J'ai 21 ans! A late blog post

I wrote this blog post two weeks ago on my flight back home for Christmas, but have only just got round to putting it up! As this post is meant to be about my time in France I'm not going to write anything about going home for the holidays or London, but here's a picture of us enjoying London anyway!

Oh, and I got a picture of me next to the British Council offices next to Trafalgar Square - that's relevant right?

Anyway, here is the original blogpost for your perusal:

I am writing this somewhere in the sky between Montpellier and London on my journey home for Christmas, in view of a little girl watching Frozen on her mum's laptop to keep her entertained! 

The last two weeks of term here in Sète have been pretty crazy with Hollie arriving from England on Thursday and having a mini tour of Sète and joining us at a Christmas party with the other language assistants on the Friday evening before we got up early on the morning of my 21st birthday to catch the TGV train to Paris!

Amy, Hollie and I stayed in a little hotel in Paris with Emily, who met us there from Angoulême, and we even had a fruitcake that my mum had sent over with Hollie for my birthday cake. Unfortunately we failed to notice the candles that she had also conveniently packed with the cake, and so tried to use a dodgy candle app on my iPad as a replacement which made for some funny photos! 

After we had eaten as much of the cake as we could manage we met up with Elliot, a French student from Warwick who is studying at the Sorbonne in Paris for his year abroad, and he took us around the sights of Paris, including the Sorbonne itself, le Jardin de Luxembourg, and his very fancy Parisian apartment! 

Later in the evening we went into the Notre Dame, where we met Monique, another French student from Warwick who is doing her year abroad teaching English just outside of Paris. We all very much enjoyed the Shakespeare Company bookshop right next to the Notre Dame, and then we had dinner in a lovely restaurant in the Latin Quarter, which is the oldest part of Paris. 

After we had eaten, we went to le Place de la Concorde and saw the Eiffel Tower from the distance and went to the Marché de Noël on the Champs Élysées, where Hollie and I had a celebratory class of champagne!

Then we walked up to the Arc de Triomphe and also took obligatory Eiffel Tower photos from Concordet, where we could get a beautiful view of the Eiffel Tower all lit up.

The next day we revisited the Eiffel Tower, walking right underneath it, although it was a very cloudy day, so you could only actually see half of it! 

After walking right down the Champs de Mars (and avoiding all the Eiffel Tower keyring sellers and the dodgy magic trick people) we took Emily to her train station, and then went to my favourite part of Paris - the Jardin de Tuileries and the Louvre museum with the Palais de Louvre. It turns out that students from the European Union can get into the Louvre for free, so we went in and saw the famous Venus de Milo statue and of course the Mona Lisa, which turned out not to be as disappointing as people had always told me!

Then we went to a crêperie opposite the Hôtel de Ville, where we ate a traditional Parisian galette with egg, cheese and ham, followed by a crêpe sucré which also very yummy!

By this time it was time to catch our train back to Sète, which only took three and a half hours thanks to the wonders of the fast TGV train! The most shocking thing was the change in temperature - when we left Paris at 19.15 it was 4 degrees celsius, but the time we got into Sète at 23.00 it was 13 degrees celsius! I definitely understand now why the French love 'le Sud' so much, and why most Southerners will shudder at the though of going to 'le Nord'!

The next two days I had my last days of term in each of my schools, so I introduced my classes to the very traditional English concept of crackers, and helped them to make them out of paper, string, sweets and christmas stickers. It was quite a challenge to fit it in to the hour/45 minute lessons I had with each class, but we managed it, and the children loved it! One of teachers actually took a photo of his class with their crackers and made a Christmas card with the photo, getting everyone in the class to sign it, and gave it to me at the end of the day which was very cute!

On the Tuesday Hollie met me in Frontignan for lunch with Penny and some of her family, and then a small tour of Frontignan whilst I finished off my afternoon classes. In the evening we went into Montpellier to go to a Provençal and British Christmas performance by the junior Opera society in La Théâtre de la Comédie. A lot of the Provençal songs involved a man playing a recorder which was very funny to watch, so we spent a lot of the time desperately trying not to laugh out loud! Sadly we didn't know any of the British songs, but it was cute to hear French children singing in English.

The next day I took Hollie into Montpellier and we did all the usual tourist sights of Montpellier, including  the Arc de Triomphe and La Place de La Comédie. We also went into la chapelle des Pénitents blancs to see their crèche Provençale, which was interesting because Provençal nativities don't just have the typical nativity characters that we are used to seeing, but are also surrounded by lots of different figures representing different jobs in Provence, such as a farmer, a baker, and a milkmaid. 

We also went to the Christmas market and bought a 'chocolat chaud', which is much thicker than British hot chocolate, and some churros which was very yummy!

We continued our touristy sightseeing the next day by walking up Mont St. Clair, on which Sète is built, up to la Croix St. Clair where we had a picnic and looked inside La Chapelle de Notre Dame de la Salette. 

Instead of taking the conventional route back down the hill to the centre of town, we went on a windy route so that we could get a better view of the lovely millionaire houses bult on the hill, which have beautiful views over Sète and the Mediterranean Sea! We ended up down on the beach whilst the sun was setting which provided us with some amazing views of the deep red clouds, and meant that both Hollie and I proceeded to spend the next twenty minutes trying to accurately capture the beautiful sky on our phone cameras!

At the last minute I was asked to take part in a 'fun day' in a primary school in Sète on Friday which was for Christmas, and involved the children learning about things from Anglophone countries such as learning Christmas songs, the Haka, tasting marmite, lemon curd and peanut butter! I was in charge of indoor games in the morning which was basically bingo with Christmas words and other words they knew, and then I was reading a book from my childhood, 'We’re Going on a Bear Hunt', to them in the afternoon, which was fun with all the dramatic actions I got the children to do!

Yesterday the three of us were invited to a Christmas lunch in Frontignan with Penny and her family, which was really nice, and was a good introduction to an English style Christmas for Amy, complete with crackers, stuffing, brussel sprouts and homemade mince pies! We played lots of games too which were fun, although we did manage to get chocolate all over our faces trying to play the After Eight game!

Anyway, I think that's all for now, and apparently we're about to arrive in Gatwick, so I'd better get ready for landing! It will be really nice to be in England for the next two weeks (and hopefully I'll get to see a lot of you who are reading this!!), and it will also be fun to introduce England to Amy for the first time - we're going to be doing a whistlestop tour of London, Christmas in Plymouth, visiting Cornwall, and a Shakespeare play in Stratford on New Year's Day! I think it's safe to say Amy is very excited!

So for now, goodbye until my new term starts - Joyeux Noël et Bonne Année!