One month later...

I've been in France for exactly one month.  That seems almost unbelievable.  Where has the time gone?  I don't notice my French getting better on a daily basis, the way you don't notice that you've lost weight or that your hair is growing, but I'm sure it is.  Every so often, some small form of improvement will catch my attention - for example, a stranger asked me for directions yesterday, and I was able to give them to him.  Although I did have to qualify with, "now, I think these are right, but I don't drive", because I'm terrible with directions in general, regardless of language.  And I really don't drive.  I could have told him how to get there on the bus...

This one-month milestone coincides nicely with my first day of Toussaint break.  Although I am living in France, which is an awesome adventure, I still like vacations!  As Elizabeth Gilbert says in Eat, Pray, Love (yes, I'll be quoting her a lot this year), "Traveling-to-a-place energy and living-in-a-place energy are two fundamentally different energies".  And I'm so ready for a little travel!

I'll be spending a few days in Tours with Gwenaëlle, then heading over to her family's house in Niort.  I'm super excited!

As proof positive that living in France hasn't made me any more graceful, even when I try, I will relate the story of my train ticket incident.  I bought my train ticket online, then went to pick it up a few days ago so I didn't have to deal with a long queue (made even longer by the strikes, I'm sure) when I'd already be pressed for time.  As I was getting everything ready to go last night, I glanced at my ticket for "Friday, October 29th."  ...........October 29th????  NO!!!  I had bought a ticket for the wrong day!  And I wasn't just a day or two off, but a whole week!  Frantic, I rushed to the train station (luckily I discovered it before the buses stopped running), waited in a long queue (just exactly what I had been trying to avoid), stepped up to the counter and gave the lady a sheepish smile.  "Hello," I said, "I've done something stupid and bought a ticket for the wrong day."  To her credit, she didn't give me a hard time.  I must not have been the first American she'd dealt with.  But she let me exchange it, and we're set to go in less than 12 hours!  I just have to get through a few classes with kids who are just as excited about the break as I am...

Actually yesterday, my lessons went quite well.  Kids that normally would have taken an entire lesson to learn a vocabulary set learned words like "witch" and "jack-o-lantern" in about 5 minutes, either because they were actually interested or because they knew we were going to play Bingo.  I had handed out pennies to use as markers, and I let them each keep one.  The teacher turned it into a culture lesson, with hilarious results.  "See, kids, this is Lincoln.  He was the first president.  He founded America."  Me: "uh, actually, no, he was later, in the 1800's.  He...he....(at this point my french failed me as I forgot the word for slaves, so I continued in English)...he freed the slaves."  Blank look from the teacher.  Apparently neither of us knew the word for "slave" in the other language, and I don't know how to mime that.  I switched back to French and gave it another go.  "He...gave freedom to everybody."  The teacher seemed to get what I was saying, and continued the lesson.  He ended with "on the back is the White House!"  I knew we had new pennies, so I didn't say anything at the time and took a glance at the penny later.  Nope, it's still the Lincoln Memorial.  It's OK, I can always cover that later during a culture lesson.  Hey, at least he was close.  I mean, I have no idea what half the stuff on the Euros is...

EDIT: I remembered while explaining the penny to a class today: the word for slave is esclave.