Today I bought a temporary lunch ticket that cost 4.89EUR
The machine that vends them doesn’t accept 1 Euro Coins, 20 or 2 centime coins.
Why?
I was informed that the correct composition of my change was to be 2x2Euro, 1x50centime, 3x 10centime, 1x5centime and 4x1centime.
Why?
Yesterday, I had one of those days. The type that has you wondering why at every turn you have to be thwarted by ridiculous rules or bizarre opening times. Friday is a busy day for me anyway, with 5 hours of classes – but I was fully prepared for this, and it’s not too bad usually. I had arranged with two of the teachers to cover their lessons when they were away, too.
Things started typically, as the bus was late. But, I arrived on time, and gave the lesson as planned. It was the first lesson in a project for my terminales class, and they’re designing and labelling a new product, to presented in a Dragons’ Den style lesson at the end of term. They had some great ideas and got on well with what they were supposed to be doing.
The next hour I was free, and I spent the time chatting with one of the English teachers.
11am brought a group of 6 students, and we did a dictation and gap-fill exercise about Australia, which had be given to me by their teacher. Again, the lesson went off well.
Lunch time is when it began. As I only had one hour before my next class, I decided to eat at school. The school uses rechargeable cards, which you swipe when you go into the canteen to get a tray out of the machine. Mine just made a very loud noise and got a red light flashed at me along with the messages. “FONDS INSUFFISANTS”. I thought I’d go and top-up my card. Only to find that the person in charge of charging up people’s lunch cards doesn’t charge them up at, yes, lunch time.
A quick trip to the local “centre commercial” – nearly all of which was shut as it was lunch time – rewarded me with an expensive sandwich from a shop which doesn’t sell drinks at all. So there was nowhere open to buy something to drink at lunchtime. It’s all so logical.
Let’s move on to the afternoon. I was getting together some pictures for my “UK Day” display in the library. Now, these need to be printed in colour, meaning a trip to the “copy centre” near the station. I finally got them all packaged up and emailed to myself for collection in the shop later. I was told by a very reliable source (Sellappan) that the shop was open until 1830…
My next class was fantastic. The pupils were interested and enthusiastic about reading the copies of The Independent that I’d transported back for them. They were even more delighted when they saw a mention of their region in the Travel magazine. They asked lots of intelligent questions and responded well when I questioned them. They really were a pleasure to teach.
Next, I went in search of the teacher of my new class…who turned out to be absent. Great. I stayed at school for those hours for nothing. Nevertheless, my final class was the terminales for another teacher, a class I would be taking alone. Their ability is very low, and they’re not really all that interested in English. When I got them into the classroom I hadn’t even shut the door before one of the pupils started messing about, shouting “I love you, misses, I love yoooouuu!” from the back of the room. At least he was speaking English, I suppose. I calmly told him “Thanks, but I’m not interested.” The quicker kids in the class started laughing at him, then translated. He shut up for the rest of the time. Then I had to shoo away some of the pupils from my other class, closing the classroom door gently but very firmly in their faces.
I had been given a listening exercise to make them do, featuring a girl with a very thick American drawl. The thing was supposed to be about how much she loved summer camp, but she sounded bored out of her skull. Here’s one exchange that did make me smile, though… Noté means “marked” as in, graded.
Pupil : Madame! Est-ce que ça sera noté?!
Me : In English?
Pupil : Misses, will it be noté?
Me : Yes, it will be noté.
Pupil : Oh my Dieu!
Finally, at six, the lesson was over and I went off to the copying place. Which was closed. New opening hours for February.
On the bright side, I really am enjoying being at home for sunset sometimes nowadays.
The Christmas holidays were fantastic. Being away from home really does make you appreciate all the little things that you don’t get when you’re away – family, friends, decent cheese, etc. When I arrived at the airport not having had tea I was pleased to discover my parents were happy to take me to the chippy on the way back. Perfect. So my first night back in the UK consisted of fish and chips – NOT wrapped in newspaper, as one of the teachers insisted on telling the pupils. I don’t understand why they hire us as spokespeople for our countries’ cultures and then shout down half of what we say based on their own experiences which they had twenty years ago. But my chips weren’t wrapped in newspaper.
Christmas itself was great, and returning to France was the last thing I wanted to do. Everyone told me that this was something I’d never want to come home from, but after my first stint, I was perfectly happy to say goodbye to my life in France (though not to my new friends) and go back to uni for the second term. That’s not to say I’m the least bit unhappy with my experience, I’ve had a great time.
Since being back, I’ve had my new timetable. I’ve managed to juggle the classes around so that I work 5 hours on Mondays and Fridays, and, depending on the week, a few on Tuesdays or Thursdays. This means not only do I have weekends, but I also have two mid-week days off every other week, so I can think about doing some visiting. I’m warning you all now.
To be continued later…
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…
A lot of us assistants went ice skating one day, when it was freezing and raining on top of old snow. Esther and I 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.
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?
Holidays =travelling = good.
Marseille seems like a pretty nice place, the architecture is really pretty here. Most of the streets in the centre of town are lined with tall buildings with shuttered windows and over the top iron railings. It’s all very French, and a bit Italian at the same time.
Yesterday we went to Monaco, which has to be seen to be believed. It really is tiny, but is totally jam packed with tall 70s apartment blocks, clustered around a few ports equally crammed with expensive private yachts. The shopping streets had citrus fruit trees, which seemed pretty strange to me. They also had public lifts and escalators all over the place. The shops themselves were interesting too, all selling mostly highly decorative things, most of which were useless. We did come across a shop selling lots of very unusual and decorative kitchen stuff, which was all very colourful and expensive. There’s a similar shop in York called Octopus, as far as I can remember.
Monaco is very difficult to navigate, despite the size. Firstly because of the different levels and secondly because of the amount of space. Pedestrians aren’t really that welcome. When you leave the station you are left wondering how to get onto the path. And while I’m thinking about leaving the station…the first thing we saw was an incredibly polished ice cream shop. The place was beautiful, selling ice cream and frozen yogurt in transparent plastic cones, topped with fruit. Irresistable. So we didn’t.
I had a great time walking around the grand prix circuit and getting enthusiastic about red and white kerbstones, and I was alone in this. Nevertheless, it was a lot of fun to see those famous places, to walk round THAT hairpin and walk through THAT tunnel.
In Marseille so far I’ve seen the old port, the Quick (which isn’t half bad) and the Palais du Pharo, which offers a lovely view of the town. Also visited the touristy sweet shop – again beautiful – and a nice market by the port. I have also spent a while negotiating the public transport system. On my first day, I bought a transport ticket, which didn’t work. So, we went to the office – on Monday as it was shut before that – to get a refund. This involved filling out a form, when we eventually convinced the person working there that we deserved a refund. This is pretty amazing for just a refund for ten Euros. Also spent an hour in a queue trying to buy a train ticket. Monaco was worth seeing when we eventually got there, though!
It’s exactly four weeks since I moved to France, and it’s beginning to feel like home.
Today was a reasonably good day. I did two lessons with the terminales 2 and 3 – the ones who are going to take their exam this year. The lesson was about how to work with a printed document, of the type they’ll be given in their exam. It wasn’t the most exciting lesson in the world, but I hope it has laid the groundwork for the more interesting stuff to come.
With class 4 of terminales, I chatted to one pupil at a time about whatever came to their minds. Now I’ve met all of them, tomorrow the teacher and I are going to split them into groups and have them do a talk show style debate, with their roles randomly distributed. This is something that I know makes you talk, because it was something my teachers made me do!
Today there were national transport strikes in France, over pensions. Some of the buses were still running here. Some of the teachers were striking in support, but may also be striking separately. Szarko hasn’t really helped the issue with his “Lettre aux Educateurs”, which is linked from the Ministry of Education website. Everyone I try to engage in conversation about it and pulls a face muttering about propaganda.
The best thing about today has to be the fact that I found a juggling club ten minutes walk away from my school, and I can join it! There were a couple of people there from my building, and everyone was really friendly.
Finally, I discovered a news website for English speakers living in France. Here is their report on today’s strikes.
I have finally managed to get internet access in my flat! The process was long, and absurdly complicated but we got there in the end. The last thing I’m waiting for is my bank in England transferring my money over here, but at least I’m going to get paid…in November. Tonight is the welcome party for the people who live in my building, so hopefully should meet some people my own age who live around here. Yesterday there was a guy in the common room with a devil stick, so I got to chatting with him and found out there’s a juggling club at the university here. They meet on Thursdays, but there’s a bus strike this Thursday…vive la France.
Sun and Cake 