Hired

So...the good news is that I got a job for next year. I got hired to work as a lectrice at the Université de Nancy. Who remembers Nancy? Avid blog readers should know that I have been there twice on day trips (it's 45 minutes from Metz by train). Let me show you a picture of my future home.


I'm feeling a little bit underhanded in the way I found out about the job. I was reading the blog of one of my friends from Metz. She fell in love with a French guy and is trying to stay in the area. She applied to a bunch of lectrice positions and accepted one at a small school in Alsace. After accepting this one, she got offered the Nancy post, but sadly had to decline it even though Nancy is a bigger, cooler city and is closer to her boyfriend because she's already accepted the post at Mulhouse. So...as soon as I read her blog post about how she sadly couldn't accept the post at Nancy, I sent my CV to the guy at Nancy. And I got it. Yay! I am so thankful to have employment. I hasn't heard anything about being renewed as an assistant next year, and I was starting to have nightmares of working in Barnes and Noble again. The good news is that I will definitely be in a decent sized city and can probably take some classes at the university at the same time. And the pay is better. The work I think involves helping students learn English specific to their respective disciplines.

BUT...and there's always a but, isn't there? The job starts earlier than the assistant job, and I'd already gotten my plane ticket based on the assistant timeframe. Stupidly, I booked my ticket through some silly website which might not refund the ticket or allow me to change it (Beware of edreams.com, people!) So I'm looking at having to buy another plane ticket, and Carlos who still wants to visit me in the states, will have to change his too (luckily his ticket is refundable!) And coming home earlier means that I will no longer be going to Spain before heading home, which is a real pity because I was looking forward to a few weeks of relaxation on the beach.

I'm not able to be happy about this quite yet until I get this plane ticket business resolved, and because my apartment company in Metz owes me about 1000E, and we've been playing some pretty vicious phone tag. This is made worse by the fact that my cell phone has no credit, and I'm also out of Skype credit because for some reason Visa's measures to protect my card from theft are also preventing me from using it online so I can't call anyone...including anyone in France. Why hasn't anyone over here ever heard of a 1-800 number. Geez...