Seriously though... it was pretty bad for a while, and it is all the fault of France.
I know that I haven't written for quite a while (a really, really long while) which is bad of me, and there's quite a lot that's happened since last I wrote. It was, after all, about a month ago. I'm going to try my best to tell the most complete tale possible, without having this blog stretch out into eternity, because lets face it, you don't really want to read something that long.
The most important thing that you need to know is that, even though I have been in this country for almost two months now, I have JUST started actually working in my schools.
This is because France lied to me a couple of times.
The first lie was in July when they sent me the paperwork for my contract telling me that I needed to be ready to start working on October 1st. This is why I scheduled my flight for the middle of September, so that I could have a week or two to figure out my living situation, get settled in and be well prepared for the first day of work.
The second lie came to me a couple weeks before I left for New York, when France told me that the first meeting would be October 7th. I thought, "Geez France, you could've told me earlier, now I'm going to have 3 weeks in France with nothing to do...oh well."
Well, there WAS a meeting on October 7th, and I guess that technically my contract DID start on October 1st... but at that first meeting, I was informed that I wouldn't actually start teaching until after Halloween. HALLOWEEN!? And while I did spend a couple afternoons each week chasing down instructors and trying to build a schedule, this meant that essentially I was supposed to just hang out for a month and a half with no money and nothing to keep me busy. Grrrrrrr.
Lucky for me, France always keeps itself busy, and what with all the social unrest lately, there were more than a few protests to check out.
I know that in the news they made it sound very bad and potentially dangerous, but personally, whenever I hear that there's going to be a strike, I associate it with free entertainment. Seriously! What is more fun that watching people take to the streets en masse?! And since I wasn't working or studying, and I don't use any gasoline-powered vehicles, I was absolutely not affected by the strikes.
(check out this video!)
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xf7k2i_retraites-les-lyceens-maintiennent_news
Okay, maybe a little affected, because whenever there are strikes people block the tramways (what kind of stupid city has Trams anyway?! They have to wait for traffic, they are easily blocked by protesters and they are really easy to ride without paying. Metros and subways are definitely the way to go.) but I usually ride my bike to work, so for me, this was just one big spectacle! My friend's sister was driving up from the south with her boyfriend and they got stuck in Nantes because they ran out of gas and all of the stations were empty. Apparently there is a big Gasoline reserve in Saint-Nazaire, which is only about 40 minutes away, but the streets surrounding it had been barricaded by burning tires (not too savvy, if you ask me... for several reasons). I myself had to cross a fire-barricade that had been set across a tramline to keep people from reaching the gas station once gasoline had finally been re-distributed... I had to cross it THREE TIMES, which, by the end, was not necessarily fun, because people were starting to get a bit cranky.
That was the day the aforementioned eye-twitch really started.
It was the end of a week spent trying to get my teachers to commit to a schedule, and as I work at two schools, and apparently nothing in France can be organized by email or conference call, I was having to bike back and forth between schools (both of which are about 25 minutes from my house) trying to create a schedule that worked for both groups... and then, as soon as I thought that I had everything figured out, one of the schools decided that that wouldn't quite work for them, so I had to start hopping back and forth again.
On the day of the fire-line crossing, while listening to some more wishy-washy non-committal "well maybe on this day..." planning, my eye started twitching like-a-crazy!
This was irritating, because I like to think that, in general, I am a pretty easy-going person. I am perhaps a bit particular about certain things, I may be mildly stressed, but I am certainly not tightly-wound and I am definitely not an organization freak.
And despite all of this, France gave me a twitchy eye!
Those jerks.
Don't worry though! It has since stopped twitching.
This may have been, in part, due to the two week vacation (yes, a vacation from doing practically nothing, haha) surrounding the Halloween weekend.
Jonathan Driggers came to visit me, and we had many, many grand adventures, including, but not limited to exploring the lovely and historically important Chateau d'Anne de Bretagne, celebrating Halloween in a properly American way, with costumes and drinks and candy, and we introduced several French friends to the joy of my favorite holiday. They even got dressed up and bobbed for apples!!
Jonathan and I also ventured to Niort to visit Katie again (Montana solidarity, yo!) ate more bread and cheese than was healthy, and went to see the Machines de l'Ile in Nantes, the MOST MAGICAL place EVER!
It's all Jules Verne-inspired steam-punked Animals made from beautifully carved wood and fashioned together with gears and designed to carry people! I am in love with every project these people have in the works. I want very badly to develop some machinist skillz and join their ranks!
Jonathan also had the good fortune to experience the beauty of French strikes. Not only did I drag him to see a protest:
(Seriously! Free entertainment!)
but he arrived at the very zenith of the three-plus week Garbageman strike. Haha.
I spend a lot of time telling everyone how beautiful and lovely and clean France is. (Even when it smells like a toilet, the streets are clean) I like to talk it up and romanticize it, maybe just a little, but when Jonathan stepped out of the train station, he was greeted by mountains of trash. Huge piles of food and garbage and recycling that had been mounding up over the course of almost a month. In some places, protesters had even helped themselves to a bit of the refuse to use as tender for their fires. So not only was it just generally really dirty, but there were the melted, twisted ashes of trash fires here and there. And the SMELL! I'm just going to say that we were lucky it was a cool fall, because if October had been a hot month, Nantes would have been unbearable. As it was, the city was starting to get pretty ripe.
It was not France's classiest moment...
And moving on...
So, my classes have started (finally!) and so far, I've really only met the kids; oh man-alive, are they cute! No jokes, French children are Adorable (with a capital A). And mostly they have a lot of questions for me.
The questions start out pretty standardized: What's your name? How old are you? Where are you from? Do you have brothers and sisters? Do you have pets? Do you like animals? etc.
But if they are given enough time, the questions get really special. Here are a few of my favorites:
"Is Hannah Montana from Montana?"
"What do American Policemen look like?"
"Do you only eat Hamburgers?"
"Have you met Michael Jackson?"
(this was my favorite question, because I laughed, said "No, and what's more, he's dead." and then, about 5 minutes later, I was asked THE SAME THING. Apparently, they reeeeally wanted me to have met the Prince of Pop.
And... I think that may be it. I have officially caught you up on all news strike and-or school related.
I shall try to keep this blog a little more up to date from now on.
Bisous
