"Yes that's it! Said the Hatter with a sigh, it's always tea time."-Alice in Wonderland

Hello there everyone! Just a quick little weekly update for you :) I spent a good hour and a half last weekend writing out a long and at times philosophical blogpost when all I really wanted to do was watch YouTube in bed and eat ice cream, only to have it wiped from the internet when I exited the blogger app to add a picture. I was enraged for a while, hence no post last week, sorry. But now I'm in a much better frame of mind. So we'll try this again and I'm seeing it as a blessing in disguise to hopefully make it a tad more cheerful than take one was! I've put this one in bullet points to make it more digestible because lots of different stuff has been going on and my 11pm brain isn't good at linking stuff together.

-Mon franglais is developping bien. Maintenant I can changer entre the two langues sans lots of probmèmes. Although, it means that I slip in a mot anglais when I'm speaking every now and then, or even worse, una parola italiana. On my first day here I kept saying grazie, but quickly got back into the swing of French. In the last few weeks though I've really started to make an effort with Italian again because I've been researching summer jobs and scuole d'italiano. I'm just hoping it won't lead to any awkward language mix-ups. 

-My exciting news of the week is that I've got myself a little second job! I know a lot of people take on tutoring or babystitting while they're doing assistantships, but I'm doing something a little different. Basically, a teacher at one of the schools I work at is translating a book for a friend who's in the French air force. This guy is writing a book about the history of French aviation and the publisher wants to include an English translation. The teacher translating it isn't a native English speaker, which technically to translate something, you should be, but that's where I come in. My job is to edit his translation and tweak it so that it sounds as if it's been written by a native speaker. It's hard work but I'm actually really enjoying it! It's hard to tread the line between wanting to provide an honest translation that would seem fluent and readable to a native speaker, whilst trying not to change the original too much as I'm not the actual translator after all, but it's a great way to fill my free time and I should even get to see my work published at the end of it!

-The Christmas decorations in Guebwiller are still up. This annoys me greatly, it's FEBRUARY!!! A house down the road has a plastic snowman in the garden, the town centre lights are still strung up despite not being switched on anymore, and there are mini Christmas trees in the shop window of a place in the centre ville. Sort it out Guebwiller. That's the only problem with living somewhere that does Christmas brilliantly- they hold onto it for far too long afterwards. Maybe it's because of the lack of snow. Usually, Alsatian winters are bitterly cold and by this time of year the ski schools up the mountain are doing a roaring trade. But this January has been unseasonably mild and wet, and my landlady keeps telling me stories about winter 1956, when January was wet and warm "just like this one", and then February saw things plummet to -25C. Brrrr.

-It amazes me how up and down my time here is, and how quickly a day can go from bad to amazing and vice versa. Our job is so dependent on the pupils and how their day is going, and what kind of mood they're in and how much or little sugar they consumed at lunch, that it sometimes feels like I am not in control of how my day at work pans out. In an office job you'd obviously expect hiccups, but generally if you go into work in a good mood, you have a good day, and if you go into work in a bad mood, you have a not so good day. One minute I'm on cloud nine after a usually cheeky kid makes an effort in my class and then compliments my French, then merely one hour later I want to get on the next flight to England (or at least just go home and sulk) after someone in a shop is rude, or a member of staff laughs at my accent, or I trip over the damn cobbles in the street outside school. Life...

-I was invited by the head of English at my second school to go round her house for lunch last week, which was exactly what I needed. I had been getting pangs of homesickness, but being in a homely environment and being given a homecooked meal was just what I needed :) The teachers at that school really are so so lovely, and it was lovely to be able to chat to them outside of work. We spoke about so much stuff, all in French and it was such a confidence booster to have a whole day of that. It was a bit of a lightbulb moment, and I realised that although I slip into English mode very easily at the weekends when I spend time with English-speaking freinds, I CAN actually speak French after all :)

-Right, so in reference to the title of this post, I'm sure many of you will be interested/ shocked/ delighted to discover that I am now a proper tea drinker. Yes, I have come over to the dark side. I resisted it for as long as possible but my New Year's resolution to drink less Diet Coke has meant that I have to get my caffeine from other sources, and tea it is. I'm also told that French tea with UHT milk is disgusting to Brits, so if I start off my tea drinking career here, it can only get better once I'm home. 

I'm not really sure what else to write about! I sat down to write this thinking I'd have loads to say as I feel like I've been really busy since I last wrote a post, but honestly it's been pretty mundane, or it's planning for exciting stuff that I'm saving for future posts (ooh spoilers). So I guess I'll end it there!

Have a great week everyone :)

Ailce x

P.S. I found myself purchasing this beast at the supermarché. I'm becoming increasingly French, send help. 

Avoir le cul bordé de nouilles

This week I was asked by two teachers to do some classes on roleplays. Almost all my hours this week were with the secondes (14/15 year olds), who I have decided are my favourite age group. When I was in Sixth Form I always thought that if I was ever crazy enough to become a teacher, I would prefer the older classes, but the great thing about the secondes is that they're old enough to be slightly mature, but they're the youngest in the lycee so they're usually not too big for their boots yet. Seconde classes tend to be nice and chilled out because their main exams are still more than two years away, so there's less pressure to test them all of the time. Anyway, they had to do roleplays between a parent and child, pretending that the child has decided to walk across France and must convince the parent that it's a good idea. I don't know why I've never thought of doing a full lesson on roleplays before, but it was brilliant! They had the whole lesson to be creative and use me to help them in whatever way they needed, rather than me just feeling like I was lecturing them the whole time. The more advanced classes used the time to to come up with some really sophisticated conversations, and the lower levels liked having the freedom to work at their own pace. Even my Thursday afternoon class who are usually a right cheeky bunch, loved being able to be creative. I turned the tables by asking them to come up to the front of the class at the end of the lesson to present their roleplay. I never thought I'd see that group nervous, but apparently they took it really quite seriously because they went all shy when they had to perform. It really paid off to give them that freedom because it made me see that group in a completely new light, and some of the stuff they came out with really took me by surprise. It put the quiet ones on an even level with the rowdy ones who make up the vast majority of the class and have a tendency to overshadow. 

I'm seeing more and more that the activities I hated at school (things like roleplays, group work and anything that involved me getting out of my chair- I was a lazy bum), are now the exact activities that I enjoy teaching the most. Plonking an long text like a newspaper article in front of a class and getting them to read and answer questions is easy, but so so dull, for me as well as them. I never would have imagined, even six months ago, that I'd ever be the type to stand up in front of a group, waving my arms about and leading speaking activities that involve movement around the classroom and encourage loudness. I will always have a part of me that is introverted and reserved, but I definitely made the right decision by becoming a language assistant because I no longer feel like it's the first thing that people notice about me or the main characteristic that pops into peoples' heads when they meet me. Alsace is like a pile of vegetables- some bits are ugly, some bits are beautiful, sometimes you feel like you've bitten off more than you can chew, but ultimately it's doing you good. Yup, I need to work on my metaphors...

Anyways, despite the back tyre of my bike getting mangled and burst by a pesky rock on my way to work on Thursday morning, I've had an awesome week. I finally got down to work on my special study (the extended essay I have to write for university while I'm abroad), and sent out some emails in the hope of finding something to do in Italy this summer. It feels good to focus working on something different, and writing emails in English and Italian has been a novelty after months of dealing with French email etiquette (even the most well-intended message can seem rude, and often I write a huge long email, only to be responded to with a two line long reply, or even just an "ok". I won't ruin this happy post with another rant against the French though, their ways are growing on me rather than getting to me, and disregarding the odd hiccup here and there, I'm sensing that I've finally started to settle. I even felt a bit sad this week when the catering college gave me my schedule right up until Easter, when I leave :( And, would you believe it, I even found myself referring to myself as "Aleese" - a true sign of integration if ever there was one! And then to top off a great week, I got an extra chicken nugget in my box from the supermarché (it's the little things), my last lesson of the week was cancelled, the head of English said that she'd noticed a big improvement in her pupils' English accent since I've been helping them, and one of my more challenging classes made me smile by first of all bursting into a rendition of Adele's Someone Like You mid-class (I let them get away with it because they sang it in perfect English) and then they told me that I speak really good French. Happy days :)

Mission: Learn French isn't feeling so much like Mission: Impossible anymore. I'm making an effort to speak at every opportunity, I've switched from reading BBC News to "Le Monde" when I'm eating my breakfast, and I got out my french grammar notebook! Didn't open it yet, but it's a start!

I hope you're having an equally fabulous week wherever in the world you are. I'll leave it there becuase the man sitting next to me in the patisserie where I am writing this has started to crack his knuckles, eewww. 

Bon weekend tout le monde!

Bisous,

Alice

P.S. I'm really sorry about the lack of pictures recently. I know that a block of text like this is dull, and it's frustrating because my camera is full of photos, but I am suffering from a lack of an SD card slot and USB port in my life. Also there are just too many photos to share on here anyway so I'm thinking of starting to use Flickr. Anyone know if it's good/ easy to use?

P.P.S. The title of this post is a French idiom I stumbled across this week meaning 'too be lucky". I thought it was appropriate seeing as I've been lucky to have my favourite classes this week, and of course that extra chicken nugget... Literally translated "avoir le cul bordé de nouilles" means "to have an ass full of noodles". I like to reward anyone who makes it right to the bottom (excuse the pun) of my posts with this information :)

So, after a lovely holiday making the most of being back in England and spending time with everyone I've been missing, I'm back. It's been interesting coming back to France after spending a holiday in England, as if this were home. It's still not feeling that way, and I'm not going to pretend it was easy coming back- not made any easier by my landlady who lives downstairs who it turns out is a compulsive neat freak. 10 minutes after I walked through the door and without so much as a "Happy New Year", she came in and launched into a rant about how we hadn't lined up the towels impeccably enough in the bathroom cupboard, there was a tea stain on a mug in the kitchen and how dare my housemate leave a sock behind in her room after she moved out! All this from the people who haven't yet taken down the Christmas decorations despite it being the 14th January tomorrow and the snow already melting on top of the mountains. I think we've made up now, but it will be interesting to see what the next few months bring as I'll be living here on my own from now on.

I was slightly nervous about living on my own, but for fear of talking too soon, it's actually not going badly. So far it's just resulted in me teaching myself how to ride my bike with no hands due to excessive amounts of free time. Obviously I would prefer to have housemates, but not having them means that I plan my free time more wisely and make sure I can tailor it towards getting out the house and immersing myself some more. I have a feeling that my options of things to do in Guebwiller are going to be exhausted soon- there are only so many times a person can go to the piscine, or have the same conversation with the person at the cinema box office before they really crave that meaningful face to face French conversation. My day-to-day French is still not up there with my Italian, but my written and academic French is hanging on in there I think. I just need to find more ways to chat with French people outside of work. I was lucky today in that I had a class of only two students who had specifically asked for extra grammar help. As it was more tutoring than teaching, and grammar- rather than conversation-focused, it was a good opportunity to do the whole lesson in French. I'm useless at English grammar at the best of times so explaining the passive voice in French was a nice challenge, and it was admittedly quite rewarding to see them noticeably improving.

Work has started back ok, there are still all the usual shenanigans with them springing lessons on me a few hours in advance and cancelling them at the last minute without thinking that I might like to be told if I didn't have to come in. There are still only two classrooms in the entire school that I can reserve, so I feel like the Pied Piper of Hamlin leading the pupils through the school to find a room all the time, but I'm trying to have an open mind about it, and although I don't think it's something I can get used to, I'm coming to accept that that's just the way things work here, and at least I'm getting a very immersive insight into this culture.

On a cheerfuller note, I've booked a spontaneous trip to Rome! I was looking at flights back home for the February holiday, but even with the most budget of budget airlines they seemed unnecessarily expensive. So I had a browse of other places that I could fly to, and bizarrely it turns out that it is cheaper to fly Basel to Rome, then Rome to London, then London back to Basel, than it is to just fly Basel to London and back. So basically I'm saving money by going on holiday, couldn't really say no could I? It's only for three nights, but I am ridiculously excited to go back to Italy again :) I also found out that I'm finishing here earlier than I first thought! My contract ends on the 30th April but I always knew that I wouldn't be staying that long due to the Easter holidays cutting into that time. What I hadn't worked out was that because of all the bank holidays around that time, after the February holidays there are only five and a half weeks until this whole French part of my year abroad is over! Good Friday is a normal working day in every region of France except Alsace, and we get the day off (feeling very smug about this, thank you Alsace!) As hard as it's been at times, the whole thing is going ridiculously quickly and I think I'm finally moving past the tricky culture shock and entering the phase of knowing that my time here will be over in just a few months and however happy or sad I'm going to be when that day comes, I need to make the most of the few months I have left here to really work on my French.

I will end my first post of the New Year on that optimistic note, have a great week everyone and Bonne Année tout le monde :)