The First of the Season

The First of the Season
Originally uploaded by Frogzone1

I thought I'd better post some proof of the temperature here at the moment, so here's something I found at the castle on Friday. It's still freezing, too. The snow still hasn't melted from last week. The upside of this is that the building's heating is still on.

I seem to be making some headway with the students, finally. On my way out of the school some of them stopped me to ask if I'd like to play cards and asked me how me day had gone, mocking each others' English the whole time. With a younger class I did a quiz on Australia, which got the class really wound up and competitive - it's nice to have a class who actually want to speak, rather than having to pull teeth just to get a "good morning". Most of these pupils are in the chemistry class I work with are in that class, so I'm starting to get to know them a bit better. It's really horrible not knowing anyone's names.

Tomorrow, as announced, everyone employed by the government - librarians, teachers, civil servants, train drivers, etc. are going on strike.


...so I'm not going to work tomorrow. I might go along to the "manifestation", if I don't sleep through my alarm. After asking a teacher if she was indeed striking in the morning, she said yes, and that we didn't have class together. Then, she said "See you tomorrow!", which I assume means at the demonstration. It's at 9am though. If you're going to go on strike you might as well take the opportunity to lie in.

After school I went to the post office, and walked past a shop full of interesting-looking things, some of them being Matryoshka. Then I looked closer. All the products were labelled in Cyrillic. In Russian. I went inside. It's a little corner of Russia in this small town. The shop owner came over and chatted with me about the products I was looking at, and said she'd love to speak some Russian with me in my free hours if I would also speak some French with her. In the shop I found dill, kvass, kasha and sushka, amongst a million other Russian products I didn't recognise. This place is amazing.

She also didn't let me out of the shop before she'd offered me everything else she had to taste, which included sugary things that were a bit like Wotsits but without the cheese, and also some neon spun sugar which was so sweet it hurt. I was also very lucky to manage to buy kvass, which I was reminded numerous time was "not like any French drinks, you know...". I only convinced her when I said I wasn't French either and I wanted to try it. It's like a cross between lager and cola, but is made from fermented bread. Weird.

Finally, I had Chinese class today, which is still pretty interesting from the Chinese-French front. I'm also getting a very different language-learning experience because the other people in the class are not used to studying languages, and they're generally older than me. As such, it's taking quite a lot of time to get through things, but I think the pace is going to pick up as the teacher seems quite impatient too!

That's all for now, I have to be up early in the morning so I can be on time for the mouvement sociale...

Quick, HELP! - Engrish

Quick, HELP!
Originally uploaded by Frogzone1

The thing is, if you say "HELP!" in French, they'll know what you mean. Are they telling us to help by not littering and then thanking us in French and Dutch? Or didn't they know the translation for "merci" is "thank you"? Opinions?

Snow and Strikes

I haven't updated in a while so this one is going to be a long one.

When I was in Marseille I tried a few new foods; pomegranates and crepes being the more successful ones. At least I know I still don't like olives, and I'm definitely not keen on walnuts either. So, when I got back here I fancied making some crepes, using this recipe, the same one we'd used in Marseille. Being lazy and distracted I didn't get around to it for a week, but when I did, they turned out not too badly.

A lot of us assistants went ice skating one day, when it was freezing and raining on top of old snow. Two of us tried to get there on the bus from the residence, but it turns out when the bus says it stops somewhere,that the stop name has noting to do with the name of the place you're trying to get to. That's really handy. So we got lost in a park and had to stop runners to ask the way, who then caught us up again and told us we were still going the wrong way. Very helpful of them, though.

When we did finally get there we found ourselves mostly outclassed by the French teenagers, who've clearly got nothing better to do than to ice skate. The ice rink was a little strange, as it had a video projector playing kids' music. So whipping round the rink to the tune of the ABC song were all the highly skilled too-cool-for-school teens, cutting up beginners and spraying each other with ice. It was a nice afternoon out though.

The big news here was that it snowed last Saturday. Proper snow. Not rubbish wet snow like it had before, but proper big flakes, going-to-go-on-all-day type snow. Except it didn't, and by the time I went to collect my boyfriend from the train station it had gone away again, leaving only pathetic piles of slush here and there. The kids were really excited about it at school though, and the headlines of all the papers were proclaiming the opening of the local pistes.

I was really happy that the strikes hadn't affected travel from Paris. The only slight inconvenience being that there are no buses after 7pm in this place, so we walked the 40 minutes home.

At school I spent the week mostly teaching terminales as usual, we did a listening exercise with John Lennon's "Imagine" which got some of them singing along. I think I'm starting to make some headway with these three classes, although a lot of them still just look at me like I'm some kind of nutter.

I also supervised a test which took a text about "Bend It Like Beckham" for some comprehension exercises. Throughout, the class asked me for answers which I kept saying I couldn't give them. I've also been pretending not to know how to spell things. I was encouraging them to speak English if they wanted to ask me something and one student who kept saying "merde!" changed to saying "shit!" all of the time. I suppose that's progress.

The above picture is from an attempted train journey a while ago coming home from the assistants' training day.

Yesterday my boyfriend went home. He made it, just. The flight was in the afternoon from Paris, so I'd booked an early train for him when we arranged the visit. Unfortunately, the train drivers were having another "mouvement social" and there were no trains at all to Paris from the local train station. We waited in the 30 minute queue to try and sort out the problem, and were given an exchange for a train from a town about an hour away by car. We were asked if we could drive there. What were we doing in a train station if we could just drive there?

So, we took the ticket, which gave us 1h40 to get to the train station. Thankfully my responsable was very understanding and drove us to the station (in between taking her coat off on the motorway and turning around to talk to us while driving at 100kph). So he made it! She was pretty familiar with the problem herself, as she's been travelling a lot for her job recently, and has been left stuck numerous times, and was really nice about helping us out. She's been talking a lot about the strikes recently, and claims that public opinion is now against the strikers, though that doesn't always help end them. I found a useful guide to French strike vocabulary, which I think I'm going to be needing soon as on Tuesday the civil service and the teachers are joining in. The writer's attitude seems to be on a par with most of the public's at the moment. I'm just glad I'm not in Paris.

One of the things I was told before coming out here was that I was lucky to be living in France at such an interesting time. Wasn't "May you have an interesting life." supposed to be a curse?

Back home and freezing

So I'm back home after five hours on the train and a week in Marseille. In the last few days in Marseille we went to Aix-en-Provence, which is a lovely town with a wonderful atmosphere. The French say that you can find some of the most beautiful, well-dressed, well-educated people in Aix. It seemed true to me. Everything was so perfect, like a cross between St Andrews and York. The side-streets were actually interesting, not scary, and full of bookshops and bakeries. One bookshop was far bigger on the inside than seemed possible on the outside, and sold beautiful postcards.

In Aix we also found the most French cafe ever, where I had dark chocolate crepes with whipped cream. How come French people aren't fat? I never see anywhere selling beautifully presented salads, it's only ever ice cream or pastry.

Upon returning home, I managed to sign up for language classes. When I walked in to speak to the woman behind the desk and said I wanted to enroll classes to learn...erm... she immediately cut in with "French?!" So much for progress. However, once she learned that I actually could speak some French she was very helpful in finding Russian and Mandarin classes for me, so I'll be doing those on Mondays and Tuesdays. The Mandarin classes have already started and there's one tonight. I'm really looking forward to it, but at the same time it's a bit intimidating - will I manage to improve my Russian and Mandarin from French?