Orientation, Falling Potatoes and French Children

Today I began my official role as "assistante de langue" in the primary school Jean JAURES. While I'm not officially teaching quite yet, I did get to meet some of the students and the teachers that I will be working with. This week is full of orientation stuff so I was glad to meet the people that I would be seeing on a daily basis. I will be working with a guy from Colorado who seems pretty cool. 

The school itself is so charming! It is small, there are 2 classes in each grade level but I had forgotten how adorable french children are!! I don't actually speak any french at school (the kids think that we  don't know any French at all and even the other teachers who don't speak English say "Hello" to us when passing instead of "Bonjour")! I will be working with 6 year olds and 7 year olds mainly and I couldn't be happier. I "work"Monday, Tuesday and Thursdays from 9:15-11:15 and then again from 2:15-4:15 and only live about a 3 minute walk from school when there's traffic so I have it pretty easy.

I still have another week full of orientation like things so I won't really be able to say that I've started working until next week but it feels wonderful to start working again! While I loved sleeping in and wandering around town, I'm glad to be able to have more structure in my French life again!  I've been discovering and rediscovering little nooks of the town and couldn't be happier with my life here in Nancy. On Sunday I hung out with my 2nd host family and lucky to spend the afternoon with them (also to eat real food that wasn't undercooked, lettuce, or happened to fall on my head when reaching for it on the shelf...a bag of potatoes is really hard!). I'm excited to enrich my relationships with them, my other host families and my french friends and deepen my ties to La Lorraine.