Saturday, January 26, 2013

French TV

French TV is pretty funny, so I thought I'd dedicate one post just to this interesting phenomenon. The overall quality of TV is much lower. I notice it a lot more, because my host family tends to leave the TV on during breakfast and dinner and sometimes the afternoon, whereas my family at home almost never watches TV. But especially in the early evening after coming home from school, there are some astonishingly terrible shows on French TV (which, by the way, has 4 main channels – TF1, France 2, France 3, and astonishingly, France 4). A lot of them are game shows in the style of Jeopardy, like “L'étoile mystérieuse” of TF1. These game shows have two differences from the few I've seen in the US: 1) they are really cheesy-looking, with décor that looks straight out of the '80s, and the people on these shows look like actual real people that TF1 just picked up off the streets and brought in to play a game.
L'étoile Mystérieuse with one of their incredibly normal-looking participants:


2) The level of trivia is much lower than on American shows. They ask questions that even I know the answer to, and I know a lot of things, but my general cultural knowledge is obviously different from that of other French people. I get the feeling that's much in the same spirit that makes everything else in France seem so much less competitive – French people just don't get intense about stuff, usually. In the US, if a thing exists, there are fanatics for it. There are video game fanatics and piano-playing fanatics and programming fanatics and people who spend years studying for trivia shows. I'm sure studies would support my assertion that the US has a really remarkable level of high achievement in economically-useful fields such as technology and innovation, but also a remarkably high level of achievement and competition in useless fields like video game competitions and trivia shows. This is partly because the US is really big compared to populous but tiny European countries, but partly because Americans have the fanatic mindset. My Frisbee coach agrees with me – Americans, he told me, are all crazy. You can go from inventing the iPhone to doing a thousand-person flashmob, and no one would bat an eyelash. You just do crazy things.

Aside from game shows, many of them are American shows redubbed in French: “Le Mentalist”, “Les Experts” (CSI), “House”, and “Esprits Criminels” (Criminal Minds) are some popular examples. These shows are incredibly difficult for me to watch, because the lips don't move in time with the voices, and I rely heavily on watching people's faces to understand what they're saying. I also find that the voices don't go well with the characters. For example, in the Mentalist, which was one of my favorite shows at home, Patrick Jane is wry, mocking prankster-detective with a light tenor voice. The ridiculous things he says and does, like accusing random people of very bad things just to get them angry and start talking, are delivered in a breezy, nonchalant, really irritating and clever way. I love it. Simon Baker, the actor, has the perfect face and voice for the job. But in the French redub, his voice is lower, more serious, and doesn't express every word with the mocking, intellectually-superior contempt of his Anglophone counterpart. It actually sounds like he's getting mad at the people he's trying to irritate, which doesn't fit his character at all. Jane should be aloof, unruffled, and coolly irritating, not irritated. I had a discussion with a friend of mine who likes to watch TV shows and movies in their original English with subtitles, because she doesn't like the French voice actors either. Especially when Lord of the Rings (my favorite movies ever) were on, I couldn't stand watching them in French, hearing the voices butchered, and all the jokes slightly off.

The other thing that threw me off in LOTR was the “vous” usage. “Vous”, for those of you who don't know, is the French formal singular or plural form of “you”. (“Usted” in Spanish, I believe.) Using vous is a veritable minefield for foreigners. The French reassure me it's quite simple – vous is for adults who I don't know yet, or teachers or anyone in a professional position, except friends of my host parents. But I keep finding more exceptions! Even adults I know well, like my host grandparents, still have to be vous-ed because their advanced age requires it. And some adults in a professional situation can be tu-ed (you informal), like Patrick the Exuberant Janitor at my high school. And some adults who aren't very advanced in age still have to be vous-ed even if you know them well, like the parents of your Significant Other. (My host sister uses vous for her long-term boyfriend's parents, and even my host parents use vous with each others' parents.) All these subtleties don't make it easy, but even the basics – remembering not to use tu with my teachers at school, for example – are difficult for me and incredibly important. I accidentally used tu with my physics teacher in the first week of school, and shocked everyone in the classroom. Oops. For us Modern English speakers (Middle English had informal thee and thou and formal you), it's awfully difficult to distinguish the two, not to mention how tricky the verb conjugations for vous are. I aced all my conjugation tests in French class, but on the fly when I'm speaking? It's a little more stressful.

As my SVT teacher would say, “Je ferme ma parenthèse.” (Close parentheses.) All of that was just a background explanation for why LOTR is bizarre in French. They all use vous with each other! It would make sense if the hobbits used vous for Gandalf and Aragorn and all the random elvish and human nobility they meet, but Gandalf uses vous for the hobbits in return. For me, every time he says “Peregrin Took!” it is not to be respectful, but to scold Pippin like the naughty boy he is. So since when does someone as small and foolish as Pippin get a title of respect that in my mind corresponds roughly to “Mister”? If memory serves, all the characters used vous for each other in the 2nd movie except Frodo to Sam. (Sam, of course, refers to Mister Frodo as vous, which seems accurate.) I don't know. I clearly don't understand all the subtleties of this blasted vous/tu stuff, but it seems to me that LOTR developed some awfully bizarre and unintentional undertones with all this vous-ing.

Similarly, in the cop shows I so love and adore, like the Mentalist, I keep being taken aback by the friendly banter between cop colleagues (who, in the show, are portrayed as living only for their job, with the other cops as their only friends) involving constant use of vous. I know in a professional situation, vous is only appropriate, but I feel like in the American culture of work-addicted, casual, friendly professionals, we could easily slip into tu-ing territory with our colleagues, if we spoke French. Who knows. But to me, it breaks the atmosphere.

The last funny thing about bad French TV is the news. I have seen 3 or 4 times where the live reporting from some third-world country, war front, or weather front went wrong, and they had to awkwardly change the schedule. “Ed, what can you tell us about the hurricane in Manhattan?” * Ed doesn't respond, and looks blankly at the camera. Nervous chuckle from the show host. * “Ed? How is everything looking in Manhattan, Ed?” No response. 10 seconds later, Ed starts to talk, but we have no sound, and so they cut back to the show host, who awkwardly apologizes to the audience and goes on to the next topic. I'm sure that must happen sometimes in the US, too, but I'm sure I've never seen it because it completely shocked me, the first time I saw it in France. Like I said, I didn't watch much TV at home, but I still think this must happen less in the US simply because that sort of technical failure is the sort of thing French people would accept as inevitable every once in a while and live with, while the Americans would set up backup after backup to make sure such an embarrassment would never occur on their channel.

This being said, bad French TV can sometimes be pretty darn entertaining. My host sister and I are currently really into a sort of reality show called Coup de Foudre au Prochain Village (Love at first sight at the next village).

There's a bunch of single women in a bus looking to fall madly in love, and they go from small rural village to small rural village in the south of France, meeting the bachelors of each village. At first sight they have to choose which bachelor to spend time with, and then they get two days with their bachelor in which to decide whether to stay with him or get back on the bus to go on to the next village. It's ridiculous and petty and I don't want to miss a single episode.

Wow, I officially have a verbiage problem: I can write over 2 pages about TV. Help! I think I'll try doing mini-blog posts (I get to call them mini if they're under 4 pages, right?) about a lot of different living-abroad topics for my future exchange students who are reading this blog, and everyone else because it's interesting to know the differences. I already did one on school, the idea of presentation, and food, but I might update them a little bit, and I'd also like to talk about higher education, fashion, language learning progression, and whatever else comes to mind. Let me know if there are any topics you'd be interested in hearing about.

Sunday, January 20, 2013

I am made of words.

I am an observer, a recorder, a thinker, not a doer. Sometimes I hate this about myself, and I try to change it, but à la base, it's what I am. I stand back and watch people, and think about it, and write about it. I would make an excellent journalist or historian, but not a political activist or someone who makes history. I, like everyone else, dream of greatness, and it makes me sick to realize that in all likelihood, my name will be forgotten soon after I die, just like the vast majority of people's names are. I dream of having my words and my ideas make a difference in the world, and changing peoples' lives for the better.

But whatever I do with my life, I am made of words. Even if I managed to be an activist of sorts, it would be because of words – not because of charisma or passion or people skills.

Without words, I am nothing. My social interactions degrade into horrible awkwardness, because I have no wry jokes, no sarcasm, no whimsical phrases that make me interesting. I have no million-watt smile or physical humor or grace or any of those language-transcending things. It is not necessarily a bad thing, but I am made of words, and without them I am nothing.

I came to France because I am an adventurer. Because I secretly am reckless and anxious to discover things. My dream job is to be like a younger, more glamorous Bill Bryson, to have adventures and write books about it and be the coolest person ever.

I want to explore Antarctica. I want to integrate myself with the Twareg and publicize their culture to create Western sympathy for an independent Twareg state. (See recent conflict in Mali.) (The same could go for the Kurds but we already know about them.) I want to live as a hobo for a month in San Francisco or New York, playing flute for money in the subway or on street corners, and write about life from the gutter. I want to work as a shiphand. I want to work for the Peace Corps or Doctors Without Borders. I want to save someone's life. I want to do the Appalachian trail, go winter-camping in the frozen North, work as a whitewater rafting guide, learn at least 12 languages, and walk somewhere where no one before me has walked. I want to take the world by force and stubbornness and fearlessness and apply my love of words to it, so people can bear witness to my slack-jawed awe of the world. So people can read and see how great and exciting a place we live in. That is truly my dream job.

I came to France because of that. It's a start. There aren't too many exciting things a 17-year-old can do, especially a 17-year-old who's adventurous but still too constrained by social rules and expectations, who wants to earn a diploma and go to a good college. But it's a start. In the end I guess I was disappointed because high school in France is still just high school, and is not actually that exciting. In many ways, Homestead was more of an adventure than this year, because of the number of opportunities that were available to me – the band trips, intense AP classes with intense people, musical and athletic opportunities, community college classes and everything else. In France, my only adventure so far has been living abroad itself, and trying to start a new life in a new language.

But I was also disappointed because it turns out that without words I am nothing. I can survive a year of being nothing, but only because I can still write in English, blog, email, and skype home. I could never settle down and live somewhere where I don't have my words.

In conclusion, I may wander far from home, but I'll always come back. And my adventures will always depend on memorializing themselves in written word, in novels, in blogs, or in journalism, because without words, I am nothing.

Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Méribel, take 1.

Over vacation (after my week of oysters), I went skiing in Méribel with my host siblings and their grandparents and some friends. I am finally writing about it now because I'm supposed to write a blog post by Friday. Therefore you can expect a little less introspection than usual, as I am working under a deadline. (Hey, when you do sports 3-4 times a week, you don't have a lot of free time for blogging.)

Méribel is beautiful. It's in the French Alps, which dwarf the Sierra Nevadas and makes them look shabby and brown in comparison. The grandparents own an apartment near the ski slopes, which was cozy and small and convenient. Here's a picture of all of us – (left to right) me, my host sister, her boyfriend, grandma, host brother, and 3 of my host brother's friends. Grandpa isn't in the picture because he took it.



The other fun thing about Méribel, besides having an amazing quality of snow, was that it was chock-full of Russians and Brits. Apparently Méribel has earned a reputation as a rich and international ski resort, and now you're just as likely to hear English on the streets as French.

Méribel!


My host sibs continue to make fun of me because, starved of English for 4 months, I was desperate to make friends with some Brits, and always tried to get on ski lifts with them. My super unsubtle opening line was “Are you guys from ENGLAND??”


My host brother did one even worse – once we were in the ski lift with some guys who started speaking in German. My brother takes German at school, so for the benefit of the rest of us, he stage whispered “It's Germans!” which was hilarious because, if the Germans didn't speak French, the only thing to tip them off about what we were saying would be the obviously loud whisper.

Fortunately, my host sister brought her boyfriend – let's call him Pierre since I still operate under the principle of not sharing people's names – who didn't know how to ski, because I'm not a very good skiier and my host siblings are both intimidatingly talented. (I have skiied since I was quite young, but switched to snowboarding when I was 13, snowboarded for 3 years, and then spent two years away from the snow because I was in NYC and the Caribbean and other fun places. So anyway, I haven't skiied for 5 years and I'm a little rusty.) We ended up spending the first day at the free bunny hill slope (it wasn't really a bunny hill, more of a normal green run) and the morning of the second day walking to a really pretty lake and the afternoon at the bunny hill and the late afternoon sledding and having snowball fights. (The sledding and snowball fights was my personal favorite part, even though the skiing was pretty boss too.)

The last 2 days we bought our ski passes and skiied the heck out of Méribel. At first I was a little hesitant and didn't do so well -- I blame it on my collection of 3 wrist fracturing incidents I collected while snowboarding, which has made me more cautious. I was a little bit disgusted that Pierre, fearless athletic kid that he is, did as well or better than I did even with no previous skiing experience. We didn't stick to the easy slopes, either -- we did Saulire, which is the highest peak in the Méribel Valley, and descended on mostly reds. Red is a European code that would be a mild black diamond in the US.

I bought this super awesome Canadian balaclava from the Christmas market in Nantes. I swear, I was bordering on heat stroke. You'll never ever be cold with one of these babies.



At first I struggled with Saulire, because the first wall is all full of moguls. The rest of that day I went around a different blue trail that avoided the first wall of Saulire, and rejoined everyone else after. Pierre is fearless -- he falls all the time, but still enjoys himself and refuses to take an easier path. At the end of the day I was completely drained, and since there'd been lots of sun and then a sudden drop in temperature as the sun started to sink behind the mountains, everything was iced-over, which made my last descent back to the cabin not very pleasant. But then the last day the snow was unbelievably perfect, I had sort of re-found my rhythm, and we had a blast. We did all reds at Tougnete, which is officially my favorite mountain ever. When it's marked red purely for the steepness of the slope, but the conditions are perfect -- great snow, no moguls, no ice, not too much powder, not too many people on the slopes -- I just have a blast, going a million miles an hour down the run. Pierre does better in bad conditions because he isn't afraid, but I beat him down the mountain by a good chunk of time in ideal conditions because then I trust myself with speed and know how to do little snake-track slaloms instead of big wide turns. Those are my favorites. In the afternoon we did the Olympic face, which was our first real black run (at least where the whole thing was black, and not just a little black arm of a red slope). It was surprisingly not too difficult, but by then we'd gotten well into our rhythm. In the late afternoon we returned to Saulire. The goal: speed runs, to get as many reps as possible before the lifts close at 4:30. Saulire, which I had struggled with just the day before and is really really long, we demolished in 4 minutes, twice (after one warm-up round of 7 minutes or so). It was insane. And awesome. So that is the story of my ski adventures. I highly recommend Méribel, or the Alps in general, to anyone who is into skiing and/or beautiful places. I could live there.

In other news, not much has been going on. I have been undergoing a philosophical crisis on the nature of fashion (continued from my rant on feminism), trying to decide if conforming to the norm is good or bad (the hipster in me vs. the blend-in-with-the-natives anthropologist in me + the insecure teenager in me). French people are extremely judgemental about superficial things, and will pretty much shun everyone who doesn't dress amazingly (calling them weirdos and freaks behind their backs and being faultlessly polite but distant to their faces). By “dress amazingly” I mean I have seen this shunning and name-calling happen for people who dress normally, or even a little better than the American average: jeans, boots, wool coat, and scarf. (Maybe it was the nerdy glasses that tipped the scale over to unacceptable? Or does just plain not being beautiful render you a social leper?) I have never experienced this before this year, and there is no more successful way to make everyone feel insecure and disgusted with humanity. (At least, for me personally.) Thus, issues. And I need to figure out whether to look more French, which I had been working on up until now, or give up and just be me, with the ragged flannel shirts I stole from my dad, no jewelry, jeans, and my good old black Converse. The question is, is fashion a social obligation, a set of rules that must be met and a source of anxiety (as I see it), or is it a way to give yourself more confidence by looking in the mirror and feeling good about yourself, feeling well put-together, as Julia sees it? I suppose it depends on if you're into that sort of thing or not, if you even like fashion in the first place. But if we shun unfashionable people, then it's pretty much an obligation to “like fashion,” in which case... well, it's an obligation. Let's just say “I can't wait to get back to America, land of sweatpants” and leave it at that.

Otherwise, school continues to go well. We had parent-teacher conferences last Friday, which went well, as all my teachers gushed to my host mom about how well I do in school. (It sickens me! Oh, how it sickens me to be doing about 15% of the work I did last year, and getting such results. My brain is BORED and UNSTIMULATED even though we spend 9 hours a day at school. I'm going to have to turn artistic or something.) At least my math teacher was rather nonchalant about it, telling me he had nothing to say and to go away, cause clearly my level of knowledge is more than adequate for the contents of the course. (What a great guy.) And I have to say my favorite meeting was with my history teacher, because we spent half the time talking about the Cold War, like the history nerds we are.

Oh, non-sequitor – I hear the train! That means the cold is coming, because the wind is coming from the east, otherwise I wouldn't hear the train. Maybe it'll snow! We've been hoping to inch a few degrees colder for weeks now, because when there's snow we don't have to go to school.

I also switched English classes (again) recently, which is pretty cool. I like switching classes. My new teacher speaks incredibly good English for a Frenchie, and in voice and mannerisms reminds me very much of my 8th grade physics teacher.

While I'm suffering slowly through the boredom that is high school and waiting with bated breath for my February trip to England and ski trip #2, I'm busy planning next summer. It is going to be super exciting! My family is coming to meet my host family in June and then we'll do *something cool* in Europe (haven't figured out what yet) before going to meet up with our dear friends Cheryl and Eric who currently live in Germany. Then we'll come home (!) and in mid-July, my host sister will come join us! We'll show her all the attractions of SanFran and the Valley and then take a roadtrip across the country to visit my aunt's cabin in Wisconsin, as we do every summer, and also bring my stuff to college. Words cannot express how excited I am for all this. The year abroad was nice and all, but can't we hurry up and finish the last 5 months and get to the exciting stuff now?


Chill French-Canadian song of the day: Loup Blanc by Mes Aïeux