Do we have this in the US?

Random little tidbit: one of my classes was cancelled today because the kids (and by kids I mean 19 year olds) were taking a first aid/disaster prevention class instead. It was so cool. They were taught what to do in all sorts of situations, cuts, broken bones, seizures, accidents, with different ages of victims. The baby dummy was creepy, but probably useful to someone someday. They did skits where they practiced dealing with each situation and then afterwards talked about the theory and what they did correctly or incorrectly. Apparently they've been doing this for years. It seemed like a really worthwhile experience to practice what to do in any emergency to reduce panic and cut down on response time. I was impressed. It left me wondering, however, do we have something like that in the US? Obviously I didn't grow up there or go to public school, so I have no idea how we're preparing our kids, especially in such an earthquake prone environment. The only American equivalent I've ever heard of is first aid/CPR classes, but those aren't linked to school and are thus not popular and fairly expensive. Maybe we should look into creating some similar program in American schools. Who knows, it could save lives.

Luxembourg: the Singapore of Europe

As you have hopefully inferred from the title, I have come to the shocking realisation that Europe is playing host to a city-state bizarrely akin to the one in which I spent my formative years. This is, in a word, supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. I've spent a fair amount of time missing the quirks of my seemingly unique (closest thing to) home, so imagine my surprise and excitement at finding something remarkably similar and significantly closer to my current place of residence. But of course, let me justify my claim, as on the surface Singapore and Luxembourg may not seem so comparable. Of course, they are both city-states, conveniently situated in their respective continents to maximise trade and business and thus bring in a lot of wealth and wealthy people. Both have high expatriot populations, because of international businesses and governments and because they are both flanked by multiple countries. The result is the delightful ability to walk down any street at any time of the day and be able to hear at least 4 different languages being spoken within a space of 3 blocks. I love that. Both countries are ruled by monarchical families, Luxembourg by an actual royal family and Singapore under the guise of extremely nepotistic democracy. Despite whatever qualms your may have about these political systems, both countries are extremely stable and extremely safe. Charming as they may be, there is relatively little to do in either country tourist-wise, but have the air gemütlichkeit for actual residents. Hopefully one day I'll be able to compare the two as a resident of both. After the 110% humidity and fantastic Indian food, my comparisons are exhausted, but hopefully I make a pretty convincing point.

Tragically, the one thing that Singapore and Luxembourg don't have in common is Christmas markets. What I would have given to have had that experience as a child. Being able to walk around in the crisp air ("nice and chilly"), moseying from quaint stall to quaint stall, sipping hot drinks and singing along to Christmas carols with someone you love; it was amazing. And I was so lucky to have the chance to go to my first Christmas market with my wonderful boyfriend. It sounds sappy, but being able to share that moment, the first real, perfect moment of Christmas, with someone I love that much, was such a gift. For that moment, I forgot about all the loneliness and the homesickness and the stress and could just be. So thank you, those moments are rare for me. I get a little lost in my own world sometimes. Anyways...Merry Beginning of the Christmas Season Everybody! Hurray for Luxembourg.

Just when I thought it couldn't get worse...

I know it's been a while since I last wrote, so let me catch you up briefly...still stuck in Stenay, still have no friends, one of my married colleagues is in love with me and seems not to understand any variation of the words "no" or "stop". I'm bored, lonely, frustrated and tired of people talking about me instead of to me. I foolishly thought that I was on an upswing when my ATM card finally came after 2 months of waiting and several trips to and arguments with my bank. I was so excited by the possibility of going grocery shopping and being able to buy stuff that I want, not just need, and being able to buy train tickets at the little yellow machines in the train stations, instead of having to wait for the infrequent times in which ticket counters are open (open late, closed early, 2 hour lunch breaks. seriously, do these people even work?). I'd planned a nice meal in my head. I was going to take some time today to actually make myself a meal, maybe even dessert, thus temporarily alleviating the soul crushing boredom of the day. But when I got to the supermarket and tried to take out money with my new card, I realised that I couldnt remember the pin number they had assigned me. So I walked all the way back to my apartment, found the slip of paper with the number and walked back to the supermarket. Attempt 2 didn't go better. I inserted the card, I typed in the pin number. The machine told me I had made an error. I was pretty sure I had typed it in correctly, but there's always room for human error, so i tried again, very carefully this time...YOU HAVE MADE AN ERROR. YOUR CARD HAS BEEN RETAINED. PLEASE CONTACT YOUR BANK. So I called my bank. No answer. I trekked all the way over to my bank. Closed until Tuesday. I emailed my bank. No answer. So now I'm stuck in the middle of nowhere with no money and no food until Tuesday, when I'll be busy at work the whole day. Considering it took them 2 months to send me the card in the first place, I don't have high hopes for how long it'll take for me to get the replacement card. The cruel thing is that I get paid this weekend. So I know I have money in my account, but I still have to starve because I can't access it.

Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!

I don't know if you can tell, but I'm rather excited by the premature arrival of my school holidays. Today, after the worlds most stressful, panicked filled day, I was informed that due to a cross-country meet, middle school play and high school internship, I'm free to start my Toussaint vacation 3 days early. That is to say that the stars have aligned to rightfully reward me for not giving up on my temporary chosen career, but primarily for not throwing problem children out of windows. I've been tempted. And on many ocassions it would have been justified. Anyways, I want to say something clever, but I think I'm too brain dead after 5 hours of class and 3 hours of prep work today. It's weird, I spent all day trying to teach people words, but at the end of the day, I don't have enough of them left over for me. I swear I can speak English, really. I just can't remember any of the words I want to use. Anyways...tired ramblings...now that I'm free (Free at last!) I'm attempting to come up with a plan for my precious hard earned extra hours. At the moment, the plan is to chill out here tomorrow, do laundry, fix holey clothing (holey not holy), research Belgium as much as possible and finally do a much needed pre-vacation room cleaning. Maybe I'll make it to Verdun for a couple of hours, for the usual, ever exciting train ticket buying and window shopping. I'm sure I'll regret the decision to stay in Stenay tomorrow, when it's noon and I'm already bored out of my mind, but at least at the moment, I need a little decompression time. But after that, Thursday, it's on to Belgium! The tentative plan is Bruxelles October 20-23, Bruges October 23-26. After that it's "home" to Frankfurt for the rest of the trip (October 26-November 2). That's a pretty big chunk of time in Frankfurt, considering all of my lovely friends are now responsible adults with jobs that require them to be physically and mentally present during the work week. But, there's always the option of day trips. So...we shall see. Hopefully in Frankfurt I'll be able to upload photos of my trips. Wish me luck!

Why I don't run

I don't want to sound melodramatic, but i almost died today. Seriously. Ok, maybe that's a little bit of an exaggeration, but it was pretty bad. for some reason I woke up early today; I mean REALLY early, and I thought, well...I don't have anything to do, so why not try to get in a little exercise. There's very little to do in Stenay and we seem to be all but banned from using the gym, so the only real options for exercise are doing crunches on our disgusting floor (because noone seems to be able to explain to me where I can find a broom or vaccuum cleaner) or going for a run. This morning I wasn't really in the mood to pick dead insects and mysterious fluff out of my hair and the weather looked pretty nice, so I thought, let's go for a run. For those of you who know me (pretty much all of you, I'd guess), unless I'm trying to escape a man in a hockey mask with a knife, I don't run. I don't find it to be entertaining, enlightening or in any way enjoyable. So the fact that, this morning, I willingly chose to do it, is a testament to how bored I am here. Anyways...I decided to go running, it was a little chilly out so I thought: should I take a jacket? No. Once I start running, I'll warm up a little and it won't be necessary. So I left the house with nothing but exercise clothes, keys and an ipod (Mistake #1). A couple of minutes into the run I thought, I'm feeling good, the weather is nice, I'll take the long way today (Mistake #2). A couple of minutes later it started to drizzle a little, I thought: it's just a little rain, it'll pass and kept running (Mistake #3). A couple minutes later, at the point of no return, where it would be longer to admit defeat, turn back and retreat to the dusty, but much warmer sanctuary of my apartment, it started to pour. Then it started to hail. Little balls of ice falling from the sky, biting my already aching naked flesh. Forgive me for waxing poetic, but it was so awful that it barely felt real. It was more like sometime you'd read about happening in some really depressing book to some really unlucky protagonist. And i'd like to point out that this is roughly an hour long run, so at this point, tired, cold and numb as I was, I still had a good 25 minutes left to go in the stinging cold rain and hail. Have I mentioned that I'm still recovering from bronchitis? And it was then that I slipped and twisted my ankle. I still don't know what I tripped over, but I do know that it hurt. So to recap: cold, wet, tired and in pretty severe pain. Obviously I gave up running, and opted for the more pathetic method of limping in the rain. It was then that my saviour found me. Apparently the universe decided that I'd been punished enough and allowed me a tiny sliver of good fortune. One of the teachers at my school happened to be driving by at that moment and thankfully she stopped to give me a ride home. So the moral of the story is: don't run ever. But if you absolutely have to, make sure you live in a place where people are nice enough to save you from yourself.

Exodus

Surprisingly all train transfers went well. Frankfurt to Karlsruhe to Strasbourg to Metz to Verdun with an enormous suitcase and a sleep deprivation hangover and not a single transfer missed. By the time I got to Verdun I was so pleased with myself that I almost didn’t realise that I had no idea what the person who was picking me up looked like and I had no way of contacting her and assuming she wasn’t a 15 year old girl or an active (male) soldier there was no-one at the train station that could have been her anyway. So I thought…I’m not going to panic, she’s probably just a little late. You’ve been spending too much time in Germany; people aren’t that punctual anywhere else in the world. That said, my first instinct was, of course, to panic; which didn’t really get me anywhere because regardless of how fast my pulse was racing, I was still stuck in the train station in Verdun 45 minutes after I was supposed to be picked up and it was starting to get dark and there was really nothing I could do about it. So I tried to be rational, which is difficult for me even under the best circumstances. I would find a pay phone and call from there, and if that didn’t work I would use my rusty French and utter patheticness to charm the ticket person into giving me directions to the nearest hotel. Then I would bravely set out, on my own in a foreign country, cold and hungry, lugging an obnoxious amount of unnecessary crap, fully aware that I’d probably be lost within 5 minutes. But it’s an adventure, right? That’s what this whole experience is supposed to be about, being self sufficient and learning to fend for myself. This of course scared me more. Overcoming the panic induced urge to vomit, I took a deep breath, stood up and nearly gave myself whiplash as I suddenly spun around at the sound of my name spoken with a soft almost London accent. My saviour had come.

It was all much less dramatic from then on. We introduced ourselves, drove to her apartment, carried my stuff up what seemed like 400,000 stairs (I’m exaggerating, it was probably only 300,000), and then went out for a beer. Afterwards we returned to her vibrantly decorated flat for a lovely home cooked meal and then French language version of Troy, which, as it turns out, is terrible in every language. So, part 1 of the journey has been a success. Soon we move on to part 2: actually going to the town I’ll be living in. 

The little green men have landed

I didn't cry much at the airport, not because I wasn't sad or wasn't going to miss my family, quite the contrary. I didn't cry much at the airport because I was so terrified that my brain couldn't even process sadness. I had rather hoped that the crushing panic would lessen somewhat once I boarded the plane and couldn't change my mind, but I can tell you that sitting here in the dark in my boyfriend's room in Frankfurt (my sanctuary for the next couple of days before the next big push), it certainly has not. This is perhaps why I spent the last 2 hours staring blankly at the ceiling, paralyzed with fear. I enjoy traveling, meeting new people, eating new foods, but I think some of the joy in that is knowing that if anything goes really wrong, you're always going to be home soon-ish and everything will return to normal. I'm craving that feeling. I flew in to Frankfurt rather than Paris specifically to experience that second home feeling I get from being here among limited friends and something close to family, but it seems that my attempts to douse myself in (almost) normal isn't lessening the premature homesickness, but rather exacerbating the problem. I know that at some point I'll create a new normal for myself in Stenay, but the closer I get to leaving and creating this new life, the more my brain seems to rebel against it, and the more nauseatingly nervous I feel about things like figuring out the bus system in rural France. I know I'm just psyching myself out, but what I would give for some indication that it'll all be ok, you know, beyond people telling me "It'll all be ok".

I am a master procrastinator!

And what i mean by that is: OH MY GOD I'M LEAVING IN 3 DAYS AND I'M TOTALLY UNPREPARED!!! Obviously I'm excited for the epic adventure that is moving to a different country by myself, and I'm thrilled to have this amazing opportunity for job experience and linguistic improvement, but...I think I've been in denial about how much work moving entails and how many things that are desperately important to me that I'll have to give up (friends, family, cheeseboard pizza, english puns...etc). So in order to avoid tears, I've been completely ignoring the moving process. As a result, I'm moving in actually less than 3 days and I still haven't packed or said goodbye to some of my best friends. I really don't know if i can do it. I mean, obviously packing has to get done at some point, unless I want to spend a year in France naked and shivering in the cold, but the very thought of saying goodbye to the people who have, over the past few years, shaped me as a person, is terrifying. Even if none of you read this (you know who you are), I just want to thank you for being so thoughtful, so tolerant of my weirdness and so willing to be brutally honest with me. I couldn't have done it without you. I miss you already and desperately hope that we'll be able to meet again sometime. Don't forget to write or call or skype or whatever. So, before the hysterical crying starts, I'm going to attempt to do some laundry and decide which socks will be accompanying me to Stenay. Baby steps, right?

Ladies and Gentlemen, it's official!

Hello and welcome to my first feeble attempt at blogging. Please forgive my run-on sentences and tendency to ramble. For those of you who don't know me, my name is Lauren Gerken; the perpetual expat, obsessive baker and (if i do say so myself) cunning linguist. Follow me, if you will, on my (hopefully) epic quest to Stenay, France and my struggles in attempting to impart linguistic and cultural knowledge about the US and American English to French middle school students. Wish me luck. Anyway...today is a historic day not only because I've just gotten over my fear of publishing my disorganised jumble of thoughts and opinions out there on the web where anyone can read and judge them, but in fact because after months of waiting and worrying, my visa has arrived. Yes, on this day, I can proudly say that I, Lauren Gerken, am officially an English Teaching Assistant in the TAPIF program in the Académie de Nancy-Metz. Hopefully the unnecessarily sarcastic tales of my trials and tribulations of the coming year will be entertaining enough to keep you reading and maybe, just maybe, they'll be helpful to the next confused and scared batch of Assistants, who, in a year, will be exactly as nervous and unsure as I am now.