A cracker to have with cheese, please....

This week, considering I'm practically sleeping at my work and 'teaching' whatever English nonsense bubbles out, I've decided to let you in on the quality of characters I teach and who never cease to amaze.

Koko Bis, whose actual name is Guy Phillipe on the role call is from the Ivory Coast in West Africa. He's about forty years old with not a wrinkle on his beaming, smiling face. In my class he has the loudest laugh I think I've ever had the privy in hearing and he takes a very, very long time in silence before he answers even the most basic question. In his personal life, he has three children who still live with their 'crazy' mother in Paris, his home for about fifteen years before he came to Montreal and he works six days as a butcher. He proclaims himself a special butcher, (why special - I still haven't got an answer) and a philosopher but to me he's got the goods of a class-A comedian.
Now, every Monday and Wednesday night for the last month I've seen Koko Bis tell the nine other students bits of his life story through a whiskey breath, which fortunately has reverted back to its original smell (his breath that is) due to the influence of his new Jamaican girlfriend. Not because she said so, I might add, because now instead of coming home to an apartment with only a bed, chairs and a table, he had a loving woman.
  
Two stories which spring to mind revolve around his illegal activities in France and his abscess.

As I mentioned before, Koko Bis lived in France for fifteen years. Fifteen illegal years, I should say.
But how could he do that? You ask. Wouldn't he eventually be caught by the police who travel in groups of three in France just waiting for an ethnic to walk down that street so they can demand their papers? Well, yes. And he was caught. Many times. But as Koko Bis will delight in telling to his avid listeners, he never had any fear of the police or the authorities and so they never cuffed him, booked him or threw him out of the country.
"You must respect them," he preached, before he told us of one time he got in a physical scuffle with them.
Perhaps his recipe of fearless respect was the perfect combination for a lineage of French cops...

And now to the final short story of the wonderfully entertaining Koko Bis.
His abscess. When he was a child of nine he developed a rather large abscess on his arm. His father was advised to take him to hospital promptly, which was many miles away. They tried many different medicines and treatments in the hope of not having to go to the hospital. When nothing worked Koko Bis grabbed a knife and sliced it open, much to his mother's horror. The family called him crazy which stuck with him until adult hood even though the action of piercing the protrusion not only let all the puss out but healed itself in three days.

So there it is.

A real cracker...

 

Stretching into new places...

What could I do to combat my forlorn mind in the event of thinking about the delightful squiggling presence of a not so near but dear three year old who at this moment likes to call people 'poo-poo head'...

What could I do when I've tried over and over to reason with our solar sun to push a little more rays our way and all you get is a cloudy reception... 

What could I do when I started talking to my family's pictures on Facebook and making up the daily dialogue for all of them...

The answer came from Santa. 

Ironic isn't it? The person who was created from a soft drink company actually gave me a ticket back to sanity on his sleigh. And this ticket is unlimited for one month. So lucky people living in the five mile radius of me, now you'll get to experience a very balanced somewhat content Tanya Wenczel. 

For the last week I've been burgeoning my own child-like sun somewhere in the pit of my belly through the yogic practice of Ashtanga... again... for the hundredth time.  

I had to face facts. Learning to breath slowly while moving into the unknown through the understanding of the body has always been the only real language of cultivating sunshine. Well, for me anyway. 

Strangely though in the years leading up to this, my mind had always convinced another part of me a different story by lisping, "are you ssserious Tanya? You have to do thissss every day! It'ssss too hard. You'll hurt yoursssself. The classsss issss an hour and a half? Hold on. That takessss too much time in your day, doessssn't it?" 

I see now that this had sabotaged the process of growing a least a fire ball. 

I also see now that I was a lazy banana head. 

So now I can control the sun or at least the effects it has when its not there in sweaty smelly clothes. Also with the month of February looming towards me, which as every Quebecois knows is the hardest winter month - people actually get frozen to a statue, I hear - I think I'm just in time.

Well I have a date with my book so I'll catch up with you some other time.

I think this dog does yoga too

Shenanigans and Snowballs

View from terrace

Having just spent four days in a Chalet over the New Year, (which is really an all encompassing word for deluxe holiday house) tucked away in the sleeping country-side of Quebec with twelve other friends, copious amounts of alcohol and as many fine foods as we could slather on many a good baguette, I am now attempting to re-adjust again to my simple diet and obviously not all at once of beans, lentils, rice and a jar of Promite, compliments from a loving sister.

On day three, I think Time itself even went on a little holiday because it honestly felt as though I had already been there for a week. I thought to myself, wow I really feel so rested and so relaxed with gravity. Unfortunately though it was actually a hangover. One that I hadn't sported for a while. It eased only somewhat after a few downward dogs (a yoga move) a plate of fried eggs and the occasional dig at someone who looked far worse than I.

After eleven hours sleep my days would commence with either a toboggan ride down the hill and in my case always into a tree, a stroll in the wilderness strapped to a pair of 'raquette' which look like giant tennis rackets that you put on your feet, throwing snowballs in a friends face or ice skating in borrowed skates across the local ice hockey arena and then throwing snowballs in a friends face.

As you can see from the picture above, our lake wasn't frozen as yet so most activities were out of the question. I was happy enough to imagine that at some point this lake could be skated on.

We played many games in the evenings. 

Mostly in French. 

And mostly ones with words. 

We even prepared for a WHO-DO-IT murder mystery game, where much to my luck I was the bearded woman from a traveling carnival and the murderer. We had our parts to read and our characters to enact but in all honesty I must really take my hat off to each individual who squeezed a nice little translation out after the french version because to my eye it kind of killed the excitable momentum that was naturally building with a group of circus freaks and zany characters.  

Now some may think I would already be at an excellent level in my French studies so this would all be easy to listen to. No! I tell you. Absolutely not. I am only elementary. I cannot understand native, fast-paced, sloppy (depending on who it is) speakers. I strain just to translate one sentence and once I have a notion of what is being said, the fluidity of a conversation has already progressed, concluded and transformed into another topic.  

Returning home was met with a warm promise of Spring. I was almost in thongs and a bikini walking in that sunny 2 degrees down Mont Royal. Except it wasn't. And tomorrow is back to minus seven. So I will endeavour to keep baking in our shit-house oven and create some of the worst things I will ever cook just for the fun of it. But mostly because the oven is the hottest place to hang out and I get to photograph these restaurant quality meals.

Avec plaisir...

With pleasure :)

Rösti loving - mmm...