Been spending most my life, living in a meatlover's paradise...

The heterosexual meateaters club would be very, very proud of me. Actually, the "heterosexual" part has nothing to do with it, this trip was ALL about the meat. Those of you who knew the old Kathryn will be shocked.

So my first two days were in Besançon, which is in eastern France near the Swiss border. Besançon is located in the Franche-Comté department of France, which some of you may know is super famous for its cheese. Since I couldn't appreciate the cheese-based regional specialties, the family I was visiting decided it would be time for a meatlover's festival. And meatlovers it sure was. And booze lover's, actually, for better and for worse!

Our first lunch was comprised of an appetizer of fresh baked ham slices marinated in a viniagrette, followed by fried chicken drumsticks and freshly homemade French fries. yum. There was also an aperitif of anisette and then a regional white wine specialty for the main dish. And fresh fruit for dessert.

Then for dinner we started with a duck foie gras (which I actually rather liked!) along with two different kinds of sausages and a strange bread-like thing that had ham in the middle, followed by a beef stew with zucchini and eggplant and some other stuff. And fruit salad for dessert. Oh, and a kir as an apero, then a regional red wine for dinner (the kir was great, made with the regional white, I wasn't a huge fan of the red).

The next day we started lunch with a different kind of foie gras, this time it was it was done with pork and beef (who knew?). Then for the main dish we had what basically amounted to veal meatballs, which were delicious. All sorts of seasonings. And a homemade tart for dessert! Anisette for the apero and red wine for the main course.

By dinnertime I was still solidly stuffed. But the meateating had to go on, we had the same two kinds of sausages and a duck foie gras for an apero and then an omelet and potato dish with ham. Equally good, equally heavy.

On day 3 I headed to Alsace, where the regional specialty IS meat, haha. So there was no question that it would be 4 more days of unabashed consumption of meat. What I didn't expect, however, was that my host is an INCREDIBLE chef, so I was spoiled rotten.

Lunch on day 3 was actually mussels in a curry sauce, which I'm going to count as a type of meat for our purposes.

Then dinner that night was slices of smoked duck and then a slice of ham, which was so impressively displayed on the plate that I took a picture:

Yes, the ham slice is in fact shaped as a rose. And there were slices of mango on there too. Yummmmm.

The next day we did lunch in a restaurant, where I had a delicious pork dish. And because no trip to Alsace is complete without some good old spaetzle (basically alsatian egg noodles), I had some of that too.

We were still solidly stuffed for dinner, so we had some freshly homemade foie gras, which was also really delicious.

On Sunday, lunch was fresh rabbit, which was also quite tasty. And I even got my own sauce, made with soy milk!

For dinner we were back to the smoked duck and ham, since we had such a heavy (but delicious...really!) lunch.

Finally, on Monday before I left, I was served another meal of the really tasty mussels.

So, all in all, that means over the course of 6 days I had: ham, pork, beef, veal, chicken, mussels (close enough to a meat), duck, and rabbit. And who knows what else I'm forgetting!

I think I gained a good 5 pounds, but I'm too intimidated to check!!!

Exposé

Since I've gotten some questions (and apparently since I'm procrastinating from doing my real work), just thought I'd whip up a quick update on the exposé last night, which went quite well despite my lack of a voice, haha.

Anyway, my big concern on the presentation was that since I was giving it to a room full of unabashed sociologists, I sort of figured the feedback I'd get at the end would be on the order of trying to turn me into a straight sociologist as well. So I thought long and hard about how I wanted to frame the presentation so that the audience would understand that the literature is at the heart of my topic and that the sociology is a means to an end rather than an end in and of itself.

And overall I think I did a good job framing it that way. It made sense in my head, and I thought I communicated that idea well. I spent a long time developing the topic and explaining my logic in how I came to the joint methodology. And I think some people got it, but a lot of them didn't. haha. So yeah, I pretty much called it, got lots of feedback trying to turn me into a sociologist. One guy said he was "disappointed" that I didn't do more quantitative analysis on the dynamics of the field. I almost said I was "disappointed" he didn't get my topic, HAHAHAHA. He also wanted to know what my theoretical foundations were, since he thought I needed to be incorporating more sociology of literature. I had a lovely moment of satisfaction when he asked me if I knew work by Gisèle Sapiro and I was able to say that I'm putting her on my committee, haha. Of course I haven't popped the question to her yet so I damn well better do so this week so that it doesn't get back to her that I'm announcing her as a member of the committee before she even knows she's on there, hahahaha. But we get along great and I'm working quite closely with her on her latest project, so I can't imagine there will be any problem. I will get on that now!!!

Anyway, the other highlight of the evening came after the presentation, actually. There was this kid who kept asking me the same question over and over, and the question made no sense. I had no freakin' clue what he was trying to ask, and he was slightly condescending and kept saying "ok, I'll rephrase it." Eventually the prof in charge of the seminar cut him off and moved on. Afterwards, the prof leaned in close to whisper to me, "sorry about that, he's one of my students who never ceases to say stupid things, he always wants to apply anachronisms, using today's language to talk about stuff in the past, so I cut him off so he wouldn't waste more of our time." Love it!

So there you have it, all in all it was fine. Not necessarily life-changing, but fine. They complimented my style, saying the relaxed atmosphere was "very American." And they meant it as a compliment, that I wasn't trying to be super formal or anything. And a few of the participants came up to me afterwards to talk about some other related topics. They're the ones who actually got the presentation, so it was great to engage with them afterwards. I was absolutely beat by that point, though, so I basically just went home and collapsed.

Now it's back to work, though, haven't done much of that recently! Will update on the trip soon!

Don't Mess with the Swiss

Well I have much to report on my grand adventure out east, but since I'm dropping with fatigue, I will start with the end of the trip.

So today was my big presentation in the research seminar, scheduled for 6 pm. I had already booked my train tickets at the time of accepting the date change, and I was scheduled to arrive back in Paris around 2:30 this afternoon. So I figured 3 1/2 hours to get home, get changed, and generally get in the mindset was reasonable.

Anyway, I got to the train station this morning and got all set up at my departure point, and the train rolled into the station. I realized right away that this was a special train because it was totally Swiss. It was a TGV (high-speed train) connecting Basel to Paris, and the decorations on the engine and outsides of the cars was all Swiss.

To make it even more obvious that the Swiss know how to do things right, we quite literally had our own steward in our car! He got out at the station to personally welcome us on board, then a little while later when he came to take our tickets, he apologized for waking me up! I had dozed off with the ticket in my hand, so he woke me up when he pulled it out of my hand to stamp it (he was even trying not to bother me!). But it was good he woke me up, since I was supposed to be reviewing for my presentation anyway, hahaha. Then he came through with beverage and snack service, just like on an airplane!!! For a fee, of course, the Swiss are nothing if not good at finding ways to take your money. But they even had gourmet teas, so I was impressed.

So there I was feeling rather smug about my Swiss train experience...when the train eased into a total stop. Then it inched forward to a station in the middle of nowhere France called Meuse, and there we sat. A few minutes later the conductor came on to say that all train traffic was indefinitely stopped because there had been a suicide on the tracks somewhere ahead of us. They opened the doors at this little station and said we could all head out if we wanted. Since it was rather warm out I went out to get some air, and our personal steward said that he didn't know much more, other than that these kinds of delays often take 4 hours.

At that point I figured my chances of making it to my presentation were rather low, so I started going through my address book until I found a friend near a computer who could email the prof and let him know (he knew I was traveling and that this was a risk, so I wasn't exceptionally concerned). She sent him a note and he called and was quite nice about it, said he'd mumble along until I got there (haha).

We ended up hanging out in the countryside near Meuse for over an hour. I took pics that I haven't pulled off my camera yet, but it's basically just of a train in the middle of nowhere, haha.

Anyway, after a while I went back on the train and started writing postcards (haha), since I also didn't see the point of practicing my presentation until it was certain I'd actually make it back on time. Eventually the conductor came on and was like, "ok, we've been cleared to start moving again." What I thought was pretty funny was that it seemed like only seconds later, the doors were closed and the train was zipping along. Don't mess with the Swiss and their efficiency, I sure hope we didn't leave anyone behind! I genuinely think that if someone had wandered off to pee in the bushes or whatever (which was totally unnecessary, the bathrooms on the train were fine), they wouldn't have made it back. That's how fast the announcement was and subsequent departure. Seriously no messing around. But the upside was that in no time we were putting the "GV" (grande vitesse = high speed) in TGV. Talk about no joke.

We made it into Paris around 4:30, so in the end it was just 2 hours late. The problem was the damned rush hour traffic, since my cab ride took forever and cost a fortune. So I didn't get back to my room until after 5, at which point I just had enough time to throw on a new shirt, whip out my presentation, and head back out. I'm glad I made it though, much happier to have it out of the way. Even if I barely had a voice.

Now I'm thoroughly exhausted and ready to collapse, but there's a salsa band playing outside my window. I have no idea why and am too lazy to go investigate.

Awkward French topless moment, Paris style!

Well, today was the much-anticipated visit to the local "prefecture" for my final regularization procedures so that I can be here legally. Otherwise known as the "awkward French topless moment."

My appointment was at 8:30, but I knew I was going to be in for the long haul when I got there around 8:05 and the line was half-way down the block. Sure enough they didn't open the doors until about 8:35, so I was stuck in the cold for a good half an hour. But I'm glad I got there when I did, since there were loads of people who arrived after me. By the time they let us in, the line was down the block and then some.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the residency card procedures is that now that most of Europe is covered by the Schengen accords, there are very few white people who actually have to go through this procedure. Sounds terrible to say it like that, but it's true. In fact, the only other white people who were there were gaggles of stupid American undergrads who didn't speak French and didn't even try. They were visible a mile away with their enormous Longchamps bags and vapid conversations about the bar scene. I pretended not to understand and ostentatiously read my French book. Too bad it was an atrociously bad book that I'm embarrassed to be seen in public with (Houellebecq, Les Particules Elementaires, I thought it would be a good idea to read it since it's so controversial, but I ended up deciding over the course of the morning that it sucked too much, so I threw in the towel and moved on to a much better one I had brought as a spare).

Anyway, we finally get in around 8:40ish, and the students are separated from everyone else. Which I found both a relief since it shortened our wait and also rather disappointing, since it made the rest of the morning significantly less interesting. All the African women in their amazing headdresses went one way, we went the other. And I was stuck listening to the aforementioned stupid Americans discuss how they don't understand why French people don't understand their massacred French.

So they finally called my name, and you go into one room to get height/weight and eyes checked. Then the fun begins. In Colmar when I had to do this last time, they put all the women in a line, told us to take off our shirts, and proceeded to march us through the chest xrays (for TB) assembly line style. Paris is way classier, we actually had three individual dressing rooms that opened up into a master xray room. So they'd go room by room, bringing one person out, telling us to take a deep breath, snapping the xray, then sending us back into our room and calling the next person. So the awkward topless moment wasn't exceptionally awkward, in the end. The problem was they were kind of slow so we had to freeze our asses off in our individual rooms before they called us. There was also a fascinating sign on the wall about French secularism, of which I managed to take a cell phone pic. But I can't seem to get the pic off my phone, haha, so that will have to wait.

Once the xray is done, you wait some more until they call you to see a second dr, who reads the results and checks your heart and bp. All that checked out fine, so then I had to wait again for a stamp, then go hand my form to another office, wait some more, and then get my official titre de sejour. Which is posted backwards because I was too lazy to use my real camera and just used photobooth. Hence the mirror image:


All that took about 2.5 hours in the end, which I thought was pretty amazing. In Colmar we had to deal with three separate visits--one for the medical stuff, one to drop off our forms, and one to pick everything up. That this was all streamlined in one visit was thus already a big deal. I was thrilled that I only had to sit around for 2.5 hours, haha. And now I'm officially legal!

Saint-Cyr-sur-Morin

Well, time continues to fly. After showing the family around Paris for the past week, I had a grand adventure of my own yesterday afternoon. My orchestra was invited to play in a little village outside Paris. St-Cyr-sur-Morin, as Wikipedia kindly told me, has a population of about 1800. It took us about 2 hours to get there by bus, bumping along through the countryside and around the traffic circles.

It was already dark by the time we got there, so we couldn't see much of anything. The concert was in a new building that was a combined auditorium, mayor's office, and childcare center. The building is brand new, we were the inaugural concert and were thus treated to a hero's welcome. The arrival of the Parisians was indeed considered a big deal!

We arrived around 5, rehearsed for an hour and a half, then went over to the childcare room for dinner. Turns out that one of the local ladies had prepared an entire FEAST for us (keeping in mind that the orchestra is about 40-50 people, this couldn't have been easy). There was fried chicken, cold cuts, potato salad, and brie. Oh you should have seen the brie. This town is actually in the region of France called "brie," so you can thank them for the cheese we all know and love. Well, I know it but can't say I love it anymore, haha. But you get the point. The brie wheel was seriously like a foot in diameter, if not more. From what I could tell, the other members of the orchestra massacred it. Oh, and there was a big fruit tart as well. And the local officials themselves came to pour our kirs.

Over dinner I accidentally became the star of the show as I was talking to one of the other cellists, who commented on the fact that my accent is quite good for an American. I never know whether to take this as a complement or not, because on the one hand she was observing that my accent was respectable, but on the other hand she was observing that I come from a group with notoriously bad accents in French, so I don't know whether it was only respectable in comparison to other Americans, haha. In any case, I unwittingly became the star of the show when as a joke I started speaking French with a terrible American accent. At which point the people around us stopped their conversations and started laughing hysterically. So then everyone made me continue because they thought it was so hilarious that I could just do it at will. So there I was like, "bonn-joor, je sweez am-ay-ree-can" (etc), with a whole crowd of French people laughing their asses off around me. At one point I said (in the badly accented French) that there were too many Americans in France, at which point they were like, "yes!" They were perhaps a little too enthusiastic on that one, haha. Again, not sure if they were laughing with me or at me...

Anyway, the concert was more or less fine, but the cutest thing was that the mayor was there, along with all the regional notables. The mayor MC'd the ceremony. The elementary school principal is in the brass section, so he was the local star for the night. A bunch of the kids came out to see us, and after the show they wanted the autographs of the conductor and our two soloists (a pianist and a trumpeter)! So sweet, particularly since I think this orchestra is fairly mediocre, haha. But the reception was so nice and friendly, they're a real community. After the concert they served us some local cider, which was of course delicious (cider is ALWAYS delicious in my book).

From there we got back on our bus, where I passed out for the entire ride home. Woke up just as the bus was navigating the back streets of the 14th arrondissement, at which point we were ready to hop off and resume our lives as anonymous Parisians. So much for our 15 minutes of fame in St-Cyr-sur-Morin!

I had to post this. For obvious reasons.

The countdown to December 15 begins!!!

Armistice Day in France

One of the things that is so interesting about France is how seriously they take their history. This is of course true of most places, but somehow here it seems like history as a concept is more visible. Just look at the ongoing obsession with WWII. This is of course not to say that history here is less influenced by political machinations or anything like that, but rather that those kinds of discussions (the political uses of history) actually happen in mainstream magazines, etc. With that in mind, I was highly intrigued to attend the Armistice Day memorial program at the university today, and sure enough it didn't disappoint.

The school is decked out in French flags, here's the entrance:


And from there I went to the location of the memorial service, in a hallway that has all of their war memorials:
This is the WWI memorial, so the ceremony took place in front of it. There was also a poster of important events/people/documents from the war (and relating to the university):

Here's why I find France's engagement with history so fascinating: the ceremony began with the president of the alumni association giving a little intro in which he meditated on the fact that because the last WWI vet recently died, WWI has passed from memory into history. He proceeded to discuss the differences between memory and history and how this will change memorial services in the future. Although he was speaking to a large audience made up of a hodge-podge of people, he was fairly technical and got into the changing relationship to the war and what that means for the next generation in terms of how we engage with the heritage of such a dramatic event. He said that they had decided to change the format of the memorial service to reflect this generational shift and that they had thus invited the history department to participate. I was impressed.

But only for a minute, as the intervention by the historian (whose name I didn't catch, but I don't think it was a hot shot in the field or anything) was total mythologizing on the glory of the school in the war effort. This woman had apparently read a bunch of the letters written by students from the university who were stationed in the trenches, and she proceeded to go on and on about the glory of the school in the war effort--how the intellectual rigor allowed the soldiers to ask fundamental questions about academia and society, how the moral standards of the university meant that a vast majority of the youth were somehow involved, how the university opened its doors to the Red Cross to serve as a hospital, how the librarian (Lucien Herr, who is super famous for inspiring a whole generation of engaged intellectuals) challenged the students to think politically, etc. You would have thought it was a propaganda video for the school or something. Granted, the school suffered heavily during the war. From what I could tell based on some contradictory numbers that were floated around by different people, 239 alums died in the war, and only 23 went and came back (it's a small school). The cohort that finished in 1913 was obviously the heaviest hit, with 44 deaths, most of which happened right off the bat in August 1914 at the Battle of the Marne.

From there, they proceeded to a lengthy discussion of March Bloch (I KNEW he was coming when they started discussing the stakes of history), who fought in WWI and then enlisted in the resistance during WWII before he was captured, tortured, and killed in 1944. He's a very interesting person, in that he published reflections on WWII but also meditated on the role of the historian in contemporary politics, etc. He's a fascinating person to read (his famous book on WWII has been translated into English as "Strange Defeat"), and of course they glorified him as a hero of the school since he's also an alum. They presented a rather skewed image of him, though, focusing entirely on his exceptional commitment to the country (and how that made the school look good) without talking about his take on the war, which was actually much more nuanced. But again, this was history-making at its finest (by that I mean intentionally constructing a history).

I suppose this manipulation of historical memory isn't surprising in the sense that the people there were all old alums (most of whom I would guess had some sort of engagement in WWII), so the school was trying to valorize their nostalgia of both the school and the war effort. It was interesting to say the least. Equally interesting was the lady I sat next to, who graduated in math in 1930 (!) and who lost 10 friends in WWII. I got to ask her a bunch of questions, and she pointed out her friends on the WWII memorial. She also told me about what it was like being a woman in math at an elite school in the 1920s, which I thought was pretty awesome. She was one of only a handful of girls in the school at all, of course.

So yeah, there you have it, definitely a noteworthy cultural experience. It's a little more noble than the way the Alsatians I knew celebrated it back when I lived in Colmar (namely, everyone goes to Germany to shop, since it's not a national holiday there, for obvious reasons, haha). Oh, and some band of juvenile delinquents slashed all the tires of German cars that day, as my German roommate at the time found out the hard way. I'll take ENS mythologizing over that any day!