Despite my having told my students that my name is Rebecca (I like to save ‘Becky’ for my friends), I am being called, and more importantly, in class I am starting to answer to ‘Madame.’ This feels like some sort of milestone…

I believe the best translation for this sign, which I saw on the door of the restaurant I ate at last night with Doug and his dad would be: Fucking turn off your cellphones!

Last weekend I spent in Paris with Helen, my wonderful Welsh friend. Here are a few of the photos I particularly liked:

My table as I planned what I would do that day.

An angle of Notre Dame I’d never photographed.

Men playing petanque in the Jardin des Tuilleries.

Woman sketching the trees in the Jardin du Palais Royal.

Me feeling quite happy to be standing where I was standing.

See all the photos I took last weekend on my flickr page!

Today a woman in a hurry to get on a metro train basically hip checked me out of the way. As she was behind me, I suppose she thought that the only way to get on the train was to get me out of her way. I couldn’t believe it. I mean, I knew the French were terrible at waiting in lines, and have a different mentality when it comes to getting on and off trains (i.e. why wait for people to get off the train when you can just push your way on before they get a chance to free up the space?), but this was a first. I made it onto the train as well, and quickly moved down the car so I wouldn’t have to stand next to such a rude person.

I just got my first newsy email from my parents who are in India! They just left Dehli where they report 14 million people live. I can only imagine what getting on a bus or train there might be like! I don’t want to think that everyone here (or in India) would have acted like this woman. They are now in Jaipur and are sound like they are having a wonderful time! I am so proud of them.

Welcome to my new apartment! This apartment is, apparently, in a bourgeois part of Lille. In fact, the apartment was listed as “Appt bourgeaois.” But, is something truly bourgeois if the word “bourgeaois” is misspelled? Hmm?

Other angle of living room:

My *big* room:

First pancakes in new apartment! Yum..

The students at the school that I teach at in Lille seem not to have gotten the memo that standing directly in front of the entrance to a building in tightly crowded groups whose members are all smoking cigarettes is both gross and rude. Today they did themselves one better and actually stood inside the entrance way – I mean, it WAS raining – smoking away. The concept of requiring people to stand x number of meters away from the entrance of a building if one is going to smoke seems to have not occurred to the French quite yet. But giving dirty looks to the smoking students as you pass among them doesn’t have much effect as this type of behavior will, if anything, make you fit right in as they puff away landing dirty looks all over the place. Smoking and smiling just don’t go together, it seems. Yuck.

I have tried two times to write a post since I got back to France, to tell a little about getting the apartment in Lille (we got an apartment in Lille), to tell about getting another job (I got another job – 4 more hours a week) and to talk generally about what its like to be back. But, unfortunately, I have had very little time to reflect. Yet, I have been seeing lots of new things (a black cat running along a fence, for example), learning a lot (there are a lot of differences between students at a private communications school and those in a public engineering school, for example), and finding new places to get a good bite to eat (will post name of new little restaurant find when I remember it). I need to get the camera back out, to take pictures of the new apartment, and the new neighborhood. Life in a big city is very exciting. Once the gas gets turned on, and there is hot water, I’ll be at the new apartment full time and hopefully will have time to share some reflections.

How are you?

I am developing a new theory:  it is simply impossible to eat out at a Mexican restaurant and not leave feeling impossibly full. But the question remains: how does it happen? Is it the chips and salsa that I cannot resist because I am usually exceptionally hungry when I arrive at these Mexican restaurants? Tonight I think I can safely say that it was the lovely sopapilla that none of us could resist at the end of the meal. That and the pitcher of margaritas. Not to mention the fact that one is always given an inhuman amount of food in the first place.

Anyway, tonight we ate at El Jardin in north Denver (Commerce City, to be exact). It was so darn good, and I left feeling so full. But there are leftovers. Including sopapillas!

As some of my faithful readers know (because they are doing the same thing), I am spending the summer reading Infinite Jest, the David Foster Wallace thousand-page masterpiece. Someone, I’m not sure really who, decided that it would be a good idea to launch a group reading of I.J. this summer. See the blog about the effort: Infinite Summer blog.

I have been doing a good bit of reading at a favorite coffeeshop here in Denver: St. Mark’s. This place really doesn’t hold a candle to my favorite coffeeshop in Minneapolis/St. Paul (Coffee News Cafe), but what are you gonna do, right? Its still pretty cool, and has great iced tea, which I discovered today after not being able to finish a whole iced cofffee a couple of days ago for fear that my heart would beat out of my chest. I am not used to drinking iced coffee.

Here is St. Mark’s:

So far the reading is right on schedule: I’m on page 294. But need to keep up the pace if I want to keep up with the schedule. I don’t think I’m able to actually comment about the book itself at this time. I mean, where does one begin? So for the moment I will just say this: I am reading it. You should too! Its not too late to catch up…