vendredi et samedi.

I'm not particularly newsfull right now except to tell you that the next part of my Uni project was done quickly and painlessly (which made me instantly think I'd done it wrong).

Oh and the Pastor of the church here phoned me up and asked me if I could share a bit at church on Sunday about how I became a Christian and the difference this makes in my life. I wasn't thinking and agreed wholeheartedly, I even said it was a 'bonne idée'. Put the phone down and realised what I had done. I don't speak French. Well at least not a monologue.

So, I am going to cheat. I spent the WHOLE afternoon writing it down and I'm going to read it. It was massive brain strain even writing it though, the number of tenses you use in these kind of things!

AND for your own amusement-
:)

I have no fancy title but there are pictures today.

I had a bad week last week, the January blues I think, just lacking in motivation to speak and live all things French, I just wanted be back in England.

Things have already been better this week, back to normal routine life, I'm still making mistakes daily, I get confused between words a lot! Yesterday talking about bent 'jambon' (ham) rather than bent 'jambes' (legs)

The kids are still amusing/bemusing/annoying, a fair few of them aren't the brightest things ever (putting it mildly) but they are teaching me patience like nothing ever has done before.

After 2 weeks a parcel my mum sent me finally reached me, I now have my new camera charger so went round today 'like a Japanese tourist' as one of my friends put it. BUT, it does mean that you have pictures from now on!

At the market today I didnt need a bag because I had brought my own and the lady said that if you didnt need a bag you got this- and handed me an armful of freshly cut parsley.

Yeah, so what do you do with parsley?

Food is ridiculously good, fresh warm baguettes and a boulangerie every 5 metres mean that I might have to book myself two seats on the plane home. This is not helped by the fact that after gym class last night there was a cake and cider social. When they mentioned it the week before I thought I had misunderstood it or something, but no. Eating straight after ab work it was. See this is why my abs are absent (see what I did there?)


My cheeky pastry of choice today.


:)

Stick to your story (whether or not you know what you said)

I spend a lot of my time feeling like a real idiot out here, I can't say that I enjoy the feeling either.

So, often now I don't listen carefully enough to what people are saying to me and I think I can just reply quickly and something will come out of my mouth that makes sense. However, this has a tendency to backfire on me. Yesterday my landlady asked me how I thought my French was and I somehow replied 'it's super'- showing just how bad my French really is. So, I spent the rest of the car journey trying to undo what I had just said, not by going back on my word ( because then she would know that I clearly hadn't comprehended the question) but by chatting about what I was finding hard, all the while trying to use my best French to uphold the image that my French really was 'super'. These are the kinds of linguistic knots I get myself in on a pretty daily basis.

It's like when you just begin to learn a language and you can only say a few things so you end up lying in all your exams... if anyone ever talks to my old German teacher I do have a sister and I did do my work experience in a shop.

Also, today I had to go home from school because I was feeling ill, this hasn't happened in a very very long time. I wanted my mum to come and pick me just for nostalgia's sake.

Ne t’inquiète pas, I think its just a migraine or something, I got off the bus seeing double and with a splitting headache and feeling sick. Not what you want when you have to attempt to teach 6 classes of children. I was thinking yesterday how well I was doing to not come down with the flu, stomach bugs, head lice, cooties, rabies and whatever else these small children have.

:)

They may as well have provided live cows for us to bite into.

Every Tuesday I'm too far away from home to have lunch at mine so I to the school cantine, it's pot-luck how good it is and school lunch this Tuesday really wasn't so great. I'm pretty sure I ate raw mincemeat slightly mashed together to resemble a circular burger thing. Being immensely and stubbornly English I cannot get used to the French tendency to eats animals that are pretty much still alive. Our plates were covered in red cow blood at the end but the other teachers proceeded to mop it all up and eat it with a spare bit of baguette.

So, after the cow ordeal I returned to the staff room whereupon I discovered another teacher eating his lunch. He had brought in something I would say is pretty un-french, a microwave-meal. On closer inspection, the label informed me that what he was in fact eating was delicately named 'hunters rabbit' and that the chunks of meat he was eating had once been a poor little bunny.
Tesco are missing a trick here, microwavable rabbit anyone?

:)

My camembert is missing.

I dont really have a whole lot to say but I feel like I should blog seeing as I have been back here for a week.

All is pretty much the same is it always is, working, eating, planning, meeting and eating some more. Teaching is going fine but and I'm having to keep topping up my patience due to what seems to be a large number of slow-to-learn children, ceaseless paperwork keeps being sent to me with no explanation of what it is or what to do with it and I lost a Camembert somehow this week. (bought it then couldnt find what I'd done with it...! so if something starts smelling in a few days time...)
:)

Chez moi encore.

Getting here...
I left home at 8am ish and got into my house in France at 9.30pm- I'm sure you should be able to get somewhere really hot in that amount of time.

I was a bit nervous/upset about leaving my lovely home and family again but when I got to the airport one of the other assistants for P happened to be there and was taking the same flight, I instantly felt better and it was so much nicer doing the journey with someone else (even though we were ridiculously tired). My rucksack was so heavy that I bent forward to pick something up and fell over backwards, arms and legs flailing much to everyone's amusement!

There was a fair bit of waiting around in cold stations and then the task of getting a taxi once back in P. Before I left my Mum had kindly reassured me that 'even in deepest darkest Cornwall you can get a taxi from a station'. We did manage to get a taxi but we had to ring up then wait. Then the guy came but it was for someone else who had been waiting over half and hour. Apparently there is only one taxi driver in P on week-nights, so we waited some more for our turn.

Being back...

I had forgotten just how much my little home smells like a wooden cabin, and I had also forgotten what cold feels like. I wore most of my wardrobe last night but still couldnt get off to sleep because my nose felt like it was getting frostbite. I ended up getting up in the night and leaving the heater on. Don't worry about me, this worked rather well.

I was concerned about doing a full day of teaching on very little sleep, but again, prayers uberly answered, I managed the super early start. The French soon kicked itself back into my head and after taking my first lesson (at what was, for me, 7.30 English time)I got to see a beautiful sunrise and eat my bag of cereal- breakfast!

I'm very much back, which is weird, sad and lovely all at the same time, and I'm looking forward to (hopefully) amusing you encore with my French 2011.
:)