WE HAVE AN APARTMENT! YESSSS!
Lisa and I met with a guy who is renovating an apartment, and we decided it was too good to pass up. It’s a 3-bedroom place (so we’re going to have a French roommate!), complete with kitchen, bathroom, living room, only for 350 Euros a month. That also includes Internet, water, electricity, and cable. And we haven’t even applied up for the CAF yet, which will most likely give us at least half of our rent back each month. It’s a 15-20 minute walk from the center of the city, which isn’t our ideal location (and it doesn't even look French, but you can faintly see the ocean from our giant window and balcony), but it is a beautiful apartment and it will be newly furnished within a week, so we took it! We can’t move in for another week though, so we’re now couch surfing at our life saving friend Erbin’s amazing apartment in la centre ville! Yay
Funny story. As a thank you gesture for Erbin, I wanted to cook him dinner. I bought gluten-free pasta, sauce, a green leaf spinach lookalike, excited to finally eat a homemade meal. I know most of you are skeptical of my gluten-free cooking, as 90% of the time something goes wrong, but pasta is something that always comes out right. As soon as I put the pasta in the boiling water, it instantaneously began to mush into a cheese-sauce consistency that eventually molded into mashed potato consistency. The questionable spinach was also not spinach, and tasted pretty grody. Fortunately my friends are very gracious and desperately tried to salvage the pasta/potato clump, throwing in olive oil, basil, garlic, cheese…. We toasted and ate the mush in unison – it was a unanimous decision that the mashed potato lookalike was disgusting. We are still unsure as to how pasta transformed into another food so quickly.
So now that I’m settling in to Montpellier, my usual European behaviors are starting to kick in. I’ve begun my sorbet/gelato tasting endeavors, which in itself is a dangerous. So far my favorite is strawberry, only because I got it from a beautiful French man at a vendor who made mild small talk with me, clearly interested in my exotic American appeal.
European favorite #2: Markets. Yesterday, a Sunday, the day of the week when all of France shuts down, a bunch of us decided to bike down to the beach. (That’s right Americans, still beach weather). Mind you, because all of France shuts down, where do they decide to go? The beach. And by what means of vehicle? Bike. Right. All the bikes in the city were rented out, thus we tried for the bus. The bus was full. My friend Wesley told us of a great junk market all the way at the end of Tram 1, so we thought that was a cool alternative. We have plenty more days to go the beach. We got to Mosson in the afternoon only to find that the market was closed. Apparently it’s just a morning market. Feeling slightly downtrodden, we headed back on the tram for a while hoping to find something exciting, only to see a market at Port Marianne! This market was a moment I had been waiting for since I arrived…all secondhand, junky kind of stuff. You could buy pretty much anything, which is how I ended up buying a cute dress that Lisa and I are going to share (2 Euros), a hair straightener that I badly needed (10 Euros), and a cute bag (.50 Euros). Then we had a lovely dinner, and came back to the Noria (for our last night!!) and watched a bunch of 30 Rock. This is the life.
We had orientation part 2 today where we learned how to be teaching assistants, which was thankfully very beneficial. I feel much more prepared on how to plan lessons, methods of teaching, and now have a great amount of resources. I really like that we approach this with the children learning English through complete immersion – we aren’t allowed to speak French to them at all, and even rarely write anything. Apparently there are issues with words like “Wednesday,” and children will pronounce it like it’s written, but if they never know how it’s spelled, they’ll learn it how we actually say it. The day went on far too long, and I was definitely drifting off towards the end (luckily a game of MASH with Wes kept me awake for some of it – it’s no wonder they put me in primary school with the little ones).
Someone thought I was from Italy today. I was a bit miffed as I find Italian fashion to be more than questionable, but I suppose that means I look Mediterranean, and by default attractive. Or it could have been my oily skin.
I’m so happy to be in an actual apartment right now, even if it isn’t mine. I still have to live out of a suitcase, but at least I have unlimited internet, clean facilities, and a KITCHEN! I went food shopping, cooked an actual meal tonight (that didn’t magically turn into mashed potato consistency), and found sabra hummus!!!!! (That’s for you, Liz and Sasha). I’m somewhat struggling with finding a good selection of Steph-friendly food in the supermarkets, even in the organic store I found. They have like one option for cereal. And it’s corn flakes that get mushy really quickly. Does France know exactly the relationship I have with cereal? That we’ve woken up together for the past decade, and how I get overly and pathetically excited to try new cereals each week? The US of A certainly has a leg up on France for gluten free food. I’m still hunting though; Google has provided me some more store options to try, a project for this week.
Well I’m off, I really need to get to bed early tonight. Lisa and I are finally going to Béziers tomorrow to see our schools (yes, schools. Lisa has 4 schools and I have 3. Absurd). We’re not used to having obligations early 2 days in a row, so this is kind of stressful for us. I am excited to see Béziers though and meet my children!
Bisous, ciao :)
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