My weekend in Poitiers (plus a few other things)

I’m really spoiling you all this week with two posts in 6 days! Thought I’d do a post about my weekend in Poitiers and a bit about what I’ve been up to this week before my sister gets here for the weekend and I won’t have time to blog!

So Saturday morning my alarm went off at 6.15am and it was very rainy and still very dark, normally it would have been very difficult to drag myself out of bed but I was excited for my weekend in Poitiers with Harriet so I got up and made my way to the bus station, albeit half-asleep! I arrived at the train station about half an hour before my train and I was surprised to see how busy it was at that time in the morning!

 

La Rochelle train station

 

In France you have to ‘composte’ your ticket before you get on the train, that means you have to put your ticket in one of the various yellow machines which are dotted around the station and it date stamps your ticket, you then have to use your ticket within 24 hours of the date stamped on your ticket. Having done that I still had quite a bit of time left until my train and the platform hadn’t been put up on the board yet so I went to the shop to get the French version of ‘Closer’ magazine to read on the train and a little box of Salted Butter Caramels as a present for Harriet (although I ended up eating half of them with her later that day! They’re sooo good!) After that, the platform was finally up on the board so I made my way there and the train was already there waiting so I got on and found a seat- because it was an off-peak train I hadn’t had to reserve a seat so I didn’t have to worry about walking the length of the (very long) train to find my seat! I was surprised how nice French trains are, at first I thought I might’ve been sat in first class by accident as it was so nice, but a small sign saying 2ème confirmed that I was in fact in second class which left me wondering what first class is like! The journey was about an hour and a half but it went pretty quickly, unfortunately when I got to Poitiers it was still raining and it pretty much rained the whole weekend which was a shame because we were going to go on a walking tour of the town on Saturday but it was just too miserable! So instead we spent a lot of the afternoon sheltering in a Crêperie where I had my first crêpe since I’ve been here- don’t know how I’ve managed to go that long without having one!

 

Me looking pleased with my crêpe!

 

Harriet is also a teaching assistant and we met some of the other assistants that are in Poitiers at the Crêperie and after that we still managed to do a bit of a tour of the town after the rain had died down a bit. They took me to see the Saint-Pierre Cathedral which was very impressive then we went to the Saint-Croix museum and after that we went into the Saint-Jean Baptistère.

 

 Cathédral Saint-Pierre

 

Baptistère Saint-Jean

 

On the way back to Harriet’s we went to Monoprix (swear I spend half my life in that shop!) to get some supplies for dinner and we also bought a kit to make macaroons. Harriet also took me to the 2€ shop which was great! After dinner we watched 101 Dalmatians in French!

The next morning we attempted to make the macaroons, we were in a bit of a rush as we were going out that afternoon, we finished making them and had just enough time to cook them and get them out of the oven before we had to leave. But only when I got them out of the oven a couple of minutes before we had to leave did we realise that we hadn’t turned the oven on properly so instead of them cooking, the neat little circles had slowly spread out in the tray and made a big splodge of chocolatey mixture! Major fail! But we weren’t too disappointed as that afternoon we went to a Chocolate festival in Chatelleraut where there were a lot of macaroons and I imagine they were a lot better than ours would have been!

 

Our failed attempt to make macaroons!

 

Chatelleraut is about 40 minutes from Poitiers so we got a lift there with one of the other language assistants who has a car and we followed another girl who was also driving there, however we weren’t entirely sure that we were following the right car so just before we arrived we were relieved when we got closer to the car and saw that we were in fact following the right people! It was 2,50€ for students to get into the chocolate festival and there were soo many free tasters that it was definitely worth it! It was basically just a big hall full of stalls selling chocolate, macaroons, meringues, nougat, jam, and a variety of other yummy things like that, so we were in heaven! There was also a stand that was making chocolate sculptures which were amazing! Me and Harriet both bought chocolate covered marshmallows which were very yummy, if a bit sickly!

 

 Me and Harriet with a lot of macaroons!

Harriet enjoying her chocolate covered marshmallow!

Chocolate sculptures!

 

I also bought a few things for Christmas presents and a couple of other treats, including a little tub of salted butter caramel sauce (my new favourite!) On the way back we got dropped at the train station and waited for my train, it ended up being about 15 minutes late which marred my previously very positive view of French trains! Because this train was in peak time I had a reserved seat and after almost kicking someone out of a seat that wasn’t actually mine, I managed to find my seat! On the way back a suitcase fell off the luggage rack and hit the woman sitting next to me on the head! I panicked a bit and didn’t know what to do as she started crying and no-one else seemed very bothered about helping! Luckily she was okay and stopped crying soon after, I think it was just a bit of a shock! When I got back to La Rochelle I had just got off the bus and was on the way back to my house when a cyclist who was looking rather lost stopped and asked me ‘parlez-vous anglais?’ (Do you speak English?) so I replied yes I am english! To which he replied (in a Scottish accent) ‘Oh! Alright mate! I’m looking for McDonalds!’ Haha, it turned out he was actually looking for a hotel which was near McDonalds, it was quite far away and I wasn’t sure exactly where, so I gave him some vague instructions and had a bit of chat before finally making my way home after a tiring but lovely weekend.

On Monday afternoon my mentor gave the children some time to finish the umbrellas and flowers that I had done with them in art, they (nearly) all turned out really well and I stuck some of them up on the display board outside the classroom. On Tuesday my mentor went to Poland for a meeting and she’s there until tomorrow so I turned up at school on Tuesday morning and the cover teacher was not expecting me, or, in his words ‘I didn’t know you existed!’ and my mentor hadn’t left me anything to do! But she had written on the planning sheet that I was doing an English lesson that afternoon which she hadn’t told me about so I didn’t have anything prepared so I spent the morning planning the lesson. It was the first English lesson I planned and taught all by myself because normally my mentor plans most of the lesson and just tells me what she wants me to do and she leads most of the lessons, but it went quite well! We revised the weather and then I taught them the colours.

 

Worskeet on the colours that I did with the class

 

Yesterday I met up with some of the other teaching assistants for lunch, we went to a Crêperie and the food was so good!

My scrambled egg, asparagus and tomato crepe and 'bowl' of cider

My mum told me that she had sent me a parcel last week and I finally got it today! I love getting post! In the parcel was a bag of percy pigs (yaaay!) and lots of stickers to take to school because I brought a few with me to France and the children love them so they'll be so excited to know I've got more! There was also a card, a little cookbook and a pen :)

 

The contents of my parcel! :)

 

My sister gets here tomorrow so I’ll try and blog about our weekend sometime next week. Although I'm not sure when I'll have time since I think I’m going to Paris on Tuesday afternoon until Wednesday evening for a meeting, but I still don’t know if I sent my reply off in time to say that I was going and I don’t have anywhere to stay yet so we’ll see what happens!

Massive post to make up for the lack of new posts recently!

Firstly I apologise for majorly neglecting my blog for the past couple of weeks, but once again the time seems to have flown by and I haven’t had a chance to write a new post until now! Now to try and remember what I’ve actually been doing…

Maybe first I’ll give you a quick update on a few things I talked about in my last blog, I (eventually) managed to fill in all those horrendous CAF forms and hand them in so my application is complete and hopefully I’ll be seeing some extra money in my bank account, but I’ve heard it can take a pretty long time so I’m not expecting anything soon!

Unfortunately the horrible rainy weather that I mentioned before hung around for about 5 days but then it cleared and made way for lovely blue skies and sunshine again but over the last couple of weeks it seems to have gone in a bit of a cycle like that. It’s funny because when there’s the slightest sign of a cloud in the sky all the locals go around in massive raincoats and some of the children at school turn up in wellies while I’m still wandering around in a cardigan as it’s still about 18ºC here even when it’s cloudy and rainy.

Since the last time I blogged I received my first parcel from home, which is always exciting! But annoyingly I didn’t hear the postman knock so once again I had to venture to the post office to pick up my parcel, it was definitely worth it though because besides all my post from home and some ink cartridges for my printer (which were the main reasons for the parcel) my mum had also put in some Cadburys chocolate fingers, a bar of Cadbury dairy milk bubbly, a bag of Percy Pigs and a bag of Percy Piglets! Safe to say they did not last long!

 

Contents of the parcel from my mum!

My teaching assistantship is still going well and I feel like I’m all settled in now and everyone at school seems to know my name. For the first couple of lessons with each class I gave a Powerpoint presentation all about me, my family and where I live etc which they all seemed fascinated by (?!) and asked lots of (often funny) questions! Last Thursday I gave my first art lesson that I had planned and prepared myself; it was based on the colour wheel, and primary and secondary colours. I was working with half of the class that day and got them to paint the colour wheel in the form of an umbrella then this Thursday I did basically the same lesson with the other half of the class but we did the colour wheel in the form of a flower. The flower was supposed to be easier as that was for younger half of the class but it obviously wasn’t as none of them even came close to finishing! But hopefully they’ll get time to finish them next week. Some of them clearly didn’t understand the colour wheel either and my knowledge of French art/painting vocabulary wasn’t good enough to make it clearer. But they seemed quite content to mix random colours and paint them in whatever order they liked so I left them to it! (Don’t think that’s quite the point of teaching but there we go…)

Colour wheel umbrellas!

Last Wednesday I finally made it back to the swimming pool and this time it was actually open! I was pleasantly surprised to find that wearing a swimming cap was not obligatory at this pool, the water was a bit cold but not unbearable and although there were communal changing rooms there were also individual ones.

However, I did find it a bit strange that you had to take your shoes off as soon as you got inside and also the usual French rule of no swimming trunks applied, meaning that men have to wear speedo-type swim shorts, since trunks etc. are deemed to be unhygienic (?!) I was aware of this rule before from previous holidays to France but really nothing quite prepares you for the sight of old men in Speedos :| I  made a bit of a faux-pas because I didn’t realise that you were supposed to take your towel into the pool area and leave it on the side ready for when you get out but by the time I’d realised that, my towel was already securely locked in my locker so I jumped in the pool quick and hoped no-one noticed! But overall it wasn’t too much of an ordeal and I’ve even been again since then and this time made a mental note to ensure I took my towel in with me. I’m thinking of making it a regular thing as I definitely need something to offset the amount of food I’m eating here!
I had a school dinner again the other day, which is always a very typically French, three-course meal and the other teachers still can’t get over the fact that I normally only eat sandwiches for lunch. As well as the massive lunches whenever it’s one of the children’s birthdays they bring in cake, sweets and juice for all the other children in their class and all the teachers in the school so it seems like every other day I get brought a slice of cake! The other day one of the children brought mini éclairs from the local bakery for everyone which must have cost a fortune but they were yummy and I even got second helpings because there were some left over at the end of the day.

 Birthday treats from the children!

A couple of weeks ago some other language assistants arrived in La Rochelle and I met up with some of them and we went for dinner at a lovely restaurant and had a very yummy meal and then we went for a night out, it was really good to meet them all and be able to have decent conversations in English for the first time in faaar too long! I’ve also been on a couple more nights out with some of them since then which were fun too.

 

 Lovely meal at La Boussole

 More nights out

This week has also been the first time I’ve done anything vaguely resembling uni work since about mid-June, for the assessed part of our Year Abroad we have to write posts (in French) every couple of weeks to describe how our language learning is going, some kind of news/event/current affairs topic and a key moment for us in the last couple of weeks and the deadline for the first post to be done is this Sunday. So naturally I left it to the last minute and then proceeded to procrastinate as if my life depended on it but I’m pleased to say I have now finished it and posted it before the deadline- proud moment right there! I’m not convinced it was very good though because I’ve definitely forgotten how to do work since June. But I was determined to get it done before the deadline because I’m off to Poitiers this weekend to stay with my friend who is a teaching assistant there, which I’m really looking forward to.

And I’m also really excited for the weekend after as my sister is coming to visit me so I’m looking forward to showing her around my lovely town and doing some of the touristy things that I haven’t got around to doing yet. And then pretty soon after that I have two weeks off for Toussaint so I’m busy making plans for trips and visits which is exciting too!

As for speaking French and trying to blend in here I can’t say I’m doing too great as everyone I speak to can instantly tell I’m English and consequently tries to practice their English on me. But on the other hand when I went to the market last week one of the traders told me my French was good, but I think he was either just being polite or he was just used to English tourists speaking slowly and loudly in English to him because all I said was four bananas please! But I do think that my French is getting slowly but surely better and I’m learning a lot of new vocabulary including my two new favourite words ‘dacodac’ which is basically ‘okey dokey’ and ‘riquiqui’ which means ridiculously small or poky. Although unfortunately I’m yet to get the latter into a conversation!

However I reckon I must be blending in okay-ish as on Thursday not one, but two people asked me for directions, I took this to mean that they assumed I was a local and knew my way around but I think it was probably rather the fact that in both cases I was the only person near so they thought they might as well try asking me in the vague hope I could tell them where to go.
However one big thing preventing me from blending in better seems to be my hair colour as it seems to be pretty rare to see other ginger people here, and the other day while I was waiting for my bus a random woman came up to me and told me she thought my hair was beautiful, I wasn’t sure whether to be a bit creeped out or flattered, but a compliment is a compliment right? Another thing which is preventing me from appearing like a local is the fact that I still haven’t got used to using Euros because I swear all the coins look the same so whenever I pay for something I have to fumble around in my purse for a good 5 minutes before I find the right change. As a result I resorted to paying for everything in notes for a while but then ironically I ended up with even more change to try and spend, didn’t think that one through!

Anyway I’d better wrap up there as I think I’ve probably rambled on quite enough already! I’ll try not leave it as long as last time to post a new blog, hopefully I’ll have time after the weekend to write a quick post about my trip to Poitiers (but don’t hold your breath!)