"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 :)

I'm at home. And I forgot I had this post waiting to be published. Shhhh.

So I promised myself that I wouldn't be one of those annoying people who says that they will be more regular with their posting, and then only comes up with a post 3 weeks later. I haven't got an excuse to bore you with, so I'll just get on with it :) I'm sorry for my absence, but in 3 days time I'll be home (yaaaaaaaay!) so I can catch up with you all then!

Two weekends ago, I decided I wanted to experience a Christmas market somewhere other than France. Ideally Germany would've been great, being the place where they actually come from, but the train to Freiburg is complicated, so I decided to go to Basel instead and see what the Swiss markets are like!

If I've learnt one thing about myself so far on my year abroad, it's that I'm bad at travelling on my own. I can't read maps, ticket machines hate me, and more often than not I just end up making a massive fool of myself. On the various day trips I've taken alone so far, I've been shouted at in English by an Italian train ticket machine, put pounds into a tram ticket machine that only accepted euros, burst into tears on an airplane because I thought we were running out of runway on take-off (that was a particularly bad day), and knocked over a flowerpot in a train station, amongst other embarrassing things. Basel was no exception. Getting off the train and heading towards customs, I realised that I'd forgotten my passport. Luckily Swiss immigration don't check everybody, only every 4 or 5 people, so I just did my best to look as innocent and Swiss as possible and squeezed through the border. Getting back into France sans passeport is no problem, but I did have issues buying my ticket (it's those pesky machines again). Basically, it would only accept euros, but I only had Swiss francs on me and the cash machine wouldn't let me take out euros, so I resorted to paying with my card. You've guessed it, the card got stuck in the slot and I was causing a backlog of people wanting to use what seemed to be the only machine in the station where you can buy tickets for France, so I waved over a couple of policemen who were walking past. I explained to them in French my problems, thinking they'd understand me because they were hanging around French customs. But no, they only spoke German. So in my non-existent German and their non-existent French I communicated my issue and after giving it a go themselves, my card had to be yanked out of the machine by a handy pair of pliers they just happened to have on them. I paid almost the entire 7 euro fare with a bunch of 5 cent coins that were lurking at the bottom of my bag, then quickly got on the train and tried to avoid eye-contact with all the people who had been behind me in the queue...

Despite my ineptitude at life, I did have a good day in Switzerland. The first place I headed was the Dreiländereck, or Three Countries Corner. It's pretty much what the name suggests- a corner where the borders of France, Germany and Switzerland meet. It's marked by a pole with flags on and you can walk between the three countries freely (luckily for me)! Fraid I can't add on any photos from my camera at the mo because the ipad doesn't have a SD card slot, but I'll do an album and put a link up to it once I'm home.

I then headed back across the Rhine towards the Christmas Market. It was my favourite one I'd been to so far despite being horrendously crowded, and stenching of mulled wine mixed with sauerkraut. This one was more oriented towards crafts and local stallholders than food and drink which made it perfect for Christmas shopping ideas!

You know those annoying people who stop suddenly when you're walking behind them, or who stand in the middle of a busy walkway, usually with a pushchair and looking at you as if to announce that being a parent gives them the right to get in everyone else's way, or looking through a pair of binoculars and holding a lonely planet guidebook? Well those people are annoying at the best of times, but in a Christmas market, it is multiplied by 1000000000000000000, and after half an hour I had to escape to the high-street and duck into H&M for some relative peace and quiet.

All in all though, I love Switzerland, and Basel really shouldn't be overshadowed by Strasbourg as a place to visit at Christmas. Although I've been feeling very settled and happy in France for the last couple of weeks, I definitely feel like I fit in more in Switzerland so it's nice to go there every now and then for a change of scenery.

School has had it's usual ups and downs. I was asked by a teacher at my main school to do a lesson about British food, so thought I'd use the same lesson that I do every week with small groups of trainee chefs at the catering college. What a mistake that was. With the trainee chefs I can unsurprisingly have a really good conversation about food and regional specialities and nutrition, while with the trainee engineers (who are the same age as the chefs) I got told "the strangest thing I have ever eaten is my grandmother" and "curry is from Germany". I think it's safe to say that my lessons at the catering college are much more rewarding. Because they are on such vocational, career-oriented courses, and because they all have to do work placements, they understand how important English is to their futures and more often than not they are really motivated to do the work, and grateful to me for coming here to teach them.

Christmas has landed in Guebwiller, and the place is just as weird as ever. They've put speakers on the shopfronts on the high-street and they blast out Christmas music all day long. It's surreal when you go into town at lunch because everything is closed and deserted, but 'Oh Christmas Tree' plays on a loop repeating the French, German, and occasionally even the English one over and over again. You get a horrible sensation that the creepy music is following you as well because as soon as you get out of earshot of one speaker, you come into range of the next one and you can't escape it!

Guebwiller is growing on me though finally. This week I went to the brand new local cinema to see the Hunger Games! The film was brilliant, and I could tell that they'd quoted the book in the film and translated it directly- a perfect example of how if directors stick to the version of the story in book, the film will always turn out well and please the fans. I think I will make going to the cinema here a regular thing because it was good to have the intensive French listening practice without the  bizarre Alsatian accent causing communication problems, and it was so cheap! The ticket, popcorn and a drink set me back just 11 euros, whereas in Crawley you'd pay that just for the price of the ticket! I also saw Casse-Tête Chinois with my housemates, which is the third in the series that started with L'Auberge Espagnole. It's a French film but set in New York with some British and American actors so the entire thing flits between English and French. It was nice to watch a film with those transitions between the languages and understand conversations where one side is French and the other English. I always think that I'm better at understanding written French than spoken French, but going to the cinema and fairly effortlessly being able to follow most of the goings on is a handy little confidence booster.

You remember last week how I said I'd written a grumpy, moany post after a bad week? Well I decided not to post that because it wouldn't do any good and it was all very subjective. I have been thinking since though that if anyone stumbled across my blog who was thinking of applying to the language assistants program, or who has applied already, they would want an honest opinion of the experience and what to expect from it. So from now on I will be completely honest about the bad, as well as the good sides of a year abroad.

The biggest problem I've been facing is the lack of organisation issue. It's been a theme that has been running through everything I've done since getting to France and is one quirk of the culture that is taking longer to get used to than the others. When I left work on Thursday last week (I had no classes scheduled at that school on Friday), there were no hours written up on my timetable for the following week, and since I wasn't in the next day, I wouldn't be able to check if I had been given any. I emailed the head of English over the weekend to explain the situation and ask for advice and the reply I got was that if no teacher had contacted me yet about what to do in their lesson, I shouldn't have any lessons on Monday. One of the conditions of me having a constantly changing timetable is that the profs have to make sure that they write up the hours they want me for the following week before I leave work for the week. So going by that rule, I shouldn't have had to turn up at all. I wouldn't have felt at all comfortable with that though, hence the email.

All was well on Sunday and the head of English said she would look at my timetable the next day and email it to me. Monday morning, I woke up to find out that one of the teachers had just texted my housemate (not sure why they didn't come straight to me, but whatever), to say that I had a lesson at 2pm. That gave me all of 3 hours to get ready, plan a lesson, find and print resources and  get myself to work which is an hour's walk away and it was icy that day so I couldn't cycle. Safe to say I was not best pleased!

After some exchanging of emails, the head of English must've explained the situation to the teacher in question and my housemate (again, I was sitting refreshing my emails so I don't know what that was about) got a text to say it had been cancelled and I could do it on Tuesday instead. UGGGHHH. I finally ended up with a full week's work, but I'm fed up of being expected to hang around at home waiting to be summoned to work, when if I had a timetable like I should, I could actually go places and practice my French rather than making do with watching French YouTubers on the dodgy internet and enduring listening to some dismal hip-hop music on the radio in order to hear some French chat every now and then.

Right, now that's out, back to happy things. This weekend was the village Church's Christmas concert. We sang in the choir and it was the culmination of all the rehearsing we've done over the last 9 weeks. We sang with the primary school choir and it was a really lovely evening of warbling followed by Pinot and cake.  I managed to embarrass myself and get a reputation as the English idiot among the old folk of the village by spilling half a glass of wine and dropping my cake on the floor at the start of the evening, but they thanked us for singing with them in their speech and although rehearsing standing up for two hours twice a week did start to drag after the first couple of weeks, I'm glad I did it and it has helped my French in a small way. We've also learnt some Alsatian so I feel like we've really been making a good effort to assimilate into the local community. As weird as I think Alsace is sometimes, it has is interesting little quirks and living in a village really gives you a much better insight into the customs and traditional way of life that I wouldn't get if I had been placed in Strasbourg or even Mulhouse or Colmar. Alongside the fact that I'm fairly sure I would've been run over by a tram or bike in Strasbourg by now (I seriously need to learn that bike lanes exist in Europe and not walk into them quite so frequently), I am seeing being put in a small place as a sign that there is more to a year abroad than just learning the language, and I am learning things about French culture and living independently that it wouldn't be impossible to find in a city, but it would be harder to access on a daily basis.

On Saturday Amy and I went to the Christmas market in Strasbourg. Strasbourg gets so much attention as the best Christmas market around so I won't go on and on about it. I would highly recommend going for the Christmas market alone, but it's such a lovely city anyway and touching distance from Germany and all the markets there that it deserves it's self-appointed title of "Capitale de Noël". Even Basel is easily reachable from Strasbourg, and I recommend Basel to absolutely everyone, even if it does have scary ticket machines.

Right, so that's an update of my last couple of weeks. At the moment I'm waiting to check in for my flight home at Basel airport. It's an unusual place because half of the airport is in Switzerland and the other half is in France. It's a tiny little terminal but they manage to make it confusing by putting the easyjet check-in desk in the Swiss side of the airport. Oooooh, a fight just broke out outside the café I'm sitting in and when the waitress tried to call the police she couldn't because she is French and therefore her French phone doesn't work in Switzerland, despite being a mere 20 metres from France.

I'll sign off there so I can go and check-in. I'm only home for a couple of weeks over the holidays so   my next post won't be a long wait away.

Merry Christmas everyone!
Alice

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas...... And that I'm a bad blogger.

It was going to happen at some point. I was always going to find myself with writer's block and neglect my blog for a few weeks. In all honesty, the Alsatian countryside hasn't been providing me with much inspiration recently and things have just been trundling along at work without much to report. I did hit the week nine wall last week which resulted in me writing a long, ranty post about how work is rubbish and my town is narrow-minded and chavvy. But I'm past that now and although I'll keep my rant stored on my computer as a reminder that it is therapeutic to get it all out sometimes, I won't put it on here because it would give the impression that I have sunk into a deep pickle and that I'm on the verge on developing dependency problems. Which just to reassure you, isn't the case at all, and without wanting to tempt fate, I've been having a really enjoyable time during the last few weeks!

The week nine blues were always going to rear their ugly head and in hindsight I should've been a lot better prepared. The longest I ever did at university before coming home was eight weeks, after which I was desperate to go back for some home comforts and a change of scenery. In Italy, I was horribly homesick in week nine because I was far enough into my trip that my surroundings were becoming too familiar and no longer exciting, while I was far enough away still from the end of my stay that home felt a long way away. Alas, the same happened here. I shan't dwell though, because now that week nine is over, I feel like I'm on the home straight- only two and a half weeks until I can touch down on English soil :)

We have been spending our weekends browsing art galleries, antique shops and the local pubs, baking brownies (hello, procrastibaking) and doing some arts and crafts to prepare for Christmas! The last three weekends have been fantastic and although we haven't travelled that far, I feel like I'm getting to know my local area much better and discovering what my region itself has to offer, instead of just using it as a base to get to other places. This weekend just passed, I went to Strasbourg to see the Christmas lights being switched on in the self-proclaimed "Capital of Christmas". I joined a few of the other other assistants in the area to watch the show, which featured people dressed as giant marshmallows and some completely un-Christmassy French country music, and have a browse around the first stalls to open in the world-famous Strasbourg Christmas market. We all joined in with the countdown to the lights going on, but everyone was looking towards the giant tree and we completely missed the rest of the lights, which it turns out were actually behind us and the tree was lit up layer on. The tree is apparently the tallest Christmas tree in Europe and when lit up at nighttime is spectacular, if a bit precarious in the wind. Despite the freezing temperatures (it was literally minus 2), and it being the most politicised event I've ever stumbled across (someone important from the Croatian government did a speech thanking the EU for welcoming them into the organisation and they projected the national flags of France and Croatia onto a government building while All You Need is Love played loudly in the square), I couldn't help but feel festive, and thankful that Alsace is arguably one of the very best places in the world to spend the run up to the festive season!

The next day, my housemates and I braced the horrible temperatures again to visit the Mulhouse Christmas market. It was't too crowded so we had a nice walk around and I managed to get a bit of Christmas shopping done while enjoying a mulled cider and a roasted chestnut crêpe!

The next day we continued our tour of the local marchés de Noël with a visit to the Issenheim and Guebwiller offerings. They weren't quite as impressive as Strasbourg and Mulhouse, but it was nice to have a walk around the town and see some of the local Christmas traditions. We followed our four markets in one weekend with a delicious Christmas dinner while watching a festive film and sharing a bottle of Alsatian champagne to finish off a great weekend and celebrate the start of the Christmas countdown!

In terms of work, I'm actually thoroughly enjoying my job. The lack of organisation in the schools and sometimes being treated like supply teachers by the profs isn't ideal, but when I'm in a lesson and can just focus on the teaching, I love it. I really never expected to enjoy teaching as much as I do! It's such a rewarding job, and for every cheeky little kid who messes around in class, there are several of his or her classmates who are genuinely motivated and hardworking. When I see them using something that I have taught them, or when you explain something that they have never understood before and you see the moment of recognition on their faces, it feels really lovely and I do feel so lucky to have a job that I love.

I'll make this a short one because lesson planning awaits. I'm sure that these last few weeks before the holidays will throw up some good blog-writing material as I have trips planned to Strasbourg and possibly Basel or Freiburg for my last two weekends here, and I intend to make all my lessons from next week onwards about Christmas, so pop back soon! And thank you to all of you faithful readers who stick with my blog even when I don't, you're awesome :)

Love to you all, Alice x

9 Days, 3 Countries, and a Whole Lot of Trains

The keen among you will have noticed that my hiatus has been significantly longer than the two weeks that I initially said I would be away for. Long story short, my laptop has been playing up for some time and when I got home from my travels I sat down to try to fix it. I wasn't getting very far anyway (my failing GCSE I.T. was not unjustified unfortunately), but let's just say that while a glass of coke may fuel me, it does not mix so well with electrical goods and my laptop died a sudden, and for now, unfixable death...

Anyway, on to the good bit. It turns out that French schools have a two week half term October holiday, conveniently placed just three weeks after the assistants start work! Obviously I wasn't going to spend all that time hanging around in Guebwiller when such a beautiful thing as the interailing ticket exists in the world, so at a horrible time of the morning I set off for the 5 and a half hour TGV journey which would take me to the south of France. The only thing I have to say about my journey from Mulhouse to Marseille is that it turns out France is a pretty big country. It especially feels like it when you are sitting opposite a man who feels the need to tap out the rhythm of the song he is listening to on the tabletop all the way to Provence and when you sit next to a woman who decides that the best way to practice her English at that particular moment was to blatantly stare at my Good Food magazine over my shoulder while I was trying to read it. Admittedly, the pumpkin pie recipe did look pretty appetising, but it didn't make for the most relaxing journey of my life, and I was happy when we finally pulled into Marseille. At first we went through the banlieues that Marseille is infamous for, and I couldn't help asking myself at this late moment why we'd chosen to start the holiday in what is often perceived to be the most violent city in France. But soon enough, the Mediterranean Sea came into view and I felt like Mr Bean when he finally gets to Cannes and sees the beach and all is well with the world. 

 
The waiting room at Marseille St Charles train station is the nicest I have ever had the pleasure of using. There were old suitcases plastered to the walls, a warm mediterranean breeze was wafting in 
through the doors, and it even had it's own library where you could sit and read or take a book in exchange for leaving one behind. All that and it was perfectly suited to people-watching, which made it pretty much my ideal place to wait for a couple of hours, despite some difficulties buying lunch (a French woman tried to explain to me how to form a queue... at least maybe I'm not coming across as so British anymore, if she had been able to figure out my nationality she would have known that I know perfectly well how to form a queue thank you very much). But anyway, nice as it was, I can't 
ever go back there because my stupidly overstuffed rucksack managed to knock over a flowerpot on my way out. It didn't break thankfully, but there was soil all over the floor so I can't see myself being welcomed back with open arms anytime soon unfortunately.

All was well again though when Amy arrived and I no longer had to be solely responsible for navigation. And of course having a proper catch-up for the first time in 4 months was pretty good too! We made our way to the first hostel of the trip, a converted townhouse building between the train station and the seafront. It was a really nice size- big enough that there were always people around but small enough that it didn't feel weird to strike up a conversation with strangers while cooking dinner. The accommodation consisted of small southern-looking buildings with terracotta roofs and we were in a six bed dorm with, coincidently, other English language assistants from Canada and 
Ireland! It was a great place to start the trip and probably the nicest hostel of the entire holiday. We spent the first evening exploring the Vieux Port area of the Marseille waterfront and walked up to
 a fort. Everything seemed so far removed from what I've been getting used to in Alsace that it was hard to believe that I hadn't actually crossed an international border. There was definitely a Spanish 
feel to the architecture and an unfamiliar twang to the accent that sounded almost like a dialect when compared to the Alsatian way of speaking that I've been dealing with.

Our full day in Marseille involved climbing a hill. Yes, we did actually exercise on holiday believe it or not! As murderous as the last few flights of steps were, the Notre Dame de la Garde cathedral at the top was absolutely incredible and despite nearly being blown off the top, the views were stunning too. 

 



Next up, was the beach! Being on the beach in 27°C heat at the end of October is not something we had been expecting, and as a result looked a bit silly- me in my jeans, Amy in her walking boots- trudging towards the sea. I had my first ever dip in the Mediterranean though, and even if my clothes were covered in sand for the rest of the holiday and the sea air turned my hair a horrible crusty texture for at least 3 days afterwards, it was so worth catching those last few sun rays of the year. It felt very strange to be back in summer, when just a week earlier I'd been wrapped up in a scarf and wearing gloves and a wooly hat to survive the cycle to work, but it was much appreciated. 

Obviously, when we passed a merry-go-round on the walk back, it was too much of a temptation to resist...



Next up, was Aix-en-Provence! As the twin town of my favourite city of them all, I was really looking forward to seeing how similar Aix really is to Bath. Unfortunately we only got to spend a few hours there, but I really liked the café-culture feel of it and the familiar studenty yet classy-ness. Put you hand up if it reminds you of somewhere...



The third city we visited was Grenoble, and we didn't really know what to expect. I think in all honesty we chose to spend a couple of days there for it's convenient location between Marseille and Geneva. I vaguely remembered something about Grenoble having skiing, but I wasn't really sure and neither of us had done any research beforehand. However, as the main city in the Rhone-Alpes region, we expected at least some hills.
 
The train ride from Lyon to Grenoble revealed pretty flat scenery and even over halfway into the 
journey, the hills weren't getting any bigger. It got dark pretty quickly and then the train suddenly came to a standstill between stations. Nobody knew what was going on, there was a thunderstorm raging outside, and we couldn't understand what the lady on the speaker system was saying due to her heavy southern accent and stressed out tone. I suspected dementors, but it turns out that it was nothing so exciting and French trains are just too pathetic to run when there is lightning in the vicinity. I know that British trains are useless in the snow, but a thunderstorm? Really, France?
 
Anyway, we finally reached Grenoble in the dark and took the tram to the hotel. Still unsure as to whether the city was actually famous for it's mountains, or if we'd ended up in the back of beyond, we ended the day deciding just to try to find a tourist information centre to look for something to do in the morning.
 
By now you are all probably yelling at your computer screens and asking how we could be so ignorant because it turns out that, yes, Grenoble has mountains. Pretty big ones! And it is also in the middle of France's number one area for skiing in the winter. I'm glad in a way though that we had no clue though because it meant a lovely surprise when I opened the curtains the next morning to find a huge mountain, and my first ever glimpse of the Alps.

The tram ride back into the city confirmed that Grenoble is absolutely beautiful, and it was appreciated even more because we hadn't expected it. The accent was really easy to understand, at least compared to Marseille and Alsace. Nobody heard our accents and insisted on speaking English, everybody was happy to let us practise and make an effort which was much appreciated. There was 
just a really laid-back atmosphere and a big student population, while at the same time the whole city was incredibly family friendly, which gave it a really homely feeling. I even found myself having a peek at the estate agents advertising boards to see what apartments here are like- definitely a good sign of a place worth going back to! 

 
There is something strange about having palm trees and mountains in the same place...



On the advice of the lovely people at the tourist information office, we headed towards the "telepherique" (apologies for the lack of accents on the e, if anyone can let me know how to get French symbols on an iPad, it would be much appreciated!) Basically, the telepherique is a cable car that resembles a series of poke balls which shuttle you up and down the side of a mountain. We bought aller simples, deciding that climbing up another hill was pushing it for one holiday, but resolved that we would walk down. The journey itself is much like any other cable car journey you might take, but it's when you reach the top that you are rewarded with the most insanely beautiful views. We were extremely lucky that the weather was perfect, and a clear blue sky punctuated with the dark silhouettes of the Alps in the distance with the city stretching out from below made for some excited photo-taking and bewilderment at how we could have ever thought that Grenoble wouldn't be anything more than a convenient place to have a look round. I think we both agreed that it was our favourite city we visited, and if you ever have the chance to see it for yourself, there telepherique is a great place to start.

We decided in the evening that we'd earned a decent meal, and that it would be a good idea to sample some local dishes. I have to say that Amy was brave and got the regional dish but I chickened
out and stuck with what I know by having pizza. Although the piazza we sat in was gorgeous and there was a great atmosphere, the cook had for some unknown reason decided that it is healthy to eat raw eggs. My pizza arrived with an egg cracked over the top of it, presumably because the heat of the pizza would cook it, but the pizza wasn't nearly hot enough for that and I ended up with a raw egg plonked randomly on top of my dinner. If that wasn't bad enough, we kept getting stared at for being the only ones eating dinner at 6pm. The staff had to set the table especially for us because no one else started eating until we had finished. We didn't really care though, not even raw food and being judged for our eating habits could spoil our image of Grenoble as a really quite amazing place.

So next up was not just a new city, but a new country as well! We were really excited getting into Geneva, being for both of us our first time in Switzerland, and overall it really didn't disappoint. I was surprised at how different things seemed from France from the moment we stepped off the train. I expected that the French speaking area would be just like France, but there were definite differences in the accent and the language, and just the general feel of the place. Our hostel here was very big, more like a hotel really and the stereotype of the Swiss being overly paranoid manifested itself in the way we had key cards for everything from the front door to the loos, and we were given these industrial-looking lockers in which to leave our stuff during the day- a stark contrast from Marseille where the attitude hade been more laid back and trusting. On our way out that first evening, we noticed a school group outside. It had never really crossed our minds before that schools might use youth hostels for accommodation, and they even turned out to be British! I admit that I quite enjoyed having other British people around, and while not as much as a novelty as it had been in Italy, hearing English being spoken by natives is a lovely thing when you're far from home. Something that really struck me about the hostels we stayed in was that the language automatically opted for was English. Even though we were in predominantly French-speaking areas, you were more likely to meet English speakers in the hostels. It was quite nice to chat to people in English for a change and being as we were on holiday, I didn't feel too guilty for not taking up every opportunity to speak French

The reason that we were surrounded by A Level physics groups was that Geneva is the location of CERN, where they built the Large Hadron Collider- something that both of us had completely forgotten about, but which we ended up visiting during our one full day there. We had planned on going to the UN headquarters, as being Languages and European Studies students we had more hope of understanding a bit of what was going on there, and we wanted to check out the interpreting labs to see what working there would be like. After somehow gaining a following of several dozen Chinese tourists, we headed towards where the tours started from, only to find the place empty. After wandering round for a while, we managed to set of a security alarm and get sent off by a gun wielding security officer. He was lovely though and immediately started talking to us in English so we really must have been giving off lost tourist vibes!

So we ended up at the hadron collider, where we really had no clue what was going on. I tried to recall some information from GCSE physics, but that was difficult enough in English so in Swiss French I had even less of an idea as to what was occurring. Despite not really understanding anything, we actually had a lot of fun reading about quantum foam, singing the Big Bang Theory theme song, and annoying members of a Czech astronomy society by clogging up the gift shop with my big rucksack. Here is me sitting in a particle, as you do...



I came out of the museum feeling as though I'd actually learnt something, and if my absolutely non-sciency brain managed to absorb some information, then it must have been a good place. I'd definitely recommend popping over there if you're ever in Geneva, although to see the actual machine and go underground you have to be with an organised group and book ages in advance. We just went to the museum and gift shop. It doesn't just have stuff about the hadron collider though- we saw the server on which the internet was invented and found out that I share a name with part of the LHC!



Geneva itself is a lovely place. I struggled to picture in my head what a Swiss city would be like before we got there because I always imagine Switzerland in my head as full of mountains and cheese. My first impressions of Geneva were that it was horrendously expensive, there were sports cars and super cars everywhere, even in the hostel car park! And that Lake Geneva, or Lac Leman as they call it, is huge and beautiful. It felt like we were at the coast and the waterfront area has a great atmosphere. If you stand in the right place, you can even see Mont Blanc from the lakeside! A view of the biggest mountain and the biggest lake in Europe at the same time is always going to be a great thing to see, as long as you can dodge the city's main attraction which is hard to avoid wherever you are lakeside. I am talking about this...



No, it's not a burst water pipe, it is the Jet d'Eau, one of the city's main landmarks. I am undecided on it's purpose and can't help thinking that they could've come up with a better way of drawing visitors to the place. But there you go, the Swiss seem to think this is what people want to see on their holidays...

After CERN, we headed towards the old town area. It felt much more like France than what we had seen up until that point with the pretty European buildings and plentiful supply of continental-style cafes, and we visited the Sainte-Pierre cathedral, the Ile-Rousseau, and the red light district. The last one accidentally of course.

On our last evening in Switzerland, we'd had enough of food being expensive and waiting for restaurants to open at times that didn't suit our eating habits as English people, so we took the easy way out and ate in the hostel canteen with the British school kids and two ladies who were in the city for a university reunion. The food consisted of a regional speciality. Now we hadn't had much luck with regional specialities thus far, so when they rolled out a cheese fondue I was pleasantly surprised. Even if it did stink like death, and wasn't as inexpensive as we'd hoped, I was glad we had the opportunity to eat like the Swiss do!

The next day was the day on which we had the most trains to catch. In order to get from Geneva to Saarbrucken and cover three countries in the space of seven hours, we had to get three trains with not a great deal of time between each one. I was slightly worried because so far, every single French train we'd caught had been delayed in some way, and the day started off with a bad omen when it tipped down with rain as we were walking to the station, meaning a long day of sitting in wet jeans loomed. Everything went according to plan from there on though and we finally arrived in Germany. It was my first time in the country and Amy and I had a great couple of days recovering from moving around so much and going shopping! I got a bit overexcited because there is nothing that could be accurately described as a shopping centre in Guebwiller, and it was my first time indulging in a bit of retail therapy since leaving England! I don't know if it's just the shops around Guebwiller, but I have found that French clothes shops are a lot more expensive than I was expecting and there doesn't seem to be a lot of choice. So you can imagine my glee at having a three storey Primark, Forever 21, H&M, and a shop that strongly resembled Boots, at my disposal!

Anyway, that pretty much concludes our interailing (I'm still not actually sure how to spell this word, if I've been doing it wrong and it has been annoying you for the duration of this post, I apologise) adventures. For now anyway. I definitely caught the travel bug and getting a little taste of what it would be like to travel for an extended period of time has further strengthened my desire to have the gap year that I was never able to have. There is nothing that excites me more than the thought that I could just set off somewhere after university and see a new country every few weeks! For now though, I'm back at work solidly until Christmas. I won't bore you with any of the details from the last two weeks, it has pretty much been more of me being left to my own devices when it comes to lesson planning and teaching. I think I am definitely settling into some sort of routine now and I'm learning who's who in my classes and learning about what they do and don't respond well to, although  I don't think I will ever get my head round their names. They all seem to be called Florian, and they call me Aleeeeese. At least we've moved on from Aleechay.

If you've made it this far, you are brilliant, I hope it was 15 minutes well spent.
Until next week!
Aleeese.

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