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| Our Guide to Life |
Let me start off this post with some big news: I have a job! I'll be Chesterfield County's newest French teacher, and I couldn't be more excited. Part of me is itching to hurry home and start planning from the coming year, but I know that each new thing I learn here can be passed back to my future students (yay!) as rich bits of true French culture. Ideas for lesson plans keep popping into my head and have been making work rather difficult ;)
So, excitement aside (or contained, for the moment), this post is about the little things that make up our daily life. We found out that our cute little thatched roof house doesn't actually have a street address. It is literally listed in the postal book as "The Hamlet" of Percy or Le Hoc, Percy. Seriously, check it out on Google Maps. The funny thing is that there are three houses that are technically a part of this hamlet, and the proper arrival of mail depends solely on the wits of the local postmen and women. They know that Roseanne and Mike are usually the only ones to receive mail from a different country and large packages, so most everything arrives just fine. If you want to send us something, act fast because we'll only be here for two more weeks!
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| Making cool steel accents for the spiral staircase |
We wake up each morning somewhere between 8 and 9, eat breakfast of croissants/pain au chocolat/ceral/fruit and then get to work for the morning. Don't worry, Mom, I'm working hard enough during the day that I have actually lost weight rather than gained from all the bread, cheese, and wine I've had in the last week or so. Our work for the better part of last week and what will probably be the rest of this week is the paving of a patio. We mix mortar and lay these giant paving tiles all day long, and it's just like a five+ hour cross fit workout with all the lifting, squatting, shoveling, and stepping over things that we do. It lightly rains almost every other day here, though there's a rumor that a heat wave is on its way, so Will and I wear these old Scottish oilskins. We'll get a picture of those and a completed section of the patio up here soon.
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| French "twinkies" |
Work usually ends when we stop for gouté, as we mentioned before, which can happen anywhere between 4 and 7, though the French only have gouté at either 4:00 or 4:30. We had the French equivalent of a twinkie, which actually tasted like a slightly denser twinkie cake filled with the strawberry filling of a nutrigrain bar, and BN biscuits accompanied with tea, as usual.
Other things you may want to know: anther workawayer named Ana arrived yesterday, there are three cats here (four if you count Ana's indoor cat who stays in her caravan), there's a nest of baby birds outside my window that seem to be trying desperately to kill them selves but I'm doing my best to keep them from leaping out of the nest (and into the gaping mouths of said cats) before their feathers are grown, there were wind gusts up to 30 mph today, Will bought outrageously priced candy at the open air market in Villedieu today, French washing machines and dryers are TINY, electricity costs less here at night, our farmer behind us rides a four wheeler and is so cool, and we are doing quite well. Til next time!
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| BN Biscuits |
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| Honey comes as a solid here |
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