Sunday 16 January 2011

Winter Highlights

So I've become awfully negligent over the past few weeks due to Christmas stuff taking priority. I feel like so much has happened that it'd be awfully boring (and time consuming) to write it all. So here are a few of my highlights from the past few weeks.

1.Pre-Christmas meet up- so all the assistant girls did a Secret Santa swapping/last supper type night which was so much fun. We went to a nice bar to swap our pressies. I was literally so chuffed when I opened my shisha pipe from Flora.... she knows me so well! Then we went out for a posh burger. Feeling rather homesick I ordered the "British Burger", which included cheddar cheese and actual bacon. Yum! it was a very nice send off to what had been a very good term with some excellent people.

2. Christmas- going home for Christmas was excellent, I was so looking forward to it and felt like I was seriously in need of a well-deserved break. France had just started to stress me out so much due to the numerous problems I'd been having. It was great to get home and see all the family- including the infamous G&G. Christmas day was great, we had a bit of a houseful as Nick and the family came to stay so I was on babysitting duty a lot of the time. Everyone liked their French themed Christmas presents and having all put on our Christmas best we headed to the pub. Mulled wine was flowing, and it was lovely to be in a room full of familiar faces, but not so lovely answering the "how's everything in France?" question for the 20th time! My mother outdid herself once again with Christmas dinner and I was so stuffed that I had to join the rest of them in the living for a nap in front of the fire.

3. New Year- Okay so this isn't exactly a highlight, but I felt it was be worth noting. I was quite ill over NY so spent most of the time lying on the sofa looking after the children. I guess I caught the bug, as both my sister and my dad were under the weather too. I really didn't feel great and then began to dread the drive back to France on the 2nd. So dosing up on paracetamol I headed down to pick up Hannah for our drive back to Lille ready to start work on the 3rd (URGHH!)

4. Catch Ups- Since getting back to Lille there have been lots of excellent catch ups with all the girls, we went for a nice meal in an old brothel when we were all back and then went ice skating. I didn't manage to fall on my bum as I predicted I would and I actually had a great time! Really want to go again now. We also had an excellent soirĂ©e chez Emily last night, it was really good to have a few drinks and chill out. I just wish I'd been told how much food Emily and Nick were going to be making, 3 types of cookies and taco salad was enough to make me wish I hadn't had that third Veggie Fajita before I went out! 

5. Close Shaves- Me and Hannah were on the Metro with our new friend Cait, who will be greatly missed, helping her get back to get stop and we got ambushed and the first station after we got on. Green guards were everywhere and we didn't have a ticket, we thought it would be clever to risk it at 9pm. Cait had spares and quickly past them on to us. Then the guards looked at our tickets," C'est pas bon, venez", so we followed him off into the station and decided to pretend we didn't speak French. The guards were determined to fine us, but we just carried on playing dumb and speaking really fast English and somehow managed to get away with it! God knows how. 

All in all, it's been a good few weeks in Lille. Very much looking forward to my birthday and a trip to Amsterdam next weekend.... watch this space!

Friday 7 January 2011

The past few weeks have been really great, there have been trips, drinks, Christmas Shopping and plenty more reasons to despise living in France, but I'll get to that in good time.

My lessons have been going pretty well. I'm beginning to get some favourites in some of my classes. I know it's bad, but it's difficult not to like the kids who always listen and answer the questions correctly. I particularly love my class of CM1s (the second oldest in primary schools), normally me and the teacher take half the class each and work on the same topic then switch on the second class. We've successfully done numbers, colours, pets, days of the week, months and after this next week they'll have an excellent Christmas vocabulary. It's very easy to see the difference between good teachers and bad teachers, it is really reflected in the students. Madame Lagache's CM1s work so well, they don't fool around and always listen but are still lots of fun at the same time. I think they are probably scared of her. I don't really blame them, as me and Gisela the Spanish assistant are also pretty terrified of her. But in my other school there are some terrible classes, they are so difficult to teach and really don't want to learn, and you can tell that this is because the teachers are much softer with them.

I'm really excited about Christmas now. It's feels like this year is going to be really good, not only because I have the money to get my family decent presents this year but also because I feel like it's more of a big deal going home because I'm coming from France. Lille is so Christmassy, there is a massive wheel on the Grand Place and there is a cute little Christmas Market. This week I'm going to carry on teaching the kids Christmas vocab, including reindeer which will be taught through pin the nose on Rudolph.

Obviously I wrote this quite a long time, and rather than bombard everyone with posts about events I can't really remember I'll reflect on the past few weeks and write a new post in the next few days.

A bientot