L'installation

Sorry for the radio silence! I still don't have internet, though hopefully I will have it by the end of the week. I've been relying on the free wifi at La Bousse, a local bar, and a transient signal called NETGEAR that sometimes gives me really slow internet in my own room. At the moment I'm sitting in La Bousse drinking a lemonade and typing this small message to you.

Last week the Spanish assistant, Felipe, arrived on Monday evening. He's from Costa Rica and used to work at Hewlett Packard. The German assistant Greg arrived on Tuesday afternoon and surprise of all surprises, is originally from LEDUC. Yes, Leduc, a small city about 300km north of Calgary, my hometown. He's been in Besançon for the past several months studying French at L'Université de Franche-Comté. German is one of his mother tongues, but he was born and has lived in Canada for most of his life. We were both pretty astonished to be meeting each other here, so far from home.

I spent most of the week either getting to know Morteau or wandering around a little bored, because my procès-verbal d'installation (proof of job) and attestation de logement (proof of housing) weren't ready, preventing me from getting a bank account and cell phone. Fortunately, I have them now and I've set up an appointment to get bank account on Wednesday morning. Morteau is a cute little town, population around 7000, and about 5km from the Swiss border. Therefore, a lot of French people live here but work in Switzerland, and some Swiss as well. They also do their grocery shopping here because prices are higher in Switzerland- there are four full-sized supermarkets: Casino, Intermarché, Carrefour and Netto Hard Discount. One day I'll have to talk about the differences between French and Canadian supermarkets. There are several bars, but the biggest are La Bousse and Le Terminus, and I think that these will be our bars of choice in the future. The bartender at La Bousse already knows our faces pretty well, considering we've been in at least four times in the last week! (Just to use the internet....mostly.....). There are several places to buy clothes and lots of cute little shops, as well as two cinemas. I'm sure that I won't be too bored here, as long I plan things to do on Sundays when almost everything is closed.

All of the English teachers are super nice. They ask me all the time if I'm settling in well and if I need anything. This weekend I might go for a drive around the valley with one of them. This afternoon I started observing the English classes. The first class was on reading comprehension, but the second was supposed to be presentations about new, innovative restaurants. Unfortunately most of the class claimed that they had filmed videos of their presentations, which are due on Wednesday instead of today. So I got to see two presentations on fictional gastropubs, one of which was located on platforms in a swimming pool in New York :). After the presentations, I was helping some students edit their presentation scripts, and discovered that they couldn't understand my accent. I ended up mostly speaking to them in French, which wasn't a big deal, but all the same it was a bit disturbing because I thought that I was going to be teaching them in English..... I will have to work on my speaking skills apparently. I was talking with Felipe later on, and he'd had the same problem. We both decided that we probably speak too fast and need to focus on speaking clearly when using our native languages. It's funny, because I don't really think about it normally. I know that sometimes I speak too quietly in English, but too fast or not clearly enough, not so much.

EDITED TO ADD: This situation shouldn't have been a total surprise to me, really. After all, some of these kids don't have a ton of years of experience with English, and I need to be prepared for that. I will try my best to speak in English with them, but I have to be patient, ask if they understand, rephrase, ask again, ask them to translate what I just said into French, and sometimes explain more complicated things in French. It's actually good practice for teaching in Immersion, apart from the translating and speaking in the native language part.

In any case, it's getting late. I have to wake up at 5:30 tomorrow morning in order to take the 6:50 train to Besançon for our first practical day. We're getting together with all of the language assistants in the region of Franche-Comté in order to learn more about how to do our paperwork and more about our duties. It's gonna be a long day, but I'm excited to meet all of the other assistants!