Language Learning

Here's Chris at our language school. He has not yet had his daily allotment of espresso, so the smile is a bit forced. 
So far Chris wins. In our French class the other day,  we were given pictures of an object, and then did a role-play in which we tried to ask a shopkeeper (our teacher) for the object by describing it, as though we didn't know what it was called in French. Chris's object was a toothbrush, which he knows is called a brosse à dents. He inventively described it as a manche avec chevaux, by which he meant "a handle with hairs", as close as he could get to "bristles". But manche avec chevaux means " a handle with horses".  The teacher is admirably restrained at such moments and does not guffaw in our faces.

In the heat of the moment Julian is confusing Je voudrais (I would like) with Je suis (I am). So he has raised his hand and said to his teacher, "I am the toilet?" One day he wanted to ask for glue (la colle) but what came out sounded like Je suis l'école? or "I am the school?" OK, maybe Julian wins.

Some days I am bursting with confidence, feeling that fluency is just around the corner. Pulling a tidbit of vocabulary from nowhere is an absolutely wonderful feeling, as though the brain has as-yet unknown powers that are only beginning to be tapped. Other days I'm convinced it's hopeless and in each encounter I gape and clear my throat and am completely bloquée. But I can't give up, because the more I study French, the more my ability to speak English is impaired. I can't think of the English words for things, and I've started stumbling into phrases such as, "I will remember that to you," like I'm a French person learning English. I'm stuck between languages. 

La Réunion

Last night was la réunion at Julian's school, the night when parents come to meet the teachers and hear what's going on at school. We brought the kids and they joined the wild pack of children tearing around the little playground. Well, "playground" is something of an overstatement -- it's a small asphalt-covered area with two bent and netless basketball hoops, and a bent and netless soccer goal. The kids don't seem to notice the lack of typical American playground equipment and spend their time playing tag and hurling themselves at the wall to pull themselves up on thin ledges, and making up games that require much screeching.

I went to the réunion at Nellie's school last week -- her school is run by two young women who are very organized and precise, and they gabbled on for three and a half hours about every detail of la vie scolaire, looking at their carefully prepared notes and outlines that had headings underlined in different colored inks. Even though the experience of listening to all that education talk left me feeling like a wolf trying to chew its leg out of a trap, I was terribly pleased with myself because I could understand what they were saying. Less pleased when I told Nellie's teacher that "She reads the books of chapters." But still.

Julian's school is run by three men, older and rumpled and much less interested in rules and bureaucratic regulations. I was understanding about a third of what they said. Maybe. 

We trooped into Julian's classroom with the other parents, who ranged from round women with only a few teeth to a very glamorous woman with gorgeous eyes and the makeup to go with it. Julian's teacher, Philippe Martin, is middle-aged, with hands that look like they could crush boulders. He wears a silver ankle bracelet over his white athletic sock. He is a mixture of kind-hearted and very solid, both physically and emotionally -- Julian has told us stories of the way he handles a classmate who sounds possibly autistic, by holding the boy firmly in his arms to keep him from hurting himself, and speaking to him in a tone both soothing and strong.

Chris and I are soon scrunching down in our seats because Philippe begins by describing his complicated classroom that has an American, an English, and a Dutch child, and then continues to talk about Julian. And more Julian. We are understanding bits and pieces, but at least we can make out Julien when we hear it. Both of us half expect the French parents to stone us when the réunion is over -- these Americans, overrunning our village and taking all the maître's attention! 

The reputation of French schools is that they run with Napoleanic precision, every French student in a class learning the same thing at the same time, all over France. Not in Philippe's class. He talks about how each child works at his own pace on what he needs to be working on. I'm not sure how he manages that with around twenty students, three of whom don't even speak French. But he inspires confidence. He talked about how the class solves problems as they arise, like that fact that kids were playing rugby on the asphalt last week (France is in the grip of a rugby craze at the moment) and kids were getting hurt. Rather than the teacher telling them to knock it off, they sat down as a class and had a kind of trial, with kids writing their opinions on a piece of paper and then voting on a solution.

At least that's what I think he said. Perhaps they're preparing to hang witches. Who knows.

Beyond Gluttony

It is possible to have a bad meal in France. A charming café in Dinan where I ate a not-quite-heated-through croque monsieur springs to mind, and so does the aftermath. So before taking the family out for a real meal, we got a recommendation from our British friends, Terry and Jackie. Go to Lou Marmitou in Mussidan, they told us. Real cuisine familiale, five courses, 12 euro a person, wine included. I wanted to get in the car immediately. But first we had to wait until the kids' hacking coughs had diminished enough that we wouldn't feel like we were spreading the plague, and we needed to convince our less adventurous member that he wouldn't starve to death while the rest of us ate ourselves silly.

Back in Charlottesville, Julian had elevated the typical kid's pickiness about food to something approaching an art form. He would have jags of only eating hamburgers for months at a time, or only peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, or only turkey. Trying new flavors and textures was only accomplished with bribery. But here in France, there is opportunity for bribery on every street corner -- les pâtisseries. So even though the idea of a five-course meal was not appealing, he was won over by the fifth course -- the dessert tray.

Once outside the restaurant, we stopped to look at the board listing the night's meal. Potage avec vermicelli. Salade composée. Steak de kangarou.

Kangarou?!

"I'm not eating that," said Julian. I wasn't so sure how I felt about it myself. We stood there exchanging glances of indecision.

"No way I'm eating kangaroo," Julian said, not indecisively.

"You can eat something else," I said.

"There isn't anything else there I like!"

"There'll always be bread," I offered, but weakly, since I was not embracing the idea of kangaroo either. I kept trying to remember whether kangarou meant something else in French, like pork chops.

Then a girl came rushing out and began speaking very quickly to me in French. I heard the word choix in a sea of incomprehensibility.

"It's all right," I told Julian. "You'll have a choice of something else." And in we went.

Lou Marmitou is a little family-run place, in a small town -- it looks like the kind of place that might not take credit cards.

"Bonsoir, Madame. Prenez-vous la Carte Bleue?"

The woman behind the bar looked at me blankly.

"La Carte Bancaire? Pour payer?" I thought I was speaking French, even if it was bad French, but the woman looked at me like I was speaking Parseltongue. She dashed off to get her daughter. Or daughter-in-law. (My French is at the stage where I get in the neighborhood of the actual meaning, not so much the actual meaning itself.) 

 

 A group of four middle-aged men was at a formica table nearby, furiously talking and smoking and drinking. In the dining room, a table of twelve Brits of a certain age were whooping it up. We were the only other table, since it was only a little after seven and too early for self-respecting French people to start dinner. Within seconds the daughter (or d-i-l) had plunked down a bottle of unlabeled red wine, a basket of bread, and a big tureen of potage, and scampered away. We served ourselves and dug in, Chris making little "unh" groans of pleasure at the rich chicken broth, bits of onion, slices of carrot, parsley -- it was homemade soup to make you cry from happiness.

 

Plus it had alphabet vermicelli, so Julian ate plenty as he tried to eat the letters in alphabetical order.

Chris had four bowls. It's only soup, he said.

Next came platters of salade composée, which in this case meant a heap of smoked salmon, a heap of terrifically tasty and firm shrimp (shells and heads on), some lettuce adorned with a vinaigrette and bits of seafood we couldn't identify, a half a hard-boiled egg, an entire tomato sliced and fanned out, and a plum-sized lump of  sauce, a kind of garlicky mustardy lemony mayonnaise. Every single bit of it was deeply delicious. Julian actually ate some shrimp, after Chris decapitated it, and Nellie was thrilled to dip her egg in the fabulous sauce.

Chris ate all of his platter, plus the rest of Julian's shrimp and smoked salmon, plus some bread. Waste not want not.

Next was a gigantic platter of yellow haricots and tomatoes, topped with two kangaroo steaks and two bavettes, a kind of beefsteak. By this time the kids were running out of room, or were saving themselves for dessert, but I managed to eat a pile of the meltingly wonderful haricots and most of a kangaroo steak. The flavor and look of it was almost exactly like that of beef, except for a slightly muttony angle in there somewhere.

Chris ate his kangaroo steak, plus the two bavettes, plus two helpings of haricots and two more tomatoes. Apparently many slices of bread were needed for accompaniment.

Ah, just what we needed! A big bowl of green salad, with a lemony mustardy dressing that immediately took me back to being sixteen, when I lived one summer with a French family that made that exact salad for every lunch and dinner. Chris only ate one bowlful, not as affected by nostalgia as I was.

It would be rude to drink only a bit of the wine, n'est-ce pas? Since I was the only one drinking, I gave it my all.

By now over two hours later, the room was filled with more Brits, several French families, and some groups of young French men. After the table of Brits sang Happy Birthday, one of the young French men came over to give the birthday gentlemen a big kiss, causing much shrieking and raucous laughter. Then we heard the French man say something about one of the British ladies taking off her dress, and the shrieking was less friendly. At some point another table of four young men called the server over, talked for a moment, left in the middle of their seafood platters, and never came back. Despite Nellie's intent observation and our best efforts at eavesdropping, we couldn't figure out what drama was unfolding. A baby was crying a few tables over, but it felt like we were part of this village family, and the sound was kind of sweet, like a little cousin crying at a big party.

Dessert next? Oh non, the cheese course, bien sûr! Chris sampled all three kinds.

By this point we were feeling quite sorry for the daughter (or d-i-l), who was the only server for the entire room, nine or ten tables, including a ten and a twelve-top, plus all the busing. She was looking rather glassy-eyed with a frozen smile as she charged around the room, asking "Terminé?" before taking plates away. When she came with the weighted-down dessert tray, we wanted to make our selections quickly before her arms gave way. I chose a slice of pie that turned out to be marzipan, Julian and Nellie got mousse au chocolat, Chris had an immense floating island -- a heap of meringue on top of custard, with caramel sauce drizzled over it.

At this point, I faltered. I looked at the pie, I tasted the pie, but I could not eat the pie. But Julian, having rejected his steak, had room for it, and sadly Chris was forced to eat only his own dessert. His tiny cup of espresso cheered him up though.

Oh, we'll be going back to Lou Marmitou. But I'll check the menu board first. And skip lunch.

Disclaimer: I'm not sure about this blogging business yet, so future entries may be...sparse. Also I've just figured out (well, Chris has) that I can recharge my camera by putting in new batteries, so I don't have any photos yet.