rainy weekend

This weekend Mystery Guest and I traipsed off to Haute Normandie to visit some friends that live near Etretat. They have a beautiful home and lots of things to do especially for rainy weather (the boys were mostly downstairs playing on the computers...) because I swear everytime we go there its just the worst weather! It really is the "pot de chambre de normandie" up there. On Sunday there were huge gusts of wind and the rain was practically horizontal! Thankfully we got to take advantage of their sauna, yup they've gone and built a sauna in the basement! (Was thinking of you Sam...)

But besides the weather we had a lot of fun. Their little girl is adorable, even if she's going through her terrible twos at the moment... You can just see her trying to push and see how far she can get away with stuff, her parents told her no cartoons since she's been naughty so she comes up to me, Karina, do you know how to turn on the cartoons? Er... nice try kid! ;-)

We got back yesterday and last night I worked on my lesson plans for Wednesday when I start my "vacataire" hours at the University of Caen. As a lectrice I had 3 hours a week in the Med departement at the hospital and when my contract finished this year my collegue decided she was going to get me back for those 3 hours so she bypassed the English department (who is supposed to deal out the hours) and got me hired directly for my 3 hours :-) Hopefully she'll be able to pull the same strings next year! I really like working there, the students are really nice and they work hard even if they like to goof around sometimes. Plus my lessons from the past 2 years are already planned so last night I just had to get the new syllabus ready and find a text from last year and I'm ready to go!

So today is my first day at the lycee where I'm seeing the students. I'm just going to be presenting myself this week and observing some classes before taking over with the half groups next week. I was supposed to go in this morning to meet 1 group but when I arrived at the train station my train wasn't on the list... went up to the ticket counter and asked about it - ops! greve sncf.... train strike! Ah, isn't that the way to start off the year? haha. Apparently it was yesterday and today so hopefully it will be all up and running tomorrow morning when I go to Caen to teach. I called the teacher and explained the situation, I love his reaction "ah, mince alors!" (oh, gosh darn it!) Looks like there's another train at 9h56 so I'll go back and jump on that one.