It’s been a while since I’ve been able to update this blog, but my internet is pretty shitty in my foyer and I’ve been super busy. Now I can give updates on all that’s been happening! I had a lot of paperwork to do last week to make sure that I was up to date on becoming a real person in the French government’s eyes, which I think I’ve finished (for now). I will still need to go to a doctor’s appointment for a general physical to get my cards and social security number and such, but that shouldn’t be for a couple weeks at least. I had two days of orientation / teaching on Thursday and Friday, and I think that I learned a lot of helpful stuff to use in future lessons.
I started teaching yesterday, at my school in Bourget du Lac. I had only kids from 5-7 years old and it was so much harder than I expected! Fortunately, by the last lesson things were getting much easier and I think that it won’t take long to feel fairly comfortable in front of the classes. I had to miss today because there was a strike and I thought the buses weren’t running (I waited for 30 minutes and my bus never showed) but then just as I got to my bedroom I saw the bus drive away… lesson learned: the French are tricky bitches.
I spent the weekend in Grenoble. It’s one of the major cities super close to where I’m living, and it was really fun! I met a bunch of cool assistants and took some good pictures and walked through a bad-ass cave. Oh and I rode on this thing called a téléphérique, which is basically a plastic egg that carries you up a zip line wire to the top of a mountain. Okay, all of that was either super over-simplified or exaggerated, but if you google it and look for a picture you’ll see what I mean.
I’ve been in France for two weeks officially, as of today. I started thinking about the fact that it felt like my study abroad lasted a long time and it was only 12 weeks, so I would have been one-sixth of the way done at this point. My contract this time around, by comparison, is 9 months, or about 36 weeks, so I’m one-eighteenth of the way done… HUGE difference, so hopefully I don’t get too bored, because that would super suck.
