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 :)