May 21, 2009 - Posted by Amanda- 2 Comments
- Saying, “op-la” each time you nearly drop something feels like the most appropriate response
- You stare aghast at visitors innocently drinking white and rose wine at room temperature
- You start calculating if it’d be at all possible to go grocery shopping in Pennsylvania on your bike, envisioning your personal herb garden (on a windowsill), and wondering if eating locally is possible in Harrisburg in December.
- You eat an ice cream cone while cycling through tourist mobs near the Roman Arena in Arles. You don’t consider yourself a tourist.
- The man at the shop near the Arena waves each time you pass, the same Moroccan man haggles you at the market, and the young beggar across from the bakery smiles a greeting
- You can’t think of the English sense of a very appropriate French idiom, and you mess up the syntax in English sentences with French word-order
- You find yourself mixing languages. “la dishwasher est proper.” “I am malade.” And your theatrical skills have vastly improved. You can now act out the fall of the Roman empire using the skeleton of your French vocabulary to fill in the gaps.
May 20, 2009 - Posted by Amanda- 1 Comment
Continuing on the theme – “No two days are the same.”
Yesterday: wake up with a sore throat. Discuss the possibility that it’s just the changing weather with Sonia and Martine. Research Blackberry/Outlook sync problems for Peter, and come to a dead-end with Orange/France Telecom account preferences. Help Martine with lunch. Cut and prepare 14 grapefruits. Write a letter while waiting for the very, very late group to come back from field research for lunch. Eat a late lunch, translating French jokes for the EarthWatch team members.
Jog downstairs to catch a skype call with Barbara in Scotland (our incredibly important A Rocha administrator). Find an A Rocha poster that Barbara in Scotland needs by August. Call my mom.
Cycle into town to post the box with the poster and some A Rocha France mail. Mail the post. Cycle to the train station and buy tickets to Paris (to see my housemate Anne June 19-24) and to Italy (to go back with Sarah as our last hurrah the first week of August). Drop of a DVD at the library and choose another, and get a glare because I’m checking out a children’s DVD and I don’t have the right library card (how do I explain to a scowling librarian that I want to watch the old Black Stallion in French as my language level’s that of a child’s!). Cycle to the copy shop and pick up two color copies of a map of Christians and biodiversity for Peter.
Arrive back at Tourades pouring sweat, and nervously notice Peter’s car. I find out that he is going to be interviewed by the French TV station today, not tomorrow, and needs the maps… do I have them? I pull them out and hand them smoothly to Peter. Escape before the TV crew interviews me again.
May 19, 2009 - Posted by Amanda- 0 Comments
No two days are the same…
A few days ago, I made lunch – turkey pot pie for the first time. As I was making this meal, the dishwasher replacement men came into the kitchen and pulled out the dishwasher and put in the new one (while asking me what I was making, and suggesting that I should let the pastry dough come to room temperature. I foolishly explained pot pie like this, “it’s like a quiche! With veggies and meat! Except without the eggs…” The conversation ended there).
While the men were wrestling with the dishwasher, and I was frantically stirring my béchamel (cream sauce) and sautéing veggies and meat for my second pie, Martine and Sarah came back from weekly grocery shopping and filled up what remaining space in the kitchen there was. As soon as the dishwasher men left, Jean-Pierre took up installing a filter for our water line (we don’t have drinkable water here), which was also in… the kitchen.
Along with ranting (in my head) that this was all at really bad timing (“Franchement, ce n’est pas bon ‘timing’!” – I was practicing!), I found it all really hilarious. It was an insane sort of dance, all very polite, all very rushed… Priscille and Sonia waltzed through the kitchen, laughing and rolling their eyes at the flying tile dust, groceries, and sauted veggies.
The guest we were going to have for lunch was 20 minutes late. So in the span of 10 minutes, A Rocha France went from insanity in the kitchen to everyone sitting in the living room, waiting hungrily for lunch, reading magazines. Somehow, even with the sudden lull of activity, the guest still arrived to the deafening sound of Jean-Pierre drilling into the kitchen tile wall…
May 4, 2009 - Posted by Amanda- 0 Comments
The A Rocha France team and volunteers filled two rows of chairs in the sanctuary Easter Sunday. We were at our co-worker Timothee’s church. We know him as the Scientific Director of A Rocha France, but in Montpelier (an hour away), he’s the worship leader at a thriving evangelical church. Easter was beginning like none other I experienced.
I sung familiar resurrection hymns with gusto, sometimes forgetting that I sung in French. Instead of an Easter Dinner, we filled the kitchen after church for an indoor picnic lunch. The rain started to subside as Jean-Pierre and Martine, the center directors and our chauffeurs for the day, took us to a beautiful island near Montpelier for coffee. This tiny island in the Mediterranean Sea houses a restaurant and ruins of a church, and is staffed mostly by handicapped workers, who tend the vines and harvest the fish that supply the restaurant. Jean-Pierre animatedly explained the dramatic history of the island, conquered and re-conquered by waves of historical figures.
We wandered towards the beach, gray and wet under a cloudy sky. Unrestrained, we jumped through wild waves, built muddy sandcastles, and picked up pretty shells like little children. Chantel and Antony dug their hands into the muddy sand and made a sprawling sandcastle. With narration, they proceeded to act out our recently-learned history of the tiny island, accurately portraying conquerors smashing through walls and, centuries later, a small museum and large parking lot being built to accommodate tourists.
After a snack and a giggly ride home, like children, we happily cleaned up and came home to a hot dinner and a movie at Jean-Pierre and Martine’s house. We sleepily rolled to bed, happy for another day off to rest after our exciting Sabbath. It was my first Easter so far from home, but how abundant and full of new life is was!
May 4, 2009 - Posted by Amanda- 0 Comments
The house has emptied out… this weekend was lonely, with only Antony and an older Dutch couple in the house. I spent quite a while in Arles running errands on Saturday, and Sunday, I went to the Camargue for a walk with Sarah, her visiting Swiss friends, and Antony. Sunday evening, we joined up with Jean-Pierre and Martine at the ‘Village de Oiseaux’ in Port-St-Louis on the other side of the Rhone for a film festival related to the Camargue festival this week. The first two films were silent films - American Westerns made in the Camargue in the very early 1900s. A live trio - a bassist, pianist, and a percussionist - ‘narrated’ the films, like they would’ve in the old days, with music. The last film was from the 1930s, all about love and drama in Provence, with lots of Provencal icons - bulls, gardians, dresses, pastis, strong accents. Hard to understand at times, but really fun! So all in all, the weekend WAS good, even though so many goodbyes hurt more and more. Goodbyes make me feel homesick!
