Lazy, la-la-la-la lazy

Hey there,

Sorry for not writing for so long! In the two weeks after my trip to Edinburgh I didn't travel as much so I was waiting to have things to write and then I just got lazy^^
So I'll try to summarize the last month!

I explored some areas of London where I had never been before, like the Portobello Road Market, which is all the more famous since the movie "Notting Hill" where Hugh Grant explained his love for the little market that sells antiques, clothes, jewellery, food, and all sorts of useless crap^^ For the fans of the afore-mentioned movie who are wondering if I saw The Blue Door of The Bookshop, well... It doesn't exist anymore. I guess people got fed up of the crowds of tourists who came just to take a picture of themselves in front of Hugh Grant's bookshop :-/

I also went to the National Portait Gallery--for the second time in a month. It was worth a second visit because there was a new exhibition, plus this time I payed 9 pounds to go and see Anne Leibowitz's exhibition, which was quite intriguing. The choice of mixing personal photographs of the artist, her family and friends with photos of celebrities was a bit unsettling... All in all I think it's worth giving it a look :)

On the 14th of November we had our housewarming party, which was quite a success!

Warming up the house

My beloved housemates :-)

Apart from that, I made my students listen to a song (again I know!) but this time they had to put the lyrics in order before we could discuss the meaning of it. I chose a song called 'J'aurais bien voulu' by Babylon Circus, a ska/reggae French band from Lyon. They are quite famous in France and they're even touring internationally: I saw them at a festival in Queensland last year! The kids loved it, they said it was quite funky and funny :-p

I also went to London in the weekend with my housemate E to see a concert (The Notwist, a German band who sings in English) It was kind of pop-electro-rock, I really liked it. Plus the venue was in a very studenty area. We then went to have a drink with some Italian friends of my housemates. Overall a good night except when we had to go back home… We had to wait for an hour at the station, so we had a nap sitting down on some flat lamps to keep us warm :-D


Admiring London by night...

Waiting for the Notwist concert to begin... This photo is for my sister xxxx

The week after I showed my students an article about Nicolas Sarkozy and Carla Bruni that had been written a year ago when they had just started going out. I was reassured to see that all my students except one knew who Sarkozy and Bruni were. We were able to talk about the 'gossipy' side of British culture and the fact that politics are more and more linked to fame and celebrity, in England and in France...

On the Thursday 27th of November it was my birthday, so before I went to bed on the Wednesday night at midnight my housemates knocked on my door and gave me a chocolate cake and a card!! How nice! I felt very lucky at that moment and went to bed with a smile on my face :-)

Yummm cake!

The next day I went to have some cocktails with my housemate K in Windsor, and then E and her cooked a delicious veggie gratin for me and even sticked a candle in it!

Cocktail time!

How cool are those hats hey?

And on the Fri night, we had a big 80s birthday party, it was a lot of fun!

Those vintage bubblegum machines are fascinating

All in 80s mode... ahahaha

The following Sunday night I went to London to go a Thanksgiving dinner organized by an American friend. There were quite a lot of people: Australians, Americans, Canadians, Lituanians, Swedish… And two British people. For a lot of us it was the first time we were celebrating Thanksgiving. Everyone had brought one thing, such as cornbread, cranberry sauce, salad, apple sauce, rice, stuffing, etc. We ate all of these as side dishes with the turkey that our friend had spent the afternoon cooking. Even I ate some and as a vegetarian I loved it! It was a lovely evening and I was glad to be part of it.


I went home quite early because the next morning I had to get up at 5am to leave for a school trip to… Paris! More in the next article... ;-)

A Scottish weekend

The Edinburgh castle

Last Thursday, I took the train in the afternoon to Edinburgh, Scotland. After a 4-hour trip I met up with F, my friend from Plymouth who had a 2-day training session there. I was quite impressed when I arrived and saw the castle sitting on a hill overlooking the city and many dark, old buildings… I dropped off my bag in a backpacker near the station and met up with an American friend of ours who studies in Edinburgh. We ate the most delicious Indian food! Then we went to a pub to have a drink with some Australian friends from London who were also visiting Edinburgh. I tasted one of the local beers (Caledonian) and it was not very tasty.


Edinburgh Old Town

On Fri I walked a bit in the Old Town, admiring the old buildings, the little dark streets, the touristy shops selling kilts, rugby shirts and cashmere scarves and playing recording of bagpipes. Then I decided to go to the nearby National Park and climb the mountain to go sit on Arthur's Seat, which is the highest point in the area. Once arrived on top, I had the most gorgeous view on the city and the sea. I sat down there for more than 30 mins, so impressed by the landscape… I was so happy it was sunny, I could see so far away!

View of Edinburgh from Arthur's Seat

Then I went down and decided to go to this bagel place my Lonely Planet guide recommended: Elephants and Bagels. It was near the university, so full of students. The food was yummy and the decorations very cute so if you ever go to Edinburgh you should totally check it out!

Cute drawings in "Elephants and Bagels"

My American friend joined me there and we went to have a walk in the Princes Street gardens, a park just under the castle. Needless to say, the park was lovely :-)

Princes Street Gardens

After a dinner in a pub with my friends I went to a Australian bar with F. We were overjoyed when we saw they had our favourite Australian beers that we couldn't find in France (or only in rare occasions and it cost us an arm), namely, Coopers Pale Ale, Coopers Sparkling (from South Australia) and James Boags (Tasmanian beer)!! The pub had big maps of different regions of Australia so that customers could pin the city they were from. Judging by the number of pins, there were a lot of aussies visiting Edinburgh!

Aussie beer anyone?

After the pub we went to an indie-rock music night in a club and had a really good time. It was kind of hard to get up the next morning, but we were excited about visiting the interior of the castle! It was quite expensive: no student discount so 10 pounds per person, with 3 pounds extra for the audioguide :-/ The visit was interesting, since the Edinburgh castle is quite different from the Windsor castle: it's darker, with a prison and lots of exhibits about war and weaponry. We had a good view from the city as well.

View of Edinburgh from the castle


Enough with the bagpipes!

We then went to a pub to taste some local food, so I was brave and had some vegetarian haggis with neeps and tatties (turnip puree and mashed potatoes). It was actually quite good, spicy and salty. The rest of the afternoon was spent in museums like the National Gallery and the City Art Centre to check out some Scottish paintings, some of which were remarkable. We also went to an exhibition on space, with Star Wars figurines, miniature robots, space Barbies and Kens, fun facts, and most of all, clothes you could try on like the costume of Buzz Lightyear from Toy Story (Buzz L’Eclair in French), Walle’s head or space outfits… With my friend F we tried on everything (well, not everything, since the clothes were made for kids, we couldn’t fit in some of them^^) and the guy in charge of the exhibition was laughing in a corner, hihi.

I know, I'm such a kid^^

In the evening F and I took the train to Newcastle Gateshead on the North East coast of England, about 1h30 from Edinburgh, to visit a friend from France who's been living there for the past 3 years. Apparently Newcastle's reputation is that of a party town, with plenty of bars and clubs to stay out until late... Which is exactly what we've done :-p
The next morning I managed to get up to go have a look at Newcastle's quayside with all the bridges crossing the river. One of them, the Millenium Bridge, is very modern and impressive; when boats need to go under it, the two parts of the bridge close as if it was the lid of an eye.

Newcastle

The Millenium Bridge and the Baltic museum in Newcastle

More bridges in Newcastle

I had enough time to go to the Baltic, a big industrial building which is now the contemporary arts museum. From the 5th floor I had an amazing view of the city (but unfortunately no photos were allowed) and I also saw several intriguing exhibits, such as one by Steve Mc Queen where you enter a huge room, plunged in darkness, and once your eyes get used to it, you can see that there are lots of mirrors where you can see yours and the other visitors' shadows, while little lights are projected on the walls and thumping and thundering noises fill the room and make children cry^^

After a brief walk I took the train back home. Strange experience to take the train for long trips like that, because people actually get drunk in the train! Indeed, it is illegal in England to drink on public transports such as buses and metros, but is legal in trains. So between Edinburgh and Newcastle, about a dozen of 20-something-year olds drunk at least 5 beers each (in only 90 mins!) and were being totally ignorant of the fact that they were travelling in a quiet coach. On my way back, this time 4 50-year old women were boozing on cheap wine and chuckling between two pretzels. I’ve got to say, and sorry for those who will think I'm being conservative or stuck-up, but I found that a bit disturbing that people were getting wasted in the train like that :-/
Anyway after a long trip I arrived home around 11pm, utterly exhausted! Luckily I had prepared my lessons for this week. I showed my students a video of French boys dancing tecktonik, this dance that became very popular last year among teenagers in France. For those who wouldn't have heard of it, it's quite funny to watch, here is the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYaZYmTwOxA

I showed my students a couple of articles explaining this trend and I was surprised to see how tolerant they were. I mean I'm pretty sure that French students would have burst out laughing in the first few seconds of the video, seeing the clothes the dancers were wearing and their weird disarticulated moves. But my students were watching attentively, and said things like it's very different from what we see in England, it's interesting, asking me if I knew some dance moves (God, no!!!), etc. My first student on Monday morning asked me out of the blue if I was going to come back next year, because she gets on with me and understands me well! So cute! I said I didn't know yet but that it was good that they changed assistants every year or every other year, it makes things more challenging and they can hear different accents and way of speaking.

Today I taught my primary school kids how to count, and when we started some games to check if they had understood and memorized the numbers, I realized they were confused between 2 and 12, which are ‘deux’ and ‘douze’ in French. Apparently they can’t hear the difference between the two sounds… Anyway it’s just one of the many examples to illustrate that I’m learning more everyday from my experience as an assistant and I’m glad I made this choice. Overall I had an awesome weekend and an interesting beginning of the week, even if I desperately need some sleep! ^^ Hope you are all well, drop me a line when you have the time :-)

Holidays

Ok first of all sorry everyone for not keeping my blog up-to-date... but I have a good excuse: I was on holidays. ahah now you hate me even more. Anyway... Thanks a lot to the people who wrote me emails to give me some of their news, I promise I will get back to you personally as soon as I can!!

So! I will try to summarize my 'half-term break' as they call it here. I had 10 days without classes which means I could travel a little bit further than London. I went to visit my friend F in Plymouth, a town near the sea, in the south west of England in the county of Devon. It was bigger and livelier than I expected, apparently there are more than 200 000 inhabitants, quite a lot of them are students, and surfers! (Crazy British people^^) When I arrived on the Saturday my friend took me to a free multicultural festival called the 'Respect Festival', which featured reggae, hip-hop, African music and dancers from India, Fiji Islands, etc. There were lots of stalls with artefacts, circus activities... Pretty good start of my stay in Plymouth :-)
While I was over there I also went on a hike between two villages (Looe and Polperro) in Cornwall, a region even more West. Needless to say, the landscapes were beautiful, the small villages so cute, the Cornish pasties yummy. Would have been perfect with a bit of sun instead of rain, wind, and even hailstones (that one of my students this week wrote 'hellstones'... I had to correct his English! lol) The 2-hour hike turned into a 3-hour session of mud surfing, and I don't even know how I managed not to slip and fall in the mud^^

We also went shopping, checked out a few student bars (one of the played Cat Empire at one point, my friend and I wondered how the staff knew this Australian band...? That was a cool moment)

After 5 great days in Plymouth my friend and her housemate came back to Slough with me for the rest of the holidays. Of course we spent all our time in London, going shopping at the Camden Market, eating out and drinking 3-pound cocktails in a bar at the Millenium Dome (aka O2), fighting our way through the rain and the wind on South Bank and walking on the Greenwich meridian line.

On Fri night, it was Halloween, so we met up with some friends in a bar, then crashed a student party in the SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies) which was fun but finished quite early (the live band and the bar closed at 11pm, what the hell?) I thought Halloween would be really huge in London, with everyone in the street dressed up... But not really. Maybe it was just big in some clubs and special places, I dunno.

On Sunday morning I went back to the Windsor Castle, which I really find more interesting than the Tower of London that we visited a couple of days earlier. Ok, at the Tower, the guides are really entertaining, tell anecdotes, scare children, but apart from that the buildings are in my opinion less impressive than the rooms in the Windsor castle and there's much less to see.

After these exciting but exhausting holidays, it was good to sit down and relax on Sunday night, and to see my housemates again! I can't imagine how hard it's going to be in May when I'll have to say goodbye to them for good :-(
This week at school was quite good, my students were really nice. Probably because I asked them to talk about holidays and tourism! I used a kind of 'bingo card' where I put different expressions they had to use during our conversation. It worked really well! They gave me advice on which cities to visit in England, asked me which country I preferred, etc.
With my primary school children today I had a lot of fun, I made them revise what they've learnt so far with several games, like Simon says (which is 'Jacques a dit' in French) and they were really into it!

Also I found out yesterday that I'm going to go on a class trip for 5 days at the beginning of December, with 37 students and 3 teachers to... Paris!!! Yeah baby! We're even going to Disneyland, and I get to go for free, yeepee. I'm excited! I will get to spend more time with my colleagues and get to know the younger kids a little bit better, since the kids going on this trip are in Year 8(=classe de cinquième in France)

The other exciting trip to come starts tomorrow: I'm off to Edinburgh in the afternoon, and coming back on Sunday night! These long weekends are awesome :-) Which makes me think, I haven't started packing, it's late, and I have an early class tomorrow morning... So I'll post pictures when I come back from Scotland, byyyyye for now!