New Year

Just a word of advice to anyone who is considering taking care of important paperwork in France and will have to have contact with certain French people in administrative positions - if at all possible, wait until after the Christmas and New Years vacations are over before making that call and asking whatever it is you need to ask.  I have had experiences with the French bureaucracy before and I know how stubborn and rude they can be as soon as they hear a foreign accent on the telephone or see paperwork that says you are not French, so I was not excited when I found out that Ariel's mandatory medical visit had been scheduled for the one day out of the year that Ariel actually had something planned that could not be changed or missed.  I knew I would have to call and talk to someone and that it would be a real pain trying to get another medical visit scheduled.  Avoiding the inevitable, I procrastinated calling until vacation started and then conveniently decided that "they would probably not be there during the vacation" and decided to wait until school was back in session to call.  Hoping the day would never come and the problem would somehow manage to fix itself, I forgot about the whole deal until Christmas day.  We went to have dinner with a family we have grown rather close to.  The topic of medical visits came up because the son, who is roughly our age, recently married a Russian girl who is currently going through the same process that we are.  This girl, Nadya, is pregnant and is currently going through the pregnancy process which includes regular doctor visits.  I honestly can't say how the process is in the United States, but from what I have heard here, getting an appointment with the gynocologue is about as difficult as getting a visa - nearly impossible for no good reason with a mandatory pain in the neck.  The OFII (the office in charge of working with foreigners - which seems weird because from what I can tell, they are the ones that seem to hate foreigners the most), scheduled Nadya's medical visit the same day as her visit with the doctor.  Her mother-in-law, a French native, called the OFII and asked if it would be possible to change her visit date and explained that she was pregnant and had an important doctor visit.  The lady at the OFII basically insulted her and said, "I have no reason to believe you are telling the truth.  Unless you can get me proof and mail it here, we will not change her appointment and if she doesn't come, chances are high we will refuse to treat her documents."  When they told me this, all the worry I had about calling to change Ariel's appointment came back twice as hard as it had been before.  I conveniently forgot to translate some of the details for Ariel knowing she was already stressed enough about the thought of possibly having to go to Bordeaux all alone to find the OFII, since her appointment was scheduled for a Thursday, the only day I work the entire day.  I let the rest of the vacation pass, and when the new year hit, I decided I just had to get it over with.  I called the office and was very pleasantly surprised.  Not only did the person who answered the phone respond to ALL my questions without hanging up, she was polite about it, and when she didn't know the answer to a specific question, she passed me off to someone else who did know the answer.  Even more of a surprise, the second person who helped me was ALSO very helpful!  I decided it couldn't be a coincidence and decided to call a different French office who I needed to talk to eventually at the same time hoping for the same sort of reaction.  I was not disappointed.  It seems like, in the first week of January, everyone I spoke to was very helpful in every way.
Now, I know I may be coming off as a little rude.  Don't get me wrong, I don't think bad of the general French population.  I don't dislike the country at all.  I just happen to know by personal experience, through books I have read (books I read for school, my French studies classes, by the way), and through stories that others have told me, that the French people in Official positions are always rude.  These people are called Fonctionnaires.  These jobs have a reputation for being the easiest jobs in the country with the best benefits.  They are given a little bit of power and it goes to their heads.  I don't know why it is, but it seems that people who work at train stations hate the trains.  People who work with foreigners hate foreigners.  People who are fonctionnaires generally hate whatever area they work in.  Again, this is just personal experience here...  But all that changed after the first of the year.  I got thinking about it and it kinda makes sense.  These people have extremely repetitive jobs, they probably do exactly the same thing every day, I'm sure they meet people every day who are upset about the situation they are in, I'm sure there are more people than I could ever count who are rude to them and don't read the instructions that are posted in huge type all over the building, etc.  It makes sense that they would get a little edgy.  I can relate!  Perhaps that is why the French need to take so many vacations.  After the Christmas vacation, everyone was pleasant again!
Now that I have imparted upon you my wisdom, lets get into the rest of the past few weeks.  I found one of my weaknesses (actually, now that I think about it, I am exhibiting that weakness right now...), and it is that, whenever I am bothered by something, I go into rant mode.  Facebook is usually my preferred method of rant, and I often get frustrated and take out my frustration in Facebook statuses.  On the other hand, when I am happy/excited/or just overall content, I tend to keep it to myself.  This weakness may have made me over-exaggerate some of the problems I have ran into in the past few weeks.  Last week was a relatively decent week in terms of teaching.  Nothing too out of the ordinary, nothing too exciting.  I decided to make my lessons for these two weeks about traveling.  I asked the students to discuss places they like to travel to, things they like to see, what have been some of their favorite vacation memories, etc.  I then took the opportunity to show them some of the reasons why Utah is known as a vacation destination.  I showed them pictures from some of the national parks, some of the arches, I showed skiiers, mountains, canyons, etc.  Many of the students love everything that is mountain bike/motorcycle so I showed them Slick Rock and Moab.  Generally this went over well.  They loved seeing my home and most of them, after the presentation, have said they would like to visit Utah someday.  Last Thursday, par contre, I had a class who, had they tried, could not have been more inconsiderate.  They obviously did not care in the slightest about the conversation topics, they insulted each other in French the entire class, they mocked the pictures I showed, they played games on their phones and calculators even after I had told them time and time again to put them away... I felt like I was losing my voice just trying to talk over them.  I wasn't just worried anymore that they weren't listening to me, I was worried they would be so loud even the neighboring classes would no longer be able to hear themselves think.  I struggled through the class, managed to keep my calm throughout the entire hour, and finally sent them on their way.  I happened to run into their teacher and explained the situation and he told me that he would definitely take care of the situation (honestly I sugar coated it for him... Despite their rudeness, I tried to protect those students as much as possible...).  It's hard because I only see each set of students once every three to four weeks, which means I don't know their names by heart, I don't REALLY know their personalities, at least not more than superficially.  I have a hard time relating to a lot of the students because of this.  On top of that, my class is not at all graded and these students don't have a real interest in English, they are generally only taking it because it is required to graduate.  Thus, when they come to my class, they see it as a break rather than a learning opportunity.  Who can blame them?  I know I would have killed to have an opportunity to speak only French or only Spanish to a native speaker from France or South America once or twice a month in high school and I probably would have done everything in my power to become friends with this person so I could have more conversations and learn more about his/her home outside of class, but I also know that I am not like every other student when it comes to language and culture.  I love that sort of thing.  Many people are content where they are.  That is one of the stereotypes cast on Americans - that we only care about America.  This is more or less true of a lot of people in America, but it is also more or less true of French people as well.  I would venture to say that it is more or less true of every population in the world.  We can't ALL worry about ALL the rest of the world, we have enough problems at home.  So yes, all that to say that, I did have a very bad experience on Thursday and I did think to myself that I would have rather made a living robbing banks than teaching high school, but that feeling passed and I am back to my general contentedness about the whole experience.