didn’t buy anything, but Isabel got some fruit and we ran into some friends and made our way to a local café where I had a goat cheese salad sandwich (lettuce and goat cheese on a baguette, so fantastic) and a Viennese baguette with chocolate chips baked in (possibly even more fantastic). Then later in the day, I had some friends over and we all made dinner together (delicious and waaay less expensive than going out). While I had asked my host mom earlier in the week if I could use the kitchen on Saturday and she had said yes, it seemed prudent to call and ask again the day of just in case. That was an interesting phone call. And by interesting I mean I had Isabel standing in front of me in the frozen food section of MarchéPlus coaching me through some broken French. It probably translated to something like this (ellipses for awkward pauses), “I wanted to ask again…if I could with my friends…kitchen…use the kitchen…if it’s not a problem…tonight…if it’s not a problem.” It’s not so much that I can’t speak French (although…there’s that), I have an especially difficult time if a) I’ve been speaking English all day (which I had), b) I’m on the phone and can’t use gestures and facial expressions to help make my point, and c) I get anxious because I want to be as clear as possible. Luckily, she got the gist and we understood each other. So dinner was had and it was had well; pizza and a giant bag of veggies, mmm, this is the life.