bad blogger!

Shame shame! I've been a lazy blogger! But a busy one ;-) Last weekend on Saturday the Katester and I made a little journey out to Cherbourg, complete with rain and al! One of our colleagues from the lycee sings in a choir and they were giving a free concert in a beautiful (but frozen as the heat was en panne..) church. We got into town late afternoon and took a look at the Christmas market. I think that one is one of my favorites! There were so many local stands and not just made in China stickers like in Caen.
As it got darker we wandered around, did some shopping and then ran into a bubble machine! There was a random little machine like some sort of soapy pied pipper blowing bubbles all through the streets!
The concert was fun, but since the heat wasn't working I was so eager to go home and thaw out my feet! We got a ride back to V-town and the next day the weather cleared up and with Mystery Guest we took a drive out to Portbail to do a little geochaching. Sadly we didn't find the cache but we had a great time :-)
Since then things have gotten a little hectic, tram strikes in Caen etc.. But I've also had fun preparing Christmas and Mystery Guest's birthday on the 23rd. :-) I've got a little mystery Christmas presents up my sleeve tee hee.

I've also taken care of a lot of administrative things today, finally got around to calling the Prefecture about my driver's license. It is true that I can pass the written exam (le code) without going through an auto-ecole but it was difficult to get the right info. I went into our town hall in the afternoon and the poor woman there was even more confused, I don't think they get a lot of Americans in asking about taking the French license... ha! I went into an auto-ecole after the town hall directed me there, I was worried about them trying to rope me into signing up there and paying them money but the woman was really nice. She helped me fill out the paperwork and told me that after I passed my code I could come in and take a few hours of driving lessons without having to pay the frais de dossier! Cool beans. I might get through my license without spending more than 200e (if a French person starts from scratch it can cost well over 1,000e!)

I also made sure to call the unemployment service this week since there had been a miscommunication concerning my last paystub. I had good news though! Because I took a job this year that was a big pay cut from last year I get a certain amount of compensation from the unemployment insurance per month! Cha-ching! I thought I was only going to get money for the month of September when I was unemployed but actually it keeps coming! Great! I guess it makes sense, the thing is that I would be getting more money by being on unemployment than taking a low paying job (like this one) so it encourages people to work I guess. Works for me anyway!