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.