Crois-moi

I’m starting a list of Unexpected Pleasures : things you wouldn’t expect to feel nice, but they do.

First on my list: riding a bike in the rain and feeling the droplets run down my cheeks, forehead, and nose (and then blowing them off with a big PFF).

And also: hearing a train rumble by when I readjust my sleeping position in the middle of the night.

Do you have any to add?

Here we go, I’m bracing for another headlong week. Monday has become the biggest hurdle : I teach a class at 8:30, then pedalpedal back home to work at Dickinson all morning. After lunch I teach three more classes, have a little break and then (as of tomorrow) meet up with my tutor for 2 hours of Arabic lessons!

Somehow I need to get my act together for teaching these kids English. Last week I was Observed by a person from the regional education office, which was scary, and I started to feel pretty insecure about my teaching abilities. But then, the very same day, children started approaching me with offerings and adoration (I got a rock, a drawing and two declarations of love) so if I’m not doing a good job of teaching them my language at least I’m inspiring some cross-cultural love. And I figure that if they’re enthralled by me during class, maybe they’ll stop kicking their neighbors and screaming ‘SEX!’ instead of ’six.’

Today Stew and I took his former host sister, the twelve year old Mélodie, to a museum for some contemporary art. It was great. She’s spunky and fun and I enjoyed going over the different art works together. After the museum we wandered across town so that she and Stew could get crêpes and pester each other like proper siblings for another hour before we took her home. That girl’s creative – when Stew tried to retrieve his stolen pen from her, she started yanking out his arm hairs, saying she was plucking them for him.

Normandy and Brittany are beautiful. The first two days out on our road trip we exclaimed over every cultivated hillside, gray stone farmhouse and head of livestock. After that we were acclimated but kept our eyes open, and we managed to do a lot in five days. We saw Bayeux, a handful of D-Day beaches and the American cemetery, Cancale, Saint Malo, Dinard, Lorient, Vannes, la Pointe de la Torche, and all the intervening villages. Each hostel was a special experience : in Bayeux, Stewart and I had a palatial room complete with politically incorrect antique furniture, but Breanna and Annie’s room was bare and even a little dingy. Saint Malo’s hostel smelled icky pretty much everywhere we went and had a kind of odd ambiance having something to do with the all of the young men who walked around in muscle shirts or greeted us through the just-ajar doors to their rooms. The hostel in Lorient was actually pretty normal, come to think of it. Just average.

Anyway, we managed to do most of the things we had set out to accomplish, and it was a growing experience for us all, I’m sure, as must be any trip which requires four people to shut themselves inside a car together for almost a week.

And then November happened, and it really was a whirlwind. I go through waves of feeling more and less comfortable with my jobs, depending on the feedback I get from day to day from the people I work with. If there’s one thing I need to learn this year, it’s not to let other people’s vibes dictate my confidence in my own performance.

For instance, I had two rowdy classes on Tuesday, and when I got home I felt like a bad teacher because I had had trouble keeping the gamins in line. Thinking about it again later, though,  I reminded myself that sometimes kids just need to wriggle, and it’s not my fault. The lesson actually didn’t go half badly, all things considered.

And Thanksgiving went downright well. We cooked things all day, set up the different tables and staging areas and all, fed everybody and still managed to enjoy ourselves and feel like we’d had a proper holiday. I even made a turkey, which was surprisingly easy.