Ma rue, mon quartier

J’habite rue Alphand, dans le 13eme arrondissement de Paris. Le nom de ma rue vient du nom du proprietaire du terrain. La station de metro la plus proche de chez moi est Corvisart, du nom de le médecin personnel de Napoleon. L’Eglise de Saint Anne est le monument le plus proche de chez moi.

 

First week....accomplished!

I knew that it would be tough but I certainly didn't expect the teachers to start like this! During his first week of school Josh had to pass two dictation test, read and translate a page (16 lines) and learn by heart a poem....in French! Are they out of their mind? 

When they talked about a "full immersion" in French, I expected them to start slowly and then increase little by little the amount of lessons. Isn't this a bi-lingual school? Instead, the French lessons are ENTIRELY in French....And then I remembered what my friend Abigail told me about her experience in France years ago. Dear Abigail, how right were you!?!

So far Josh didn't complain and I am so happy and grateful for this! He loves to write with the fountain pen and he loves the cafeteria (he says that it's the best food he ever had in a school ...) but I'm not sure he loves to write every day his homework on the agenda. Not yet! 

We celebrated the end of his first week with a stop in a beautiful Patisserie et Chocolaterie and here is what he got:

It's a "Religieuse chocolat": une étonnante puissance de goût caractérise notre crème au chocolat.

Talking about food, we started to explore our neighborhood more intensively and yesterday we visited the  "fromagerie" Quatrehomme, at the corner of the street. It's a cheese-shop and you can tell that the products are excellent 100 feet away by the smell! We had the Camembert au Calvados....exquisite!

http://fannypacktravel.wordpress.com/2011/06/30/linstitution-du-fromage-a-paris-fromagerie-quatrehomme/

 

  

The problem now it that we'll have to sterilize the refrigerator! 

Today my mother arrived and she'll stay a week or so. Obviously she loved everything, even the house (I still have to adjust to the colors of the walls...). We went around a couple of hours and at the end she was exhausted by the amount of stairs and metro lines we had to change! 

But she's happy and relaxed, much more than she came to visit us in South Pasadena. Even the garbage cans were nicer! No comments...

We went to dinner tonight in this restaurant close to our house: it's always packed so you'll have to wait about half an hour to get your table (and they don't take the reservation) but it's unequivocally worth the line! It's called "Chez Gladines": the food is really good (Josh had an "Omelette Basque" and my mom had an "Escalope de veau montagnard" while I decided to taste the "Magret de canard"), the size of the servings is more American than French and the atmosphere is quite friendly. But don't go there if you are on your first date: too crowded, not romantic. Let's say that nobody cared if Josh started to play with his fork!

Unfortunately neither of us were able to convince Josh to try the infamous escargots but we'll try again...perhaps next time we'll tell him that those brown spongy things covered with green cream are only mushrooms. 

Who knows? He might try them.

Tomorrow Versailles! And the weather forecast says: sunny day. HURRAY!

La rentree' (aka first day of school)

Here I am, Monday, September 5th.

My son, the Italian Giovanni Sebastiano, who lives in USA, attended his first day of school in a French class....Is he going to be mad at us  for all this changes when he'll be 14? Is he going to blame us for moving him from a Day Care in Torino  into USC day care then Monterey Hills School followed by Marengo Elementary and then EABJM in Paris to end back next year again (hopefully) in Marengo  in 6 years? Or is he going to appreciate the opportunity we gave him as a kid to explore and see new things?

Here I am, a scared mom, looking around all these new faces, with my endless anxiety and my continuous doubts....did I liked, when I was in elementary school, to be moved back and forth from one American school in Al-Khobar to an Italian school in Jeddah then to Italy? Not really, but my parents never asked....

I hope that he's going to be strong and self-confident and learn that friendship doesn't depend on the distance between houses. 

Am I the only mom who has these feelings?

He didn't seem to be anxious this morning: he saw some familiar faces, the kids that we already met a couple of days ago. He had his new backpack (no wheels allowed) loaded with 48 lbs of material (I'm not kidding, we had to buy all the books, notebooks etc).

When the French teacher arrived, he picked up his desk and waved goodbye to me just before the door was closed. Here she is, speaking a mixed language...

He later told me that they had to sort all the material, make sure they knew where to put the French books and the English books, how to use the agenda (they're supposed to write down every day the assignments), how to use correctly the fountain pen, etc .

So far, everything looks fine. Tomorrow he'll try the cafeteria... The menu is soooooo French!!!! 

Surprise !!!

This afternoon I took Josh to the Jardin du Luxembourg, for a play date with his new friend Louis. They still have some issues in understanding each other since he is British and his mother is Australian....and Josh is Italian! But they're kids, so I think they'll going to sort things out with the accent very soon. Between the 2 pm rain and the 4 pm rain they were able to have fun at the playground...then Louis's dad exclaimed: "Wow, it's 4 pm! Shouldn't we have tea?". Very British!!!

We went to their home so that the kids could play a bit more and here comes the surprise.... 

Yeah! That's her, Mrs Statue of Liberty....actually this is the bronze model used by the artist for the final statue in NY. I forgot it was there...next to it there's a very young and tiny American oak tree, planted some years ago, in memory of the victims of September 11, 2001. Very touching.

Parents in Adaptation picnic

Who's to say that French and Americans are different? I found so many similarities in moving to USA and then to France. The problems of renting a house (if you don't have a Bank account, you can't rent it), the problem of opening a Bank account (if you don't have a house, you can't open a Bank account)...same problems, whether you are speaking in English or in French. 

Now I know they are similar also in welcoming new families to a school: all thanks to a PiA organization, very similar to the PTA in our South Pasadena school. As soon as we had Josh enrolled, they started sending us emails and offering us all types of information through their website. They welcome and support new parents who arrive from abroad. Their website is entirely bilingual and you can find several information regarding the school and the summer camps of course, but also the weather, the Paris transportation system, blogs, cafe', restaurants, markets, language schools, extracurricular activities, doctors, babysitter, yoga, and so much more. 

We went to the first meeting with PiA this Saturday, at the Champs de Mars, just in front of the Tour Eiffel. There were probably a hundred of new parents, coming from all over the world. All the volunteer parents had their T-shirt with their names on it and gave us our personal tags  with a color code for our son's class, so that we could look for other classmate parents just by looking at it. The Peer Leader kids (middle and high school) had a pink shirt with the logo WELCOME written in all different languages: as soon as we arrived they picked up Josh and put him together with other kids in the same class and organized for them all sorts of games. It was really well organized. We met several other moms and dads and spent a couple of hours talking with them and getting to know each other. The location of course was spectacular and luckily the weather was warm. 

 

Now here is the BIG difference between Americans and French: in USA you would never organize such a huge meeting without offering food or drinks...here, despite being a "picnic" and being organized right at lunch time (between 11 am and 1 pm), no food at all. We had to bring our own bottle of water and we were courtesy invited to buy our lunch at one of the  kiosks that are all around the Champs de Mars!

By 1 pm we were starving and Josh was exhausted after so much playing and running: so we decided to go back home and cool off in our shaded patio.

Hint for the Americans coming to France: if you're invited to a picnic, don't assume they're going to feed you!  Just bring your own stuff.

Mice vs Squirrels

Yesterday we went walking to a park nearby, the Parc Montsouris. It's only a couple of blocks away from our home and since it's still summer holiday here, it was packed with kids and parents and, of course, grandparents. 

Apparently the name of the park was once Moque Souris (literally "mock mice") because of the number of rodents....well, we didn't see rodents, rather we saw a big lake with ducks and ....black and white swans. Beautiful! 

There were hundreds of giant Asian carps in the lake, as big as sharks! 

I sat on a bench and observed my son trying to interact with the French kids: fortunately he is not shy and there's always the international (i.e. Italian) hand language. Then he met some French-British kids who played soccer with him. Bad idea: how do you expect to do such a sport near a lake without the ball ending in the water? 

Paris day 16. It's raining again

That's right, every day around 5 pm the rain arrives...also the meteo reminds me of California and its sunny weather. But it's ok, I missed the seasons in South Pasadena, and in a few weeks I will finally be able to wear again something made out of wool instead of the 3 layers of cotton!

Anyway, we were able to enjoy a few hours of warm temperature this Saturday so we all went to see the Louvre.

The first surprise was this one: 

Josh couldn't believe his eyes. He thought that the street was named after his school...it would have been nice, but actually the plate refers to the Battle of Marengo ...which is in Piedmont (close to our home Torino)...if you are curious about it, just read here: http://www.historyofwar.org/articles/battles_marengo.html

Sorry Marengo Elementary School, there's a more famous and ancient Marengo! But you're still the first, in our heart.

The second surprise was that, despite being in the high-middle season and despite the reviews, the length of the line was less than five minutes. This time I was able to visit the museum...the last time I've been here I ended up in the medical room as soon as I walked through the entrance (kidney stones!). Nothing to say about the doctors and the nurses at the Louvre, but the museum is much better! 

We walked and walked through endless corridors and I realized that in one year I visited the Metropolitan in NY, the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg and now the Louvre! Wows!
This is the Egyptian Gallery, one of Josh's favorite spots. 

Giuseppe especially appreciated the giant stinky feet of Ramses II.

So here is Josh's comment in front of La Gioconda (aka The Mona Lisa):"It's so small!...Can I touch it?". No, honey, you obviously can't unless you want to verify the security system...and see if Dan Brown got it right in his "Da Vinci code" (btw, no trace of Jacques Saunieres's murder scene in the Grand Gallery).

Giuseppe in front of Arcimboldo's Four Seasons. Who won the price for the biggest nose?

After 3 hours we decided to give up...we still have another year to complete the visit! Of course there was a major thunderstorm waiting for us at the exit but what a better excuse to sneak in a Cafe' and get ourselves a pain au chocolat?

The news about this last few days are that we met the other parents in the Adaptation class and we found out: 1) there is no Chinese, since the kids will struggle with enough French; 2) three other kids are from USA and one is from Italy. Unfortunately the library at the school is only for grown ups so I'll need to enroll us in the American Library in Paris. Too bad. 

Now it's time for me to stop writing and go to bed. I'm exhausted since today I went back to the surgery room, from 8 am to 5.30 pm. I was excited, of course...kind of nice being again a surgeon! Congrats to myself. The good thing about waking up in Paris at 6 am is that the boulangerie in front of us is already open and you can buy excellent croissants, warm and just out of the oven. No Starbucks here!