Sous le Soleil Exactement

I’m gone from Spain now, but I am happy that I made these two friends.  I also was very fortunate with my landlords of my apartment: my last day in Spain I had gotten rid of all of my food and decided to eat lunch out, but my landlady, Maxi, invited me over for lunch with her family.  She also insisted on making me a tortilla española to have for the airport, and it was delicious.  One of her daughters drove me to the airport, and I am terribly grateful.  I know that they were probably better landlords than the majority of the people out there (I’m not sure if they felt a bit of responsibility for me since I was foreign, as well), and I hope that I was a good tenant for them.

Since I’ll be teaching in France I felt that I should touch up my French a little bit.  So, what better way is there to do that but to go back to Cannes where I studied in 2006?  I can’t think of anything at the moment.  The journey was reminiscent of my voyage 4 years ago.  I stopped over in Paris, I went in search of the Eiffel tower, and there was a world cup game going on.  Only this time, I feel so much more experienced with travel in France and Spain.  I’m able to do things more efficiently: I know how to use the metro and how and where to get a cell phone.  I have friends in Paris, and it was wonderful to spend time with them.  I guess what I’m saying is that in a way I realize that I have changed over the past four years, even if sometimes I feel as though I’m still the same person.  Sometimes I don’t think I have changed, but when I compare my trip in 2006 to my trip in 2010, I can tell that there are major differences.  I can only hope that they are for the better.

My time in Paris was short, but I felt like I was arriving at a home away from home.  I just enjoy France so much more than Spain.  I met up with Mandira and we ate crepes and watched the World cup game of the US vs Ghana by the Eiffel Tower.  It was a great time.

I left Paris to head on to Cannes, and that trip felt much easier than the previous time I had taken it.  For instance, I only had one bag with me instead of two.  And, once I got to the train station in Cannes, they now have escalators, so I didn’t have to carry that bag up and down the stairs (or, like what happened 4 years ago, have a random person grab one of my bags and help me).  I then got to the college, and instead of moving in immediately, I waited a few hours for my new landlady to arrive and take me to my studio apartment.  I have to say that I am much happier living away from campus, even if that means that I am not as socially active there.

For the most part, I have been trying to recuperate from this previous year of teaching.  To do that, I have been enjoying the beach.  I still can’t believe that I’ll be teaching again in a couple of months, and I am still torn about the decision.  But, hopefully, when all is said and done, I’ll be much better at French than I currently am.

As far as my classes here, they’ve been okay.  Sometimes, just to relax I use the 15-minute break during class to walk to the sea just to listen to the waves for a few minutes.  My first teacher, Giselle, was wonderful at the conversation part of the course, but I didn’t particularly like her style for teaching grammar.  For that, it was as if she would just give us grammar exercises without any explanations, and then be surprised when we did poorly on the homework.  However, her classes were heaven compared to what came after her.  With Véronique, there’s just no easy way to explain her classes.  She is a new teacher, and it felt like there was no structure in her class.  A group of us were not satisfied with her, and we took our concerns to the school’s administration.  We’ve now switched classes to be with our third teacher, Marie-Hélène, and she is much better.  I feel like I’m learning something again!

Over a weekend I went to Avignon to take a tour of the lavender fields.  I didn’t realize, but there’s a theater festival that goes on in Avignon for the entire month of July.  It was as though all of the wayward wanderers of the world had descended upon the city to try to have their 15 minutes of fame, or at least experience someone else’s.  It was impossible to walk down the street two steps before someone was advertising his or her play.  It got to the point that I just started saying, “Sorry, I don’t speak French,” because that was the only way they would leave me alone.  While sitting at lunch, I was given at least 5 flyers for various plays.

I took the day-long lavender tour, and it led to a fairly tiring day.  It started around 9, and we got back around 6.  We went to lavender fields, lavendine fields, and sunflower fields.  We also stopped at a provençal market (sorry, mom, I didn’t see any tablecloths I thought you’d like at this one), a lavender distillery, the lavender capital: Sault, an old city: Gordes, and the lavender museum.  On my train trip to Avignon, I had watched in vain for a glimpse of a lavender field.  I saw random lavender bushes every once in a while, but never a field.  Well, I found out later that what I was seeing was actually lavendine, a lavender hybrid produced to grow at different altitudes.  When we were driving away from Avignon, our tour guide explained to us that true lavender grows only at high altitudes, and for various reasons true lavender only grows in Provence.  The road she took us along into the fields reached a summit that was marked by a sign, and then we dipped into a valley on the other side where there were lavender fields as far as the eye could see.

 I enjoyed my day in the lavender fields, even if it was a bit of overkill.  That’s what I signed up for though!  One of the older couples on the tour told me around lunchtime that if they saw another lavender field, they would scream, and that once you saw one field you had seen them all.  Well, yes, that might be true, but there’s also a sense of majesty in seeing something that beautiful, and I took as much of it in as I could since I knew it was not an experience to be taken lightly.  Walking into the fields it felt as though the world had fallen away, and it was just me, the flowers, and the buzz of the bees all around me.  That same couple that didn’t seem to realize that what they had signed up for was a lavender tour also refused to walk into the fields even a foot because of their fear of the bees.  While I also wouldn’t want to be stung, for me, that constant hum was a bit more like a reminder of the nature that was surrounding me and not something to be feared.

One of my mistakes for the day was that I didn’t put on sunscreen in the morning; I thought I threw it in my bag, but I hadn’t.  So, by the end of the day I was red as a lobster.  Fortunately, I had purchased myself some lavender oil at the distillery, and one of the reputed medical purposes was that it helped sunburns.  So, I tried it out, and while I still hurt for the next day or so, the burn never peeled and has now added a deeper tan than I had before.  So, I’m convinced enough to say that it works!

My last day in Avignon, I went into town and just wandered around a bit.  I ended up on the tourist train, and the only part of it that I truly enjoyed was that it went up into a park by the Palais des Papes which had an amazing view over the Rhône River.  I then ate lunch, and rounded out my last couple of hours by going to one of the plays in town.  It was a two-woman show, and I don’t think there was actually a plot other than showing the women’s interactions with each other.

Back in Cannes, I’m trying to enjoy being by the beach as much as possible, but sometimes it’s difficult.  For instance, just before I went to Avignon, I was swimming and stopped suddenly because some seaweed floating on the surface of the water scared me.  As soon as I started treading water, BOOM!  I kicked what I’m certain had to be a jellyfish.  Pain shot up from my foot, and I hightailed my way back to shore.  I found it a bit ironic that I got scared by nothing, was trying to tell myself that it was unlikely that seaweed or anything else would get me, and then I kick a jellyfish.  Now I realize that being in the water might be like the bees: I need to take the chance to reap the rewards.

After that, I went a little over a week without swimming.  I still walked along the beach, but the water always looked a bit cloudy, and I prefer it when it’s clear.  The last couple of days it’s been perfectly clear, and I’ve been swimming like a guppy fish.  Sometimes I wonder what it looks like with me as a grown woman out in the deep water, swimming to the seabed and back up again, and then I think I’m glad that I’ll never know.  It’s fun!  And the other day, I even found a watch that was still working under the water.  Now that I’ve fiddled with it, I realize that the clasp doesn’t work quite right, which is probably why it got lost in the first place.  But who knows?  Maybe I can get it fixed.

Bryant was in Nice last week, and he and a couple of his friends came to Cannes to see the fireworks for Bastille Day.  It was a great show, and afterwards we went in search of ice cream and then just wandered around.  Apparently, I took them in the wrong direction for the wandering, because when I walked home I found where there was a Michael Jackson tribute show going on.  I just loved that they were playing MJ on the anniversary of France’s revolution.

While I like it here, I’m also really ready to be back home for a while.  I miss a lot of things, and sometimes I still can’t believe that I’ve decided to stay on this side of the Atlantic for another year, especially when that reason is teaching!  But, I’m trying to look at it as an opportunity to be here, and hopefully get better at French along the way.  Only 3 more weeks!

The first and last kebab

Before Christmas, Bryant, Sara and I all decided to go out for kebabs.  The only problem was that Sara only had a one hour break, and that really wasn’t enough time to go out and eat them in a restaurant.  Since Bryant and I had two hours, we decided to go get the kebabs and bring them back to eat in the Bilingual room at school.  At this point, we still didn’t know each other that well.  I thought they were both content with the job, and nice people, but we hadn’t really connected yet.  The day we got kebabs that all changed.  I don’t remember if we discussed the job, but we all said that we would show no shame in the face of the kebab, and we all ate the kebabs in any fashion we could.  Perhaps I should also mention that kebabs are a bit difficult to eat, and the only way to even consume them in a fashion where you don’t end up with food all over yourself is to first eat as much of the filling as you can before picking it up to eat as a sandwich.  However, this first day, we just went all in, using both hands and ending up with sauce all over our hands, the table, the entire room!  This day was the day when we say that we became kindred spirits.  I think that they would say that the feeling is mutual.

After the kebab adventure, we were able to open up to each other a little more about teaching.  We were all discontent with the lack of help we found at the school.  In the science classes I taught, many days I was handed the book as I walked in the door and told to ‘teach this, this, and this’ which I suppose gave me good practice at improvisation.  In my primary conversation classes, I was given lesson plans most of the year that revolved around science, and that just bored the kids.  I know that they needed to understand their science lessons better, but the way they told us to teach was not fun for the kids, and as a result, they were terribly unresponsive.  By the time I was told to start coming up with my own lessons (which I had more or less been doing anyway, just using the science vocabulary), the kids were still a bit put off with trying anything in English.

Then, there is what I had to do the majority of the time: infantile.  I understand that these kids are young and crazy, but it just felt impossible to do anything with them in a classroom setting.  I was told at the beginning of the year to not single one child out because then I will lose the attention of the rest of the class and not regain it.  I somehow feel that I lost control of the class anyway just because I was not allowed to use any Spanish with them.  There were a few times that I would try to do a simple game with them, but because they didn’t understand it was disastrous.  I also did research at the beginning of the year on teaching this age group, and the majority of what I found said to use repetition, repetition, repetition.  By Christmas the kids were doing well with the repetition of the routine, but after this there was a point where they became bored with it.  When I tried to change the routine they didn’t like that either.  It was also very difficult due to the fact that I had only had one resource to teach them with: flashcards.  We were told at the beginning of the year to not use any kind of worksheet/coloring sheet or crafts with them unless it was a holiday, and I assumed that because of this restriction that I should also not use videos, which I found out the last week was true since Sara was told not to do video for her final class with them.  I did anyway, and they absolutely loved the episode of The Little Mermaid that I showed them.  One little 4-year-old boy looked at me and asked conspiratorially whether the movie was in English too.  I thought that it was cute that he put the two ideas together.  And in every class I showed this video, the kids said the same things at the same time in the video, so I know that they understood the general concept due to the animation even if they didn’t understand all of the dialogue.  And on top of all of this, we had no books to read to these kids.  Closer to the end of the year, I found a website that had simple books in flash format.  I screen captured the books, printed them, and read them.  When the children realized I was reading them a story, it was amazing how much silence fell over the classroom.  We had asked our director for books all year, and she kept telling us that some were coming, but they never did.  At one point, she even asked us if children would even like books, and that question came form the mother of a 3 and 5 year old, so it just seemed ridiculous.

 My middle/high school classes were pretty inconsequential.  They were cancelled probably over half of the time, and then when I was there I was supposed to be teaching them out of the Cambridge book for the KET exam.  This was also difficult because most of these days I came directly from teaching 3 year olds, so I wrongly assumed that the kids would understand a lot more than the younger kids.  While it was true that they understood more, I would forget that I couldn’t talk to them normally.  My high school classes were similar to my primary science classes since I would walk into the class and be told what to teach.  Without the materials beforehand, it was extremely difficult to teach grammar points that I know since I’m a native speaker, but I had never heard of them before, such as countable nouns.

All year I have disliked the nickname Winnie the Pooh.  However, it was terribly cute that a 5 year old ran up to me on the last day and said, “Winnie the Pooh, te quiero mucho.”  So while at times it felt like the kids didn’t like me teaching them, it appears that some of them did.  I also saw a marked improvement in some of them with communication in English, and I wonder if that also had anything to do with me being with them once a week.

Outside of teaching, I tried to experience Madrid a bit more once my master’s classes finished.  I went to some of the touristic sites, and I went to an exhibition about King Tut’s tomb.

I will just say that this year has been an experience.  While I don’t want to be a teacher, I have accepted another teaching job in France that stats in October, and I know that my time in this school and my time in the masters program has probably better prepared me for what to expect in France.

The last week of teaching, Sara, Bryant and I went for our last kebab.  Before this, we also looked up job burnout symptoms and realized we were all suffering from over 75% of them, including self-medicating through food.  So, we decided to revel in it.  We were a bit neater eating our kebabs in the restaurant, and we were able to pick out some of the filling with a fork before picking it up (well, Sara and I used this tactic, but I don’t think Bryant did).  We had come to the end of the year, and we knew that we had made it through teaching together.  In addition to this self-medication, we also went to the hard rock Café for a special black tie Toma Ya dinner.  We sang along to the songs, and stuffed ourselves until we couldn’t move.  Unsurprisingly, Bryant was the only one who ate the entire meal – Sara and I only made it half way through.

That dinner was a great way to end the year, and I’ll miss working with those two.  All I can say now is that we did it!