and now for something you'll really like

I thought I had already heard the most bizarre things kids could be thankful for, until a ten-year-old girl was making her list yesterday, and asked me for the translation of a "bald mouse."

Me: A bald mouse?
HER: Yes a mouse that is bald.
ME: Can you describe it some more?
HER: Well, it's like a mouse, but it can also fly, and to fly it spreads its arms.

If you speak French you already know what this animal is so please don't laugh at me. Actually, everyone, please don't laugh at me. I told her it was a flying squirrel. And she thanked me and wrote it down, and I made a mental note that she was crazy. But then I got home and looked up "bald mouse" and it's a bat.

And it wasn't that funny until I thought of my alternate-reality Batman: FlyingSquirrelman.
All the alternate-reality super-villains are trembling in fear right now.

how old are you?

Today a kid asked how to say underwear in English and got sent to the corner.

It was the teacher who sent him to the corner. I didn't take any disciplinary action. Because when I held up a flashcard with the word "pumpkin pie" and the entire class screamed "PUMPKIN PEE!" I laughed for almost a minute before regaining composure and correcting their pronunciation.

So who am I to judge.

I am thankful I flipped through that French firearms handbook over the weekend.

This week I'm bringing Thanksgiving to France.

Today my students wrote "I'm thankful for..." on a piece of paper and then drew pictures to complete the sentence. If they already knew a word in English they could label it, which is probably why all of them were thankful for cats. And then I helped translate their other favorite things.



One major, and mysterious, difference between French kids and American kids is that almost all of them were thankful for sheep. Also they wrote long lists of their family members with (deceased) written after the deceased ones. It was very sweet.

And then there were the things that were the same as American kids. "How do you say pistol? It's a semi-automatic." asked one adorable boy, pointing to the barrel of the weapon he was most grateful for. How do you say flames? Parachute? Tank? Half the class was thankful for tanks. Grapple gun? Spear? Machine gun? Assault rifle? Before you congratulate me on my French weapon vocabulary, let me clarify I was looking at very detailed drawings.

Besides the requests for the translation of zombies, Manga comics, Rhianna, hamsters, cherries, and crocodiles; every kid wanted to know how to spell my name.



Bless your hearts.

And thank goodness for tanks.

"Where did you find a blow torch?"

"We didn't find one, we made it ourselves - we just attached a lighter to a can of spray-deodorant. Best way to set cockroaches on fire, hands down. The entire apartment was cockroach-free after just a few minutes."

Every time I finish telling a story like this, my friends ask the same question. "How do you get yourself into these situations?" The answer is simple: Yes.

Yes can get you into all sorts of adventures, good or bad. If you say yes to everything, no matter where you're living or what you're doing, I guarantee things are going to be more exciting. Some days you'll only get lame questions like "Do you want extra chocolate with that?" but some days you'll hit jackpot with questions like "Do you want to learn how to gut a fish?" Keep saying yes and someday you too, can make your own blowtorch.

If you haven't read David Sedaris' essay "In the Waiting Room" then you should. He talks about doing the same thing in France, with the word "ok."

"The word was a key to a magic door, and every time I said it I felt the thrill of possibility."

Saying yes to everything means doing things I never planned on doing. Meeting a North African politician, eating chestnut paste, screaming anti-Sarkozy slogans at the top of my lungs, midnight fishing, square dancing with French teenagers, learning to break-dance from a 3-year-old Cape Verdian, helping a Polish tour guide install iTunes, scuba diving, and saving lost puppies.

It's easy to get yes-happy. Yes I will join your Christmas choir! Yes I will go to the Plague festival! Yes I would like some warm sugared milk! Yes I will take an alphabet class with Algerian immigrants!


Riding a carousel. Ok, this was not a really difficult yes.

Yes, I know I'm probably going to end up dead or with head lice. But for now I'm alive with a clean scalp, and every day is an adventure.

everyone take their pencils out of their mouths

Because it's time to learn the days of the week!
I teach at three different schools, three different days.

At my Monday school the kids are angels and all the classes have an ocean view. At the end of the day I think "I love teaching! I want to keep teaching forever! I'm so good at it!" Monday is a the-bus-arrives-exactly-when-I-get-to-the-bus-stop-so-I-don't-have-to-wait-at-all kind of day.

At my Tuesday school the kids are pretty nice and it's in a nice neighborhood. Not angels, not on the beach, but nice. On Tuesdays I think "Teaching is ok. But I'm not very good at it, and it's really exhausting." Tuesday is a miss-the-bus kind of day.

My Thursday school is different. On Thursdays I think "I hate teaching, I'm horrible at teaching, I hate this country, and I want to go home." Tuesday is a take-the-bus-half-an-hour-in-the-wrong-direction-and-then-step-in-dog-crap-twice kind of day.

Today is Monday!

If you still haven't grasped them I recommend this video:

a jacket a day

It's a lot warmer in Marseille than in Minneapolis, but you wouldn't know it to look around. People bundle up here like it's the arctic.

Mostly to show off, I only wear my coat when I really need it and hardly ever turn on my heater. "Look at that awesome, inappropriately-dressed Minnesotan," I assume everyone must be thinking. "She has access to warm clothing and heaters but doesn't use them, and it makes me respect her." French friends won't have any of it though. "I'm not letting you outside without that jacket - you'll catch a cold."

I know we have this saying in the U.S. but does anyone believe it? I thought it was like wishing on dandelions. Cold doesn't make you cold, any more than hanging out at the tapir cage turns you into a tapir. I have proved that second fact with four years of study at the Minnesota Zoo.

I attribute my recent sneezing (and subsequent French "bless you's") to sleep deprivation or a possible allergy to cockroaches. But no one agrees with me. "Well, now you've done it," they all say as I twitch my nose "You've gone and caught yourself a cold like we said you would. Maybe if you have worn a sweater..."

I have yet to see a dandelion here, but I bet they're worth their weight in gold.

pas de nouvelle, bonne nouvelle

I have yet to have a conversation with someone here without them asking if I have news from my family. It's very considerate, but I never know what to say. My sister got a new job this week, so I've told half the population of Marseille, but if you don't know her is it really that interesting?

To me, news about someone you don't know is something big. If my family moved to Kazakhstan to become bat farmers that would be news. Since they haven't I usually say, "No news." to which people respond "Well, no news is good news!" And it's true. Because I don't think my family would do well in an arid climate like Kazakhstan's, and those bat bites are a nightmare.

need some toast?

Every morning when I wake up I stumble out of bed and type my dreams on my computer. I used to write them in a notebook, but they were only legible 20% of the time. Which is really unfortunate when they include gems such as these:

I hurry to my next class, Fight Room. "Did you take notes last week?" I ask my classmate in the seat next to me. He punches me in the face.

Snow is falling really thick, and I catch a huge piece. Then I realize it's not snow it's a giant dead white goose, and I yell "don't touch that!" but it's too late my sister has already touched it. She freaks out and wants to wash her hands, so I say lets go up to that abandoned castle and you can wash them.

He was sitting across the street with his guitar. "What do you want me to play?" he yelled, and I said Cat Stevens.

I find a photography book with pictures of George Costanza wearing a business suit. Then I'm in the book, and the two of us are being chased by a giant catfish, and the more we swim toward land the further away land is.

Was handing out toast to people who needed it.

Cheese Review 11 and 12

11. Smoked cheese from the Carpathian mountains (Polish)
Pretty good. Looks more like meat than cheese, but it is cheese. In this picture it looks more like bread, but there's a bear in this picture and that's hilarious so stop complaining.
Rating: 5/10


12. Twarog (Polish)
Sour and wet. Apparently you can mix it with sugar, salt, onions, or peppers. You can also make it yourself but it's really complicated and you need to live in a climate similar to Poland's.
Rating: 6/10


I don't know if you've heard already but I'm a pretty big deal in Marseille's Polish community. My Polish friends introduce me to Polish chocolates, Polish tea, Polish music, and best of all (though it's hard to top chocolate) Polish cheese.

At lunch today we debated whether Poland or France had better cheese, which seemed like a ridiculous argument. René (French) ended it by citing the Charles de Gaulle quote "How can anyone govern a nation that has two hundred and forty-six different kinds of cheese?" And then we all agreed that because of quantity alone, France was the clear winner. René said there were 365 different varieties, not 246, but during the conversation he casually mentioned 23 I had never heard of, so he does seem to know what's up. I wrote them all down.

I'll eat you up

All of my kids were wild things today. In every class they were jumping out of their seats and saying "sex" instead of "six" and whispering to each other. So instead of playing games or singing songs we spent the whole day silently copying down vocabulary words into their English notebooks.

If you haven't played Diner Dash on the iPhone you should, but for now I will explain it to you. You run around a restaurant taking customers' orders - when they want your attention they'll raise their hand, and if you're not fast enough they'll storm out.



On super-hard levels you have everyone in the restaurant raising their hand at the same time. Welcome to my classes today. At any given moment there were twenty kids staring at me with big eyes and raised fingers while I ran around frantically trying to answer every question. Questions like these:

"I just wrote an M but it's an ugly M."
"I want to white out this line and start over, is that ok?"
"I can't write the letter H."
"I'd like to write in cursive but the teacher would get mad, will YOU get mad if I write in cursive?"
"I can't write the letter Y."
"Did I do a good job?"
"I can't write in a straight line."
"Did I do a good job?"
"Did I do a good job?"
"My six looks like a five, I'm sorry."
"I can't write the letter S."
"Did I do a good job?"
"Should I underline the date? You didn't underline it but it would help it stand out."
Did I do a good job?"
"The nine you wrote on the chalkboard is really ugly and it's distracting me."
and, my personal favorite:
"Wassima says I'm a piece of trash."

I hope they are never wild things again. The good news is I saved twenty-five cents in reward stickers. And now I'm going to go play Diner Dash.

not my style

I hate to disapoint people who think I'm surrounded by haute-couture runway fashion, but I feel safe in estimating that there is more English on clothing in France than there is in the U.S.


French brand popular with middle-schoolers


For reasons unknown, 98% of French people own this sweatshirt.

Usually it's teenagers and adults sporting these English words and slogans, and they all speak enough English to know what their clothing says. Not the case with elementary schoolers. Today I was practicing introductions with a class of ten-year-olds, and they were really struggling. Their shirts, however, had a lot to say.

One girl's shirt: "Things I like: painting my nails, going for walks, talking on the phone. THINGS I LOVE: TEXTING JACOB!" Another girl's read "I'm way too young." I had no comment on either of these shirts.

The boy wearing a sweatshirt that said "MINNESOTA: a Camp the original sr0ike 173-4-" wasn't as lucky. "Where did you get that sweatshirt?" I kept asking. "You know that's where I live, right? That's the state I'm from, on your sweatshirt. Followed by some gibberish, but still." He'll probably never wear it again.

clap your hands

Maybe teaching English to preschoolers isn't so bad.

everything I really need to know but don't

Am I the only one who remembers absolutely nothing from high school physics? Because I don't. And the worst thing about forgetting physics is I feel like it would have been really useful knowledge. Chemistry, worthless. History, a joke. No one has ever asked me how many atoms of boron are in a mol, or needed to know the thirteen social factors leading to the Franco-Prussian war. But almost every day I think about physics.

Tonight on the way home, it felt for a second as though our metro car was going the wrong direction. And I thought, if our metro car is traveling at a speed of 60 miles per hour in the wrong direction, and the other one is shooting toward us also at a speed of 60 miles per hour in the right direction, and the cars are made of steel, and I am in the third car, will I live to solve this physics problem?

Our physics teacher would give us constants to use in these equations - the velocity needed to melt steel or the minimum weight that would crush a human skull. I would write these golden numbers in the back of my physics notebook, knowing they were sure to come in handy. But what did I do with that notebook? Threw it away with my chemistry and history ones. And that's why I'm sitting on the metro car, possibly minutes away from death, with nothing to do but stare at my reflection in the window.

Esssactly

Major spoiler alert for people who are months behind on reality television: I was catching up on Project Runway last week, and when Casanova was cut I was crushed.



Casanoava was a Puerto Rican contestant who spoke in broken English and was always yelling "Essssactly!"

INTERVIEWER: You seemed to struggle with some of the challenges [...] do you think it was an issue with the language barrier or do you think that it was that you had a different interpretation of what you thought that they wanted?

CASANOVA: Definitely maybe I can say both.

The guy never made any sense. No one could understand him. In short - he was me.

Because that's how I see myself lately - I am the zany foreign character on my own French reality show. Always thirty seconds behind in the conversation. Laughing really loudly when I don't understand jokes. Only speaking in the present tense. Drifting off midi-sentence when the vocabulary gets too difficult. And always, with a bewildered look on my face, repeating my famous catchphase: "What is going on?"

Other likenesses include Gloria from Modern Family



and Consuela the maid from Family Guy.



Cross your fingers that viewers find my antics endearing, so I don't get voted off.

Je peux demander des poivrons? Des courgettes?

when the cat's away the mice will dance

Last night, after watching a French movie and all its bonus materials, I told the couple I live with I was going to go to bed early. "I don't know what it is," I explained, "but lately at the end of the day I'm just freaking exhausted."

"OH MY GOODNESS!!!" they both screamed. "Say that again! Say that again!" Knowing better than to repeat what I assumed had been an accidental swear word or innuendo, I asked what was going on.

"That was such an amazing sentence! You used all the right verbs, and all the right articles, and slang only French people know!" Apparently this perfect sentence called for a celebratory dance that consisted of holding their fists high in the air and prancing around the apartment. You can't take more than two steps without hitting a wall in our apartment, so it was more like spinning around in circles.

When my flat-mates hate my hair, they really hate my hair. And when they think my French is getting rad, they really think it's getting rad. And it's scary to watch.

"Well, like I said," I mumbled, since they were too busy dancing to hear me, "I think I'm going to go to sleep."

only FOOLS use red

My favorite French thing isn't a word or a food, it's a hand gesture. It doesn't mean anything, but it means everything. The closest translation is "oh man!" or maybe just an exclamation point.

Yesterday my class of 7-year-olds was copying down the numbers eleven through twenty in their English notebooks. Things were going pretty well. They were all quietly using their little rulers to write in perfectly straight lines, and struggling to read my handwriting. The first time I wrote something they thought I used a different alphabet. Ouch.

I was writing "sixteen" on the board in my very best penmanship when a boy in the front row raised his hand and asked what color they should be using. The teacher said blue and he started squirming. "But I've been writing in red, is that bad?"

"Yes." she said. "That's VERY bad. Why would you use red, what were you thinking? Now you need to tear out that page in your notebook and start over completely. And your notebook will be missing a page, so you've basically ruined the whole year."

I smiled because I thought she was joking. Then I realized she wasn't. Time for a French hand gesture to sum up the situation.


yikes from Brooke Barker on Vimeo.

Cool illustrated video of a talk on education.

Name that city

Marseille, France or Algiers, Algeria?

1.


2.


3.


4.


5.


6.


Answers below.

I was walking by the port today and I remembered how when I first got here, I always complained that it reeked of fish and smoke. But now I can't smell them anymore. And that means two things. One, all my clothes will need to be washed at least four times when I go home. And two, Marseille has grown on me.

Please forget anything I said about wanting to be in some quaint French town. Marseille is big and dirty and exciting and I love it here. Even after I get mugged I'm going to stick to this conclusion. I'm positive there isn't any city that's better. But maybe Algiers is close? I can't believe how similar they look. Pretty rad.

Answers:
1. Marseille
2. Algiers
3. Algiers
4. Marseille
5. Algiers
6. Marseille

If you got them all right you get a sticker.

trompe-l'œil in action

There are cockroaches on the first floor of our building. I live on the third floor, and on my way to work I walk through the mob of them, dancing all over the place. It's like a little morning celebration.

Every once in a while I think the bloodstain on the stairwell wall is a giant cockroach, and I panic and stop in my tracks. The baby cockroaches scurry frantically around my feet, worshiping their giant cockroach king. Should I throw my bag at it? Should I race past? But then I realize oh good, it's just that bloodstain.

where the good girls and boys live

I live in a beautiful city right on the ocean, and it's November and still warm. Awesome for me, lame for French kids who want snow. It's snowed once in the last eight years, and it lasted less than an hour. Whenever I tell a class that we have snow they yell out "La chance!" in unison. (Lucky!)

I've introduced myself to elementary-schoolers so many times that I have it down. I show them a photo of my family. I show them my Minnesota Twins shirt and tell them about baseball. That one always impresses them, and I see them looking at each other like "Hey, that shirt says 'Minnesota' on it; she isn't making this up." Then I show them a pair of gloves and say that where I'm from, there is a lot of snow.

Then things get crazy. Usually French children raise their fingers instead of their hands. But not when you mention snow. They're raising their arms, they're climbing on their desks to get higher. Do you ski? How do you get places? Are all the flights canceled? How do you keep your house warm? Do you wear coats? These were all real questions.

But the best one came from an adorable boy in blue glasses and a soccer jersey, who was holding his breath until I called on him. He let out a sigh of relief when I finally did, and then asked "In Minnesota, is it Christmas every day?"

Of freaking course it is. I said there was snow, didn't I?



Is there a more awesome place then America? We have Barack Obama. We have the White House, which for some reason all 8-year-old French children are obsessed with. We have Michael Jackson and Hollywood and hamburgers. But that wasn't enough. So those scientists in Minnesota, bless their hearts, they sat down and finally found out a way to make it Christmas every single day. That's probably why when the kids finally start to calm down, after I tell them I have one Christmas a year and I've never met Jay-Z or the president, I get the same question in every class:

"Why on earth did you leave and come here?"

Cheese Review 9 and 10

9. EMMENTAL
This isn't that exciting, because another name for Emmental is Swiss Cheese. But it was made in France, and it was pretty delicious. Not Comté-delicous, but pretty delicious.
 Rating: 8/10



10. CROTTIN DE CHEVRE
This translates to "goat dung." I had super high hopes for this cheese, but it actually lived up to its name. Probably because I skimped and got a cheap kind. It tasted bitter and spongy, a really bad kind of spongy. Yikes it was nasty. Maybe I will try again with a higher-quality goat dung? Stay tuned.
Rating: 1/10

Martha Stewart guest post

One of my recent obsessions, along with eating macaroons and feral-dog-watching, is making granola. It sounds nerdy, if you have a terrible hearing impediment that makes "delicious" sound like "nerdy." I found a recipe on Serious Eats, and even if you're not planning on ever making granola you should look at those pictures and I think you'll change your mind.

Here I've catered the recipe to people living in an apartment where the kitchen has recently been completely destroyed in a gas fire.

2 glasses of oats
1 glass of nuts/seeds
1 glass of honey and olive oil mixture
Find the toaster oven behind the bookcase and plug it into the outlet in your bedroom. Bake half an hour at 150 degrees Celsius, then mix in dried fruit if you haven't eaten it out of boredom. Today I only ate half the dried fruit out of boredom.


This granola has almonds, pine nuts, sunflower seeds, and the uneaten cranberries.

It's so easy a feral dog can do it. And if the guy at your outdoor market likes Americans, you can get seeds, nuts, and fruit for free. Oats and honey are practically free so, you do the math.

Kate Moss hates tomatoes

All I said was "I didn't eat breakfast this morning." but judging by her look of disgust and horror I might as well have said "I ran over a little girl with my car this morning."

The couple I live with is positive my diet of chocolate and cheese has me minutes away from starvation. They both agree that I'll never weigh enough to birth children. And the box of rice I was holding when I nonchalantly said breakfast was below me put the wife over the edge.

"If you want to eat like Kate Moss when you go back to the US that's FINE. But not while you're here!" she yelled, slamming down a plate of tomatoes and fried eggs. I can't tell you what makes chocolate diet food and tomatoes a hearty meal, but I will offer this advice: don't tell French people you didn't eat breakfast, and heaven help you if you say you don't want dessert.

My flat-mates say it's a good thing I have a fat face. "Even if you lose weight from not eating enough tomatoes, you'll still have that fat face." Thanks friends.

I quickly changed the topic to the pond scene the husband was engraving on a knife handle. I complimented him on the reeds and he said thanked me. But when he went back to engraving I had to stop him. "Can we all just take a minute and be impressed that I know the word 'reeds'? Because how often does that word come up?" And we did, thank goodness. I'm tired of this amazing vocabulary going under the radar.

I have a fat face full of French knowledge.

vacation's over

It doesn't matter how great your day is going, walking into a class of 8-year-olds and hearing them all gasp "OH MY GOODNESS, she's beautiful!" in breathless awe is going to make it better.

Speaking of people being easily impressed, I passed out stickers to kids in my classes today. I have been obsessively collecting all summer, buying packs for five stickers per cent. I knew the kids would be ridiculously excited, but I didn't realize the teachers would be so impressed. "The children can take these stickers home? Should they return them next week? You mean they can KEEP THEM?!?"

Hands on your desks guys. We're not going to continue until everyone has calmed down.

wait for the screaming

I found a mouse in my room yesterday. It was Halloween and I was watching Ratatoille on the television, when a mouse ran by my foot. Ratatouille isn't a 3D movie, so I turned off the tv and we started the hunt.

In high school I had a pet mouse, the smartest, bravest, and most honest and noble creature that ever lived. In French class we had to write a paper on our hero, and I wrote about my pet mouse. Then we had to change papers with a partner and my partner had written about his mom, who was fighting cancer. That was not the best day. Today I spent five minutes looking for what I remembered being a fantastic picture of my mouse. And here it is.



So, it's really unfortunate that it's actually the worst photo ever taken. Speaking of unfortunate, there was a mouse in my room yesterday. I'm not really scared of mice. I only have two rules: I don't want to touch mice I don't know, and I don't want to see them dead.

Most animals in French are masculine if you don't know their gender, but my flat-mates kept calling this mouse a girl. As in "Hurry, she's fast!" She was not that fast. I think she was probably drunk. I asked my fellow mouse-hunters why feminine pronouns were used for rodents, but they were too busy getting out the tube of mouse glue to give me a grammar lesson.

Mouse glue. France is known for its pastries and and its art but not for its mouse glue, and that is a shame. It's thick and brown and we covered a piece of cardboard in it and set the homemade trap on the floor. Then they placed half a baguette in the middle, because the only thing French mice love more than smoking and wearing tiny berets is a good baguette.

"In the middle of the night you'll start to hear screaming," they explained. "And then you'll be able to sleep peacefully." I've never associated peaceful slumber with screaming before, but I have also never baited a lady mouse with half a baguette, so it seemed like as good a day as any to try something new. Our mouse was serious baguette enthusiast, and within minutes she wandered over to the carboard and go stuck. Her screaming didn't have the soothing effect I had been promised - it sounded desperate and human. But after a few seconds she was quiet, and she closed her eyes and shook in fear. "Let's get a box," I motioned with my hands as to the size, "and we can put her outside."

"Nah, we don't have a box that small." said the husband, twirling a hammer. After one final look at her shaking on the bed of mouse glue, I went into the kitchen and waited. There were four tiny screams of terror before there was silence.

And so ends the tale of how I gained and lost my first French roommate. Now it's just me alone here, and several irrational fears. I'm afraid to turn on the radiator, because if there's a mouse inside it will explode and die in there. I'm afraid I'll freeze to death (this is closely related to the fear of not turning on the radiator). And for some reason I'm afraid to touch the tube of mouse glue, which is still sitting in the middle of my room. There's a drawing of a mouse on the box, and when it's quiet, I can hear her screaming.

cheese review 8

8. CAMEMBERT
My first experience with this cheese was a reference in the movie "Wallace and Gromit, A Grand Day Out." But my first experience eating it was last week at my friend's apartment. It tastes a lot like brie - but a little less brie-ish. I had just eaten a lot of other cheeses without cleansing my palate, so I might have to review this one again.

rating: 7/10