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.