Mini Christmas with my fellow assistants and a little too much Vin Chaud (though, on the other hand, can there ever be "too much"?)

Yesterday, Sunday, we were treated to a rare sunny day, cold and very clear. The air smelled earthy and wintry and I ran around taking pictures of the deserted high school campus in the sunlight, trying to learn the Nikon's many/varied/complex controls.

Here are a few of the results. I was playing around with the two dimensional forms of the buildings and the rigid symmetry of the campus and trying to remember f-stops and apertures and contrasts and center-weighted metering and all that good stuff.

In the afternoon, we three Belin assistants went to a concert in the small village of Colombier about 10 minutes to the north of Vesoul for what we thought was going to be a classical Christmas music concert in the church there. It was, in fact, delightful. But it was two hours of delight on a hard wooden bench with very little heating. The local community orchestra was surprisingly good and they played a truly diverse program: A song from Pearl Harbor, one from Pirates of the Carribean, a medley of Broadway tunes, a Tchaikovsky piece, a medley of a French singers' work, four other compositions by American composers, a modern version of Greensleeves...if that isn't random than I don't know what is! What the majority of these numbers had in common was their connection with American composers/films, which, while fine, was slightly disappointing from a French cultural perspective.

On a related, but tangential note, I have been having great difficulty finding things to read in France. The English books available are either high school reading list classics, which, by and large, I am enjoying, but they do tend to be tragic/depressing/thought provoking. After a few in a row like this you kind of need something lighter! The other end of the spectrum is Nicholas Sparks/Stephen King mass markets, which, frankly, I have never liked very much.
I'm surprised to find it so difficult to find books written by French authors, but each time I go into a bookstore or library I see the same books that we had on sale in the Book Store when I left, just translated into French. I even saw a copy of Boulder author John Shors's Beneath a Marble Sky (Sous un ciel de marbre) in the tiny local library! This is truly frustrating, however, when I am looking for books to improve my French. I have never really wanted to read Confessions of a Shopaholic in English. Why would I want to read it in French!?! I am hoping my upcoming trip to Paris will give me a chance to visit the famed Shakespeare & Co. English book shop so I can restock my bookshelf!

We made a lovely group dinner last night. A green curry with red pepper, carrots, ginger, onion....and vin chaud, the traditional Christmas drink of the Alsace region, made with spice sachets and red wine. We exchanged our little gifts around my tiny sapin de noel (Christmas tree) and drank...three bottles of red wine! Among four petite females! And then we all had to be up to decorate the lycee with one of the teachers at 9am this morning....oh. oh. oh.