Magical Adventures of the Extreme Right

I totally dig around on the internet for cool French stuff. All the time!

Back in January, I came across this comic strip by Odieux Connard that I loved. It really spoke to some of the political discussions I'd been having- and especially around the holidays, the question of wether or not to talk politics with family was real relevant to me.

So I translated it and sent my copy to OC. First time ever doing something like that! I send him my text at around 1am Chicago time. By 8am, he's replaced the original french version with my copy! So excellent! I totally gave a happy little shout when I got that email! ;)

Here's the english version: Jean Jack and the Extreme Right

And in french: Original post, Les Adventures Magique de l'Extrême-Droite

Woo! What do you think?

Long time no see!

Hi everyone!

So I'm still an avid Francophile, but I moved back to Chicago. It was supposed to be temporary!

I came back in Spring 2011 to work at my previous job- a travel company. They're always busy in the summer. But as the months ticked by, I realized that I missed the security of being able to work full time. And I missed being home! I thought an eventual degree in Mandarin would lead me to China- even farther from my beloved Chicago (and Mom and Pop). Plus, I'd made the progress I was hoping to make in my French- after 2 years abroad I was feeling pretty competent.

So in November 2011 I went back to Lyon for a couple weeks, got my stuff, said some tearful goodbyes, and came home. I stuck around the travel company until finding a new job working for a business publication. It was supposed to involve lots of French, but turned out to be French-optional. So I stayed there for a year and then moved on.

Since then, I've invested heavily in music as a career, which has been seriously very rewarding! I now work for a major institution on the Chicago music scene. But I miss French! I miss speaking in French, reading in French, picking up free newspapers and thumbing through them on the tram... IN FRENCH!

This lack of Fracophonia has led me back to this blog. I need to share my love of French culture! There are so many fun ways to keep up on your French- TV, radio, blogs, books, meet-up groups! I also want to talk about some of the challenges foreign language speakers face. I think. We shall see!

Stay tuned for what's next in the French speaking world! And thank you for reading ;)

Waitressing?

August is almost over aaa!! I seem to have found two jobs, a babysitting job for durring the week and a waitressing job for the weekends maybe? I'm not entirely sure how long the waitressing job is going to last, maybe they told me but maybe they didn't... in any event it's great experience and I'm getting paid. So woopie! I've been working there a week now, it's called "Le Colorado" after a late 70's american sitcom about the founding of the state of Colorado (never heard of it). I just started taking orders which is awesome. It's a family restaurant and I do the afternoon shift, and like any typical french bistro there are two entrees and two apetisers that change daily, along with the sides. It's definitely an engaging job, very physical and lots of memorisation. Plus I have to get used to all the food vocabulary; goujonette for fried fish, oh my goodness there are like a million different types of fishes they eat over here...

So I don't know if I'm going to be able to do this job durring the school year, but it's allowing me to become accustom to serving tables in french, which is great. Honestly if being a waitress doesn't work out for me it's not the end of the world, it's not a particulairly low stress job and I'm not phenominally jaw droppingly gifted at it, which isn't a big disapointment. But this set up I've found recently is allowing me to hone my skills.

Working is good, finally starting to live off what I earn again instead of off my savings is awesome. I'm still tossing around the idea of moving to China to teach english for the rest of the year. Been watching movies- "Hors de Prix" with Audrey Tattou was great! And I finally saw 300, got a kick out of that film (Gerard Buttler be looking fiiiiiiiiiiiiiinnne). Also been learning a lot of fiddle tunes to expand my busking repetoire, though I haven't been busking in a while... Started foot stomping along with my playing... video forthcoming. Oo also been swaping english for spanish with my mexican friend Andrea! Here we are trying to look awkward:


Oh one last thing. That job I wrote about in the last post, the one with the screaming boss, there was one really good thing that came out of it. I left the restaurant with a couple of chefs and told them how I'd really blown the audition, they were all like "noooo your so nice!!!" and one, this guy Frank, offered to take me around to a bunch of restaurants to see if they were hiring. He'd spent seven years living in the states so we talked a lot about America while distributing my resumé. We ended up at a casino which is right next to this giant park with a free zoo in it, he won 40 bucks at the slot machines! We had a riot. He bought me a giant cotton candy!!!!!

just a quick note

friday the thirteenth aaaa!!! Trying to find a waitressing job here in Lyon, already tried two places and didn't get past the test runs but that's cool cause one job had an angry boss who yelled A LOT and the other would have been really hard to get to wilst going to school. I'm starting to rethink this whole going to school thing this year... This first year I'd be doing a degree in linguistics because the administration told me that was the only way to get teaching french as a foreign language certification but then I found out later that you can get a degree in translation and get training to teach french. By the time I'd found that out it was too late to change. So I'm starting to think about going back to Chicago and getting a degree teaching english as a foreign language before heading off to asia for the rest of the year. I would come back to France in the fall of 2011 to start a Chinese-English-French translation degree. This way I'd get experience doing something I really enjoy and want to do long into the future, plus being able to earn some mone to put aside as well as becoming familiar with mandarin. We'll see...

Been busy busy busy, started busking a little and was raking in 10 euros an hour on average... it was a very interesting experience that got me thinking about audience manipulation but was also quite stressful. I started busiking while a wonderful english friend of mine who I met in Berlin was visiting, here's a photo of us:


Juggling viola and waitressing is not so easy, the viola juggling stick kind of fell on the ground and rolled under my couch if I may metaphorically say so. I started marking on a calender every day I play the viola, it's very motivating. Roommates are gone, both working in different cities in France for the rest of the month... Stoped reading for a while and now started "The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One" by William K Black which is excellent and I highly recommend it. Dreaming of Berlin and learning german and going over there and busking. I wonder if I'll ever love speaking another foreign language as much as I love French. I constantly enjoy French, new words and gramar forming new pathways in my brain.

Had an interview today with the owner/head chef of a very prestigious restaurant here in Lyon, he had the tricolor red-white-blue collar which means he passed a national exam to achieve culinairy greatness. He spent a decade living in Chicago, we had a lot to talk about.

Ok, going to bed! More later, more soon! Love.

NEW POST!

Lyon

ok so blogging? Oh yea that!!! It's been a while... and people let me tell you I've been busy! Here's the big stuff that's been happening.

Generally, life here in Lyon has been getting much better as of late. In March, I found a job babysitting a kid named Max, which was really fun. He taught me lots of french and we got along well. But he was having trouble learning how to read french and obviously I wasn't the best of teachers being that I don't speak the language fluently, so his mom fired me. Here's a picture of my temporary charge:

It turned out alright though because I immediately found another job, one that is more in tune with my career aspirations. The company I used to work for in Chicago has an office in Geneva and they were delighted to take me on for the summer. I'm still waiting for my work visa to be approved but hopefully I'll start there this week or next. I'm really happy, looking forward to doing my old job and continuing to gain experience within the same company.

geneva

I'm looking forward to exploring Geneva. It's a two hour train ride from Lyon and much more international. I visited a couple of months ago with a friend; we concurred that Geneva is what the first moon colony will look like: an expensive, urban, global village. I've never seen a comparable city- the abundance of Porsche's and Bentlee's made Mercedes your default everyman car, you could get seven dollar hot dogs and six dollar sushi, every culture of the world represented, and the speed at which neighborhoods changed in that little, little city... it was shocking. I'm going back. Geneva is a curious place. Plus being an international hub of diplomacy they have a lot of great art and music coming through, and you know I'm looking forward to that!

my Geneva/Berlin cohort

berlin

After Geneva I went to Berlin. Berlin, I love Berlin. I knew I would from everything I'd heard, so I delayed visiting, waiting for that perfect space in time to become acquainted. I visited the same friend with whom I'd toured Geneva; he was living in Berlin for a month working on music. I met a bunch of musicians, even had a chance to perform. There are tons of artists living in Berlin and for some obvious reasons. The rent is generally cheap- less than Lyon and definitely way below London or Paris. The public transportation is great and runs all night, and bars can remain open for 24, 48, sometimes 72 hours!! Food is not expensive by European standards, only a little bit more than the states. But no tipping and no sales tax on groceries. There are lots of farmers markets, they even had street markets targeting the younger demographic which start around 1pm and go until the evening. Oh and of course universal health care, important for freelancers. Overall, it's perfect for artists and creative entrepreneurs. Especially performance artists- the infrastructure makes it easier for audiences to go out at night and stay late. What's more there seemed to be a really warm reception for artists- restaurants and bars host musicians working for tips as an added draw for customers. Did I mention I was impressed? I really want to go back... so I'm going to try and learn German now.

the gate of ishtar in Berlin- origial gate to Babylon (you know the linguist loves it)

I'll have the opportunity to learn German while I'm studying at the University of Lyon! I got accepted- which means I can stay in France for the next 3 to 4 years! I'm very very happy. I'm enrolled as a linguistics major but I want to change after the first year and do English-French-Chinese Translation. Yep, I'm going to try and learn Chinese. Let me explain, it's not a completely random idea I had. I've been curious for a while to learn a language which isn't based on the roman alphabet. I tried my hand at Arabic back in Chicago and discovered that learning a new alphabet is crazy hard, something I probably wouldn't do unless I was getting paid. Being in an academic environment is going to help me to learn a new alphabet. Plus there are lots of opportunities for English teachers in China- and I like teaching English. So if I'm not speaking fluent mandarin in the space of three years, I can still live in China and make a good living, all the while continuing to improve my Chinese. Finally I was thinking maybe as a musician, a classically trained musician who's getting more into improvisation, I would be able to find work in China or Japan (which is like right next door! look there's just a little bit of water on that map!) either as a teacher or performer. That last part all depends on how much I play music over the next four years, so I've been practicing and hope to continue.

I think that's all the big stuff! I've been having a great time. THANK YOU ALL FOR BUGGING ME TO BLOG!! (it takes a village... *sniff* to make me blog...) Oh and I moved into a new apartment- no longer am I living across from a construction site and wedged between two cemeteries. It's like a real apartment guys! Living room, gas stove, BATH TUB!!! It's awesome. I took a bath. And I have two new roommates, they're excellent. Ok that's it for now! Promise it won't be another four months until the next CHILLING INSTALMENT ;} Bye

Tadaaa!

uuuuugg... I spent all evening on the internet... it was not on purpose. What's the difference between a live journal and a blog? I ask you. Today was really excelent aside from my inability to pry myself away from the interweb. I've been caught in it's glue-silk. I may resort to drastic measures... which will remain mysterious for the moment. FIND OUT NEXT er... SOMETIME SOON.........

I worked on job applications. I applied to the coolest jobs first and then discovered problemes with my resume that the cool employers will tip down their sunglasses and raise eyebrows at. Such is life. I got some responses though! They didn't turn into anything because I don't have a french bachelors but at least now I know I'm barking up the right tree! Woof y'all! It snowed in a rainy way, which was preety on the bamboo clusters surounding the library. I wanted to take pictures but my camera's battery was dead. Tomorrow.

I met for the first time with a girl named Andrea. She's from Mexico City and she's getting a degree in translation, for which she has to master French, English, and Spanish. We totally want to learn the same languages! I helped her practice english for an hour, it was so much fun. She was studying irregular verbs like sleep, spend, get, take, steel, feel, hear. We made up stories about Haiti- I felt the ground shaking, I hear the house falling, I got food rations from the rescue team. Also about her getting her wallet stolen- They spent my money, they took my walet, I sleep with one eye open. Next week we're going to do the same thing in spanish! She's a big sweetheart.

I went to the grocery store too and bought beans and tomatoes. I wonder where I could find a place to buy Masa here, then I can make tortillas and tamales. I did what I did for as long as I could... and now it's bed time. Night!

Maybe I'll write more often...

It appears I've taken a break from my journal in French so that means it's probably a good time to blog.

Lord I hope I get accepted to this bachelors program for next year... I met with an academic advisor today and it was helpful. If I am accepted I'll have the opportunity to learn two other languages while studying French. She told me that with the degree I'm going for it's hard to find opportunities in France but easier abroad, which is good for me! I want to start learning Chinese, we'll see where that takes me. There are so many opportunities for teaching languages in China. Otherwise Spanish is one of the languages I would study. I met a girl from Latin America who's getting a degree in translation here, we're going to exchange English/Spanish lessons. The first one is tomorrow, I'm excited!

If I don't get accepted though, I have a back up plan : be an au pair. To be continued.

After meeting that advisor I moved over to the Mission Emploi office. They have an awesome trove of how-to books for cover letters and resumes. I found a book of anti-cover letters mixed in there with the serious stuff, it's HILARIOUS. First point of business: make an awesome kick ass cover letter for babysitting jobs. I would love to babysit; kids are awesome and it would be a totally different experience from what I can get in a class room. Using the über-polite vocabulary expected by employers is fun, for example...

Dans l'attent, Monsieur, veuillez agréer l'expression de mes sentiments distingués.

In the mean time, Sir, please accept the expression of my distinguished sentiments.

heehee! So polite and so banal!!

When the Mission Emploi closed I went to the library and rooted around for Beginning Spanish books. Nuthin. So I studied for the upcoming French test to prove to the universe how awesome I am at French. I did verb drills and listened to music, it was fun! The library is all glass and metal, and surrounded by bamboo.

Now I'm home drinking caramel tea. I should start meditating again. Ok I'm out!