My weekdays have become pretty routine - I teach in the school or tutor everyday but Friday, a day during which I tend to sleep for long periods of time. Also during the week, I keep one leg firmly planted in each culture by watching the latest episodes of Glee, 30Rock, and (a little embarrassingly) The Bachelor the day after they air in the US. Weekends are finally beginning to feel like real weekends - pauses from the routine.
A couple weeks ago, a woman named Florence who works for the Office of Student Life (La Vie Scolaire), invited me and a couple others over for dinner this past Friday. She made tartiflette, a traditional dish in Savoie. It's delicious! The whole night was really great - Florence has two very nice children about 6 and 12 years old I'd guess, and a man friend. Also, another student life employee, Xavier, came to dinner. We talked about culture, politics, and of course food.
So many French people I have met readily admit that the French are not particularly open-minded, particularly about language. Part of that is the education system - it's just not parituclarly good at teaching English, it seems.
Example: One example of this would be that textbooks first teach middle school students the verb "to have" with the word "got" so that students learn that the appropriate way to say something is "I have got the keys" or "She's got blue eyes." I think they are taught that this is the Present tense, but it is actually the Present Perfect of "To Get", and "have" in this structure is really just a helper verb to the main verb "Get." I explained to my middle school tutoring student who just learned this that "got" is actually optional and that the main verb "have" does not need "got" with it to make it correct - in fact, she will learn in the future that that verb "to have" is a helper verb to all sentences formed in the Present Perfect, in which the principal verb could be anything.
Anyway, I understand the French perfectly well on this topic. I used to hate it when I heard people speaking Spanish in the States. But I've changed a lot since then ;)
Another point that came up was America's obsession with murder and crime, evidenced by popular shows such as CSI and Dexter, which are very popular in France. I proposed that in the debate of whether Art Reflects Life or Life Reflects Art, this would be a case of the former. Violent crime IS much more prevalent in the US. We get accustomed to reading about it (I don't remember a week when I opened the RedEye in Chicago and didn't see news about gun deaths) but the truth is about 30,000 people die each year in the US by guns, about 40% of which is homicide. So, it makes sense to me that we would have more cultural commentary -in this case, in the form of TV shows- on this particular state of our culture.
Then we talked about 9/11. Oh Lord. I was asked very seriously if I really believed it was terrorists or if I thought there was "something else" behind the acts. I remember being jolted by the movie 9/11 by Michael Moore and some of the disturbing facts it presented, but I also understand Moore to be a bit manipulative with facts, and someone who thrives on making bold and controversial commentary, so I took the movie with a grain of salt. Had I ever given serious thought to whether our own government could have a hand in the attacks? Simply, no. I responded that if I really believed our own government could be responsible for that, I couldn't live in the US. But since I also can't NOT live in the US (since all my family and friends are there), there is perhaps an element of forced belief - as in, I am forced to believe our government couldn't possibly do that. At the end of the day, I think it's conceivable that certain individual members of the government could have profited from the attacks, but I don't believe that it was a widespread conspiracy planned on a systematic level.
I am not one to shy away from heavy conversations, but even I was starting to feel the heat. Finally, the topic of conversation changed to food. I love that the French can talk about food literally for hours. It's fantastic. Crepes, honey, cheese, wine, stews, ahhh! I love it.
Anyway, then we played some games. One of them was called the "Lapin Cretin," or the Crazy Rabbit, which was a visual accuity and reflex game. I won. Then we played "War of the Lambs" the point of which was to "fence in" as many lambs of your color (black, red, blue, or yellow). I lost that won.
More chatting by the fire and we called it a night at 1am. Florence said she's going to have another dinner, when she'll make fondue. YES! Can't wait!
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