Today was the first day at my 2nd school, and if anything it was more chaotic than before. I finally got my class schedule yesterday, and it's different alternating weeks. The teacher I've been emailing with asked me to come in at 9a, before my classes, to meet the principal. So I dutifully turned up at 9a, to the confusion (and pity) of the very kind secretary, who informed me that he wouldn't be in for some time. In the meanwhile I got my keys (which, if I understood correctly, are for the only part of the school I don't have classes in?) and got a lunch card made for the cafeteria. Eventually the principal, who wasn't expecting me, came and said "Oh hi, you're the new English assistant? Great!" and left. That was it.

At 10a I went to the room indicated on my schedule, only to be met by a baffled art teacher who told me I was in the wrong place and took me to the nearest available English teacher. Evidently this is Week B, meaning I'd missed my 9a class while waiting for the absent principal (though no one seemed to mind this?) and had nothing further to do until 11a. Most weeks I'll have a 3h gap between the 11a-noon class and a 3-4p class, but that teacher wasn't ready for me, so I could go home early.

Thinking that now I'd be able to go to the rental agency, I decided to make use of the hour of waiting by making photocopies of some of the documents they require. With that in mind, I went and asked the secretary to show me what to do. She sent me to the other secretary for the access code, who told her officemate to get it for me, and off I went. Two minutes later, when I came back to ask why it didn't seem to work, she gave me a funny look and said it wasn't for the copy machine right in front of her office; it was for the teachers' copy machine, upstairs. That machine accepted the code, but I couldn't seem to convince it to actually copy anything for me. After two minutes of poking about randomly, it spit out - and I am not making this up - a page of the sheet music for "Summertime," from Porgy and Bess. By then I was starting to attract stares from the other teachers, so I pretended that this was exactly what I'd been after all along, and fled.

Class, when it finally happened, did not go as well as I could have hoped. They were (I'm seeing in retrospect) 3rd-Euro, so the oldest and also most advanced class I'll have - not to mention the only one at either school that I'll see every week instead of every other. The format of the class was exactly the same as at the other school, with me up front answering questions, but with a key difference: the teacher wasn't there. She split the class into two groups of 15 and sent me into another room with half the kids, and after half an hour we switched. It wasn't awful, but it really, really wasn't good. I have had not a single minute of any kind of teacher's training, and I have no strategies for getting 14-year-olds to do what they've been told to do in the absence of a "real" teacher. Most of them didn't really bother asking questions; they just talked to each other (in French) so loudly that I couldn't hear anyone who actually was trying to talk to me. They didn't seem to dislike me, and didn't ignore me altogether - most of them did ask at least one question, and laughed at funny answers - but they just would not stop talking to the kids around them, for a cumulative effect of not even being able to hear me borderline-shouting asking them to keep it down.

Which sucks. Because, from what I can tell, I'm not going to get any training. I don't particularly want to resort to threats, but even if I did, I have no idea how their discipline system works so I wouldn't know what to say. And I have no real sense of what level of nonsense is acceptable in French classrooms, anyway. It's frustrating mostly because the times I'm with them are supposed to be cool and fun, a chance for them to do something other than copy things down from the blackboard and do textbook exercises, so I really don't want to have to be strict. And as a kid I never had much respect for strict teachers anyway; bullies are bullies regardless of the age differential. But I'm really not sure what direction to take this in.

After the class was over, the teacher asked me what I thought. I said that their questions were good (which was largely true) but that they were really loud. Since we were in different halves of the same divided trailer, I had assumed she'd heard the noise and how loudly I kept having to talk to be heard at all, but apparently not . . . she looked really surprised and said asked which group, and got a very determined look on her face when I said both. So maybe she'll take care of that for me, at least to some extent - I'm not really sure. She didn't offer any strategies, but she was running out the door. So we'll see, I guess.

Eventually I managed to get some non-musical copies made, and headed out to the leasing agency to try and negotiate some sort of compromise between their requirements and what I can actually provide. They want French bank account info, 3 previous pay stubs, and a solvent French person to act as my guarantor. I have none of these. I have American bank info, but you can't open a French bank account without proof of address, and I don't have an address, which is why I need an apartment. Without a bank account I can't get paid once (let alone three times), and anyway I don't get my first check for weeks if not months. The closest thing I have is a completly unofficial scrap of paper that says "you'll take home about 780€" down at the bottom. And in place of a guarantor I have LocaPass, a French governmental program whose specific purpose is to act as a guarantor to foreigners, young people and others without anyone French to do it for them. If I default, the government reimburses the rental agency for my unpaid rent. Acceptance of LocaPass in lieu of a guarantor is required by law.

I still have no idea whether my first and second substitutions are acceptable (or if they're not, what would be) because, in point of fact, the LocaPass-acceptance law is considered quaint and adorable by virtually all rental agencies, and is thus flagrantly violated. I'm not really sure why - it seems like a promise from the government to pay would be worth more than a promise from some random person, but I think it might have to do with the fact that the government makes you process a bunch of paperwork to file the claim. Anyway, back to the drawing board for the moment. I've got at least until Thursday (when hopefully-soon-to-be-roommate gets back into town) to come up with something. The Bargels are out of the running because they're already doing it for all three of their children. Tomorrow I'm going to ask for advice at my main school, and if that's no good I'm going to stop by UVA's study-abroad office at Université Lyon 2 and see what they suggest to the study abroad kids (who also have to find their own housing). The woman who works there apparently spends a lot of her time sorting out housing issues, so if nothing else maybe she can bully the rental agency into, you know, following the law. If that doesn't work, maybe future-roommate's parents can be convinced to guarantee me as well as her, and if that falls through I guess I'll start looking for another apartment. But hopefully it won't come to that. This all seems really silly because, regardless of what goes on the form, my parents are obviously the ones who would actually pay if something went wrong and I couldn't, so I don't need anyone to actually take on the responsibility of agreeing to pay my rent. I just need a name for a paper. . . but it's a scary paper that apparently says that if I stop paying rent without warning, the guarantor can be liable for three entire years' worth of rent (regardless of the fact that my lease isn't going to run past May). So I can understand people not wanting to be on the hook for something in the neighborhood of 13,000€. But still.

Anyway, hopefully that will all get sorted out soon. Tomorrow is back to School 1, so I'm hoping it will go as well as it did on Thursday.

And now, sleep.