Oh man, it's been a while. I think the easiest thing to do is to start with a cast of characters. Here goes:

Ana - a Spanish assistant from Salamanca. I've seen a lot of her lately, which has been really fun. And good for me - she doesn't speak English, so it's mostly when I'm with her that I really speak French. She works in the same school as Hannah and Ryan, and she, Ryan and Raquel are roommates. Their place is about a 5-10 minute walk from my first school.

Hannah - I've mentioned her here before, I know. She's from Berlin and is one of the first people I met here. She also lives right near me, which is excellent because we can walk home together if we decide to stay out past the oh-so-late hour of midnight, when transport stops running. (Hi, Hannah!)

Jack - British assistant who works in a primary school. Also one of the first few people I met.

Marie - my roommate, a French art student. I don't know her super well yet, but she's really friendly, and also a little punk.

Michael - another assistant, this time from Australia. He speaks really good German as well as French, which means hanging out with him and Hannah is a lot of linguistic fun. No, seriously, I'm not being sarcastic. I love it.

Pierrick - Marie's friend who lives in our building. The spelling of his name is a total guess. Hanging out with the two of them is fun, mostly English with a little French, and always silly. They like to ask me to interpret the lyrics of bad-but-fun American pop songs, with hilarious results.

Ryan - assistant from Michigan, lives with Ana. Since we see each other mostly around her, Ryan and I speak to each other almost exclusively in French, to the amusement of a French kid who we met at a party.

Sara - assistant from New York. She is a ball of energy and lots of fun to be around. Fun fact: she was a flying carpet for Halloween as a kid, but not the one from Aladdin.

Steven - assistant from the UK, though I forget exactly where. He like pub quizzes, and comes up with team names like "Team It Takes Three Entire Weeks to Open a Bank Account in Lyon" and "Team SFR Takes A Month to Start Your New Internet Connection In Lyon" (both true, btw). One of those people who seems to know everyone, and very fun and friendly.


And now, excerpts from the past three weeks, in no particular order.

On the ninth, a week after starting work, we had our orientation. It was equal parts self-explanatory and confusing, with (on the one hand) a lot of information we'd necessarily already gotten from other sources since we were already on the job, and on the other hand tossed-off references like "oh, and of course you all know you're required to buy civil insurance, you should look into that, good luck" (not, of course, referenced in any of our paperwork or mentioned by any of our schools). On the plus side it didn't last long, and during the second half of it we met with other people who were teaching the same school levels as us to trade about lesson plans, discipline, dealing with our schools, etc. Frustratingly (for me), the woman who was facilitating decided to do it in French, although she speaks English (being an English teacher) and the orientation groups were split by language. I'm getting much much more comfortable in French, particularly with understanding, but this was a lot of detailed information that I really wanted to understand thoroughly. Fortunately, enough people started asking questions in French, gave up, and switched to English that she eventually gave up and stuck with that language.

The ideas people gave were somewhat useful, with different games we can play with the kids and stuff like that, but it turns out that almost everyone else has vastly fewer classes than I do. I have 21 different groups, and really it's closer to 30 or 35, because with several of them I'll take half the class each time-slot, meaning I'll see a particular student once every four weeks instead of every two. (Most people I've talked to have a total of 10-15 groups, so more like 20 half-groups at most.) That really makes it hard for me to see how I'm supposed to build any kind of relationship with the kids - it's hard to demonstrate consistency when seeing me is so rare that it's necessarily outside of routine. But still, at least some of the suggestions seem like they'll be useful - not least the suggestion to inform the teachers at School 2 that I'm entitled to two weeks of observation before they get to send me off by myself. (They claimed that they'd "never heard of that" and "it must be a new policy," despite it apparently having been on the books pretty much since the program was conceived. But they did finally agree.)

My favorite moment was toward the end when we got into a conversation about things that are different in the US and the UK, touched off by a reference in some of the suggested materials to "lollipop ladies." Apparently that's what they call crossing guards, because the stop signs they hold look like big lollipops. Anyway, that led to discussions of different holidays, like Thanksgiving for us or, for the British kids, Guy Fawkes Day. They explained it to us thusly:

[Explanation of the plot and how he was captured]
"Yeah, and then he was burnt on a bonfire."
"No, hung, drawn & quartered!"
"THEN burnt on a bonfire."
"And on Guy Fawkes Day all the kids go around with effigies in wheelbarrows and burn them! It's really cute!"
[American] "Yeah, that sounds . . . cute. . ."


Most of my non-working (and non-hanging-out-at-my-apartment) time lately has been spent hanging out with Ana and Ryan and co, and that has been excellent. As mentioned above, talking to Ana means speaking French, and since a) I have no choice but to speak one of my foreign languages with her and b) she's not a native speaker either, any self-consciousness disappears. I've also found that I'm much better able to understand French when spoken by native speakers of Spanish, which is useful for now but probably not great in the long run - the reason it's easier is a combination of over-pronunciation of letters that are really meant to be mostly dropped, and a word-order that's familiar to me from Spanish but not technically correct, or at least not in common use. But for now the main thing for me is just to get out and get talking, and for that it's been perfect, not to mention a lot of fun.

Also, my previous experience with tutoring ESL and with interpreting a bit for friends who aren't native to English, I seem to have a bit more of an awareness for who, at any given time, can't follow the thread of a conversation - remembering that Ana can't follow when we go into English, that some British non-assistants can't follow into French, and that most people can't come along into Spanish or German. That's not to say that I'm the only one who notices things, but I do a good amount of filling Ana in on what's going on during detours into English, which is both good practice and a lot of fun.

Being Spanish, A is also of the opinion that lunch is a Meal, for which cold sandwiches and the like are Not Appropriate. Since their place is so close to my School 1, I've gone there for lunch a few times when our schedules mesh, which has been really nice. Ana claims not to like cooking, but last time I went over she made something called "arroz a la cubana," or Cuban-style rice. It doesn't sound like something I would like at all, but it was actually really delicious, not to mention easy:

- Cook some rice.
- Put some tomato sauce in a pan and heat it until it's hot enough to boil. (She apparently normally uses straight tomato sauce, but she didn't explain when she asked me to pick some up, so I got veggie pasta sauce and it worked really well for this.) Into the hot tomato sauce, crack as many eggs as you have people. They should each be in a separate part of the pan, and if possible you shouldn't break the yolk. You can't really stir it without messing up the eggs, so she just sort of jiggled the pan every now and then to move things around slightly. Keep cooking it until the eggs are as cooked as you want them.
- Meanwhile, fry two or three bananas in butter until they're blackened and almost falling apart.
- When the eggs are done, serve everything together.

I'm not really that big on eggs and normally I hate bananas, but this was inexplicably delicious.


Another cool thing of the past week was that Steve Yang (of TJ and UVA fame) dropped by for a visit, passing through from Paris to Geneva (and points beyond). My apartment is teeny tiny (pics to follow), so Ryan and Ana and Raquel generously offered to host him for me. Highlights include a tasty dinner at a local bouchon (a type of traditional Lyonnaise restaurant), another tasty dinner at a local vegetarian place Steve had read about, and general wanderings around the city. At one point we also decided to hike up from Vieux Lyon to Fourvière (aka the Elephant). There's a funicular you can take (which wikipedia informs me is the oldest still-used funicular in the world), but we decided to walk up about a million stairs instead, which seemed like a much better decision before the skies opened. By the time we made it to the top we were thoroughly drenched, but still in pretty good spirits. As a teacher at my school pointed out to me, in winter in Lyon, warm winds bring rain and cold winds bring sun. So we might have been soaked, but at least it wasn't too freezing.

More soon. (Also, see below for another entry.)