A bit of a general update

 

My assistantship is still going well, on Monday we practiced ‘Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes’ again and they’re pretty good at it now, it’s so cute! I’m still a bit of a novelty around school and I get a warm welcome every day when I turn up. But I was a little confused the other day when I got to school and walked into the classroom and one of the children shouted ‘Malcolm’ at me! But then one of the others said to him ‘it’s not Malcolm, it’s welcome’ and I had to try very hard not to laugh because I didn’t want to put him off speaking English!

We’ve had a few colder, cloudy days this week and all the children (and most of the teachers) turned up in their raincoats and I was there in a skirt and t-shirt! At break time one day it was very grey and threatening to rain and one of the teachers joked that it was like being in England, which all the other teachers thought was hilarious! Then as it began spitting one little 4-year old came up to his teacher and said ‘what’s happening?!’ obviously not accustomed to rain! Meanwhile another little girl was running around the playground warning everyone ‘It’s going to rain! It’s going to rain!’ It then proceeded to rain for about 5 minutes before the sun came back out.

Yesterday was the first time that I taught a group of children completely on my own, I took a group of 12 children out at a time to do PE. It was a bit scary to have so much responsibility but it seemed to go well, apart from one child that I had to send back inside for messing around!

The english textbook!

As well as teaching I’ve also just been doing odd jobs that need doing, so for example I’ve been typing up key points from the class grammar textbook which has actually quite useful as a bit of basic revision for me! But I have to say the French keyboard is pretty confusing to get to grips with and it’s so badly designed, why would you make it so that you have to press the shift key every time you want to put a full stop or a number?! And yet you don’t have to press the shift key for an exclamation mark, a colon or other even less commonly used things! I’ve also spent quite a bit of time laminating things which you would think would be fairly boring, but being a bit of a simpleton I found it quite fun!

Yesterday I took down an old display and put a new one up which doesn’t sound too bad but unfortunately it was rather high up and therefore it involved the use of a ladder. I don’t like heights and I’m a little clumsy, so me and ladders really shouldn’t mix, it was at that point I found myself wondering if falling off a ladder would be included in my year abroad insurance or if that’s classed as some kind of extreme activity! But luckily I didn’t have to find out as I managed to do it without injuring myself (or anyone else for that matter)!

One lunchtime one of the other teachers brought some figs in from her friend’s fig tree and she let me have one as I hadn’t tried a fig before. I was a bit worried that I wouldn’t like it but have to be polite and eat it all anyway, but it was quite nice, but very messy!

On the bus on the way to school everyday I go past a bakery which has a drive-through like at McDonalds! I took a quick snap on my phone on the way past the other morning because I thought it was quite funny!

Asides from school, I've been doing a bit of wandering around the town shopping because I'm good at that! And I’ve also spent quite a bit of time Skyping various people to make up for lost time when my microphone wasn’t working!

Also, I went out last night with one of my housemates and some of her friends in La Rochelle which was good fun! Given how cheap alcohol is here in the supermarkets I thought it would be similar in bars and pubs but it was actually quite expensive! (5 or 6 euros for a malibu and coke!) I found it quite funny that the second bar we went in, which was called 'Bad Boys' (in French), liked to play a lot of cheesy, old, English music! The third bar we went in was closing as we got there and the fourth was an Australian themed pub but they mainly played French music that I didn't know!

Me, my housemate and her friend

I was planning on having a nice lie-in this morning but annoyingly I woke up at 10am and couldn’t get back to sleep, and although 10am sounds like a lie-in, given that we didn’t get home until 4.30am, it felt pretty early! So I dragged myself out of bed feeling a little less than perky and was glad to see that it was lovely and sunny. Besides the obvious benefits of nice weather it also meant that I could wear my biggest sunglasses to disguise the fact that I was hanging a bit and looking pretty rough, even though I’d hardly even been tipsy last night, definitely getting old! So I ventured off to the Post Office to collect my recorded delivery letter which had annoyingly been delivered the other day while I was in the house but either the postman didn’t bother to knock or I didn’t hear the door. I was a little anxious about going to the post office as I’d heard a lot of stories about how complicated and unhelpful they can be and I wasn’t really feeling up to much conversation this morning, especially technical jargon in French so I was relieved when I handed over my card and showed my driving licence and then simply had to sign a piece of paper before being given my letter.

The post office in the town centre

Having tackled stage one of the French bureaucracy system fairly easily I’m feeling a little more positive about the next stage for me which is the CAF office, probably on Monday morning. (CAF is a French housing benefit that you can claim to help pay your rent, I’ve heard it’s a pretty long, paperwork-heavy process but you can get up to 40% of your rent paid so I reckon it’s worth it!) 

That’s about it for now as I’m being very boring and going to bed to catch up from my lack of sleep last night!

But on a side note, French people really need to learn that double denim is very rarely okay!