Being a Tourist on my Day Off

I’m pleased to report that my first day with the children at school went pretty well yesterday. I was introduced to the children and they all seemed excited to meet a real-life English person! I’m mostly just observing for the moment so my day wasn’t particularly eventful, in the morning I sat at the back of the class and finished off covering the books in sticky-back plastic (yawn!) and was a little creeped out by a girl that was turned around watching me intently the whole time! Am I really that fascinating?

At break time one of the other teachers brought a leaflet out to the playground about some sort of exhibition to do with the anniversary of the Port being open and said that all the members of staff could get free tickets from the Town Hall in the village. One of the teachers said she would get my ticket for me if I wanted one, I’m trying to do a kind of Yes Man thing so I said yes but I’m not exactly sure what I’ve agreed to do! We’ll see!

 

The classroom I'll mainly be working in

After the break I did more book-covering and observed for a while. It didn’t seem to be long before we stopped for another break, this time lunch, which is 11.30am-1.30pm!! Most of the teachers go home at lunch time but two of them stay so I ate lunch with them, they seemed to find it quite funny/strange that I eat sandwiches for lunch! In the afternoon I taught the class how to say ‘Hello, my name is’ and got all the children to say it one at a time so I could get to know their names (forgotten them all already). One thing I learnt from the day is that they like long breaks as there was yet another half an hour break before finishing at 4.30pm and there is no school at all on Wednesdays! I don’t think my brain has quite changed time zone yet because for some reason when school finished I thought it was 3.30pm so I rushed off to get my bus at 3.50pm. When it got to 3.55pm and the bus was still not there I looked at my phone and realised that it was in fact 4.55pm and the next bus wasn’t until 5.15pm! The school is a 5 minute walk from the bus stop so I didn’t really think it was worth going back so I sat on a nearby bench reading my French gossip magazine and taking some photos until the bus finally arrived!

The church in the village

I was a bit miffed when I woke up excited for my day off today and looked out the window to see that it was cloudy. But by the time I was ready to leave the house the sun had come back out and it turned out to be another glorious day so I spent a good ten minutes plastering on the sun cream before I left the house, it’s a hard life being ginger!

I ambled along through the le Parc Charruyer, which is a massive park near my house that has a little animal park in! Then I carried on down to walk along the beach, it wasn’t exactly the prettiest beach I’ve ever seen, but it is a beach nonetheless and it’s only a 10 minute walk from my house.

 

Le Parc Charruyer



Plage de la Concurrence

 

I then headed for the Old Port where I caught the ‘passeur électrique’ which is a little solar-powered boat which takes you across the harbour to save you having to walk all the way around and it’s included on my bus pass so I thought I’d make the most of it!

 

On board the 'Passeur Électrique'

 

I made my way to the Médiathèque (big library and exhibition centre) where there was a photography exhibition I wanted to see but as I was almost there I remembered that it shuts between 12pm and 1pm and it was indeed 12.40pm so to save myself sitting around waiting on a bench again I looked around for something else to fill the time. Just across the road was the La Rochelle Maritime Museum which is onboard an old boat in the port. Now I wouldn’t say that I’m really interested in boats but it was only 4€ for students and I thought it would give me something to do, so I decided to see what it was all about. I’m afraid I can’t tell you that it was particularly thrilling and obviously everyone else thinks the same because I only saw one other person in the whole museum. That is apart from in the bar/café at the end, which was rather busy! But I think that may have been something to do with the fact that it was rather difficult to find the way off the boat, I seemed to go round in circles in the maze-like corridors and I’m pretty sure I went through a door I wasn’t supposed to but I finally managed to get off the boat and make my way to the Médiathèque! The photo exhibition was a collection of photos by Jean Gaillard, who took black and white photos of everyday life in the La Rochelle area in the 1950s and 60s, it was really interesting! (If you're interested you can see some of his photos here: http://www.agglo-larochelle.fr/diaporama.php?diap=73)

 

Maritime Museum

 

 After that I made my way to one of the three Towers in La Rochelle- the St.Nicholas Tower. After my experience of going up the Lantern tower last week (think narrow, spiral staircases with tiny, slippery steps, very high up, almost getting blown over by the wind, and very low/non-existent walls) I wasn’t too sure that I wanted to go up the St.Nicholas Tower but it’s free for under 25s and I’m a sucker for free things! Thankfully this was a much better experience than last week and I took some photos looking over the town before heading back down again. After that I was considering going to the shopping centre on the bus or going to the local swimming pool but by this time I’d been walking almost non-stop for 3 hours in the sun so I just walked back home to have a nice cold drink and a sit down!

View from up the tower

Sorry I rambled on a bit, well done if you made it this far! I'll try and post again at the weekend unless anything really exciting happens before then!