Fun, a Flanders flower and a faithful God.

Hello!

Last Wednesday I went to my friend Halle’s 27^th birthday party. She had around 20 girls round to her flat for a bring and share meal. There was so much homemade cake! Halle is from the US and works full time as a team member for Agape Campus, a Christian student group here. It was good to chill out, I had been really looking forward to it. When it came to it I was a bit nervous as I didn’t know most of the people that turned up at first, but it was a nice set of girls and we chatted a bit then played a game.

With another American friend, Christy, and my Chinese housemate, Manqi, we have taken to making biscuits (or ‘cookies’ as the Americans say).

So far we have made lime and coconut, peanut butter and chocolate chip, and apple and toffee biscuits (pictured). They have all been rather successful, and I’m impressed at that as foreign recipes aren’t always guaranteed to work. I’m sure we’ve made another type too, but it escapes me.

Last week in class I wore a poppy and asked my classes if they knew what it was about. They didn’t have a clue. Which was fair enough really as they’ve probably never been to Britain in November. However, less excusable was the fact that Remembrance Day is a bank holiday in France, and many of them didn’t even know why they had a day off! It was quite nice to give them a glimpse of something cultural and explain it when none of them knew. Some of them were a picture of ‘I don’t care about this, when are you going to stop talking?’ whereas most were genuinely interested.

Despite going through a tough time here, I’m going to tell you some of the ways in which God has been good to me (thanks for your prayers).

• I am grateful for my timetable in general, and the early morning starts (I never thought I’d say that!). I have to start teaching at 8:15am on 4 out of 5 mornings, which is hard for me as I’m not a morning person! But it does mean that I am able to have a routine and get more done in my day which has been essential for getting lesson preparation done and the suchlike. My timetable has a nice mixture of classes most days except for Tuesdays, but then I just repeat the same 2-hour lesson three times in the same day so I’m well-practised by the end! Also I find that the students are less concentrated in the afternoons, so I’m glad I’ve got a mixture of morning and afternoon classes (though sometimes they seem as though they’re still asleep in the morning!).

• I get along well with my colleague Martin and I think he gets along with me too, which is obviously a good thing. Even though he often annoys me when he chats on all the time about all sorts of things or doesn’t listen to me, he often makes me smile or laugh. There’s a real sense of being in this together. We’ve both been thrown in at the deep end and we both have the same heap of work this semester with teaching and prep and marking. Things here could be a lot worse if I didn’t get along with my colleague or they didn’t get on with me.

• God has provided me with a few friends who have been forthcoming in inviting me to do things, rather than me having to organise to do things with others. This has been a real blessing as I’ve been able to join in with things without making the effort to organise them. I'm not averse to organising things of course, but this term I’ve been spending so much energy on my job that I just wouldn’t have bothered getting out there and meeting people if they didn’t invite me, so it's helped a lot.

That’s all for now,

Fiona x