Christmas in France

Christmas in France! It seems a little less commercial  than in the US but you still hear a good amount of Brenda Lee signing  "rockin' around the Christmas tree." Speaking of which Parisians appear to eschew 'natural' looking trees for ones coated in fake snow or even more conceptual trees (vive la difference!)

Paris has a good number of decorated streets and Christmas markets. The Christmas markets aren't too different from ones in New York except for street food they sell hot wine, crepes, and chestnuts roasted over an open fire.  Mary and I enjoy walking through them, crepes are great but chestnuts turned out to be a bit of a let down  after Nat King Cole's build up.

A side note; don't believe all the 'bad weather' hype you hear in the states. We've a bit of snow but barely an inch or two. There must be something in the conversion to metric, because airports closed for days and people slept in train stations rather than go home. But don't worry, the only danger is wet feet (though I guess if you're not used to any snow, a little bit causes a lot of problems!!).

Finally, Merry Christmas all! We'll be taking a little vacation from blogging for the next week but we'll post more exciting stuff in the New Year!

French Class

For the last three weeks Dave has been taking intensive French four hours a day at the Alliance Francais. Its a very international class containing Asians, Europeans, North and South Americans. While nobody speak French well, most everyone speaks English which is the 'lingua franca' of the class!

Its been a while since high school French but something must have stuck with Dave because he feels he has managed to handle getting back from random phrases to passe compose and the future tenses easily. He is a frequent contributor in class and even corrects the teacher from time to time!

That part about correcting the teacher is an inside joke but Dave really is enjoying the class. The teacher does a good job of coming up with interesting exercises. One of the most fun was a skill Dave doesn't need anymore 'Speed Dating'. He is planning to take more classes in the new year. Until later, or as Dave says 'Awh Rev-war'!

Lets go Metz!

 Weekend before last Mary and Dave went on their first weekend trip to the border town of Metz. We heard they had a great Christmas village, an interesting mix of German and French architecture, as well as a huge flea market! We also heard it was cold, so we put on our long underwear and took the TGV out to Alsace-Lorraine.


First off, it was much colder than we thought! Also the flea market closed at noon, so the market was shutting down just as we found it. Dave was able to score a 2 euro cap from one of the stalls, which was much appreciated with the weather.  We enjoyed the cathedral at Metz but we most loved something we didn't even know was there when we left for Metz, the La Cour d'Or Musee. (Which initially just seemed to be an inexpensive place to get warm.)

The musee told the  history of Metz through art, from the  city's day as a garrison town on the Roman border town ( building the museum lower floor actually exposed a Roman bath, which you can see) to the present.  This includes numerous medieval decorations, many uncovered when people renovated their truly ancient homes. These kind of discoveries are extra interesting since coming from the States the only old hidden discovery is liable to be asbestos in your 1950's era home. Truly a great museum! Even so Metz isn't really a destination to go out of your way for, but if you ever end up in the area definitely worth checking out.

Hoboken to Paris

We finally got internet so expect a flurry of catch up e-mail in the next few days.  In the meantime checkout our apartment overrun with our boxes (which came in early last week.)  We just wanted to give you an idea of what 28 boxes look like in an already furnished one bedroom apartment. They are virtually all put away now but we are still saying 'why did we bring so much crud?!?!'

Also our new address is    

    17 Rue Etienne Marcel #3
    Paris, France 75001

Lots to be Thankful for!

Sorry it's been a while since our last post! We don't currently have internet at our apartment, and it might still be a while before we have it, so the posts might not be as often as we'd like for the next few weeks... and there's so much to say!

Anyway, on Thanksgiving Day we were able to move into our new apartment, which gave us a lot to be thankful for! We'd been in temporary housing for the prior month (and in 3 different places in that time!) so it felt very good to settle into a place where we'll be for a year! It's a very cute one bedroom right in the center of Paris, and we really like it. All of our stuff arrived on Monday, so we've been busy getting unpacked and finding room for 28 boxes of stuff- thankfully our new place has lots of storage!! We'll post pictures once we have internet at our apartment.

On the Saturday after Thanksgiving (Mary had to work on Thanskgiving Day since it's just an American holiday) we were able to attend a Thanksgiving dinner at one of the churches here. Everyone was supposed to bring a side dish, so we attempted to make a sweet potato casserole that's one of Mary's favorites. It miraculously turned out pretty well despite not being sure if we'd bought the right sweet potatoes, didn't know how long to cook them, only had metric measuring utensils, and not being able to find brown sugar (and mixing white sugar and honey instead!). It's always nice to have a taste of home - especially if you're celebrating far away from family and friends!

We'll write more later, but hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving!!

First Days of Work

Mary is now a productive member of French society! She's finished 3 days in the office, and thankfully a lot of her French has come back to her. If the conversation gets too in depth or if it's about a topic that she's not very familiar with, she begins to get lost, but she's thankful for what she does understand! Her coworkers are very nice though, and ALL of them speak better English than she does French!!

The office is similar in most ways to her office in the US, but she's noticed a few differences so far:
1. There's much more of an open floor plan - no cubicles - the desks are laid out more just as flat desks with no dividers. Mary's in a smaller room with only 3 other people, but everyone seems very nice!
2. Free coffee, tea, AND hot chocolate!! I guess they only took this away in the US!
3. It seems the employees here are in the office longer, but they also take a lot more breaks! Coffee and a smoke in the morning, lunch, coffee and a smoke or two in the afternoon... I guess if you're regularly going to be in the office for more than 10 hours, you need little breaks to keep you going! Mary`ll need to discover this lifestyle... one of her coworkers commented today on how he's amazed the English expats can focus for so long without a break!
4. Mary's biggest frustration so far... the French keyboard is different from the English keyboard (basically q w a z x and m plus several of the punctuation keys are in different spots!). She switched the setting to an English keyboard for part of the day today, but decided that was too confusing! Amazingly, her mind has started to relearn the keyboard... but we'll see what switching between an English laptop at home and a French keyboard at work does to her mind and fingers!! The good news- the !! is in a very convenient location on the French keyboard, and anyone who knows Mary well at all, knows she does use it a LOT!! ;)

Though the days are long, they seem to fly by!

Happy Thanksgiving to all of our friends and family! Eat an extra helping of pumpkin pie for us!! :)

A' Paris

We flew out this Monday night and arrived Tuesday afternoon. After a short 12 hour nap we were up and looking at apartments all Wednesday. We think we found one, but more on that when we move in, hopefully Friday.

   Mary starts work on Monday so in the meantime we have been exploring the city. Yesterday we visited the Musee D'Orsay and today Montmartre. On Thursday Dave insisted on visiting a local game shop but jet lag pretty much wiped us out after that and we didn't too much until we met one of Mary's coworkers at a restaurant. There we were serenaded by a quite good country/southern-rock band, save for the occasional lyric that slipped into spirited humming.

   The city is actually fairly small so we have been walking pretty much everywhere. It would be super easy if the streets weren't so crazy for two people used to New York's convenient grid system or the signs where in English. Dave picked up an audio dictionary and an offline map of Paris which have already proved helpful. Mary's French has proved very serviceable and she coaches Dave so he gets a giddy thrill asking for "l'eau' in French.

Dave in front of Notre Dame

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Dave and Mary on the Seine with Ile de la Cite in the background

Mary at Montmarte

Leaving for Paris

 

 Here we are after our visa interview in front of the French consulate.  We had visions of talking over our visit to Paris with a stern Frenchmen in a little office, turns out it was more like the DMV; present your papers at one window, sit down, get your pictures and fingerprints taken at another when called, and pick up the visa later that day. In the end we were just happy to be finally on our way... 

Mary in front of Central Park