House and family

So I probably should have done this for one of the the first posts, but here is a little bit about my host house and family:

This is the entrance.  You can see the coats on the rack and part of the door, as well as some of the kitchen. The floor is beautiful clean white tile.  Dirt just can't hide at all.  I will never have this floor, because even if I put white tile on my floor, I'll never have the initiative to sweep or vacuum it every couple of days.  There are also a lot of plants throughout the house (another beautiful home item I would never be able to maintain.  At least a floor can't die).  This is another sneaky part of French culture that isn't at all obvious.  When the French invite guests over for an aperetif, meal, or other such visit, the conventional gift is a bouquet of flowers or a small plant.  For a larger gift, perhaps for family you don't see often or a special occasion, you would give a house plant that can be maintained.  In France the weather is generally quite mild, so temperature is not a limiting factor.  It is common to receive small cacti and palm trees.  Over time, and if you're good at repotting and maintaining plants, your house may have plants all over the place, in every room.  Like this one.  There are flower shops everywhere selling all kinds of flowers and plants all year round.  Sophie even commented that they couldn't find a flower shop in Canada when they went to visit her cousin in Quebec.  I think it's a temperature thing, It's hard to generate a culture around flowers when you can only have them outside 3 months a year.

This is the dining table, a cupboard and the start of the living room:

A view of outside, in the summertime the family eats on the deck seen here.

Here is the living room, there is a fireplace and sofas:

Here is the veranda, on warm days in October and September we sometimes ate dinner here:

My Host Family  :)

Oh, I almost forgot to mention: I do hope I get a chance to take a picture for you, but Olivier has a mustang. He bought it here from someone who imported it from the States.  He's rather proud of it and likes to drive it on weekends and holidays when it's nice outside.

Quelle neuf?

So now I know why Churros/Chi-chi is unheardof in Ontario:  It's illegal to make them!  If you have a food cart or truck you can only sell prepackaged goods that have been reheated.  Chichi just doesn't work that way.  Kinda sucks for anyone who wants to sell any kind of food on the street.  There is one exception:  If you have a food truck you can make "french fried potatoes" if ou want to, but everything esle must be prepackaged and precooked in a "regulated facility".  Sometimes the government just sucks.

Presently there are 2 cats in the house.  Ghizmo and Harry (pronounced "Ari").  Harry is extremely rambunctious and gets up to all kinds of mischeif.  On dit qu'il fait des betises.  Today he knocked over a glass bowl and a glass vase with a plant in it.  They both broke so, being the only one in the house at the time, I cleaned them up.  The cat is currently in a small room with his bed and the litterbox where he will be staying for a while.  He's so cute, but he's so bad.  He reminds me of my dog.

Since I last posted I've been to 3 or 4 different cities, Sophie's mother's house, painted a painting and read a book in French.  (plus some more stuff I don't remember right now).  So basically I've been doing everything but write on this blog.  I guess I'll try to catch up maybe.  I probably have over 1000 pictures of France by now.  But that just means more to sort through.  I'll post again... in the future.

Dance

Here I am taking several dance classes.  I have contemporary for 2 hours in school on Mondays, 1 hour ballet followed by 1 hour and a half of modern on Tuesdays, and an hour-ish of jazz on Thursday, which makes for 5 and a half hours of dance a week.  It's great being able to dance here, especially since I won't be able to in SSS- It won't fit into my timetable.  I still get to choreograph though, which is exciting.

Over all the arts here seem more liberal than Canada.  In art and dance class in school there is no real structure and I'm not really sure how marking works.  It is very contemporary   In the studio that I go to outside of school it's basically exactly the same as Canada, so I think it's just the school.

The dance studios at school are beautiful.  Here are some pictures:

They are brand new and slightly bigger than our new studios at SSS.  They also have a completely enclosed porch on one side of the studio shown at the top.  Yoga on the porch would be awesome in the summertime.  

The school rents out their studios to the conservatory dance course, which is 8 hours a week in the evenings and weekends.  Why don't we rent out our studios?  They aren't used at all on weekends.  We could use the funds for the dance program.

I'm sure there is a reason we don't rent out our dance studios.  It's probably a fire hazard.

Last weekend, I went to a discotheque with Mary-Lou and a friend of hers.  There weren't many people, which I found strange since it was Friday, but apparently Thursday is the big party day in France.  Saturday is pretty big too, but not as much as Thursday.  It was fun, the music was really loud.  Even Mary-Lou said afterwards that it was too loud.  The DJ wasn't wearing his earphones, they were just hanging around his neck.  I think he'll probably be deaf at 30.  It was good music though!  I had lots of fun, and I think I want to go to clubs in Canada when I'm old enough (and when my friends are old enough) I got sprayed with champagne at some point, so one of my dresses smells a little alcoholic, and we were knocked into by some really drunk people on more than one occasion.  It was a fun night, we got home at about 4 am.  The next day we had waffles after lunch, which were awesome.  I will own a waffle maker at some point in my life.  On Saturday night we went to a hip hop battle, which was also pretty amazing.  There were these little kids that were maybe 6 or 7 that could do all of these flips and tricks that I could never hope to do.  It was another fun (if very late) night.  On Sunday we went to a museum, which was educational.  I didn't get sprayed with champagne, but I did learn about the war of Vendee, which many people died in, including women and children which were massacred in their homes.  All in all a very good end to the week.  I'll do 2 more posts this weekend to make up for not posting last week.  I'm only really writing that there to guilt my future self into writing more.  Just so you know.

School Food

The last post on the subjects of both school and food:  The Self at school.

At lunch, students do not have the option of bringing a lunch.  They can go home, or eat at the Self which is what they call the cafeteria at my school.  You get a card that you pay for at the end of each trimester based on how many days you are at school.  They deduct field trips and days you are sick, an unpardoned absence is not deducted.

As you enter the self, you scan your card for a tray and collect utensils from bins.  You can then go get one side dish, one entree and a dessert.  You can also get two side dishes instead of an entree if it's something you don't like, say, for instance, potato puree and sausage that tastes like DEATH.  The side dish place is a salad bar, and is self serve.  The entree section is a counter where cooks serve you whatever is on the menu for that day.   There is usually more than one choice, although on Wednesdays not a lot of students eat at the self because school is over at 11 or 12, so there is usually not a lot of options.  At the dessert section there is also fresh fruit and sometimes cheese.  On the way out you can get napkins, a glass and bread.  You can also get condiments, more bread, and lettuce on the other side of the rotary door which separates the eating area from the food gathering area.  (Side note: the rotary door is not backpack friendly)  When you are done eating, you put your tray with your plates and utensils on a conveyor belt that goes back to the kitchen.  All of the dishes are ceramic, there is very little that goes in the garbage.

I'll post a picture on Monday or Tuesday.  The self is usually crowded and with all of the things you have to hold on to it's hard to take pictures.  Not that I ever remember to, I'm usually pretty hungry, they don't eat until noon or 1pm, which is normal I guess but not what I'm used to.

That's it for today.  Picture on Monday (I wrote this yesterday, I just forgot to send it)

School. Yeah!!

In this post I'm going to talk about one of the things that bothers me about Ontario.  That is Liability And Insurance Rawr.  See! it's a cool acronym that spells something  :) .  I'm mostly just saying that whenever some student decides to do something of questionable wisdom and hurts themselves doing it, it means that there is automatically one more rule put in place to prevent whatever they did.  This phenomenon is not present here.  These are some pictures of what French kids get to do in labs.

 





I think it's also because schools are underfunded, but honestly, I'm beginning to question that.  Do you know how many smartboards I've seen here?  Zero.  How many cool lab experiments have I done?  Five.  At least.  How is it that a school can be too poor to afford <insert complaint here> if it can afford to replace perfectly functional projectors with 4500$ touchscreen smartboards?  (the price is random, I don't know what model is in our school)

The labs I've done here remind me more of the labs I did on a field trip to Laurentian than the ones I've done in SSS.  These pictures are from biology class, and we did a very similar gizmo in SSS that actually came out with different results.  In this experiment we subjected chlorophyll to white light, which was then filtered by red, green and blue coloured filters.  We measured the O2 and CO2 in the air surrounding the chlorophyll as we changed filters.  We didn't control for temperature which I think may have been the reason for the difference in result between the two experiments.  It was really cool and very enjoyable.  The kids who take science here usually get 2 or 3 labs a week.  3 is if you take a SPE course, which is over and above normal courses.  I wish we could have one lab like this a month, that would be really cool.
-That's it for now, I'll post on the weekend :)

Food Again

The escargot were alright,  but I think they are an acquired taste.  They were made by Sophie's mother, the picture below is of her cooking the escargot.I think so far my favorite dish here is quiche.  Sophie's recipe for quiche is awesome, so I typed a copy to make at home.  I also really like the sea food and a lot of the salads Sophie makes here.

In the YES orientation in Canada, they told me to bring kraft dinner or something for comfort food, but I'm not all that emotionally attached to kraft dinner, so I didn't bring anything.  The food I've most missed actually is Baba Ganoush and corn chips.

Today we went to a farmers Market, which is called a "marché". I thought we were going for a walk.  I'm still not exactly fluent in french, although I can now carry descent conversation and understand what is going on in movies.  In the marché, there were three counters of cheese.  I got to try two different kinds which were both really good, I forgot to get the names of them, which I should really start writing down.

One of my favorite parts of travelling to France is all of the food I've had the chance to try.  It has even made me think that a possible career choice for me is to become a nutritionist.  I don't think I'm a good enough cook to be a chef for a living, but I have an avid interest in the molecular composition of food and how it relates to the production and use of energy and other vital substances in the body.  Also, I love taking about it, so it's possibly a perfect career choice.

Some pictures of the marché:

Today at lunch I tried spiral shellfish, which I liked less than the muscles and more than the escargot.  We also had prawns which are delicious but really hard to eat.  You only eat about a sixth of the fish, the rest you have to carefully remove from the part that you eat (which is in the middle).  I forgot to take a picture, but if you don't know what a prawn is it's like a big shrimp, and you only eat the inside of the tail and a small portion of the middle part of the body that is attached to the head.

I've been looking through Sophie's cookbooks and I took pictures of some of the recipes I want to try.  She has two cookbooks full of desserts.  I think they were both gifts, because this family doesn't eat a lot of desserts.  I also looked through another cookbook with entrees and appetizers (and more desserts).  I found a new truffle recipe!  I can hardly wait to bake for Christmas now.  I'll have to make a quarter of each recipe so I can make it all.  With what time I do not know, I'll have to invent a new hour - somewhere between 6 and 7pm.

That's all for now folks,  I'll post again either tomorrow or Wednesday  :)