Two weekends ago, I decided I wanted to experience a Christmas market somewhere other than France. Ideally Germany would've been great, being the place where they actually come from, but the train to Freiburg is complicated, so I decided to go to Basel instead and see what the Swiss markets are like!
If I've learnt one thing about myself so far on my year abroad, it's that I'm bad at travelling on my own. I can't read maps, ticket machines hate me, and more often than not I just end up making a massive fool of myself. On the various day trips I've taken alone so far, I've been shouted at in English by an Italian train ticket machine, put pounds into a tram ticket machine that only accepted euros, burst into tears on an airplane because I thought we were running out of runway on take-off (that was a particularly bad day), and knocked over a flowerpot in a train station, amongst other embarrassing things. Basel was no exception. Getting off the train and heading towards customs, I realised that I'd forgotten my passport. Luckily Swiss immigration don't check everybody, only every 4 or 5 people, so I just did my best to look as innocent and Swiss as possible and squeezed through the border. Getting back into France sans passeport is no problem, but I did have issues buying my ticket (it's those pesky machines again). Basically, it would only accept euros, but I only had Swiss francs on me and the cash machine wouldn't let me take out euros, so I resorted to paying with my card. You've guessed it, the card got stuck in the slot and I was causing a backlog of people wanting to use what seemed to be the only machine in the station where you can buy tickets for France, so I waved over a couple of policemen who were walking past. I explained to them in French my problems, thinking they'd understand me because they were hanging around French customs. But no, they only spoke German. So in my non-existent German and their non-existent French I communicated my issue and after giving it a go themselves, my card had to be yanked out of the machine by a handy pair of pliers they just happened to have on them. I paid almost the entire 7 euro fare with a bunch of 5 cent coins that were lurking at the bottom of my bag, then quickly got on the train and tried to avoid eye-contact with all the people who had been behind me in the queue...
Despite my ineptitude at life, I did have a good day in Switzerland. The first place I headed was the Dreiländereck, or Three Countries Corner. It's pretty much what the name suggests- a corner where the borders of France, Germany and Switzerland meet. It's marked by a pole with flags on and you can walk between the three countries freely (luckily for me)! Fraid I can't add on any photos from my camera at the mo because the ipad doesn't have a SD card slot, but I'll do an album and put a link up to it once I'm home.
I then headed back across the Rhine towards the Christmas Market. It was my favourite one I'd been to so far despite being horrendously crowded, and stenching of mulled wine mixed with sauerkraut. This one was more oriented towards crafts and local stallholders than food and drink which made it perfect for Christmas shopping ideas!
You know those annoying people who stop suddenly when you're walking behind them, or who stand in the middle of a busy walkway, usually with a pushchair and looking at you as if to announce that being a parent gives them the right to get in everyone else's way, or looking through a pair of binoculars and holding a lonely planet guidebook? Well those people are annoying at the best of times, but in a Christmas market, it is multiplied by 1000000000000000000, and after half an hour I had to escape to the high-street and duck into H&M for some relative peace and quiet.
All in all though, I love Switzerland, and Basel really shouldn't be overshadowed by Strasbourg as a place to visit at Christmas. Although I've been feeling very settled and happy in France for the last couple of weeks, I definitely feel like I fit in more in Switzerland so it's nice to go there every now and then for a change of scenery.
School has had it's usual ups and downs. I was asked by a teacher at my main school to do a lesson about British food, so thought I'd use the same lesson that I do every week with small groups of trainee chefs at the catering college. What a mistake that was. With the trainee chefs I can unsurprisingly have a really good conversation about food and regional specialities and nutrition, while with the trainee engineers (who are the same age as the chefs) I got told "the strangest thing I have ever eaten is my grandmother" and "curry is from Germany". I think it's safe to say that my lessons at the catering college are much more rewarding. Because they are on such vocational, career-oriented courses, and because they all have to do work placements, they understand how important English is to their futures and more often than not they are really motivated to do the work, and grateful to me for coming here to teach them.
Christmas has landed in Guebwiller, and the place is just as weird as ever. They've put speakers on the shopfronts on the high-street and they blast out Christmas music all day long. It's surreal when you go into town at lunch because everything is closed and deserted, but 'Oh Christmas Tree' plays on a loop repeating the French, German, and occasionally even the English one over and over again. You get a horrible sensation that the creepy music is following you as well because as soon as you get out of earshot of one speaker, you come into range of the next one and you can't escape it!
Guebwiller is growing on me though finally. This week I went to the brand new local cinema to see the Hunger Games! The film was brilliant, and I could tell that they'd quoted the book in the film and translated it directly- a perfect example of how if directors stick to the version of the story in book, the film will always turn out well and please the fans. I think I will make going to the cinema here a regular thing because it was good to have the intensive French listening practice without the bizarre Alsatian accent causing communication problems, and it was so cheap! The ticket, popcorn and a drink set me back just 11 euros, whereas in Crawley you'd pay that just for the price of the ticket! I also saw Casse-Tête Chinois with my housemates, which is the third in the series that started with L'Auberge Espagnole. It's a French film but set in New York with some British and American actors so the entire thing flits between English and French. It was nice to watch a film with those transitions between the languages and understand conversations where one side is French and the other English. I always think that I'm better at understanding written French than spoken French, but going to the cinema and fairly effortlessly being able to follow most of the goings on is a handy little confidence booster.
You remember last week how I said I'd written a grumpy, moany post after a bad week? Well I decided not to post that because it wouldn't do any good and it was all very subjective. I have been thinking since though that if anyone stumbled across my blog who was thinking of applying to the language assistants program, or who has applied already, they would want an honest opinion of the experience and what to expect from it. So from now on I will be completely honest about the bad, as well as the good sides of a year abroad.
The biggest problem I've been facing is the lack of organisation issue. It's been a theme that has been running through everything I've done since getting to France and is one quirk of the culture that is taking longer to get used to than the others. When I left work on Thursday last week (I had no classes scheduled at that school on Friday), there were no hours written up on my timetable for the following week, and since I wasn't in the next day, I wouldn't be able to check if I had been given any. I emailed the head of English over the weekend to explain the situation and ask for advice and the reply I got was that if no teacher had contacted me yet about what to do in their lesson, I shouldn't have any lessons on Monday. One of the conditions of me having a constantly changing timetable is that the profs have to make sure that they write up the hours they want me for the following week before I leave work for the week. So going by that rule, I shouldn't have had to turn up at all. I wouldn't have felt at all comfortable with that though, hence the email.
All was well on Sunday and the head of English said she would look at my timetable the next day and email it to me. Monday morning, I woke up to find out that one of the teachers had just texted my housemate (not sure why they didn't come straight to me, but whatever), to say that I had a lesson at 2pm. That gave me all of 3 hours to get ready, plan a lesson, find and print resources and get myself to work which is an hour's walk away and it was icy that day so I couldn't cycle. Safe to say I was not best pleased!
After some exchanging of emails, the head of English must've explained the situation to the teacher in question and my housemate (again, I was sitting refreshing my emails so I don't know what that was about) got a text to say it had been cancelled and I could do it on Tuesday instead. UGGGHHH. I finally ended up with a full week's work, but I'm fed up of being expected to hang around at home waiting to be summoned to work, when if I had a timetable like I should, I could actually go places and practice my French rather than making do with watching French YouTubers on the dodgy internet and enduring listening to some dismal hip-hop music on the radio in order to hear some French chat every now and then.
Right, now that's out, back to happy things. This weekend was the village Church's Christmas concert. We sang in the choir and it was the culmination of all the rehearsing we've done over the last 9 weeks. We sang with the primary school choir and it was a really lovely evening of warbling followed by Pinot and cake. I managed to embarrass myself and get a reputation as the English idiot among the old folk of the village by spilling half a glass of wine and dropping my cake on the floor at the start of the evening, but they thanked us for singing with them in their speech and although rehearsing standing up for two hours twice a week did start to drag after the first couple of weeks, I'm glad I did it and it has helped my French in a small way. We've also learnt some Alsatian so I feel like we've really been making a good effort to assimilate into the local community. As weird as I think Alsace is sometimes, it has is interesting little quirks and living in a village really gives you a much better insight into the customs and traditional way of life that I wouldn't get if I had been placed in Strasbourg or even Mulhouse or Colmar. Alongside the fact that I'm fairly sure I would've been run over by a tram or bike in Strasbourg by now (I seriously need to learn that bike lanes exist in Europe and not walk into them quite so frequently), I am seeing being put in a small place as a sign that there is more to a year abroad than just learning the language, and I am learning things about French culture and living independently that it wouldn't be impossible to find in a city, but it would be harder to access on a daily basis.
On Saturday Amy and I went to the Christmas market in Strasbourg. Strasbourg gets so much attention as the best Christmas market around so I won't go on and on about it. I would highly recommend going for the Christmas market alone, but it's such a lovely city anyway and touching distance from Germany and all the markets there that it deserves it's self-appointed title of "Capitale de Noël". Even Basel is easily reachable from Strasbourg, and I recommend Basel to absolutely everyone, even if it does have scary ticket machines.
Right, so that's an update of my last couple of weeks. At the moment I'm waiting to check in for my flight home at Basel airport. It's an unusual place because half of the airport is in Switzerland and the other half is in France. It's a tiny little terminal but they manage to make it confusing by putting the easyjet check-in desk in the Swiss side of the airport. Oooooh, a fight just broke out outside the café I'm sitting in and when the waitress tried to call the police she couldn't because she is French and therefore her French phone doesn't work in Switzerland, despite being a mere 20 metres from France.
I'll sign off there so I can go and check-in. I'm only home for a couple of weeks over the holidays so my next post won't be a long wait away.
Merry Christmas everyone!
Alice
