Monday, October 1st, 2013
Two things of good news. 1) the internet started working at the foyer on Sunday. So much for having to wait until Monday, but I’m not complaining. Just in time too, because I had forgotten how totally dead everything is on Sundays in France. This is one thing I don’t think I will ever get use to, or quite agree with. Not only do things close early during the weekdays, like at 7pm but stores aren't open at all on Sundays. This leaves only 1 day of real shopping for those who need to do it and it's a made house when you go anywhere. I understand that everyone deserve time off for religous stuff, but France is not exactly orthodox catholic or anything so why care if people work? I mean yeah, give people off if they do want to go to church, but some people like students even prefer to work weekend so they don't have to during the week. Anyway, end of rant. Yay internet!
2) today was our orinentation for all the assistants. I finally got to meet a lot fo the other assistants and see which ones were in my city and region. It was a very long day, with some things I found to be a bit pointless and other things which were nice. One of the nice things was they had a representative with Banque Populaire there who was very nice and said we could come by anytime to set up a bank account. I'll probably go with them since there is a branch right by the foyer and on my way to the tram I take to g to school. They also had information about health insurance and social security but it was all very confusing. They went over a bit about what our role as an assisant is but said we would get more about this on our training day on Oct 10th. The gist of our role as assistants is bascially to make students talk and to make sure they get counted absent if they don't show up.
We also did a little tour of the city, which was a bit pointless for most of use since we had already been here about a week and had seen pretty much everything. We ate lunch at the school whixh was like any other French school lunch. Though this time we had Paella, which is a spanish seafood dish. Note to self: sea food in school is not all that great, very fishy tasteing. On a more interesting note, they actually put muscles in the dish plus whole shrimp. You would never find that in an A,merican school. partly because it would be too expensive, and also I don't think kids would know how to eat it. When you get shrimp in France it's usually whole ones with the head still on...yummy. I love it when my food looks back at me.
But tomorrow I head to my school for some observing and hopefully everything goes well.
