New, Nouveau, New!

I was surprised by how excited I was to come back to France and to be back in my home in Carpentras.  By the time I landed in Marseille, I was so anxious to see the Patris family and to be done living out of a backpack!  I think that being sick at the end of my trip helped to make me look forward to being back even more than I would have otherwise.

This was my first ever Nouvel An (New Year) Celebration in France and I’m very curious to know if it was typical.  When I celebrate New Year’s in Wisconsin with friends, we’ve generally gotten together earlier in the evening, had some sort of potluck where everyone brings some snack foods, played games and hung out for hours, watched the recording of the New  York Ball Drop at midnight, and then crashed on the floor shortly thereafter.  As we’re all now above the legal drinking age, we’ve added various liquor and alcoholic drinks and champagne at midnight to the mix, but the remainder of the details remaining more or less the same.  We sleep in late, make some pancakes in the morning, and people leave at various points throughout the morning and early afternoon. 

My French celebration started out more or less the same, with people coming and bringing various prepared food/drink items.  However, rather than just snack foods, we sat down and ate a large (delicious!) dinner together.  After that, we hung out, had some drinks, and when midnight struck, broke out the confetti, streamers, and noisemakers.  Normal, right?  So then we continued to have fun, hang out, whatnot… and headed to bed by 2 or 3 am, right? 

Wrong.  2am, 3am, and 4am came… and I thought for sure that we were going to take at least a short nap before getting up again, but at around 4:30am several of boys seemed to catch a second wind, and started taking shots!  So much for rest, I suppose.  We started a game of Taboo (in French) around 5am.  It was ‘Extreme Taboo’ or something and involved not only the ‘typical’ Taboo (where you have to get your teammates to guess a word by describing it but have a list of related words you are forbidden to use) but also options where you were limited to 15 words in 2 minutes and where you had to use a little doll to act out the words you were trying to describe.  You’d be surprised at how much more difficult it is to do in French!  Everyone was nice to me and flipped over the hourglass twice- meaning I had twice as much time to attempt to get my teammates to figure out what I was saying :)  I think I was fairly successful- it was a good test of my French!  We continued playing until around 10am and then people started cleaning up and mostly left by around noon.  I headed home but didn’t feel like it was a good idea to nap since I was afraid I’d throw off my clock… but finally gave in around 5pm, at which point I’d been up for over 32 hours straight!  Here I went four years at UW without pulling a single all-nighter and then pulled two in the same week without really even planning it.  Oops?  One highlight of my night:  one of the guys said to me (in French), “You don’t really sound like a French French person…” to which I replied that I wasn’t French at all, but American ;) 

Another fun celebration early in the New Year was in Marseille, when I took the train down to celebrate Miss Becca's 23^rd birthday.  It was really nice to see a lot of the Marseille gang again, many of whom I hadn’t seen since our training session in October, and also to meet some of Katharine’s French collocs.  My trip started out a little bit sketchy, when I was stuck on the train next to an Algerian man that wouldn’t stop talking at me and then when I got lost near Vieux Port in the dark shortly after arriving… but things went uphill from there.  Katharine taught us a new game that’s a cousin of beer pong called “beer flower” which is I think more amusing to watch than to play.  To give you some idea, each player has a cup partially filled with beer and is trying to bounce the ping pong ball into the full cup in the middle of the table.  When a player succeeds, everyone has to chug their beer asap and then play flip cup… the last player to successfully flip their cup has to drink the full cup from the middle, so people frantically rush to finish their drink and flip their cup as quickly as they possibly can.  People are talking and laughing and then you look over and all of a sudden, everyone’s silent as they scramble to finish their drink.  I hope Becca had a good time because I know all of the rest of us did :) 

Other notable New Year activities… I’ve had the opportunity to check out a lot of new (sorry, I know that’s getting old- I’m done now!) places with locals who’ve shown me around.  (Further posts with more details on their way...)  One of the teachers at the school decided to take me around the region by car on our day off (there are no English classes on Wednesdays) which was much more quick and convenient than me traipsing around on foot or figuring out the bus schedule.  Since this area’s rural, there aren’t that many buses that would have gotten me to the places that I got to see.  Some of the pictures are below:

Pierrelongue- the church stands above the whole rest of the city

Brantes

Croix du Calvaire in Malaucene 

Something else that was really interesting for me was the French Soldes aka Sales which happen twice a year, once in Jan/Feb and once in July/Aug.  Unlike American stores that have sales whenever they jolly well feel like it (JC Penney, anyone?), all French stores have sales at the same time.  It makes for some awesome shopping!  I went to Avignon with two students (who are in seconde and terminale, the equivalent of sophomore and senior in the US system) to check out the scene and ended up finding some awesome French Chucks as well as a nice skirt and several new dresses.  I did my best to stay away after that, as I knew I could have been easily tempted to spend my entire (read: not very big) French paycheck on new stuff :) 

Anyway, I’ll wrap this up for now- more stories to come from the start of 2011!