You probably know already that school lunches in the U.S. are notoriously bad. Brown, frozen food reheated and served with ketchup, canned vegetables (if any!), and sugary milk. By comparison, the food in French schools is wonderful! There are chefs in each school district, the food is balanced and prepared fresh and served in courses. This takes place at the school, but "la cantine" is staffed by city employees whose contracts are separate from teachers or administrators. Here's a sample menu:
A little translation: Entrees are appetizers, Plats are main dishes, Garnitures are veg/garnish, Laitage is a milk product, and Dessert is self-explanatory. So here's the week of October 2-6 at Massillon:
Monday: Beets with vinaigrette, roasted chicken with zucchini, Camembert cheese and pears.
Tuesday: Tomato salad, pork stuffed with herbs, ratatouille (roasted summer veg), St. Paulin cheese, and praline dessert pudding.
Wednesday: No cantine because students have no school, or just a couple of hours in the morning.
Thursday: Boiled egg with mayonnaise, beef ravioli, semolina (not sure what kind of garnish that is!), local bleu cheese, and strawberry mousse.
Friday: Pearl salad (which I assume means salad with Israeli couscous or something), breaded fish fillets, pureed vegetables, cantal cheese and local yogurt with fruit.
Sounds pretty appealing, right? There's always water, milk, and juice to drink, plus fresh French bread. This was one of the parts of French culture that I was most excited about; the kids having such a complete and balanced meal and encountering new foods at school. Naturally, it wasn't at all what I expected.
For the first month of school I decided to keep both kids out of cantine altogether. Well, I had planned to introduce Lincoln to it the third week, but that was when the school asked us to move him up to second grade, so I figured skipping a year was enough excitement for one week. So finally in week five he stayed for lunch on a Tuesday. Well, that was the day I got a call at 2:00 p.m. saying that he'd been pushed down by another child on the "playground," which is a nice way of saying "the concrete courtyard lovingly nicknamed "Shawshank." Remember?
Still, the following Thursday he decided to go again, with assurances from the school that the kid who'd pushed him had been given a talking-to. That night, he informed me that he'd forgotten to throw away a piece of cheese from his plate before carrying the plate up to the dishes counter. The lunch lady, rather than asking him to throw it away, grabbed him by the wrist, dragged him across the room to the trash cans, and made him throw it away. By Friday he seemed fine, and we chalked it up to another annoying difference between French and American cultures.
Well, all that weekend Lincoln complained of chest pain. He couldn't sleep. He was o.k. when distracted, but as soon as the game of Uno ended, or the T.V. went off, or the karate class was over, his hand went to his chest again and he winced and gasped.
My six year old was having anxiety attacks.
Six.
Because a woman employed to care for children can't keep her hands to herself, or use her words.
That week he missed school for several days, saw his pediatrician, and went to the emergency room for an EKG to rule out a heart problem (which, thankfully was ruled out). Each of the three pediatricians we saw said the same thing: Cantine is a problem all over France, especially for foreign children. DO NOT make him go back.
Fortunately, the reassurance that he didn't have to return to cantine and the knowledge that vacation was coming were enough to alleviate the worst of his symptoms, and he was able to finish the last day or two of the week. We are reevaluating the kids' schooling and thinking of moving them to a public school nearer to our apartment, so that they can avoid cantine and I can avoid spending four hours per day walking and busing to school.
SO. That brings us to Saturday, October 14, when we were preparing to pack up the car and drive to Paris to meet my parents, hooray! And pick up our dog as well. During the week of Lincoln's anxiety attacks, I also learned that everything the airline had told me about a dog flying unaccompanied was wrong, and at several points it looked like he wouldn't make it at all. But thanks to the incredible generosity of my friends Kim and Angel, who'd fostered him all summer, the paperwork was signed off and he was good to go. Josh had meetings in Paris from Wednesday to Friday the 13th, so I got us mostly packed up and ready.
Well, something in the hotel in Paris disagreed with Josh, and my never-allergic husband broke out in hives. We spent Saturday traveling to Urgent Care, realizing that they require an appointment, traveling home and then back there again, only to receive steroids and antihistamines that were completely unequal to the task. Saturday night was the expats' Halloween party, so Josh stayed home while I took a Ghostbuster (Sylvia) and a karate master (Lincoln) to an apartment downtown for pumpkin carving and a potluck feast.
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| I brought deviled eggs, but not the cute and spooky ones! |
It was such a great evening. I don't know how our hosts managed to pull it off - that many pumpkins, that may families, and yet it was almost totally relaxed and fun!
The first half of October was a whirlwind for our family - but then, every week here has been a whirlwind in some fashion. After the Halloween party we came home for quick showers before bed, ready to drive all day Sunday and finally hug our Mom and Dad/Nana and Pappy again! And that's the real reason I barely blogged in October: I was having too much fun with my parents to write about it.
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