Beaucoup beaucoup de pluie et un appartement!

The last few days have been so hectic, I hardly know where to start! I don't know if anything was shown on international news, but France's headline news story on Monday and Tuesday were 'les inondations' (floods) of Montpellier. After two days of glorious sunshine, I woke up to pouring rain, which being from south-west England didn't faze me, so I carried on out and caught the train to Sète to meet Amy (my now roommate) to look at some apartments together. We saw two apartments which were perfect for what we wanted, and so eventually made the choice of one which is right next to a beautiful church building, and is very French!

Here it is:

Anyway, during the day we got pretty soaked and had to shelter from the massive outpours of rain like this: 

Apparently 252ml of rain fell in just 3 hours, and the river Lez in Montpellier burst its banks, completely flooding huge parts of the city, so much so that people were canoeing down the streets and people were stranded, having to sleep in their offices and in schools because they couldn't even leave their buildings to get home!

Unfortunately that meant I was also stranded as I couldn't get back to my hotel because all the trains, trams and roads were shut! Fortunately Amy's contact teacher who she was staying with invited me back to her flat and gave me dinner and rang up loads of people to see if there was any way of getting home. I ended up staying overnight and sleeping on her sofa, and the next morning the teacher took me back to the train station in Sète to wait for the first train back to Montpellier so I could collect my suitcases and come back ready to move into our apartment that evening. After waiting for about 4 hours a train finally came that took me to Montpellier and I was able to get back to my hotel.

However, it seemed that the day was just not going to be a good one for me, as when I got back to the hotel, my code to get back into my room wouldn't work, and as it was before 5pm there was no one on reception so I had about 45 minutes of desperately trying to get into my room and running around the hotel to see if there was anyone who could help me! Eventually I found a man who told me that the hotel changed the room codes every Monday even if you were staying there before that, and kindly found me my new code so I could get back into my room!

By the I was in a massive rush to get back to Sète on time with my stuff to move into the apartment and sign the contract, not helped by the fact that the trains still hadn't been completely sorted and so my train was running almost an hour late! In the end I had to take an expensive taxi journey to Sète, which got me to the apartment just in time!

The next day, Wednesday, I had my first training day back in Montpellier, which was basically a day of paperwork and meeting my 'reférent', Vincent, who is the teacher in charge of the area where my schools are: Frontignan. He was very nice and gave me my timetable which says I'm only going to be working on Mondays and Tuesdays!! He is going to take me to visit my schools and meet the teachers I will be working with next Thursday, after I have two more training days tomorrow (Friday) and next Tuesday.

So, my next main things to do are to open a French bank account and sort out all the various bits of paperwork that I need for various different things (the French like to make their administration as complicated as possible it seems!).

I think Amy and I are going to go to IKEA this weekend (yes, Montpellier has an IKEA!!) to get some bits for our apartment, which should be fun. We have been having fun living together so far, and have come across many different phrases that we use - it's like I'm learning to speak French and American!!

Anyway I should probably go and try and work out my paperwork, so I'll write again soon!

Au revoir!

P.S if you want my new address, feel free to email me and I'll send it to you!