This week flew by! Seriously, I have no idea where the time went. And I'm sure this last week before Christmas vacation is going to fly by as well.
Wednesday, we spent the afternoon in St. Quentin at the Christmas market. I think it's my favorite market up north (I don't think anything could be Aix's market). It's just so cute and sweet! And there's real snow and everything! Love it! Plus, we had some lovely mulled wine. It doesn't get better than that. Then, later on that night, we curled up with cups of tea, chocolate cookies we bought in St. Q., and watched The Santa Claus movie. That's like my favorite Christmas movie ever!
We had some snow earlier this week! It was actually sticking and everything! The maintenance guys were putting down sand so people wouldn't fall on the ice. Yes, very practical. Salt doesn't exist here for weather related things. I just avoided the cement stairs into the high school and took the other entrance. I almost thought that we would have some actual accumulation, but of course, in true Picardie fashion, it soon turned to rain.
Classes went very well this week. You know it's a fun lesson when groups of 16 year old boys start to sing along with the Mariah Carey "All I Want for Christmas is You" fill in the lyrics exercise. They loved it! It's been successful in every class so far and hopefully, it'll continue to be successful this week.
My class with the BTSers was entertaining as well. The same group wanted to come with me yet again, and Claude agreed, but they had to promise to write up something about the ateliers and what they do. That spoiled their ambition, so I had a different group who actually agreed to do it. That lasted for all of two seconds. As soon as we were in a classroom, one student (who has been less than chatty with me this year), suddenly got very chatty. In French, of course. He had like a million and one questions for me. We hung out a few times last year, because he's friends with T., so he wanted to catch up. It only took a few minutes before the others joined in. They wrote something to give to Claude, but believe me when I say it was less than impressive and totally not what he asked for. One thing they wrote when I said that we didn't really have baguettes in the US (they wanted to know what one costs because that's one of the ways the French judge the cost of living of a place) was "There is not bread in US". Umm... even if that was true, it's still not grammatically correct. The rest of the sentences were even worse.
One of the students in the TGM has been really chatty in English lately. He's been asking for certain phrases in English and then using them to talk to us. Thursday at dinner, he spoke entirely to us in English (well, in between asking for translations). So sweet! I seriously love my students.
Maria's boyfriend is here from Spain. It's pretty interesting. He only speaks Spanish and a tiny bit of English. Leads to some interesting conversational tactics. But he does seem really nice.
Oh, and earlier this afternoon, we went to Chauny's little Christmas market. It was tiny, but cute. All the booths were of local artists and the like. Everything was handmade by people in the area. It was nice, and there were some really pretty things to look at. It wasn't like every other Christmas market that you find in like Paris or Amiens or wherever.
Okay, I'm going to get back to watching a movie with Natasha. Ciao for now!
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