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Here I come, America! Taking a vacation to the gool ol' US of A. I'll try to update but understand I'll be very busy!
This is going to be a very small post but I just had to share my little mishap. A lot of French and English words are very similar. Therefore, if I don't know a word in French I will say it in English with a French accent. If the person I'm talking to doesn't flinch, I know it worked. If they give a confused look, I know I made an oopsie. Examples: "different" becomes "dee-fair-ahnt", impossible "eem-poh-see-bleh", and so on.
So I was talking to my tutor about my upcoming visit to the US. I said I was scared because I don't do well with preservatives, only I didn't know the word for preservative so I Frenchified it "pray-zair-vah-teef" and got a very odd look. "Quoi? (What?)" she said. I'm supposed to talk it out in French, not just say the word in English, so I said, in French, "Like to make food last longer." "Ah, non non non," she says laughing "c'est 'conservateur'" then, switching to English, informs me "préservatif means 'condom'". No wonder why she gave me such an odd look, I just told my teacher very nonchalantly that I'm scared to go back to the US because I don't do well with condoms!! On June 21st, a Sunday and the first day of Summer, Besançon held it's annual music festival. Our tutor was going to be playing by the Rivotte, about a 20 minute walk from our apartment, so we planned on seeing her and then listening to other artists as they would be scattered all over the city. It was a pretty crummy day weather-wise, either raining or misting all day long. We set out at around noon to head to Rivotte. To our surprise, we passed no one on the way there. Once we got there, no bands were playing either! We had gotten there by walking along the river, so heading back we decided to take a different route that would bring us through much of center city. Nothing! We figured everything got cancelled due to the rain and headed back to the apartment to have a lazy Sunday. At somewhere between 5 and 6 pm, we suddenly started hearing music through our open windows. At first I was too tired and miserable to go back out and venture, the walking and rain had agitated my bad leg, but some jazz music made it's way to my ear and we went out in search for it. Well, the city was transformed! Every corner and side street had musicians playing. From a couple kids rapping, to rock bands, to a couple old men playing accordions, to solo acoustic guitar, every genre imaginable was being played. I never did find my jazz trumpet, so we joined our friends at a bar right around the corner from the apartment. It was in a large plaza so it had been turned into one of the larger "main stages" of the area. Currently an electro-pop type band was playing. We asked our friends why it was on a Sunday and why it started so late. Apparently, all of France has a "fête de la musique" on the summer solstice no matter what day it is, also explaining starting late (since people would still be working if it had been a work day). I don't understand why they wouldn't take advantage of it being on the weekend by starting earlier, but I've noticed the French can be very slow to change their ways. If that's how it has always been, that's how it will most likely always be. A couple of weekends ago the Musée de Temps (Museum of Time) had a public exposition where watchmakers sold their watches and clocks. There were a couple vendors from Besançon, an antiques vendor, and about 5 big name brand vendors. The expo was really neat and it is now my goal to be able to purchase a grandfather clock made in Besançon. To honor the exposition, they also made the museum entry free for the weekend so we checked it out. The Musée de Temps is situated in a palace built in the early 1500's to the Perrenot family. Nicolas Perrenot was a close trusted advisor to Emperor Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire. He was made suzerain (feudal overlord) of Besançon and soon became the most powerful and rich family in the region. He constructed Palace Granvelle for his family and as a sign of his success and social ascent. In the late 1600's after the French conquest, Palace Granvelle became a home for governors. Louis XIV actually took the title of "Louvre" in a room of course now called the Louis XIV room (very creative) in 1683. In the 1800's it became a historical monument and then museum of one form or another throughout the years. In 2002 it became the Museum of Time, kind of a play on words as it both honors the historical events that occurred in and around Besançon since the Renaissance as well as honoring Besançon becoming the French capital of watchmaking in the 19th century thus joining together two definitions of the word "time" (French humor often heavily relies on word play which is why it doesn't translate well to other languages). The first floor mainly focused on major historical events of Besançon and Franche-Comté. Portraits of the Granvelle family are here as well as paintings of battles, sieges, and royal weddings. There are also enormous tapestries of the life of Charles V. The paintings were gruesome to behold. In 1635 Richelieu (chief minister to Louis XIII) and Louis XIII fully realized the potential Franche-Comté's location held and broke the treaty of neutrality between France and Franche-Comté, arguing there was reason to break it as Besançon gave asylum to Gaston D'Orléans - a conspirator against Richelieu and Louis XIII as well as brother to Louis XIII. This brought on the Ten Year War, a significant and dark time in Franche-Comté history. France was stretched pretty thin financially at the time, as they also were holding other battles against Spain as well as participating in the Thirty Year War. Due to this, France told their soldiers and hired help, "Yo, we got no money to pay you, so you need to pay yourself by looting and doing whatever you want to citizens." Obviously, this not only led to looting, but rape, torture, murder, burning of towns, and confiscation of land. At the same time the plague, which had been slowly creeping its way toward the area, took hold. An excerpt from the writings of Girardot Nozeroy detail what he saw: "In cities dogs and cats were delicate pieces, then the rats were required. In the end they came to human flesh, first in the army where the most fleshy parts of slain soldiers were boiled or roasted, and outside the camp pecked human flesh to eat: we discovered in the villages children murdered by their mothers to keep their dying brothers alive, and the face of cities were the face of death." In the end, it was estimated that Franche-Comté lost approximately 2/3 of it's 450,000 population. This was all depicted with brutal honesty in the paintings. I found it tough to view but at the same time was moved deeply. I don't know whether it was because America's battles were over 100 years later and times had changed or because it was "forgotten" when writing our history, but things like this were never depicted in American paintings of war. It's always guys in fancy dress shooting one another. The second floor was all about clockwork and the history of Besançon as the watch-making capital of France. It consists of 1,500 watches, blanks, and boxes, over 100 grandfather clocks, 2,000 engravings, tools, crystal oscillators and resonators. It also boasts the Leroy 01, the "most complicated watch in the world" consisting of 975 pieces. |
AuthorA US citizen discovering expatriation in France. Archives
February 2016
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