Thursday, February 26, 2009

back in France

It's true. After a flight to London for Gibraltar and a night in Gatwick, a flight to Toulouse and a train to Rodez I am back home.

Home being here for one more month at least.

Morocco was splendid and I'll be posting some bon mots about my experiences here in the next wee while, unless I don't. In which case you'll have to talk to my face about it.

Saturday, February 07, 2009

Morocco

Off to Morocco on Monday, unsure how much internet I'll be in the mood for. I'll likely be checking email from time to time but don't know if I'll feel like doing a whole whack of blog entries.

We will just have to see won't we.

Due back in France on the 26th.

Wednesday, February 04, 2009

snowballs

“Damn right Canada is better than France.”

“Mon ami, pourquoi?”

pourBANG! Mon ami, pourBANG.

The trouble started when some snow fell on the ground from the sky, and a bunch of students couldn’t resist the novelty of a snowball fight, something that has been interdit (France talk for forbidden) on playgrounds at home as far back as I can remember. Just to show them some tricks I sculpted a few white spheres of geometric precision and went to work.

Why everytime I try to do something nice does it inevitably end with me pegging a kid in the head and running away while his nose starts to bleed? Is it really my fault that children have such soft noses and cartilage?

I mean, I’m not Darwin or God or L. Ron Hubbard or whoever was responsible for this bullshit. If I was in charge we would all have metal plates on our faces from the start.

Egg + sperm = zygote with a teensy metal plate. And so goes the miracle of life.

In my world that clumsy kid who bounced his face off a sidewalk in grade 5 would never have been teased for a month because he was wearing a basketball face mask. Pretty much shutting down the whole “If God exists why is there evil in the world?” argument, thank you very much.

But I’m not God. I’m just a man, like spiderman or batman. A man trying to do good in the world with the superpowers I was born with.

Because I’m Canadian my particular superpowers happen to include an ability to hurl snowballs with a velocity and accuracy that scared and intimidated the French into having a series of massive, nation-wide protests demanding my ouster a few days back.

It’s a national genetic predisposition France! Stop being so racist!

All the placards people carried referred to me as ‘Darko’ and I don’t understand why the Communists were so uppity as I’m not alienated from my means of production. Unless it’s warm out and I make a snowball with scrapings from the freezer, in that case they may have a point. Whatever their problem, it snowed again and everyone was smart enough to calm down, leave me be, and return to their breads and cheeses.

Through the uproar I have been fortunate to learn a few things though. A well placed stone can do the work of ten snowballs, and although the flag is the tricolour, and their sports teams are Les Bleus, the French bleed red just like everyone else. Especially the small ones I call ‘les enfants’.