I’m sitting at my desk in my new apartment. The thick billowy grey clouds are slowly marching by. It’s finally stopped raining for the day and my shoes are dry once again. Jason Mraz is strumming contentedly at the guitar in the background. I stick my head out of my window and peer just to the left to check that the Eiffel Tower is still there. She is. The steady sparks of light from the very top let me know that, despite the inclement weather, the tourists have still made the climb and are using up the memory cards in their cameras like it’s going out of style. I’m happy for them.
Today I had to go this meeting for the high school language assistants in my department, Créteil, to get ideas of how to use materials and ideas for classroom games and management and stuff. It’s nice. Especially because we get to meet and spend time with other assistants that are in our same boat. The drawback is that it’s such an obnoxious trip to get to the high school where the meetings are held! With no direction at all except for the address of the school, I proceeded to take the metro to the RER station, and then when I got out to the Middle-Of-Nowhere RER stop, I asked around until I found the random bus to take to get to the actual school. The whole time thinking, “why are all of us going to this obscenely difficult place to reach when they could just pick a place that’s on the metro that we could all reach in 30 minutes?” But I kept this to myself. Kept it to myself, that is, until I found some other assistants and then joined in with their chorus of whining, lol.
But I’ve been learning so much through everything I’ve been doing here. For example: Realtors charge a month’s rent PLUS 12%, not simply 12% of the cost of one month’s rent. This makes much more sense and is a much more shocking price once you convert it into dollars. Also, I am completely incapable of estimating how much pasta is appropriate for a single person. This is especially irksome because I have no means to store leftovers, so anything I make I have to eat. Thus, I am currently suffering the effects of a rather severe spaghetti-coma. Don’t worry: I’ll push through.
Anyway…simple, yet important things.
Next post I’m going to put up some pictures of my apartment. I just have to actually find it when it’s in a state of order. I have such limited space that if I’m not very careful, I put a few things down randomly and use up all my counter/table top space. So that’s going to be a constant struggle I think. And I still don’t have a trashcan. Apparently they don’t sell them in France because I’ve been all over searching for just a simple trashcan. Fortunately, I have been stocking up on plastic grocery store bags (no thanks to stupid Leader Price where they charge you for their plastic bags…I’m too poor to care about the environment, dammit!) Using a plastic bag for now is probably best because if I can do without a trashcan for the time being, I can use that 15 or so euro towards something useful like, oh I don’t know, food comes to mind.
This was kind of a whiny entry, lol. Sorry. Next time I’ll be more upbeat! See you then!
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