Vacation

I have just finished my last class before the vacation begins! For the next week and a half I will between Annecy, Chambéry, and Geneva visiting friends. The weather is still beautiful here and I hope to ride my Lance Armstrong bike around the lake. I will report back soon. How was homecoming, Furman people?

love,
Sarah

The weekend: scooters, cows and explosions

October 14-15

This summer I worked in a "Parisian" café in Greenville with a baker, Mark who is French. He moved back to France before I quit my job and is living a half hour away in Annecy. On Friday he calls and we decide to meet for dinner with his girlfriend. I am excited about this, but I am also feeling like I am in a time/space warp and that the world is literally shrinking.

I am in the parking lot surrounded by high school kids on my cell phone when I see Mark. Surprise. He is perched on his scooter (a less powerful motorcycle) on which he plans to drive us both back to Aix les Bains, a 15 minute bus ride. I am thrilled/terrified. But I take a deep breath, strap on my helmet, and try to bury my helmet head into Mark's back as we fly into town. Each time we approach a speed bump I scream compulsively. We dart through the pedistrian-only area, trying not to plow down the old ladies or their tiny dogs. It is the best and most horrifying experience of my life. The next day I search for used scooters in the paper...

(Do you like the present tense that I used there?)

*****

This weekend I also went to Annecy. I had two motives. First, Saturday the town of Annecy celebrated the descent of the cows from the mountain, and I had to be a part of that, obviously. The town celebrates the release of the cows into the mountains in the spring and the return of the cows in the fall. Second, Tessa Lynch, another assistant, was having a house warming party to which many other english assistants and French folk were invited. Again, I obviously had to be there; I was desperate to meet people my age.

The cow festival was magic. "Traditional artisans" in their traditional clothing had booths set up around the pedestrial section of town. I saw people pressing apple juice from real apples. I saw a yodeler and a guy sawing wood. Accordians and cheese samples were plentiful. For lunch we ate tartiflette, an exceedingly heavy mixture of potatoes, onions, ham, milk, and about a pound of cheese per person. In the afternoon we found a nice curb on which we could watch the parade that we had all come explicitly to see. Men, women, and children dressed in old French costumes pranced down the street performing traditional dances that resembled square dances with more clapping. But we were not there to see dancers. No. After the dancers a flock of sheep followed by a heard of brown and white goats passed by, leaving offensive trails of anxiety behind them. The goats had a tendency to stop walking in the middle of the parade or to turn around and walk the wrong direction. The cows stole the show, however, with their enormous shiny bodies that reflected the tiny trees delicately strapped to their heads. About 2 feet tall, the branches, weighed down by colorful ribbons and ornaments, tipped over the side of the cow head. They looked ridiculous. Sitting on the curb, I was precariously close to their swishing tails. And on several occasions a cow would abruplty turn its head toward me, and I would find myself staring directly into its slimy nostrils. Naturally, I would let out a little scream and then offer it a kleenex.

*****

OK I've been writing this post for too long. To sum it up: the housewarming party was a lot of fun. I met tons of people and had a grand 'ol time. And it was a good thing I was still awake at 6:30 am because a pipe busted in the kitchen creating a icy pool on the tile floor. We stood there and blankly stared at the water before starting to run around like idiots trying to find the source of the leak. I starting throwing towels on the floor and wringing them out in the sink before realizing that the water was coming right back out onto the floor after entering the sink. Right. New plan. Call the owner of the apt. Check. The water was turned off and the flood drained by 7:15, at which point I dried myself off and went to bed.

Note to self: high school kids are too cool for pictionary.

You would have thought I had condemned my kids to american cheese hell when I suggested that we play a friendly game of pictionary together. My previous classes had loved the game. Why would this class be any different? We had just finished discussing an advertisement that I had torn out of a magazine, and I thought that pictionary would be a nice way to end the class. The object is to draw senarios such as "singing in the shower" or "fighting" or "cracking a walnut," and whichever team guesses correctly in english gets a point. Come on, kids, let's get creative. But instead of light hearted drawings, I got 11 light hearted looks of death. Twenty-two holes seared into me from their 22 eyes. I glanced at my watch. Fifteen minutes to force them to draw. They eventually managed to muster a scribble or two, mouthing the answer to their team over their shoulder, while I just sat there, between Team 1 and Team 2, smiling and encouraging them as hard as I possibly could until the bell rang.

my e mail address

sorry--that photo site was for people with facebook..i thought it could be viewed by everyone...I'm working on a public photo site (pbase, james) so you can all see photos.

ok my e mail:

sarah(dot)elizabeth(dot)allen(at)gmail.com

ok put a period where it says "dot" and the @ where it says "at" got it? great

p.s. I don't have internet access over the weekend.

The view from my windows.

My dining room table (situated in my living room and bedroom) is placed right beside my two large door/windows that I keep open as long as the weather is warm. At night while eating dinner, I can look outside my window directly into others' windows. Directly. I eat and wait, hoping to see some French people doing whatever French people do. It's almost like a movie. French George on the bottom floor usually wanders around his apartment at night. French Cindy seems to be doing dishes all the time. The French cat stares directly back at me. Most people have their blinds closed, like normal people would. But not everyone. I keep trying to catch someone's eye and give a friendly wave. But I think that would cross the line into hey-we-are-watching-each-other-and-now-I'm-feeling-creepy territory. Oh, there are also plenty of bats flying around. I really hope one doesn't mistake my apartment for a dark damp cave.

My room part 2

There is Kerri the middle school assistant who has been living with me the past week until she finds a place to live. You can see into the bathroom. Someone please explain to me why there are tiles on the wall??

You can see my bed, table, tv and pink curtains.

On my birthday at the top of this mountain in Grenoble.

I can't get the other photos working arrgg

Yes! My apartment even comes with a hair dryer

that apparently has no heat setting. I can just feel my hair literally freezing and breaking off my head, smashing into a pile of split ends...

But school, oh school. I have somewhere around 12 or 14 classes that I see once every week or every other week. I can't really read my schedule to tell you for sure. I have a nice mix of older students interested in English and literature and students who are in my business english courses. These BTS students are between 19-24 (yes, older than me) and many have quite colorful hair and oddly placed piercings. Before I came I expected my BTS students to be young adults intrested in entering the business world with an eager and overly ambitious desire to learn all vocabulary remotely associated with business. My BTS students, however, look like they would rather give their neighbor a tatoo than help him/her open a bank account. "No, really, I don't want to see all of your piercings. No! I swear I don't!"

The object of my classes is to make my students speak English. The classes are divided into two smaller parts; I take half of the class for one hour while the prof takes the other half, and then we trade. During the training in Grenoble, the instructers gave us plenty of silly games and activities to encourage discussion and speaking. The other day I had half of the class for a whole hour and the other half for another hour. Those were the longest hours of my entire life. Introducing myself took no longer than 8 minutes. I had a mini breakdown inside my head when I realized that I still had 52 minutes left. But I pulled it together and had the students interview each other and present each other to the rest of the class. So fun (read: painfully boring for me and the students). But today I read aloud an article to the students and made them talk about some random details in the article. Slightly more fun. Maybe a 4 on the 1-10 funness scale. But after class two girls came up to me and asked me if I wanted to meet with them later outside of class to practice English. Tomorrow we will meet in Aix for lunch and conversation. I am excited to help these girls prepare for their oral exam at the end of the year. But now I must be off to another BTS class...

A week is too long without internet

Last week I had the opportunity to meet all of the other language assistants in the Grenoble region at a conference of sorts in the mountains of Grenoble. About 200 of us from around the world gathered at a camp/lodging thing made for elementary school kids. We were high in the mountains in the middle of NOwhere. We were 8 in a room sleeping together on little bunk beds, and we crowded around tiny tables for our three meals. The conferences was indended to help us learn how to teach. We got lots of ideas for activities and strategies for dealing with high school kids. We also got all of our insurance, bank, and health information, which was boring but helpful. Anyway, we had fun together dancing at a fake disco the lodge had organized for us. If you know me, you know I love dancing. whenever. wherever. get your groove on. we stayed until midnight, at which point my birthday started...

For my birtday I stayed in Grenoble with Tessa and Laura-two girls from furman that I met this summer. We took a lift to a super high point overlooking grenoble and ate some pizza and drank a bottle of bubble white wine costing a heavy 1.23. Then we found oursleves in the London pub listening to a completely random mix of country and pop music. I told one of the bartenders that it was my birthday so that he would let us go upstairs for the extra seating, but little did I know that birthdays are a celebrated occasion at the London Pub. About an hour after we arrived, suddenly the lights went out at the bar. The next thing I knew a giant apple tarte with 4 blazing candels was placed before my confused eyes. Geez, I though, you know you're in France when your birthday cake is an apple tarte. I was very pleased, needless to say, and I blew out the candels and passed the tarte around for everyone to try. I don't really like apples, but no bother. I ate it anyway.

I have also started school and it is going very well. I actually really love teaching english. The staff is really cool and the kids are nice, for high school kids....I must say more about school later though because my time is almost out. Look for photos soon hopefully.... thanks for reading!