La neige

First, I assure everyone that I have not completely abandoned this blog. I'll try to be better about it. One of of computers has been down for 2 months, and at this point I don't think it will ever be fixed. This is just one of the symptoms of the treatment our group gets from the school. They earn over 1200 euros from us every month and in exchange they treat us like some disfiguring growth--benign, but always there, reminding them of their plight. They can't wait for us to get out of their hair (or "hairs" as some of my students say), even though we live shut away in a tower. If anything breaks, 9 times out of 10, their response is strangely that they didn't buy it, so they can't touch it. The only man who is remotely nice to us is Jean-Luc at the front desk who has a bad habit of treating us as a single entity. Anytime a package arrives, it gets passed off to whomever walks by the desk first. And good luck trying to figure out who has it. "I gave it to the tall girl", isn't exactly helpful when you have 4 girls over 5'8". I had the unfortunate pleasure of being in the kitchen the other morning when the "femme de ménage" (who curiously cleans very little) made her weekly appearance. Honestly, the kitchen was not the cleanest that I'd ever seen it. Some of us had stayed up late talking and trying to get rid of some "revisionist wine" (another story). No one cleaned up, but in these situations the kitchen is usually spotless by lunchtime, when everyone starts to use it. So, as this lovely woman enters the room and the first thing out of her mouth is "So, no one ever cleans this?", pointing to the hot plate. What ensued was a very awkward conversation where I had to defend our cleaning habits to a woman who enters our space once a week, and always happens to find it at it's worst. So, she went and fetched the woman who takes our rent every month. Luckily at this point, Irene had come down to the kitchen too, so I wasn't alone. She said we were destroying the kitchen for future renters and reminded us that they had invested in a used fridge. Literally, though, if you gave us 20 minutes, the place would be sparkling. And we pointed out that we collectively purchased a mini oven--is that the behavior of someone who wants to destory the kitchen? Mme Haïs threatened to close the kitchen and swore that the head of the school would call us all for a meeting about the state of it. So, we're all looking forward to this. The proviseur is the only person here who hasn't labeled us as "dirty foreigners".

I woke up this morning to find a dusting of snow on the ground. Hardly any at all, but still snow.

This weekend is the Festival International de la Bande Dessinée. Last night Jess and I took the bus downtown to see what was going on. The streets were not packed, but there were people walking around. On any other night the streets are dead, so this was a good sign. The restaurants were also full, another rarity. I overheard someone in the street say they were going to "faire la grosse teuf". I love the word "teuf". It's the verlan (slang that spells words backwards--how can this be cool, but pig latin isn't?) of "fête", or party. We heard Japanese, Italian, Spanish, English, and German. Originally I had thought that this festival might attract an interesting, artsy crowd (think graphic novels), but at some point I realized that BD also includes comic books and this festival will also attract some real geeks (think first edition hermetically-sealed Spiderman stored in a humidity-adjusted room). So, Jess and I stopped to get a drink and people watch before heading back home. I guess we didn't look like big spenders, because it took us a half hour to get served--and we were sitting at the bar, directly in front of the barman.

Today I'm leading another 3 hour long in-service training session. I was with the same group yesterday afternoon. Last night I discussed this with Martín, whose first remark was "that's not really your job". And he's right. It never occurred to me to say no, though. Today's session should be interesting, as the theme is pronunciation, and I'm team-teaching with a French woman who speaks terrible English. Something tells me that she'll still manage to find a way to tell the students that her pronunciation is better than mine. Only two more weeks until vacation, at least.