Positive stress

Finally back from Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines, which is often something of an escape for me, to a job where the stress is very different from my regular job. This week away the emotional/mental stress is mainly from exhibitors, in an industry where negotiation is common currency, who try to get a little bonus here and there, and complain about some things that not only can’t really be solved but that derive in part from their own manner of working to begin with (i.e. regularly complaining when a room full of tables lit by hundreds of lights where each exhibitors exceeds the agreed limit in wattage gets uncomfortably hot on a 30° day).

The bigger escape for me at Euromineral (or, more accurately in my case, Eurogem) is that the days are physically exhausting more than mentally so: The days start early and end late, involve a lot of running around, and each day the sleep deficit gets a bit deeper – it’s great. I don’t sleep long enough, but I sleep like a rock each night, and thus break continuous cycles of lack of sleep due to more negative stress which sometimes wakes me in the night, making me spend more time worrying about things gone wrong than finding good ways to fix them and, more importantly, avoid them in the future. It lets me concentrate on other people’s problems for a while, so that when I come back to mine my mind is clearer, and the big picture easier to see.

Today is a transition day – back to normal life in Mulhouse, catching up on sleep, household stuff, and connecting the big pictures thoughts that popped into my head over the past week, without being eclipsed (and forgotten) by other matters.

Georges est doux, Georges est frais, mais Georges n’est vraiment pas pratique

In the never ending pronunciation difficulties of “Heather” some people just give up and suggest calling me something more pronouncable. Inevitably they choose uncommon names; a few years ago it was Bernadette (which never stuck) and Sainte Marie this year they’re split between Heidi (the equivalent of Heather in German) and Ginette: the on-site electrician, Pierre, came up with that one – and since it’s stuck for the whole week, he has become George. The suggestion came from his assistant/side-kick and got funnier when he reminded me of an amusing Tic Tac ad that shows how TicTacs are better than yetis. Random? Absolutely.

Here and here are a couple more ads from the Georges series, but I haven’t been able to find the one where they play hide and seek.

Anything but perfect

I sometimes laugh about the way English words work their way into French, and are forever after used erroneously to mean other things, or at least in other ways, but us anglos are far from innocent of this. Maybe it’s because I’m hungry (sooooo hungry) but the first ones that come to mind for me are food-related.

How did we manage to turn “entrée”, as in the “entry” to the meal; the first of at least 2 courses, into the main course? How often do French people get totally confused looking at a menu in North America and see the appetizer list and the entrée list…and then dessert? I always joke, particularly when food-related customs raise eyebrows, that us North Americans are just a bunch of cretins anyway (I mean really, eating pizza with our fingers? How dare we!). I am also suddenly reminded of a friend that told me that after a meal they had a yoghurt for dessert (very common here) but had some cheese afterwards. How could we be so backwards? Cheese ALWAYS comes before dessert (although I have since learned that in the past it was the opposite!). This train of thought also takes me to an old colleague who would happily finish anyone’s lunch if they couldn’t, but once he’d had his dessert, he refused all offers; once he’d had his dessert, there was no going back.

On a different note, I’m not sure if this can be called an error, and it can certainly come as a surprise crossing from one culture into another, but while ordering filet mignon in Canada will get you beef, in France you’ll end up with pork.

The world of bad translations is always good for a laugh too. I’m not exactly sure how I would translate “crudités” (salad? greens? …) but when I saw “crudities”, I couldn’t help but imagine the server pulling out a string of inappropriate words.

A restaurant in Colmar (I’ve forgotten the name) is touristy enough to have a bilingual menu, but the English is rife with words that make you hope the translator didn’t get paid. I can’t imagine a tourist figuring out that lardoons is bacon bits (from the French “lardons”; bacon being “lard” while “bacon” refers to salted back bacon).

I need to try to remember to write these things down when I see them, because there are some really really good ones that I can’t seem to think of.

That’s a hardware problem

As is inevitably inevitable, Eurogem was not without its hitches. Despite repeated tests of everything the day before the exhibitors started arriving, the first day always has its quirks. The most irritating was the complete inability to get the computer working at the reception tent on site. It took a couple of hours before someone decided to follow the cables, strung all over the place to feed the ridiculous amount of kilowatts needed to run such an even, and found that someone had jammed a door (through which the key cable in question passed) closed, slicing the cord in half. So, the computer doesn’t work? I hope not!

The fish are just chillin’

Actually, our poor fish are probably doing anything but; since summer seems to have arrived over the past couple of days, the aquarium has been well over the recommended temperature, to the point that turning off the light didn’t seem to make any difference at all.

I’ve been bugging Luc to let me liberate more babies from the baby box, and today we actually let all those in the big box out, stuck all those in the little box into the big one, and used the little one as an ice box to try and cool the poor things down.

We started out with about a 15 or 20 (small) ice cubes, already worried that it might be too much. Those melted in no time, and the temperature was still much too high. Another box with double that, and we’ve almost reach the top end of the recommended 20 to 25° Celsius…but there are no more ice cubes for the moment. I hope that that will be enough until more ice cubes are ready!

Meanwhile, some of those we let out have already found their way back into the filter to hide. I had hoped that they were too big for that now, but no luck. Hopefully they’ll find their way back out at feeding time, and get stuck on the outside rather than on the inside when the get too big to pass through the openings.

Who knew fish could be so much work and worry!

Now THAT’s French

My cousin, Amy, is visiting me as part of a trip around Europe. In an effort to give her a somewhat authentic experience, we decided to get fresh pastries in the mornings. Yesterday I walked to the nearest bakery (less than a 5-minute walk away) that we had actually never tried, since we most often go to the bakery on Sunday mornings and it, like most, isn’t open then. Today though, it was a must to go to one near my old apartment which, aside from being open on Sunday mornings, also makes what they call cinnamon crosses that are just_so_good. The problem is, it’s a bit too far to walk when the purpose is getting breakfast, but really much to close to drive.

On a soon-to-be-related note, we have discussed getting bikes many times, but hadn’t gotten around to it. Lucky for us, Luc’s grandfather offered to lend us a pair of bicycles. We’ve had them for a week, but have been somewhat constrained by the fact that we don’t have locks. As a result, the only use they have seen was the trip from his garage to ours…until this morning.

Without locks, Luc had to come with me to the bakery, just to watch the bikes while I bought the pastries. The fact of being on a bike at all made me feel a bit more French, the fact that it is a woman’s bike even more so (I’ve never had a bike without a cross bar before), but the baguette held firmly in the rack on the back for the trip home just screamed “I AM FRENCH!” In fact, people driving by actually smiled at me, which I’m not sure I’ve ever seen (other than creepy people when I first arrived and was probably unwittingly giving off some kind of signals that screamed “I AM NOT FRENCH!”…Aimée, I know you remember!).

I wonder if, when the time comes that I can start applying for citizenship, they would accept that is proper integration into the French society. Then again, when I applied to become a normal contributing member of society that fact that I actually speak French didn’t seem to put me above those that don’t speak a word of it, and are now required to take government-paid French courses, so I’m afraid that riding a bike down the street with a baguette might not cut it…

German certified

Well, I am happy to announce that I (just barely) got my first-level German certificate! I’m not thrilled about the “just barely”, but not surprised either. I have not been thrilled with my learning from the start, and was in a course level that clearly exceeded my abilities, adding to my frustration and potentially further limiting my ability to progress. That said, I am glad to have a concrete piece of paper that says I can get by, even if my ventures into German with my favourite German clients is usually limited to “Ich brauche drei Zitrone” (I need three lemons) – thank you Babbel for that one! Incidentally, I can say that in Spanish too, but since I don’t have my certificate results yet, I’ll keep that one for later.

Evolving customer services

I’m a big fan of good customer service. Bad service really REALLY puts me off (like the time I went to the “best” steak tartar restaurant in Mulhouse, and it took 3 hours for us to get served our respective raw meats – not to mention the fact that we watched people that arrived after us get served before us). Unpleasant service angers me (like the pizzeria up the street from my work where servers are often downright rude). But I probably don’t talk about good service often enough (like the time I sent a message to Attensa’s Twitter account – Attensa is my RSS feed reader – about the way messages displayed, and, after unsuccessful attempts to handle it with them, I ended up on a screen-sharing teleconference, with a developer fixing things right before my eyes).

That said, that is not the type of service I meant to talk about. I wanted to talk about customers services. I recently bought airline tickets with Lufthansa, and the email confirmation came with several attachments: calendar invites that, upon opening and accepting, put my flight times directly into my Outlook calendar. I don’t know if anyone ever asked for that, and I don’t think there’s anyone that can’t live without it, but what a cool addition to the service level. The only downside is that it uses local departure and arrival times, so each flight that crosses a time zone will appear either shorter or longer than it really is (depending on the direction), but I still think that it is a great idea.

French fusion

Yesterday had the immense pleasure of trying out an amazing restaurant. It was a follow-up to a creativity workshop, and the restaurant was chosen for its creative appeal. Creative it most certainly was. I have had the pleasure of a few upper scale restaurants, complete with waitors that describe each dish (particularly those provided by the house, such as the “amuse-bouches”, and while there were no theatrics, the scene was something else. Each table had its own set of dishes, and decor, and the menu was anything but ordinary. While I normally would have shyed away from “fusion” cuisine, but putting a name to it after trying it makes all the difference (like that time in elementary school that Pascale had our whole class try smoked eel (before telling us what it was).

I was going to go into detail about the meal, but I couldn’t do it justice. It was just excellent, and the presentation was unbelievable. The amuses-bouches came on a flat, rectangular place with a little dish for one of the three parts (I’ve forgotten exactly what it was) and a mounted test tube for the vegetable soup. My entree; “square de chèvre”, was not only perfectly square,  but also vaguely gift-like with paper-thin slices of zucchini (courgette for the Brits in the crowd) appear to hold the whole thing together like a wrapped present. My steak was served sliced, over a bed of noodles…and wrapped in plastic, tied with a bow, like a gift basket. Dessert was a gift in itself: chocolate (from Venzuela) mousse with crème brulée in the middle. After dinner we were brought small square dishes with what appeared to be a large after-dinner mint (suspicious, since I’ve never seen after-dinner mints in France). The waitress (which is probably the wrong word, since she was also the owner, along with her husband – the chef) poured water onto each tablet, which expanded directly upward into a perfect (if slightly bent) cylinder. Fortunately nobody tried to eat (although she mentioned that others had before) because it was a sort of wet-nap!

We were the last in the restaurant, and had a nice chat with the owners (who also offer catering and cooking at your own home, among other things). They change the menu every 3 months too, which means that I’d need to go roughly every 2 or 3 weeks to try everything, but most importantly I need to go back to try the apple pie (which, of course, didn’t look like apple pie anywhere else).

At the risk of feeding the arrogance around French cuisine and French chefs, I have to say that it’s one of the best parts of living here.

The end of another school year

Okay, so I’m not technically in school, but adult education courses also follow the academic school year here, which means no courses during the summer, and with several one- or two- week breaks throughout the year. In particular, this week was the wrap-up of my Spanish course (German had already finished) as well as “certificate” exams in both languages (only loosely connected to the courses themselves, these exams are available for anyone wanting to test their level). I actually managed to meet my goal of finishing all of the Babbel lessons (and if doing a fair bit of review, since doing all the lessons once has very little value, as one quickly discovers when at the 7-day review recommended in the application you realize that half (if you’re lucky) of the words are buried deep within your brain, only to return to the surface with much coaxing. I’m particularly proud of that feat, though, since Babbel moved the goal post (pardon the pun that you will understand in the next sentence) more than once, adding a couple of lessons here and there. The last two lessons were a second and third lesson on European football and, specifically, Euro 2008 (with amusing phrases like “Zidane is suspended!”).

It’s been an interesting experience, as I struggled to get out of work in time for classes, but it feels great. Now to play the waiting game until the results of the exams come in the mail. As a great man once said “the waiting game sucks, let’s play hungry hungry hippos” (sigh, is there any part of life that the Simpsons doesn’t play into?). I admit that I’m relieved to have a break, and have my evenings to myself, but worried, since I don’t have a clear deadline that I sometimes need to actually escape the office at a reasonable hour. Thank goodness for holidays (even working holidays: EuroMineral and EuroGem is in just one more week!).