Monday, I had no classes. And once again, I was not informed about this. Two of the BTSers also showed up. The surveillants tried to get them to have class with just me, but they were like "No offense, Shannon, but if the teacher's not here, we're leaving". I wasn't going to argue! They are nice guys, but trying to get two of them to talk for 50 minutes straight alone... not a fun time time for any of us.

And as you all know, Monday was also St. Patrick's Day. In true American fashion, we were all Irish that day. We all wore green and went to the bar and had them make us green beer. We got some strange looks for that one, but they already think we're crazy. We also met a nice group of young people. We were talking, and they asked for our names, but first the one guy said my name! Didn't find that too weird, because maybe he heard one of the other girls say it. Then, he said that he was a student of Claude's. Flash to me running through the faces of the students in all of my classes, but I could not for the life of me place him. Luckily, he added in that he is actually not in one of my classes. It just appears that I am talked about a lot in his class. Joy! Well, this is the first time I hung out with a student from my school that wasn't actually one of my students. That's got to be some sort of progress. We helped him write a letter in English to his girlfriend who is studying English in Malta right now.

Tuesday, my classes all went smoothly. In the last class, only two students showed up! Apparently, Claude's name had been on the list of absent teachers at one point during the day. That led to an interesting class period. We discussed the differences between Arabic and French (yeah.... I'm still trying to figure out the connection to English on that one) before I showed them how I would naturally introduce myself to a person in English. The class actually went very well, and I got to practice my French a lot.

Katie has a friend staying with her for the week, and she arrived on Tuesday, so we went out for coffee and Viany made her a welcome meal. J. (gendarme) also came. Aww... poor J. He thought we hated him. He was supposed to stop by on Sunday to say "coucou". We waited and waited, and he never came. Viany sent him a message on MSN on Tuesday, and he said that we told him not to come. What?! Apparently, he sent a message to Hart's (stolen) phone and the person replied back saying that we were fed up with visitors and we didn't want to see anyone anymore. We hadn't told him before that about the stolen phone, because we were going to discuss it with him when he stopped by. At least we got that all cleared up! He told us a plan of action, so today, we are going to file a report at the gendarmerie. At the very least, with the report in hand, Hart can have her number blocked so they can't abuse any more of our friends.

Yesterday, I pretty much did nothing. Got to love those days! I took a walk, because it was really nice out. Other than that and my one class, nothing. Viany made homemade pizza for dinner, so that was a very positive point of the day.

Today... another uneventful day. I only had one class... if you can call it that. My secondes had to take a quiz, so I just sat there looking through some Terminales' papers. Afterwards, I helped N. and some of his classmates with a translation of a letter they're writing to a firm in Poland. Claude was talking to me about them afterwards and how promising they all are. He also said something about how they're going to Sweden in May (which I already knew) before inviting me to come along! Of course, I'll have to wait and see what the dates will be, because technically, I'm leaving mid May, but we'll see. Now, I'm just waiting for Hart and Viany, and then we're going to the gendarmerie.

Tomorrow, I am going to Paris with the school. I saw the schedule for it today. It showed that it's going to take 4 hours to get there by bus! Ridiculous! I hate buses. By car... we're talking two hours at the most. The plan for the day is a boat ride down the Seine to see the major monuments and then the visit to the National Assembly. Then, another 4 hour drive back.

In other news, I bought my ticket to Dublin. I will be there April 14-18. So, Rome and Dublin for this vacation. I'll also be spending quite a bit of time in Chauny this break, so I think I might do Paris for a weekend or something. We'll see.