Peace out, Chambon Feugerolles

This is my last week of teaching in France - I have spent the past 6 months teaching English to elementary school students in Le Chambon-Feugerolles, a little town of 13,000 outside of St. Etienne, where I currently live. You can read more about St. E here.

The town is by turns picturesque, conveying a vaguely quaint, cozy feeling. My experience, however, has been far more complex than that.

(I see this house on the walk from my Monday morning school to my Monday afternoon school. I see its topsy-turvyness as a fitting metaphor for the absurdity I experience on a daily basis.)

Teaching has not been at all what I expected, and far more of a challenge than I ever realized it would be. I've been set adrift by many of my experiences, but I don't have the time to tell all the stories here. I am sad to say that my experience with teaching has been a negative one overall, although it hasn't been without its pleasant surprises, either. I am so very grateful to the teachers who have taken the time to get to know me and who made the effort to help me when I needed it.

French culture, and by extension, the children of France, remain enigmatic. France is a beast I still don't understand, and fully comprehending it is a feat I may never accomplish. On the other hand, I've certainly learned a lot trying.

In any case, that's all I've got to say on that. Peace out, Chambon-Feugerolles!

Andrenne

St. Victor's Abbey

My friend Jessie and I took a recent jaunt up to Marseille to see the city for ourselves, in all its glory. We only had 36 hours there, so we had to be picky about how to spend our time. At the end of our second afternoon however, we found ourselves with two hours to spare before we had to trek to the train station, so we referred to our handy-dandy 36-hour travel guide and decided to see the Abbaye St. Victor.

The article upon which we'd been relying asserted that the structure had been built in 4BC, describing it as a "dark austere church that is a good comparison to the more modern churches and cathedrals. It also revealed... the amazing advances that were made in engineering knowledge to make the more modern churches seem light and airy."

Well, we thought, that sounds like an interesting thing to see - let's go check it out!




Hmm, I thought to myself, this looks remarkably like a Christian church. I started to question the author's assertion that this structure was built in 4 BC. Because if you think about it, it would be mighty challenging to build a Christian structure before Christ.




I turned to Jessie and asked, "4 BC, you say?" We discussed the possibility that the abbey had been built in the name of a different religion. But in that case, it would make the most sense for the Romans to have built a Roman temple in the south of France in the late BC years. And then, given that assumption, shouldn't a Roman temple look like, well, a Roman temple?

I snapped a few more photos and resolved to look this up when I arrived home. Wikipedia set our travel author straight: "In about 415, John Cassian founded two monasteries of St. Victor at Marseille, one for men (the later Abbey of St. Victor), the other for women."

And that's not all - the structure from 415 doesn't even remain: "In the eighth or ninth centuries both monasteries were destroyed by the Saracens, either in 731 or in 838, when the then abbess, Saint Eusebia, was martyred with 39 nuns. The nunnery was never re-established.

No rebuilding took place until the first half of the eleventh century when through the efforts of the then abbot, Saint Wiffred, the men's monastery was at last rebuilt.

All that now remains of the abbey is the church of St. Victor, dedicated by Pope Benedict IX in 1040 and rebuilt in 1200. It was made into a minor basilica in 1934 by Pope Pius XI."

I feel better now that that's been cleared up. And to the travel writer, I say it pays to do your research before you publish. Even if it is just an online travel article.

Andrenne