Hello beautiful new day! What’s that? What’s that you say? It’s still dark outside?
It’s cloudy and just a little bit rainy? I have to leave the house at 6AM in
order to drive to Lille for Orientation?
That’s just a brief description of
how I felt this morning when I woke up at 5:30AM. My roommate drove us to Lille
(a 2 hour drive) in order to get to our 9AM Orientation. Wait just a minute,
you most undoubtedly point out, if it’s a 2 hour drive, why on earth didn’t you
leave at 7 instead of 6. Well dear reader, we wanted to allow plenty of time
for traffic and human error and boy am I glad we did. I ended up arriving just
a couple of minutes before 9; traffic is thriving in Lille. However, we did not
start until a bit after 9:30 so in this case you are very nearly right.
Four
hours of paperwork talk was more than enough to get us all very hungry for our
cafeteria lunch (pasta topped with vegetables and a slab of meat but no sauce
unless you count the mustard sauce which was delicious but I failed to grab
enough of it to really drench my pasta because I was worried I might not like
it). I sat with some pleasant young folk of near my own age. All the English
speakers were together and I was surprised by the variety of countries of origin
as well as accents. The girls from India had Indian accents, the Chinese girl
from England had and English-Chinese accent even though English was there first language they learned it with the accent of their parents I guess. There was an Irish accented girl
(I kept being surprised when she said serious things with an Irish accent
because I kept expecting her to say the cliché things I usually hear in that
tone), English accents, Australian accents, New York, Southern, even a
Canadian, all accounted for.
After
lunch we had another two hours of activities to prepare us for teaching (mostly
useless, or something I could have learned in a brief e-mail). Finally, at
around 5 o’clock we started our 2 hour drive home, which took us almost 3
hours. After all that work, the most interesting thing I learned was that it is
impolite to drink from a water bottle in public, or to even ‘chug’ water in
public. This is why the French people have such small glasses for water at
meals. The students are not allowed to drink water in class either. Our
instructor told us today that ‘if it is a really hot day we can tell the
students to set aside the rule for 5 minutes and pull out their water bottles,
have a sip, and put them away. But definitely, under no circumstances let them
drink water otherwise because they are just testing you. And if you don’t set
down the rules they will be pulling out their cell phones next.’ All of this I
found rather comical.
So
Orientation accomplished. Unfortunately, there are to be two more such events
where we will work more with teaching ideas. Each language has their own dates
for these next meetings, this means that I will be on my own to get to Lille (thus
most likely taking a bus to Étapes and then a train to Lille the day before so
I can spend the night there and make it at 9AM the next day. However, one of
the instructors said that if I liked I could spend the night at her house and
drive with her to Lille the next day. I will have to take a train to her the
day before as well but I won’t have to pay for lodging so that is nice).
Another fun fact: for the first couple of days at my school people kept thinking I was the Spanish assistant (I happen to be darken than she is anyway). More class tomorrow morning, I'm going to try to find a Physics class or a French class to sit in on.
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