lundi, septembre 29, 2008

allll good!

Busy day but a good one!

I had a short meeting at the lycee where I'll be teaching. They were so friendly and nice and the school seems relaxed and there seemed to be a good atmosphere between administrative staff and even among the students (love country schools, the kids - even if they pretend to be - are not punks :-) er.. hopefully I'm not eating my words next week! lol)

I met a lot of the other teachers and it's always funny these days to be introduced as the new "assistante anglaise" because 1. even though I know they're referring to "anglaise" as my language and my status I am not English 2. the "assistant" is usually a freshfaced just out of college student. This just confuses the hell out of everyone because I'm neither "anglaise" nor "freshfaced" so they start speaking very slowly to me "WEL-COME to the SCHOOL"... er, gotcha :-)

It's not that I mind that they're speaking slowly, I would have appreciated it 5 years ago but it does crack me up. Then when I start talking they look all taken aback which makes me giggle inside. I was talking to one of the English teachers and she told me, wow you've been here a while, your French is so good no one is going to want to speak to you in English. Which is always nice to hear but I don't want to think that I'm putting off some sort of vibe that makes people think I'm going to make fun of them! Oh well.

Anyway seems like a nice school, they haven't figured out my schedule yet so I'm going to go on Thursday to a meeting to try to sort that out.

After lunch Mystery Guest dropped me off in Cherbourg for my meeting with the unemployement people. It went really well, they were nice and told me what to do. Looks like I can get benefits for the month of September and since I'll be in the system when my contract runs out in 7 months I'll automatically start getting benefits again unless I tell them I've got another job. There's just some paperwork I have to ask the university for since they'll pay my unemployment and not the government directly. Should be fine though.

After the meeting I had time to kill before my train so I went into town, Cherbourg is a really nice town, especially when the sun's out! It was such a nice stroll along the port and in the old center (not bombed out during WWII like the rest of Normandy was..) I stopped a few bookstores to browse and treated myself to a "double pain au chocolat" which I've never seen anywhere else - its a pain au chocolat with 2 bars of chocolate inside and then doused with chocolate on the top.. yum. :-)

So the good news is that besides my meeting Thurs it looks like I'll have the rest of the week fairly free to stay home and FINISH this memoire!!!

Need. To. Work.

4 commentaires:

Leah a dit…

Ok, I know you must have said other things, but the only thing that registered was the double pain au chocolat. Quat?? Gimme somma that!

Oh, and glad to hear it's going well on the job front. ;)

Kristin a dit…

So glad that the meeting went well! And yes, I did appreciate them speaking slowly when I was there!

If you feel like packing up a double pain au chocolat anytime soon I'm sure my stomach can handle it. :)

MilkJam a dit…

I'm so glad to see that the double pain au chocolat has marked everyone so profoundly :-) if you ever come to visit i'll take you there! ;-)

Katie a dit…

thanks for your advice! If I decide to stay I will probably have to work that B+4 ob my resume to try and get a job. btw what are you doing your masters in? english?