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NCE to SYD
Two British girls - one year abroad - 10,000 miles apart.
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Reunited ❤️ Sydney Harbour Bridge, February 2017
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Australia Vlog, Part III.
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Australia – UK – France – UK – France… UK (Helen)
I currently frequent British Airways and EasyJet flights between Nice and London so often that I could draw you a blueprint of the terminals.
I have nailed the ‘seasoned traveller’ air at departures; long gone is the fumbling mess trying to find her boarding pass and passport in the bottom of a badly packed (usually oversized) bag.
It’s been a crazy couple of months, and I realised whilst in Sydney visiting Liz that I haven’t written a single blogpost this year! I’ve been up to my ears in applications for summer internships, swinging between ‘I can absolutely do this!’ and ‘why am I even attempting this?’ But the hard work – swotting up on business terminology, the psychometric testing, telephone interviews, flying back to the UK for an assessment centre with four days’ notice and a very unhappy class teacher – has finally paid off with an offer to spend ten weeks working for RBS within Analysis and Business Solutions. I nervously waited for the first half of this week, refreshing my emails and doubting the figures I’d used in my case study, then realised that I’d given them my UK number as my contact number. ‘Absolute wally’ is an understatement when describing how I felt realising that an offer had been waiting for me in a voicemail since Monday. Big shout out to my lovely best friend Phee, who not only had me to stay for the night in London, but also insisted on giving up her bed so that I got a good night’s sleep before, bought me crème eggs, provided top support and motivation, and made me the best cup of tea I’ve had in weeks. If you’re reading – thank you my angel, and a shout out to your fab flatmates! And to one of my super friendly interviewers who warned me before even starting ‘if my phone goes, my wife has gone into labour!’
The job offer has been a welcome relief given that France hasn’t been particularly easy since returning from Christmas break. Without going into it too much, I feel quite worn down with a difficult colleague, who is supposed to be in the position of supporting me and ensuring that I feel settled here. There have been numerous occasions when I have felt deliberately ‘tripped up’, and under credited, and ended up sat in tears in the headmaster’s office last Friday - always a highly embarrassing experience because the hierarchy is much more evident in schools in France - when I learnt that said colleague had shared information around the staff room and with the other language assistant that I had told her in confidence. If nothing else, I haven’t been short of examples for that age old ‘tell me about a time when you encountered a difficult work situation’ question in interviews! The experience has also brought me closer to certain colleagues, who have been nothing but supportive, and I am so, so grateful for that. (Delphine, thank you for letting me unattractively cry into your lovely jumper, and for inviting me to your dance/Tao class on Saturday – even if the instructor did start talking about ‘ze power of ze perineum’, in complete French I might add, and the importance of ‘sexual energy’.)
I’m determined not to let one person, and one element of my year abroad, affect my experience in general. Whilst it hasn’t been the year that I’ve expected – being located somewhere quite remote where the buses stop by 9pm latest doesn’t allow for the wild year off that might spring to mind for most when you say ‘I live in the South of France’ – I found myself questioning the other day whether I would ever ‘un-do’ my experience given the chance. The answer is a resounding no. As cliché as it feels to type, I am so much stronger than when I moved to France, my language has improved tenfold, and I feel a lot more confident and self-assured after six months of battling French bureaucracy and standing in front of a group of 16 year olds every day, trying to capture their attention in another language and stop them from firing swearwords that they think I won’t pick up on. Teaching has never been what I want to go into, but I’m so thankful for the experience, and will genuinely miss some of my classes. It warms my heart when students – many of whom gave up long ago, and have no interest in school – get excited when they walk into the classroom and realise that I’m teaching that day, or when they email me in their own free time to check their work or ask me about something that they’ve seen in English. On Monday I had one of my most rewarding moments – a teacher telling me that a previously unengaged student had requested to work with me for the following week, because our lesson together was ‘the best hour of English learning of his life’. Moments like that make the job completely worth it. Spending the year working, and living at school for a tiny amount each night, has also allowed me to travel to Sydney to see Liz, to plan for Thailand in May/June, and to have change left over! It’s a really rewarding feeling to be able to stand properly on my own two feet and not need to depend on my parents (at least not financially!) for this year.
Talking of Sydney – I MISS IT SO MUCH. It was wonderful to see Liz, and to get to share a bit of her year abroad and see all of her favourite places/meet the people important to her ‘down under’. I’ll leave all the details to the vlogs that Liz will be uploading on here over the next few weeks, or I’d be here all night, but I’ll be posting lots of photos. I have honestly never fallen so in love with a city in such a short space of time – the way of life, the people, the layout of the city itself. Oh, and lots of iced coffee and sunshine. I would give anything to go back and do it all again, and I will 100% be heading back in the future to see other bits of Australia. I cried a lot when leaving, and I haven’t cried about leaving somewhere since I was nine years old and leaving Disney World, so there’s your proof that it’s a very special place. I feel so very lucky to have had the opportunity to spend time in a country that some can only dream of visiting one day, and I’m so thankful to Liz for having me for two of the best weeks of my life.
I’m heading home tomorrow night for a weekend of early 21st celebrations, and I-got-a-summer-internship disbelief, with my biggest supporters, so I’m off to pack! I’ve also just booked flights to Paris for two weeks’ time to spend the weekend with Kat, which is super exciting!
Love and bisous as always,
Hels x
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Australia Vlog, Part II.
Hels: Then we went to the Blue Mountains…
Liz: …on Thursday.
H: So I sat by a really lovely couple on the flight out – he was originally from Australia but she’s relocated over here. And they said “you have to go to Empress Falls in the Blue Mountains”. So that was where we went!
L: It was fantastic. I mean, basically it was a large waterfall, so we were walking down…
H: …we were told 15 minutes.
L: It wasn’t 15 minutes. We were walking down, and walking further down… and we could hear water, we just kept walking down.
H: We’d see lots of sweaty people walking up to the top.
L: (simultaneously) We were like “this isn’t going to be fun on the way on the way up”. Actually, the way up wasn’t nearly as bad as I expected.
H: No, it was really nice.
L: But it was steep. Definitely steep.
H: And Liz got her bum out in the waterfall, and we had chicken and avocado sandwiches and then we walked back.
L: Well we had chicken and avocado sandwiches like four days running.
H: They were good sandwiches.
L: And then… did we do something when we got back?
H: We had to take the car back.
L: Oh yeah, we got rid of the Kia Rio.
H: Yeah we took the car back. And cafes close here at like 3pm, and we couldn’t find anywhere to go so we ended up going to that very nice man in the station and bought iced coffees.
L: Oh yeah, got iced coffee in a bottle, which is like cardinal sin here.
H: It was very nice though!
L: Oh yes, Tuesday when we went to get brunch and this was Helen’s first coffee experience in Sydney. And I was like “what coffee do you want?” And she says “a white one”.
(both laughing)
L: (shaking head) That’s not how it works.
H: It is in France.
L: It is in France. But then she laughs at me when I go “I’d like a soy flat white please”.
H: (sniggering) No, Liz goes “I’d like an iced coffee – oh, can you make that soy, and actually can I have the sugar on the side?”
L: (indignant) I didn’t ask for the sugar on the side! You’re supposed to mix it in with the shot of coffee before you put the milk in.
H: Very Sydney, anyway.
L: Well, when in Sydney…
H: So…. Friday was Barangaroo and the day it clouded over. And the funky guy by the cruise ship playing awful music.
(Liz pulls an unimpressed face)
L: On his ukulele, just slowly murdering Guns ‘n’ Roses.
But it was a really really gorgeous morning… and then it was starting to cloud over and I was like (pulls face) “let’s get back on the train”. By the time we’d got back to the train station at mine – bearing in mind it’s only two minutes walk from the train station to my flat – we still chose to go and get coffee in the station café rather than walk home because the rain was so torrential.
H: The monsoons descended again. We were going to do the pylon that day, but we decided to leave it so we could actually see…
L: …actually see something – other than the massive cruise ship that was sat in the harbour that day. Complete with like, a waterpark, or whatever it was.
H: Errrrm, Saturday was another overcast day. We’re not really selling it, are we? (laughing)
So we went to the cinema again. To be fair, we both had work to do that day as well.
L: We did, we did.
H: No, but we went for brunch as well! No… that was another day. We just live in Newtown.
L: We do – this is basically my life, living in Newtown.
H: No, it was just cinema day.
L: Because no holiday is complete without having to do internship applications and phone interviews and assessments.
(Hels has her head in her hands)
So no, we have had work to do. But we went to the cinema, which we thought would be a nice trip out on a Saturday morning… like, don’t get me wrong, I LOVE Natalie Portman, but that was about the most intense two hours you could have asked for on a Saturday morning really.
H: We went to see Jackie. I just sat and marvelled at Natalie Portman.
L: I was just like “when do we get to see his brains blown out?!” (clapping hands in glee)
H: It was quite graphic for that bit!
L: Yeah but that’s what actually happened.
H: I know. But I didn’t expect them to like… brains on the seat.
L: Ah well.
H: Casual Saturday morning viewing.
L: Highlight of Saturday though.
H: No, that was… We left, and Liz was like “that wasn’t what I expected”. But no, Natalie Portman was great so it was all good.
L: It was at least more intellectual than 50 Shades. You know, we can admit to having liked 50 Shades Darker if we at least went to see a sensible film that week.
H: Good cinema experiences. Expensive cinema, but… (shrugs)
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Australia Vlog, Part I.
Liz: I’m not even sure what we’re going to do… Right, so instead of writing a blog together, we thought we’d do a video log, because we’re just more hilarious in person.
Hels: We’ve left it right to the last day, so I have two hours until we leave for the airport.
L: With your trusty koala. [Hels picks up koala] This is Pierre.
H: So.
L: So… A run down of what we’ve been up to. Helen even has a list - of course she has a list.
H: We’ve done quite a lot though! We’ve fit a lot in.
So I flew and arrived on Monday 13th – shoutout to Qantas for being so lovely when you’re ill on their flights… Thankfully I wasn’t properly ill. Just quite hot and stuck by the window. [laughing]
L: And then when she eventually arrived and got her bag, she then sent herself through ‘something to declare’ because she’d brought a bag of peanuts into Australia. Not even an open bag of peanuts, just a bag of peanuts.
H: I was advised… I was advised by the air hostesses that if I had anything on this list. So I figured better safe than sorry, and then was just waved through along with all the people with their surfboards and thousands of dollars in cash and actual things to declare.
L: And you were so tired that you didn’t actually recognise me.
[both laughing]
When you got to arrivals, I was stood there with a very very large sign which said ‘MISS HELEN BREALEY’ and she just goes [oblivious looking around].
H: I saw everyone but Liz.
L: Literally this close [gestures about a foot away from face] before she realised I was there.
H: But we made it in the end.
L: We did.
H: And Liz turned up…
L: …I turned up in the Kia Rio…
H: …in the funkiest car I’ve ever seen. Probably suitable for a 60 year old, minus the massive customised lights stuck on the bumper.
L: A 6 year old?
H: 60 year old!
L: Oh yeah, 60 year old. Yeah it’s definitely a granny car. Except we calculated from the ridiculous headlights that it was probably some…
H: …17 year old boy.
L: Youth. Youth these days.
H: So we went up to Palm Beach, which was gorgeous… and went for lunch at that really funky place.
L: Oh, yeah!
H: Where the sandwiches were as big as my head.
L: That’s not hard.
[gesturing around face] Sandwich-sized.
H: And then… So that was Monday. I stayed awake for the whole of Monday.
L: Oh we went for a run as well. The best way to show you where I go to uni is “let’s run through it”.
H: Quite impressive.
L: It was quite impressive. I’m amazed you stayed awake all day actually.
H: And I think that was the earliest bed since I was about 10. About 8pm.
L: Welcome to my life!
H: Wild night with Liz… No, we’ll get onto that.
[both laughing]
L: That was next Monday!
H: Tuesday. Tuesday was the rainy day.
L: Tuesday was… yeah, Helen thought she’d arrived for summer in Australia.
H: Maybe I brought the English rain with me. But like, monsoon rain.
L: I took her to like, my favourite brunch spot in Sydney. Which is basically just a massive garden. That went well.
H: Not ideal in the rain. But that was nice – after they forgot us for 40 minutes outside.
L: Yeah, they gave us a buzzer and were like “we’ll call you when it’s ready for brunch”, and after an hour we went and said “that was a long 20 minutes”. They said “oh we’re not using the wait list anymore, the buzzers are broken”. Thank you.
H: So we did that. And then I got taken to the heaven that is Newtown.
L: I love Newtown…
H: …shortly before I stepped in poo, in my Birkenstocks.
L: [laughing] We had to get her some wet wipes because she was like “it’s not coming out of the little creases in my Birkenstocks”.
H: So yeah, I had to make a little trip to the pharmacy and buy some Wet Ones.
L: Wet Ones! [finger guns]
H: …to clean my shoes.
L: Oh and it was Valentines’ Day, so we went on the most cliché Valentines date. We went to see Fifty Shades of Grey… at lunchtime.
H: It was actually really good. Really really good.
L: [quietly] Yeah, I quite liked it…
H: And we took funky health food snacks.
L: We did take health food snacks! Basically Newtown… classic Newtown.
H: Really cool place.
And then Wednesday, Botany Bay and Cronulla.
L: That was good. I mean, we were supposed to go to the Royal National Park and I’m glad I checked the website because it was like “storms – don’t go here, you won’t be able to see anything, it’s too dangerous, don’t go anywhere near the cliffs”.
H: Yeah, so we went there, and then… we went to the Opera House [dreamy look].
L: It was great. So good.
H: It was amazing, but I wore the stupidest shoes in the world.
[both laughing]
L: Coming back on the train… Seriously, after we’d been to the concert, getting back on the train literally – I mean, the train is about a 5 minute walk from the Opera House and every step, Helen was like “ow, ow, I regret this”.
H: “Ow, ow”.
L: “Stupid shoes”.
I mean, it was funny, but not at the time.
H: No. So I walked barefoot down the steps of the Opera House – classy bird.
L: That’s quite a good anecdote actually! I was thinking more just like goddess, rather than… mess.
H: Great night though. Apart from the girl sat next to me, who was more interested in checking her Snapchat stories.
L: Oh the one next to me fell asleep.
H: It was a good night… for us, at least.
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Totally overexcited about feeding wallabies, 28th December 2016.
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Our gorgeous Christmas Day, complete with novelty hats! 25th December 2016.
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Balmoral Beach to Clifton Gardens walk, 7th December 2016.
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Covered in glitter at Strawberry Fields, 19th November 2016.
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New year, new blog post. (Lizzy)
“Woops, I did it again” doesn’t even cover my failure to keep up the writing. At least I have two months’ exciting content to now splurge.
Really, I should have written a post when I got back from Melbourne after exams. But I’ve been busy! If getting a Netflix trial for the sole purpose of binge-watching The Crown counts as busy. I believe I even got to the gym a few times. In all seriousness, I was actually at work fairly solidly for the few weeks between going to Melbourne and my family arriving for Christmas. And I realised that I was also simply exhausted, having thrown myself into uni every week since the semester began in July - this is not a complaint, I hasten to add. Passing all of my modules with good grades - apart from Japanese, but even passing that was some sort of miracle - was proof enough for me that I deserved to give my brain a break.
Strawberry Fields festival was certainly an interesting kind of break. I flew to Melbourne the same afternoon as I finished exams, and the next day I was out in the middle of nowhere at Strawberry Fields. My friend Liam had found himself with a spare ticket and I’d essentially invited myself - apparently I wasn’t too bad a companion for what ended up being one of the weirdest weekends I could have imagined. With a crowd of five or six thousand people, Strawberry was a far cry from my previous festival experiences - namely, Glastonbury. This didn’t just manifest in the size of the festival, but also in my general inability to tolerate life in a tent. I can say with confidence that I was absolutely no help pitching said tent, and that our choice of pitch - which turned out to be next to a near-24/7 deep house stage - was possibly the worst decision we made all weekend. Nearly two months on, I can still feel the bass vibrating through the ground that I was trying to sleep on. Also, at a gathering whose dress code appeared to be “go crazy or go naked”, complimented by a hefty amount of drinking and drugs, I clearly didn’t fit in: rising at the sort of time that people were wandering towards their tents after partying all night, and taking advantage of the lack of phone signal to sit and read my book for hours each day. But for all the sweat, dirt and portaloos, there were also some pretty amazing things. Namely morning swims in the Murray River, the amount of hammocks and general chilling areas built into and around the art installations, and the Tea House stage that saved my life (see: reggae/disco/jazz, fairy lights and tea ceremonies). By the time we left, everything we had brought with us was covered in a layer of grime, and I was ready to sleep for days. A break? Absolutely not. But intriguing/amusing/eye opening? Very.
I only spent another day or two with Liam before heading back to Sydney on the 23rd November, and on my only afternoon actually IN Melbourne, I foiled my own plan to visit a museum or some other culturally enriching entity by stumbling across a cat cafe instead. Even returning to Sydney turned out to be a small nightmare: with my flight being cancelled, I ended up spending the night in an Ibis Budget hotel (essentially a luxury prison cell) and catching a rescheduled flight the next morning. As I have explained to my mother, this was the only instance for as long as I can remember that I have been to McDonalds - a bad night’s sleep and being torrentially rained on had added insult to injury, and chicken nuggets for breakfast was the only thing that would pacify me.
Other than a few beach trips and walks in between working, that was the end of my adventures until my family arrived on the 14th December. I spent every day of this three week interim bouncing up and down with excitement - I’ve loved every minute of living here, but I’ve of course missed home somewhat, or mainly the people that I call “home”. For the first five days of our holiday together, we stayed in a gorgeous traditional terrace house in Newtown, thanks to Airbnb. I'd say that Newtown is to Sydney what Shoreditch is to London: a youthful, trendy hub of liveliness, with more than its fair share of hipsters. It therefore makes for a fantastic collection of restaurants and bars, and apparently I didn’t fail once in my choice of food - I lost count of the number of times Mum told me I should become a food critic (I can dream, right?) Unfortunately the weather was less fantastic, soaring to a humid 36 degrees on the first day (unsurprisingly, after 24 hours’ travelling, my family didn’t entirely share my enthusiasm for a brisk walk around my suburb and the uni campus), and then proceeding to rain heavily for two days solid. In classic Caroline fashion, Mum not only brought her hot water bottle, but also a multitude of jumpers - one of which I hand delivered to her when she spent a morning working at a colleague’s office, because apparently wearing two still hadn’t been enough. You can take Caroline out of Britain, but you can’t take the Brit out of Caroline. Whilst Will staved off his jet lag by partying with a friend whose gap yah stop in Sydney fortunately overlapped with our holiday for a few days, Mum and I wandered around Surry Hills in the rain, drank a lot of tea, and were in bed before 9pm most evenings. I might as well have been at home, it was bliss.
We had a unexpectedly sociable holiday, too. A trip up the coast to Palm Beach with Colin, a friend of Mum’s from her skydiving days (pre-me); an impromptu beach afternoon with family friends we haven’t seen for ten years; and coffees, lunches, dinners and ice creams with various other people. After Newtown, we spent the pre-Christmas week in Manly, beaching and beaching and beaching. Will surfed every day, and even Mum and I managed a surf lesson. It was another Airbnb triumph, this time a gorgeous loft house - two minutes from the beach, cosy, and complete with a visiting flock of cockatoos every evening. Christmas lunch was amazing: a beachside restaurant, no turkey in sight (I don’t have anything against turkey, but a change was nice - though I still stuffed myself to the point where I couldn’t physically function until I’d taken a nap). On Boxing Day, we flew to Melbourne to visit Liam’s family, who lived in the UK when I was in primary school but have since lived abroad. Said trip was proceeded by trying to hire a car online on Christmas Eve for Boxing Day (the only time I’ve ever witnessed Mum not booking something weeks/months/years in advance), and so we found ourselves driving the couple of hours out of Melbourne to our friends’ house in someone’s 2003 Honda Jazz. Glamour personified. It was a wonderful few days, including a visit to a wildlife sanctuary, and a small local food and music festival we visited one night, at which Will and Liam drank competitively to build the tallest mountain of empty beer cans possible. This venture resulted in the boys bunking off to the pub, stealing a childrens’ scooter on their return to the festival, and Liam being covered in countless insect bites the next day, having fallen asleep in the garden in just his underwear.
The last few days of our holiday were spent back in Sydney, and despite a hiccup with the accommodation, it was a relaxed and happy note to end on. For New Year’s Eve, we spent the evening on a ferry in the harbour with a picnic. Although expensive, a boat trip was completely worth it: the views of the sunset, the aerial display, the city skyline and, of course, the fireworks, were stunning. I left Mum and Will at the airport on New Year’s Day with a heavy heart; I’m so looking forward to what the next six months of my exchange will bring, but having my family here for Christmas made everything even more special. Admittedly I’ve spent the last few days really missing them, but I’ve also been keeping busy and having some really great me-time: getting some admin done, treating myself to a coffee if I’m out and about, reading, seeing friends, and getting back in the gym. I should be back at work in the new few days, and it’s only a matter of weeks until Helen gets here!
As ever, onwards and upwards.
Liz x
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Love, But Not ‘In Love’ (Helen)
I’ve had two blissful weeks at home for Christmas and there’s one question that I’ve been asked so many times I’ve lost count – ‘how is year abroad going?!’ We usually follow this by lots of French clichés and laughing and ‘I didn’t have that opportunity when I was your age – how incredible!’ Yes, it is an amazing opportunity, but the thought of leaving home again in a few days to fly back to France fills me with a dread that I can’t really describe.
In the twelve weeks that I’ve already spent in France, I’ve learnt more than I ever could have hoped, and I think it has been what I needed to bring me out of my shell a little and challenge me. But at the same time, it has very much confirmed that I don’t want a career in anything relating to teaching (and has given me a whole new level of respect for anyone who has enough patience to even consider it!), and truthfully I’ve often felt lonelier than any other time in my life. I appreciate just how lucky I am to have such an amazing group of friends surrounding me at home, and being away from that is hard. There aren’t many assistants in the town that I live in, and even then it’s not a very close group of assistants. We rarely go out – mainly because Grasse has so little to offer – and going out will be even harder in the New Year now that the train station has closed to allow for refurbishment of the track between Grasse and Cannes. I feel selfish, because I couldn’t wish for the people I’m working with to be any nicer, but there’s just something almost missing. Liz said it’s sad that I’m counting down each time to the end of term and to heading home, but that doesn’t mean that I’m not taking anything away from my time abroad.
I’m noting the positives in that my language has improved no end, and I feel a lot more culturally aware. I’m lucky in that I’ve been able to travel quite extensively along the south coast and to visit friends in other parts of France. But the experience in general is challenging me a lot more than I expected it to. I sometimes feel a little like I’m putting on a bit of a front, but at the same time maybe not because it’s certainly not like anything is wrong. I just haven’t fallen in love with the experience like I expected to. I’ve learnt a lot, and I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else in France in terms of being located in the Côte d’Azur, but the thought of heading back to Heathrow and getting on a British Airways flight back to Nice on Monday morning doesn’t leave me feeling good. Maybe I’ll feel differently when I get back there and settle back into my routine, and I’m reminding myself that of course home and the UK is always going to feel easier, that pushing myself out of my comfort zone is how I’ll grow. I wouldn’t say no if a job sent me in the direction of France in the future, and I love speaking the language, but it’s not somewhere I want to settle.
I’m having the idolised experience of life abroad, and I’ll forever be grateful for that, but to anyone in the same boat feeling like it’s not the roses and barrels of laughs that we were promised, I get you. You don’t have to be 100% ‘in love’ with your year abroad to be making the most of it, and there’s no one way to do year abroad.
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Tu me manques, Angleterre. (Helen)
11 weeks have passed since I arrived in France. (Whaaat?!)
I arrived over-emotional, lacking in confidence after a horrendous French au-pairing experience, and heartbroken after someone who I cared deeply about turned around and told me he’d met someone else (icing on the cake – she’s French!) Safe to say, I wasn’t feeling too positive about my little move across the English Channel. Where am I now? A fair few lbs heavier thanks to a new found love for camembert and red wine, significantly more proficient in spoken French and paperwork, and with a renewed sense of self-confidence – I have the endless compliments from my students to thank for that, even if some days I do want to tear my hair out and hide under the desk eating the sweets that I’d (wrongly) thought would buy their attention for an hour. But most importantly, I am happy and settled. I never thought that I’d feel so at ease living in a foreign country and speaking another language, and I’d be lying if I said I don’t feel pretty damn proud of myself for how far I’ve pushed myself out of my comfort zone. That being said, I’m so excited to get home for a couple of weeks to spend Christmas with family, though it’ll no doubt feel weird being surrounded by so much English again, and driving on the left hand-side of the road, right hand-side of the car.
Since I last blogged, I’ve been to visit Abbie at her gorgeous apartment in Toulon, where we drank far too much wine and coffee, but it would be rude not to with the cute balcony and the nearest beach bar serving a glass of wine as big as your head for just €5! I’ve had my second training day in Nice, been to various Christmas markets where the norm seems to be to wrap fairy lights around the palm trees, and experienced Thanksgiving dinner for the first time. I’ve struggled over writing my first cheque, now that I actually have a proper cheque book, been hiking in the beautiful French mountains with Delphine and Arcadia, and discovered a little haven in the form of a huge warehouse of English books, run by British expats. I’ve also cracked the mystery of every single student reciting the exact same (wrong) phrase in their presentation. The official, printed textbooks are teaching them said phrase. I give up. Words have been spoken with Mr I-Can’t-Stop-Making-Sexual-Gestures-In-Class who is now, seemingly, reformed to an absolute angel of a student (she says, holding her breath). And I’ve educated a student who wasn’t aware that different time zones are a thing…
Avoiding my CAF application like the plague, whilst the boarders make howling noises in the common room (I work with 15 – 18 year olds, not pre-schoolers, believe it or not), I’ve found myself reflecting on the main things I’ve learnt over the past 3 months:
Pronunciation is everything
I had to stifle a few laughs as my students told me during our lesson on city tours that ‘you can eat good food in pubes in Dublin’. Sorry, what? Pubs, kids. Then there was the girl during the lesson on ordering drinks in a restaurant or bar who interpreted cava, as in the alcoholic drink, written on the sheet as me asking her how she was (ça va). That being said, I can hardly laugh given that I got corrected this week when I pronounced the ‘t’ sound at the end of ‘doigts’ (fingers). Turns out that rather than talking about my fingers, I was referring to a sexual act involving someone else’s fingers…
You can never find a cashpoint, but rest assured that you’re never far from a condom machine. Priorities.
The French don’t really go in for outdoor cash machines other than if they’re directly outside the bank linked to it. Argh.
Adopt a laissez-faire attitude as quickly as possible.
French transport is shocking, and the trains frequently announce halfway through your journey without any warning that they will be terminating at the next station, or simply suddenly appear as ‘cancelled’ on the station boards and app with no explanation. Last week Arcadia and I found ourselves sat at a near-deserted station, questioning whether the next train home would be cancelled too and calculating how much time we would have to run to catch the last bus. I eventually got home to find that there was a power cut meaning that the front gates weren’t working and that there was no internet for the next day or so. Apparently the fact that Marina and I weren’t able to access where we’re supposed to sleep wasn’t of huge concern to the site manager…
As for paperwork, don’t even get me started. That’s enough to drive anyone to a nervous breakdown.
French men really aren’t as eloquent in their flirting ability as the stereotype suggests.
Example in case – walking home from the Toulon Christmas Market with Abbie, Rosie, and Rosie’s friend from home Ayesha. Some French men decided to shout as we walked past, quickly realised that we probably weren’t French, and so resorted to shouting their only known phrase of English - ‘big dicks!’ Delightful
Be careful who you smile at
I’ve perfected my ‘resting bitch face’ given that it’s still very much the case in France that if you, as a woman, smile at a man that you do not know, you’re indicating being sexually interested in him. So long, smiley hels.
Learn your slang
I thought that my French was half decent until I stepped into the classroom and heard everything from ‘putain’ (which can mean anything from sh*t to f*ck) to ‘branleur’ (wanker). Then there’s the day to day abbreviations that just go straight over my head. Slang, especially when it’s vulgar, is very difficult to directly translate in terms of how offensive, and there are so many variations that I’m constantly worried that the students are just throwing insults around.
Everyone spits
Maybe because everyone smokes (straights) from the age of about 14. In fact there’s almost as much spit on the pavements as there is dog poo. There goes that lovely romantic image of beautiful France.
Even the boys do bisous
Good luck working out who to kiss and who you should just shake hands with. And always go for ‘vous’ initially just to be safe. ‘Comment allez-vous?’ is a polite form of ça va (how are you ?) whilst ‘quoi de neuf’ is the super informal version.
French gyms are very odd.
And a rip off. I went to a trial session with Marina last week – a cardio fat burner class, followed by ‘oxygene’ which was described to me as ‘like yoga’. More like yoga on crack. There’s something disconcerting about thrusting your hips in the air to Rihanna’s ‘Work’ in a gym so small that the actual workout area is directly behind you so people can watch the shenanigans whilst they work out. In addition, you need a doctor’s note to join the gym to say that you’re physically fit enough. So basically if you’re someone who genuinely needs to lose weight and could do with joining the gym, you probably can’t. How ironic.
Shampooing/Après-shampooing
Simple little words like this – shampoo and conditioner – which describe exactly what they are lull you into a false sense of security that the French language is logical. Throw in the grammar rules and the idioms and it’s as far from logical as you can get.
Laïcité is an odd concept.
I’m not allowed to teach about Christmas, because it’s a ‘religious holiday’, yet there’s a Christmas tree up and we get the last afternoon off so the staff can have a good old Christmas party?
The French don’t like to have to wait
If you want to cross at a (marked) pedestrian crossing, you have to stick your leg out and look busy in the hope that the Citroen hurtling towards you will stop. Failing that, it’s a broken leg. Oh, and a hefty bill because France don’t go in for NHS style healthcare.
In the same respect, queueing is alien to the French, which makes the inner Brit in me shudder. Often I’ll be in a shop and realise that I’m actually getting further away from the till. Just this week, an old man strolled straight to the front of the busy checkouts in the supermarket and positioned himself in front of me with his baguette and bottle of red wine. Not today, Pierre. 3 months in France has taught me to stand my ground.
Failing all else, just shout and throw your arms in the air
In Antibes last weekend, walking back to the station with Arcadia, we witnessed a minor car accident that had just occurred, and with it how one should resolve said situation when in France. Do not exchange your insurance details. Get out, slam your door, shout, then get back in your car. Wind down your window and shout some more, stall the car, then drive off.
9 sleeps, 2 of which will be in Lyon this weekend at the Fête des Lumières! See you soon England!
Lots of love,
Hels x
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