les fêtes

Bonne Année! Happy New Year to everyone!

I hope everyone had a great Christmas and New Years wherever you were.  I was at home in Salt Lake with a house full of rambunctious family members.  Some of the things on the daily agenda included jumping into ski clothes and heading up the mountain, building awesome VIP snow forts (with Isaac Ray as the bouncer), swimming, eating yummy pies, Guinness cakes, and various chocolates, and after Christmas, dodging Nerf gun bullets from all angles, staying away from the battery operated tarantula, and ice skating a couple laps around the Olympic Oval. 

We had the Ray family bunch over for a week and a half, and the Keith Happ clan joined us as usual from Christmas to New Year’s Eve.  It was great to be home and relax for awhile.  Now I’m back in France, after a somewhat treacherous but could-have-been-worse trip.  SLC-PHX-PHL-CDG Paris.  Luckily all prayers worked and my bag made it, which was one of my biggest worries.  I managed to stay awake the whole afternoon and went to bed early-ish.  And amazingly, most traces of jet lag have disappeared, which is probably the best I’ve ever done!  I guess I’ll wait till my 8am class tomorrow to be fully convinced though…

 

This morning when I woke up I was almost unsure of where I was though, as there is a blanket of snow covering Sens!  And more has been falling all afternoon.  Now it’s pretty much NOTHING compared to what we got in Sandy before I left, but that certainly didn’t keep all the buses in Sens from catastrophically failing.  Oh Sens.  Hopefully my 8am students will show up for class tomorrow, because let’s get one thing straight.  If I am getting up at 7am to start my day getting kids to speak, they best be there. 

 

Today was a fairly smooth transition from vacation to work mode.  I was lucky to have a pretty good conversation topic on my side: the holidays.  If I only would have kept track of how many times I asked… What did you get for Christmas? What didn’t you get for Christmas? What did you do for New Years? I am really allowed to know that as your teacher? I share one class of 5 with a teacher, bouncing around conversation topics.  After the teacher prompted the students to ask me questions about what I did over the holiday, one asked me if I was drunk on New Years.  La classe.  And no, I will not share my answer. 

 

So, I’ve started the ‘almost’ second half of my journey in France this year.  I say ‘almost’ because it technically isn’t yet the second half, but it feels like it with a break like Christmas separating the school year.  In just about 2 weeks, I’ll be starting with a new schedule.  I’m excited about that in most cases.   To start working with new students, new faces, new teachers.  But it’s true I’ll miss some students I’ve been working with.  Annnnd not others : ) 

 

Bonne année à tous, and send me updates!  I’d love to hear how your holidays were and what’s in store for you in 2009! 

 

A plus,

 

alli