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!