Don't be shocked, but this is a new blog post...

Ok, I think we can all acknowledge that this blog will only on the rarest of occasions be updated.  Teaching really takes it out of you.

Since Christmas, when I last saw most of you, many things have happened.  I managed to catch three extra days at home before coming back to France, I finished at one school and started at a new one, Meredith came to visit, and we started another break, which finds me traveling to England.

So let’s talk about that.

The trip to England itself has (naturally) not been without hitches. It seems that this time in France, I cannot seem to get on the right side of transportation. This time, I actually managed to do everything right and it was the train that messed up (usually it is me).  The basic plan was to take the train from Grenoble to Lyon, where I would switch to the TGV for a trip to Lille, where I would then take the Eurostar into London. Easy as pie, right?

Wrong. France is currently stuck in the same cold snap as the rest of Europe, although thankfully it’s much milder. Nonetheless, transportation is not at its finest, and when I got to the station at Lyon, I discovered that my train was delayed by an hour. This by itself is not so much a problem.

What is a problem is that Lyon’s train station has no real indoor space. The trains are on the upper platform, which is open to the staircase and escalators. The lower level has multiple automatic doors where everyone comes in. All told, it’s cold in there, with the open space and wind blowing.

Finally, thankfully, the train shows up. And now we’re an hour and 15 minutes behind schedule. I might still make my Eurostar, but it will be quite the squeeze, since I had an hour and a half between the two.

But while I wait to find out if I’ll make my train, I can tell all of you about what I’ve been doing recently. The biggest change is changing schools. When I first started this school year, I was assigned two schools, one in a suburb of Grenoble and one in a completely different town.  What was finally decided was to split the year between the two, so that in January it was time to change schools. The new one is in a town called Vizille, which is a completely separate entity from Grenoble, and as such, the public buses don’t run all the way out. So to get there requires a special coach, which takes up a good 45 minutes of travel time each way.

I will not lie. This is not ideal. It requires a new transportation pass in addition to the one I already have, and adds half an hour to my commute each morning. Not to mention I have to climb a hill to get to the school. Given the recent cold snap and the lingering snow from a week ago, this has resulted in quite a bit of muttering during the climbs each morning. One bright side, however, is that the coaches only sometimes have working card readers. Which means that on those lucky rides, I pay nothing at all for the 45-minute trip. This is very nice, as I have to pay for each individual trip, and getting almost every other one free is a very nice perk.

The school itself – it’s actually not so bad. The teachers are very welcoming. I even had one invite me to her house for dinner over the break if I’m around.  They also give me just enough guidelines to work with so that I feel like I’m actually contributing something to the students instead of merely speaking English at them for an hour.

The students themselves aren’t half bad either. I think my favorite classes are still the 5iemes (7^th graders). They’ve had enough English to understand most of what I say, but haven’t hit puberty yet (for the most part), and as such, are still willing to make idiots of themselves/play along with what I have planned.