Things that I think of when I think of France

I've been wanting to do this post for a while.  I've taken a whole lot of pictures of things that when I see them I think of France, or things that make up daily life here.  So here's my collection of pics with little commentaries.

The shower/bath.  Often showers are in baths and you have to hand hold the shower head.  I didn't realise there was a reason for this until recently when a friend of mine explained that often French people sit in the bath to take a shower and run a little bit of water to sit in and then use the nozzle to shower while sitting down.

French electrical plug

Bonne Maman - many good things are made my Bonne Maman.  This is chocolate mousse. MMmmmmmmmmm. Miam miam.



A type of roast chicken spread thing that is yummy on crisp bread.  You can get it in pork too.

One of my all time favourite cheeses here in France.  There are lots of budget brand imitations but you just can't beat the real thing.  You can buy this in NZ in certain stores for over $11, its about 2 euros here!

Palmiers - one of my favourite pastries. Mmmmmmm.

Nutella - the French love Nutella, it's everywhere.  It's great on crepes!

French bread stick - nothing more to add.

Sparkling water - Badoit, a classic French brand.

Orangina - fizzy, orange juice.  Another French classic.

Sponge - why is this here? - because I'm yet to find a scrubbing brush in the supermarket to wash the dishes.  The trend seems to be one of these sponges.  I don't like it much, but that's how it is!

Dehydrated pureed potatoes.  Yummmm!!

Baking ingredients - this is yeast, below is baking soda.  They just aren't the same here (and obviously don't come packaged the same), it makes baking challenging.

Typical things to accompany a meal. Bread, red wine and pastry desserts.  Look at the cute packaging the pastries come in from the Boulangerie.



A typical post box.

A long, round pillow.  Pillows here are often long and round like this or square.  You do get rectangle like we are used to back home but square is the most common.

Volets or shutters.  Virtually every dwelling will have these, whether they be old, wooden ones or metal ones or these new modern ones that roll up and down.  They are fantastic for sleep-ins and siestas as they block out all the light.

Squared paper - for some reason people like writing on squared paper here and most of the time the kids workbooks are squared.

This is the view from my apartment over the school.  The teacher's staffroom is in the building to the right, the canteen is to the left, upstairs. The girl's dorm is the building in the background and behind the building to the right is another building where I work and where there is also the boy's dorm.  Students who live at school during the week eat all three meals at the canteen.  Apparently breakfast is a real buffet!

Teacher's staffroom.  Things about school here.  If a teacher is away, there are no relievers so there is just no class.  If there is a strike teachers choose if they strike or not, they are not obliged to strike.  There are lots of strikes.  Students still have to come to school in case their teacher isn't striking.  The system for employing teachers here is complicated and I still don't have my head around it. But one aspect of it is that people don't really get to choose where they work and they can be placed in more than one school.  I have quite a few friends who work in one school and in the same day have to drive 30 or 60 minutes to work in another school in another town.

This is where the students hang out.  Its great because this building is their zone.  They come here if they don't have class, and if there is a wet lunch time (which is often!) they have somewhere covered to hang out.  Students don't have to sign in or out here, they can come and go from school as they like.  They aren't allowed to smoke in school grounds anymore so they all hang out the front of the school smoking.  Teachers don't do duty here.  There are people specifically employed to supervise students, do duty and deal with discipline/detentions etc.

This is the hallway of the building where I work.  Very sterile. Very 1970's.  My high school also has a kind of trade school side to it too.  There was an open day this weekend and I looked around. It was very interesting.  Here they can do pharmaceutical training to make lipsticks, shampoos, creams etc. There is food tech, electrical engineering, machinary and many other detailed crafts/trades.  Students decide for Year 11 if they want to head down this path and spend their senior high school years working on this qualification.  Its kind of a type of polytechnic.

My classroom - again rather sterile.

A typical sign.

Classic flush for the toilet where you lift the button up.  These are becoming less common being replaced by the push button we are used to.

One of the ways to have the window partially open.  My first week here I had the window open and it fell out like this.  I was freaking out it was broken until I realised it was a feature of the window.

February

When I look back over my photos for February they sum up this month - cold and snowy.  Nearly all my photos are of the snow and if not of the snow, everyone is rugged up very warm with coats, scarves, hats and gloves.  The unseasonally warm winter came to an abrupt halt with the arrival of the 'Grand Froid' (what we would probably call a Cold Snap) which took over Europe at the beginning of the month.  One Sunday I was meant to go to Paris, as I had a fun day planned, and I woke up to find 10 cms of lovely, fresh powder on the ground.  As my friend I was going to go to Paris with said to me, 'Normally I love snow days but today I'm not so pleased to see the snow'.  Usually the snow melts after a couple of days here, but the temperature sat around -8 for most of the week so the snow didn't go anywhere and stayed in really good condition too.  I was very sad I didn't have skis with me, not that there is anywhere to go skiing around here.

Me at school (where I live) with the Snow Bird we made and the random Pied Piper statue

L'Aigle in the snow

View from my bedroom window.  Sunset.

Then it was the beginning of the school holidays and everybody went off and did exciting things but I had to wait a few days until my adventure started.  So I was sitting around by myself a bit bored and feeling sorry for myself.  Fortunately, a good friend of mine was still around so we hung out over those few days, reading books, watching dvds and going for drives in the countryside taking pictures of the classic Normandy scenery all covered in snow.  It was beautiful.

Solligny.  The lake frozen over, I was here a few weeks earlier when it wasn't frozen.

Normandy countryside

View from Mortagne-au-Perche

Then it was time for my next adventure to begin.  The day before I left L'Aigle, the temperature jumped up to zero and all the snow disappeared.  But I was off to Prague and I arrived in a snow storm so it was back to navigating streets, drugding through snow and trying not to slip over.  So I arrived at the airport and I waited for my hostel pick up but they never arrived and I didn't have enough money for a pay phone and my cellphone didn't work over there. So I worked out how to get the public transport to the hostel but still got lost and needed to ask lots of people for directions.  I got to one hotel and I asked if they could point me in the right direction and the guy said 'Follow me' and we walked out the door and two doors down was my hostel.  Amazing location.  It was literally two doors from the tower of the Charles Bridge.  Great hostel.  To make up for not picking me up they gave me a bottle of bubbly!  It's very unpatriotic of me but while wandering the streets of Prague I stumbled across the French Embassy and I'm so used to things French now, I got all excited as if I'd just stumbled across the NZ Embassy. I nearly took a photo of it and then double-checked myself, reminding myself what nationality I actually am!!

My hostel on the left

My upgraded room and free bubbly

I really loved Prague. It had a great atmosphere. Everything was within walking distance. The hostel was great and I met some fun people (mostly Australians - ironically) to hang out with.  Prague was beautiful, so many gorgeous buildings that I was very trigger happy.

Yummy food to try

One of many cool buildings

Cathedral in the Palace grounds

Palace guard dressed up warm

Changing of the guards, with band in the windows

Prague in the background

View towards the castle

View of Charles Bridge and the Old Town Square

The Astronomical Clock

Old Town Square

On Charles Bridge looking towards the Tower (next to where I was staying), St Nicholas Basilica and The Palace

My fellow backpackers that I met at the hostel.  All Australian and a welsh lass.

Then it was off to Vienna.  Sadly, Vienna just didn't have the same atmosphere as Prague and there wasn't anyone to meet or hang out with at the hostel.  I found it wasn't as set up for tourists as Prague and it was just big, obnoxious buildings with no character to look at and more museums to look at.  After awhile big buildings and museums blur into one, whereas Prague had a lot to it that this didn't happen.  Vienna is culturally a great place if you want to spend money on museums, ballets, operas, concerts and balls, but I was on a budget.  I did go to the Imperial Apartments to see how the Hapsburg's lived before the fall of the Empire.  That was very interesting to see how a court of 5000 does everything in excess.  I went to Mozart's House but I thought that it was not done as well as I think it could have been.  I went to a free organ concert in St Peters Cathedral which was very cool and shelled out for tickets to the Opera which was the really good and the highlight of the trip.  It was in German with the general synopsis subtitled in English on a screen, so I didn't get all the jokes but it was good to at least get the storyline.

Hofburg Palace, former home of the Hapsburgs

My new centre piece for my table at home. Its made of gold and is 90m long and literally weighs tons.  This was the biggest of many similar type centre pieces - ridiculous!

Wine Labels, made of silver.  There were different sets of these too.  Although there is not as much silverware as there used to be as the silver was needed during their wars and even the royal family was not exempt at having to hand over their silver to be melted.

St Stephen's Cathedral

Mozart's house

The roof of St Stephen's

The organ in St Peter's where I went to a free concert

The Danube River, looking back towards the Danube Tower and the new city

At the Opera

The view of the massive gardens at another one of the Hapsburg's Palaces.

After Vienna, back to France and it was a bit like coming home really.  Familiar language, familiar culture, familiar food (all of which I love and think is beautiful and appeals to me more than any of the other European cultures).  Everything was familiar and not foreign like it was in Prague and Vienna.  I really do feel like I'm half French at times.  My friends here say I am.  Nonetheless, the thought of going back to L'Aigle and hanging out at the lycee by myself for the rest of my holidays was too depressing, so I went to St Malo in Brittany with one of my friends. I loved it! It's an old walled city with heaps of character.  Great seafood, great regional specialities to eat and drink.  It was at the beach.  There was even surf and surfers - the first time I'd seen either since leaving home.  It reminded me a lot of the Mount in some ways, yet in other ways it was so different.  This would probably now be my favourite place in the North of France.  I wish I was here in Summer because I would definately be back there then.  Some of our work colleagues are from this town and when they heard that we were there we ended up going out for dinner together and then they showed us around the town again but with their own local interpretation on all the little spots around the place.  It was great to hear personal anectodotes to add some more charm to the town. It was funny being able to relate to what it is like living in a popular summer beachside town.  Some very similar experiences.

Intros Muros - the walled city - St Malo

Moules Frites - Yum, need I say more.

Apple Pie with salted caramel sauce. I virtually licked the plate clean!

The beach! Yay!

Walking along the ramparts of the walled city.

Looking down from the walls, towards one of the popular beach spots in summer.  Notice the man-made pool.  On the two islands in the background are more fortresses.  Nearly every island you could see had a fortress of some kind on it.

The walled city by night with sea fog rolling in.

Walking the streets at night with our local guides.

Waves and surfers. Ahhhhhh! Bliss.

Well, that's February wrapped up right there.  The weather is getting warmer now so that helps to improve the mood.  The end of my contract is coming up fast and with that comes a very mixed bag of emotions and lots of loose ends to start thinking about tidying up. In the meantime I'm also organising the rest of my travels for while I'm over here.  March sees me heading off to stay with Janet in London for a weekend.  This weekend is Attempt Two for my cancelled day to Paris, and I'm hoping to finally get to Mt St Michel one weekend with some of my friends from L'Aigle.  This has been a place I have wanted to see since I sat in French class back at Otumoetai College and stared at a poster of it on the wall for over 3 years telling myself that I would go there one day.  And I am not going back to NZ until I have been there!! Bises for now. xx