Breakdancing, Brass Bands and Bins

The past couple of weeks have been spent generally trying to sort my life out French-style, which, in short, means a ridiculous amount of paperwork teamed with a ridiculous lack of efficiency. The high point of all this was when Harrie had to send off two photocopies of her passport to Orange in order to receive her €5 free credit on her Carrefour phone.  A week later, she’s still waiting with a phone that is far less useful than the biros and razors dear old Bic should really stick to making.

Technology has also let us down in the form of the Neufbox, the all-purpose (but actually does nothing at all) router . We’ve been dismally watching the orange ‘erreur’ light flash for three weeks now, and even made two wasted trips back to Carrefour where were firmly told to wait some more for technical checks, because in France it’s OK for internet to take three weeks. The only plus side of this was that it made it OK to go to McDo daily, which I’m now missing an unhealthy amount.

 Today I whipped out my domestic goddess and rummaged around in the wires for a bit, and ten minutes later we had English TV, internet and free phone calls to England. Cheers Carrefour. Domestic goddess didn’t survive for long though, as I immediately got too cocky and tried to stick up my picture board, and ended up super gluing not only two fingers together, but my shoe to the floor, and, thanks to some rogue splodges of super glue, my foot in my shoe. It was all painfully reminiscent of the time I tried to dry my shoes in the oven after a rainy day and ended up with a ruined oven and a very small pair of shoes.

There’s been none of this pathetic behaviour in class though, I’ve stepped up my game there after coming home after my first day with an invitation to visit a boy’s family in Morocco and ten Facebook friend requests. This would have actually been my second day, but the pupils casually went on strike the day before, and the day after that, the trains did the same thing. There’s nothing quite like a good strike in France; they’re averaging two a week since I’ve arrived.

In my classes this week we’ve been going through news articles and having vague debates about the topics, but I remember being in classes like mine and thinking it was all a massive doss. To try and get the students out of this mindset, I worked out you don’t need to shout or get angry, you just need to calmly tell the student who claims he ‘doesn’t need to know English because he can breakdance so well’ that unless he gets up and immediately demonstrates, he can do the work like everyone else (or go back to Tonga as I was thinking myself, but I don’t think Summer Heights High’s really hit France hard yet.)

Despite all this, I don’t really feel like an English teacher, and ‘don’t look like one either’ according to the bloke selling metro tickets, who has no idea when he isn’t part of a conversation.  I’ve actually spent an unusual amount of time in gay bars this week, and the other night, after the long struggle of wheeling Harrie’s granny shopping trolley back from Carrefour in the rain, we whipped out the 1 euro wine (lethal) and headed to La Plage, my favourite bar in Lille. There’s just something about the sand on the floor, the absinthe, Sambuca and red wine mixure that is a ‘flaming dragon’ and the barman who will take 5 minutes to make your drink because he wants to show you what he learnt at bartender school that is beyond funny. This only gets better when a brass band barges in, complete with trumpeters and a tuba bigger than me, and insists on playing ‘hot stuff’ over the DJ until he gives up completely. Vive la France.

There are plenty of other ridiculous occurrences that I could go into, but the final pathetic issue in ‘ma vie francaise’ is that we can’t find our own rubbish bins so we have to nip out under darkness and deposit our plethora of empty wine bottles and pasta sauce jars in the neighbours’ bins, which they are so tragically obsessive about that they employ someone to monitor them during the day. They probably have a point though, as like some kind of grubby trackie-clad Santa, it’s time once again for one of my frequent illegal bin trips followed by an unhealthy (but very French) amount of cheese for dinner. A bientôt.