A Tour of Sablé-sur-Sarthe

Happy France gives you an approximation of where things are

Sablé is, technically, a city, but with a population of a mere 15,000 residents, it's quaint, quiet and absolutely charming. The perfect conditions to inspire some serious writing sessions.

Boat on the Sarthe River

The most impressive aspects of Sablé are its church (with its monument to Sablé's fallen soldiers and citizens)...

...The port along the Sarthe river...

...And the Château that proudly overlooks the city.

Still, not all is the idyllic paradise I make it out to be. Indeed, there is a scourge in Sablé-sur-Sarthe that strikes absolute fear into my heart.

There is...graffiti.

Thug Life, yo.

All joking aside, everyone that I have met here has been friendly and good-humored. They all lack the permanent scowl that comes from the grind of living in a large city day in and day out. Still, I'll admit that after residing in Miami and Dijon, Sablé does feel tiny. It lacks the big-chain clothing stores that I would normally find all over France, something that, for the time-being, my wallet can thank.

There is, however, a McDonald's right across the road from where I currently reside. I honestly cannot make this stuff up, people. When I think about how I once complained last year that all I had to see in Miami was a McDonald's...

In case I need to go on a shopping spree, I would be required to travel to the nearest large city to Sablé-sur-Sarthe: Le Mans.

Yes, there is actually a French city called Le Mans. I have yet to visit but I will undoubtedly end up there at some point during my stay in the Loire Valley. Here is an arrow pointing in its direction.

Now, to answer the most burning question that has been on everyone's mind...

Yes, French stop signs are in English. Who would have thought it?

And since I promised you all horses, here are some more horses. Lots and lots of horses.

Trotting along

Here's lookin' at you, kid.

Barb the French Bean

Instagram, The Bum, and I

In my last post, I Am Alive, I sort of promised to have a great post for you all.

Well...this isn't it.

Instead, I would like to make a post about Instagram. If you have an Iphone or an Android, then you know exactly what I'm talking about and for those of you who don't, I'm sorry.

Instagram is an app that allows you to take pictures, make it look like you just used a lomography camera and then share it with friends, strangers, puppies, inmates, butterflies, brick walls, bums and anyone else on Instagram.

Yes, I am an addict to Instagram, but not to the point of having a million pictures (at least not yet). That said, I would like to share a few Instagram pictures of my own.

This is a picture I took in Miami

 A very loved place in Miami

Piano in Orlando

 For those who would like to follow me, you can follow me @hdrea. Please let me know that you are one of my readers as I would love to follow!

Also, I'm curious to know how many of you use Instagram and how often do you use it? What was the first Instagram picture you ever took?

Hanny the coffee bean

...And Then There Were Horses

Well, folks, after having traveled for three hours from Miami to Boston, spent four hours waiting to travel on a six-hour flight to Paris and then proceed to wait and take a couple of trains, I finally arrived (safe and sound) in my new base of Sablé-sur-Sarthe, right in the Loire Valley. And let me say this: the air is so clean and pure here that it is as if my olfactory senses were getting a high-five from nature.

Oh, I also mentioned in my previous post that there would be horses.

Lots...

and LOTS...

of horses.

Barb the oh-so-happy-she-might-explode-from-the-joy-or-dissolve-into-a-babbling-mess French Bean

P.S.

This is what my posts look like when I have not slept for 48 hours straight and have swollen feet from extended periods of pressurized sitting down on planes.

In My Quest to Remain Tri-Lingual...

One of my life goals is to be able to speak the Romance languages. As it is, to date, I speak three languages, two of which are Romance languages: English, Spanish and French. Even if I never meet the goal of learning Italian, Portuguese and Romanian, I'd like to retain my tri-lingual talent instead of having it bite the dust.

Thanks to living in a Latino-megalopolis like Miami, I am confident that my Spanish-speaking abilities remain fluent and the only things that I truly need to brush up on are where to place accent marks on syllables and how to conjugate verbs with "vosotros" instead of "nosotros" and remember that "vos" is equivalent to "usted." Perhaps, as a means to make my Spanish more authentic, I should consider changing my relatively standard American accent to sound more Cuban when I speak in English.

Hm. Maybe not.

As for my French language skills...well, much like my cartooning skills, they've diminished. More specifically, my ability to carry a conversation fluently has atrophied.

I came about this realization when I discovered my new cell phone's capacity to record. Like any curious individual faced with technology, I tried it out the recording function and spoke to my phone in French.

A few words in and I was at a loss of vocabulary. I found myself grasping in the back of my memory to remember basic words like enregistrer (to record) and avoir quitté (to have left). No one in my area speaks French so it shouldn't have come as a total surprise to me. And yet, my little francophile self was very, very alarmed by the egregious change.

I am certain that my reading and oral comprehension have remained on a similar level and that, thanks to the recording, my pronunciation hasn't worsened; that in itself is an achievement when I consider that fact that I live in an area that is predominantly non-French-speaking.

Still, I am not one to give up without a fight. If I needed to raise my level to my former francophone glory, then so be it. I began to re-watch some of my favorite, albeit depressive, French movies to refine my oral comprehension...

...which had the inevitable side-effect of tugging at my heartstrings and warping my general worldview. 

Getting a bit fed up with having my tear ducts drained every time I re-watched Au Revoir Les Enfants and Les Choristes and wondering why the best French films never had particularly happy endings, I decided to embark on another pedagogic strategy. With the help of French Trainer Barb (who is totally different from regular Trainer Barb), I delved into a different strategy of coaxing the hidden vocabulary by stating basic sentences that described the things I saw.

If I made a mistake, French Trainer Barb would waste no time in correcting me.

*Ah, ah, ah. The "douchebag" insult doesn't exist in French. One would say "a cretin" or "an idiot" instead.

*In fact, the French word for "douchebag" is (literally) "a vaginal pear." (I am so not making this up.)

French Trainer Barb also recommended that I listen to great French music, like Daft Punk.



Yes, listening to Daft Punk and watching movies in a foreign language are a couple of  methods of maintaining fluency; reading is also a good one. However, the best way of performing the upkeep would be to, of course, face a real world situation in which I face the throngs of needing to fend for myself in a foreign country, a.k.a., immersion. A good example of immersion would be to return to France and thrust myself once again into a French-speaking world.

Which is exactly what I am going to do.

Last month, I got an e-mail that had been filtered into my Spam box. It was from a French high school principal who had kept my résumé when I had sent it to his school in early 2011. He offered me a job to teach both English and Spanish full-time for the upcoming school year in the Loire Valley. He wanted to schedule an interview with me via Skype, if I was interested.

I said I was interested. I had the heart-stopping interview on Skype. And I got the job.

After more than a year of being unemployed, someone out there in Croissant-and-Baguette Land realized that I was a valuable two-for-one deal that shouldn't be passed up. It could not have come at a better time, too.

For all intents and purposes, I am, technically, employed. I have signed the job contract and the Direction Départementale du Travail, de l'Emploi et de la Formation Professionnelle  (DDTEFP) have given me their blessing and given my contract a literal seal of approval. The French consulate in Miami processed the visa application and I am now the proud owner of a shiny sticker (the third one in my current passport). All that's left for me to do is to pack a 50-pound suitcase and board a couple of planes on Wednesday, the first one connecting to Boston before heading over to CDG-Roissy.

Now that I am employed with a French job, that means that once I have integrated with French life, I will have to inevitably deal with being buried under a mountain of photocopies, applications, photocopies, signed pages, photocopies and passport-sized photographs. I'm also running out of passport-sized photos for my applications. I knew that the Famous French Paperwork and I would become BFFs soon enough.

And in case any of you are wondering: yes, I am a bit nervous about this prospect of teaching both English and Spanish full-time. In fact, I'm also stricken by the paralyzing thoughts of "what the Hell have you gotten yourself into/you have no idea what the eff you're doing."

Yet amid my worries and temporary feelings of insecurity, I am far more excited by the fact that I was the best (possibly only) candidate for the job and I gladly welcome a chance to have my life go in another direction. In France, no less! I can only imagine the eye candy that will be captured on my little Canon camera throughout the next year. So, dear readers, expect future posts featuring croissants, baguettes, cheeses, châteaux, wines and horses.

Yes, that's right. I said horses. Lots and lots of horses.

Here's a cartoon of a horse.

I clearly need more practice at drawing them on Microsoft Paint.

Barb the French Bean

P.S.

To anyone who is currently down in the dumps in life, I beg of you to hold out a little longer. As cheesy at it sounds, things will turn around for the better when you least expect them to do so. In the meantime, keep your chin up and remain hopeful at seeing a brighter moment in your future.

P.P.S.

I'M GOING BACK TO FRANCE! AHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!

I Am Alive

Isolated in an ivory tower...

Captured by pirates...

Fighting the oppression in Narnia...

Alright, I have no amazing excuse as to why I have not posted in a while, except the usual excuse of life getting in the way. I have been busy to the point of exhaustion, but I am alive and that's exactly the point of this post (obviously).

With that said, I shall now end this post with a few odd photos.





This is a candle for a beer bottle






 I thought this was funny because it does have some truth to it





 Kronenbourg in the bathroom of a restaurant. I could have gotten drunk in the bathroom...

-Hanny the coffee bean

An *Actual* Chicken Cartoon

I love it when I get into the cartooning mood and this morning, I woke up with a couple of crazy ideas for cartoons. Cartoons involving chickens.

But before I get to that, I'd like to present a little Two Beans Or Not Two Beans trivia factoid for you lovely readers: did you know that if Hanny the Coffee Bean hadn't had the brilliant idea of using Microsoft Paint, my blog posts wouldn't have had cartoons at all?

I'm not joking about that.

At the very dawn of founding our corner of the Internet, I expressed to Hanny that I wanted to have cartoons to explain my blog posts. Actual pen-and-ink drawings that I crafted with my own hand.

However, I fretted about it due to one minor technicality: I didn't own a scanner.

"How am I supposed to make cartoons if I can't scan them?!" I asked my partner-in-crime. "Do I draw them and then take pictures with my camera? Do you know how dumb that will look? I mean, who wants to see a picture of a drawing?"

"Just use Paint," Hanny coolly reasoned.

It's hard to believe, but until that painfully obvious suggestion came, I had not even considered making my cartoons using a computer. It was a foreign concept to me and a daunting one at that. Ditch paper and pencils for pixels and a keypad? Will I even be good at it?


Turns out that I don't do such a terrible job at it and I have since embraced being able to make full color cartoons in a few clicks without developing a severe, crippling cramp in my right hand.

Lately, though, I was at a loss for doing that. Even if I had an idea, no matter how insignificant it was, I couldn't be bothered to open Paint to make the cartoon. It wasn't until I woke up this morning when it hit me. Just for once, I'd actually like to make a cartoon by hand, not on Paint, as if I wanted to get back to my cartooning roots. It's just what felt right and realizing there are no paradigms to creativity is something that I have to constantly remind myself.

So, for the time-being, here is one of the dumb cartoons that popped into my mind. 

(Oh, by the way, even after so many years of living in a world filled with technological advances, I still don't own a scanner. In the end, I've taken a photo of a drawing, the very thing I avoided doing right from the origin of this little blog. Ha. Ha. HA.)

Sorry, son. You've been cock-blocked.

I'll admit that I wasn't trying hard to make an excellent cartoon. But I came to the realization that my artistic skills are a bit rusty, meaning they have totally deteriorated to a level which embarrasses me. Here are some drawings from my past so you can compare them to the simplistic chicken and rooster:

Sea turtle

Multi-tasking octopus. I remember that the word "multi-tasking" was very in vogue back in the day.

A lobster and a shrimp (prawn)

Even Atlanteans need a few arrows of love.

A Florida Marlin. Gotta root for the home team.

Clown fish with an anemone, circa post-"Finding Nemo"

Sea slugs that are clearly snails *head desk*

A Flamenco dancer to represent Spanish class...

...and a frog to represent French class. This was WAY before I realized I would one day live in France and come to utterly despise the whole frogs = France stereotype. 

This Killer Whale/Orca was my favorite of the cartoons. Probably because it was a bitch to color in all the dark areas and it gave me a sense of accomplishment after it ate up two ballpoint pens in the process. 

I did these drawings for my high school's nautical-themed yearbook when I was a Senior. I was seventeen. Turning into a responsible adult who can't even draw a below sub-standard chicken makes me want to tear my hair out.

Anyway, I did say I had ideas for chicken cartoons (plural). Whether or not I will express myself by sitting down and drawing them, or chicken out and rely on Paint once more, will be determined in the future. Rest assured, though, I will continue to make all the lovely, wonky pixelated illustrations you've grown to love.

Translation: that means that I'm too broke to buy coloring and art supplies, let alone a scanner.

Barb the French Bean