First week of classes, a good start

I'm typing this Friday, from high atop the Foyer International, looking out over the rooftops past the Eiffel Tower to the odd skyscraper-thicket of La Defense.  I’m holding extra office hours here on a non-class day, having survived my first week of classes in pretty good form.

The group seems congenial, and so far at least they are buying what I am selling on multiple levels—though I know from somewhat brutal experience (cf Oxford 2011) that It Can Blow At Any Seam.  Not to say I’ve not had a couple of curve balls thrown—it wouldn’t be a Summer Abroad experience without them—but I feel good about the class qua class and qua group: they are responding intelligently to the readings (both on paper, and the greater “reading” of the city that I am trying to foment through the experiential directives), and I am not picking up much in the way of cliquishness or exclusivity as has occurred with a couple of the trips in the past.  It’s kind of amusing to hear them say, “That new group of students from Michigan—they are LOUD!  I see what you mean, John.”  The proof of the pudding, of course, will be to survive weekends when the temptation to party down gets too much to resist.

One curve ball is that my otherwise pretty quiet apartment turns out to be right next door to a major remodeling project that started… Monday morning.  This being an ancient building, the first step is demolition of old plaster and major wall-knocking, with the ouvrier Yuri pounding away with a sledge starting at 8:15 one morning.  That’d be bad enough, but until I can communicate successfully, he seems to be taking his smoke breaks in the couloir a meter from my (trapezoidal) front door, which is, as the Brits would say, “Dashed bad luck old boy.”  Luckily I have places to retreat to.

The class has a mix of abilities and talkativeness, and I am attempting to quash the over-eager one without being too brutal; at least she is semi-aware of it, and I have broken out my “you don’t need to raise your hand, you can be my go-to person in case the discussion flags” routine out of my Cagey Veteran Teacher toolbox.  Even so, she is the person who as regular as clockwork will jump ahead while I am discussing item 2 in a list, and ask a question about item 4, necessitating Zen Teacher calm after awhile, both to keep myself from snapping at her and to stave off the eye-rolling from the rest of the class, which she acknowledges her propensities have tended to earn her in the past.

As I did last year I am working hard at butterfly-check-ins with as many individuals as possible, again both for the positive and to prevent the negative (if an instructor is seen to be talking too frequently to this person or that, then expect “he played favorites” on the evals).  The in-class journaling that I do helps to facilitate good rapport right out of the chute, and with only 18 students I have much less of a struggle reading and making comments each day, and handing back their in-class blue-books the next day.  It’s such an interesting balance to strike: there are a handful of students who really appreciate some of the writing advice and grammar nomenclature that I am trying to slot in quickly at the beginning, and others who want me to lecture more about the readings or provide lots of background history.  Next week will be crucial, I think.  There wasn’t as much push-back against the Jefferson readings as I expected (maybe because R had made some cuts from years past), but as we move into Henry James’ Madame de Mauves things may get more difficult.  I also have one student whose journal entries are so different from everyone else’s that I wonder if I have a genius or a nut-case on my hands.  Maybe both…

Yesterday we had our first field trip of the course, which had already been booked by the time I had come on.  I had thought originally that it was a bad idea, but I see it is genius both in its placement and in its target: we “did” Versailles (palace only) and Giverny on the same day, leaving on a bus from in front of the hostel at 9 and returning by 6.  Now, I know that two hours and a quarter is too little a time for either of these sites, but there’s genius to it, too: we could join the conga lines, do our audioguide thing through the palace, and then reassemble at the top of the garden to return to the coach, and then leave the gardens and Trianon for another trip without the palace; since they would be receiving 6-day Paris Museum Passes (good for Versailles) and since they have Navigo passes that get them almost to V (or possibly all the way—the vendor who brought them may have paid for Zone 5 but I have to check), the garden and Trianons can be a separate outing at no extra cost to them, but they have a context for the readings and so on.  Then to continue on to Giverny—which is much less accessiible by public transit—and visit a very different locus of French cultural capital, joining a different conga line, makes perfect sense, especially since the topic of Wednesday’s in-class journaling was GK Chesterton’s “A traveller sees what he sees, a tourist sees what he is told to see.”

I have to admit that every field trip is fraught with peril for me as a leader, and the discrepancy between participant and soi-disant-responsable is never greater than when the students are milling around waiting to be shunted and I am churning over how / when / where to shunt.  Gauging how reliable they will be for rendezvous time, calibrating how explicit to be about meet-up points (“Take a look backwards.  Do you see what this path to the coach parking looks like from the direction you are likely to be coming at 4 o’clock? Good.”), and anticipating which of innumerable foulups will occur—all of these things help make me a bit less tolerant of dopey comments or complaints, yet I have been getting more skilled at forewarning about these things (“Just so you know, on field trip days, be aware that your question might be super-important to you at that particular time, but it is probably not the most important thing for me.  So don’t take it personally if I defer it til later”).  

This particular trip featured three interesting fillips: I had gotten the cell phone number of Dans the driver early that morning and it seemed like a lot of digits.  Turns out it was a Latvian number—who knew that 371 was the country code for Latvia?  Not me.  Without a 00 in front of it, sna marsh paw.  But he called me and all was fine.  Second thing was, Dans looked completely blank when I said hello and started talking French.  Uh-oh, what Amelie calls my guerilla-French (and I call my gorilla-French) must be even less comprehensible than I thought.  No, he wants English.  Turns out his French is worse than mine.  And his English is worse than my French.  And he seems to have never heard of Giverny.  No matter, he can look it up in his GPS while we do the palace.  All this is established as we punch through traffic, admire the parking lot on the peripherique going the other way, and try to communicate that due to a general strike threatened.

So then we get to Versailles and it looks as if they are letting tourists in.  I have to decide how much time will be necessary to make our 13:50 time at Giverny, but I don’t know how long it’ll take, since I don’t have A Mep and I just have my recollection from a week before of looking at ‘em on a big map back home.  I figure an hour fifteen max, and arbitrarily set a 12:20 rendezvous time.  We’re dropped off (I am giving the dude a big shine by not having him park in the bus parking—he gets to pocket the extortionate parking fee that they probably gave him to pay)—and he goes to a rest stop outside of town to hang for a couple hours and reset his GPS, 

Here comes curveball number three: While I’m finalizing with Dans, I have a student distribute tickets and she informs me that we’re two short.  Merde.  Brandon and Caroline have no tickets.  They are printed with names, arriving in two batches from our vendor, and of course I am blaming myself for somehow spacing out in the printing process or checking that they were all there.  [It doesn’t occur to me that only 17 were sent, and I did not catch the shortage.]  On the way up the cobblestones to the first of the two lines, a resuming-student who just visited Versailles with her family a few days before volunteers to give up her ticket to Caroline, and I give mine to Brandon—“Yeah he really looks like a Stenzel doesn’t he?” and we briefly debate re-assembling all the sheets and handing them in in a sheaf.  It could work, but it’s a risk I would rather not take, betting that thet won’t cross check names.  Lisa then heads across to the ticket office and buys a couple at full retail, ouch, and I hold our place in the second line, rejoining the group just after the headset disbursement.  Simple solution…

The rest of the day worked fine—the kids underestimated how long it’d take them to get to the bus, justifying my call on the timing, and we got to Giverny just in time.  Bummer that we couldn’t stop for food, but I told em about the options for afterward, and a good time was had.  Giverny was a bit of a mosh pit with several groups of schoolkids and the usual crush of other tourists and Monet-foamers.  Yet even that was great: look at where these kids are being taken—how many California students get taken to some artist’s monument?  Not many, and a bunch of my students got this.

OK I have to wrap this up—it’s evening, and the news about Brexit and the financial semi-meltdown has depressed me somewhat.  Well, a lot.  But after some excellent talks with students up on the terrace, and a trip to the grocery on my way home,  I took a good jog all the way up to Sacre Coeur and back this evening, and I feel better.

And any way you slice it: the place is pretty damned amazing.  I'll take some pictures of this apartment and environs soon.

John's Impromptu Paris Adventure Begins: 2016

Another foreign adventure begins.  I am comfortably ensconced in the rented apartment (I confess I take a different trajectory to it each time, which will continue for awhile as I get accustomed to the little warren of streets only a block or so from the Seine) and I had a good meeting with a couple of the Foyer Internationale staff yesterday afternoon after shooting over from Brussels, where I had some sweet time with brotha Julius and the girls, just as I'd hoped.  The train was a half hour late, which only meant that I had a bit more time to yak with J, and then it was a fast hour and a half straight to Paris-Nord.  The attacks of the past year manifested themselves in National Police i.d. checks on the train, and comically-youthful dudes with berets, flak-jackets and AR-15s serving as A Presence in the stations.

I seriously cannot believe how quiet this place is, even with windows open.  It’s a single room, but a big room, and because there are windows (dormers) on both sides, it feels more spacious than it is.  Because it’s at the very top of a listed building (the narrow stairs to the 3eme are historic, comically so), there are immense beams visible, though the decor is comfortably spare and modern, and the walk under the roof to get to the door is distinctly unprepossessing).  I don’t think I’ll be undertaking any gourmet meals here in the galley-kitchen, but I’ve made strong coffee, eaten some yogurt, and can whip up omelettes or simple meals without a problem.  Pictures will follow.

The weather is gray and the Parisians are fed up with it, but last night after dinner with Natacha near the Hotel de Ville, the slanting  sunlight turned things to magic and on the bridge we passed a guy proposing, I suppose European style (they had a stroller), getting off his knees and slipping a ring onto her finger.  It was literally happening just as we walked by, one of those strange and wonderful encounters straight out of a movie.  

The river is still so high that the bateaux-mouches are not yet running.  I haven’t walked or run the esplanades yet, but from the bridge that N and I crossed you could see the water lapping just a foot below what is normally a sizable drop—if you did as the Parisian young’uns do and hung your feet over as you sipped your wine, they’d be soaked.  That said, I’ll take this over oppressive heat, at least for a while.

Yesterday afternoon on my walk-around at the Foyer I had a pleasant contact with one of the directrices, who seemed impressed both by my attempts at French and by my apparent willingness to play ball with them in terms of enforcing the rules of the place.  The key will be to clarify to these kids that this is a residence and not a hotel, and to really set the tone early and often that the lamentably common Lumpen-behavior of American Students Abroad just won’t cut it.  I’ll be doing my orientation this afternoon (I’ve already had a message from one student with a missed flight) and passing along these and other Uncle Charles policies, before doing a bit of a walk-around in the exquisitely touristique ‘hood along the Boulevard St Michel between the Luxembourg Gardens and Notre Dame.

OK that is my allotted time, and Peregrinator gets rolling again.  Though this course won’t have as many moving parts as the Grand Tour, there are still myriad details to work through, not to mention a constant impetus to read and inform myself about the subject matter so that I am not winging it academically!  

New Zealand in retrospect, pictures to follow

Wish I could say it's been completely "no news is good news" on the blog front, although I have to say the past week has been ... unusual.  I am typing this in the lobby of the Radisson Blu Hotel near Nadi, Fiji, where we have been since Sunday night, when we caught the last flight in from Sydney.  Our frequent flier miles only allowed this routing, via Nadi to LAX, so we decided to extend the layover and make it a holiday at the end of our sojourn.  I haven't uploaded pix from the fun we had last week so I will do a skeletal of our New Zealand trip in hopes of filling in a little.

Last few days in Sydney were filled with some social engagements (thanking people who had helped us, dinners etc) and some grading (there was less of a sense of urgency than sometimes, in part because the program finished earlier than the Davis quarter) and lots of packing / organizing.  We went to Alex's school concert, again marveling at how easy it is to meet people late in the game when you have something in common--if we were here for more time we would have a lot more of a social life than we did, which is both a positive and a negative, given my work habits!

By Dec 5th we had split our bags into a leave-in-Sydney pile and a take-to-New-Zealand pile, and and thanks to an incredibly generous offer from our friend and colleague Lorraine we were able to dump the Sydney pile in her storeroom and not store in a hotel for 10 days.  Then it was off to Christchurch on Air New Zealand, complete with the new "Welcome Aboard Air Middle Earth" inflight briefing that you can view on YouTube.  Pretty cute how the whole country has tapped into the marketing swing this way--probably the biggest thing the country has ever had in that line.

Thankfully all the arrangements that my sister Kate had made for us turned out great--including the weather: we checked into our little airport motel on the outskirts, then had dinner with Am's old friend Dave who drove up from Timaru (that's loyalty for ya) so we at least took him out for dinner.  He finised by taking us on a tour of what remains of the Ch-Ch downtown, which is incredibly sobering: after the earthquakes there are giant scars where buildings used to be, lots of street work, and a general sense of rolling-up-sleeves or else this place will die.  Most impressive to me was a 10-story Rydges hotel still standing but eerily dark, not a light on anywhere: condemned to come down like so many others because of internal structural damage. 

Next morning back to the airport for a short flight to Queenstown, the adrenalin-sport capital of the world.  Alex was impressed that the plane only had four seats across, and that there was no security check-in.  That said, he was pretty gripped when we started bouncing around over the Southern Alps.  The plan was that we would meet Kate Rob and Kieran in the airport when they arrived from Palmerston North, the closest airport to their home in Wanganui, and sure enough we were all together in an hour or so. 

Though I had had a great visit from Kate in July, I hadn't seen Rob in 20 years, and hadn't seen Kieran since he was 3, so it was all quite amazing.  We picked up our Toyota Previa rental and mashed all the Stenzel-Mel gear in before heading for our palatial motel in Q.  There was a little drizzle but nothing like what the place often features--Am and I took a little walk up the hill trying to find a view after I had bailed out to a cafe for some grading for a couple of hours.  Once again I marvelled at the ways NZ was set up for different types of tourists, from campers to conventional motel-dwellers.  These holiday parks / motor hotels all featured a variety of modes from tents to RV pads to self-contained units like the ones we packed into, with better appointed kitchens in some cases than our "boutique apartment" in Mosman.

Next day we drove down to Te Anau, winding through lake country redolent of the Tolkien movies, slotting in a picnic by the far arm of Lake Wakatipu in between rain showers, before another motel just across the road from Lake Te Anau from whence weather willing we would take a bus to a boat to Milford Sound.  That's when Kate's weather karma really kicked in: unlike the other 300 days of the year, we had beautiful clearing skies, enough recent rain that the waterfalls were running, AND the road to Milford was open again after being closed for several days by a slide. 

More: our deadpan-delivery bus driver, the amazing boat journey, the stunning drive, the glow-worm caves, the return to Q complete with sunny swims, last night in Q, then John learns to drive on the left in a rental car, up to Wanaka and thence over Haast Pass and dow to the West Coast, etc.