Thankfully this week it has warmed up slightly so I no longer have to write while wearing gloves, but I am using a French keyboard. I’ve got used to the placement of the letters now, but you have to do weird things for punctuation like hold down the shift key for full stops and numbers so this post will only last as long as my patience does!

This week I finally started work properly at my second school. They have been very confusing with my hours and kept giving me times that clashed with my main school. When I did turn up, they gave me a group of pupils and told me to take them to my classroom for conversation classes. Except that I don’t have my own classroom yet seeing as it was only my second day there… Nobody seems to be taking responsibility for finding me a room and everyone I ask sends me to somebody else. I must have met every administration person in the school by now. 

In the end, despite being plonked in a room with no resources, not even a whiteboard, I actually really enjoyed my day at the catering school. The pupils’ level of English varies massively within each class- while some can have a conversation at an almost fluent pace, others struggle to understand simple words such as ‘friend’. I definitely prefer working with smaller groups because you can make sure that everyone gets a chance to talk and you can fit more activities into the hour. Big classes can be good too, but it’s easy for the quiet ones and the naughty ones to get away without saying anything. At school, I always wondered why the teachers were always trying to get me to talk more. I assumed that a class full of quiet people would be a teachers dream. But I get it now. As long as they listen when I’m talking, it’s much easier to teach a class of people who are keen to answer questions and read things out than a class full of well-behaved but quiet pupils. Especially when the main reason I’m here is to help them with their spoken English.

After realising at some point last week that my French hadn’t really improved at all since coming here, and despite choosing not to do Erasmus based on the fact that I thought I wouldn’t have enough interactions in French, I found myself in an English speaking bubble. I spent the whole weekend avoiding speaking French because I had a cold and even opted to use the self-service checkout at Leclerc. I think we realised that this wasn’t the best way to be going about things so now we have started speaking French at home for a few days a week and are making more of an effort to take part in local events. On Tuesday, the school hosted a ‘vin nouveau’ evening. It was basically a cheese and wine evening and involved tasting the ‘slightly fermented’ grape juice from the newly harvested grapes. It was delicious, if slightly more alcoholic than I was expecting. We spoke lots of French and got to meet some of the teachers from other departments within the school who we usually wouldn't see, so that was a good opportunity. And we found that after a glass of wine, speaking French comes a whole lot more naturally!

On Wednesday, we accompanied our landlady to the village choir (which may or may not have come about after the wine evening caused us to come home singing)! They seemed very keen to have us join in and we brought the average age of the choir members down by about 40 years. We sang lots of French Christmas songs and although I’m not sure my voice is an asset to the choir, we have been invited back after the holidays.

Speaking of which, I am now beginning my first two-week holiday of the year! We are given two weeks in October, two weeks at Christmas (in which I'm coming home, you lucky people ;)), two weeks in February and two weeks at Easter. I decided not to go home for this one because I’ve only been away for a few weeks, and if I went home at this point, despite now feeling pretty settled here, I would probably find it very difficult to come back.

Ooh I’ve just been given a free croissant! There are representatives from a bank in the staff room who are giving out pastries.

I was highly amused when I went to the school secretary to ask her to stamp my Erasmus grant form which confirms that I have turned up for work. The French word for an ink stamp is 'un tampon', so you can see why I had to stifle my giggles. Oh why am I so immature in these situations, I don't know who decided it was a good idea to let me become an adult, let alone teach classes...

Overall, my classes this week have been lovely and the pupils really are sweet. In the catering school, one of the girls in my post-A level group who is about my age was asking me about what it's like to be away from home in a strange country. She concerned herself with asking me how I was doing and if France was treating me well enough, which I thought was very thoughtful of her :) On the whole, they are really quite well motivated and as long as it's not an 8am class or a 5pm class, they are keen to listen and willing to work hard. For most of my lessons in the last few days, I have been doing a class based around the topic of social networking. I found an article about the oldest person ever to use Facebook and gave it to my classes to read. The woman who the article follows was called Ivy Bean and she was 102 years old when she joined Facebook, so the text mostly referred to her as "Mrs. Bean". Once we'd finished reading, I asked the pupils who Ivy Bean was and to give a summary of why she was famous. In almost every class, the answers were "acteur", "comedien" and "humoriste." Apparently Mr Bean is quite a popular character among English teachers to use in classes! When I then explained that the text talked about Mrs Bean, the responses I got were "Mr Bean has a wife who is old and uses Facebook?" Next time I will change the name to Smith or something else that won't cause confusion.

Another problem I've been having is the mixing up of languages. In Alsace, pupils start learning German when they're in primary school and only start English when they're eleven years old. The effect this seems to have is that their minds automatically jump to German when they go into foreign language mode. I've been told that someone's sister was born in the year "zwei thousand" and when I asked a question to which the answer was "number six", one boy shouted out what sounded like "sex! sex!" Turns out he had a moment of linguistic confusion and was actually saying "sechs, sechs" the German word for "six". 

My French cultural insight this week is about queueing. It is often said that the British love to queue, and the rest of the world doesn't, but what I've realised this week is that although queueing isn't done the same here, there is still a strict social etiquette surrounding it. At the supermarket, people mill around waiting for a checkout to become available without forming a definite queue, but when one does open up, whoever started milling around first, is the first to get served and everyone else steps aside. I noticed a similar thing at the bank. As I walked in, people were just standing round in no particular line, but as soon as a woman walked in and stepped up to the counter without joining the group of loiterers, everyone started tutting and saying (yes, out loud) how rude she was for jumping the queue! It seems that when you walk into a shop, you have to memerise everyone else in the shop so as to keep a mental note as to which people must get served before you and when someone new walks in, you have to keep an eye on them so you know when your time has come to step up to the guichet. It all seems very unnecessary to me. Why people can't just form a queue, I have no idea.

This is rapidly turning into a longer than anticipated post, but keep reading, there are pretty pictures coming up!

Today, one of the teachers at my second school offered to take the three of us who are working as assistants in the town to the "ecomusée". Basically, it's a piece of land that the locals have turned into a typical Alsatian village. I couldn't work out if they had physically moved the buildings from their original locations in order to better preserve them in this new place, or if they'd built these places from scratch in the style of the middle ages and using the traditional methods. I think it was probably the second, as you are allowed to walk around the houses and the village to see the traditional Alsatian set-up.

It's a really interesting place, and they do put a lot of effort into making it realistic- there are farmyard animals roaming about and people dressed in traditional clothing riding their old-fashioned bikes around the place. We also happened to be there on a day when they were shooting a film! Some bits of the village were cornered off and were functioning as the set for a German film. We went on a horse-drawn hayride through the fields which surround the village with a German tour group, and as we passed part of the film set which was in the woods, they all started crazily waving and shouting to a couple of the actors who were milling around there. So we think we may have ended up accidently spotting a German celebrity in the woods while on a hayride with his fan club... Only in Alsace...

Here are some snaps for you

Well amigos, that's it for this week. I'm off interailling for 9 days or so, so pop back soon for lots more photos and for more of me rambling on about France, plus a couple of new countries next week!

Alice x

Unrequited Love

Hello there dear readers, you join me on an unseasonably frosty evening in Eastern France, so frosty in fact that I have resorted to wearing gloves to type this. I will apologise in advance for any typos my frozen fingers may make. Apparently choosing to live in a region based in part on the fact that it is the driest and one of the warmest in France, was a mis-informed decision and the autumns here are actually colder than the ones back at home.

Well I am now over two weeks into my time in l'Hexagone, and I suppose it's being going fairly smoothly. Aside from the whole 3 degree centigrade thing of course. I have been settling into my new job and despite still using English more than French at the weekends and while teaching, I have been managing to speak a decent amount of French to my colleagues to sort out problems and make sure that I'm doing the right thing.

At the training day in Strasbourg, we were told that our schools should be giving us 10-15 days to observe classes before actually being put in front of them alone and told to educate them. Considering the lack of training we've had, I felt that even just a week of observations would do me the world of good. I would then be able to find out which topics the different classes are covering, their level of English and what I was actually expected to do with them. So I decided that these observation days weren't just going to be offered to me and I'd have to ask for them. I was going to have to be assertive. So basically I went to the head of English and told her what I'd been told in Strasbourg and emphasised that it would really benefit me and make my lesson plans a whole lot more effective and interesting if I could spend just a week learning the ropes. I was met with a reply of "well THAT'S new, we don't usually do things like that here." I'll take that as a no then... It's so easy in this kind of situation to think that that would never happen back home, and if it did I'm sure the parents would have something to say about the fact that the teachers are effectively using us as a babysitter for half the class so they can focus on a smaller number of kids at a time.

You're probably wondering what the title of this post refers to. Truth be told, I feel like France doesn't like me yet as much as I like France. Yes, I like croissants and croissants aren't good for me, but it's more than that. I feel like it's going to take me slightly longer to feel properly settled here than it did in Italy. It's not a bad thing, just something unexpected. I've begun to have a theory as to why I've experienced more feelings of culture shock here in my first 2 weeks, than I ever did in Italy. It wasn't so much that I didn't experience feelings of alienation and homesickness in Italy, in fact I was almost always craving a bit of "me" time with nothing but an episode of The Great British Bake Off and a slice of Victoria Sandwich to keep me company. But I think that is to be expected when au pairing. You are so completely immersed into your host culture that wanting to escape it occasionally is inevitable. The majority of the differences I found between the UK and Italy were positive ones: the weather was infinitely more cheerful, the food could put even the grumpiest of year abroaders in a good mood, and the lifestyle suited me perfectly. So although I was "culture-shocked", it was almost always in a positive, managable way.

Here, it's different. It's not that I don't like France, on the contrary it's one of my favourite places I've been to (I would never have chosen to spend 7 months of my life here otherwise!), but having been here before and having studied French for many more years than Italian, I sort of had a better idea of what to expect from my experience here. At least the lifestyle side if not so much the teaching side of things. I expected that this would have set me up nicely and I'd bumble along just fine, however instead I've been experiencing a completely unforeseen combination of emotions. First of all, going somewhere knowing what to expect and it being exactly as you imagined it, while seeming like an ideal situation, is not nearly as adventurous or comforting as I'd hoped. In fact, at times I have even been disappointed that I was experiencing the same sort of things from French culture that I'd experienced before on holiday here. This made me think "what am I actually doing living here if I can find out everything I want to know about a place from just going on holiday or by sitting in a lecture theatre in the comforts of university?" Whereas there have been other times (usually job related), when things are just so so different to how I'd expected that it has moved beyond adventurous and is just plain frustrating. When you walk into a school for the first time and are immediately thrust into a classroom with a group of 15+ lively, occasionally rude, almost always uninterested teenagers and told to educate them for an hour with no topic, no guidance, and no resources beyond a whiteboard pen to work with, you start to have thoughts that "this would never happen back home".

What I'm starting to realise though is that while that may be true, and Britain may do things differently, I'm not here to have an experience identical to the one I would have at home. I'm here to experience a different culture and see the ways other groups of people around the world approach things. While to begin with I may not like the way things are done here, at least I'll have a ton of funny stories to come home with and if anything I will go home with a new-found appreciation for British life. As long as I don't let my expectations and experiences make me see France as somewhere any less amazing than I know it really is, I don't think that can be a bad thing.

Anyway, rant over. Sorry about that. I shall move on to happier musings...

This week I started at my second school. I'm only there for 3 hours a week, but it's nice to have a change of scenery and it's walking distance from my appartment. This one is slightly different in that it's a professional school where they teach things like catering, marketing and management. I was warned by the teachers at my main school that this was the "chavvy" one, and the previous assistant who I had been in contact with thought it was a good thing that I wasn't spending all of my time there... So I went in there expecting the worst. But the day I spent there turned out to be the best of my week! The "kids" there are slightly older, some of them are actually a year or two older than me. I'm not teaching whole classes there though, only doing one-to-one conversation classes so hopefully the age issue won't cause any problems. In my main school, they've told the students that I don't speak any French, the idea being that they are encouraged to only speak to me in English, but the teachers in this school seem a lot more willing to let me use French. In a way I like this because pretending not to speak a language is harder to keep up than it sounds, but I do think that they would improve a lot quicker if they had a native speaker only using English. I suppose it's just about getting the right balance.

Starting at the new school meant standing through yet more class introductions. I know what kind of questions to expect from them now, but they still make me laugh. In my first two hours there I got asked for my number twice by 16/17 year old boys, and invited to go to Oktoberfest with them. Inappropriate, but hilarious.

I would say it has been a successful first full week for me in the world of work! My only embarrassing moment came when I opened the staff room door and made a teacher jump, resulting in him spilling coffee all over the floor. But we'll pretend that never happened and that I blend in... I don't really in the slightest. It was raining the other day so I wore my hair up, not something I usually do because it makes me look like a 10 year old boy, and not something I shall be doing again in a hurry because I was questioned by an unidentified colleague as to why I was using the staff loos and not the student ones, then proceeded to get told off by the cleaning lady for "hanging about in the corridors", when I was early for a class. To add insult to injury one pupil's reaction at being told by his teacher that I was paid to speak English to him was, "But she's so young! Can I get paid to speak French to her?" I need a way to make myself look more sophisticated and French. Haha not going to happen, as the employed, adult member of French society that I now am, I spent part of my first pay cheque on a onesie. In fact my two housemates and I got matching ones...

It feels very surreal sometimes to be in the staff room hearing all the gossip about the students when I only left school myself two and a half years ago. As an assistant you're in a strange limbo world between the pupils and the teachers- closer in age to the kids, but working as a member of staff. I have felt more settled into the life of a teacher this week though- I am now the proud owner of my own set of whiteboard pens, one teacher is making me responsible for grading his class and giving them their termly conversation mark, and I even got offered a glass of wine at lunch in the staff room! Well, if it gets you through the day...

As I mentioned earlier, it's got properly chilly the last couple of nights but our landlady has yet to switch on the heating. We thought that we were lucky having an older couple in charge of the heating because they would feel the cold more and put it on early, but as yet, no such luck. We got around it last night by going out to a hotel bar where one of the teachers was playing a gig with his band. It was nice to go out and try some of the local food (I had tarte flambée, it's like pizza, only better. A crispy base, cream instead of cheese, and topped with onions and bacon), although the band's lyrics were un peu bizarre. My favourite line was "Baby, I wish I had a dishwasher because I spent so long washing up that you cheated on me." They were singing in English and we seemed to be the only ones there who understood the hilarity so we had fun being the only ones uncontrollably laughing to ourselves. The other people there were just nodding along, as far as they knew, they were listening to a sophisticated English-speaking band whose music was totally serious.

I'll leave it there for now because the internet has decided that now would be a good time to hate me and slow right down, but I'll be back in a week or so with my last update before the holidays. Thank you all so much for continuing to take the time to read about what I'm up to!

Until next time amigos :)

I'm Back!

You can breathe a sigh of relief, your lives are once again complete now that you have my blog back in your weekly routine. Ok, I exaggerate. But I am back and if you've stuck around this far, then welcome back, and thank you for taking an interest in what I'm up to once again :)

Almost two weeks ago, I embarked on the journey to my placement in France which will make up the main chunk of my year abroad. I am located in a little town in southern Alsace to be precise, not far from the German and Swiss borders, which will be my home for the next 7 months. I thought that I wouldn't mind being rural, that I'd get used to being in a little authentic French village. I'm sure I will eventually, but for now it's a bit of a shock having a serious lack of shops/ buses/ train station/ people around. This video portrays it perfectly. We even have sheep.

I should really explain why, 10 days in, I'm only just now producing my first blog post. First of all, I wanted to spare you all the horror of reading something that I'd written in a mess of culture shock and one too many remedial croissants. Anything I wrote while feeling a mixture of flaky pastry-induced happiness crossed with stress-induced annoyance at my school/ town/ toothpaste bottle would've been a terrifying thing to behold, and ruining your day is not something I wish to do! The second reason is quite simply that I have not had the time. Strangely enough, moving abroad does not just involve booking a flight and checking that your EHIC card is in date, and to my horror I have had to set up a bank account, apply for a social security number, buy a French SIM, set up an internet connection, sign a mountain of paperwork, plan lessons, and settle into a new apartment, all while starting a new job which requires me to teach a bunch of often reluctant teenagers on a daily basis. Feeling sorry for me yet? Don't worry, I'm actually having a really great time and have met lots of lovely people, spoken lots of French and eaten many a croissant. Culture shock has surprisingly been more of an issue here than in Italy and I feel like I have very much fallen down the rabbit hole, but at least here I have a fairly consistent routine to settle into and plenty of English speakers around to make sure I don't actually forget how to speak my own language again (in my first week at home after Italy, I said "grazie" to the self-service checkout at Tesco...). My apartment is lovely and my room is at least twice the size of my one in Bath, although this does mean that after unpacking all 20.1kg of my stuff (shoutout to easyJet for letting me on the plane with extra luggage free of charge!) I have many walls to fill. So if anybody would like to send me postcards/ random photos to stick up, please do!

So what am I actually doing here I hear you cry? Why subject myself to the torture of teaching classes of 15 year-olds on my own and living a significant bus journey away from the closest train station and shopping centre? Well, unlike the majority of year abroaders, I decided not to do a university exchange. When the time came to make a decision about my year abroad, it really didn't appeal to me and I knew that being the perfect description of an introvert, I would end up in a bit of a bubble, probably only making friends with other English speakers and being limited by a student loan as to how much tiramisu and croissants I could buy. And this way, I can dodge exams for the next 1.5 years. Winning.

My first week here was a blur of settling into French life, meeting teachers and introducing myself to classes. I am working in two lycees (the equivalent of British school years 11-13), one of which is a general secondary school in which they mainly do science courses, the other is a professional school in which they offer courses in hotel management and catering amongst other things. Introducing myself consisted of me standing in front of fascinated teenagers and being bombarded by questions. Some of them were quite imaginative to say the least. I was asked "Who's your favourite member of One Direction? Why do British women drink so much? and Is it true that British men are bad lovers?" I don't know whether to laugh or cry about what might come my way next...

I realised what the point of the weird pre-toasted bread they sell here is for. It doesn't go bad because it's pretty bad already so it's good for keeping at the back of the cupboard for the Sundays (and lunchtimes, and Mondays, and sometimes Tuesdays) when the shops are closed and you've forgotten to stock up on the proper stuff. There is no such thing here as popping to the shops at lunchtime, and everything from taking the bus to a trip to the corner shop has to be pre-planned. I think I would be in a pickle by now if it wasn't for the plentiful supply of people here in the same situation as me. In our house we have English, Welsh and Canadian assistants, with the French landlord and lady living downstairs, and at my training day in Strasbourg on Wednesday I was fortunate enough to meet plenty of others assistants placed in the neighbouring towns who are from as far away as America and Canada, and from as close as 15 minutes away from home!

Strasbourg is a fantastic and beautiful city, and although I haven't had a chance to take any photos yet, I have a feeling I shall be spending a good amount of time there and we all know that I go a bit over the top when there is a photo opportunity (the result of three months in Italy was about 850 photos...) so I can assure you that there will be photographic evidence of my adventures soon!

I will leave it there for now because I need to go and fill in some more forms (I think France are single-handedly destroying the world's rainforests with the amount of paperwork they demand for the simplest of tasks), but I will be back with another post very soon and I should have lots of stuff to write about because I start work at my second school this week, and then I'm off interailling during the October Toussaint holiday! Yes you read that right, a two week holiday after just 2.5 weeks of work. Maybe the French administration system isn't so bad after all.

A bientôt!