Daniel Ferrante

A sample of how my days in France go.
I live in a dorm room on the campus of the city’s university. The walls are rather well soundproofed, so I rarely hear much from other residents, unless someone is really blaring music.
However, every morning I am awoken by the sound of people opening their blinds. Unlike [...]

I got up early today to go running. I’ve been running semi-regularly since arriving in France and the recent cold weather makes running difficult with my lungs - but the cool weather also makes it easier for me to go longer distances before giving in to exhaustion. Generally when I went running in the U.S., [...]

It started off simply enough. Five of us assistants from America (Sunshine, PGOAT, Moses, YAEB and myself) decided we should have a Thanksgiving dinner here in Dijon. We’d invite a few friends and the other American assistants, do our best to imitate an American Thanksgiving dinner and try to stave off the home sickness.
At some [...]

The PGOAT (note, not “the_pgoat” from Fark, but literally, the PGOAT that I have ever met) needed to take the Literature GRE exam. As it was being held in Geneva, Switzerland (a.k.a CH), several of us decided to join her. The co-conspirators were myself, Sunshine and the Aussie (and what do you call a boomerang [...]

While my students continue to say and write the funniest things (”During All Saints Week I did a camel!” or “We played volleyball on the b*tch.”), I discovered I have been making a huge error of my own.
In French, when one expresses a need to do something or have something, one says, “J’ai besoin de…” [...]

Imagine this. It’s the first day I’m in Dijon. I’m at the city’s Arch, talking with three other assistants and one of the program administrators.
I hear someone singing, rather raspily and not very clearly, but obviously in French. I look up and this short Jamaican is walking towards us. He walks up to one of [...]

Ladies and gentlemen, your attention please. Thanks to the diligent work of Sushine and myself, the following internet flash songs have been unleashed upon France.
Banana Phone: This one went over quite well due to its catchy, oft repeated opening line, “Ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring. Banana Phone!” There were, of course, some mispronounciations like, [...]

I got back from holiday yesterday afternoon, and there’s a few things I want to post about. However, as today is a French Holiday, and I can’t find anywhere to upload my pictures, I’ll have to wait.
I will share this, though. On the way from Nice to Paris, Sunshine and I had a table / [...]

Hello, and greetings from Nice (pronounced like “neice niece”), France (pronounced like “dance” only with an “Fr” not a “d”).
Nice is great. We’re staying at a wonderful hostel that was at one time a monestary monastary.
We’ll spend the day tomorrow cruising the city, seeing the sites (including Girabaldi’s grave and a WW1 memorial), and, if [...]

While on holiday to the Grand Canyon with Green Tortoise, one of the drivers woke us up early one morning screaming, “Wake Up Lazy Europeans! Get out of bed!” (incidentally, he also jokingly complained that the Grand Canyon sucked because he thought it would be “grander”).
The Europeans on the trip laughed it off, but I [...]