The reason (see, managed to start a sentence without "so." Dr. Carroll would be proud.) that I'm here in France at all is to be an assistant de langues vivantes- in my case, English (there are Spanish, German, and probably others out there, but I haven't really seen any of them, and since I don't speak Spanish or German, it would be interesting anyway). I work in a few schools down in Orly with a wonderful English teacher that I follow around to several classes. (As an aside (as if you should be surprised that I would put an aside in parentheses, but this one is actually reasonably important, aside (badum ching) from the parentheticals within wherein I explain why an aside should not be surprising, but I digress), this situation is not a usual one for assistants; they usually work in a few schools and go into the individual classes at those schools and work with lots of teachers teaching English. In my case, I go around a few schools with this dedicated English teacher where she teaches all the English that the kids learn. Basically, it works great for me because she does most of the lesson planning and knows what she wants me to do, but I don't get as much contact with as many teachers.) And after that long aside, let's keep going! I work in primary school (teaching CP through CM2, so ages 6-11); I know mostly primary assistants, because that's with whom our training sessions were. Yeah, that's right. Proper grammar gets confusing. That said, I do know some lycée (high school) assistants, and they're really cool. Mainly, I know the inimitable Grace and Stephen. They're the ones with whom I've been spending the most time, especially over the holidays since they actually stayed in Europe. Anyway, to the first meeting!
On one of the first days I was here, we got together at this great little Basque place called Glandines over by Place d'Italie. The portions were... generous, and the food was reasonably cheap for a Parisian dinner. And we got pictures afterwards! And here they are! (See? I can do non-convoluted if need be. But it's a blog, and why would you make anything simple on a blog?)
And because I'm such a socially inept kind of guy, I got to meet more assistants through Grace! Like Johanna! Johanna is pretty groovy- she spent a year teaching English in... Latin America. I am totally blanking on where- I think Honduras? But I have no real idea, and she'll probably beat me something furious for forgetting, and then the assistants will dock my pay and I'll be unable to purchase some of that sweet gruel at the orphanage. Mmm gruel. And with Johanna, we went to a nice little café near Belleville, and we got these sweet shots off the park nearby (where apparently you get solicited for coke at night, not that I would know from experience). And here are some of those views!
And then there's Suzie. But we'll talk about Suzie in the Nuit Blanche post. So I guess I'll leave you with some nice views of the Seine and me nomming a tuna sammich. Mainly because I'm a bit tired of blogging today (two long posts and negotiating photo sharing and all that takes a bit out of you), and because there's talk of fondue, and while my wallet says no, I think I'll overrule it this time. So to those pictures I promised!
Ah, the views of Paris.
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