What archives used to look like before the digital revolution. Photo by dolescum

Grenoble Life editor James Dalrymple delves into the archives to relive some of the highs and lows of the past few years online in the Capital of the Alps.

A great many articles have been published on Grenoble Life since we started in October 2008, contributed by a wide range of contributors from Britain, the USA and Australia, to India and France itself (or should that be herself?). It occurs to me that a number of them deserve revisiting, if only because I can’t make them all instantly present on the front page at the same time. Moreover,  some my personal favourites – perhaps owing to the dark arts of Google – seem to have fallen off the radar. In any case, here is a little sum-up of what you may have missed from the Grenoble Life archives.

It may be unfashionably erudite for a website built upon social media, but Grenoble Life has hosted a number of well-informed and beautifully written pieces about the city’s rich past. For a potted history of the Capital of the Alps, you won’t do better than this splendid two-parter, while one of the Dauphiné’s more colourful historical characters is dissected, literally, here.

The history of any region of France must also necessarily be the story of its food and drink, and Grenoble is no different. These posts on the popular local green stuff, Chartreuse, and the humble walnut, also known as noix de Grenoble, provide a nice entry point into two regional specialties. Meanwhile the city’s contemporary food culture – from high to low – has been celebrated here in a number of ways, from this ode to Grenoble’s foremost covered market Les Halles Sainte Claire, to advice on where to find “decent hot chillis here and stuff like lemongrass, galangal, and other Southeast Asian vegetables and spices,” or where an “impoverished young person” can get cheap eats “served with customary indifference and a bad attitude.” By contrast, the cities bars and cafés have been received with greater warmth here and here.

With Grenoble being surrounded by mountains, the site has not neglected to mention skiing, particularly the bargain basement variety, while the city itself has been treated as both a travel destination in itself (for once) and the starting point for epic journeys on “The world’s least user-fixable vehicle.” Skiing asides, the imposing massifs have also provided inspiration to budding climbers and photographers alike, proving there is more to the Alps than the snow, while Grenoble Life’s armchair mountain enthusiasts have been able to “take a walk on the wild side.”

If that convinced you that Grenoble only catered for les sportifs, I would like to think – from its thriving music and cinema scene (covered here and here) to its brocantes – the cultural side of the city has not been entirely neglected. Add to that the opportunities for young people to participate in English-speaking theatre and musical events for a charitable cause, the city has something to offer for those, like myself, with “gym commitment issues.”

Grenoble Life hasn’t always been about consensus, however. The French education system has proved a passionate subject among English-speaking residents past and present, both for its detractors and supporters.  The exigencies of French administration have also come under scrutiny, whether it be for starting your own business or simply getting a valid visa.

A critical eye has also been cast upon Grenoble’s public conveniences, albeit with a wink, while the greatest controversy was sparked by Grenoble Life’s Daily Deconstructionalist, sadly inactive of late, whose acerbic takes on French road safety campaigns and the City of Grenoble Magazine drew a colourful response. While there is no harm in vigorous debate, perhaps it was the gathering clouds of acrimony that inspired me to write this well-attended general Grenoble love-in.

And all this barely scratches the surface, given that I have not mentioned the many illuminating interviews and practical posts that have graced these pages over the years. I hope that Grenoble Life will continue to be a source of information, discussion and amusement to English-speaking residents for some time to come. That said, I should mention that none of this would have been possible without the goodwill of aforementioned contributors, and that I still very much welcome your blogging suggestions, no matter how subjective they are, or how new to the city you may be. Your participation is, and has always been, the life-blood of the site.

Sunday school

Vickie Allen shares her experiences of a rentrée of a different kind at St Marc’s English Speaking Church, Grenoble.

Last week children donned their cartables as the mass rentrée began. Schools and universities across France once again filled with students of all ages, embarking on the new academic year. Some approached the gates with a little anticipation, I’m sure, but all the students crossed the threshold with the knowledge that ahead of them lay new skills, new insights, new friends and a new, increased understanding of how the world works. But it wasn’t just full-time students who were digging out their cahiers and stylos.

Sunday morning marked a return to the classroom of the Adult Sunday School at St Marc’s English Speaking Church, Grenoble. I joined the class last spring, keen to gain a more in-depth understanding of the Bible, a more intellectual understanding of my faith. A small class of just four, we found the discussions of the Gospels inspiring and informative.

Lead by the pastor, Stephen Coffin, classes centred on a reading from the Gospels, putting them in their the socio-historical context as well as exploring the descriptions of Jesus and his life from our basis of faith. As last term came to an end, we prayed for a larger class that could enjoy the teaching as much as we did, and would enable some more lively and varied discussions. Our prayers were answered and on Sunday morning we were a group of nine.

The first day of school is often spent easing students back into study and it was no different for us at the Adult Sunday School. The new term’s theme is the letters of the New Testament, many (but not all, as we learned) written by Paul. We looked at the social history of the time, the way letters were written, how they were carried and the language used. I was fascinated to learn that Paul wrote his letters in an everyday, colloquial Greek rather than the formal Greek more often used by those educated enough to be able to write. This simple language was more effective in reaching the audience and reminded me of the first published translation of the Bible from Latin by Martin Luther in the 16th century. We also discussed Paul’s travels in and around the Mediterranean, looking at maps of the familiar landmasses, marked with the ancient cities of Thessalonica, Antioch and Corinth.

As the lesson came to a close we were given our homework; to read Thessalonians I and II. With the historical and social context fresh in our minds, these letters will spring to life for us as we start to delve into Paul’s message to Christians throughout time. We’re still a small group and would love you to join us and gain a greater understanding of the Bible.

The Adult Sunday School at St Marc’s English Speaking Church meets at 9.30am every Sunday morning and is conducted in English. Services (which follow the Anglican format) start at 10.45am during which there is also Sunday School for children aged 2-11 and a youth group. The congregation typically swells at this time of year as families return from their summer holidays and students arrive. For more information, visit St Marc’s.

Destination Oisans: Photos, films and thoughts on the reality of life in the mountains.

Photo: Vickie Allen

Vickie Allen tries rock climbing the ‘iron way’ (aka via ferrata) at Alpe d’Huez. She took her camera too. Don’t look down!

I rarely hear my own heart beating in my ears. But I hear it now; loudly. My legs tremble, my hands burn. I try not to look down to the river running 100m below me but I can hear it gushing over rocks between heartbeats. A bird flies past my head and above me the clouds are gathering. I ask myself – not for the first time – why I’m doing this.

And then my breath kicks-in. And I realise that via ferrata isn’t just great for the body, it’s a mental sport too, requiring focus, strength and a kind, supportive, inner voice. A great lesson for life as well as for the rock face …

Via ferrata – for those who aren’t familiar with the term – can be directly translated from Italian to mean ‘iron way’. For those who are familiar, the term conjures up images of iron rungs bolted into the mountainside and a cord of metal that criss-crosses the cliff face. This is your iron way, your route up the mountain.

Photo: Vickie Allen

There are lots of via ferrata in the Oisans region and for our first attempt for the year we thought we’d keep it simple, opting for the découverte route in Alpe d’Huez, from the base of the Sarenne gorge. découverte simply means discovery, and differs from sportif in that the routes tend to be more like a scramble up the rocks via narrow paths, rather than comprising of long sections of rungs (which is what you’ll find on the sportif routes). At the bottom of the Sarenne gorge you have the option of either type of route and they cross mid-way, allowing you to try both disciplines in one hit.

Did I mention that the routes take you hundreds of metres off the ground? This means safety equipment is essential. You’ll need a climbing harness, a specialised via ferrata attachment (which comprises of two spring-lock carabiners on a short length of rope and a third which acts as a braking device), a helmet, comfortable clothing and trainers or other suitable outdoor shoes. You’ll also need a lot of guts, especially if you’re afraid of heights.

Photo: Vickie Allen

Via ferrata is a great way to combat fear and conquer your adrenaline. I’ve done a few via ferrata now, and a bit of climbing, but the first of the season is always terrifying. It took me a good hour regain confidence, not just in the safety equipment but also in my body. Trusting my hands not to simply let go of the rung at an inopportune moment took a lot of energy. And this is why my hands are burning now … I literally gripped and hauled my way up the rock face. Not great technique but for the first ascent of the season I’m just glad I made it. And this is why I persevere with the sport: it’s literally the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done.

When you’re on the face you’re part of a team and the team are there to support you and talk you through, when necessary. But essentially you’re on your own, in your head. And the way to talk to yourself when you’re coaxing yourself up and up and up is maybe the way we should coax ourselves through life. “Come on Vixie, [that's what I call myself in my head!] you can do this. Here’s another crossover. One carabiner to the next section of line. Done. The second. Done. Nice work. Check you’re secure. Now, get your right foot onto that rung and lean for the hand-hold. Secure? Edge the left foot along the rock and squeeze it onto the rung. Good. Secure. You’re doing well. You can do this. Breathe. Remember to breathe”.

Photo: Vickie Allen

The other beauty of the sport is that you can only deal with one section at a time and quite often you can’t see what’s ahead or below, so your only option is to focus on the job in hand. The strange peace that ascends as you move up section by section, staying solidly in the present is another lesson I think we can apply to our own lives. What’s the point in worrying about what’s to come or what’s behind us? Let’s just deal with what’s in front of us right now.

And then, before you know it, all your coaxing and inching up the rock face brings you to the top … that triumphant final haul over the last edge and you’re done. Hopefully with a big smile on your face as you realise what you’ve achieved and how – with all that focussing on the present moment – you’ve left all your other worries at the bottom of the route.

Photo: Vickie Allen

How to reach the Alpe d’Huez via ferrata: the route starts at the bottom of the Sarenne gorge, just upstream of the chairlifts. You can walk into the gorge via the footpath from Huez or down from Alpe d’Huez on the steep path that descends next to the second car park on the way to the Col de Sarenne. You’ll finish just below the same car park and the walk back into Alpe d’Huez takes about 30 minutes. We completed the route in around 90 minutes, but the speed at which you go depends on your fitness, experience and whether you want to stop to take photos to scare your friends and family…

Photo: Vickie Allen

For more  on Alpe d’Huez in the summer and climbing in the Oisans region, go to Destination Oisans: Photos, films and thoughts on the reality of life in the mountains.

Time to break the piggy bank?

In the wake of street protests against government reforms, Steven Grover demystifies the state pension system in France and the changes to retirement age.

Millions have taken to the streets to protest against the French government’s proposed overhaul of the state pensions system and the progressive raising of the retirement age from 60 to 62 and the full pensionable age from 65 to 67 between now and 2018. Both houses of parliament have adopted the key clauses of the pension reform bill with the Senate due to follow suit imminently. A final vote is expected in late October to fully pass the bill.

Under the current rules, both men and women in France can retire at 60, providing they have paid social security contributions, although they might not be entitled to a full pension until they are 65. If the new rules are adopted this will rise the retirement age to 62 by 2018, and the pension age to 67, which the government says will save €70 billion.

So how does the state pension system work?

The amount of pension received will not change, and even if the changes to the retirement age and required years of contributions are adopted, it will still be one of the most attractive state pension schemes in Europe.

Retraite De Base

Currently for a salaried person (and auto-entrepreneurs) to receive a full basic pension they must have contributed for at least 164 trimestres - so 41 years, this is slightly dependant on age but is the case for those born after 1952. The Retraite De Base is managed by the Caisse Nationale d’Assurance Vieillesse (CNAV).

A full pension is calculated as follows:

• Take the average of the 25 highest paid years in your career (linked to inflation).

• Your pension is then 50% of this amount, though it is capped by using the social security annual ceiling (€34,620 in 2010). So the maximum pension would be 50% of this – i.e. €17,310 per annum.

• If you don’t qualify for a full pension then you have the option to either purchase additional trimestres, which can be expensive, or you can take a reduced pension which is proportional to the number of trimestres you have contributed for, i.e. if you had 123 trimestres your pension would be 75% of what your full pension entitlement would have been.

The biggest drawback with the Retaite De Base is that it is based on the principle that people currently working are funding the pensions for those who are already retired. This is being compounded by the number of pensioners rising due to the post-war baby boom and unemployment levels continuing to increase month on month. As a consequence the number of people funding pensions is decreasing so it has become harder to maintain this model. According to government sources France’s pensioner population is forecast to rise to 18 million by 2020 and 23 million in 2050. Therefore if nothing is done the existing pension deficit of €32 billion could rise to some €50 billion a year by 2020 and to €100 billion by 2050.

Retraite Complémentaire

All employees also benefit from a retraite complémentaire for which contributions are compulsory. Arrco (Association pour le régime de retraite complémentaire des salariés) covers all employees in the private sector. Management staff (cadres) also must contribute to the Agirc (Association générale des institutions de retraite des cadres) supplementary pension.

In return for the contributions paid, employees obtain pension points on a monthly basis. These points give the right to a supplementary pension income at the legal retirement age. The pension will be financed by the contributions of those who are still working, and payment of the pension is guaranteed because the contribution by those working is compulsory.

The amount of points received is calculated as follows:

• Divide the value of contributions by the purchase price of a point (€14.4047 per point for Arrco, and €5.0249 per point for Agirc for 2010).

• At retirement the accumulated points are converted into euros by multiplying them by the value of each point. (€1.1884 per point for Arrco, and €0.4216 per point for Agirc in 2010). This calculates the annual pension entitlement.

Self Employed

For professions libérales it is a lot more complicated as the régime de base is managed by the CNAVPL (Caisse nationale d’assurance vieillesse des professions libérales) and is based on points system like the Arrco/Agric instead of taking an average salary.

Artisans and commerçants still come under the same régime de base as employees, but this is overseen by the Régime Social des Indépendants (RSI).

For the retraite complémentaire it is again complicated as there are 11 different organisations who manage it for this sector, based on profession. Most people will probably be attached to the Caisse Interprofessionnelle de Prévoyance et d’Assurance Vieillesse (CIPAV), this includes auto-entrepreneurs and again functions on a points system like the Arrco/Agric.

What private schemes are available?

PERP

The main private, personal pension is the Plan d’Epargne Retraite Populaire (PERP) which was only introduced in 2003. Anyone can save from as little as €50 per month into a PERP. The investor then receives an income tax credit for payments made into it, up to 10% of their revenues from professional activity the year before (after deducting 10% for professional fees). This is however limited to eight times the annual amount of the sécurité sociale ceiling, so a maximum deduction of €27,696 for 2010, and the minimum deduction is 10% of this ceiling (i.e. €3,462).

With most contracts it is possible to stop making payments for a time or to increase or reduce the payments as the situation demands. The payments made into the PERP are locked until retirement when the investment ‘pot’ is used to buy a type of annuity which, according to the terms of the contract, can be fully passed on to the surviving spouse on death.

The only circumstances under which money can be taken out of the PERP before retirement is if the investor’s business activity is ceased due to a liquidation judgment or if they contract an illness/disability that makes it impossible to exercise their profession. In some cases it is possible to recover some or all of the PERP in the case of divorce, or the death or incapacity of a spouse.

Assurance Vie

An assurance vie contract may be a more appropriate place to save on a monthly basis, as the withdrawals from such a contract are not required to buy an annuity and do not have to be held until retirement age. The premiums invested do not receive income tax credit or rebate but withdrawals are taxed at very low rates, especially after the contract has been in place for more than eight years.

In addition, and especially if portability of pension income is a concern, many “offshore” assurance vie providers offer tax compliant investment and savings products in other European jurisdictions. So for example if the policyholder was to move back to the UK from France, then the French assurance vie policy could be converted to a locally tax compliant UK ‘version’ with no cost and would still offer favourable taxation on withdrawals.

Over 22 million individuals or couples have either invested lump sums or save regularly into assurance vie contracts, and neither French capital gains tax nor income tax applies whilst the funds remain inside the policy. Even when an amount is withdrawn only the growth element is taxable. Any gains are liable to ‘social charges’ of 12.1% when they are drawn down, plus taxation on a sliding scale depending on how long the policy has been in force:

35% for a policy less than four years old,
15% for policies between four and eight years old and
7.5% for all policies over eight years old.
After eight years there is also an annual tax-free allowance of €4,600 (single person) or €9,200 (married couple) of gains.

QROPS

For those French resident British expatriates who intend to retire permanently in France and who have pension funds left in the UK, it is a very good idea to investigate whether transferring and consolidating their UK pension funds using a Qualifying Recognised Overseas Pension Schemes (QROPS) or Qualifying Non-UK Pension Schemes (QNUPS) would help their situation in France and offer more control over taking non French pension benefits.

The information provided in this article was obtained from public sources including the AGRIC, ARRCO & CNAV websites, and is only provided as a guide based on our understanding of current legislation. If you need assistance in this area you are strongly advised to seek the help of a specialist in this field as each individual case is different.

Steven Grover is a partner with the Spectrum IFA Group in Paris:
steven.grover@spectrum-ifa.com
www.spectrum-ifa.com

The many flags of the Open House logo

English-speaking voyager Maureen Walsh describes the soft landing in Grenoble provided by the local expat association Open House.

Our sojourn from the United States this past July and our settlement in Grenoble for my husband’s one year sabbatical at the Grenoble Ecole de Management was sometimes fraught with both expected and unanticipated difficulties and inconveniences. Getting our OFII (l’Office Français de l’Immigration et de l’Intégration) stamps, cellphone, TV and Internet service, bank accounts and apartment in our adopted city took time, energy and patience. Now that that is behind us, it struck me how those trials were often softened by all the hospitable people who put out the “welcome mat” for us here in Grenoble.

Before we had left Raleigh, North Carolina for Grenoble, I had done a cursory Internet search for possible groups we might join to integrate ourselves more easily into French culture. At that time I came across Grenoble Life’s March 2010 piece, Anglophone Grenoble, a rough guide, and its reference to Open House Grenoble, a group that has been around helping English-speaking voyagers just like us since 1987. I tucked the link into my computer favorites list thinking that it just might be what we were looking for once we had finally touched down in Grenoble.

After settling into Grenoble, I bee-lined to the Open House Grenoble website to find some particulars about upcoming events we might be able to enjoy. I saw that they held a weekly Tuesday morning informal get-together called Coffee Chat at a local café where the conversational language was English. It sounded like the perfect introduction to the organization without having to broadcast our beginning French language ineptitude. We met at that time in the centre ville at Pain et Cie, but have since moved to Take-Away at La Caserne de Bonne. We were delighted to find a mixture of amicable French and English speaking people who seemed eager to befriend us.

Soon after, those of us who were regulars at Coffee Chat questioned why a similar morning meet-up couldn’t be created for speaking solely in French. (Yikes!) Café Français was born this January and slowly built a following on Thursday mornings coming together at our old stomping grounds, Pain et Cie café. This became a great opportunity to share a coffee, stumble over our French words and have native French speakers patiently help us with the practical issues we have negotiating life here in Grenoble.

When my husband, Steven, and I formally became card-carrying OHG members in September, we discovered the French-English Exchange group that meets two Friday mornings a month at CLEF (Association des Centres de loisirs Enfance et Famille). This group converses on impromptu topics and plays often humorous games aimed at language learning, dividing the time together between French and English conversations.

Getting our feet wet with the language groups led us to check out other OHG interest groups. No one organization can be all things to all people, but Steve and I have found that we can dabble in many groups that appeal to us. We have sometimes found our way on Thursday evenings to local Grenoble pubs including Le Family Pub for Chill-Out Evenings, stopping to share a drink and some conversation. And for me, the former English major, the Open House Book Group has filled a special spot. Our circle of between 10-12 bookworms gathers at the café, Le 5, at the Musée de Grenoble once a month where lively, stimulating and intelligent conversation ensues about the books we read in English. In the same location, once a month the Creative Writers Alliance meets to support both fledgling and veteran writers alike allowing them to share their trials and triumphs.

There are some OHG groups that we won’t be joining. Since we don’t have young children here in Grenoble, we don’t fit into the Baby & Toddler Activities group nor will we be participating in the holiday-related activities suited for older children. But as we still have some time ahead of our departure and with Spring on the horizon, we hope to join some of the outdoor groups that participate in Mountain & Outdoors activities and Cycling. Of interest, as well, is the fitness-oriented Wellness group that comes together at CLEF on Tuesday evenings with Hula dancing or occasional workshops featuring activities such as yoga, shiatsu, reflexology or aromatherapy.

Last, but definitely not least, OHG also provides opportunities to delve into the gustatory world. We already drink BEAUCOUP de café et de thé during language exchanges, but there is also an active Wine Tasting group which explores regional wines in members’ homes. With the planned monthly Lunch Out opportunities we can sample different Grenoble restaurants in the company of other adventuresome souls. Recently, we lunched at the Hôtel Lesdiguières, the lycée for hotel and restaurant management here in Grenoble, but with the myriad of restaurants in Grenoble we have an eclectic list from which to choose. Open House has also in past years hosted a Christmas Apéro and a Summer Picnic where members and their families have gathered together for good food and fun times in the spirit of the seasons.

Our life in Grenoble has undoubtedly been filled with one-of-a-kind opportunities and welcoming people. We have been fortunate to be able to partake of the Open House Grenoble activities, and we’re going to truly miss all these good friends when we must return to the U.S. So the next time a friend from home asks me how I spend my time here, I’ll just have to point them to this article or to our blog, A Year in Grenoble, and let them envy all the convivial opportunities we’re going to very reluctantly leave behind with our Open House friends.

An ultrasound scan. Photo: j.dopf

In the second part of a blog about her experience as an expecting mother in France, Grenoble Life’s Shonah Wraith describes her second trimester.

Now comes the very exciting and somewhat invigorating part of this process. The wonderful second trimester. Somewhere around the 13th or so week there is a renewed sense of vigor. There is no need to put your head down on the nearest solid surface and close your eyes for the uncountable time that hour! Amazing!

Holding onto this feeling – and a very full bladder – you are able to walk into the darkened ultrasound room and see what was last a peanut and now resembles something larger than a peanut and perhaps for the first time your partner gets to see this phenomena too!

There are lots of measurements taken and not a lot of them will make sense. However the very reassuring aspect about having a baby in France is that, medically speaking, you and your growing foetus are well taken care of. If the doctor* notices anything out of the ordinary he/ she will tell you and give you instructions accordingly. And adversely when things are OK, they will let you know.

From my experience after this ultrasound the doctor gives you (yet another) prescription to have (yet more) blood tests done and very specifically a blood test to check for the possibility of downs syndrome. Now, before you go to the laboratoire d’analyses médicales to fill this script, you have to wait until you receive a very specific letter from your doctor and go between the dates he/she gives. Armed with these bits you can go and have your blood tests done. Alternatively, you can do what I did and not listen to the doctors’ instructions (or I put it down to being totally overwhelmed by experiencing the ultrasound – and I am standing by this!) then have the lovely secretary at the laboratoire try to explain in her slowest French that you have done it all wrong! As a side note, the laboratoire will become very familiar to you and everyone is more than happy to help. My only piece of advice is to get the little container for your “sample” at the visit before you need it, as the “sample” needs to be fresh from the morning of your visit.

This ultrasound was the marker for my husband and I to tell people. We asked more than once, during the ultrasound, if the doctor thought everything was OK, and given his countless reassurances we felt confident we could tell our most treasured secret to the world! This was at week 14, so not only did we have to tell the world, but the French authorities in the form of the CAF and the CPAM.

At your ultrasound the doctor will also give you the appropriate paperwork to give to these authorities, which by law you have to do by week 14. But be aware of all the other information you will need – passport, titre de séjour, husband’s taxable income for the previous year, your taxable income for the previous year if applicable, social security numbers, work contracts, bank codes and what you ate for breakfast for the last 10 consecutive days.

Now, do not fear if you forget something they will surely let you know, but this will delay the process of you being “on the books”. All of this running around (see full training in process!) will be well worth it, as: 1) you won’t have to do it in the foggy haze of the post-partum period; and 2) If it is all done on time the government gives you a financial reward in the seventh month to assist with the baby (I believe it is more a prize for passing the French bureaucracy test!) … but do not fear if you have not done it correctly or on time, you will still receive this reward, with a delay.

AND now ENJOY! You should be “glowing” and showing. SO instead of just feeling a little bloated, your pregnancy body should be well visible. On this subject you may need pregnancy clothes, underwear, oils and potions. There may be some fabulous shops in Grenoble – and if there are I would like to know for future reference – but I was not able to find any for clothes or underwear and outsourced all of mine from the UK and Australia.

Mothercare is great, but sadly do not deliver internationally anymore – time to reconnect with long lost friends and relatives in the UK! Also bio-oil is one of the nicest things I have ever applied to my body. Sadly, it is not available in France (it supposedly helps prevent the dreaded stretch marks) and would well be worth getting it from somewhere/someone!

Another activity that is wonderful to add to your training regime is yoga and, posssibly at the end of the trimester, starting ante-natal classes. A compassionate sage-femme who conducts all of this (and more for the post-partum period) is Catherine Muguet. She will even do your ante-natal classes in English (fully refundable on social security)!

Toward the end of the semester your old friend fatigue may come knocking on your door. Welcome him in and put your feet up – remember you are growing a person in there!

You then enter the tapering off stage of the training and preparing for “the event”. Where the line seems but a hazy memory and your expanding mid-section reminds that you are closer to the end of this process and nearer to the start of another.

*My doctor did three out four of the ultrasounds. The 4th was done by a partner doctor in the practice. I understand from speaking to other people, it really depends on where you go as to the process you must undertake to have your ultrasounds done. Also when I say four ultrasounds I am also counting the internal ultrasound you have at six weeks, mentioned in the previous post.

Please note this is purely a subjective account of this situation in France

Les timbres!

US newcomer Maureen Walsh reports on obtaining long-stay and student visas through the Office Français de l’Immigration et de l’Intégration for a year in Grenoble.

Arriving as newcomers to Grenoble from a small town in North Carolina in July 2010, my husband, Steve, and I were trying to carefully follow the letter of the French law regarding completing the steps necessary for our stay in France. He had recently been accepted into the AQ Bridge Program at the Grenoble Ecole de Management. This was an opportunity to spend a sabbatical year away from his position as the NC State University Director of the Engineering Entrepreneurs Program and explore new possibilities in a foreign country. So it would have surprised many of our friends to know that in our initial 2 ½ months stay in France, we hadn’t actually perfected all of the legalities. This was not malice aforethought, mind you, but only due to the timing of our arrival. Not until the middle of September 2010 did we get things settled! That was when our little yellow OFII (Office Français de l’Immigration et de l’Intégration) cards were pasted inside our American passports. We breathed a sigh of relief. We were now “bona fide”!

The process began in North Carolina. Since we hoped to stay in Grenoble for a full year, Steve applied for a student visa, and I needed a long-term stay visa in order to live in France. That involved a LOT of paperwork – there was the NC State Bureau of Investigation report, an FBI report, fingerprinting, certifications from our bank as to our financial worth, proof of health insurance, proof of purchase of airline tickets, certified birth certificates, marriage certificate, proof of acceptance into a French school, statements from me regarding the reason I was applying for entry into France along with a promise that I would not work while in France, and proof of a commitment to a residence in France (rental contract). It seemed like the list would never end.

We needed three copies of each item for both of our folders and this all had to be translated into French. In addition, there was the Long Stay Visa application form (Demande Pour Un Visa De Long Séjour) and the OFII form (Visa de Long Sejour-Demande D’Attestation OFII) with the top part filled out. A lot of trees sacrificed their lives for our trip to, and our stay in, France.

Once we had assembled all that, we made an appointment to go to our regional French Consulate in Atlanta, Georgia – a “mere” seven hour drive away. We made this appointment on-line and traveled there on an overnight trip in April. The meeting was not what we expected. I thought we would be invited into a cozy room to meet with a consulate representative to present our paperwork and be interviewed – perhaps accompanied by a glass of French wine, too? On the contrary, we arrived and soon discovered that the official Long Stay Visa application form posted on the website of the French Consulate in Atlanta that we had printed and completed, in “impeccable French” I might add, had just been completely changed the previous week. The new questions didn’t match the previous form. A sense of impending doom followed by a mild feeling of panic began to spread within the confines of my head. We stood at a narrow counter and worked to fill out the new form on the fly sans dictionnaire!

When the interview process took place, we were standing at another counter with the consulate employee sitting behind glass with a tiny slot through which we passed our massive paper pile in 8 to 10 pages stages. Time stood still. The employee would ask us questions (in French) and forget to turn on the microphone. We had to continually ask the him to repeat his questions and to turn on the sound – I thought I was living the drive-up window scene in the movie, Wayne’s World. He swiftly shuffled our papers, picked up the phone a few times to call France and kept looking at Steve suspiciously because he was applying for a Student Visa. This was the first line of defense those in America encounter in their quest for a visa to France! (Does the word perspiration mean anything to you?)

We left the office exhausted and made the return drive home. And waited … Our passports with our visas pasted in were returned to us about a month later in the prepaid FedEx envelopes that we had provided. Another hurdle passed. We were on our way to France!

Once we entered France via Switzerland, the next step for us was to find a permanent residence. We had arranged to stay in an extended-stay apartment for our first month in Grenoble, but we would need a more permanent address for the duration of our stay. In addition, we needed fixed and mobile phone numbers to put on the OFII form. Would it ever end? After the arduous work to acquire those, we sent off the paperwork by registered mail on August 4th. Timing for that was not, shall we say, optimum. We soon learned that most of France is not working in August because ils sont en vacances! Finally, we received letters telling us that our OFII forms had been received. We still had to wait to be contacted for our appointments to complete the process. A week and a half later, a letter arrived outlining what we needed to do for our appointments that were scheduled for the 16th of September for Steve and the 17th for me.

We were nearing the finish line! We needed to have a un examen radiographique, un photo tête nue, un examen clinique général and beaucoup d’argent. For the money part, we visited the Préfecture for taxe perçue à l’occasion de la délivrance du premier titre de séjour. This meant we had to buy des timbres á la caisse de préfecture in advance to cover the fee for the OFII validation. The timbres look like postage stamps and are similar to the stamps paid for when you complete a purchase on a house. For Steve that amounted to 55€ ($71.75) and for me, 340€ ($443.57) (exchange rate: 17/09/2010). We understand that in the U.S. the amount can be closer to $1,000.00 per person, so we think we got a bargain.

As a student, Steve had to first go to the Centre de Santé which is located near the train station in Grenoble and have a basic physical. Then, two days later, he needed to board tram C and head off to the Domain Université Centre de Santé to get a chest x-ray at one of those mobile units set up in a parking lot. A week later he returned to the first Centre de Santé to pick up his certified medical certificate. Finally, he was instructed to go to the OFII office with all his paperwork to complete the process. He was told they take a limited number of applicants each day. Since they don’t make specific appointments, show up early and try to get in the door – at 6’2″ and 90 kgs he was ready for action. He arrived an hour before the opening and was the first one in line. He presented all his pieces to the puzzle, and they pasted a card in the passport and covered it with a film cover. One down, one to go.

My requirements were a little different. As I am not a student, I was instructed to report to the OFII office at 13h 30 for my x-ray, and my medical exam would be at 14 h. I was pleased. It seemed that I had an appointment and would escape the running around that Steve had had; it would be “one-stop shopping”. Wrong. I arrived at 13h25 (the bureau is closed from 12h until 13h30 for lunch) and found a long line of people waiting for the opening. I joined the line, and I glanced at the paper the person in front of me held. It looked just like mine. Exactly! We ALL had the SAME appointment time.

The overworked employee at the desk dealt with people speaking many different languages. Some were anxious (like me), and some became belligerent when they were told their dossier was incomplete and that they would have to return with some other required paperwork. After sitting in the too-small waiting room for a half-hour, I was called back for the exams. The x-ray tech showed me to a dressing room and told me to disrobe to the waist. I looked around for the usual jacket I always get to put on when I have any upper body pictures taken. Nothing. Leave your modesty at the door. That done, I moved on to the nurse. She weighed me, stuck me for, as she said, “le sucre” (diabetes test), took my blood pressure, and then we proceeded to the height and eye charts.

If you know the French alphabet pronunciation, you remember that vowels and some consonants are pronounced differently from their English look-a likes. (i is “e”, e is “ai”, g is “jay”, j is “gee.”) We had to remind ourselves of that when responding. As a side story, we have an Australian friend who told us of her experience at OFII. She didn’t know any French when she arrived, and when she read the eye chart, she answered using the English (Australian) pronunciation of the letters. The medical people all thought that she was legally blind!

Getting our OFII stamps has given us the freedom we need to fully enjoy our experience here in Europe. Until we got that, if we had left France, we were told, we would not have been allowed to re-enter through the borders without returning to the U.S. and reapplying for a new visa. With our OFII stamps and our American passports, we can pursue our wanderlust. It didn’t take us long to pull out the map and start eyeing all the possibilities that became open to us with just that “little yellow card.”

To see our further adventures, please visit our blog: walshesingrenoble.wordpress.com

examen radiographique: xray
un photo tête nue: photo of a head without a covering
un examen clinique général: medical exam
le taxe perçue à l’occasion de la délivrance du premier titre de séjour: the charge collected at the issue of the first residence permit
le caisse de prefecture: prefecture cashier
centre de santé: health center

A detail from The Crucible poster

Camille Bromley reviews the Upstage production of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, running at Ste-Marie-d’en-Bas until Saturday March 19.

In an ambitious choice, this year’s Upstage production is The Crucible, Arthur Miller’s dramatization of the Salem Witch Trials and allegory of 1950s McCarthyism. Upstage, Grenoble’s finest English-language theater group, and made up of high school students from the Cité Internationale, never fails to put its best foot forward and this year I was quite looking forward to seeing how the young actors would treat such a sober and violent subject.

But I was wrong in thinking that the Upstage group would rise up to the mature themes presented in the play; in fact, I found that the themes treated in the play spoke very well to adolescence, and as such the teenage actors did a wonderful job of bringing this out to the audience. After all, the accused-cum-accusers that fuel the drama are the young girls found to be “dancing” in the woods—girls much the same age as the actors playing them. And a large part of the horror felt by the puritan townspeople of Salem and subsequent finger-pointing comes from a disbelief that these “children,” who are actually young women, could be capable of lying, vengeance, deception, and sexual acts. Not to mention the fuss raised in our day and age over peer pressure — from Act I we see the influence of the group working on each individual girl, until one by one they crack from the pressure and join the ranks of the accusers, condemning others to save their own skin.

The Crucible’s cast includes a healthy representation of female actors, but the male actors held their own, occupying no less challenging, if less terrifying, roles. John Proctor, conflicted and confounded by the women in his life, is the victim in Act IV of a nail-baiting interrogation of circuitous logic administered by the very severe Deputy Governor Danforth, in which he realizes hopelessly that to be accused is already a condemnation, and a dishonest confession may be better than a righteous death.

Passionate performances (screams, shrieks, tears, thundering accusations, uncontrollable trembling and general hysteria) were given by most of the cast, notably the character of Mary at the climax of the play, and there were several standout character performances, especially Giles Corey complete with cane and fabulous accent. And Upstage didn’t forget their signature interjections of humor (“We saw our gym teacher with the devil!”), as difficult as it is to inject humor into such a play.

The simplicity of the set design and the subtle lighting cast a barren, chilled atmosphere as background to the action, and left the attention on the performances. As always in the Theater Ste-Marie-d’en-Bas, the intimacy of the room and conviviality of the bar made for a pleasant evening.

Kudos to directors Dave Simpson, Julie Valade, Claude Deladoeuille, and Therese Zanone for another impressive performance by Upstage. But I have to admit, after witnessing such a “world gone mad,” I sure was glad leaving the theater, feeling secure in being a little less mad than them.

Breakfast at Le Valombré

Vickie Allen swaps the pistes of Alpe D’Huez for a weekend getaway at the chambre d’hôtes ‘Le Valombré’ in the Chartreuse. 

Squelching through the mud to avoid the frozen snow that last fell at Christmas, I was glad we hadn’t bothered to pack our ski stuff.  We watched over-dressed school children judder down the slushy nursery slope served by a single, antique drag-lift, their mittens dangling on cords from their wrists, googles perched on their helmets, zips undone. At our backs a southerly wind, disturbingly warm, swept through the trees and cooled as it hit the height of the Col de Porte, but not enough to reassure us that the promised snowfall was on its way, not at this height anyway. 

Situated at 1,326m there was still snow on the ground but as we descended into Chartreuse we drove back in time to find fallen leaves, bare trees and grassy clearings on the edge of the dense forest. It was autumn once again. 

Bare trees and clouds above Grenoble

We chose Saint-Pierre-de-Chartreuse for a quick mid-winter getaway as it’s so close to Grenoble (just 30-40 minutes by car) and we’d been enchanted by the forest when we visited for the day in the summer. 

As Brits who work in tourism, we’ve always been fascinated by the concept of a chambre d’hôtes. Having worked in a number of chalets and hotels, as well as running Mountain Experience, we weren’t sure if the idea of staying in someone’s house and being a guest at their table was tempting or not.  So we decided to check-in and see … 

Despite our English reserve our host Jean-Pierre was warm and accommodating from the moment we arrived at his home, Le Valombré. A barn conversion, the building is stunning with the self-contained guest quarters, that sleep up to ten people, on the first floor. The Boyfriend had chosen the Jade Room when booking from the photos of each colour-themed room on the website. We found it to be just as it looked online; light and comfortable with a huge bed and comfy armchair. Perfect for relaxation and privacy, but how would we find eating with a stranger? 

The Jade Room

Jean-Pierre shared the starter with us, but refrained from the main course and dessert. Leaving the table every now and then to refill the water and check the oven, his presence was comfortable and leisurely. He grasped his way through our faltering French, phrasing his questions to fill our awkward English silences with the utmost grace and ease. He chatted happily about his previous life in Paris, the conversion of the building and local visitor attractions. His recommendation to visit the church of St-Hugues-de-Chartruese to experience the modern art piqued our interest, and after a tasty four-course meal (with the obligatory local cheese-board) we made our way to bed.

We had agreed on a late breakfast at 9.30am and awoke to find the table laden with homemade preserves and yogurt. The mint and melon jam reminded me of sweet Moroccan tea and was a surprisingly refreshing accompaniment to warm croissants. The Boyfriend’s sweet tooth preferred Jean-Pierre’s strawberry and pineapple jam, while we both salivated over the oven-fresh brioche cake nestling under the lid of its red oven dish.  

Whistling his way through the morning routine of breakfast and cleaning, Jean-Pierre directed us to the church, whose art he described as incroyable.  

I have to admit a soft-spot for churches, especially those decorated with religious iconography. In France you’ll find many Catholic churches dripping in gold and ancient carvings so the modern strength of the abstract art at  St-Hugues took us by surprise. Red and gold dominates the wall hangings, contrasted by the blue stained glass windows of the transept. The artist Arcabas merges familiar biblical symbolism and stories with dark, passionate interpretations. The result is emotional and interactive; you can’t help but slip into the world of demons and angels. 

Inside St-Hugues

Slipping into Arcabas' world

The cooler colours of St-Hugues' transept

We wandered the rural village of St-Hughes and drove to the more commercial, resort of St-Pierre-de-Chartreuse. With the ski lifts closed, no snow and ESF instructors wandering the town in their uniform, it was easy to forget that this was mid-February. Most of the hotels, restaurants and shops were closed. Tourists were very thin on the ground and I wouldn’t have been surprised to see the odd tumbleweed blowing through the deserted grey carparks.  

The view from St-Pierre-de-Chartreuse

October conditions in mid-February...

Without the softening effect of snow, the scenery was raw, with mountains jutting out above the trees and narrow roads lining the winding base of the deep gorge. We spent the afternoon admiring the skeletal trees and vertical cliff faces, contrasted with gently sloping hills and forest clearings dotted with traditional houses and converted barns. As the rain started we returned to Le Valombré, anticipating another lovely meal, gentle conversation and a cosy sofa. 

For our first experience of a chambre d’hôtes, we could have asked nothing more of  Le Valombré. As the only guests, we were eased gently into sharing our meals and felt much more comfortable and relaxed than if we had stayed at a hotel. It was the perfect combination of privacy and relaxation, with the added benefit of our personal chef and knowledgeable host. And the lack of snow actually gave the break a slower pace, with no need to zoom around the slopes.  

So as we wandered into the forest at Trois Sommets, picking our way along the edge of the frozen path, I was happy to leave the kids to their ancient drag-lift and slush; breathing in the warm wind, pine needles and mulch … an autumn break in mid-February and a Valentine’s Day to remember. 

Vickie Allen shares her photos, films and thoughts on the reality of life in the mountains at Destination Oisans.

Test de grossesse

In the first part of a blog about her experience as an expecting mother in France, Grenoble Life’s Shonah Wraith (née Kennedy) talks about finding out she was pregnant.

Even though discussions had been had, plans had been made and action put into place, it was a big shock when suddenly I found myself at the chemist asking for a test de grossesse.  The pharmacist was very kind explaining the best time to do this test for the best results – and as I am a stickler for rules I then had to wait until first thing the next morning to do the business on the stick. So it happened that at 5am I was attempting to re-read instructions, aim onto a very narrow stick to do what seemed to be the most difficult test I had ever sat – one that I couldn’t ever have studied for. It did not take long to realise what I had suspected for a few days.  All I can say about this moment is – savour it. This is the time you can breath and realise that what you have wanted has become a reality.  Take time before the other reality of doctors appointments, blood tests, getting a mutuelle and possible incomprehensions take over.

Ahhhhh! Breathe in, breathe out…

Once you have done this as many times as is necessary you have to get une ordonnance from your médecin traitant for a blood test to confirm the heart palpitations of excitement the little purple/ blue/coloured line gave you. I merely rang my doctor and asked for the prescription, rather than making an appointment with him.  He had the prescription waiting for me in his surgery, I picked it up and went to the local laboratoire d’analyses médicales for the blood test.  The following afternoon I had the positive confirmation.

Then you have to ring – who now seems like your best friend – your doctor and see him/her. The doctor will read the results and reiterate to you that you are indeed pregnant! They will then give you an estimated date of arrival, another ordonnance for a blood test to determine your blood type (you will then be given a carte de groupe sanguine – you will need to keep this for the whole process), toxoplasmosis and rubella and also suggest a gynécologue/obstétrician. Of course you could choose your own, if you had a preference of where to go. It seems to me, the place you give birth is determined by where your gynaecologist is located. Next mission* is to call this doctor, make an appointment and wait.

And waiting seems to be the word for the first trimester.  You know you have crossed the line, but there are so many potential obstacles that you don’t feel like you are truly training for the race properly. Your daily life is meant to continue, but somewhere in the background (more often than not in the foreground if you suffer from morning sickness, tiredness and uncountable trips to amenities!) of everything you do there is “that thing” that no one else knows. You go to the gynaecologist’s office and feel like an imposter amongst all the big-bellied women!

Oh!  And while you are waiting you might want to look into a mutuelle if you don’t already have one.  Especially if you want to go down the clinique route and have a private room when the time comes. As I previously said this whole process happened a lot quicker than we had anticipated, so I was looking for an appropriate mutuelle before crossing the line, however had not made a decision before the result. I was nervous that I would then not be able to have a mutuelle. However, in France, with the company I decided to go with, pregnancy is not classed as a pre-existing “condition” and I was covered instantly.

Next to the first appointment, which in a word is amazing.  Once again the doctor will confirm to you what the stick, laboratory and your first doctor told you, but this appointment is like watching your favourite movie – that you have seen countless times – in technicolour WITH surround sound … you see this tiny peanut shape and hear “the” heartbeat.

Now, it is such a personal choice whether or not you tell people within the first trimester that you are pregnant.  My husband and I decided to wait to tell anyone, so wait we did for another agonisingly long six weeks.  During this time, though, there are many places to visit virtually.  You can follow what your creation is up to, while you can’t physically see what is going on.  Some sites I found really useful during this time were

• Baby Centre (where you can choose UK or US)
• Huggies (where you can choose the country of your choice)
• Having a baby in France practical information

And if you are impatient to buy books the bookworm café has a great selection.  However, if you are trying to be discreet you can buy books from Amazon.fr and the book depository, both of which have free delivery.

You then enter into the declaration and echographie stage!  When the line is well and truly behind you and the training moves into full swing!

*My doctor also gave me un’ordonnance for an echographie.  However, when I visited my gynaecologist he did the echographie in his office, and there was no need for me to go to a seperate place for this.  This may depend on your gynaecologist.

Please note this is purely a subjective account of this situation in France

Grenoble depuis "la montée de Chalemont". Photo: FrenchHope

In the first part of her blog Footprints in Grenoble, American student Aleigha Page shares her first impressions of studying abroad in the Capital of the Alps. 

My name is Aleigha; I am an American student studying here in Grenoble for the spring semester. I began my study-abroad research fall of my freshman year, and I was immediately drawn to the catalogue featuring Grenoble. The mountains, the globes which take one up to the Bastille, and pictures of wild flowers growing on the mountainside all convinced me that Grenoble was the city for me.

Off the beaten path

I like that it is a little off the beaten path of European study abroad destinations, but that certainly does not mean life in Grenoble is boring! Grenoble offers a happy medium of big city and country nearby. The centre-ville is fabulous, and offers every store one could ever imagine! There are restaurants, cafés, brasseries, pubs, bakeries, and so much more. 

Just because Grenoble is in the mountains, does not mean it is removed from culture. But I also love the fact that the mountains are in easy reach of the city. I have hiked up the Bastille twice, and both times offered the best view of the city. The Bastille is a very old fortress built into the side of the mountain, which served as a prison and has now been converted into a hiking trail. When the weather warms up a tad, I intend to make many more hiking expeditions. 

Arrival

My first day in Grenoble began after a three hour long train ride from Paris, after three days of sightseeing the City of Lights. Needless to say, I was exhausted by the time I made it to Grenoble. I walked into the Grenoble train station, trying to wrap my head around the fact that this new city was about to become home for the next four months. I gingerly stood with the other students in my group as we observed the group of host families.

When my name was called, my host mother and I shyly made our way toward each other. I was thrilled to finally meet the person whose home I would be staying in! But all in approximately two seconds, it occurred to me that she knew absolutely nothing about me, other than the obvious statistics: American female student here to study French. And I knew little about her other than she was an artist who worked from home, enjoyed cooking, and lived in Grenoble.

I was not exactly sure how to kick off our conversation for various reasons: a) I was tired and still getting my body acclimated to the new time zone; b) I was trying to be sensitive to French etiquette and customs, and I was not sure how to converse without accidently saying or asking something offensive; c) Even in my native land, I am very shy the first little bit I meet someone. Combine all three of those, and I was at a loss for words. However, we made our way to the train, and we made small talk as she pointed out important landmarks, and told me our tram stop.

Old town

On the tram, I marveled at the buildings we whizzed by. Grenoble is an old town, and the buildings have that old European, stucco style walls with orange tile roofs. The buildings are different colors – some of them pastel orange and yellow, others brown or shades of beige.  

Of all things in life, I know that I will never forget my first impression of my host home. It is a charming house built onto the side of another building. We go through an apartment hallway, complete with a spiral staircase, to an outdoor entrance. Go through the door, and enter into a charming courtyard which leads into the house. The house is old, and certainly has the charm and character of an old home. I am a sap for old buildings and especially homes; I could spend days marveling at the old homes, whether at home or in France. 

The next couple of days were spent getting unpacked and settling into my new home. My first full day in Grenoble, we were taken on a tour of the city. In the Place Notre Dame, there is a café which is especially for philosophers; however anyone is welcome, along with at least four other cafes. In another town square, there is a café which is the second oldest café in all of France, the oldest being in Paris! There really are cafés on every street, and just about every corner in France. I always thought that maybe the café was an overdone French cliché, much like berets, but no. I can safely conclude that there will never be a shortage of cafés in la France.

Goals

I have officially been in Grenoble for two weeks, and I honestly find something new or interesting every time I leave home. There are so many winding streets filled with shops and little restaurants throughout city. Prior to my study abroad departure, I made a list of goals, and one of those goals is to see something new every day. I can easily put a check next to that box. I recently discovered the most adorable salon de thé I could ever imagine –chandelier hanging, mismatched antique furniture which had been reupholstered in various fabrics of pretty prints, tablecloths, and white tables. I did not have the chance to stop by, but having tea in one of the salon de thés is certainly on my to do list. 

My introduction to Grenoble could not have been better. I cannot wait to explore more and get to know the city, not only through the eyes of a visitor, but as a member of this city. I want to have a relationship with Grenoble, not only to be a passerby. I know that Grenoble will leave a significant footprint on my heart and in my life, and I certainly intend on leaving a few of my own footprints for Grenoble.

Photo: Vickie Allen

Vickie Allen takes a break from the slopes of Alpe d’Huez and heads off walking in Bourg d’Oisans.

It may not have snowed since 11.01.11, but you’d never guess by looking at the pistes …

Alpe d’Huez has over 900 snow cannons, more than any other resort in France. And really it’s just as well, as so many of the pistes here are south-facing. So the fact that it’s not snowed for nearly a month doesn’t matter too much; the cannons are blasting water into the air each night, creating piles of new snow that’s being spread around the resort to keep the pistes topped-up. This technique is all well and good when the weather’s cold enough for the cannons, but if it starts warming-up at night we could be in trouble…

For the moment though, Alpe d’Huez boasts some of the best snow in France. Only the lowest, sunniest runs are closed (which includes the Sarenne) but new arrivals do get quite a shock when their first view of the resort is this:

Photo: Vickie Allen

The skiing may be good but I’m just not feeling it right now. With mid-season rapidly approaching I needed to get out of resort, so was far more enthusiastic than usual when The Boyfriend suggested a trip to the supermarket and a walk in Bourg d’Oisans.

Bourg is a hive of cycling activity in the summer months, but it’s a bit of a ghost town during the winter. Its location at the base of the steep-sided Oisans valley means it spends a chunk of the winter months either in the shadow of the mountains or under a blanket of cloud. Today however, it was sunny and toasty, with temperatures hitting 25ºC in the sun.

After a rather dull and chilly whiz round Casino we drove out to the fields that surround the town. There’s a lot of housing development going on in Bourg, but once you get past the Happy Valley projects you find fallow fields bisected by manmade mini canals.

Photo: Vickie Allen

Despite the warm weather, spring is yet to arrive in Bourg but there are a few signs that it’s not far away.

The trees remain bare but as the snows melt and the streams start to run once again, green life is appearing in the water. Weeds and water plants strongly rooted, reflect the sun’s warmth as they cling on against the flow that comes from the mountains. We heard the distant rumble of rock falls as the temperature change and melting snow loosens cracks on the mountainside.

Photo: Vickie Allen

Rustles in the dry leaves covering the mulch betrayed the field mice and squirrels out foraging, and we spotted a heron working its powerful way along one tree-lined canals, looking for prey. Squelching through the mud and remnants of frozen snow, protected by the shade of the trees, we made our way to the bank of the largest canal, Bourg’s protection from the heavy meltwater that gushes down into the valley at the end of each winter.

Photo: Vickie Allen

The level of the river is low at the moment and may stay that way unless we get a significant snowfall before the end of the season.

The forecasts remain hesitant to predict anything other than sun, so maybe we now need to accept that it simply won’t snow this much this winter: Mother Nature’s way of rebalancing after last year’s epic snowfall. Or maybe she’s playing her cards close to her chest and – as the older generation of local mountain folk believe – she’s going to test the mettle of the half-term tourists with a huge dump just in time for the first weekend of the holidays …

We’ll just have to wait and see.

Photo: Vickie Allen

Click on the links for more information about Bourg d’Oisans and riding this winter in Alpe d’Huez.

Destination Oisans: Photos, films and thoughts on the reality of life in the mountains.

The Upstage 2011 cast and crew

The cast and crew of Upstage – an English theatre group comprising students at Cité Internationale Europole in Grenoble – share their experiences as rehearsals gather pace for this year’s production: Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, Ste-Marie-d’en-Bas, March 15–19. 

Francesco Amadori 

This is my first year in upstage productions and I am so pleased to be part of it. From day one, everyone was really friendly and made me feel at ease in the rehearsals. We work in a great atmosphere and I love the way the directors take their time to pay attention to every detail in the scene which we are practising. 

I play a well-to-do, hard-handed land-owner named Thomas Putnam. He is a participant in the trials of Salem and “helps” the prosecution of Giles Corey. This part, seeing as it is not one of the major ones, allows me to participate backstage during the play, as well as being on stage. 

Alba Besson 

Girls found dancing in the forest; women accused of witchcraft; a mighty judge brought to Salem to sort it all out and to hang the guilty… Sounds like a pretty good play don’t you think? 

I’m Alba and I play the part of Samuel Parris, Salem’s egocentric reverend, and so far I’m really enjoying being one of the baddies! The cast this year is really fun: we all get on great and function well as a theatre troupe. The rehearsals, with a little nudge from cakes and the soundtrack to “The Boat That Rocked”, are progressing slowly but surely and through them is emerging an exciting adaptation of Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible”. 

Hopefully, Parris’s selfish, sly and self-righteous personality won’t rub off on me too much! 

Mariam El Boudi 

Hi everybody! I’m Mariam, a 17-year-old girl who plays Mary Warren, a naïve young woman, and Rebecca Nurse, a conventional 72-year-old woman. Exploring The Crucible through Mary Warren’s character is a powerful and overwhelming experience, especially since this will be the first time I’ll be playing in Upstage. The balance stems from Rebecca Nurse’s character who is, according to me, of a much lighter tone. As Mr Simpson [David Simpson] said “the emotional levels and the acting challenges are very demanding”; therefore, we are experiencing a break away from Loot which was performed the previous year and was much more hilarious. 

I’m looking forward to be performing with the rest of the team!!! 

Jaicy Elliot 

This is my third and last year in upstage and I am proud to say that I play the splendid Elizabeth Proctor. 

This is a great change as I have been accustomed to playing men. Elizabeth is a very strong lady dealing with deep emotional conflict within her marriage as well as playing an extremely important role in the witch trial. 

The play is definitely more serious and grave than the past few upstage has put on but I’m glad to say that the very new actors’ enthusiasm and good humour still fits in what we call the upstage family and style. 

Matias Gaggiotti 

Hey, I’m Matias and in The Crucible I play Deputy-Governor Danforth, a pretentious and selfish judge, who is extremely loyal to the rules and regulations of his position. He constantly changes tone and mood and so I am sometimes pushed to act calmly and then erupt into an explosion of anger. He is a challenging character to portray but it’s also fun to immerse in this selfish, “just” character. The team this year is convivial and we all feel comfortable acting in front of each other. The production team is doing a brilliant job and the play is evolving swiftly and surely. The actors help the production team from time to time in making the tickets and other technicalities. Overall everyone is having fun and enjoying their role. Although the play is a challenge (due to its sometimes complicated language and strong themes) the team faces the challenge and overcomes the difficulties to produce a first class performance. Of course there is place for improvement but we will all be there coming March to preform the play in all its splendour. And I’m sure you’ll be there too. 

Andrew Hanlon 

Ladies and gentlemen of the court, I have come here to refer you to the facts. Every year for the past 18 years there has been an Upstage production, and every year there are a talented few, selected to perform and be part of the Upstage Experience. Ladies and gentlemen of the court, ladies and gentlemen of Salem, I am no lawyer, I am but an old farmer with 600 acres with timber in addition but I challenge you now, find one of that chosen band who will testify here, before God and the good people of Salem, find one who claims that their time could have been better spent. Find one who says that the few hours a week were not worth the feeling of success. Find one, I challenge you, find one who would not have become one of the select few, chosen to join the Upstage family. Just one. Ladies and gentlemen of the court, I rest my case. 

Anthony du Hecquet de Rauville 

Hello there assembly! I’m John Hale. Reverend John Hale that is. 

Now for today’s opening sermon, I have chosen to read to you from the Book of Upstage, Chapter The Crucible, Verse 2011. 

You see, this verse details how Anthony de Rauville joined Upstage and what he thought of it. 

Everyone knows that when in trouble, Upstage is the best reference when it comes to chilling. After all, it is THE place to be. What more could a young man such as Anthony want? He decided that he wanted to not only enjoy himself, but entertain others. After a long audition, he was finally admitted into the book of Upstage. Many a cold winter afternoon, you could see Anthony and his friends practising away, repeating line after line, movement after movement, and so, after many hours of hard work and perseverance, he was finally admitted into the Chapter of The Crucible. Do you see what an interesting life he and the other members led? Wouldn’t it be a waste not to enjoy this chapter? Well then why don’t you head on over to Théâtre Ste-Marie-d’en-Bas and enjoy a wonderful show. 

Yannick Jamey 

I’m very happy to say I’m playing in upstage for a third year. This time, I’ll perform as a minor role: Judge Hathorne, a very unfair and sadistic Salem judge, which sets quite a contrast in character for me, compared to my previous roles as a thug and wanted criminal. Hathorne is very intense, as is the actual play, which is somewhat much less of a comedy than what upstage usually produces. I think “the Crucible” is magnificent and wholly remarkable, and with an impressively big crew to bring it to Ste-Marie-d’en-Bas, I look forward to a thrilling performance. I would like to thank Mr. Simpson and other upstage members for exceptionally having given me the pleasure and opportunity to perform once again with the big family… 

Astrid Lund 

This is my first year at Upstage, but I still felt welcomed from the start, and as time goes on my confidence on stage has grown. There is a real feeling of belonging to a group, and it’s great seeing the play coming together, thanks to a wonderful cast and crew. 

I play Abigail Williams. She is 17 years old during the trials. She is manipulative and dramatic, as well as darkly charismatic, with constant shifts of mood and behaviour. At first she seems to be modest and proper, but soon it is obvious that she is far from that… 

Colleen Massé 

Upstage. Since the moment I saw the play last year, I just knew I wanted to be part of it. And I’m not disappointed. It is better than anything I had expected!!!! I’m Tituba, Parris’ crazy servant on my good days, and Mercy Lewis – as Arthur Miller said “A sly merciless girl of 18″ – on my bad days … These two small parts seem just perfect for me to get used to acting, and to how Upstage works … Why now, what more could I say? Apart from buy your tickets, and expect a night you won’t forget! Because there shall be no trickin’ with no Devil as long as Tituba’s around, and no terrible secrets with Mercy Lewis. Of course not…! 

Mairwen Perenon 

I wanted to act in Upstage since seeing The Ladykillers. I am very happy to have been included in the Upstage team this year. My characters are very challenging for me as I have never acted before. I hope I will satisfy the audience with my work on them. Ann Putnam is an old woman who is deeply affected by the loss of seven children in childbirth, whereas Francis Nurse is a landholding farmer whose wife is accused of killing Ann Putnam’s babies! 

Fred Shahani 

Hi, Fred here. This is my first year at Upstage, I arrived a little late but I felt welcomed from my first day. I am part of the production team and I mostly do the odd jobs such as fetching Mr Simpson and Julie’s coffee, scrubbing the floors and filling in for the actors who couldn’t be bothered to come… The main reason I wanted to come to Upstage is for the cheap coffee and free food but I’m also interested in how a play evolves and what happens behind the scenes. The Crucible is a great play to start off with as it has a lot of themes that are still valid today. The play is rapidly improving and I look forward to the future. 

Lewis Smith 

Hi, I’m Lewis. This year will be my second in Upstage, working with the magnificent Production team! I’m mainly responsible for any sound effects or music you hear in the theatre, as well as the Upstage website. Why did I join Upstage you might ask? Because I love working backstage in theatre productions and contributing to them, having tons of fun, and of course watching lowly actors rehearse for hours on end! (Cue evil laugh) Upstage really is great fun, whether you be an actor or techie, whether the play be a comedy or not; there will always be great people, great music, and of course free food. 

On top of all that, on top of the teamwork and stress management skills you develop, the feeling of accomplishment and success after the final production is wonderful, and is definitely worth the effort! 

As Nietzsche once said, “What is good? – Whatever augments the feeling of happiness.” Upstage is thereby the highest form of good. 

Nicholas Smith 

Hi, I’m Nick and this year I decided to join Upstage, the Europole theatre troop. So far I’m not regretting my decision at all! Since the beginning of the year I’ve been having bucket loads of fun at rehearsals. The atmosphere amongst the cast and crew is great, everyone gets on really well, and when you’ve had a stressful week and are rundown with exhaustion, Upstage is a real pick-me-up. It helps to swallow the proverbial medicine that is the French lycée system. 

I play John Proctor, an honest and faithful farmer, pillar of the community and model to all … kind of … 

Camille Tabary 

Aye love! 

I am Cheever, the prison guard. 

I am a minor character in our play The Crucible who likes to get tipsy, or even drunk … My real name is Camille Tabary and I am a terminale. A small part was perfect for me this year because it really enabled me to participate in the upstage experience and have fun, but also continue working at school. Upstage is a lot of hard work but also great fun because we all have the same goal: perform the best Crucible possible. It will be an amazing play that you won’t forget, because we put our heart into it. So come and see us. Maybe I will share with you some of my cider. 

Teo Taylor 

Lights On! 

Hi. My name’s Teo Taylor, and I play the role of, well, Teo Taylor. I have to admit, it’s a role I particularly enjoy, because it is that of a psychorigid, boring, terribly bad looking “computer genius” (that’s what a history teacher once said, so for all you know it might just be that I know how to turn on the printer.) In short, I’m the closest you’ll get to the Upstage geek – shirt in trousers, glasses, terrible taste for shoes, and never eats at midday. 

As you might have expected, I’m one of the four techies. More specifically, I’m the one who does the stuff like the poster or the lights. So, if you like the poster, knowing I’m responsible for it, I hope you’ll trust me when I say that what the actors are producing is way worth seeing, to come and see for yourself in March (I’ll be sad if you don’t…) 

See poster below for ticket and performance information 

The Crucible poster

Pat Brans

Grenoble-based Pat Brans has published a book called Master the Moment, in which he shares the secrets of 50 leading CEOs on time management and workplace efficiency.

January is normally the time most people set themselves resolutions for the New Year but sadly it’s also the easiest time to break them. When the days are short and gloomy and everyone seems to be suffering from seasonal adjustment or at least a Really Bad Cold, it is not easy to keep your well-intentioned promises. However, if one of your goals for 2011 was to get yourself better organized and more efficient – it’s certainly one of mine – then Pat Brans‘s new book might make a good personal investment.

Visiting professor at Grenoble Graduate School of Business, Pat Brans provides corporate training on time management and personal efficiency. He has held senior positions with three large organizations (CSC, Hewlett-Packard, and Sybase) where he focused on applying technology to enhance workforce effectiveness. But don’t just take his word for it – Pat’s new book is the result of discussions with 50 leading CEOs, unveiling their tips for personal productivity.

Pat explains: “High achievers are not necessarily smarter or putting in more effort than those around them. But they do have different attitudes and are more careful how they use time. From their perspective they are moving at a comfortable pace. To the typical bystander, they are zipping past.

“It’s about knowing how to set goals and how to reach them. Too many people make a resolution to become more organised or to accomplish more, but then weeks later they see no difference. The problem is that they don’t internalise the ideas and turn them into habit. My book explores how you can turn powerful ideas into automatic behaviour. It provides a set of time management habits and a method you can use to make the changes you need to set you on the road to achieving your goals.”

Master The Moment features material from exclusive interviews with CEOs of 50 top companies and institutions including Curves, City of Grenoble , Columbia Sportswear, Southwest Airlines, University of Maryland , US Census Bureau, and Energizer Holdings. The ideas in the book are backed up with research by psychologists and physiologists in areas such as motivation, decision theory, procrastination, habit forming, and physical fitness.

Pat adds: “The value of Master the Moment is that each of the people included is highly successful, and each is in a position to observe hundreds of other people work. As such, this group has a unique vantage point from which to develop a well-founded opinion on what makes one person more effective than another.”

Not sure if you’re getting enough done in the time available to you? Take the quiz: www.bcs.org/books/timequiz

Take a look (includes contents, first chapter and index)

About the book:

Master the Moment: Fifty CEOs teach you the secrets of time management
Pat Brans, ISBN: 9781906124731, Format: Paperback
£12.95 Standard, €20.95 Euros, $21.95 US Dollars
BCS books are available to order from the online BCS Bookshop, all good bookshops and Turpin Distribution Services Ltd, Pegasus Drive, Stratton Business Park, Biggleswade, Beds,  SG18 8TQ, United Kingdom, +44 (0)1767 604951, enquiries to custserv@turpin-distribution.com

photo: Vickie Allen

Vickie Allen reports on the snow – or lack of it – at Alpe d’Huez, and gives her tips for winter sports enthusiasts on how to predict the weather.

Sitting in our t-shirts looking across the green valley to the bare mountains behind, yesterday felt like April. In fact, last April the weather was far worse than it is now, with lots of snow falling late in the season.

Today as I look out of the window at the blue skies and the green trees it feels like Spring is already here. However, The Boyfriend has a different theory: winter hasn’t yet arrived.

photo: Vickie Allen

And he may be right. We’ve had a few big dumps of snow but nothing major and nothing really prolonged, which is what’s needed to provide a good strong base of snow. So maybe winter isn’t really here yet, maybe it’s on it’s way…

Our mountain weather is notoriously unpredictable and erratic. Last week we experienced all four seasons and after a week of sunshine the sort of temperatures we usually experience in May, the forecast is now predicting a week of clouds and snow.

photo: Vickie Allen

Just a few regular dustings really, around 10cm for the week, because the irony is that it’s going to be too cold to snow next week. The freeze level is due to drop from 3550m to 1850m today. By Thursday morning it will reach 0m and jiggle around up to 400m until Sunday.

photo: Vickie Allen

However, it’s not worth worrying about. Life here is lived determined by the weather and you have to be flexible to adapt to the whim of Mother Nature. This is one of the may reasons I love it, it stops me planning too far ahead! Forecasting here is supremely difficult and my interest in it has become purely theoretical. I’ve been closely watching the forecast for the past two years and love to watch the number but rarely do I base my life on them. They merely provide an idea of what may come to pass, but for life, I rely on these three methods for predicting the weather:

1: look to the south for storm clouds as this is where our weather originates
2: stick your head out of the window to test the temperatures and smell the air
3: layer-up no matter what the weather

photo: Vickie Allen

If you’re heading out on holiday soon then pack for all weathers, as you should no matter what time of year you visit the mountains. And if your trip is booked for later in the season then know that the weather might not be what you’re expecting, but you’ll have a great time anyway.

photo: Vickie Allen

PS: if you liked today’s photos, check out my Flickr page and entries into the Alpe Photo Contest.

Click on the link for more information about riding this winter in Alpe d’Huez or use the comments bow below to ask questions, I’d love to hear what you think!

Destination Oisans: Photos, films and thoughts on the reality of life in the mountains.

A still from Garage, 2007, directed by Lenny Abrahamson

Camille Bromley reports back from the Celtic Connection’s third annual Irish film event and tells us a bit more about activities planned by the association over the year.

At the end of November Grenoble’s Irish cultural association, Celtic Connection, held a film event at Cinema les Melies, showing two Irish films: the animated children’s film Brendan and the Secret of the Kells, and Garage, winner of the 2008 Irish Film awards as well as the CICAE Art and Essai Cinema Prize at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival.  

Asked about the choice of the film Garage, Celtic Connection explained, “We have shown films for three years now and wished to show the ‘maturity’ of Irish cinema with a provoking film about a social theme that was not too evident in the euphoria of the “Celtic tiger” era, and we seem to have been a bit prophetic in our choice.”

The film shows a lonely garage attendant’s tentative first steps towards friendship and human connection with a 15-year-old boy.  The story plays between comic and tragic, with a nuanced and delicate perfomance by Patt Short. Perhaps the most wonderful aspect of seeing the film on the big screen was the beautiful Irish country landscapes. The pace of the film being slow (like life in a rural town), it allows plenty of time to appreciate gorgeous shots of Irish countryside, which can only be described in the most typical way as green, lush, and foggy. The film was shot in Cloghan, County Offaly; Woodford, County Galway; and Rathcabbin, County Tipperary over a six week period in late summer 2006

This was the third annual Irish film event for Celtic Connection.  Previously they had shown Small Engine Repair with the Cinemathéque de Grenoble, and Once.  At every event Celtic Connection offers an apéritif beforehand and “a few drinks” afterwards in the Irish bars of Grenoble.

Don’t want to wait until November 2011 to see another Irish film? 

The Celtic Connection gives its recommendations:

For Adults: 

Breakfast on Pluto, 2006, Neil Jordan
The Wind that shakes the Barley, 2006, Ken Loach
Paveen Lackeen, 2005
Once, John Carney, 2007.
Bloody Sunday, Paul Grengrass, 2002
In America, Jim Sheridan
Omagh, Pete Travis, 2005
The Magdalene Sisters, Peter Mullan 

For Children:

Into the West, Mike Newell, 1992
The Ugly Duckling and Me, Michael Hegner and Karsten Kiilerich, 2007
The Secret of the Kells, Tomm Moore and Nora Twomey, 2009

 The Irish film institute website also has an archive of films

What else does Celtic Connection do?

A lot, as it turns out—Celtic Connection holds a variety of activities centered on Celtic identity throughout the year.  All the events are annual.

Upcoming is Christmas drinks at the Family pub on Friday December 17th.

Then they start off the new year with a restaurant meal for the ladies, in the tradition of Nollaig na Mna (Women’s Christmas). Traditionally, each year on January 6th men would take care of the housework for one day, offering women a chance to go out to relax with each other.

Later in January a night to celebrate the life and works of the national Bard Robert Burns: Celtic Connection’s Scottish contingent organized Burn’s night last January, complete with haggis, speeches, and music.

On March 17^th is, of course, St. Patrick’s Day.  Celtic Connection celebrates on a weekend around this date, organizing a meal at a farmhouse restaurant just outside Grenoble.  Last year, they say, “we had 70 people and a band and danced the evening away.”

On June 16th in Dublin and elsewhere is Bloomsday, to celebrate the life of Irish writer James Joyce and relive the events in his novel Ulysses, all of which took place on the same day in Dublin in 1904. Last year the Bookworm Café hosted a reading of Ulysses, with the enthusiastic David Simpson as a reader. On the agenda this year: Edwardian dress-up…? 

Around the 20th of June Celtic Connection holds their annual picnic in conjunction with the Irish association in Lyon, AFIL.  The picnic is held at a lake near Grenoble, and attendees sometimes reach 80 people, making for a great afternoon of fun, games and songs.

Celtic Connection isn’t about to miss a Halloween event on October 31st, seeing as the celebration of Halloween began in Ireland around 100AD.  There’s an event for the kiddies with traditional games, apples and fruit, and costumes, while the adults have mulled wine or the more traditional Irish coffee.  In 2010 the Halloween event was held at Café Mari and included a full Irish breakfast, which is “a brunch with sausages, rashers, eggs, black pudding, lashings of tea and brown bread” (being American, I have no idea what rashers or “lashings of tea” is supposed to indicate, so I leave this in quotations).

The Irish film showing, growing in popularity each year, takes place mid-November.

Finally, Celtic Connection winds up the calendar with Christmas drinks in an Irish bar.  It starts no later than happy hour and everyone brings food and music.  This is a social event and people are welcome to drift in and out all evening.  Celtic Connection does advise drinking in moderation, although they know that it won’t be a problem—at least on the Irish side—because “the French traditionally consume more alcohol than us!”

Don’t believe them?—According to the World Health Organization, Ireland’s per capita litre consumption increased from 7.0 in 1970 to 14.5 in 2001, and was 13.5 in 2004. This compares with 20.4 in France in 1970 down to 13.0 in 2004.  Ok, so the Irish do drink slightly more that the French . . . but it wasn’t always the case!

For more information:

Celtic Connection’s website

To be kept informed of Celtic Connection events sign up for the mailing list by emailing celtic.connection.grenoble@gmail.com

AFIL, Celtic Connection’s sister association in Lyon

The Irish Film Institute website

The 2011 official St. Patrick’s Day festival in Dublin

Burn’s Night

Dude, where's my car?

… or, don’t let the heavy stuff freeze … Vickie Allen of Destination Oisans shares some timely tips on unburying your car from the snow.

I’ve just cleared a whole heap of snow from my car. The snow storm that’s had me tucked away indoors for the past 24 hours deposited snow in Alpe d’Huez that swallowed my hand and forearm whole; a more scientifically-accurate depth of 43cm. (Thanks Mum for my new tape measure, must remember to keep it in my pocket …)

Of the many winter sports available in the Oisans region, none of the tourist bumpf includes snow clearing on it’s list of snowy sports. But it’s physically challenging, works up a sweat and is great for the soul. What better way to measure your achievement than taking a soft snowy lump (see photo above) and extracting the ice-encrusted car within?

Anyone who’s lived in the mountains will tell you that learning to love snow clearing is one of the best ways to cope with the long winter season. It’s an inevitability, and if you can embrace the idea then you can turn something painful and time consuming into something enjoyable. And surely that’s what we seek when we come to live in a climate that’s so inhospitable most of the local wildlife beds down and sleeps for half the year … and I’m not just talking about the marmottes!

Snow clearing is something best done while the snow is fresh. Leave it too long and it’ll freeze, solidifying and welding itself in thin layers to your car, path or anything else you happened to leave out in a snowstorm. And it’s not just the snow on top but the snow around. Those friendly snow plough drivers do their best to keep the roads clear but – in an effort not to scrape your car – they’ll happily block you in behind a thigh-high wall of solid snow. Tip: try not to park parallel to the curb in a snowy ski resort, it’s much easier to drive straight forwards or backwards out of a snowy space.

Over the past five years I’ve developed my snow clearing arsenal to a crack selection of efficient and necessary tools:

Essential – if unconventional – snow clearing equipment

Ortovox avalanche shovel: much more user-friendly than the typical metal snow shovel and packs down so can live in your car or your tiny resort hallway;
Bum board: essential for clearing the snow that’s actually fallen on your car without scratching the paintwork;
High boots and long trousers: believe me, when the snow’s up to your knees trainers or Timberland boots just won’t do;
Gloves: seems obvious but you’d be surprised how many people clear snow from their cars in their regular gloves. I keep an old ski pair on the back seat. I only use them for clearing the snow so it’s okay to get my hands filthy as I scrape the dirty, frozen scuzz from beneath the wheel arches and along the base of the car.

As I was clearing the snow, it occurred to me that there are so many things in life, events that we consider trials, that carry such negative connotations or feelings for us that we put them off indefinitely. And once we finally do face them head-on, how fantastic do we feel? Imagine how much more powerful and positive we’d be if we could just deal with these dreary or painful tasks as they came up, knowing that the longer we leave them, the worse they’ll become.

One winter I didn’t clear my car for about ten days. There was probably a metre of snow on top before I mustered the willpower to face the fact that no knight in shining armour was going to clear it for me. Neither would the freeze/thaw cycle of early spring do anything other than make the whole job much harder than it had to be. The whole task of clearing the car, which of course was completely necessary, was much more painful than it needed to be; partly because it was hard work but also partly because I spent the whole time beating myself up for leaving it so long.

Ah yes … that’s what my car looks like …

So I’m going to apply the ’snow clearing’ attitude to my procrastination list – which, of course, is separate to my ‘to do’ list. I’ve already been to the bank to open a savings account and taken photos of all the stuff I’ve been meaning to sell on e-Bay. What’s next on the list?

And how about you? What chore are you hoping someone else will do for you? What idea is ready to be realised but getting staler every day you put it off? What honest conversation do you need to have before the spring thaw arrives?

Get to work today and I promise you’ll feel a huge sense of achievement; just as I did when I finally unearthed the car.

Slack lining in Parc Paul Mistral

In the second post of his blog ‘From Admission to Graduation’ MBA student Joseph Schott shares his experiences studying in Grenoble and tells us about slacklining.

Two months into the MBA program at Grenoble Graduate School of Business, and I already feel like I’ve accomplished a lot. Traversed a long, dark tunnel of French bureaucracy? Check. Met classmates from all around the globe? Check. I’ve even finished a few modules. Now its time to settle in and enjoy all that the city has to offer. So far, the relaxed vibe and multicultural atmosphere has been just what I was looking for. There are so many universities and innovative firms located in Grenoble that I keep running into interesting people all the time. I still have a long list of new places to see, but today I want to write about something new I found a few weeks back.

Walking through Parc Mistral, I noticed a man floating in the air between two trees. I took a quick look around. The trees were swaying gently in the wind and the sky was clear. There were families picnicking on the grass. I checked again, and sure enough he was now walking, carefully suspended about one half meter above the ground. Someone was beating out a rhythm with drums near La tour Perret. Beneath him, I could just barely make out the shimmer of something stretched between the two trees: my first look at a slackline.

In slacklining, you try to find your balance and walk back and forth on a band of flexible material that can vary in length, width, and elasticity. The material is very thin, which is why I couldn’t see it very well from the side, and the elastic fabric stretches with each step, making it very different from tight-rope walking.

Slacklines can be connected to any two anchor points, like trees in a park. Since the line is so close to the ground, when you lose your balance you just step back on the grass. If you go up in the mountains and anchor the line between two sides of a crag, it is called highlining. In this case, you’ll need to wear a climbing harness and attach a safety cord that travels with you around the line. Go up even higher to where the air starts getting thin, and you have something people call skylining.

A slackline

For me, it was satisfying enough just managing to walk back and forth between two trees. The flexibility in the line causes it to wobble back and forth beneath you, and it must have taken me two hours to just barely stumble to the other side. It’s all about balance. Making it through requires a kind of Zen concentration to clear your mind and focus only on your body and the line.

A beginner mistake is to stare at your feet, but since your feet are moving around with the line, this makes it hard for your brain to know where the ground is in relation to your body. It’s much better to stare straight ahead at something that doesn’t move and raise your arms for balance. You need to keep good posture, with your hips forward. As people get better, they start to add tricks. Jumping around on the line, sitting down and standing back up, doing splits, yoga, whatever you can think of. What used to be known as “what rock climbers do when they’re bored” has really come into its own.

My MBA program is moving fast, and I’m meeting people, learning a lot, and getting ready for my next career move. Our course on international negotiation in particular is extremely hands on and engrossing. Some days though, when I’ve done too much accounting and just need to clear the numbers out of my head, a Saturday afternoon slacklining is a great way to do it. Best of all, the slackliners I’ve met around Grenoble are always welcoming of new people who stroll by and want to see what is going on. This communal atmosphere makes it a great way to meet new people and get connected to an interesting international crowd.

For some more information, you can check out the wiki here and two great videos, here and here.

For all your administrative nightmares: Binders. Photo: nick findley

Grenoble Life editor James Dalrymple had to do a Validation des Acquis Professionnels et Personnels (VAPP) and survived to tell the tale. Here’s what happened and why.

Master your subject

For those wanting to one day take the competitive teaching exams or concours de l’enseignement (CAPES, Agrégation) to become a teacher for the French state system, you may be aware that things have changed. The government have scrapped the institutes (IUFMs) that provided teachers with practical training after these exams to gear them up for life in a classroom. Instead, it is now an obligation to have a Master’s degree in your chosen field before taking the concours, the second year of which orientates wanabee profs in two directions: a master’s in pedagogy (for those teachers taking the CAPES) and a master’s in research (for those wishing to take the agrég).

Setting aside the questionable French wisdom of abandoning practical teacher training for more theory – and thus a greater insistence on what you know as opposed to can you teach? – the shake-up has a number of consequences for anglophones intending to run the gauntlet. Firstly, you will require a master’s degree or equivalent in order to take the exams; secondly, the requirements for entering into these master’s programmes have become much stricter.

Getting a head start

When I arrived in Grenoble I knew several anglophones who had been able to enter directly into the second year of the Etudes Anglophones master’s programme given that they had a Bachelor’s degree in their native country and were seen as having an advantage over French students who had studied English literature to degree level in France. Therefore such people were able to obtain a master’s level (aka, Bac + 5) having completed what amounted to one term of classes evaluated via graded written work and oral presentations, and a dissertation on the research subject of their choice. One of my friends even wrote an article here about it. However, upon applying myself, I was told that a Bachelor’s was not sufficient to enter into Master 2, and my claims to know people who had done this were met with indifference. Something had changed, but no-one would explain what and why, nor was there information online to this explicit effect.

Formalising experience

At 32 years old with a job and a family, I was not able to commit to the full two years of the programme, especially frustrating since I knew people who had – with the same BA-level qualifications – gone directly into Master 2 with minimum fuss. There are two potential administrative procedures for people in my position: a Validation des Etudes and a Validation des Acquis Professionnels et Personnels (VAPP). As I hadn’t done enough additional post-degree study according to the new rules to claim the equivalence of the first year of the master’s, I failed in my efforts to pursue the former (lighter) route. Given I have worked (first in publishing and then in teaching) for around ten years, I had to opt for the VAPP. This also applies if you are over 28 or have interrupted your studies for more than three years (check for me on both counts!).

As far as I know, the VAPP doesn’t exist in anglophone countries but is a necessity in France where qualifications weigh so much more than work experience. It is not enough just to submit a CV. In France your experience has to be formally recognised by a commission and involves the supply of copious justificatifs (i.e. proof), explantory detail of all your acquired skills and knowledge and certified translations of your diplomas and certificates. In effect, the VAPP dossier becomes less of an application than a lengthy project that must be printed and bound six times.

Luckily for me I have a patient wife who was brought up in the French education system and has a black belt in admin. Without the help of such a person, you might as well forget about doing the VAPP. It is not just a question of being able to write French perfectly, but of knowing the specific terminology adopted within France’s idiosyncratic employment culture to explain one’s skills and knowledge. This requires hours of research in itself.  

Beware sworn translators

Worst of all, we had a dispute with a sworn translator, unbelievably British in origin herself, over grade equivalences. If you have a 2:1 Honours degree from a British university, this is the second highest mark you can receive after a First. Thus you would expect this to be translated as Mention Bien, the second highest level in France. Our translator, however, on whom we depended to certify the document as well as translate it, wanted to put Mention Assez Bien, effectively demoting my grade by one level. On this issue she would not budge despite our protestations. In the end we had to settle for her leaving the grade in English, and translating the rest, and hoping that the commission presiding over my dossier could understand the value of a 2:1.

Jumping through hoops

My dossier has been approved, but I can’t shake off the feeling that this was just a hoop thrown up for me to jump through – that the detail of my application was less important than my having tackled the time-consuming obstacle thrown in my path. I imagine that, in undertaking such an arduous task, I have proved to the commission who approve the VAPP that I am genuinely motivated. Wouldn’t a simple interview have sufficed ?

Feel free to use the comments box below to share similar experiences and advice or your own administrative nightmares.

Anyone remember this? Photo: litherland

In August Grenoble Life editor James Dalrymple found himself with time to burn and decided to enrol in French classes at the CUEF. Here’s what he has to say.

Between finishing my job as a teacher in a private institute and beginning life in l’éducation nationale , I found myself the grateful recipient of more than one year’s untaken annual holiday. To get a taste of university life ahead of my new job on campus, and avoid spending all day in my dressing gown, I enrolled in a semi-intensive French class called Passerelle pour l’université française at the CUEF, one of the many rather inelegant departmental acronyms found there.

Centre Universitaire d’Etudes Françaises (CUEF) is part of Stendhal University and offers a variety of courses of different durations and tailored to different levels. According to the website the Passerelle “s’adresse aux étudiants désireux de s’inscrire dans une université française,“ which might lead you to the conclusion that it is less a language class than a series of lectures. In fact it is a fairly varied and pleasant FLE-style course comprising four hours of class time a day for two weeks, focused on improving a facility for formal expression and speaking.

Working on a rich range of materials including articles, video and audio reports, the course enables a broadening of vocab and a tightening of written style that suited me just fine. Longer summer courses exist, but the timing of the Passerelle was better for me. I should also add that this was not a class that prioritised free oral expression, although we had opportunity to debate the themes which arose in the materials (such as: the history of social housing in France, the future of urbanisation, surrogate motherhood).

The course was also a reminder of some of French education’s more idiosyncratic aspects: the insistence on summarizing and reducing articles from the press to their bare essentials, long after students had shown an understanding of the text. Agree with the efficacy of such an activity or not, it is a common exercise in French classrooms and worth familiarising yourself with if you are planning to study here. Personally, as someone who had learnt most of their shaky French à l’orale, I made masses of progress in terms of written structure, vocab and grammar.

The two weeks included access to a multimedia lab which was essentially just a computer room manned by a teacher-technician who could sometimes advise on specific online exercises to meet your needs. Furthermore, the fee included a guided visit to Musée Dauphinois which currently hosts an interesting temporary exhibition on Grenoble-born luminary Jacques de Vaucanson (1709–1782), one of the fathers of early robots: mechanical automatons that owed their design to greater understanding of the human anatomy.

Normally the course is aimed at B1 and B2 students, but I was pleasantly surprised to be told that I was pushing completion of C1 by the end of the course (and I was given a handy certificate to this effect; always useful in France), so there was a bit of a spread of levels in the group. This didn’t seem to matter too much, though, and it was great to be in one of those multi-national (albeit predominantly German) learning contexts where the common language is the one being studied.

If you have had good or bad experiences at the CUEF, please share them with us below. For further information on the CUEF and other French language courses in Grenoble, check this out.

Grenoble ... 'a rich intercultural nature'. Copyright Agence Prisme / Pierre Jayet

Mary Zaccai, international press officer at Grenoble Ecole de Management, hits back at the negative and sensationalist media coverage of recent events in Grenoble.

I have this frustrating feeling that all the hard work I am putting in each day promoting Grenoble Ecole de Management (Grenoble Graduate School of Business) and by extension Grenoble itself is being severely put into question by all the negative media frenzy about the city.

Listening to and reading international press, it is as if Grenoble is one of the most dangerous cities in the world, hit by crime and drugs … are we talking about the same place?? Am I living in such conditions? Certainly not.

Just by running a google news search on Grenoble, I noticed that usual news about mountaineering, football etc. has been dramatically replaced by news about the speech president Nicolas Sarkozy delivered in Grenoble, days after one neighbourhood of the city was hit by riots. The riots began when 27-year-old Karim Boudouda robbed a nearby casino and fled to his neighbourhood, Villeneuve. When cornered by the police, he opened fire and the police shot him dead. The riots were limited to a small area, but the media frenzy made it as is the entire of Grenoble has become a war zone. As for the speech, as the Financial Times mentions: “Never before has a French head of state made such an explicit link between immigration and crime.” And he decided to do so in beautiful Grenoble, forever linking the city to shocking suggestions such as citizenship-stripping proposals to deal with immigration.

The irony of all this is that the attraction of Grenoble lies primarily in its rich intercultural nature. The school is a prime example with 96 different nationalities from all quarters of the world. Walking through the streets, our students are always struck by the many different languages they hear, delicious smells from the American cookie shop or the Arabic cake stands, the sushi bars, the Italian quarter … a melting-pot with all the advantages that this has to offer. Not to mention: its history, beautiful sites, booming economy largely based on international connections, and vast student population that brings this vibrant feel to the city.

Grenoble, the city I was born to, the city I came back to after living in the UK for seven years, the city I promote - is for me a safe haven, a thriving and dynamic city, enriched by a multitude of cultures. A place to meet the world.

Girose glacier from Dome de la Lauze

Rebecca Skillman narrates the highs and lows of a walk on the wild side: a 3-day glacier hike roped to a mercurial mountain guide at an altitude of over 3000m.

August 2010

Inspired by my husband, Juan, who has been yearning to do a glacier walk for yonks, and our crampons, unused in their boxes since winter, we book on the Bureau des Guides des Ecrins three-day Randonnée glaciaire around the Meije. We know the Ecrins well, but walking above 3000m of altitude will be a new experience.

Day 1: La Grave to the Selle refuge (2673m) via the Col de la Lauze (3512m)

We meet our guide, Jean-Paul, at La Grave. He has brought his wife and daughter along for the trip, explaining that they’ll be roped up separately, so are not technically part of our group. In addition to ourselves are Grenobloise Chantal and a Parisian couple, Pauline and Annette.

We set off, taking the cable-car to the top, just below the Rateau. Leaving the grotte de glace tourists behind, we step onto the Girose glacier. My crampons don’t seem properly adjusted to my boots. I hesitate to place my foot inside, as Jean-Paul instructs, confused by what he says about the crampon fitting. To my shock and amazement I find him literally shouting at me. I can’t believe it. How am I going to spend three days with this man … But fears are displaced, at least for now, by the staggering view. Across the valley, north of La Grave, the Aiguilles d’Arves glisten with the previous night’s dusting of snow. We are bathed in sunshine and the glacier looks sensational (see top).

Being roped up and walking “in formation” is a strange sensation. No possibility of stopping for a snack or drink, let alone a pee. Photo opportunities are confined to hasty snaps – before a yank from the person in front puts an end to it. An hour or so on we stop for a break and Juan and I scamper up the Dome de la Lauze. We are hardly catching our breath but Jean-Paul is already bidding us come down. Why the haste? Is it the biting wind, or some other reason? I drink in the 360 degree views,  and follow him down reluctantly.

It’s as we descend from the Col de la Lauze into the Selle valley that our problems start.

Descending from the Col de la Lauze to the Selle valley

Pauline and Annette are manifestly ill prepared for (or ill informed about?) the walk. It is walking, albeit down a very steep, snowy slope. But Annette has no stability, hunched over as she tentatively inches her way forward and down. It’s painful to watch, and even more agonising to have to stay roped up as a pack. I am ready to scream when – praise the Lord – Jean-Paul announces that we can unleash ourselves. Juan, Chantal and I speed on ahead. The relief is unimaginable. Slippy slidey snow. Weeha…

At the bottom of the descent, we bask on a grassy slope above the Selle refuge, waiting for the rest of the group to catch up. We can see Jean-Paul, at times far ahead of his herd, for a guide – and then, good, he is waiting for them. It should have taken us an hour, but is nearer 2.5 hours by the time we are all down. Jean-Paul is obviously concerned about the viability of the group, which is stretching the classic rule of going the pace of the slowest beyond what is safe.

Our late descent (which Jean-Paul admits was a mistake) meant the snow was unstable and could have avalanched. But he doesn’t seem to think any particular action is required on his part. By good fortune the two women have seen that their presence is jeopardizing the feasibility of the walk and they decide to pull out. It’s a sad moment – failure for them and (indirectly) Jean-Paul, and the loss of good company. But it has to be the right decision – and Jean-Paul is simply lucky that he didn’t have to impose it.

The Selle refuge

From the refuge we watch the sun’s last rays against the massif du Soreiller, then spend the evening chatting.

The massif du Soreiller glows amber in the setting sun

Jean-Paul perfunctorily teaches us a few knots. Clearly, we are the zillionth group he has done this exercise with. He brusquely informs us that we will be getting up at 5am, having breakfast at 5.02am and leaving at 5.30am. Yes, sir! I am awake most of the night, unable to shake off the stress of the day. But somehow manage to be ready for 5.45, completely zonked.

Day 2: Selle refuge (2673m) to Chatelleret refuge (2232m) via the Col du Replat (3201m)

Head torches light our way as we leave the refuge. By the time we reach the Selle glacier it is almost light. Crampons aren’t necessary here but as we walk up the eastern wall of the glacier they once again earn their places in our rucksacks. What a pleasure walking with them, our stability enhanced with so little effort.

Arriving at the Col du Replat

We arrive at the Col du Replat and perch there on a knife edge. The reward is generous: wonderful views all around, including south towards Gioberney and the Pilatte glacier, and east to the Dome des Ecrins.

A breather at Col du Replat

Snow turns into rock as climb down into the Selle valley

It’s too cold, not to mention vertiginous, to stay long. With some reluctance at losing hard-won altitude so soon, we rope up and begin the descent. There are some tricky passages scrambling down a rock wall. I find it’s tempting to use the rope like via ferrata, giving it my whole weight. But we are not hooked up to the rock, so this would be fatal. Jean-Paul yells at us to keep the rope between each of us taut – if one person falls their fall will then be less. But how can you do this when each of you is negotiating delicate foot positions, manoeuvring around awkward ledges? If the rope is taut we will pull each other off the mountain. As Jean-Paul barks at me from above (“Do you understand me, Rebecca?” Yes. “Then why aren’t you doing as I say?”), Juan simultaneously nags me to give him more slack. Grrrrrr!! Talk about being between a rock and a hard place …

On a sunny, flat rock we find a resting place for “lunch” (it’s only 10.30am), still above the snow line. We catch a glimpse of an ermine zipping around the rocks. Across the valley rock climbers attack a vertical wall.

We’ve been walking for five hours but Chatelleret refuge is still not even in sight. We set off again and practice a few ice-axe techniques on a scrap of snow. I then choose to dawdle, enjoying going at my own pace. Juan uses the opportunity to take some flower photos (Androsace pubescens – now how often have you seen that?!)

Androsace pubescens

I’m too tired to do anything other than will my feet down the path, as erratic cairns give way to a well tramped route. Across the Selle valley we can see tomorrow’s path disappearing up the northern end of the valley into what looks like an impassable precipice. I put it out of my mind. The mountains’ barks are sometimes worse than their bite.

We regroup outside the refuge and enjoy blueberry tart. The refuge has a lovely position alongside a river that ribbons to create a hundred picturesque picnic sites. Juan and I use the refuge shower, powered by the ultimate solar heating system: a long black hosepipe. Bliss. While our guide and family take a siesta the three of us find a spot by the river to chat, analyzing the faults of our guide and putting the world to rights. It’s an effort to stay awake but we’re determined not to undermine the possibility of sleep tonight.

Supper – and not a moment too soon. Jean-Paul surprises me with a party trick: how can you position three glasses and three knives so as to support a jug? (answer: it’s all in the way they overlap) Fuelled up, we waste no time in heading for bed, Juan protesting at the early hour but in fact not far behind the rest of us (what else can you do?!). The 20-bed dormitory is full, the ambiance high as a good French Camembert, and the malfunctioning window letting in gusts of near-freezing air. But nothing will stop sleep this time. Eight solid hours.

Day 3: Chatelleret refuge (2232m) to Villar d’Arène (1667m) via the Col du Clot des Cavales (3158m)

We are again a few minutes over Jean-Paul’s projected departure time – this time because he is behind schedule. Once again we set off as dawn breaks. The granite peaks are temporarily transformed into sandstone as the early sun picks them out. A magical time. 

We don’t need crampons until the last stretch of snow below the Col du Clot des Cavales. It’s a gritty, unpleasant walk: extremely steep, unstable underfoot and impossible to keep the rope straight and free from the many jutting rock faces that we have to pass around, and which break the continuity of line. Jean-Paul is impatient – all three of us answering him back like rebellious teenagers. What on earth does he expect from people who have never done this before?

From the col we look back to yesterday’s descent. From this perspective it looks barely credible as a route.

Col du Replat from Col du Clot des Cavales

To the east is the valley of the “Torrent du Clot des Cavales”, which joins the Romanche valley further on. With the sun shining straight towards us, and scree on all sides, the landscape is at its most austere. We enjoy the eagle’s eye view for a moment or two, but don’t dally. The wind, and knowledge that we still have many hours of walking ahead, push us on.

Here, at least, there’s no need for ropes. We zigzag down through the snow, the Pavé refuge soon revealing itself next to the lake of the same name; the path runs slightly south of the refuge, along textbook moraines.

Jean-Paul seems more than usually introspective. At the confluence of the two rivers rocky haute montagne scenery gives way to more gentle alpages frequented by a number of day walkers approaching from below. The greenery and flowers, and gentle gradient, are very welcome. I voice my appreciation to Jean-Paul but he either doesn’t hear or doesn’t want to hear, and says nothing.

Looking back up the Romanche valley from the Plan de l’Alpe

The end of the walk is beautiful, following the Romanche river east and then north to the car park just south of Villar d’Arène. It’s only the last half hour that really gets to us. Juan needs several breaks in order to make the distance. Back at the cars Jean-Paul offers us a chilled beer and we conduct an informal post mortem. It is extraordinary. Here’s this vastly experienced mountain man, with a devoted wife and daughter, finally acting like a human being. Relief at being able to talk adult to adult for the first time in three days is tempered by sadness at the wasted opportunity: with different group management this would have been such a different adventure.

Jean-Paul explains his bad temper as being common to all guides (really?), and that it was only when we were in danger that he lost his temper (?!) In his view there are any number of routes where the effort and aesthetic are better balanced. He claims the use of the description “randonnée glaciaire” by the Bureau des Guides is misrepresentative – this walk is more accurately début alpinisme. We charge him with the responsibility of reporting this back to the Bureau des Guides. “So no hard feelings, then?”, he asks us. And I guess there are none. But I’ll know what questions to ask next time.

Joseph Schott anticipating life in Grenoble

Joseph Schott has come from the USA, via Japan, to do an MBA at the Grenoble Graduate School of Business. We will be following him ‘From Admission to Graduation’ as he blogs on life and learning in the Capital of the Alps.

Hello, my name is Joseph Schott. I’ll be starting at the Grenoble Graduate School of Business as an MBA student in September. I’m originally from the United States, but I spent the last four years in Japan with the JET Programme. While I was there, I taught English as a foreign language, did some translation and interpretation, and led a small non-profit that performs some support functions for the JET Programme.

While the cities in Japan are beautiful and convenient, the whole country is also full of mountains. It is a great place to be if you like hiking or rock climbing. It was hard to leave! I originally studied social sciences in the US, but working in Japan with people from around the world made me want to get more involved in international business. So after considering the great location of GGSB, (and drooling over pictures of French cheese) I put my interests together and applied at Grenoble.

I’ve been asked to write about my hopes and fears, as well as what I’m doing to prepare for my new life in Grenoble. I’ll start with the juicy bit and go right into my fears. It goes without saying that moving to a new country is a very complicated process, and a lot of the time I’m just glancing at my calendar, hoping that nothing goes wrong. However, my biggest worry about coming to Grenoble is the language. I only just started studying French a few weeks ago, and I’m an absolute beginner.

I’ve been told that Grenoble has a very large and vibrant international community, and from what I’ve seen on this blog, the range of people you can meet is one of the city’s highlights. At the same time, I’m not under any illusion that I’ll be having an easy time without speaking any French! In Japan, I was usually the one helping other people navigate bureaucracy and solve communication problems, but in Grenoble I’ll be back to being a beginner. On the other hand, I’m excited to pick up a third language to use in business and for making new friends. And for that I’m going to need to speak a lot more French!

I’ve found lots of French language resources and language tapes, and I’ve been carrying my beloved Anki around with me everywhere. If you’ve never heard of Anki or other similar tools (they are usually called spaced repetition systems or SRS), I’d definitely recommend checking one out. The idea is that you can store huge amounts of small facts as virtual flashcards, and the program will take care of scheduling which cards you review. So for example, you might eventually have 3,000 vocabulary words, and Anki will bring up about 100 each day. It can make sure that difficult phrases and words are brought back frequently, and things that you’ve already memorized are brought up sparingly. It works from my mobile, and I use it while I’m on the train, waiting in a line, or when a conversation is waning. Best of all it’s open source.

I’ve also been brushing up on my math and finance, and reading some books to get ready to go back to school. I’m currently reading a book on job hunting and just finished an interesting book on Google’s business model and path to success. I’ve also subscribed to a few rss feeds from business blogs. I’ve seen some interesting articles on www.voxeu.org, www.deadlysins.info/wordpress, blogs.hbr.org, as well as many others. Reading these keeps me excited for the intensive studying that will start in September. I also watch many of the presentations from the TED Conference, which are very short, but center on global issues and very inspiring.

However, wrapping up my life in Japan and saying farewell to everyone I’ve met has been the most difficult part of my preparation for Grenoble. Changing location so often, especially between countries, gives you a chance to meet lots of interesting people, and with social networking services like facebook, mixi, and so on, it is easier than ever to stay connected. At the same time though, these applications can make it easy to give yourself the illusion of being connected and ignore the real value of the relationships you’ve made. Before moving my focus to Grenoble, one of my biggest tasks has been to properly say goodbye to all of the amazing people I met in Japan.

As I finish these preparations and the start of classes draws closer and closer, I find myself feeling more and more excited each day. I can’t wait to meet the other members of my class and get started on my new life. I’m also looking forward to checking out the climbing gym near the school, relaxing at one of the cafés around the city, and trying out the hiking in the three surrounding mountain ranges.

I first got involved in climbing in Japan, where it is just starting to really become popular. Actually, people there use some French terms as loan words too, such as gaston (ガストン). I did mostly bouldering, so I’m excited to learn more about top-roping and outside routes, which I’ve heard are more popular in France. The nearby mountains look they’ll be great for hiking, and maybe I can even spot a Dahu!

Essential Questions. Photo: banlon1964

Grenoble Life editor James Dalrymple shares five pearls of wisdom gleaned from teaching English to professionals in the city.

This month presents a watershed moment for me professionally as I end my stint as a teacher-trainer – of mostly professional adults – at a private institute and prepare for my first taste of l’éducation nationale française. Having obtained a post on campus as a lecteur, I will complete the job that has defined my experience in France since my arrival, and take a step into the unknown.

Some might say that the move from formateur to lecteur will be a case of “out of the frying pan and into the fire,” but, as a cathartic act of drawing a line under my experience, I have compiled a list of five pearls of sagesse concerning teaching professional English in France.

1. Everybody speaks English now, right?

Wrong. Even if English has gone global, there will be times when you are confronted with students who have apparently never spoken it before, let alone knowingly seen or heard it. Even in cosmopolitan Grenoble, expect to have to teach some adults who are closer to vrais than faux debutants.

Why should everyone speak English? I have had the unenviable task of trying to teach people who had neither significant professional need to speak the language, nor a lifelong burning passion to begin doing so. At one time I had to manage a contract with a medium-size manufacturer, at which all the shop floor operators were obliged to have English training. For many of these mostly middle aged men (and some women) from the shop floor, whose modest education was a distant memory, the effort spent in learning English vastly outweighed the reward.

No doubt these same men could acquire certain technical skills faster than I ever could, yet English remained alien and abstract despite many hours in contact with it. During my time with these people, I am ashamed to admit that I may have learnt more from them (about industry, about how things are made) than they learnt from me.

Most English teachers in the private sector will probably relate to my feeling that many student-trainees have been permanently damaged by a school approach to language learning that was, for many, didactic and dogmatic rather than communicative or intuitive. It is often difficult to get the French to let go of the idea of grammar as language’s evil twin, and that speaking a language is akin to navigating a minefield of punishable mistakes.

2. « On est nuls en Anglais en France »

Despite what I said in observation one, many French people speak excellent English. Countless times I have met students who, upon eloquently introducing themselves, feel the need to add the little disclaimer that their English is terrible and how embarrassed they are to speak it. Normally I point of out the window at this moment and ask them which country they live in, where they grew up, and why on earth they are not prouder to be able to express themselves in another language, even if only a little.

Maybe it says something about the French attitude to their own language that they would prefer not to speak another if they can’t speak it beautifully. Compared to Britain though, where learning foreign languages has been in serious decline since a law was passed making it no longer mandatory after the age of 14, the French are a nation of linguists.

3. Time = results

Not necessarily. Interest and enthusiasm for the language and the culture remain paramount. Too many people are sent for English training as if sent to learn any other professional skill. I have often been confronted by a belief that time spent in the classroom will automatically be rewarded with improved TOEIC scores, for example. Professional need is no substitute for passion for the subject, and the fact that many adults in France come to training out of obligation rather than choice engenders a passive attitude to learning which is often an obstacle to meaningful progress.

4. I want to speak Business English

Unfortunately for teachers, human resources and training managers – not all known for their broad knowledge of language pedagogy – often insist upon certain thématiques for the ESL classroom. In my opinion there is too much interference from companies who want to impose skills-based English upon their employees. However, you can’t run before you can walk, and it is very frustrating being told to teach students how to participate in a meeting in English, or speak on the telephone, for example, without having mastered the basics.

5. Grenoble needs an International House

Grenoble has an enormous market for English teaching, but no focal point to promote excellence or provide training for its teachers. For us long-term formateurs, we need to do more to share our ideas and improve standards. Hard-working teachers also need to feel that their efforts be rewarded with the possibility of professional development, whereas often the door to such progress seems permanently closed. As far as I know there is currently nowhere to do the CELTA in Grenoble – an internationally recognised English teaching certificate that does not hold nearly as much weight as it should in France – although Marianne Reynaud organises TESOL-affiliated seminars.

Given the size of the English teaching sector in Grenoble, there should be an innovative and internationally-accredited institute like International House where teachers can be trained and learn to train others. Such an institute could act as a catalyst for improving standards and, by bringing teachers together, raising the morale and pride among the ESL workforce.

Free toilets in France tend to serve only 50% of the population

Finding public conveniences in France not up to much? Grenoble Life’s resident Australian Shonah Kennedy reports from the front line.

Having arrived at Paris Gare de Lyon an hour prior to the TGV leaving, I decided to try out Le Train Blue café express.  This forced lunch time also coincided with a call of nature. Perfect – delicious lunch in an iconic café (well, the express part) and the thought of clean facilities to use – free of charge too – or so I thought. I was assuming a little too much.  After going down the steps, I was greeted with a barrier that asked me for 20 centimes. I thought this must not apply to sit-down diners, so I asked my friendly waitress and her answer was confusing to me. Having thought I misunderstood, I repeated my question in a different way, but I received the same answer. I took my 20 centimes, placed it in the slot and was allowed entry into the exclusive world of European facilities – or lack thereof.

I have a social problem when it comes to needing the bathroom in France. And, may I just point out here that I have lived in different countries in Europe and seemingly this is a Europe-wide problem. However, now that I am living in France, this is the country I am picking on – I drink a lot of water.

Prior to leaving the house every morning I drink one litre of water and my ritual café au lait! My difficulties begin about half an hour after I lock the door and leave my clean, reliable facilities far behind. Perhaps it is all psychological as I don’t see others with that grimaced expression on their faces looking beseechingly up and down every street in search of the elusive cubicle. BUT, here we can remove almost 50% of the population as there ARE public urinals (as unhygienic as they look) scattered around Grenoble for those more vertical in their activities. THEN, to add some sort of insult to the matter, I have also seen a number of doggy toileting areas. 

What about the female of the species? Why is it we must pay for the privilege of hovering above a bowl? AND, may I interject here and say even though we do pay (and up to 70 centimes in some places – I get desperate) it does not guarantee the cleanliness of the area or the provision of paper.

So … in my quest of need I have found some amenities – and at times free – I would like to share with you.

You can of course boldly go where many people have gone before and risk the cafés/brasseries. This can be done by walking in as if you own the place – or are at least dining there. This plan is often foiled when you get that lost look on your face and it is evident to all that your only intention is using the bathroom* and you aren’t dining there, had no intention of dining there and probably never will. Or you could be completely honest and ever so sweetly ask “Puis-je utiliser vos toilettes s’il vous plaît?” Be prepared for holding on just a little longer, however.

Then there are the chain restaurants/coffee houses. The only reason I ever walk into these places is on the off chance the big burly guard is not standing against the wall asking to see your receipt, so that you have the exclusive right to use their second rate facilities. Normally you can see if he/she is on duty before you get so far into your mission you have to explain yourself to the self appointed toilet* bouncer.

There are a number of so-called self-cleaning toilet cubicles found around Grenoble. They do cost – normally 20 centimes (that you need the exact change for) – and from experience I have only used one that looked like it had been doing its job properly (on the North East corner of Place Du Dr L. Martin). Sadly the others I have tried: next to the merry-go-round in front of FNAC; behind the market at St Claire Les Halles; and at Leader Price in Seyssinet, should be relieved of their self-cleaning duties due to a job not well done.

Then, there is my find of the year – The Bibliothèque Municipale de Grenoble. On the first floor, on the left hand side there is a toilet. It is guard free, does not require any donation and normally there is paper! However, do take hand sanitiser as the soap is usually missing. But, it is a toilet. It is in the centre of town and it is relatively clean.

I hope there are others out there who share my European social inadequacy and can help with any alternative treasures they have found when nature calls.

*Australian English = toilet; American English = Bathroom (When visiting America I received some vulgar looks after asking where the toilet was!)

Montessori school shelves with toys. Photo: 3neus

In a three-part blog Camille Bromley describes a day in the life of a teacher at the Montessori International School of Grenoble. Read part I.

7:38 am

Bus stop, Place Verdun.  As the number 31 bus to Meylan: Maupertius approaches I’m hastily devouring the remaining third of my Big Chocolate, freshly purchased for 1 euro from Sandwich House located behind the Maison de Tourisme tram stop, outgoing side. Ordinarily the Big Chocolates from this Sandwich House are not especially good pain au chocolat, but they’re easily the size of two regular pain au chocolat, a good bargain at 1 euro (the American in me is always a sucker for bargains), and in the morning when they’re warm they’re still pretty darn tasty.

The Big Chocolate is the ritual first step in my once-weekly workday as an English teacher at Montessori International Primary School in Meylan, as this is the only day in the week I exit the house early enough to catch one while still warm. The other days of the week I work as an English assistant in public primary schools.

Teaching at Montessori International School is not like teaching in French public school.  It’s vastly different, in fact.  If you’re not familiar with what’s called the Montessori Method, I’ll briefly explain: The Montessori Method of children’s education was originally developed in the early 20th century by an Italian educator named Maria Montessori. It’s an alternative approach to schooling, encouraging a child’s individual self-directed learning using the support of materials and teacher observation. 

From what I understand, while many schools worldwide function under the heading of Montessori School there are no defined guidelines for the specific practical application of this education system. However, the general idea is that children learn best when they follow their natural instincts and interests. In other words, it’s self-study for kids; less academically-put, the kids do what they feel like.

This “do-what-you-feel-like” philosophy is most decidedly not the norm in French public schools, from what I’ve seen in my year’s experience there, the essential part of a teacher’s oral utterances consisting of phrases such as, non, tu n’as pas le droit!; vous levez la doigt pour avoir la parole!; TAISEZ-VOUS! [yelled shockingly loud]; vous êtes insupportables aujourd’hui! [tone of resignation and accompanying sigh]; and finally the much-loved Bravo!, with exaggerated sarcasm. Thus, Montessori International reputedly offers an alternative to parents who prefer their kids to receive more positive encouragement than negative during the first 6–9 years of their educational development.

However, I haven’t given an entirely clear picture of the Montessori International School in Meylan. This school is foremost an international school, with instruction provided in French and English. I am the English-instruction teacher (on Mondays anyways), and a woman with a confounding last name, Martine Grzelak, functions as school director and French-instruction teacher. 

We take care of the primary-age children, age 6–12. The children in this group, about 25 of them, are mostly Francophone, with a solid group of Anglophones and couple French-English bilingual kids. There is another, separate class of students at the school, the pre-school age group (ages 3–6), also Francophone or Anglophone or both, headed by Emilie Ballivy. The pre-schoolers are called Les petits castors, which gives an accurate impression of their work ethic and focused accomplishment under the guidance of Ms. Ballivy.

The school makes use of an impressive collection of Montessori materials and supplies, and the curriculum is organized around the French National Education program, so that children are expected to cover a similar material to public school students. More on the Montessori Method as the day progresses.

Part II

Part III

Part III

12:00 pm

Lunchtime. The microwave cart is wheeled in, desks are cleared, chairs fetched. The students eat in the classroom. The children are expected to be settled quietly in their chairs, ask to go wash their hands, and then ask to get their lunchboxes before they are allowed to eat. Meanwhile, the child in charge of setting the table this week goes to get the silverware and dishes.   

12:30 pm

Everyone is finally sitting and has more or less the complete tableware set in front of them: plate, fork, knife, little yogurt spoon, and plastic cup (Martine’s cabinet has slowly but surely been rid of all the glassware glasses, not intentionally).

The table setting procedure always takes much longer than is logically necessary, probably because the child assigned to set the table is for some reason 90% of the time the same small boy, who due to his diminutive size and severely ADD nature seems the absolute worst person in the room to give the task of distributing various separate pieces of cutlery to students sitting in disorganized clumps around the big room, not to mention that when you see him trying to lug the heavy glass water pitchers around to each table you get the sinking sense of futility of watching someone trying very hard to complete a Sisyphean task. Half the pitcher will have been emptied on the floor by the time he gets to the table, and he’ll be sent to get more in five minutes.

I send the children in groups of two or three to the cloakroom to get their lunchboxes. I imagine that you can tell a lot about the home life of individual children from their lunchboxes. A lot of the older children seem to have the freedom to creatively fashion their own concept of a meal; there’s a group of three girls (who aggressively defy the assertion that social cliques don’t exist in small schools) that bring their lunches in family-style portions to share with each other: a bag of Lay’s potato chips, a Tupperware box of pasta and sauce, an entire sleeve of Speculoos cookies.

The Anglophone children belong to a different breed of household, one that clearly holds in contempt the irresponsible consumption of low nutrient-to-calorie ratio foods and environmentally unfriendly packaging. S—, a six-year-old with extraordinary feminine style (how a child of that age is able to exude such class is beyond me), declares matter-of-factly that she hates ice cream and cake. Her treat of choice is the green pressed seaweed paper that sushi rolls come wrapped in — in French it’s translated as algae, which expresses better, I think, the total bizarreness of a six-year-old reveling in the taste of a seaweed wrap (imagine an apple cheeked little girl saying with a charming missing-front-tooth smile, “My favorite food is algae”).  

1:15 pm

The kids are fairly hopping to get outside after a full morning of being together in one room. They go into the cloakroom to remove their slippers and put on their outside shoes, most of which resemble work boots or what English people call “wellies” rather than the slick bright white Pumas or the metallically shiny girl-sized heels (!) public school children wear. This is because the playground provided for amusement and the venting of various child frustrations during the lunch recess is not actually a playground, it’s an empty field behind the Montessori school building accessible only by a quick jump across a ditch (a wide step for you or me, a brief air-bound thrill for the 11-year-olds, and an unbreachable chasm for the 3-year-olds, who nevertheless enjoy the jump immensely so long as you’re holding their hand.

Supervising, I can’t help thinking that innovative playground developers, with their tangle of curved colored bars and knotted rope systems, are entirely missing the point — the kids have more fun rolling around in the grass and throwing rocks at trees than with any preconstructed equipment education authorities can buy. I’m reminded how innocent and sweet children are at heart when I hear G— and S— playing a sort of tag-zombie game which seems to consist of yelling “I’m going to suck your brain!” and attempting to grab the skull of another player.

2:00 pm

Emilie and I file the children back into school, past the company workers in button up shirts and pencil skirts taking their smoke break. Monday afternoon is devoted to art class and Spanish class, and the children are sent in small groups to participate in those activities. Otherwise, the students can continue the projects of the morning. The students complete impressive individual projects throughout the year that don’t sacrifice depth or quality for the lack of collaborators.

S— is working on a postcard project; she’s contacting friends and acquaintances across the U.S., asking them to send her postcards at the Montessori school address, teaching her about their town or state. She’s gathered a large number of postcards and will organize them into a visual presentation. O— has completed a project about the state of Israel, its history, people, and culture, and the poster is hanging on the classroom wall.

One of the goals of the Montessori school is to effectively link all subjects together in the child’s mind; to create a truly interdisciplinary understanding of the world. This objective makes for very creative project ideas, and the results are evident in the variety of student-made artwork and presentations on display around the school.

3:30 pm

The school day is over, but many students will stay for the next one to two hours, playing the gymnasium or participating in an activity Martine or Emilie has organized. I, however, say my rounds of “See you next week” and am out the door.

The next day I’ll be at one of the public primary schools in Grenoble. Not being an education expert, I’m not going to offer my judgment of the effectiveness of the education system in public schools compared to the Montessori approach. The purposes and needs of the two school systems are vastly different and require different methods of teaching and classroom management. Montessori schools may give more individual attention, but they also provide a lot less guidance and structure. This may or may not work well, depending on the character of each individual child. One thing I do know, however, is that I’ll be doing a lot more yelling in my public school.

Part I

Part II

For more information:
http://www.montessori-grenoble.com/UK/school-montessori-grenoble.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montessori

Part II

8:12 am

Terminus on the number 31 bus line. The bus halts in front of a grouping of new, enterprise-y looking buildings with big reflective glass windows framed in a shade of blue that suggests innovation and forward-thinking. The school is rather unexpectedly housed in one of these buildings, towards the back of the complex, sharing quarters with some kind of company that requires men and women in business attire to enter and exit through the same doors as the free-spirited, frequently-in-high-speed-motion Montessori kids.

The school is essentially three large rooms, the primary schoolroom, the pre-school room, and the gym, which is carpeted and doubles as an art studio and Spanish nook. There is also Martine’s office, a nap room for the preschoolers, a storage room, and a cloakroom where the children hang their coats, bags, and change their shoes into indoor shoes. They are only allowed to wear slippers inside the school, as it is carpeted. This reminds me of Japanese schools, except that here the children are allowed to bring their own slippers. In Japan the slippers are part of the uniforms and must be regulation color and design.

8:45 am

The kids wander in the room one by one and are by this time more or less all present. After some general comments and reminders, Martine starts the weekly routine of designating “responsibilities” onto each child. This is performed by use of a chart listing cleaning tasks to be completed each day and a small canvas sack containing the names of each child on Velcro tabs.

It took me a few months to figure out that the responsibility entitled Muffin referred to the class hamster. Insisting that the responsibilities be assigned by a random pull from the bag, Martine cheats openly on her own rule by fishing for names that she believes merit a particular nasty chore this week. The kids either suffer tremendously from the injustice of this favoritism or get a kick out of it, depending on how you choose to interpret the situation.

The responsibilities I find to be an ingenious system for ensuring an attitude of collective care and respect from all the students towards the cleaning and upkeep of the school room and materials. By being allowed to choose, in a fashion, what chore they do each week the child is given some autonomy and feels like she’s making a voluntary decision to contribute. This is probably a distinctive Montessori touch. Japanese schoolchildren also clean the school as part of their daily duties, although there they are responsible for the bathrooms as well, which I remain convinced is a mistake (imagine how what kind of clean job a second-grader might do on a bathroom — then repeat that every day for the whole year).

8:52 am

Work time. The children are either broken up into groups or sent to a desk to work individually. All the primary school kids, from 6 to 12, work in the same room, some in groups and some independently, and they pursue different activities. Martine keeps an eye on all of them and remains aware of how they’re doing and what progress they’re making, a remarkable feat for about 15 different students and different levels.

There are no set subject periods or age groups. The children have more or less the choice to work on one activity the entire morning or change subjects freely. There’s no morning recess, although there is a snack, which the children are expected to provide, following a rotation schedule. If the children tire of one activity and want to do some less-strenuous but still constructive activity such as reading, it is permitted within reason.

I take the group of English speakers. There are two first grade girls, a third grader, a fifth grader, and sometimes a first grade boy. We either do a language-arts activity all together, harder versions adapted for the third and fifth graders, or I split them up to work in pairs or alone. It’s my choice based on what we’re doing that day and how well the children are working together. When the English speakers take breaks to work on another subject, I choose a group of French children to do an English language lesson.

11:00 am

With Martine in the room, the classroom functions smoothly. With some notable exceptions, the children work quietly, although their rate of productivity is subject to debate. Clearly, some children are more ideal Montessori students than others. A group of three boys writes a bilingual dialogue together concerning an inept motorist and a driving instructor for their upcoming play. Another boy does French grammar exercises on the computer. A girl visualizes multiplication with wooden beads and a counting board.

Meanwhile, little G— sulks at his desk, complaining that his work is “too hard” and he doesn’t “understand nuffing,” and I— doodles on the margins of his essay and gazes out the window. I remind I— to get back to his work and Martine appears over G—‘s shoulder to investigate the veracity of his claim.

Part I

Part III

Grenoble Life editor James Dalrymple shares a few photos and reflections on the Grenoble’s defaced shop fronts and the transformation of the city on a Sunday.

Sunday in Grenoble. All the shops are closed, their shutters displaying garish graffiti. Quite depressing, no? Well, not for me really. I have a curious proclivity for decay and dereliction – as an amateur photographer, anyway – and hate shopping, so Sundays in Grenoble provide an irresistible opportunity for me.

To be fair, though, any casual visitor to Grenoble – particularly on a Sunday – might be tempted to see a city blighted by vandalism: tagging, bill stickers and a recent proliferation of anti-capitalist street art. Or else they might be lead to conclude that the Grenoblois store owners are lacking in civic pride or are overly laissez-faire when it comes to the wanton degradation of their shop fronts.

For me Grenoble’s Saturday to Sunday transformation is a welcome one. Gone are the herds of gabbing shoppers and down come the shutters, with their daubed slogans and spray-painted murals, simultaneously lending the city an air of decadence and “down at heel charm,” as a guidebook might optimistically put it. Sometimes vibrantly coloured, sometimes dingy, the character of the city on a Sunday is undeniably different. Love it or hate it, it invites you to look; inseparable as it is from the visual language of the city.

Here are some of my photos of Grenoble’s shut up shops, and of other defaced or stencilled doors, graffiti and bill sticking around the city. Let me know what you think about the photos and of Grenoble’s “down at heel charm.” 

Prakhar Amba, Grenoble Life’s very own photographer-flâneur, strolls the stalls of the Brocante des quais du Vieux Grenoble, June 13. Here are his photos and impressions.

Last Sunday (June 13th) I was walking along the pedestrian bridge on Isère which gives a wonderful viewpoint of the cable car (Les Bulles), crossing the river to the Bastille. I saw an unusual number of cycles chained to the bridge. I followed them to discover a flea market on the Quai de la Perrière, Grenoble, leading up to the rue Saint Laurent.

I started with a shop selling plastic dolls. One look at the price tag (150 euro) and the silent horror on my face must have convinced the shopkeeper to nod sharply to me, “yes,” and silently mumble, “get away,” or something of that sorts. I walked away wondering, is this really a flea market? Thankfully, as I walked deeper into the market prices fell to earthly levels and whole loads of antiques and curiosities were on display.

Lots of toys, train sets, gramophones, rotary telephones, big-box AM/PM radios, video games, hats and all sorts of knick knacks were present at bargain prices. It was like a walk into the past. Remember the good old days when the world was analogue, things were made in wood and real brass knobs and lasted generations? I tried to fathom the age of the Remington typewriter, alive enough to type out another letter –wondering if today somebody would bother to keep their keyboard for even 20 years.

Somehow the planned obsolescence of today’s products (three years lifecycle max.) has taken away the memories we used to have with our possessions. What would the flea market of future look like? I wondered as I photographed the flea market of today.

My wife bought two porcelains dolls (10 euro a piece) dressed in 19th century clothes, from an old grandmother who had a hard time parting with them. She had had them since her childhood and gave one last brush to their hair, passing on her memories.

URSSAF - another elegant French acronym

Patrick Owen shares his experience starting an English teaching business, becoming an Auto-entrepreneur and dealing with France’s particular administrative complexity and love of acronyms.  

So as I come to the end of my ACCRE, I’ve contacted the URSSAF who told me to contact the APCE.  I also contacted the RSI and the CIPAV but had no response.  Therefore I sent an email to the CNAVPL.  I must, also, remember to send my annual report to the DRTEPF.  If all of this sounds like double Dutch, welcome to my world, since I started my own business.  I knew the French administration loved acronyms having lived in France for eight years, dealing with the CAF, EDF, GDF, etc.  However, when I set up my own company I entered a whole new ball game. 

After working in various language schools I decided to work for myself.  Everyone warned me against it; “It’s really complicated,” and, “The charges are really high,” were just two of the comments I heard.  It is amazing that France has so many small businesses, when you hear all the negative reactions.  In the beginning, I wasn’t sure what type of business to create with various projects in mind.  However, I soon discovered that in France, once you have trained to do one thing changing direction is not easy. Changing careers involves financial and time investments that I did not have.  I therefore decided to set up a language teaching business, since this was what I knew best. 

Now, it might be useful to explain why I had decided to set up my own business.  Many language schools will employ teachers on freelance contracts, as I had discovered during my first year in France.  The problem is that to work for a business school or university, where the better pay rates are, you need a principal employer.  In addition, for a reason that I can only speculate at, few employers are willing to sign the paper agreeing to be your principal employer.  There are two solutions: one is to use a société de portage, the other is to be your own employer.  The société de portage acts as your employer, in the sense that they take care of all the administrative paperwork, of course for this service they take a fee.  My feeling was that the fee charged didn’t really justify the work involved,  I therefore decided to set up for myself. 

I attended an event held by my local Chamber of Commerce, which didn’t turn out to be much help.  I was unable to get answers to my questions and, as I was not setting up a commercial activity, they were not the right people to ask.  In the end, it was internet forums that proved to be the most help.  I typed my questions into Google and sifted through the responses.  It was here that I learnt I would have to see the URSSAF.  They seem to be the organisation that catches the companies who are not commercial or tradesmen.  I also discovered that provided I didn’t earn too much and didn’t employ anyone else, the process was fairly simple. 

I printed a form on the internet and headed for the URSSAF.  I had been told I didn’t need an appointment.  This worried me slightly, as I had experienced the queues at the Social Security and the Prefecture.  I was pleasantly surprised to be received within ten minutes of my arrival by a pleasant and helpful adviser.  She rapidly entered my details and answered my questions, in less than an hour I was in business, literally.  She offered me a free appointment with an accountant and, best of all, showed me I was eligible for a dispensation of social taxes for one year.  I left the URSSAF with a whole different image of the French administration. 

The dispensation for one year is important and a big helping hand.  Normally a company’s charges are fixed for the first and second years.  Then the third year’s charges are calculated on the real income of the second year.  The problem is that, although, the first year’s charges are relatively light, in the second they double and this kills a lot of small businesses.  Now, certain categories of business creators, the unemployed for example, can ask for a first year free of charges.  I qualified because, although I resigned, I had been looking after my kids one day a week and received income support.  This taught me that you have to read everything because there is often an advantageous exception which you may not always be told about. 

While surfing the internet, I also discovered that if I wanted to teach in companies I would need to make a déclaration d’activité with the DRTEFP (Direction Régionale du Travail, de l’Emploi et de la Formation Professionnelle).  In France, companies are obliged to pay a tax towards the training of their employees.  This tax is often collected by organisations which manage the training funds.  These organisations will only accept training courses run by companies who have made the declaration.  Many people wrongly refer to it as an agreement, however the DRTEFP are very strict in their literature that it is not an agreement from the state, merely a declaration.  

I discovered that with the right documentation, a curriculum vitae, a casier judiciaire vierge (a document you can order online showing you have never committed a crime), and your first training contract the procedure was straightforward.  It is the contract which can be a little complicated, if you haven’t got a declaration number how can you sign a contract?  I got around this problem by noting that my declaration was being processed, and offering my first client a clause whereby if I didn’t get the number the contract was null and void. 

I treated starting my business rather as a challenge and as time went on it became a puzzle, for which I was never sure I had all the pieces.  To be honest I enjoyed pitting myself against the French administration and proving those who said it would be hard to do wrong.  It must be said that I chose the simplest possible structure and being a teacher, who teaches in companies, I have very few overheads. 

It is worth mentioning in conclusion that a law was passed in 2008 making it even easier for freelance teachers.  The status of Auto-entrepreneur is designed for people who may have multiple employers as well as working for themselves.  The process of setting up is very simple and can even be done online.  The real boost however comes in terms of charges and tax.  The Auto-entrepreneur can choose to declare his turnover each month or trimester.  The social charges and tax are calculated based on what he declares and paid immediately.  This avoids the nasty bills arriving one year after a good year.  It also means that if you have a month with no income you pay nothing.  This regime is much more sensible for someone like me. 

Unfortunately, and here is the downside of my experience, getting information about this new status has been hard.  I have read the law and the Auto-entrepreneur’s handbook.  As a sole trader I can ask to benefit from the same regime, and I have done so which brings us back to the beginning of the article.  The acronyms are all the people I have contacted to ask for help changing my status.  

On the whole my experience has been positive; the principal problem has been people.  Everything one needs to know is on the internet.  When dealing with employees of the various administrations it is a case of pot luck.  The first person I saw was excellent, others have been less so.  I once made the mistake of phoning on the day of a strike, my call was answered after prolonged ringing by a harassed and unhelpful lady.  I blame myself for this one, though, after three years in France I should have known you don’t phone the public service on strike days, I was lucky someone answered.  My advice is to be determined, do your research and treat the experience as fun, and you will be fine. 

Patrick Owen
www.englishcoach38.com
letter-from-france.blogspot.com

A filled blackboard. Photo: Rainer Ebert

In response to criticism of the education system on Grenoble Life and from the Anglophone community in France, Iain Smears mounts a passionate defence of French schooling.

Many people in the Anglophone community in Grenoble will come into contact with the French education system either through their studies or those of their family members. There are aspects about it which seem to draw criticism from a considerable proportion of the English-speaking community.

In this article, I would like to depict how my own experience of doing maternelle, primaire, collège and lycée in Grenoble, then of going to university in the UK, has shown me the many benefits of the education on offer here. In fact, it is precisely some of those aspects of the system which are often criticised which I would argue have been of value to me in my university studies. I will focus on secondary education, or more specifically the Bac Général, as I have only glimpses and second hand experience of French higher education and cannot claim to know much about the other paths in secondary education.

A major concern for some is the long hours of schooling throughout collège and lycée. I did the Bac Scientifique with the OIB (L’option internationale du baccalauréat), and I’m the first to admit that it was demanding. On a few occasions, I’ve been asked by parents with children about to embark on this path if it’s true that I did 50 hours of work a week. Their frowns of anguish are of little surprise to me when I place a finger on my lip, recollect, then declare that it was probably a dozen or so hours more than that.

I do see the sense in many of the objections to long school days and I will readily concede that perhaps the content of lessons from 5-6 pm isn’t what I remember the best – however, little is said of the end result of French schooling: how does it influence one’s experiences in higher education and after that?

I chose to study mathematics in the UK. Bit by bit, I noticed how my fellow students were finding the course more trying than I was – some would find it hard to do their work on time, others found it hard to get out of bed, some needed vast amounts of caffeine or chocolate to feel ready to take on their work. Someone put my thoughts into words by calling it a “great big hangover for having partied for the previous 18 years.”

For my part, I continued at my usual rhythm inherited from Terminale by learning my lectures as well as I could and doing my homework sooner rather than later. I think that strong discipline not only leads to successfully acquiring the material, but also helps to explore the subject to its fullest, satisfy one’s curiosity and therefore enjoy one’s studies.

The extensive testing and harsh grading schemes in French education also attract criticism. Yet I believe that it is instead very beneficial to get substantial practice of long examinations. Being able to focus and to stay sharp under pressure is an important part of exam technique and I am glad I was able to get practice in this before end-of-year exams at university.

As for the unforgiving grading, it made those good grades well deserved – something in which I found satisfaction. I found that for me and other pupils at school, it encouraged a determined attitude towards trying one’s upmost. Compare this to the comments I have heard of several students in the UK about how they were “spoon-fed just to pass exams” and “weren’t proving [their] own ability, but that of [their] teacher”, which has not helped them find self-confidence and belief in their ability. I think that learning that someone can indeed rise up to a challenge is important for him to value and appreciate his work and also helps in face of future challenges.

It is true that some people can find the difficult grading scheme discouraging. But even though grades matter for later progression, it should be remembered that what is learnt matters most. Whether someone gets a B or C on an A-level or roughly equivalently [i] a 10 on the Bac, what they have gained from school will likely be the same. When that person goes onto university, it is what that person has acquired that will be key. I know of some who struggled in a subject throughout lycée, then needed that knowledge to some extent in their later studies, and have told me since that they felt they were at an advantage against others in their group.

However if there is a clear-cut problem with the grading system, it is that it puts at a disadvantage French students who wish to study abroad, e.g. the UK. This is because admissions tutors might not be aware of the discrepancies between the systems and take estimated grades for the Baccalaureate at face value – i.e. they would assume, say, that an A is worth 16 on the Bac. Things are made worse by the fact that high numbers of UK students get the top mark: according to wikipedia [ii], 43.7% of students taking an A-level in Mathematics got an A in 2007. And unlike A-levels, Baccalaureate students cannot retake exams to improve their grades. This can result in disproportionately demanding offers for Baccalaureate pupils.

A final advantage of the French education system, which is not immediately apparent to those still undertaking it, is that it offers flexibility in later choices. Of those who did the Bac Scientifique in my class, some have gone into media relations, politics, languages, nursing… Some feel that the schooling did not suit them, but what they have done enables them to embark on a wide range of paths afterwards.

In conclusion, even though the French secondary education system has its faults, I hope it will not be forgotten that the overall result of the extensive schooling is threefold. First, it is an opening to numerous topics – it showcases vast bodies of knowledge and works to stimulate the pupil’s mind in all forms. Second, it helps to equip its pupils with the attitude, determination, self-confidence and ethos which are important in all walks of life. Third, it aims to keep as many doors open as possible all the way until the end of the Baccalaureate. Combined, I think these three aspects allow the education system to offer what one generally wants: the freedom to choose one’s way through an opening to the world.

The crèche: in safe hands

Grenoble Life editor James Dalrymple blogs on his experience with French childcare in Grenoble and the difficulties getting that all-important place at a crèche.

Handing over your baby to complete strangers is not first on our list of desirable experiences but it is an everyday reality for working parents. France has a relatively high proportion of working mothers and an enviably fertile population, but a surprisingly short basic maternity leave. These are just some of the contributing factors that necessitate widely available and affordable childcare, which in turn do their bit to help get the balance right between being a parent and having a career.

The scolaire system

Getting a place at a municipal crèche, however, is notoriously difficult in Grenoble (and probably elsewhere in France). The largest intake of babies is in September when toddlers doff their mortar boards and graduate to Ecole Maternelle (nursery school), freeing up space for the newbies. Thus, unless you are confident of conceiving in accordance with the demands of l’année scolaire, you may find yourself out of luck when your congé de maternité or parental comes to an end. (For your info, nine months of pregnancy added to around three months of post-natal maternity leave - give or take – would make this September a good time to conceive in order for your baby to get into the crèche in September 2011 – you know what to do!).

Such crèches are subsidised by the Mairie, but parents still pay the bill depending on their means: making them affordable to all. The charges are subject deductions from the CAF before you see them, so that there is none of the time-consuming reimbursement admin which affects visits to many doctors. For my wife and I, it amounts to about two euro an hour. What’s more, thereafter, you can declare this expense against your annual income tax obligations (impôts) which sees this figure drop by a further 50%. In short, the piggy bank can be left intact for the time being.

In my experience the crèches are clean, well-equipped and staffed, with fresh meals prepared on the premises and bubbly personnel. At the end of each day I am given a detailed report on my daughter’s food intake, sleep time and number of nappies (couches) filled with unnerving precision. I am always reassured she is in safe hands, free to explore a terrain filled with ludic objects to peruse, which makes a change from her reordering my CD collection or trying to rewire a wall socket chez moi. 

The nanny state

The alternative is a crèche familiale: effectively smaller groups of children cared for at somebody’s home. This is billed as a municipal service and thus subsidised but is closer in spirit to having a private nanny. In our case, we were desperate for the lively atmosphere of the crèche for our daughter, with the different carers and larger number of children. Whereas many people appreciate the crèche familiale, we didn’t feel comfortable leaving our daughter with only one person: a person who wields such an enormous influence in a child’s life yet does so largely away from the scrutiny from her peers.

Although I’m sure the majority of women who work at crèches familiales are professional, I have heard of instances in which they were not. And if you refuse the woman the Mairie offers you, they immediately blacklist you and you have no chance of getting subsidised municipal childcare. It seemed that if we accepted this process, it was a big step into the unknown. Private nannies were also scarce at the time, and among those we met who weren’t fully booked there were some who didn’t seem to even particularly like children. These individuals were also unwilling to accept temporary terms with us while we waited for a place at the crèche to become available, as they wanted a longer commitment.

In my local quartier, the municipal crèche is situated ideally at two minutes walk from our flat, and would have stood as a mocking reminder of what we had missed if we hadn’t got a place there. Finally we resolved to make an arrangement whereby our daughter attended the halte garderie, which is effectively the same as the crèche but only for up to two days maximum. Normally this is organised on an ad hoc basis or, as in our case, with temporary rolling contracts. Luckily we were able to make other arrangements for the remaining hours that we needed but it allowed us to ingratiate ourselves a little with the staff there and secure our position on the waiting list until a place made itself available. This happened in three months.

Baby betrayal

At first our daughter was crestfallen upon being left at the crèche, acting as if having befallen an enormous betrayal. Traitor! she seemed to cry upon being passed to the crèche staff. There is an integration system by which you can leave your child at the crèche for a couple of hours at a time, gradually building up to full days, but babies are an unpredictable bunch. One day you feel a guilty tingle of satisfaction when your baby cries on being handed over to a carer: yes, my baby still loves me best! The next day your child will cry when you come to pick her up. Traitor! you seethe in silence. In the parental logic, the latter is just the baby ‘releasing tension’ at the end of the day.

The inevitable inconvenience to all this contact with other children is what has seemed like an endless loop of spectacular illnesses. The first time you see a baby projectile-vomit (à la L’exorciste), it is terrifying, but it is impressive what one can become inured to. The winter just past has been a hard one: with the somewhat false alarm of swine flu providing unwelcome distraction from the lurid retinue of tummy bugs and gastros doing the rounds. At the crèche, there is no escape from the steep curve towards stronger immune systems, but this has to happen at some point.

The three days a week my daughter spends at the crèche currently provide most of her contact with French, despite the efforts of certain staff members to speak English to me. As my wife and I speak English at home we hope this will be an effective path towards her obtaining bilingualism; but it is interesting to see the different phonemes she manages in her babillage. Among the distinctly Anglophone syllables we have started to identify some impressively rolled Rs. Once she yelled what was clearly a resounding Merde!, but I’m sure she didn’t learn that down at the crèche.

If you want my advice, persistence is key. Where there is will there is a way.

Still searching for the right path in Grenoble?

Grenoble Life’s Shonah Kennedy shares her experience of coming to the city on the “coat-tails” of her husband and discovering she was not the only woman in Grenoble who had temporarily placed their life on hold to be with the man of their dreams.

Heading back to Grenoble after a mini-break in Switzerland I wondered why I felt a little apprehensive. Then it hit me. I was going back to Grenoble AND going back to work! That is right – after what seemed like a formidably long time – I have a job! So, on the return journey to Grenoble, and inevitably to work, my thoughts were consumed by the metaphorical journey I took to get to where I was … it felt like a round-the-world trip, with multiple stopovers!

Until I had coffee with a lovely American girl, I felt that I was on the aforementioned sojourn alone – I imagined I had been the only one ever to have temporarily placed my life on hold to be with the man of my dreams, to live his dreams for a while, as mine simmered on some distant stove-top. However, as we chatted it emerged that she had decided to take a slight detour from the road she was traveling on when her husband received a job offer here. I felt relieved – even though she had been through many of the bureaucratic and emotional ups and downs that I had had to endure – as I was not alone anymore. Actually I would come to learn that the round-the-world was almost over-booked!

Even though my dear husband was very supportive and really encouraged me to get “out there” and look for the job I now have, and be able to write about it here, I really felt as if I had started this metaphorical travel with no preparation – I hadn’t purchased the latest guide book, I didn’t know the sites to see and I didn’t even think to take a language course … so when I ended up on the road, I felt as nervous as if I was going to hitchhike solo the whole way, and just hope that I arrived at the destination I was intended for.

After the coffee with my, now, dear American friend I started thinking there must be others out there like me, wandering around in the wilderness of a round-the-world which wasn’t entirely self motivated. In fact, I found a conglomerate of women living lives they would otherwise not have expected.

Now I have a job, in a profession I adore, and feel a somewhat useful part of society my lost days are few and far between. However, I have spoken to some women who still feel lost, after many years of being here. The decision was not entirely theirs in the first instance, to move to Grenoble, they “followed” – for want of a better word – their husbands here and have never really found their Grenoble feet. These women left good jobs, independence and a place where they felt at home to be with the one they love, but sadly the love of the town has never found them.

Then there are the women who have had a wonderful transition (are these the ones who acquired an upgrade to first class on their round-the-world, I wonder?!) and have not felt as if they have given up their path in lieu of their partner’s, but more taken a segue for a limited period and see many positives in the entirety of the adventure – new place, new language, new friends and an experience they would not otherwise have had.

After speaking to many women (and I know I keep mentioning women, it is not that I assume this situation only happens to women, but during my discussions on the topic of partners following partners, I only heard two separate rumours about men who came to Grenoble because their wives had jobs here) being in Grenoble for many different reasons – marriage, husband’s job, husband’s contract, boyfriend’s research etc. – I came to the conclusion that even though we are all on the same metaphorical journey we will all come home with different travel stories. Some may suffer from travel sickness, while others don’t. Some are in first class, while there are many of us in an overcrowded economy. Some get the interactive TV screens, while for some it is offline for a while, and they must wait for it to be reset. Whatever the situation the journey itself is seemingly memorable.

I would like to thank all the women who shared their stories with me, and I would like to make you aware that each of you has enhanced my round-the-world more than you will know!

Gratin dauphinois. Photo: Marylise Doctrinal

It’s a no-brainer really. Grenoble Life wants your comments about favourite things to see, do, eat and drink in Grenoble and its surroundings.

I have been asked by French Entrée to write a post on what to do and see in Grenoble. Upon tackling this in earnest I found myself baulking at the task. An increasingly poorly written list began with a walk to the Bastille, continuing through the various museums to barely legible mentions of the more attractive squares in the old town. Then, I thought, rather than regurgitating the generic Grenoble itinerary, I thought I would solicit a more idiosyncratic list of Grenoblois pleasures, open to suggestions from YOU. What and where do you like to eat, where do you drink and people-watch? Tell me about your favourite local walks, markets, parks, neighbourhoods.

Here is my idiosyncratic inventory of Grenoble favourites, a by-no-means-comprehensive list of reasons to be cheerful. I’m sorry if this heralds few surprises and all seems a bit generic … please use the comments box for your personal lists below.

• ‘Glacier Gonzales’ (Rue Servan). As good as ice cream gets, in my view.
• Driving along the Voie Sur Berge, with its colourful diaporama of the Quai opposite, reminds me of the climax of The Italian Job, even if my Citroën Saxo is not a Mini Cooper and I’m in the wrong country.
• Cycling the banks of the Isère, with its generous network of lanes.
• The crazy geometric paving stones on the University campus. Far out!
• The crumbling beauty of the St Laurent district.
• Drinking kirs and people watching on Place St André (aka Place du Trib) in the summer.
• Sitting on the sofas at the musée de Grenoble when it’s quiet, which it usually is.
• Tartes and hot chocolate at ‘Tarteline’ (Grande Rue).
• Fromage blanc at the dairy farm at Charmant Som, with bilberry coulis.
• Fondue at ‘A Confesse’ in St Laurent
• Parmigiana at ‘Ciao a Te’ (Rue de la Paix)
• Pizza in general. But if I am to be perfectly honest, my favourite pizzas come from a camionette in Montbonnot rather than one of the many along the Quai or elsewhere in Grenoble itself. However, it is my contention that you can find a good pizza more easily in Grenoble than in the tourist hot-spots in Italy itself.
• The tram. Being on the tram makes me happy, even it doesn’t go anywhere near my home. Watching it glide onto campus or snake through the old town makes me misty-eyed with pride and affection for my adopted home town.
• Bastille Day fireworks at Parc Paul Mistral.
• Being able to watch a football match at the Stade des Alpes and then stroll back into town for a beer. Even if the standard of football from the home side has been appalling this season.
• La Nef and Le Club. Old school cinemas with dependable art house programmes.
• Gratin dauphinois when it is freshly made (i.e., not resurrected after deep-freeze hibernation). To my memory, the best I’ve had in a restaurant was at the ‘Café des Alpes’ on the way up to Le Sappey ski resort.
• La Fête de la Musique. A nationwide event, admittedly, but one that impressed upon me something about the French. In England such an event could not happen without copious amounts of drink and drugs, and thus a heavy police presence – a sentiment echoed in Lucy Wadham’s The Secret Life of France (a book well worth reading by the way).
• The old town. I was surprised when I came to Grenoble how many French people – Grenoblois or not – were dismissive about the city, saying it wasn’t beautiful. It may not have great monuments of individual interest but I like the character of the old town and its attractive squares. You can give me this over the British high street, with its identikit shopping precincts, any day.
• The white-capped Belledonne massif, providing its luminous theatre scenery to the city.

Ok, your turn …

Classroom. Photo: sfar

Gregg West is an American history and geography teacher at Cité Scolaire Internationale. He also handles the school pantomime, organic gardening club, interpersonal communication classes and music club.  In this explosive article for Grenoble Life, he describes his career-long efforts to change the education system in France.

It would be preposterous to assume that any education system in the world does its job correctly, when one observes the amount of poverty, crime, violence, drug addiction, alienation, loneliness, pollution, general unhappiness, and other symptoms of human foolishness, frailty, or limitations.  But one could just say, “Oh well, people do their best and one can’t ask more of them than that.” Nevertheless, when one is a teacher and has to face an educational system day in and day out with its many constraints, it can be very trying, for even if he or she sees many kids succeed and go on to brilliant careers and happy, if not totally unperturbed, lives, there are a lot of others who will live troubled existences.

Over the last 37 years, I have tried to learn to teach and have perpetrated my teaching upon unsuspecting people, both children and adults, in North America, Scotland and France, but I have also had these teaching systems (pardon my syntax) perpetrated upon me. The following observations about the French system are not at all intended to exonerate other systems from similar criticism.

More is better

Since settling permanently in France in 1983 I have witnessed a system which believes that more is better despite the famous saying of Montaigne (loosely translated) that a “well-made head is better than a full head.” Indeed, in the Connexion of February 2010, the minister of Higher Education, Ms. Valerie Pécresse went so far as to say to a journalist “you seem to be contradicting yourself when you cast doubt on the level of lycée students passing the Bac but then suggest reducing the number of hours.”  Really, Ms. Pécresse, this is a national disease, thinking that more is always better. So why not give children 16-hour school days? Children need time for other things than school work to become thinking, feeling, well-balanced individuals. I thought everyone knew that … hmmm.

A second aspect of the French system that is curious for those of us from English-speaking cultures is the belief held by many that school is only for instruction of specific subject matters, does not require a global education of children in terms of understanding their social and psychological context, learning to motivate them, inciting them to improving their citizenship, social relations, and so forth and that, therefore, teachers do not need to learn anything but their own subject matter at university. No interpersonal communication, no group dynamics, no pedagogical methods, no interdisciplinary knowledge to coordinate interdisciplinary projects … It apparently threatens many whose work status and contract only commits them to knowing their subject … even if inspectors put pressure on them to teach better … and the French government has just decided to shut down IUFM (teacher training institutes), something highly consistent with this view.

In this extremely cerebral environment, a third characteristic of the French system, at least insofar as it concerns university-bound students, is that they needn’t develop artistic, manual or day-to-day skills like typing, driving a car, first aid, or cooking at school. (Well, they DO learn road security, but only the theory … ) In short, learning does NOT involve doing things, except writing essays, carrying out a few carefully limited classroom experiments, doing research and other relatively abstract tasks. So these other skills surprisingly only get developed among a minority of people who have the money to do them outside of school or have families patient and qualified enough to help them learn these things. When I see high school kids pecking away with their fingers on a keyboard, when I have to fork out over 1000€ for driving classes, or when I see the beginnings of obesity among French young people like in my native America, I do wonder about these priorities.

Lip service

Finally, as with many other school systems, the French speak of democracy, but practice dictatorship, pay lip service to cooperation and solidarity but practice competition, praise acceptance of differences, but punish those who do not “fit in” with ridicule, humiliating grades, and other forms of social exclusion, lecture people about human rights while submitting high school students to 50 hour weeks (35 hours of class plus 15 hours of homework a week), claim to be ecological while using throw-away pens, producing millions of tons of new, bleached, non-recycled fibre paper waste that are not even recycled, and brag about their great cuisine while abandoning their children to canteens that serve poor quality, poorly balanced meals that contain pesticides, instead of making quality and organic food priorities.  What is the saying, “Do as I say, not as I do?” Problem is, it doesn’t work that way and, as Leonard Cohen said, “Everybody knows…” Kids’ strongest learning experiences stem from doing and from example.

In such an unnatural neurotic environment, is it any wonder then that many French kids suffer from depression, insomnia, smoke a lot of cigarettes, become fashion victims or anorexics, drop out due to a lack of motivation (around 10%), or decide not to care about politics or association activity, plunging into a life of semi-blind consumption as adults, with no personal artistic side that they can cultivate to express themselves healthily? Is it any wonder that they become recalcitrant at suggestions that they drive less (so little physical exercise during their childhood), watch less TV (when did they learn how to entertain themselves?), vote more (when did anyone ask their opinion anyway?), or think about important issues (weren’t they only supposed to give teachers the answers required?), or question notions the media and political elite expound as evident (nuclear energy and genetically modified organisms aren’t dangerous, are they, or THEY would tell us … like our teachers … wouldn’t they?) Once you’ve got people conditioned, it is very hard to change them. Some would even suggest that this conditioning has been done CONSCIOUSLY to preserve the privileges of elite, but I’m not much of a conspiracy theory advocate, so I’ll leave this idea aside. I think it’s just force of habit and past conditioning … an unwillingness to question what came before.

Unfamiliar future

At any rate, all that I have described is what one would call a SCHEMATIC, OVERDRAWN picture of the French Educational system. Of course, there are positive sides, but you all know those; France is one of the world’s leading countries in social programs, economic productivity, democratic freedoms, and so forth … well, for the moment at least … But is this preparing us for an oil-poor, resource-poor future in a world where company relocation to Newly Industrialized Countries may force us to reorganize a great deal of our economy and learn to share, be happy with less, and use our imagination to find new, workable ways of life?

But of course changing things is never easy. People are afraid of unfamiliar ways, they think that what they know is the only way, there are vested interests, it involves calling habits and training into question, it doesn’t suffice to throw money at problems, and even good ideas, if poorly or insufficiently applied will lead to failure. In short, it isn’t a technical impossibility, but it remains a political improbability.

Political debate

I decided in 1987 to try to do something about all this. I spent five years in a minor political party which seemed highly motivated to lead change in society as the chairman of their education commission, consulting hundreds of students, parents, teachers, and others involved in education, as well as union representatives and school directors. We worked out propositions to change school radically (more on what these were later) … something in line with the party’s desire to “create a cultural majority for change.”

I sent the propositions to the hundred or so representatives of various regions in the party’s governing committee a few months before it was scheduled for debate on the agenda. But the day of the debate, there were “more urgent matters” so debate was pushed back till the very end of a Sunday afternoon when one third had already left to take their trains, leaving only 10 minutes to debate a topic that concerns every single citizen of a democratic country. Of those remaining, fully half were teachers … and a plurality of these opposed all the measures which might require them to retrain to handle new functions. So without any guidelines on HOW to change our propositions, we were sent back to the commission to “work on the propositions some more…” Thoroughly disgusted, I resigned as commission chairman.

An alternative school

In the U.S., as a young teacher, I had already experienced the difficulties of even modifying one local system of education, so I reasoned that if what I considered the most progressive political party in France and its host of teachers were unable to be open towards real change, then there was little hope of changing such a huge system from within. I worked for the next seven years on the idea of creating an alternative school, parallel to the system, in hopes that an example outside the system might show people what is possible. But here too I was to be foiled. Among the enthusiastic parents supporting this idea, most were penniless; among the enthusiastic teachers supporting this idea, most, not surprisingly, wanted to be paid! Real estate was too expensive to rent in large towns, and small towns placed obstacles in our path, fearing we might lower already precarious enrolment figures, provoking the closing of their public schools. There were also dreamers who talked about “borrowing seven million francs” from a bank as if any bank would ever entertain such an idea. A subscription among political activists raised some 135,000 francs, but we were never able to establish a three year budget that promised any hope of surviving, even on minimum incomes, so we were obliged to abandon the plan and send people’s money back.

At this point I decided to give up. I had a good job in a public school and began trying to develop extracurricular activities to compensate for the unidimensional aspects of school. I created a music club and later a theater program where kids could learn self-management, cooperation, create, express themselves, develop their confidence, teamwork and self-esteem, associate with older students and adults as role models instead of submitting to age segregation, and receive recognition without grades from those around them.  I found no need to involve parents for the music club, but broke an additional taboo when I got parents involved heavily in the theater program … something few French school teachers like to see … parents in the school working with kids … perhaps because it threatens their own prerogatives to teach as they see fit … but this was only outside of class …

In my own classes, I developed a method of teaching involving considerable debate and discussion, with occasional projects and games, but the program was often so immense that time was always pressing us to return to a teacher-centered curriculum.

Moving the mammoth

I suppose this is why when I was approached by a sympathetic political activist, I accepted getting involved in an association whose goal, like mine, was to move the mammoth (change the educational system) even though I remained very sceptical about the possible success of such an effort.

Over a period of about three years, we developed a support group of some 300 people, including thirty to forty teachers and three school headmasters, and we elaborated propositions very similar to those the education commission I’d managed had put forth only to be rejected. We outlined a plan for creating special schools, particularly in the junior high years (collège), and hopefully one or two in each department, which would function differently and thus serve as an illustration of alternative approaches to education. The basic ideas behind these schools included:

• Only four hours of academic solids per day, so less Math, less French, less language, less science, less history and geography (oh dear!!!). Interdisciplinary projects as a way of exploring basic subjects.
• Groups for enrichment, remedial work and orientation for one hour a day.
• Workshops to learn practical subjects, develop artistic abilities, and physical education 1 hour a day.
• Collective expression and action a few hours a week to put democracy into practice.
• A severe limit on homework and no grading, but still evaluating and testing.

One can like or dislike these propositions, but the fact remains that they allow schools to handle a number of the objections mentioned above and the existence of a certain number of schools of this type in the Northern part of Europe tends to confirm that they can be a positive experience, developing well-rounded, independent, thinking students … if properly applied.

We sent a 10-page summary and a longer 40-page detailed version of the project to various people in positions to make decisions. We met with those in charge of education at City Hall and the Conseil Général, as well as the man in charge of innovation at the Rectorate and the Academic Inspector of Isère. All reacted favorably, saying the idea looked great. When we said we also had a list of teachers and an administrator to run the school though, the Rectorate and Academic Inspection suddenly began hemming and hawing about the fact that they would need to talk to unions about it, that they couldn’t name people on the basis of aptitude or motivation, but only on the basis of seniority points (meaning the death of the project) and that they would have to check with their hierarchy on whether this was all possible (i.e., if it wasn’t pursued, it wouldn’t be THEIR fault …) Despite attempts to get them to put this on paper, they refused and they began doing what bureaucrats do when they don’t want something to happen. They sat on it, refusing further meetings, correspondence or any other indication of their position, killing the project.

Things I can do

So, at age 57, tired of spending so much energy for nothing, I chose to devote myself instead to things I CAN do without political games and support from people higher up. I continued with my teaching job, interpersonal communication classes, the music club with its concerts and CDs, the theater program with up to five shows and 750 spectators per year (our headmaster even had a stage built for us … and other groups in the school to use.) And I created an organic gardening club in our school.

None of this however will make the changes I believe that France (and other countries) desperately need in their education systems if they want to create a vast majority of real human beings capable of adult behaviour, wisdom, commitment, values, and coherent behaviour emancipated from the manipulative, narrow channels that current systems carve for them.

Quatre cafés. Photo: designwallah

Gill Baconnier has lived in France for over twenty years – seven of them in Grenoble. A former feature writer for an English regional magazine, her articles about life in France can now be found at her blog French Windows. She has kindly agreed to share this article about French cafés and bars with Grenoble Life.

There is a wonderful cartoon by the French cartoonist, Sempé, which depicts a man standing at one end of a café-lined boulevard with an anxious expression on his face. In the next frame, he has emerged at the far end of the boulevard, having slipped around the backstreets and avoided having to walk past all those people-watchers. Believe me, I know how he feels – it takes great courage. In fact, I recently tripped and fell headlong on the pavement in front of a dozen or so cappuccino-sipping café customers. I do believe they were mildly amused – after all, it’s not every day you see a plump middle-aged English woman perform a perfect flying tackle on a lamppost.

Taverns have been around forever but cafés were opened specifically to sell coffee. The first coffee house was opened in Constantinople in the fifteenth century. When the new drink arrived in France in the seventeenth century it quickly became fashionable and in 1686, the first French coffee house – or café – was opened in Paris. It was called the Procope after its Sicilian owner and soon became a meeting-place for writers, artists and philosophers such as Voltaire, Balzac and Victor Hugo. A second café – La Table Ronde – was opened in Grenoble in 1739. Situated opposite the law courts and the theatre, it has had its fair share of famous clientele: Jean-Jacques Rousseau came here, perhaps after one of his Solitary Walks and so did Choderlos de Laclos, possibly in search of a Liaison Dangereuse. Sarah Bernardt and Fernandel drank here as did Jacques Brel, Georges Brassens and a host of other actors and singers.

There is a café for everyone in France. If you are of a philosophical bent – like Sartre, for example, who spent most of his life in the Café de Flore in Paris – then the café-philo is for you. You don’t have to drink much but you do have to be able to spout a load of old rot about the meaning – or not – of life. My daughter went once and came back either drunk or extremely bewildered, I’m not sure – in any case, she was completely incoherent. She thought so…therefore, she was…or something like that.

Then there is the café littéraire where completely sober people stand up and recite poetry or prose and then talk about it over a drink or two. To be honest, I’ve never been to one of these – they remind me too much of Eng Lit lectures at University and when I go to a café, I want a drink and a good laugh – not an in-depth discussion of limping iambics.

The Irish pub has become very fashionable recently. Every French town has a Shannon Pub or a Shamrock Bar. These places are usually furnished with wooden benches and trestle tables while the walls are hung with anything remotely Celtic: Guinness adverts, pictures of Donegal, leprechauns, Aran jumpers etc. For some reason, Saint Patrick’s night is very popular in France and most Irish pubs will be holding events such as céilidhs to the accompaniment of fiddles, flutes and bearded bard. Sometimes they get it wrong, of course, and I personally know of two ‘Irish’ pubs called The Loch Ness and The Queen’s Head. Kilts, Celts – it’s all the same to them…

Another recent phenomenon was the chicha-café. They didn’t last long because of the anti-smoking law which defeated the object somewhat. They had names like ‘Oasis’ and ‘Le bar à Chicha’ and had exotic Arabian nights-type décor. Apparently (the information comes from my daughter, who is – as you may have guessed – a regular café-goer) one would lounge around on silken cushions, drinking mint tea and taking regular puffs of fruit- flavoured tobacco from a hookah pipe. In fact, my daughter’s birthday present to me a few years ago was an evening out in a chicha bar but I was afraid I would cramp her style somewhat – and I wasn’t completely sure I would be able to heave myself up off those cushions at the end of the evening, my knees being what they are. I settled for bath salts instead.

Then of course, there is the café de la gare: the station café. Seedy, moody, depressing plastic-table-topped-Gauloises-smoke-filled meeting places…the stuff obscure French films are made of, quoi … unfortunately, they are rapidly being replaced by cheap and cheerful American fast-food outlets – not half as romantic, I’m afraid, but just as seedy. And of course if you lit up a Gauloise you’d be thrown out.

The French bistrot is just a café with a name of obscure origin. A popular explanation is that it comes from the Russian word for ‘quick’ and originates from the period of the Russian occupation of Paris. However, this is much disputed and the true meaning remains a mystery. Who cares anyway? It’s just a café with a fancy name…

Bars – as far as I can gather – differ from cafés in that they cater for locals who just want a shot of pastis and a read of the newspaper – and perhaps a bet on the horses. The bar-PMU doubles as a betting shop and if you accidentally wander into one of these establishments you will be met with cold stares and frosty silence. There will always be a television in the corner broadcasting a horse race and a burly barman who will pointedly ignore you.

In all these places, you can sit at a table – either inside or out – and expect a waiter to come and serve you. This is the theory. In practice, you sometimes have to do a lot of coughing and finger-raising before you manage to catch his eye. And don’t be fooled: French waiters have phenomenal memories. You can give the most complicated order and they will have no trouble at all remembering it along with three or four other orders from other tables. They will also have no trouble at all remembering whether or not you gave a tip the first time – and treat you accordingly on your next visit. You have been warned…

Some Grenoble cafés you might like to visit:

Cafés-philo :

La Table Ronde (café philo-littéraire), 7 place St André

Le Tonneau de Diogène (café-philo), 6 place Notre Dame

Irish pubs:

The Druid’s Pub, 3 Rue Diodore Rahoult,

O’Callaghan Pub: 2 Place de Bérulle      

And if these are not to your taste, there are plenty more to choose from here.

Villeneuve d’Uriage

Rebecca Skillman talks to residents of the hamlet Villeneuve d’Uriage, near Grenoble. She shares with us her discoveries about issues of sustainability and community in Alpine village life.

Perched above the thermal spa town of Uriage, the idyllically located hamlet of Villeneuve d’Uriage is home to around 150 people. I was curious about what attracts people to live here; how people relate to each other in the village; and whether there is more to the hamlet than simply “Grenoble satellite”? 

I talked to three couples who have made the village their home. The interviews reveal the similarities and differences in how we view “nature”, our overall need to connect with each other and our search for sustainability in the 21^st century. 

Kelli (Project Manager, HP) and Olivier (Sales Manager, HP)  

Kelli: I was born and raised in Boise in the US. The decision to move to France wasn’t difficult – this was the right place to be at this time in our lives. What was hard was leaving family and friends. I told myself: part of my cost of living is getting back to the US as often as possible. That’s how I talked myself into making it work, and it has. 

People here have been very kind. At the same time I miss the feeling of community I had back home. In Boise, when you do something like running errands, you have a list of people you’re gonna do things for. You walk in and out your neighbours’ homes – you don’t knock – and it’s very informal. You garden together and you build your houses together. One time my mother’s basement was flooded and suddenly there’s a whole crowd of people fixing the problem and drinking beer, making a party out of it. If there’s an issue, you sort it but have a good time doing it. But here in the village it’s just the two of us. 

I’m very happy here but if I could change anything it would be the distance between Boise and France!  And, day to day, I wouldn’t choose again to work from home. Much as I love our place it’s one of the things that’s slowed me becoming part of the community. 

Olivier: I was looking for a balance between proximity to Grenoble, for my job, and a village that is really alive – people working here, farmers, tractors passing the house. Other mountain villages may be pretty but at 9am they are empty. When I see a tractor here, I’m happy. And it’s the first time in my life I feel content coming back home after work. 

Living in this area, I’m ideally placed for my outdoor passions. I love wild places and I like to spend my weekends rock climbing and skiing. What drives me is being challenged by nature, having the feeling that it’s stronger than me. The down side is that it means I’m rarely home at weekends, and that doesn’t help for integrating with the community. 

Pierre Yves (Research Scientist, CNRS) and Françoise (Research Engineer, CNRS) 

Françoise: My husband, Pierre Yves, discovered the village 15 years ago – and I wasn’t sure, because the road gets very iced up in winter. But the spirit of the village worked its charm on me – even though I didn’t know the place at that time – and I was captivated. 

What appeals to me is that the people who live here are very close to the natural elements, flora and fauna and this closeness expresses itself in the way they rear their animals, and gives the village a special kind of energy. I love being able to walk in the streets in the evening and having nothing but pleasant surprises, and smiles, in my encounters with the neighbours. 

With regard to village life, when we first lived here I was involved with a village association. We organised several events to help people meet each other. As time went by that stopped because we ran out of energy. But now something similar is happening around Alain and Yvette’s farm. 

The people who work on the farm have an attitude and philosophy that’s a little different from mainstream agriculture. For several years they have produced organic wheat using an ancient stone mill to create flour. From this they make bread, the main source of income. Around the farm, there is a small kernel of people who have created an association, Grains de beauté, whose main aim is to promote contact, and a meeting place in the widest sense of the word. This word “meeting” is a common theme in everything organised. For example, it could be a willow basket or bread-making workshop, or the regular choral events.

Pierre Yves: This hamlet is probably unique in the Grenoble area: it is small, isolated and surrounded by nature. The thing that struck me when I first arrived, well before I knew people here, was the timelessness of the place. When you go to Alain and Yvette’s farm, you enter another age; the place feels unchanged in centuries.

Referring to what Françoise said about how people relate to each other …  she mentioned that everyone is friendly. This didn’t happen as easily as that. What’s interesting to me is that on the one hand – of course – there are different factions. The other side of this coin is that there is no such thing as anonymity in the village. 

In Villeneuve there are three broad groups of people: those who have always been here (mostly former farmers), new arrivals such as us (one is a “new arrival” for a long time!), and farmers actively farming. The fact that most of the farming around the village is organic, and connected with nature, contributes to the atmosphere of the hamlet and the area around it. 

The smallness of the hamlet, surrounded by nature, resonates very strongly with me. We aren’t going to be able to forever extend the metropolitan areas; towns, in general, are located in the middle of the richest agricultural land. So at some point this urban expansion will have to stop. Villeneuve feels like a potential model of how we will need to live our lives in the future. 

The development of non-agricultural activities around the farm is, for me, very much linked with the question of how we make the transition to sustainable development. The farm, and the activities linked with it, represents a local approach that restores a sense of collaboration, whether material or artistic, on a human scale and in sync with the rhythms of nature. What happens around the farm seems to me to answer a need that isn’t met in the way we currently organise society in terms of how we connect with each other. It is one way in which people are trying to satisfy this need. 

Yvette (agricultrice) and Alain (agriculteur)

Yvette: I’ve always worked on the land and my life in Villeneuve began when I found a small farm to rent, way back when was 17. I arrived on my own and, at that time, there weren’t many women farming in that way. Suddenly everyone was giving me a helping hand. 

I started farming with some goats and, at the same time, Alain started the vegetable garden. From that, he developed into market gardening. Little by little, I wound down the goats and both of us worked in market gardening. We began to integrate ideas from bio-dynamic agriculture – an organic approach using an awareness of the energies that govern the land, the animals and nature in general. 

We lived through a period that was challenging, economically. At that time the local farmers were amused by our way of doing things. But, when we bought the house, that changed our relationship. They saw that we were managing to make a go of farming and we became the enemy by virtue of the fact that, as people working in agriculture, we blocked land that they wanted to develop. Overall, we had 10 years of good relations, 10 of bad and now we have had 10 years of neutrality – but at least no tension. Our closest links are with people who have moved here from elsewhere. 

In terms of the farm itself, there’s potentail for our level of activity to develop. My personal project is to develop animal rearing: in addition to the cows that we already have, introduce a few goats again, some hens and turkeys. 

Alain: This work may evolve through the support of the association ; it isn’t necessarily a profit-making activity. But you or I, or any of the people at Villeneuve realise that it’s important to have animals in a village and it’s also important to have people to look after them. That’s where I see the link between the farm association and the people of Villeneuve and around. People need to realise that animals bring a particular type of energy which helps us to live. It’s not just the responsibility of farm workers, it’s for all of us, for the future, to realise that we have a role and that it’s important to maintain farm animals. 

In today’s society 9 out of 10 people are doing a job that has nothing to do with our physical world. They live in a virtual world in terms of computers and IT, producing things that we don’t need. This may create employment but it isn’t real in the sense that if this work were to suddenly stop … where would we be? We’d still need to feed ourselves, somehow. This way of living and working leads us to completely disconnected lifestyles where we travel and lead our lives in a complex way when there is a far simpler way of nourishing ourselves. This “virtual world”, on the other hand, generates ridiculous ideas … like that it’s ok to take a plane to the other end of the world for 20 euros. For me that is completely unreal! People want to live in a “green” way but they think it’s ok to buy a plane ticket at such a low price?! There’s hard thinking is needed there.  

I believe people have a fundamental need to regenerate, to get together and do things with others. I see an alternative way forward that contacts what’s deeply important for all of us. I mean, what’s fundamental in order for society to develop. For this we need to make contact with each other, starting with those of us who are able to meet around a place and try to move towards something better, socially. 

I think that a farm is the ideal place to start rethinking how society can work. There’s already a structure, and a sense of birth and creativity – animals, the food we produce. From here we can begin, gradually, a project to develop our society.

For further information about the farm association, Grains de Beauté, and its activities, contact the association: beaute.des.graines (at) gmail.com

Radio. photo: morberg

English Talk Radio is a talk show in English on 90.8 Radio Campus Grenoble. We talk about film, theatre, finance, restaurants, travel, and have a variety of topical guests. We are four presenters: Kristine Minski talks about finance, Christina Menez talks about China, Mary Zaccai talks about student issues, and Vivian Draper – animatrice/rédactrice – hosts the show. Every Sunday at 12.30pm, and every Wednesday at 7pm on 90.8, Radio Campus Grenoble and live on www.campusgrenoble.org – and also here on Grenoble Life.

The February 7 English Talk Radio show took place at The Bookworm Café in St Laurent, Grenoble. Listen to the full show here:

p'tit vélo dans la tete on campus - photo: www.ptitvelo.net

Are you a student or a new arrival and want to know how to live in Grenoble on a budget? Expatriated Brit John Lubbock has learnt the hard way, and has kindly agreed to share his tips and experience with Grenoble Life readers.  

Grenoble is not a bad place to be poor. But, like a tramp with a favourite patch, you have to know your environment; or like a foraging bear, where the best pickings are to be had. You may need to change some of your bad, foreign influenced habits to make the most of your insertion into French culture (beer is expensive apart from Stella, which isn’t one of the best things about French gastronomy, is it?). 

Tourists, as we all know, are naive sponges who deserve to be squeezed dry, so try not to seem like one. People will often poorly attempt to converse with you in English when they realise you are not a native, but insist, “Je suis en France, il faut que je parle en français“, and they won’t despise you as much for usurping their language as the world’s Lingua Franca. It is mostly from lack of better information that tourists agree to pay higher prices, so I intend to give you some information to help you make better spending choices.

Accommodation

If you do not want to spend your first month in France on a sofa or in a hostel, it pays to research accommodation before you arrive. There is an association called OSE Club which you can join for €30 which will find apartments for you in a designated area of the city, if you want to be near to a university. Then there are websites such as www.appartager.com and www.vivastreet.com, which have petites annonces for flats, but these are generally only useful if you pay the €10 fee to see the telephone numbers of the advertisers and call them up directly as they don’t answer messages on the site.

Watch the French film L’Auberge Espagnole before you go to get an exaggerated idea of being interviewed by your future flatmates and the kinds of hilarious European stereotypes you are likely to be cohabiting with. If you are not a student, it is even more important to find a flat quickly, because without a rental agreement, you will not be able to get a French bank account or contract telephone, and will thus be considered a SDF (Sans Domicile Fixe) by the French. This will mean that you are forced to become a baba cool (hippy) and sit in the street with your dogs holding out a frying pan to ask for spare change.  

N.B. If you are staying for less than a year, it is worthwhile getting a contract phone, which will be cheaper than pay as you go, the phone will be nicer, and there’s little they can do about it when you tell them that you’re leaving the country before the contract finishes and close your bank account. But don’t tell anyone I told you.  

If you have never lived in the socialist paradise that is France, you may not be aware of the kinds of social benefits available to people living there. The CAF‘s housing benefit system could pay for some of your rent if you are a student or living on a low wage, although like most bureaucratic systems in France it takes about six weeks to get anywhere with it, and since these forms are all in French, it is more like a test of your reading comprehension which you need to pass to gain entry to French society.  

Learning French

If you are (un)lucky enough to be a political refugee, asking at the Préfecture (a big administrative building which makes you feel like Josef K from Kafka’s The Trial, wondering if you’ll ever be told what you’ve done wrong in order to end up there) or at the Conseil Général can get you free French lessons, which can otherwise be obtained by calling the ADATE organisation. I am not sure if you can get lessons with them without being a refugee, but I am considering telling them that I have been forced to flee from the UK as a result of the impending government takeover by a bunch of Tories with accents so posh and annoying that they constitute a form of social oppression. If you have to go to the Préfecture for any annoying bureaucratic reason, like to obtain a carte de séjour, don’t ask anyone which ‘queue’ you should stand in. The French for queue is pronounced like ‘que’, while saying ‘queue’ sounds like the French word for something rude.  

Transport  

When it comes to transport, if you are poor, the bicycle/vélo will become like your husband or wife, or perhaps the god to whom you pray for benevolence. If it works well, you love it and praise it, and if not you curse it. There are three main places I know of to obtain bikes cheaply. Firstly: on the street. I found three bikes lying in crumpled heaps on pavements in the first month I was here. The problem then is to take them to somewhere you can repair them. So either have a bike repair kit (Decathlon, around €15), or go to the second place to get cheap bikes – Un P’tit Vélo Dans La Tete meaning something like ‘A little bit biked in the head’.

This atelier (workshop) sells bikes that have been repaired for between €15-60, or you can go there to fix your own by paying a €15 abonnement (subscription). It is a good place to practice your French, as there are lots of guys who can help you to fix your bike, and they have a handy board on the wall with a picture of a bike and the French names for every part of it indicated. However, fixing bikes takes time, and if you have a second hand bike, or one you bought at P’tit Velo, it will break down roughly every two weeks. On the plus side, you will get very good at repairing bikes. The third option is Métrovélo, who will give you a generic yellow bike for €75 for six months (plus €50 deposit) and repair it for you if it breaks down.  

Of course, you can always chance a free ride on the tram, but getting caught by the officials will land you with a €65 fine, unless you can pretend to be a totally clueless foreigner. The tram tariff is €24 a month for students, but Grenoble is the flattest city centre in France, and waiting for a tram and slumming it with Joe Public are hidden costs not worth paying in my opinion. That’s why liberté comes before egalité and fraternité: because it’s more important.  

If you want to go further that the city limits, go to www.covoiturage.fr and find someone who is making the same journey as you to go with. It will be far cheaper than any other method of transport, and the people I’ve met doing it have all been nice.  

Food  

Although many people come to France for the food, as an impoverished young person, this will likely be one of the areas in which you sacrifice quality in order to live within your means. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, a man who lives within his means has no imagination; but you will likely be finding your culinary options limited by the exigencies of having little money to spend. Ed is a cheap supermarket, and it happens to bear the name of some of my friends, although since the name Edward doesn’t exist in French, they call it “Ee-de”, which sounds much more corporate and less friendly. It is worth taking a notebook around to the supermarkets to write down prices of items you buy regularly, because while vegetables may be cheaper in Ed, Géant may have cheaper milk, for example. Unfortunately, I have just been informed by my collocataire that Ed is closing down – evidently the world of modern commerce is too cruel for such friendly-named businesses – but Lidl is almost identical in that it has hardly any choice of products and brands you have never heard of, but they are all usually cheaper than the Géant/Casino equivalent.  

Yet if one just bought the budget Casino brand pasta/rice/couscous to eat with with vegetables every day, you might end up wanting to kill yourself. So for the minimum luxury of not cooking the food yourself, you can go to a CROUS canteen, near the gare, or in Domaine Universitaire. These are supposed to be for students, but you can just pay the €2.90 it costs for a meal there in cash without showing any student card as well. You get bread, salad or cheese, a main meal of canteen standard chips/pasta/vegetables/etc. and some meat served with customary indifference and a bad attitude by people who look deeply unhappy about serving ungrateful students who could pay their wages with their tuition fees (those who go to an École supérieure anyway).  

Working  

Of course, if you really want to make things easier on yourself financially, you could get a job. “A job? What’s that?” I hear you cry. “I am a student – they don’t work. Then I wouldn’t have time for all the drinking and Facebook which the energy I consume from crisps and Red Bulls goes into”. Well, you could work part time. If you are a native English speaker, you could get employed by a soutien scolaire company, telling kids what they did wrong with their homework. Believe me, it’s satisfying to be on the other end of this after receiving homework corrected in red-teacher-ballpoint ink for 10 or more years. Don’t be put off if you don’t have a TEFL or CELTA qualification, I didn’t find this a hindrance, though it may help to say you have experience of private teaching even if you haven’t.

If there’s one thing I learned looking for jobs here it’s that it doesn’t pay to be honest: always tell them you are available to work, always tell them you have the experience. It took me a while of offering my services to language companies (Grenoble Life already has a useful list here), universities and other places like the Chamber of Commerce and Rectorat before I was employed, but once you have your foot in the door, you will hear about other teaching  jobs that are advertised within teaching circles.  

The Pôle jeunesse on Avenue Agutte Sembat has a useful wall full of job and accommodation offers. But if you have a degree, they will tell you that they can’t help hoity-toity types like you and that you should go instead to AFIJ who have an office at 29 Avenue Felix Viallet near Cour Jean Jaurès. These guys mostly have offers for internships or well paid jobs, so if you are just looking for a petit boulot, the Pôle jeunesse might be more useful.

You could try working in a bar, but the French can be quite snooty if your linguistic skills aren’t up to scratch. This matters less when applying to one of the studenty bars like London Pub or Sun Valley, but you will invariably have to call a Frenchman ‘boss’ (and thereby lose all the nationalistic self-respect you have built up living in your own great land), and traipse around the campus putting up flyers just for the pleasure of sacrificing most of your evenings for €9 an hour. There are also lots of agencies you can work for who hire waiters and other restauration workers for company or other private functions, but I personally found them somewhat useless, though Adecco is worth a try. Then you can try the listings in Pôle Emploi, which is like the JobCentre in the UK, but with more paperwork.  

Of course one of the reasons why you came to Grenoble is to ski, so if you are a student, join the École de Glisse, and try to obtain some cheap equipment from one of the second hand ski places like Boite aux Skis. There is no way of getting around that skiing is expensive however you do it, but hopefully you will have saved enough money in other areas to afford the silly ski-pass prices. And if you injure yourself, just remember to have your European Health Card handy. Good luck, mes amis.

Dials. Photo: ericcomando89

English Talk Radio is a talk show in English on 90.8 Radio Campus Grenoble. We talk about film, theatre, finance, restaurants, travel, and have a variety of topical guests. We are four presenters: Kristine Minski talks about finance, Christina Menez talks about China, Mary Zaccai talks about student issues, and Vivian Draper – animatrice/rédactrice – hosts the show. Every Sunday at 12.30pm, and every Wednesday at 7pm on 90.8, Radio Campus Grenoble and live on www.campusgrenoble.org – and also here on Grenoble Life.

The January 22 English Talk Radio show features Trudi Penkler, psychologist and inter-cultural coach and trainer, talking about teenagers and moving. Listen to the full show here.

Les Nouvelles de Grenoble

In the latest post in his blog The Franco-American Daily Deconstructionist; History and Culture in Everyday Life,  John Hess leafs through the City of Grenoble Magazine Les Nouvelles de Grenoble. Here’s what he has to say about it.

Many of you who have the good fortune to live in Grenoble, wait breathlessly for the end of each month, because that means a small portion of your tax payments will be returned to you a hundred-fold, in the form of Les Nouvelles de Grenoble, “the city informational magazine.”

For those of you who do not have this good fortune : the magazine is a glossy, super-sized A4 format affair, arriving free in residents’ mailboxes each month. It is published by the municipal government, at taxpayer expense, and purports to provide helpful information about happenings in Grenoble, especially of a political, social, or cultural nature.

Perhaps you enjoy reading Les Nouvelles: it’s professionally produced, there are lots of color pictures, the articles are short and easy to digest, and it’s all so refreshingly upbeat. When I read Les Nouvelles de Grenoble, I realize that I am living in the world’s most wonderful city. Perhaps I have even died and gone to the urbanists’ paradise. Well, then I go out my door, and harsh reality sets in; but o the illusion, however fleeting, is delightful!

But have you ever wondered about the content of the magazine? For it clearly is not just the neutral statement of city-related current facts and goings-on that you would expect from a publicly-funded publication. There is, of course, the natural phenomenon of editorial selection: the magazine is strangely silent about the crimes, mishaps, and dysfunctionalities that weigh on city life; we hear only about the good stuff. The temptation to intellectual dishonesty seems to be too great, however, for the editors to stop there. What they do report on has to be qualified with glowingly positive adjectives.

So does issue n° 131, October 2009, tell us on the front page that in matters of sustainable development, “Grenoble is keeping its promises”, even though this is a self-evidently worthless statement. If one wants to know if promises are being kept, one generally has the sense not to ask the promise-maker, which is sort of like asking the accused if he’s guilty or not–and basing the verdict on the answer.

On page six of the same issue, we find out that the city-engineered renovation of St Bruno Square has “restored its soul as the lively and convivial heart of the neighborhood.” Well, I hadn’t noticed, but if the city engineers say so, then that’s good enough for me!

On page seven, we find out that there is not just a new crèche in that same neighborhood, but a “spanking brand-new” crèche, which is somehow different from a new crèche, though I suppose appropriate for child-rearing disciplinary purposes.

On page eight, we find out that the Philippeville Square crèche is “new, beautiful and environmentally-friendly”, which will certainly be a relief to parents concerned that their children’s day care was aggravating global climate change, though they may regret that the newness is not spanking in this case; and while some local residents find the crèche “butt-ugly”, they were apparently not interviewed for this article.

On page fourteen, we have another “spanking brand new” building, this time a library in the Teisseire quarter, also qualified as “magnificent.” (If the Teisseire library is already “magnificent”, then what adjective remains to us to describe, say, The New York Public Library, or the Great Library of Alexandria ?) It goes on and on, upbeat snippets about all the wonderful and progressive developments in Grenoble, directly or indirectly thanks to the actions of the city government, culminating in the municipal self-love-fest about sustainable development from page 18 onwards.

How can this sort of thing be possible ? Well, in a country where the press is expected to be partisan and indeed captive of a particular interest group or ideology, and where the state likes to pose as the benefactor to all (and never mind where the money comes from), it is not just possible, but considered quite normal. And this is the problem !

But why do I complain ? You know, in fact, the business model of Les Nouvelles de Grenoble magazine has inspired me. Watch this space, as Grenoble Life becomes John Hess Life, full of interesting articles about how wonderful, nay, ineffably divine, John Hess is, all written in breathless prose by John Hess. You will, of course, pay a monthly subscription fee for the privilege.

Freebox: Photo Martin Menu

Grenoble Life editor James Dalrymple has one piece of advice for readers hoping to set up an internet connection in France: don’t use Free. Here’s why.

One of the first considerations when setting up home in a new country is getting an internet connection, nowadays almost as essential a utility as gas, electricity and water. When I arrived, one company dominated combined phone and internet packages: Free - seemingly the only good value alternative to France Telecom at the time. Now there are better value options on the market, but extricating yourself from your contract with Free is not as simple as it should be, to say the least.

Customer service in France often leaves a lot to be desired, but Free goes beyond the normal depersonalised call centre experience to seemingly deliberate efforts to overcharge and stonewall customers that have spawned large internet communities of unhappy punters and consumer associations, but has not apparently done enough to make Free contemplate their reputation.

A Free account is relatively easy to set up, but when you want to cancel your contract, they require you to return the Freebox router by post. All very well, except for the fact that – in our case, and that of many others – receipt of the box is not acknowledged, even if you have paid for a registered delivery service which enables you to track the package by internet to its destination. Free don’t receive the boxes themselves, but subcontract this task to a logistics company.

When Free disputed receipt of the box, our enquiries at the Post office were met with the response (or something to this effect) “Free do this all the time.” Angry consumers in numerous web forums support this, as does the existence of an association named Freeks, dedicated to helping customers untangle themselves from unpleasant disputes with Free, among other internet companies, and who list ‘mediation’ with Free as one of their services. This leads one to suspect Free are quite aware of the situation many of its customers find themselves in, and it is not just a case of logistical inefficiency.

Having claimed that they never received the box, Free then demand that you send them proof of dispatch (i.e., the receipt for registered post) by fax. That’s right, an internet service provider who communicate by fax - everybody’s favourite  21st century means of contact. It gets worse. There is evidently only one fax machine, apparently located at a call centre in Eastern Europe, which is engaged for large periods of the day. As if people don’t have better things to do than spend entire working days trying to send the equivalent of cyber bog roll to the other side of the continent.

Further still, the company insist that you call them within two hours of having sent the fax (assuming you have been able to get through), on a premium rate number. Finally, when we reached the call centre by phone, the operator was both vague and reluctant as to whether they had received the fax – maybe try again tomorrow? (another day loitering by the fax machine, more premium rate numbers). Only on being pressed did the unhelpful operator admit to receiving all the pages of the fax, but claimed it was illegible. Of course it’s illegible, it’s a fax! … we wanted to scream.

It’s a Catch-22, for if we hadn’t rung the bank to halt the direct debit we would probably still be in some daily fax-rage limbo while we almost certainly continued to pay for a service that we are not receiving, and have no wish to receive. We have written to complain to Free’s Customer Services, a postal-only service in France, and they have accepted the end of the contract, but not receipt of the box. They are demanding payment for a additional month’s subscription, and are still asking for the box back, which apparently costs around 400 euro.

Unfortunately you can fight with your principles but short of getting the consumer associations interested, you run the risk that Free will sell the debt on to debt-collection agencies, which really isn’t funny. It’s all over the web, from customers in the same situation as me, to those who never received the box in the first place, and have been paying for a product that was never delivered.

Thus, if you are a new arrival to the country hoping to choose an internet supplier, I strongly recommend that you opt for one of the alternatives. For example Numéricable, the optic fibre cable company, offer a faster connection and a basic telephone and internet package which costs around 20 euro a month, at the time of writing 10 euro less than Free. Numéricable at least have offices in Grenoble with human beings to whom you can speak face to face – which is reassuring – and send a technician to install and remove the router. I haven’t had the pleasure of having to close a Numéricable account, but it can’t be worse than my experience with Free.

Please use the comments box below to share your experiences, good and bad, with internet and phone providers. I hope that this word of warning might help other customers avoid falling into the same trap.

Mixer. Photo: Andrea 'Bau' Pinti

English Talk Radio is a talk show in English on 90.8 Radio Campus Grenoble. We talk about film, theatre, finance, restaurants, travel, and have a variety of topical guests. We are four presenters: Kristine Minski talks about finance, Christina Menez talks about China, Mary Zaccai talks about student issues, and Vivian Draper – animatrice/rédactrice – hosts the show. Every Sunday at 12.30pm, and every Wednesday at 7pm on 90.8, Radio Campus Grenoble and live on www.campusgrenoble.org – and also here on Grenoble Life. 

The 18 December 2009 English Talk Radio show took place at the Grenoble Graduate School of Business and featured GGSB’s Judith Bouvard, Dean and Director, and Mary Zaccai, International Press Officer. Listen to the show here

'Crise immobilière'. Photo: _02_

 Grenoble Life editor James Dalrymple shares his personal experience as a first-time home buyer in the Captial of the Alps – and is happy to report that it’s not all bad news!

Now that I am starting to see a flicker of light at the end of the rather dank and cavernous tunnel called home-buying, I feel compelled to share some of my observations. Whereas I can confirm its status as one of life’s more arduous experiences, it has not been worse than I had anticipated, for no-one ever said it would be a breezy walk in the park with a big piece of cake.

Before deciding to buy a flat I’d had several friends trying to re-educate me on the value of renting for life; unconvinced by the merits of life-long debt and the likelihood of paying the price of one’s property several times over in interest. “Be cash rich and asset poor,” these savvy characters insisted, pointing to the lower home maintenance costs and fewer taxes for locataires (for example the annual taxe foncière is only levied upon owners, not tenants).

One fact of life as propriétaire in a co-property is that one can face hefty fees if the exterior of the entire building has to be repainted, or if there is a shared heating system to be replaced: neither a tenant’s problem. Owning one’s own home, though, is pretty much brainwashed into Brits as a rite of passage, even if we have to accept that we can’t necessarily afford what our incredibly lucky baby-boomer parents had. When my career is over, however, I would like to have paid for my home, and be able to subsist rent-free on whatever meagre pension I have accrued.

To quote a Grenoble Life contributor, Felicity Lodge – whose article Arranging your finances in France is well worth a read - ”buying a property in France is highly regulated”.  I concur, and there are some major pros and cons to the regulation. She goes on to say, “the amount you can borrow is controlled so loan payments and any other regular obligations cannot be more than 33% of your monthly income (net of social charges)”. This may seem strict but the French are a prudent people, and the banking culture befits a country less footloose with borrowing. The kinds of problems that led to the sub-prime crisis in the US couldn’t have originated in France. Likewise, credit is not as easily available as in the UK, and I have the impression that people are more sensible with their disposables.

The upside of a regulated home buying process is that there is less risk. Once you have agreed a price with a seller, you can engage the process via a specialised lawyer (a notaire) who manages the sale from then on. Once you have signed the pre-contract compromis de vente, there is little chance of being gazumped given that the seller would subject themselves to a significant fine if they chose to break it.

In Britain you stand the risk of having incurred legal and surveying costs only for the seller to pull out in the 11th hour to accept a better offer from a rival buyer. That this gazumping is allowed to stand in the UK is obscene, one feature of the county’s rather lunatic housing market. In France, however, the absence of risk comes at a cost: namely 6-8% of the sale price. This covers all legal, tax and surveying concerns, but certainly amounts to much more than the sum of those individual costs in Britain: and most of it goes directly to the government. This fact lends credence to the idea that renting is better value than buying – it is an enormous financial consideration to face on top of one’s downpayment, and a serious obstacle to owning a number of different properties in one’s life.

In the event our notaire was good value for money, something of a showman in fact. Having let his juniors take care of the preliminaries we were marched into his office for the final exchange of contracts. With well-honed comic timing and vigorous gesticulating, his beautifully flowing oration was magnificent to behold: condensing a summary of France’s unsurprisingly substantatial housing law into an hour-long address. Furthermore there were some last minute complications with the bank but he - a force of nature not to be meddled with - was by then sufficiently committed to our purchase to bang some heads together at the bank to keep the ball rolling.

Personally I could see no advantage in approaching an agence immobilière (estate agency). Assuming that you have an idea in which quartier you would like to buy, and the appropriate value for a property in that area, you can search for private sellers online on sites such as Paruvendu and Leboncoin. We negotiated directly with the seller, bypassing the middle man. Given that the notaire conducts a thorough survey of the property and that you can withdraw without charge at the signing of the compromis de vente, then the need to work with an agent did not make itself apparent to me.

If, like me, you are a first time buyer in France, you could be entitled to a zero per cent loan of up to around 30,000 euro. Such loans, and their duration, are defined by your means. We qualified for approximately half of the thirty, and it has to be repaid within the first six years of our mortgage.  However, we found ourselves in the slightly sticky position of having (for reasons too boring to explain here) to apply for this from a different bank to that from which we had agreed our principal mortgage. Of course, the bank from which we were requesting the zero per cent loan held us captive while they tried in vain to beat the mortgage we had secured from our other bank, and upon realising they couldn’t do it, saddled us with a rather inept trainee to administrate the loan.

Trying to get a bank to hurry up (necessary when deadlines have been imposed by the notaire) when there is essentially no profit in it for them is quite futile – more so when you’re main contact hasn’t a clue what he is doing. Amusingly, said bank tried to fob us off by saying something along the lines of “there’s so much admin involved in this loan that it’s hardly worth it”. That’s right, admin not worth potentially thousands of euros – I don’t think so! However, they almost had a point, the sheer quantity of justificatifs required would have impressed even the most hardened of fonctionnaires. Just the photocopying and stapling drew a Herculean effort from our trainee bank manager, who made a clerical task seem like Fort Boyard.

Anyway, now that the boxes that once dominated the flat start to empty and disappear, and life seems worth living again, we can look forward to the much fabled tax credit for first time buyers: apparently the interest we pay on our mortgage is deductible from our annual income tax bill for the first five years of repayment. Rumour has it that if the interest is greater than your obligations, the French government start mailing you cheques. I’ll let you know next September. These advantages put a little shine to the lie that renting is throwing you’re hard-earneds away to a landlord whereas paying a mortgage is like putting money in your own piggy bank. A mortgage is still (in my case) a 25-year burden, but on balance I think it’s worth it.

Photo: meddygarnet

 Want to improve your French while in Grenoble but don’t know where to go? Grenoble Life’s Camille Bromley has done the research so that you don’t have to.

Need to work on your French? A look at French classes in Grenoble

by Camille Bromley

For those in Grenoble who need a little push – or a big kick – to get their French up to par: let’s get to it! After arriving in France to live last summer, I discovered that my confidence in my US-learned French was largely unfounded. Pressing ahead with self-motivation and grammar books, I found myself in foreign language quicksand – the more French I gained control of, the more I realized how far I had to go. I promptly researched language schools in Grenoble, settling on a CUEF (Centre Universitaire d’Études Françaises) course at the Université Stendhal, and received the kick start that I needed.

Although your French level will undoubtedly progress in the course of daily life, a language class will accelerate the process and draw your attention to vocabulary or grammar you may be still missing. A language class also introduces you to other foreigners in the community, many non-English speaking, many new to the area, with a similar level of communication to yours, a valuable resource to make friends and practice your French outside of class. Class teachers provide insights into French culture and local goings-on, and many courses organize activities outside of class.

Grenoble offers quite a few community French language classes and several official schools.

Language Schools

The language schools are run professionally and so offer a rigorous schedule, a higher quality of instruction, and more sophisticated materials. The downside is that tuition fees swallow a significant chunk of the wallet.

1. Centre Universitaire d’Études Françaises (CUEF)

I took CUEF’s intensive French language course this summer. It was 20 hours per week, duration four weeks. It cost 640 euros, which works out to eight euros per hour. A variety of courses are offered, general French language courses as well as courses targeted towards specific needs. For those of us with a day job, there is an evening course, eight hours per week.

The teaching materials used in my course were excellent. Audio equipment was available for intensive listening comprehension exercises, and visual materials such as video clips were used regularly. CUEF does not follow a textbook; the class curriculum is created according to teacher preference. Because CUEF is affiliated with University Stendhal, students of CUEF are eligible to perks such as free use of the language laboratory equipment and participation in weekend excursions.

I was satisfied with the course and I definitely saw improvement by the end. For more information see the website. 

2. Alliance Française

The Alliance Française, conveniently located in the center of town, offers intensive, semi-intensive, and specific-needs French courses. The fees work out to nine euros per hour. The organization of classes is similar to CUEF, but the facilities lack a language laboratory with audio equipment.

For more information see the website.

3. Association Babel

Babel, a language association and home to an English library, offers courses in several languages. The class size is smaller and the ambiance more intimate.  There is a French language course as well as a French/English conversation exchange group. At the moment, the course is not available but may resume in January 2010, upon request. The fee for the course is 265 euros per year. The fee for the exchange group is 50 euros per year.

2 rue Sainte Ursule, 38000 Grenoble
04 76 42 43 91
association.babel (at) laposte.net

Community Classes

Community classes are taught by French volunteers, at very low cost. They are more flexible and less demanding than the language schools, and may offer more opportunity for conversation practice and personal interaction. However, almost all the community classes are targeted for beginner to lower-intermediate level learners.

1. MJC Abbaye, Ateliers du Français

Held Mon, Tues, Thurs 2:00-4:00, Fri 9:00-11:00, 2:00-4:00
Fee: 25 euros/year
Level: beginner to low intermediate

2. ODTI

Held Mon and Tues 9:00-11:00
Fee: eight euros/year
Level: beginner to intermediate
Focus: vocabulary, cultural knowledge of France and Grenoble, grammar

3. Association AMAL

Held Tues, Fri 2:00-4:00
Fee: 10 euros/year
Level: intermediate
Focus: grammar, reading, listening
57 Avenue du Maréchal Randon, 38000 Grenoble
04 76 44 71 14

4. Association LEFOP

Fee: two euros/year
06 81 38 97 92

5. Association Préludes

Thurs, Fri 9:00-11:00
No fee
04 76 54 33 14
associationpreludes (at) hotmail.fr

6. MJC Villeneuve

Fee: five euros/year
04 76 09 18 29

7. Centre Social Teisseire, Association FACILE

Tues, Fri 9:00-11:00
Fee: three euros/trimester
04 76 25 49 63

8. Centre Social Vieux Temple

Tues, Thurs 8:45-11:45
Fee: three euros/year
04 76 54 67 53

9. Centre Social Vieux Temple, Communic’Action

Fee: three euros/year
04 76 54 67 53

10. Centre Social Prémol, Atelier Communication

Tues 2:00-4:00, 6:00-8:00; Thurs 9:00-11:00, 6:00-8:00
No fee
04 76 09 00 28

11. Centre Social Arlequin, Atelier de français

Tues, Wed, Thurs, Fri 9:00-11:00, Tues 2:00-4:00
No fee
04 76 22 42 20

Language Partner (Tandem)

If conversational or oral expression is what you need work on, it may be more useful to find a language partner. The idea is that two people meet regularly to practice each other’s native tongues, dividing time equally between the two languages. No fee is involved. This is a great way to make a new friend and learn about French culture and local events.

You can find demands for a language exchange on announcement boards in buildings at the Université Stendhal campus, especially at CUEF and the Maison de Langues. You can also post an announcement yourself.

Alternately, the student organization Integre Grenoble posts demands for Tandem on its website.

Café linguistique

Café linguistiques are open to foreigners looking to practice French and French people looking to practice a foreign language. They are typically held in the evenings in various pubs around the city. The location and date change each time, so you will have to follow the postings. Check Intregre, an organization for international students in Grenoble, and Happy People, an organization for introducing foreigners to locals and arranging language exchanges. Intregre is almost exclusively a young student crowd, while Happy People includes members of more diverse backgrounds.

Musée de Grenoble

The colors of Gaston Chaissac are brightening up the winter season here in Grenoble with the current exhibition at the Musée de Grenoble, Gaston Chaissac: poète rustique et peintre moderne. Camille Bromley of Grenoble Life explains.

by Camille Bromley

Chaissac was a self-taught French painter from the first half of the 20th century, a working class man who was eventually ‘discovered’ by a couple of established artists and introduced to the society of artists in Paris. Chaissac separated himself and his work from the intellectual elite, however, referring to his style as “modern rustic.” The description seems apt; his work is modern in form, in color, and rustic in its simple, even childlike crudeness. In addition to the drawings, paintings, and collages on display at the Musée de Grenoble are sculptures made out of common objects: a bucket, a basket, stones, a personified broom, endowed with Chaissac’s signature awkward smile.

Sans titre, 1957-59, huile

This is a perfect exhibition for children; certainly much of Chaissac’s work actually resembles children’s drawings, and the bright colors and unsteady shapes are immediately appealing. Chaissac’s world is highly personal and isolated as well; despite the rainbow of colors these figures aren’t openly joyous, their uneven eyes and crooked mouths seem to be hiding an inner something. You can imagine an emotional complexity being expressed with unsteady hands. The museum has set aside a room at the end of the exhibition for the Chaissac-inspired artworks done by local children. It is now quite full with colorful figures and bent smiles. There are collages on the wall, faces made with buckets, flower pots, colanders. One of my elementary school classes painted their own Chaissac portraits — what a wonderful way to introduce children to art!

The exhibition will run until January 31^st, 2010.

There’s much more to see than the Chaissac exhibition, however. The Musée de Grenoble is renowned across Europe for its permanent collection, especially that of the 20th century. The museum is over 200 years old (founded in 1798), making it the oldest museum of modern art in France. It houses Egyptian, Greek, and Etruscan antiquities, and a history of Western painting is organized chronologically from the Middle Ages to current day, including significant works by Matisse and Picasso. One of the most pleasantly surprising rooms features former artists from Grenoble and their breathtaking landscapes of the surrounding mountains.

For a small city of about 150,000 residents, Grenoble is home to a rather impressive art museum, and the entrance fee is next to nothing: 5 euro, or 3 euro reduced rate, and only 2 euro for s