Pride Comes Before a Fall

How virtuous am I?! Three blog posts in a week?! Don't get too comfortable, I don't want to let my fans down but I'm pretty sure this won't last. I'm not entirely sure where this new-found dedication comes from!

It's been nearly a week since I dragged myself out of bed at 5.30am on my day off to go skiing with the collège. I was very excited despite my extreme fatigue; somehow I just couldn't get my shoes on the right feet and I think I put the milk in the bathroom before returning it to the fridge. I say "I think" because I can't quite remember, but I have that horrible nagging feeling in the back of my mind which seems to confirm it. But I managed to somehow pull myself together and make it outside with all my gear by 6am to meet the bus. I was quite curious as to what I was actually going to be doing. This being France, there's no kind of briefing before a trip and information seems to be on a very Spartan need-to-know basis. Literally all I knew was that I was going skiing somewhere in Les Vosges (the mountain range closest to us here in Briey), that the bus left at 6am and that I needed to bring snacks with me. That was IT. It was quite exciting really, sort of like going on a blind date. 

I arrived at 6am only to find the PE teacher accompanying the trip and 4 students. FOUR. In England for our ski trips there was always massive demand and half the school would want to go. I guess here it's less of a novelty, so it's probably not worth taking a day off school for it when you can head down yourself in the school holidays. So that was surprise number one. Then, a full-sized bus turned up and I was halfway through a mental rant about how crazy the French are about transport and how this bus was completely over the top for the six of us when I realised that there were other people on the bus. Surprise number two: we were sharing transport with kids from two other schools in the area. To be fair, that's very environmentally forward for the French. Bien joué. 

Thankfully, I can sleep through anything, so 50 or so noisy kids were no match for my powers of falling asleep anywhere I choose. I'm going to admit here that I love sleeping on public transport - I'm not entirely sure why. But it means that I'm always refreshed when I get to my final destination. And it helps to pass the time. Trains are my favourite, but buses are very acceptable substitutes.   But I digress... I had a lovely sleep anyway, but it was very confusing to wake up 3 hours later, and still not have arrived?! Surprise number three: Les Vosges are further away than I thought. Honestly, the way people talk here, you'd think they were a quick hop, skip and a jump away. Couple of minutes on the motorway, et voilà! (Although this may vary from French driver to French driver. Apparently some do stick to the speed limit, but I'm not sure on that one...! (JOKE) (ish)).

And so after three and a half hours we finally arrived, changed quickly into our ski gear and headed up to a chalet to queue for our skis and ski boots. (I'm not going to get started on the French and queueing here; it would take me far too long to rant). We were ready to start, when along came surprise number four: the teacher left me in charge of three of our pupils, while he gave the fourth some lessons. Gulp. I looked at the teacher for reassurance that this was a massive joke/misunderstanding, but all I got in return was a Gallic shrug and a "you told me you'd done a week's skiing, right?" Erm yeah, because that makes me an expert and someone responsible enough to look after three children... Uh oh.

But I didn't want to make a fuss (I know how stereotypical this makes me), so I took it in my stride and set off to the slopes with a sinking feeling in my stomach but a smile on my face. We started on the baby slope, and I managed to make it down without falling, so I made a crucial error. I got cocky. So when one of the pupils suggested we go straight up onto the blue run, I agreed.

Oh, how very true it is that pride comes before a fall. Because I reached the top of the blue run, set off... and promptly forgot how to turn or stop. I think I did about 200m before I crash landed on my face, leaving my skis somewhere behind me on the mountain, sending my poles flying down the mountain ahead of me, and losing my hat in the process. Cue three concerned pupils (all of whom can ski way better than me to begin with) surrounding me, trying to work out if I was OK and gathering my things for me. I picked myself up with a grin (can't let these kids get the better of me, I'm supposed to be looking out for them after all, not the other way round), started off... And made less than 100m before I wiped out again. On my face, again. This was about 10am and we were staying til 3.30. Uh oh.

The beauty of the ski resort we were at was that it was tiny - it was only one mountain, and all the runs led into one another - each difficulty level just started higher up. Which meant that I was able to dismiss the kids to let them do their own thing (i.e. not fall over), and I could keep an eye on them as they overtook me on the way down. Phew. I gathered my wits and went back to the baby slope to teach myself to stop and turn, where I could fall over in peace without the kids laughing at me (to my face). Finally, I was enjoying myself.

But this happiness was not to last, as by mid-morning the PE teacher had joined us and he was keen to progress. He decided that we were to all follow him onto the red run. By this time, I had just started back on the blue run, with some success, so I swallowed my doubts and followed him with a heavy heart. I should have heeded the signs. First of all, I fell over before we even reached the lift for the red run, and we weren't even skiing downhill at this point. Second, when we reached the lift, there was a sign warning that the route was very icy, and only competent, confident skiers should attempt it. Finally, five people in front of me fell off the lift before it even got up the hill. (We were using button lifts where you have to wedge a pole between your legs and hold on for dear life as you're dragged up the hill, not chair lifts, and this one was a particularly fast one). But I valiantly persevered, watching the other kids and the PE teacher head on up before me before having a go myself. The first time, the pole slipped right out of my hands. I went back to wait for the next one, and this time we had lift off (excuse the pun). However, the problem with this was that I was no longer sitting on the lift, but was hanging on to it for dear life while I was dragged up the hill on my stomach. I think I went about 100m before I realised that I should let go. Then, the lift had to be stopped while I retrieved my skis, poles and that bloody hat and waddled back down to flat ground. Oooops. 

I decided that third time would not be lucky for me in this case, so I settled myself at the bottom of the hill to wait for the others to arrive. My suspicions were confirmed as I watched one girl fall off the lift about three quarters of the way up and slide down the way she had just come, taking out half a dozen people behind her on the lift, all of whom slithered down in a big heap to the bottom. That could have been me. 

The others somehow made it down in one piece (presumably because they're a lot better than me), and I was allowed to make my excuses and head back to the green/blue runs, proverbial tail between legs. However, I slowly managed to rebuild my shattered pride bit by bit as I persevered and gradually began to improve. We had a break for lunch and after lunch I skied for an hour and didn't fall once, even on the blue slope. Go me!

And all too soon, it was time to leave and head back onto the bus for the long journey home. I was sunburnt, bruised, stiff and completely exhausted, but I had the most fantastic time. I'm totally going again next chance I get, even if it means I completely annihilate my pride once more. What's more, Les Vosges are absolutely beautiful and I really want to go back and see some more of them. I managed to survive this time with only some bruises on my legs, bum and on my elbow (did not know that that was possible) - so what's the worst that can happen?! 

Bises,

Sophia xx

10 Weird Things About France

Bonjour tout le monde! I should definitely be working but then I thought, "stuff that, I want to write my blog instead". Only problem now is that after writing this, I think I've run out of procrastination tools. Urgh. Sundays in France are boooooooring (no public transport or shops open on Sundays = serious work avoidance tactics required). You know it's bad when you can't even go to the supermarket to procrastinate because it's not open on Sundays.


But I digress. I've been in this wonderful country for nearly 5 months so I feel that I am now sufficiently qualified to talk about why France can be a pretty strange place to live sometimes. Don't get me wrong, I love it here, but at the same time a lot of things seem to happen to me on a regular basis which make me very confused... 

1) The French do weird things to custard. This is not necessarily the weirdest thing on my list, it's just the first one which popped into my head. In the past two weeks I have eaten normal custard and custard in jelly form - managable. The straw that broke the camel's back had to be the custard cake. Cooked custard in a flan? Confusing. Yet they don't sell custard cream biscuits...

2) Even big, respectable supermarket chains seem to be doing dodgy deals. I went into my local supermarché in December looking for shampoo to find that all of the Garnier shampoo labels were in Polish. The conditioner, however, was in French, as were all the other shampoo brands.

3) The French aren't so big on dental hygiene (it seems). I haven't (thankfully) noticed this first hand, but when I went to said supermarket looking for mouthwash and dental floss (I had the dentist when I come home and I was feeling guilty), there was a choice of two mouthwashes and no dental floss. For an entire dental aisle. There was toothpaste, toothbrushes and denture glue stuff a plenty, but that was it. Apart from some plasters and verruca cream. For when you get verrucas in your mouth, y'know.

4) Fresh milk is as rare as gold dust. Enough said. I got laughed at recently by a group of people who asked me if I had to get my milk straight out of the cow to be able to drink it. While I'm not that much of a purist, it is true that I am prepared to walk 15 mins each way a couple of times a week to the only supermarket in town which sells fresh milk. I tried with the UHT, I really did, but I just couldn't handle it day in, day out.

5) There is a brand of sugar called "Daddy". LOL! It's even in a pink packet.

6) You can get a doctor's note to get you three days sick leave if you have a cold. A COLD. Unless you're me and you still don't have any health insurance, that is...


7) The keyboards are all mixed up (and very difficult to type with as a result). For example, you have to press shift to get any of the numbers on the top line. Eh?! And you have to press shift to get a full stop, but not for an exclamation mark, colon, semi-colon or comma. Eh?! And you have to press Alt Gr to get the @ symbol. Not cool, and definitely not useful.


8) School here is from 8am to 5pm (6pm in some schools) but the French government thinks the kids aren't working hard enough so wants to cut their school holidays so that they're in line with other European countries...? Go figure.


9) The French seem to be obsessed by the 80's phenomenon which is Happy Days. Not only is the themetune used as a radio jingle for a particular supermarket ad, there is a Happy Days themed restaurant nearby. Erm, what?!


10) French bureaucracy and my quest for health insurance. See earlier blogs.


So that's all for now, folks. I'm off on a wild weekend to Lyon with the lovely Michèle next weekend, so I will have some news and photos for you then. Very excited for this!


Bises,


Sophia xx

Flossing? Or Blogging? That is the question...

My boyfriend actually had the cheek to remind me last week that I wasn't keeping to my New Years Resolutions because I wasn't updating my blog frequently enough. I would just like to point out that although I have been a bit remiss with my blogging, I have been very busy over the past two weeks. Furthermore, I have religiously stuck to my other Resolution of flossing once a day, whereas dear Christopher has not, even though he said he would. So you get less procrastination, but I have a beautiful healthy smile. Everyone's a winner (except you, Chris. Go floss.)

Anyways, I do realise that the two activities are not mutually exclusive, so I'm trying to make amends for my poor time management and I will fill you in on the past two weeks. I've been out and about quite a bit! Alex and Sarah kindly came to visit me two weeks ago... I think (hope) they had fun out here! We certainly ate a lot of good food, which in my book means that we had an awesome time, no questions asked. First of all, they came to visit my humble abode here in Briey, although I'm not sure that they were terribly impressed by the sights here (i.e. my room and the cake shop). However, both of them are city folk, so I think being out in the sticks was a bit discomforting for them. It's understandable.

So I tried to make them feel a bit more at ease and we wandered off to Luxembourg City for a day trip! Although I have to admit that we didn't see a lot of the city because we had a long lunch with a generous bottle of wine and so proceeded to go sightseeing in hysterics and meandering round the funny streets. Now I'm no travel writer, but Luxembourg seems to me to be a pretty funny place. It's sort of like a place in Scandinavia which has relocated and now seems a bit lost in amongst all the crazy Frenchness which surrounds it. It's clean, prosperous and you can smell the success in the air (and in the BMW exhaust fumes), but at the same time the roads don't seem to go anywhere and everything seems a little bit confused in the same way as French towns are all higgledy-piggledy. 

But Luxembourg just couldn't contain us, so we took a horribly early train to Paris a couple of days later and had a couple of days in the Big City. But first of all I feel that I should mention the hilarious restaurant we ended up in in Metz the night before... We were feeling the idea of a slap up meal and managed to choose the poshest-looking restaurant in the area (which luckily had a 26 euro menu, as well as a 90 euro truffle menu). We wandered in a bit sheepishly to have our coats taken from us by one of the waiters, we were shown to our table only to be disturbed (in both senses of the word) by the other waiter, who was waving a big glass jar under my nose and looking up at me expectantly. I worked out that there were truffles in the jar and that we were meant to smell them and show our appreciation. Obviously. FYI, they smell a bit weird. Like burnt mushrooms. We were then presented with our "amuse bouche" - translation: "amuse the mouth", which consisted of a courgette mousse, a tiny cup of lobster soup, a cube of mysterious meat on a cocktail stick with a gherkin, and a shrimp in some pastry. This caused a lot of sniggering as I'm sure you can imagine, but it did taste good. Our starters followed, then our mains, then a waiter came round to sweep the crumbs off the table with a tiny brush before we were presented with petits-fours and our desserts. Finally we had our coffee and were able to escape, giggling like idiots, into the night. It was simultaneously the tastiest and the weirdest meal I've ever eaten. I'm obviously not cut out for fine dining. I have no photos of this evening for obvious reasons - it's very uncouth to photograph your meals like a cheap tourist.


Now to Paris! We stayed in a cool little hostel in Montmartre, the only downside of which being that we had to share a room with two Ozzies and a mystery guy who didn't tell us where he was from. They were nice people, but they stank so bad that in the morning Sarah and I thought we were being gassed...

We had a lovely wander around Paris, saw some of the usual sights, and somehow ended up in a lovely little bistro in Montmartre for tea which actually had a cheap menu before wandering into a dodgy little bar where the cocktails tasted like paintstripper because they had so much alcohol in them. All in a day's work... When we were wandering down the Champs Elysées we even managed to see the French Handball team being interviewed in the Renault shop! We had no idea who any of them were but I took a picture anyway...

I even managed to get a cheeky trip in to M&S and procured myself some salt and vinegar crisps - my God how I've missed those!


So to sum up, I hope Alex and Sarah enjoyed their trip out to see me! I certainly did :) More adventures to follow soon, I promise!


Bises,


Sophia xx

Bonne Année!

Happy New Year tout le monde! Fear not, one of my resolutions this year is to be a bit more attentive to this blog...

For a country which can be incredibly work-shy, France can also be a bit of a slave driver when it feels like it. Hence why I am back at work on the 3rd January. That's a bank holiday in Scotland. It feels ridiculously early! However, the flipside of this is that I get a two week half term in just under six weeks, so I shouldn't really complain!

For the most part, it's lovely to be back. After all, I'm missing the apocalypse-style weather conditions and I've got a lot of things to look forward to this term, including skiing with the lower school, a cheeky jaunt to Paris and an even cheekier trip down to Lyon. So far, so joyful. Happy new year! I even had a good journey over, seeing as how I ended up on an Air France flight even though I booked it through Flybe - free drinks and snacks ahoy! And the seats are so roomy: I sat next to a pretty hefty lady and didn't even lose an inch of my seat to her. My return flight on Easyjet (AKA Pack 'em and Stack 'em Airways) will feel a major step down, let me assure you. But all in all, this put me in a very good mood.

So you can imagine my joy when I came back today to find not one, not two but three letters from the health insurance people. This is now 4 months on, and I thought I would never have to hear from them again (except for the niggling doubts because I have yet to receive my social security card thingy). I should have listened to the doubts. The goons have changed my social security number?! But it means I might receive my official card soon. (One can dream). Letter 2 informed me of my online login details. So far, so good. 

BUT WAIT

Letter 3 informed me that I needed to choose my "level of health insurance" - i.e. whether I was happy to pay the bare minimum and receive a euro a year in reimbursements or if I wanted to pay a small fortune to receive... 5 euros a year? (I may exaggerate slightly). There was even a dire warning at the bottom of the letter to "make sure I didn't stay without any insurance". All I had to do was choose my level of cover, fill in the mahoosive form, send in another two copies of my bank details (that would be the 5th and 6th copies then) and Bob's your proverbial uncle. Once you've worked out which of the prepaid envelopes to send the form back in, that is. In all their mystical wisdom, my health insurance provider was helpful enough to provide me with two prepaid envelopes, each with a different address, and with no indication of which envelope was the correct one. Presumably fate would decide whether or not I deserved my health insurance. I even checked this all out with the teacher who is responsible for me and she gave me the green light to cross my fingers and to proceed. So far so good...?

BUT WAIT

I dutifully trotted up to Annabelle The Secretary's office (she deserves her capital letters, see below) to get her to send off my form and to ask her to choose the envelope so it wasn't my fault if I sent it to the wrong place. Bear in mind that one envelope was for Marseille, the other for Paris, so it would be a bit of a big deal if it went to the wrong one! However, this turned out not to be that important in the end... Annabelle took one look at the letter, asked me if I really wanted to pay for this, and looked at me like I had 3 heads. I replied politely that yes, I thought it was better to be safe and sorry, so I was prepared to pay for insurance. She then changed her expression to look as if I had 6 heads, and proceeded to explain to me that IT WAS ALL A SCAM and that it was actually an extra service which I would have to pay for on top of my current health insurance, which is already up and running. This was my turn to look at her like a crazy woman, prompting her to ring up the insurance people and asking them to confirm that I was already covered and I didn't need to pay for anything else. This answer dutifully came (I was allowed to listen on speaker phone), and so I was dismissed, feeling like a very gullible foreigner. My only consolation is that the teacher I looked at the letter with fell for it too. 

So I just about managed to be pulled back from the precipice of Death By French Bureaucracy, but it just goes to show that you can't get too cocky. French bureaucracy will always triumph in the end, unless you have Annabelle the ninja secretary to sort your life out for you. She's like a real life Gandalf, albeit a female, non-bearded, much younger one. She's very much my favourite person right now! The only thing that concerns me at this point is that if it is so difficult for me to pay them or even just getting them to stop trying to scam me, how would I ever ask them to pay me back if I got sick?! I'm going to have to get Annabelle to take me to the doctors, I suspect.

That's all my news for now - hopefully I'll have some more soon and I'm going to try and get some more student quotes for you ASAP - I know that's all you're interested in! I don't start teaching properly again til next week though, so don't get your hopes up just yet.

Bises,

Sophia xx