We're back from our homestays!!

April 15, 2008

Bonjour, nos familles et nos amis!!

Well, we’re back together as a group after 2 weeks on our own in our homestays on various farms. We all had a blast, and everyone had some great experience they wanted to share with the group, and consequently, with you too. We all discussed our homestays in a roundtable discussion about our experiences and the kind of work we did on the farm, and then chose our highlights, our lowlights, and then a story, if we felt inclined to share one.

Carly stayed on a vineyard in the Bordeaux region, with a family of a mother, a father and a brother, aged 21. Her work involved using a handheld tool, much like a pistol, to attach tape to the wires of the vines to hold them up. The tape was accompanied by staples. Carly has a love of motorcycles, and her highlight was going to a motorcycle show at night to see over 300 motorcycles with her homestay brother. Her lowlight, and resulting epic story, was getting sick in the second week and throwing up in her room, which was attached to a very personal family story.

Rebecca was on a farm of what the French call “forgotten vegetables.” She lived in the same house as a theater troupe. She says she learned a lot about ‘aromatic plants’ and says it doesn’t sound as good in English. Her meals were often given very late, 10:30 PM or later. Her family was a mother and a daughter, age 15. Her family took her to a music festival, to the theater and to Bordeaux, as well as to the markets to sell their vegetables. Rebecca’s work was to unload the vegetables from the car and to then tag all the vegetables with their names and prices. She says the first time she did it, she had about 75% of the vegetables correct, but the second time she had 99%! Her mother was an interesting person who was born in Algeria, lived in India, and knew a little Italian. To describe it, Rebecca said, “My whole homestay was a passive aggressive fight with a gay man. I showed Fred who’s boss.” Fred was Rebecca’s housemate who lived across the hall from her, who would sing songs loudly in the shower and folded his clothes in the hallway.

Jack, too, stayed on a vineyard in a family of a mother, father, brother and sister. His average work day consisted of “man’s” work on a vineyard: “planting the points” or nailing posts into the ground to hold up the vines, from 8:30 to noon and then from 12:30 to 5:00. He also went to the schools of his homestay siblings: the middle-school (le collège) and the high-school (le lycée). He says at the brother’s school, the brother almost got into a fight, which Jack stepped in to break up. He went with a worker at the vineyard to a music show at a club in Bordeaux called The Heretic, a show which proved to be quite interesting as it was a punk show! He says he had a great time, even if sometimes he couldn’t understand the names of the bands. He also attended English classes at the schools he went to and said that they asked him a lot of questions which he answered in English, and said that the teachers spoke with British accents.

Emma was also on a vineyard (I bet you’ve gathered by now that most of us were on vineyards!) and her work day was the same as Carly’s, only she didn’t use a pistol to tape the vines to the wires, instead using her own hands. She lived with parents and two sisters aged 11 and 19. The younger sister became Emma’s “professor” in French, including homework and lessons (Emma learned a poem, but she refuses to recite it for us at the time of writing this). She says her family was very humorous, and very unique: the mother moved to France from Poland and her father is Spanish, but they both spoke perfect French. She says the kitchen was being redone and that the people who worked on it were very funny. They were guys from the town and one guy enjoyed talking to himself and skipping work to work on other people’s homes in town. She went to Bordeaux with her older sister to post posters advertising the wine for an upcoming convention, and then they all went to dinner with friends. No doubt it was intimidating, but she also claims it was the best night and she had a fantastic time talking to les jeunes.

Colin likes to say his overall experience was “like a small Bible.” Colin’s farm was dairy products: “Really good cheese, really good yogurt… okay butter.” The farm was very clean, and there were about 100 cows, 25 goats, a baby mule, some pigs and some chickens. His job was to give milk to the baby goats. His claim is that it sounds adorable until you actually feed the baby goats, which he says smell bad and are stupid and jump on you like puppies. He knows now how to prepare baby goat milk, so if you have baby goats that need feeding, Colin’s your man. He had three very interesting stories to share: he accidentally let all the adult goats out of their pen and had to fetch the homestay parents so they could wrangle them back in. He also accidentally flooded half of the first floor after the shower didn’t drain properly, causing overflow into the other rooms. And lastly, he witnessed a stillborn cow birth, which he said was interesting but, naturally, a little distressing. His parents did traditional Irish dancing as a hobby and says that the dancing was much like Larry Muir’s contradancing class except with Irish music. His father played the accordion, which Colin says is an underrated instrument: “It’s like if a saxophone and a piano had a kid.” The most interesting thing he discovered was that death on the farm wasn’t as shocking as he thought it would be, because it is accepted.

Claire too had an interesting experience. She says she wasn’t quite sure what her farm was, as they did a lot of things: they kept and sold chickens, they cultivated a small bit of pine forest, they farmed cereal grains and they also kept bees for honey. Her family consisted of a mother, father and four brothers ranging in ages from 7 to 17. Her first day, she cleaned the screens in beehives with a butter knife and a screwdriver, but most of the time what she did was varied. She says the whole family, including grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins all lived on the farm as a big business, and along with that, the family also ran a small house to harbor the religious pilgrims following the path of St. Jacques from France to the coast of Spain. She says the highlight of her time was when the youngest son would teach her various French board games and card games.

Joanna was on a vineyard with a 70-year-old couple, the couple’s son and their grandsons. She said the son, in his thirties, really liked the French soccer player Zidane and told a story about how one time he followed Zidane to a restaurant after a game and asked for his autograph. Her homestay mother was “very into being French” and would often tell Joanna, “What I’m doing now is very French.” On her vineyard worked a very interesting man who would sing songs about America whenever she walked by, including the National Anthem. The son had two young sons, ages 8 and 12, who were very cute and sweet. Her lowlight was a constant embarrassment of going the wrong way to do the traditional French greeting of bisous (kisses in the air next to both cheeks).

Esme was on a vineyard as well, with a man and his parents, but no children. She said it was much like going to stay at her grandparent’s house for two weeks, including the food and décor, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t have a good time with them. She said her first three days were spent sitting for ten hours in a room with a bunch of old French men at a wine tasting convention. She says she was the only girl in the room. The parents run a gite on their property which Esme stayed in, mostly alone except for two masons with whom she talked a lot. Her work included working in the field, like weeding with hoes. Her homestay was different as she was not actually in the Bordeaux region, but rather in the Medoc region. She said she spent a lot of time walking and got lost a few times, but always managed to find her way back to the farm.

And last but certainly not least, me, Rachel. I stayed on an organic beef farm with a family of a father, mother and two sons ages 13 and 17. I regret saying I didn’t have much work, though I did do a little gardening and I went with the father on all his errands. My lowlight was a good time turned bad the next day after I went bike-riding (although it was more like spur-of-the-moment spelunking through thorns) with my younger homestay brother and his friend. That was not the bad part, but rather the bad part was when I discovered the next day a thorn buried in my thumb, at the base of the nail in the corner. I managed to dig it out but it hurt a ton! I don’t have any extreme highlights, because my whole experience was wonderful, but one of the best moments was my last night, when we had company over and at the end, they brought out home made cream puffs with birthday candles in mine, and sang “Happy Birthday” in English. It was so touching! Also interesting, and incredibly fun, were the two nights where my homestay father took me to a local theater to see the rehearsals of two plays, one play with kids my age and one play with adults. Most of the kids were younger than me but I did make a new penpal friend while at their rehearsal and we played theater games, which is always fun. The play they were rehearsing was strange, but not in a bad way. It was very much contemporary and very good. The adults were doing more of a comedy piece, which was actually pretty funny and I could understand most of it after the third time viewing the scene. There was a part where they sang in English, which I helped them with, since they wanted help with pronunciation. It was great to see the rehearsal, and cool to see how similar it is even globally between the community theater and the theater at Bush. The process was pretty much the same, which was comforting, but different because it was with older people, in another language. It was fantastic and really jump-started my research on French theater for my project in Paris.

Don’t forget that if you would like to hear more about our experiences, as some of us have some other intensely riveting stories (I’m not just saying that to sound like an advertisement or a book review, but I do mean that some of us had some very surreal experiences that can only be shared one-on-one! I know I did!), you can always ask us to tell you some stories and we’ll be more than happy to comply.

At the moment, I am sitting in the refectory in the chateau in Argy. It’s very beautiful here, but it’s been kind of rainy and cloudy. I hear it’s been snowing back home in Seattle, so at least we have a little more fortune than you folks, but it is very cold sometimes (my fingers are a little cold right now) because of the stone walls, and because it is so airy. We’re all staying in a gite onsite, with all the girls in one room and the boys in the other. There’s been a good amount of work, including cleaning out a small moat, feeding the donkeys and moving carriages. We’ve been here for a day so far and we have three weeks here, so we’re still all adapting to the change from being away from our familles d’acceuil and back together, still swapping stories. It’s a huge change, and it’s very tiring, but also pretty cool. There’s a lot of nature around here. None of us have yet had the opportunity to go into town, but this weekend we are all planning to do so. This week has actually been doubly exciting because of the two birthdays that are happening! Yesterday, April 14th, Joanna turned 17 grand years of age and, incidentally, this Friday the 18th is my own birthday. It’s a very exciting time for all of us!

We miss you all very much and you can expect an update in the coming weeks from Emma. Thanks for reading and good luck with your midterms!

-Rachel