After roughing it for a little while on vacation, it is just so nice to come back home, especially after staying in a youth hostel.  You have all of your stuff at your fingertips; you are not sharing a room with 15 other people, etc etc.  I've been home for a few days, but I am still enjoying my privacy, having access to more than two pairs of shoes, etc, etc.

Another week of classes down, and I'm still having trouble getting them to talk.  Several people have told me that students don't like to talk because often French teachers will ridicule students who make mistakes, but I am never ever mean to someone who makes a mistake, and at this point in the semester the students know that. 

Another problem I've been told is that in French schools, the teacher is the master, and the students are just supposed to sit back, take notes, and just absorb his plentiful knowledge.  This strategy doesn't work for language learning seeing as how you actually have to participate and make efforts to speak.  So when I ask them to speak, they are somewhat bewildered at the concept of participation.  And since so many of my classes are focussed on oral comprehension, a lot of the classes are like pulling teeth.  

The result is that I've been giving more horrible "teacher speeches," the "I work so hard and you don't appreciate it; I only ask that you participate," but this is slowly but surely destroying every ounce of dignity I have so I am no longer begging them to talk.  My new strategy is that if they don't talk, I will just wait for someone to answer.  I will wait 5, 10 minutes, whatever.  But I can't learn English for them, and well if they don't do well on their exams, it is not my problem.  

I'm about 3/4ths of the way done with classes--the end is in sight!  I will officially finish with one of the classes tomorrow, and for some of the others the last classes will just be oral presentations so they will finish  up soon.  Exams start in May and last through June, but that shouldn't be too much work for me so I can focus on learning Spanish, generally being lazy and whatever else suits my fancy.  Not knowing when my exams are (due to the horrifyingly unorganized university) means that I don't know when I finish and therefore don't know what I am doing this summer.  Hopefully I'll make it to Almeria so I can have some beach and Carlos time.  I'd also like to be there for the feria, which from what I gather is basically just a week-long citywide party.  

Speaking of Carlos, he has bought his ticket to come visit me in April!  He'll be here about 2 weeks, which will be so wonderful after 3 months of not seeing each other.  My friends in Nancy are also excited about meeting him after hearing me talk about him for a whole year.  

My friend Sarah is leaving Nancy because she has an internship in Paris.  Our little group is getting smaller and smaller, but well now we will have a floor to crash on in Paris and another excuse to go.  I talked to Jordan the other day, who is getting married on Saturday (!), and I am going to meet up with her and Jodain in Paris next week for a day of their honeymoon and hopefully  I'll be able to crash with Sarah and spend a little more time in the city.  I'm getting spoiled with all of this travelling--my half week in Paris with Mattie, Angela and Parks is in about 3 weeks.

Voyage to Berlin

My week in Berlin was marvelous.  It is just a great city with lots of museums and cool things to do.  After 5 days we didn't get to see that much of it; I can't imagine trying to visit just for a weekend.  It is a big city, but it has a different vibe than Paris--people on the metro are still in a hurry but if they bump into you they stop to apologize.  And, well the city is not that expensive so we ate well and cheaply (I am remembering many bad yet expensive meals in Paris).   It has lots of things to do like most capital cities but lacks the stressed and pretentious atmosphere of other big cities.

We came by bus (a part of our super-low budget plan), and it was my first international coach experience.  As soon as we got on the dirty and crowded bus, I realized that you get what you pay for.  All of the bus drivers spoke only Polish and didn't seem to know what was going on.  In Berlin on the way home no one could tell us what bus we were getting on and just kept referring us to other people who didn't know either--causing us to wonder, "Are we in France, or what?" The good news is that (with the exception of a single transfer, which involved zero waiting time) we got there directly which is quite a change from my trips to Almeria which involve at least 5 different modes of transportation.  In total, the trip  took about 12 hours, but each way it was overnight, and though I didn't sleep too well on the buses, it was nice not to waste entire days en route.

So we arrived on Monday at 6a.m. and it was snowing fairly heavily (this didn't stop all week until Friday when it turned into rain).  It was a lot colder in Berlin, which made me develop a little appreciation for the weather in Lorraine.  The good news about snow is that it makes for nice pictures!  Our hostel was really well located, not far from Unter den Linten, which is a street with lots and lots of historic places like the cathedral, university, museums, the operahouse and, Opernplatz, the square that was the site of the Nazi book burning (see the third Indiana Jones film...).  The monument for this event is really cool...it is a window in the ground down to a room full of empty bookshelves, enough bookshelves to house all of the books that were burned.  

On Tuesday we did a free walking tour, and it was really cool.  It was nice to get a sort of "insider" view of the city and to see thing that we wouldn't have known how to find otherwise, such as the site of Hitler's underground bunker (which is now completely unmarked).  We also got to see building which housed the Nazi airplane strategists, which is now a tax office, and a cool socialist propaganda mural, which is left up as a reminder of the past, and finally we saw a lot of the wall and learned exactly how it worked.   There is so much history to the city that it is almost overwhelming. 

For the rest of the trip, we did a lot of shopping, saw a cool film museum in Potsdamerplatz, went to the national gallery, and found a really fun pub quiz in both German and English where we met some nice Berliners.

I also had the opportunity to meet up with some German friends who have moved to Berlin.  Luisa worked in Metz's tourism office last year and was my next-door neighbor in the foyer de jeunes travailleuses before I moved out.  She met with us and took us to a cool restaurant.  She is now working for the German Ministry of Foreign affairs, which is a really awesome job, and I am glad to have a connection there--who knows when I might need it?  

We also got to meet up with my friend Janne--we'd become last year in Metz because she was the roommate of my friend who was an assistant.  Janne took us around her neighborhood, which was really cool since it was a little off the beaten path and felt like "real Berlin."  

So Germany earns a place on my list of coolest places and places where I could imagine myself living--if I only spoke German!  Well maybe I'll start thinking about that once I conquer Spanish.  

"Je ne suis pas dictionnaire"

This sign hung on a string in the classroom of all of my high school French classes, and if we were really annoying my teacher, she would wear it around her neck and point to it every time we asked her for a word in French.  I'm having the same problem in my classes.  I give an assignment, and then they just ask me a zillion times, "How do you say this and how do you say that?" and the lazy ones don't even say it in English, it's just "Comment dit-on...?" over and over.  And well I'll admit that often it is good to ask a native to get the bon mot for the context because sometimes if you just use the dictionary word it can come out awkward or just flat out wrong.

This  is how in my first year of French I ended up saying "Je suis votre plus grand ventilateur" (I am your biggest ventilator") when I was trying to get out, "I am your biggest fan."

But I don't like knowing either that the website www.wordreference.com could replace me in my classes.

Branuary celebrations are continuing, still lots of fun, although the older I get the earlier I have to turn in...

I am getting my application together to be an assistant in Spain...let's see if I can use my connections to get placed in Almeria.

It was stealth snow; it fell Sunday night when I sleeping.  So I didn't see it until I stepped outside my apartment so early on Monday morning (but still running late) because I had to get all of my copies done before the first class.  3 inches covering everything without a single footprint.  It's then that I could have used snow shoes to get to work since it ended up taking me twice as long to walk to school.  Normally I don't pay too much attention to the weather.  I always dress warmly; I always carry an umbrella.  But this time I felt sort of deceived; I don't mind the snow, but it was cruel to fall when I wasn't paying attention and surprise me when I was running late.

It is Tuesday night which means that I am finished with class for the week, but whew, let me tell you that Mondays and Tuesdays run me completely ragged.  

On top of that we are having our "English Night" on Monday nights.  I am not sure I have mentioned "English Night" before but at our first lecteur meeting our boss encouraged us to set up a night to go to a bar and invite our students so that they would have the opportunity to speak English in a more relaxed atmosphere.  It really caught on last semester, partially because French students don't really have clubs or sororities or fraternities so they don't have too many contexts to meet other students.  But last semester among the 7 lecteurs we got into all sorts of confusion about what bar to have it in and what night of the week so this semester we have the date and time all sorted out, and we will only have it every two weeks because while it's really fun sometimes, it does feel like work other times.  Sometimes it's fun to hang out with the students and show them, "Hey, I am a person too!"  but sometimes hanging out with them gets tedious and or/awkward.

A few weeks ago I started tutoring some doctors, pneomologists to be specific.  Luckily I don't have to do much preparation, and they are nice and receptive.  This tutoring is solidifying my suspicion that after teaching English for so many subjects this year , I will be prepared teach English to any group of people in the future.

I started taking a Spanish class last Thursday.  I was actually looking for a class of one of my Mexican lectrice friends who said I could come, and I stumbled into the class of a different teacher and well just asked her if I could stay.  It was a strike day so there were only 2 students, and I think she was just glad to have someone else present.  Class ended early, and I stayed to chat, and she told me that my Spanish was better than anyone else's in the class (this is NOT a beginner class), and I'm still feeling pretty darn smug about that.

It is strike season again! People in the universities are all up in arms because the gov't wants to change the way teacher/researcher positions work.  A lot of teachers are withholding the grades from last semester in rebellion--to the dismay of the students, some of whom are not sure they will graduate now. All of my classes were cancelled last Tuesday, and I was still paid (oh joy of joys!)--because the day was "banalisée" which means that classes were cancelled so that everyone could discuss the reforms.  Now it seems like there will be massive professor strikes, although I will not be affected--if I strike, I don't get paid!  Plus, I don't care about teacher/researcher reforms.  It's going to mean a lower turn out in my classes from the students because they won't bother coming when most of their other classes are cancelled.  I'm not sure if I am happy or sad about this.

The strikes are not limited to the universities--trams, trains, you name it, just about everyone is striking.  Someone told me that they are striking to tell Sarkozy to do something about the economic crisis, but I just can't understand how someone could think that not working would help alleviate the suffering from the crisis?