On jay jeem! On jay jeem!

 

Learning French at the Saturday market.

Name your poisson.

The week of transition is over. Our first "bon weekend" consisted of a couple of longer walks around town, the Saturday market at Jardin du Mail, and, on Sunday, Ella and Ivy's first gymnastics meet with their new club, Angers Gymastique (That's "Onjay Jeem!" if you're listening to the cheering section). It case you didn't hear, they took first place! And, if you're a glutton for coverage of this event, you can watch my 9min 56 secYouTube video.

En France, no kiss no medal.

Monday the new batch of AHA students arrived on a few different trains from Paris. We took turns helping Kristin and the AHA crew provide a welcoming committee. It was actually nice to return to the train station, this time not feeling jet-lag stupid.

Sue, Pauline, and Jack welcome Alex:

another aha moment.

It's been 20 years since I was last in Europe but, at the train station, with my restored consciousness, it dawned on me -- isn't there supposed to be a Peruvian flute band here? Maybe Angers is off the PFB circuit but it was their omnipresence that characterized them more than their music. I'm sure many travelers have gone mad with paranoid delusions of being followed from town to town by the PFB. So, has the pan-flute craze dissipated? Or are they living under my bed?

In case you're wondering where these places are exactly, and you're too lazy to search the internet yourself, no worries. I've been adding a few things to our Angers Google map. The blue markers are the student host-family locations. The place where you should send peanut butter and mexi-blend cheese is marked with the yellow house.

Our first walks around Angers have been filled with great sights of the very old and the new. The centuries of architecture and decor are striking--that, and I've always been a sucker for fancy door knobs. But even as contemporary construction has seemingly eliminated old-world decorations from the urban landscape, some themes have survived in new media.

At Maison d'Adam, the oldest house in Angers (left), classic half-timber construction provides ample opportunity for a craftperson's legacy (my sincere apologies for the gratuitous gender neutrality).

By way of contrast, in our new millennium, after crafting your ephemeral six-pack, you can at least complicate your legacy with Lookme™ boxers (left). These euro man-panties are on sale down the rue for €28. That's 20% off -- or 20% on depending on your perspective.

The modern period has also delivered locally tangible shifts in the form and function of human creation. A short walk from the train station (where a mid 20th century statue of a young woman falling out of her yoga pose adorns the adjacent traffic circle) takes us back, again, to the street below our apartment where Jack is pictured getting a head start on French idioms from a contemporary expression of liberation.

On the food front, tis the season for crepes. Tonight, we found out yesterday, is La Fête de la Chandeleur. Contrary to my ill informed assertions earlier, this, the celebration of the presentation of Jesus at the temple, is apparently the end of the Epiphany season. And, instead of cake, crêpes are used to mark the occasion. And while we did our duty and put crêpes on our menu, according to Wikipedia, we missed a couple of details:

     "In France, Candlemas (French: La Chandeleur) is celebrated with crêpes, which must be eaten only after eight p.m. If
        the cook can flip a crêpe while holding a coin in the other hand, the family is assured of prosperity throughout the
        coming year.."

So... ate too early and totally skipped the coin thing (although I'm sure I could have flipped a crepe with a coin in both hands. But, no doubt, our carelessness may have taken a year off our financial lives.

Despite our risky disregard for local superstitions, we got to celebrate our first La Chandeleur with Taylor and Debbie via Skype. Taylor (being offered wine by Ella above) fixed up a crepe-ish pancake with fixins on her i-Pad and tapped (nom nom nom...) it right down.