Rain, Rain, Go Away

We had one day of sunshine without rain since my last post! It was over 20 degrees and wonderful! Other than that, it has been VERY rainy outside and my umbrella and I have developed a love/hate relationship. While it worked very well for me in Canada, the wind by the ocean is slowly destroying it and it has started to leak on the inside. So not only do we get damp and wet, but then we get cold.



View from the tower of the Gros Horloge in Rouen

And tea is ridiculously expensive here! We're talking 3.90 Euros ($5) for a tiny cup of tea....from a tea bag. It's cheaper to get hot chocolate (which is delicious here most of the time!). So in the afternoon between trains when Lidia and I usually want a tea to warm up or something to munch on, we end up going on excursions to find a place that is A) open, B) has indoor seating and C) serves some sort of food. The problem is that lunchtime is from 12-2pm and dinner begins at 7pm. In between those hours, only snacks are served at certain places, and snacks include small quiches, a croque-monsieur (two pieces of white bread with fresh cream, ham, more cream, and then melted cheese on top), leftover pastries, and crepes (if you're lucky). Not ideal if you're looking for a healthy bite to eat.
Side note: I have also learned that "crepe" usually means a dessert crepe with nutella or jam on it, and "galette" means the kind of crepe with meat and cheese and substance.

I should also mention that salad here is not the healthy meal we have at home. Salad means lettuce with some sort of dressing on it. Another assistant from the States ate with us in Rouen and ordered a salad and it came out as a platter of cheese with a small pile of lettuce in the corner.



View of Rouen from the tower of the Gros Horloge

The roommates and I are having some of our wonderful teacher-colleagues over for dinner on Thursday and I will be making tacos and fajitas (close enough to Canadian food! I couldn't make poutine since neither cheese curds nor gravy exist here, and I don't have a deep-fryer to make Beavertails!). I'm quickly learning what is not available here, and it also turns out that sour cream does not exist and neither does the term "crème sure". Luckily Old El Paso has a small section in our grocery store, so I can buy the taco kit. I will also make small pancakes for dessert, but I have to be careful because French flour is different and does not work the same way as Canadian flour does.

Other items not available here: Instant oatmeal (even when I used the French words on my packets from home to ask for them, the sales associate looked at me like I was from another planet), fresh skim milk (only found in room-temperature boxes of highly sterilized milk), and baby carrots have not yet made their way across the ocean.

Also, the grocery store seems to have fun moving merchandise around daily, so that you can never get accustomed to where anything is. Even the produce assortment gets shuffled around at an alarming rate. The daily grind of finding bell peppers and mushrooms must have been too mundane and so they added a challenge.


View of Rouen from the tower of the Gros Horloge

Rainbow as the rain slowed down!




















Le gratin at Le P'tit Bec in Rouen



Just under two weeks ago, I had to go to Rouen for my mandatory radiology appointment to get x-rays of my lungs (I passed the test! I don't have TB!), and then I stayed in Rouen for the night since we had a full day of mandatory training the next day. I got to meet other language assistants from all over the world and socialize with them, which was nice. Another Canadian assistant and I even ended up rooming with some American assistants at the hostel! We went to a restaurant called Le P'tit Bec and I tried a gratin dish with julienned vegetables, smoked salmon, fresh cream and emmental cheese. It was delicious, but it was heavy like a brick, so I couldn't finish it. The wine probably didn't help either!



Hostel room in Rouen

Then I went to Paris for the weekend and stayed with a friend of a friend, and we checked out Paris in the rain on his Vespa. I have to admit that I did a lot of cringing as we drove in between cars, but he was a safe driver and being on the scooter actually saved a lot of time in traffic. Since it was raining (quelle surprise!), we visited the Musée d'Orsay, later checked out a wine festival in Montmartre in front of the Sacré Coeur Basilica where I also tried duck on a baguette and loved it, and then we ate at a Mexican restaurant where there was a surprise Zumba lesson and after dinner it turned into a club. The next day was also cold and rainy, so I returned to Rouen, and saw a movie (Ruby Sparks - I don't recommend it) with the other assistants. The next day I had a doctor's appointment at the OFII office where I saw a nurse who asked general questions, a doctor who asked for my immunization records, (but really only wanted to know if I had had a vaccine for TB and then it didn't make any difference when I said I had never even heard of it) and finally a lady who put a sticker in my passport which certified my visa. All in all, it took over 2 hours for the process. By the time I went back to Yvetot, I was exhausted, but I only got back just in time to go to my class.




At The Louvre just before the skies opened up and it started raining



In the Tuileries gardens in Paris

View of Paris from Musee d'Orsay

Big clock in the Musee d\Orsay


L'Arc de Triomphe in Paris

Me on a Vespa





Sacre-Coeur Basilica behind me at the French regional wine festival

The classes have been going well, but some classes are very reluctant to speak (to me, anyway...some have no problem talking with their friends in the middle of class!). Other classes with students who excel in languages are amazing and I could teach them all day. They listen, participate and ask questions! The goal is to get the students to speak well in English for their final oral exams, and if they are in their last year of high school, they have a final 30-minute oral exam to complete before heading off to university.



Dieppe

Dieppe Castle

Dieppe Castle

View of Dieppe from the castle



Church in Dieppe



Oops! Forgot to take a photo until after I had devoured my crepe!

This past weekend, I went to Dieppe with Benni and Lidia, and we checked out the market, a few shops, and the beach. I still remember the train station from 9 years ago! Benni and his friend split off from Lidia and I and we did our own thing. I got hungry for dinner, so we stopped to try coquilles Saint-Jacques at the "Tout va bien" restaurant before heading to the train station. They were in a New England clam chowder-type sauce with mushrooms over a crepe and I thought "damn, these are sort of like tiny scallops!". I later looked up what coquilles Saint-Jacques is in English, and it's scallops after all! At least they were fresh from the sea in Dieppe! I also had a few bites of my "salad" :).




Market and church in Dieppe

So Lidia and I walked to the train station where we were meeting Benni and his friend, and on the way, we noticed that Benni had called each of us. We called him back and found out that there was a mix-up with the train times and that the train had left! It was the last train out of Dieppe! Lidia and I were stuck in Dieppe without a bus and no taxis in sight! We went into a hotel to ask how much a taxi would be if we called one, and it turned out that the gentleman behind the counter was from Tweed, Ontario! My fellow Canadian took pity on us and offered us a room at a better rate, which, frankly, we had no choice but to take. There isn't even a youth hostel in Dieppe! 

Our hotel room in Dieppe

To make the best of our situation, Lidia and I decided to visit the castle museum in Dieppe the next day before our train home. We found a bakery that was open on Sunday and they had pain au chocolat et aux amandes (chocolate croissants with marzipan and almonds)! I was 1-bite into mine when I tripped and fell over a pipe sticking 6 inches out of the cement on the ground. My croissant went flying! I now have a scraped palm that looks like a child fell off their bike! My other wrist hurt a bit afterwards, but it's fine now. So we continued in the rain to find the castle, and got in free (teachers get into museums for free) only to find that it was more of an ivory collection on display rather than the castle itself. By the time we got back to Yvetot, we were cold and wet!


Dieppe coastline

This coming weekend is the beginning of the Toussaint (All Saints) holidays, and I have booked my train ticket to Nice! Monaco is a half hour, 1 Euro bus ride away! Then I will visit Nice and Cannes, and meet up with Emily (Canadian assistant from Calgary) in Marseille and we will see Aix-en-Provence, Montpellier, Toulouse, and Bordeaux where there is a student wine tour for 15 Euros! We plan on couch surfing with families and taking the bus between cities where possible to save some money.

The weekend after our holidays, I will be visiting a friend I met last year in South Africa! I will take the overnight train to Munich, spend all day Friday in Munich and bus over to her place in Stuttgart in the evening, where we'll stay for the weekend. It was actually the cheapest way to get to Stuttgart, oddly enough!

Tomorrow I am going to visit another Canadian assistant from Guelph in Saint-Valéry-en-Caux for the day, so I'm headed to bed! :)