Vers, Poux et Autres Parasites de l'Humain

Sending kids to school is just an invitation for illness to come party at your house. That plague invested centre of learning seems to harbour all that, surely in the 21st Century, we should have stamped out around the same time as Smallpox.

Ew. Yuk. Why oh why do these things exist?!

But, apparently not...

So, in the past month I've been subject to an infestation of head lice (I didn't actually get them, but the friendly warning letter that came home from Marc's school was enough to get me running through my hair with nit combs twice a day and soaking it in tea tree solution - and, no Sarah, I didn't feel the need to announce it to everyone I know).

Just the other weekend, the newest residents, namely 'worms', were casually introduced at the dinner table; 'Yeah, so Marc has worms. We've all got to take some drugs. Don't you just love kids.'

No, is the answer to that rhetorical statement. Right now, I do not. Thankfully, this common parasite has been around long enough (and in enough species) for the human race to have developed pretty effective drugs, so just one dose of it kills off any possibility of them for two weeks, when any remaining eggs apparently start hatching and it's good idea to re-dose yourself with the stuff. Just in case. I've been hoovering and washing everything in sight all week. Just found out that household detergents do nothing to the eggs though so tempted to start throwing bleach around.

Absolutely disgusting. I'm itching all over just thinking about it.

No, I'm not deluded and I knew about these before, but the reality is just something else... Working in childcare before you have your own should probably be banned as it must put so many people off! If everyone did it, I think the human race would be extinct right now.

I just can't wait to find out what's next! Fingers crossed that's not Giardia or Scabies. Half expecting him to come back with Ebola. Eurgh.

Où Sont Les Cours de Français?

In order to help me to improve my French (what's the point of moving to France if you're not going to learn the language...?), Fran has helped me to sign up for French lessons here.

The main French classes are run by an organisation called 'AVF' who are a bit like a PTA/WI style organisation who run activities and events in the local area. We went to sign up a couple of weeks ago and they were really disorganised. They had lots of tables all scattered around with no clear organisation. It took us around 10 minutes just to work out that we had to register with AVF before being able to sign up for classes and other activities, and then another 5 trying to work out which table was the registration table...

We finally got me all signed up for Thursday morning French class, and the lady at the table told us that she'd 'see me next week'.

One week later on a Thursday morning....

Off we go to find French classes! I got up really early and we left around 10 minutes extra to find this class as Fran wasn't sure exactly where it was. We walked about 15 mins to what seemed like a carpark with flats and small businesses around it and wandered up to a few of these buildings/tried doors etc. 

We wandered into a community centre style building, and a elderly daycare centre, and into what turned out to be residential flats, but couldn't find French class...

About 40 mins later, we decided to walk over to the AVF building (tiny little library style building with several 50+ clueless ladies). Fran went in to ask while I pushed the pram around outside (Aurianne was going to sleep). Apparently the conversation went something like this:

Fran: "Hi, I'm here with my au pair [points out of window at me] and we were told French classes started today at xyz building but we can't seem to find it."

Lady 1: "Oooh, french class? I don't know. Marie-Antoinette do you know about French class?"
Lady 2: "Hmm, no Marie-Christine (they're all called 'Marie-something', says Fran), I don't know about French classes. Perhaps Marie-Clare knows?"

Lady 3: "I don't know Marie-Christine or Marie-Antoinette, perhaps there's some paper somewhere that has some kind of useful information on i?"
*queue everyone blindly looking at bits of paper*
Lady 2: "Ah, no Marie Clare, I just can't find anything about it anywhere"
Fran: "Perhaps there's a phone number for the French teacher? Or perhaps you could just send me/cate an email when you find out?"
Lady 1: "Oh, no. I don't think we have a number. Marie-Antoinette, do you know about a number for a French teacher?"

... and on it went...

Fran managed to get pretty much no information out of them, but they did find out that classes were due to start the first week of October, so that was something at least!

While we were there Fran also asked if they would put up a notice on their website about an afternoon for au pairs to meet as I've yet to meet any. They were insistent that I would meet au pairs at French class and at all the social activities AVF runs which, by the way, I really had to come to, "here's another useless bit of paper which tells you what we've got going on, and on which days, but with absolutely no information about times or locations! If you wanted to find out more, there's no contact or website information either, so you'll just have to guess!" (I've been given 3 of these so far).

Fran tried to explain that as most of the social activities were likely held in the evenings, or run into school pick up/drop off times, that most au pairs would be working and therefore unable to attend. She also explained the logic that if you have 3 different French classes, and 6 au pairs, the chance that all of them would ever actually meet is quite unlikely as they may not all go to the same ones... They didn't understand this either, obviously.

A couple of days later, I had a phone call on my french phone from one of the ladies from AVF (Monique, I believe). I think she was trying to tell me about what day French classes started, and that they were with someone called Colette, however I'm not sure, as this phone call was all in French. I kept asking her if she could please speak a little slower, but she just kept speaking at the same speed, but a little louder/clearer instead. 

Also, in my opinion, it's a little stupid to call people in French to give them vital information about a French class that they were probably attending because they didn't understand French... No? Just me?

Alsace le Soir

As a historian, Helene has lots of interesting things to talk about. She told me lots about the history of the area we were going to – Alsace. It was an area that was taken over by the Germans during WWII and so had a lot of German influences. She also told me about the Saint-Laurent cross which is on a few mountains around here (thought I might be able to find more info about it online but Google is failing me). Her husband Benoit was from Ventron and that he told people he was German. I was really interested about this. It seems odd to me that an area outside of Germany would want to call themselves German after the atrocities of the war. She kept saying that the area didn’t have national pride for any particular nation before or after – yet she was saying that people from that area call themselves Germans…

The Alsace region looks very German. I think if I didn’t know any better than I would have thought it was Germany! It also seemed quite old and a bit rundown; most people hadn’t repainted their shutters, broken garden fences etc. but maybe that’s just rural France in general?

It’s an interesting area though. Apparently the schools in Alsace don’t have to follow the French National Curriculum and can adopt the German version if they want to, or just make something else up entirely. Lots of schools also teach in German. Very strange!

As we travelled through, Helene promised to take me to visit lots of the local villages properly. She said that somewhere near they made the proper German pretzels, and that there was lots of local German sausage shops too. There was also apparently lots of interesting historical sites which, again, she promised to take me to visit.

We arrived in Saulxures-sur-Moselettes at around 5:30pm. Helene decided to stop at the shop on the way to the house as we needed food. I decided to go in with her as I needed a few things – face wipes and paper etc. I didn’t realise but France doesn’t really make basic things like lined paper so I had to buy squared paper (like the stuff we use for maths in UK) instead - very annoying. I did manage to get myself some more fruit juice though.

It was around this point that Helene told me that there wasn’t any internet at her house. Not impressed. Apparently they sometimes went to the ‘Maison de Tourisme’ (Tourist House) to get internet but as we drove past it we saw it had been burnt down… Helpful.

We finally got to their house at around 7pm. It was in quite a pretty area next to a farm and was a very old house. More to come about the house later…

Helene was very tired but we still worked out way round all the bedrooms making beds and vacuuming the rooms (well, I vacuumed the rooms). We then, finally, got to have something to eat!

Helene told me all about how her sister was very strict and hadn’t let the children eat with the rest of the family in Corsica. She had thought it very mean (I didn’t) and said that her children were all very constipated from eating too much pasta and bread, but not many vegetables. It’s for this reason that we ate pretty much nothing but vegetables for the next week.

For dinner we had a really nice creamy vegetable soup, followed by lentils with hot dog sausage bits in it. For desert it was natural yoghurt (which all the kids put 4-5 teaspoons of sugar into – disgusting) and I had a peach.

Apparently her oldest daughter, Alienor, is allergic to just about everything – almost all types of fruit, nuts, some vegetables etc. Helene says it is because she let her try everything before she was 1yr old and so for her other children she only gave them plain potato, milk and bread (or something super plain like that) until they were almost 2! Therefore, the family didn’t eat much fruit and continued to eat not much fruit for the whole time I was there…

No pictures to cover this part I'm afraid, and I didn't take that many pictures during most of my time in the Vosges either - sorry!