As promised, here are some pics of my 'collocation' thanks to my roommate Lucy who took pictures last Thursday night at our first official roommate dinner. It was the first time all eight of us were together at the same time and place, and it was good fun. We had a huge chicken and veggie curry, rice, heaps of naan bread, and lots of ice cream for dessert.

We're quite the well-balanced apartment with 4 guys and 4 girls...

Roberto, Olivier, Germain, and William

Me, Stephanie, Marta, and Lucy

We only have a few sharp knives so we used scissors to cut up the chicken...

The fish on the window (and on the walls, and ceiling...) are left over from some nautical-themed party that happened before I got here, as is the pirate flag we have hanging over the breakfast bar. I pretty much knew I wanted to live here when I saw the pirate flag.  

I wouldn't say that I live in a 'nice' apartment but is spacious, well-equipped (washer AND dryer, which is almost unheard of in France), and has a very laid-back, 'college' atmosphere. It isn't without it's imperfections: in places it looks like a bowling ball has been dropped on our tile floor; there's a mouse that eats our food- the other morning I woke up to find that she had nibbled a tunnel into my baguette; we have to sit by the window in the living room to steal the internet from our neighbors; and our windows sorely need washing. And as you can imagine with eight of us living here the dishes are never-ending...and for some reason our garbage bag is ALWAYS full.  

Despite all this, I love it, and couldn't be happier. I feel so extremely lucky to have found it, considering some people have had to get studios, have unfurnished apartments, or had lots of trouble even finding an apartment. I love exploring my neighborhood, and it's filled with cute cafes, boulangeries, and one of the best markets in Lyon takes place every morning until noon right down the street from me.  This morning I got a zucchini, a bunch of spinach, and a mother-load of green beans for €2.25.

Cookie baking is also quickly becoming a regular apartment occurrence.  On Sunday we made them again, and got experimental by adding bits of dried apricots and honey.

In other news, I'm already on vacation!  We have a week off for Toussaint (Nov. 1st) and I'm going to ITALY!  My friend Larina, whom I went to Costa Rica with, is studying in Bologna and I'm going to visit her for 6ish days over Halloween/my birthday. Since my plans were made so last minute I had to opt for only available mode of transport within my budget- an 11 hour bus ride!! I should really know better than to take a bus, considering my history with them (aka getting the 24-hour flu on the 24-hour bus ride from Berlin to Grenoble, and the more recent blown-tire incident on the Megabus on the way to Minneapolis) but I'm keeping my fingers crosses (and maybe a few Tylenol PMs) and am hoping it won't be so bad. It's a night bus, so hopefully I'll be able to sleep a bit, but even if I don't I return on the 3rd and don't work until the 6th so I'll have plenty of time to recuperate.  

Ciao for now!

This past weekend the weather was absolutely gorgeous, and I spent it going to the market, cooking with friends, lolling around (snoozing on the pelouze (grass), as I like to say) in the park near my house, and wandering around the city. This is a picture of the main street/hill that I take to get from the center of the city up to my neighborhood. The two girls in the foreground are my friends Lucy and Linsey.   

 

I also met up with a bunch of assistants in the Parc de la Tête d'Or (literally, Golden Head Park) which is essentially Lyon's Central Park, complete with a large pond, a zoo, and lots of walking trails and cafés. Originally we were going to see an orchid exhibit at the greenhouse but someone had misread the signage and it wasn't actually even taking place in Lyon. But we had a good time wandering around and having coffees at a café next to the pond. I also ended up feeling even more lucky about my living situation because there were two girls there that are still without housing.      

On Sunday morning my French roommate Germain and I set off to find ingredients to make chocolate chip cookies.  This wasn't easy considering almost everything in France is closed on Sunday, but we did manage to find an open grocery store. We had to cut up chocolate bars with scissors because they don't have chocolate chips, and I didn't think they tasted quite as good as ones made in the States, but they were a huge success with the flatmates and of course with eight of us living here they were gone by the next day. Germain had insisted on making chocolate chip cookies because I had told him that I was going to make them with one of my classes on Monday.   

Which brings me to what I'm really here to do- teaching. Very part-time teaching, as it turns out. I work on Mondays and Thursdays, and will eventually find something to occupy myself for at least two other days a week. I technically only work twelve hours a week but if you include the commute, recesses, and lunch (2 hours!) I work about 24 hours total. My commute is a bit ridiculous; I have to wake up at 6:15, take the metro (15 min. with one switch), catch either the 7:10 or 7:24 train which takes 35 minutes to Villfranche-sur-Soane, then take a bus across the river from Villefranche to Jassans Riottier (another 15 minutes). Not to mention all the waiting for metros/trains/busses, and the walking to the metro stop and the school on either end. But since it's only two days a week and I have what amounts to a two or three day weekend every other day I can't complain, and the commute leaves me plenty of time to read, sleep, and marvel at the efficiency of the French public transportation system.  

 

I work in two schools within a 5 minute walk of each other; one called the Ecole de la Mairie (Mondays and Thursday afternoons), and another, much smaller one called Champbouvier (Thursday mornings). The Ecole has 14 teachers and about 300 students, and Chambouvier has 5 teachers. Each day I have 6 or 7 different classes, with kids ranging from 7-11. I'm still getting used to what/how much each teacher expects me to do because my involvement with the classes seems to range from full-on planning and teaching to just assisting them with their already-prepared lessons. For the most part the teachers are all great, as are the kids. I'm greeted hundreds of times a day by "Ello Keem!"  They're really excited to learn English, are a joy to work with (for the most part), and have produced some hilarious/adorable phrases/pronunciations in English. After teaching one class the multiples of ten ("Twenty, thirty, forty...") I asked if anyone knew how to say 100 and I got a very logical, albeit incorrect, guess of "Tenty?"  Another time when I asked them "What's a shorter way to say 'Hello' in English?" I didn't get the "Hi" I was looking for but one little girl did postulate a very timid "Lo?"  The class that I baked cookies with had a blast, and it was a fun challenge to divvy up the baking tasks among 12 ten year-olds.  

  

The youngest classes are going to be the hardest, and it's also too bad that these are the classes where I'm pretty much left to my own devices in front of 25 seven year-old French children that can barely form a sentence in French much less learn English. I'm going to have to come up with lots of easy songs and games to keep them occupied. I'm soo happy that my French is as good as it is because I don't know how I would get by without being able to give directions and tell them to be quiet in French.  

I'll write more about what I'm doing in the classes later on, as well as post pictures of the schools. Let me just end by saying that you know you're in France when they pass out notes for the kids to take home to their parents on what to do in case someone (the teachers, the busses, the lunch-ladies...who knows) decides to go on strike. Love it.  

To start off, here's a picture of Lyon as seen from Fourvière, which is a huge white church on top of a hill that has the best views of Lyon. On a clear day you can see the Alps in the background. The giant 'crayon' building is the only skyscraper in Lyon, and I seem to feel the same way about it that I felt about the giant, lit-up Citgo sign in Boston; a huge eyesore, but it wouldn't be Lyon without it. 

The past week has been incredibly busy so I'm just now getting around to writing a post- there's lots to tell, but most importantly I FOUND AN APARTMENT!!!! I spent all of last Tuesday online looking on various apartment websites and making tons of calls, most of which resulted in a) no answer, or b) an already rented room. I had also been hearing stories of people who looked for apartments for weeks--the Australian girl I met at my Nathalie and Jean-Rémi's apartment had been staying there for almost three weeks before she found one--so I was pretty worried about it. The other assistant staying with them, Lucy, who is now one of my good friends here, was also looking for an apartment so it was nice to have someone to share the anxiety with. By the end of the day, I did manage to set up three appointments to look at apartments for the next day. 

The first was in a great location, but it was kind of a mess and my roommates would be quite a bit older; a 32 year-old and a couple (30 and 26). I didn't meet the couple but I got the impression (based on his wild, curly red hair and giant beard, his sweatpants, and the fact that he was 32 and still asleep when I came at 11:30 on a Wednesday) that Martial might be kind of a bum/dirty hippy.  Don't get me wrong, I love the hippies and I probably could have lived there contentedly, but I had a very strong desire to clean as soon as I saw it. He was nice enough, and the rent/location was so great that I probably would have taken it if I hadn't gotten the second apartment, which I fell in love with immediately, and where I ended up living.

I was actually extremely lucky when it came to getting this apartment- I called the woman literally as she was putting it up on the website, and since I was first to call she offered it to me first. There were quite a few people interested in it; there was actually a Scottish assistant looking at the apartment at the same time as me. Needless to say I was pretty stressed out while I was waiting to hear if I had gotten it or not, and I was so excited that I got it that I hardly slept the night that she called me. The rent is slightly more than I wanted to pay, but I can apply to government aid that could get me about 80 euros off/month. Also since I'm only working 2 days a week I can definitely fine tutoring or babysitting jobs on the side.   

The third option was a very nice room in a great apartment right off the main shopping street in Lyon that was being rented by a divorcé.  His nine-year-old daughter lives there every other week, and he went to his country house every weekend, and it wouldn't have been so bad except that it really didn't allow me to have anyone come visit/stay over.  As much as I loved being in a host family I was looking for something more independent.  

 

SOO, I'm living in an apartment with 7 students, whose ages range from about 21-26, in my absolute favorite area of Lyon. My roommates are Stephanie (from England), Olivier (France), Lucy (New Zealand), Roberto (Panama), Marta (Spain), William (France), et Germain (France). I feel like I've pretty much found 'l'Auberge Espagnol' of Lyon. For those of you who haven't seen the movie, a French guy studies abroad in Barcelona for a year and ends up living in a great apartment with other international students and and has life-changing experiences blah blah blah. No it's actually a great movie. This fictional apartment has become the standard ideal for young people who move abroad, and is pretty much what I was hoping to find in terms of a living situation. So, as the French would say, "j'ai trouvé mon bonheur," literally translated: "I found my happiness."    

I live in a neighborhood called the Croix-Rousse, which is located on a hill in the north of Lyon that looks over the entire city (including the other hill with the church on it). Like I said, when I first came here two years ago I fell in love with it, but never dreamed that I would actually be living here! Historically it was the neighborhood where the silk workers lived; Lyon was famous for its silk trade and it was the primary source of its wealth. Since it's slightly above the main party part of the city it has the cozy feel of a smaller town but it's only about a 15 minute walk down to the Place des Terraux (pictured below) where there are tons of restaurants and bars. Also all the steps and hills will make for great exercise. 

The huge statue/fountain was designed by Bartholdi, who also designed the Statue of Liberty. The City Hall and the Fine Art Museum are also located on this square, and the Opera is just down the street. The first apartment I looked at was on a side street near here.    

  

Here are pictures of my street, as seen from both ends

If you ever want to send me something :) :) :) my address is:

Kim Kroeger

8 rue Célu

69004 LYON 

France

I will post pictures of my room once it gets a bit more homey. I made a trip to Ikea and got the essentials but it's still pretty bare. It's not huge (but certainly bigger than my room last year) but it has wood floors and a large east-facing window with a very wide ledge, so I get plenty of light and in the springtime I can keep some potted plants and herbs there. It came partly furnished with a desk, a large bookshelf that is serving as my bureau, a rolling hanging rack for clothes, and a mattress on the floor. It needs some work, but in general I'm really happy with it. Here are the views from my window:

In other news, I've been to my school twice so far (Friday and yesterday) but that will have to wait for another time....