Antibes

Last weekend we took a trip to Antibes, a small town to the west of Nice. It is so picturesque, with pretty ramparts you can walk on and a small sandy beach, which is a novelty in this part of the Cote d’Azur. It also felt really clean as I could smell the salty air as I walked around, whereas Nice smells more like a city with cigarette smoke and car fumes (though occasionally you can smell a really perfumed scent like incense in the evening, I guess it’s a type of flower but whatever it is, it smells good), and a bit quieter, so all in all, a great place to get away to for the day before work started properly.

The Socca cooking

I tried my first piece of Socca, which is a regional speciality. It’s like a pancake but made from chickpeas and is sold as street food. You eat it straight out of the oven/pan and with pepper, and it was delicious! Here you could see it cooking in the covered market in Antibes, which had all kinds of stores selling food from all over Provence, the Alps and the Cote d’Azur.

Obligatory rustic shot of spice in a market

That’s only half the reasoning for the trip to Antibes. I had seen an advert for a chocolate festival, whose tagline went something along the lines of ‘Prepare to be AMAZED! Plus lots of tasters’ – which had us hooked. When we arrived, it was a bit smaller than all the advertising had suggested (it was one tent) but it was fun to watch people make flowers out of sugar. The free samples were sadly a bit thin on the ground but I did try an amazing brownie, and something which I don’t know the name of but it was like a spongy, mango flavoured Turkish delight.

This week was the first week of teaching on my own! It was pretty fun, and the moments where the kids didn’t have a clue what I was talking about were happily few and far between. My timetable has also worked out pretty well, giving me a 3 and a half day weekend (Cambridge next year is going to kill me after this). Some teachers want me to deliver the lesson that they are teaching but with a smaller group to focus on their oral work, whereas other teachers have just said ‘ Do anything to get them to talk’ – which is a lot of freedom! After the Toussaint holiday (half term) I get to do some lessons on the song ‘Stand by Me’ which is going to be super fun as I love it! I also love that it has roots in Psalm 46 –

¹ God is our refuge and strength,
an ever-present help in trouble.
² Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way
and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea,
³ though its waters roar and foam
and the mountains quake with their surging.

Amen.

L’automne arrive…

Autumn is coming...

My first day at school, aged 20 and 5/6

Whoops, BIG GAP between posts but I am still alive.Sorry! Just busy! Lots of assistants have arrived now and I’ve started work (officially no longer someone whojust spends all day at the beach) so I have been doing lots of interesting things.

I’ve just finished my first week of work! It was mostly a week of observation where I saw how various teachers taught their classes. This was really interesting as the style is very different to teaching in the UK, it is very teacher led and would be classed as quite old fashioned in the UK I think. My work will be different in that I will be working with small groups and doing everything possible to make them talk, which they hopefully will, otherwise it will be a long lesson! They have never had a language assistant before, so the fact that they have time to speak may take some getting used to as it is so grammar-focussed here. The kids on the whole seem quite sweet and eager to learn English, and it’s a school which gets results in better than average area so there aren’t too many problems. The teaching staff are all so friendly, especially the English teachers who I am working with, but I am also observing other subjects to get a wide range of examples. I even observed a lesson where they were dissecting sardines, which given how much I simply love fish was lots of fun.

Tomorrow is the start of real work, and standing in front of a class on my own. I didn’t think I was nervous, but then it hit me this weekend that this is actually a real job and that I will be a responsible adult for seven months, which is a bit scary! (But exciting at the same time!)

My flat is now full! I live with a French student, Angela, and an American language assistant, Molly. Both are super nice and there is a relaxed atmosphere in the apartment. It has been great having a fellow foreigner around to tackle scary things like bank accounts and housing forms, as they become a lot less daunting when you have a partner in crime! And we can take awkward first day photographs like this one:

p.s. I wore stripes deliberately to make a good impression 🙂