Sunday, January 17, 2010

A Wintery Christmas

So my first experience of Christmas in winter! We've had a few decent snowfalls, & there's still quite a bit on the ground now although it hasn't snowed in a week. The snow froze and even 2 downpours haven't got rid of it. The mountains look amazing! My Christmas went well, and was certainly multi-cultural. I spent Christmas Eve with my French friends, when the real celebrating is done. What a feed, but they did it in style. Between courses (of which there were so many I lost count) we talked and played games, which means our stomachs had time to make room for more food! 1 game we played was Pictionary - drawing is enough of a challenge for me, let alone trying to guess in French! But it was heaps of fun. 3 of the specialities I had that night = home-made orange wine, a local thing called crozet (still actually not sure what it is!) and foie gras, of course. I had Christmas dinner with 4 americans, and we made a French dish called raclette. Very easy, very likely to become a favourite of mine.
Then
all too soon my very relaxing (AKA lazy) holiday was over and it was back to school. The 6th January is traditionally a day where the 3 magis who visited Jesus are remembered. It's a very agreeable tradition: special cakes are made, which are called galettes, I guess we'd call them almond pies, each one with a plastic (or metal) figurine in them, which relates to the 3 magi or more recently Christmas. The pie is cut up and pieces randomly handed out. The person in whose piece the figurine is gets to be the king (or queen). So our lovely teacher Valerie put on galettes for us in class! A nice welcome back. And of course between class we got to play in the snow!

It's not all been celebrations, though. I had to go to the hospital to have a CT scan of my shoulder. I took along Carma, another student who speaks better French than me, just in case I needed some help. Well, I introduced her to the radiographer, who then asked me if I understood what was going to happen. I said yes, so she told me that Carma couldn't come in with me! It actually worked out well on the whole. The only problem was that I had to lie in an uncomfortable position on a cold hard table waiting for the Dr to come - which took 30mins! Anyway, the good thing is that the scans showed the problem, which is a torn ligament, and now I wait til Wednesday to see the specialist to get a plan of action.

When I got here in September, 1 of the teachers told us that French has 40,000 verbs. Seemed a bit over the top to me! But this week I realised that it must be a real statistic when I learned a new verb. The word for picnic in French is 'piquenique'. So guess what they made a verb out of it: piqueniquer, which means to go for a picnic. Amazing, I can't believe they made a verb out of that english-french word! Something I learned about the French culture (told to me by a local) is that they're pessimistic & critical. Well people say that about kiwis too right? Here's how it shows up in class. When we have dictations they're marked out of 10, but unlike the NZ system, in France everybody starts with 10 points and you get marked down for every mistake. This means that people often get less than 3 out of 10. A bit discouraging! I'd prefer to get credit for everything I do correctly but hey, when in France... Maybe I should go and study some more.....