Mid-March mayhem

Hello everyone,

I’ve been encouraged to find out lately that a few more people read my blog than I thought! Thanks, it makes it worth writing!

C’est la fête !

Last Monday evening I participated in something nicknamed ‘la fête de la craie’ (Chalk party!) which consisted in going around the campus I work on with a bunch of other guys from the Christian student group chalking the name of a website called questions2vie.com (questions of life.com) everywhere to raise publicity for it. It’s a website which has been launched recently to allow French students to respond to and ask big questions about life and God. We split off in pairs to tackle different parts of the campus.

My friend Halle and I were sent to the part of campus which is most familiar to me – the part between the metro, the library and by L and B buildings. I felt like a right rebel doing it, but with the quiet assurance of my friend beside me and the fact that it was clearly going to spark interest (as soon as we started people were reading what we were writing) we soon started to have fun with it.

A colleague saw me in the middle of chalking and stopped to ask what I was doing, but it was alright as she’s a young Spanish lectrice like me so she didn’t think badly of me – to the contrary – she took a little card with the website marked on it and even said she might talk about it with the students! Right towards the end of the night as we were writing the website on the ground for the last time a security bod came over to us in a bit of angry state and asked us to stop. Oops. So we did stop – at ‘QUESTIO’ – shame we were in the middle of our biggest chalking! It looked a bit stupid leaving it at that, but we decided it best that we obey. We were worried after that that the bloke was going to go round with water and wash them all away (thankfully he was too lazy for that or God stopped him from bothering). Some of the others met a gendarme when they were chalking, but apparently he was cool with them saying ‘Oh it’s only chalk? That’ll soon disappear here in Brittany then!’

My friends at Agape set up a stand on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday on campus too to raise awareness and discuss questions with students as well and I think they had quite a good response (hopefully not just to the carambar sweets!).

Washing machine continued

You remember the start of the washing machine tale from last week? On Tuesday I nervously sat down to make a call to the company, encouraged by Manqi, and kept being given different numbers to ring. So on the 4^th number and after having some difficulty to find Michèle’s file on the computer, we got there and the man changed the rendez-vous to Friday, thankfully 5 days before the repair man was supposed to come.

I welcomed the repair man on Friday, turns out the ‘repair’ wasn’t much of a repair and is something an ordinary person is supposed to do to maintain the machine from time to time. He opened the compartment in the bottom left corner which is where things go which have come out of your pockets and the like. It stank and there were a lot of clothes fibres clumped up with a coin and a few bits and bobs, a lot of water came out too. He had a bit of a job getting it open! Once that was cleared the machine was happy again, he stopped it and it unlocked normally after a minute or so. He explained that some of his colleagues would charge 150€ straight up for that as they’d been called out for something which is not really their job! But he explained that he was nice so wouldn’t do that (and I think he took pity on me due to the fact my laundry had been stuck in the machine for 8 days and I was a young foreigner). So I was happy to get my clothes back and they didn’t smell too bad, so I gave them another wash and all was well.

Technology mishaps

Two weeks ago I came to playing a podcast to my listening class on my speakers only to realise it was far too quiet for them all to hear at the loudest setting. Panic! So I had to think on my feet and apologise to them. I gave them a choice of leaving and I would send them the link to the podcast online so they could do the task in their own time, or staying and I would listen to the podcast through earphones and project what was being said with my own voice so they could do the task in class. It was quite amusing to have to do it that way but 3/5^ths of the class stayed so that was how it worked. For my second listening class I dashed back over to my office and the staffroom and gathered extra equipment which would allow them all to do it normally.

Then last Thursday I had a shock when I wanted to use a projector for a listening task – listening to Jamie Oliver on youtube. I had put my name down for the projector two weeks previously and when I was in the day before I noticed another teacher had added her name to the sign up sheet, but wanted the projector for a longer time so she would take one earlier in the day. There are two so this should be fine, but occasionally one has been going walkies recently, so late on Wednesday afternoon I went to check if they were both there. Yes they were. Phew, things were looking good for Thursday. Thursday at 13:20, 10 minutes before class, I go to collect my projector and there aren’t any there. Then the other teacher who’s signed up walks in and I ask her ‘Are you using a video projector now?’ She said ‘Yes, I’ve just come to collect one.’ My face fell and I said ‘There aren’t any’. She was annoyed like me, especially as she had booked it for her students to do presentations with. How is it that both of the projectors disappeared between the end of the day on Weds and lunchtime on Thurs for neither of the two teachers who signed up properly to be able to use them?? I don’t know but it’s rubbish! I had to change my lesson round completely and I’m hoping I can get one this week.

Homesick

I’ve had quite a bad bout of homesickness recently, been quite down and missing my family a lot. Only got to hang on a week and a half now before I set off for England for a wedding and a short break.

Fiona x