La musique = l'amour

Sorry I haven't updated in a while: I'm sure you must all be itching to read more about my ever-fascinating life in la Normandie. A few discoveries have been made over the last couple of weeks, which I plan to share with you:

1. As the holidays approach, students turn into excitable, uncontrollable monsters who don't care about anything you say, unless you (as I did last week) threaten to never teach them again and sentence them to an assistant-less year. Turns out that my kids do actually like me :-D

2. The people at the CAF are in fact wonderful people who, despite asking me for proof of social security (which I don't have yet) and a traduction assermentée of my birth certificate, which they did not receive, decided to give me lots of money towards my rent for the year. So rather than being a penniless assistant living in a "studio" (read: bedsit) for extortionate amounts of money, I will be a slightly richer assistant living in a bedsit for not very much money.

3. There are more than an average amount of creepy men who find it appropriate to not just ask a girl out, but ask her increasingly intimate and inappropriate questions about her love life on the tram, living in Caen.

4. Musicians are genuinely the most wonderful people in the world. I knew this already, but it's true.

Yes, the end of term is nigh. It is a mere 10 days before I leave the shores of la belle République and return home to blighty. And, as I said in my last post, it's WEIRD. But it's going to be a busy 10 days, as any end-of-term period should be. Because whilst it is very definitely Concert Season back in Exeter, I have my own concerts coming up here, too :-) On Friday, I get to wear a sparkly gold scarf and sing Gospel songs with the amazingly wonderful Ensemble Vocal Arpador (Eglise de Janville, 20h30), and then on Saturday I will be adorning a Christmas hat and playing festive pieces with the equally lovely HarmonieSMN (CSCS Mondeville, 16h15). Sunday sees the choir's repas de Noël (it's sure to be interesting as a vegetarian), followed by a Carol Service in the English-speaking church - I'm just going to that, rather than performing. On Tuesday I get to witness the delights of a school soirée cabaret, in one of the other assistants' schools, and then I suppose I ought to start getting ready to come home!

So yes, busy busy busy for me. I love it :-D

I also, as the title of this post suggests, love the choir and wind band. It doesn't matter how stressed, how upset, how homesick, or indeed just how grumpy I am, whenever I go to rehearsal, I come back smiling. The welcome I have received in both groups has been amazing: not only have they let an English girl who doesn't understand their note-naming system join their ranks, but they've actually been nice to her as well. I have people come and pick me up before each rehearsal and take me home afterwards so that I don't have to use public transport, I get a thousand kisses before we start, and on Monday at choir people were falling over themselves to find me a way of getting home after the concert on Friday. Musicians = awesome. 'Nuff said.

As ever, I continue to be amazed by the French school system, and continue to make a regular fool of myself, including in my first meeting with the Deputy Head, it being when only two of my students turned up, and he walked past to see a strange girl he had never seen before chilling out in a classroom with two 12-year-olds, seemingly doing nothing. Suffice to say he was a bit confused, as was I when a man in a suit came in to the room and asked me who I was. Cue Gemma trying to explain that she had no idea where the rest of the group was, that she was the English assistant, and eventually turning to one of the pupils in desperation and asking her to explain. Embarrassing? Just a bit...

Another concept to which I was introduced this week was the "heure syndicale". Essentially, each term, French teachers are apparently allowed one hour when they can meet and talk about union things. Now, this in itself is not a problem. Getting together and talking about problems is, of course, a generally good idea. But putting this hour in the middle of a Monday and therefore cancelling a lot of classes? Potentially not such a great idea... It led to a lot of very confused pupils wandering around wondering if they had to go to class or not.

In other, perhaps more exciting news, I have been offered a Summer job, which means that my bank account will indeed be very healthy by the beginning of next year, and, even more excitingly, I have found a flat for next year. Well, I say "I", when I actually mean the ever-more-wonderful Jenny. But we have a flat! No homelessness for us, no way.

In general, happy faces all around, and now I'm going to pop off to bed. Bisous à tous :-)