Day 15: Another French Saturday
My plan for today was to (1) come up with an abstract for a conference being held at UL (my MA alma mater in Ireland) in November, (2) plan this week’s classes, (3) mark some written work done by the students, (4) work on a translation piece I’m doing to improve my French & (5) finally get started on some grant work I wanted done before I moved... NATURALLY, that’s exactly what happened, hah.
Instead, I woke around noon and played around on the INTERNET & looking & maps of the city/region to get acquainted with bus/tram routes, etc. Turns out I can’t really do the grant-writing until I’ve printed stuff off & needed access to a printer... which is impossible to find, & my uni office bldg is locked on the weekends. SO...
I went into centre ville (town centre) to run some errands... another nice, sunshiny day... lovely! Needed an adaptor for my macbook to connect to the projectors in the classrooms & got lost in the winding streets looking for the Mac store (actually, it’s the “bemac” store... but whatever – it had my product!) & realized that it was right in the place de la Réunion that I’ve been talking lots about. Then I wandered the shops for a bit – went into H&M (it is GIANT) & got a flashdrive at Chapitres, bought some strawberries at a farmer’s market, & found some much-needed supplies at the grocery store, including a knife! I can now slice & dice tomatoes & cucumbers and be a part of the human race again. haha.
I returned home & was on skype with family for a while, then Caroline (the girl from Mulhouse who lived in SC last year) came by with more much-needed supplies (including a duvet & plates! It’s starting to feel like I’m living here & not just surviving...). Then I headed out to Claire’s place to actually try & plan.
We didn’t get much done, but we’re progressing – trying to come up with lesson plans for 6 levels of English over an 11-wk span in 2days is just not reasonable. The fact that (in the English-speaking world) she’s mostly been exposed to Brit Culture & I’ve mostly been exposed to everything BUT Brit culture (okay, not South African... but still) is both a Pro and a Con. We have a wide variety of subject matter to choose from, which makes it both fun & distracting... so it’s slow-going.
After an hour or so of “planning”, we headed over to a prof’s house for an evening with the faculty. The lady’s home we visited was beautiful! It had quite a lot of character and she’s only just moved in – cannot wait to see what she does with the place. The evening went well – a little painful at times, mostly because non of us really know one another and the guests spanned 22 year old lecteurs/lectrices right out of Uni to the Dean of the College of Arts (guessing around 60)... it was a little to “highbrow” for my comfort, but I’ll need to get used to that, eh? Thankfully, my family once again saved me and I had been “invited” to play a board game for my mom’s birthday.
The hostess had been offering to lend me a toaster oven since I arrived, but I’d never gotten around to picking it up, so while I was there, I took it with me... and since my tram wasn’t due for another 20 mins when I got to the station, rather than sitting in the dark alone with my toaster oven, I decided to walk home... took me about 12mins!
I got home in time to join the family on skype for a game of “Are you smarter than a fifth grader?” & had a blast! I heart board games. Such a nerd.
That took me until about 1am my time, when I joined Dracula before bed.
Notice how much I accomplished on my “todo” list??? le SIGH.
