What do you want for Breakfast?

Say that in your best French accent.

Friday morning one of my schools planned an American/ English breakfast in order to learn the names of different foods and experience a different culture.  In case you don’t know, English breakfast is quite different from a typical American breakfast.  Where we would have pancakes or French toast (which the French don’t actually eat for breakfast) on a Saturday morning, the English would substitute these delicious morsels for a more savory meal.  Beans, fried bread, and black pudding (“sausage” that is to my understanding more like congealed blood in a synthetic casing—delicious) are the main dishes in an English breakfast.  Because my school is hosting an American assistant—that’s me by the way—we served a more appealing American breakfast complete with pancakes, scrambled eggs, sausage, and bacon.

Yummy pancakes and "toasts of butter and with jam"

In preparation, the students colored both English and American flags, we had to represent their neighbors to the north, and then I strung these flags on a garland to hang about the room.  Such lovely decorations, the tables were trimmed with white tablecloths and red and blue napkins, so patriotic and not too different from a French patriotic occasion.

Our lovely and patriotic decorations. USA!!!

I made the pancakes before the students arrived and gawked at my teacher’s insistence at teaching me the proper way to make a pancake.  I admit my French is not particularly great even after 5 months and I am not a master chef, but my intelligence was insulted as the Frenchman, who had never before seen a pancake, attempted to teach me, the American, how to cook an American delicacy.  I may have unintentionally replied with a snarky “I’m an American, I think I know how to make pancakes”.  Whoops.  To be fair, this is not the first time he has insulted my intelligence; he has previously assured me that there are in fact 51 United States in the United States of America.  Wow, of course being away for 5 months I must have missed the day we adopted this 51^st state.

Apart from serving Canadian bacon instead of crispy strips of bacon and my students choosing to eat their pancakes with jam instead of the maple syrup I tried to convince was delicious, the breakfast was a blast.  They’ve learned how to order pancakes in an American restaurant.   Succès !!!!

 

My students playing a breakfast board game. I think the bespectacled boy on the right looks like a cross between Harry Potter and Luke White

There was an article in the local paper about our breakfast.  Here’s the link and a scan of the print version.

http://www.lavoixdunord.fr/Locales/Douai/actualite/Autour_de_Douai/En_Pays_d_Ostrevant/2011/02/08/article_petit-dejeuner-anglo-americain-a-l-ecole.shtml

 

It basically says students ate American breakfast with the American assistant they are hosting. Awesome.