A Garlicky Situation

Ugh, I am a little down just now, and I don't know why. This happens occasionally, after all it is hard being away from Chris and my family, but I'm seeing them on Sunday so it's really annoying to feel so sad. Normally I'd call Chris but he's working late and I'll need to go to bed before he'll get back. It's really stupid though, I've had a very nice week and can't complain, so my melancholy mood is inexplicable.

We had our Roman party on Saturday and even though my costume looked just like I'd tied a bedsheet around myself (possibly because I had in fact tied a bedsheet around myself) it was a nice night. The honey and rosemary toasts, rasberry cheesecake, apple tart, and muscat were all particular highlights. However I do recall being rather down over the weekend as well as I barely went out. S's friend A was here since last Thursday and so they were doing things together which I was also invited to, but which I had done before recently and didn't much feel like doing again. On Friday I went food shopping with Cl for the roman party and we spent 3, yes that's three hours in Auchan (a supermarket) which was a bit crazy, and I managed to spend an inordinate amount of money on food considering I'm only here for a few more days then I go home. On Saturday and Sunday during the day I did basically nothing, although Sunday night another friend from India came round and made us curry which was very nice. Then on Monday S and A went to the Calanques- the sea- which I would have really have liked to have done, but I was working, so when I got home from work I spent the night in alone. Yesterday was a good day- I didn't need to work, as the school had the previously mentioned Challenge Langues Vivantes so I spent the day playing Happy Families with the kids and met some English expats. After school I took the bus back to Avignon with S and A who were also in Cavaillon, and then I went yet again to the shops and impossibly bought even more (all I needed was chopped tomatoes and margarine but I ended up buying 23 euros worth of stuff). When I got back to the house, there stainding in the kitchen was a strange and very tall man, plus A, who immediately took a photo of my puzzled face.

The man turned out to be D, a guy S and A had spent time with at Villeneuve on Sunday and at the Calanques on Monday, and who they had met by surprise at the bus stop in Avignon and had invited back. He was a Canadian who was travelling around Europe for 9 months, and so he stayed for dinner- lentil soup (with groans from the boys who I think wanted something more substantial or meaty, although in the end they liked it) and pizza which was surprisingly given to S by our most mysterious housemate- Mr Sh, who lives downstairs next to the garage and who we almost never see. After dinner me and S and A went to a friend's house for a 'Nutella party' which comprised of biscuits and bread and breadsticks all of which were spreaded with or dipped in nutella- a fairly calorific but pleasant affair although by the end I was completely shattered and desperate to go home.

Today I went out with S and A as A wanted to look for presents to take back to friend's and family, and then we met D and a girl we're friends with N, at the Palais des Papes and went up to the Jardin Des Doms and passed an agreeable afternoon picnicking on the grass in the sunshine. We then went to the bus stop with A, to say goodbye as he went back to Germany. Then we came back here with D so he could give S his photos and we drank ginger tea.

The reason behind the ginger tea is a battle I've been having over the last couple of days with a cold which I am determined not to succumb to. Basically on Saturday night at the party Cl wasn't very well and she even had to go to bed early because of it. Then on Monday morning I awoke with a really sore throat and constant thirst which for me is usually the first sign of a cold. I can just about deal with the sore throat, but I hate what usually follows- a nose so blocked I can't sleep, losing my voice, a hacking cough and then eventually a nose so runny I either need to sniff or use a tissue every two seconds- and it just so happens that I had recently found out that garlic was good against colds.

The reason I knew this was that last Tuesday, just over a week ago, I had some bread that needed to be used up and decided to make garlic bread, the problem being that I wasn't so sure how to make it- in the end I chopped up about 3 cloves of garlic for about 12 very small pieces of bread (think a slice of a baguette) and mixed the garlic with margarine, spread it on the bread and toasted it. This I then offered to S, and apparently I'd used way too much garlic, which wasn't a problem of taste- it tasted pretty good, kind of spicy- but after we'd finished eating it S pointed out that eating garlic can often result in smelling like garlic. Which could be a problem, considering that this particular night S had a date. I thought it would be fine- just brush your teath and it'll go away, right? Wrong. I then did some research on garlic. Apparently it sticks to your lungs or something and the smell comes out when you exhale whether you brush your teeth a hundred times or not, plus the smell actually comes out through the pores in your skin. So, whoops! Nonetheless I tried researching contra-garlic measures, but the most effective seemed to be eating fresh parsley, which we didn't have, or not eating garlic. But while I was doing this research I discovered that garlic also had antibiotic properties, and was therefore good for colds. Which brings me back to....

My battle against the ever approaching cold. When I felt the sore throat coming on, I decided to see what natural anti cold remedies might be available, by doing my usual form of research- typing 'natural cold remedies' into google. Zinc, vitamin C, ginger, echinacea, and of course, garlic. Phase one was a fairly disgusting, but actually better than I thought, concotion of two crushed cloves of fresh garlic in a cupful of boiling water mixed with ten drops of lemon juice (for the vit C) which I drank on Monday night. Yesterday morning I awoke with a similarly sore throat, but no other symptoms. Yesterday evening after the nutella party I drank another garlic-soup concoction, plus a carrot-apple and strawberry drink I'd bought which contains half the RDA of vitamin C, plus in the morning I'd eating a vitamin and iron rich cereal, to which I added raisins, for the iron, the reason behind this being that as a vegetarian I am susceptible to anaemia which in turn lowers the immune system, which isn't good in the battle against a cold. Today I awoke with a sore throat again, but still no other symptoms, and the first thing I did was drink the vitamin C juice after which the sore throat got better throughout the day- phase three involved buying some ginger today and making ginger and lemon tea. Now my sore throat is almost gone, but who knows, it may be back tomorrow. Which is just about where I'd got to in my evening I think...

Anyway D left for Lyon, then he's going to Rome, so he has continued on his travels. After he was gone we made a quiche (phase four- eggs for the zinc!) then I prepared for school and tutoring tomorrow (though I am still rather unprepared for school, there may be some improvisation involved tomorrow), then Stefanie was tired so she went to bed, then I came on my computer, had a look at the roman party pics on facebook, felt rather down and decided to write in my blog...

...and that's about it! Who'da thunk it but I actually feel a lot better now, maybe I needed some spiritual cleansing in the form of spewing out my life and boring contra-cold eating habits! So now I'm going to sleep. If anyone actually got through this labyrinth of a blog post, well done, I'm a bit all over the place right now. Oh but if you have any other cold cures, let me know- I've still to try echinacea but I'm working my way through the list!


P.S.- If you're wondering what happened on the date after all the garlic, apparently he didn't seem to notice the smell but sadly S decided she didn't like the fellow any more, he just wasn't her type. So if you know any young, handsome, eligible bachelors in the Avignon area let me know and I'll pass the information on!

The Visitors

Well it's now nearly a week since the arrival of my beloved, who only stayed the weekend and left on Monday, and nearly two weeks since my parents and aunt came, and a week since they left. And now S's friend A is here, so March has been quite the month of visitation.

I had a fab time with my family and also a really great time with C, and I will be home again in just over a week, for the last time until the end of the Avignon Experience. It's really true when everyone said 'it will all go in so fast'- can't believe there are just 3 months left, and two weeks of that I'm in Glasgow. There are so many things I've yet to do- The Camargue, Les Calanques, Aix-en-Provence, and further afield, Toulouse. I also want to visit my aunt in Nice at least once more. To be fair the weather has only just perked up enough to go visiting, and I got to see Orange and Arles with my parents when they were here. Clearly I am working hard on doing all my sightseeing, sitting as i am in my bed with my pc on my lap at midday on one of my days off. On the other hand I am going shopping shortly to buy food for our Roman Party, our second soirée deguisement after the 80s party was a success. I may also need to think about a costume, as I haven't got one yet. If I have my way we will also have a fancy dress party the weekend after my birthday- A Spiderman Party! Rachel I will give you adequate warning if I in fact decide to do this, not sure there will be enough people here to do it as most of my friends leave at the end of April :( having only seven month contracts. I can only think of about 4 or 5 of my friends who will still be here for May and June. I am getting pretty sad about this, having to say goodbye to everyone in just over a month :( but I am really glad that my flatmates will still be here!!

In other news my friend's cat just had 5 extremely cute kittens, photos will be forthcoming on Facebook!!

Anyway I'm off to do something, something being my new favourite word as I use it uncommonly often... or something like that.

Where the Hell Are We Jumping?

The title of this post refers to our blatant rip off of 'Where the Hell is Matt', us being S and Cl and I. Basically, whenever we go anywhere we haven't been before, we take a photo (usually several) of us jumping. That's pretty much it. But our plan is that somehow this project will grant us funding to travel the world, see loads of different places, and in each of them, to jump. We could even have a theme song, like 'Jump!' by Girls Aloud, or that jumping song in Glee when they do the mattress advert. We could try and do different style jumps in each place visited, and interview other jumpers, and learn the local culture in reference to jumping, and we could do a 'who's the oldest person we can find who wants to jump in our photos?' feature. This is going to make us famous one day, just you wait and see. If you have any more ideas with reference to our future jumping project let me know- i.e. who would you like to see jumping? We could try and get celebrities to jump, so if you are so inclined to tell me, which celebrity would you most like to see jumping, and why?

In other news, I did not get a snow day yesterday after all, and most of it has melted, but I am still blinking freeeezing. I'm not going out tonight, already have my PJs on and am chilling out at home, obviously, since I am writing in my blog- twice in 3 days, I may be getting better at this. I have just about gotten over my anger at one of my schools (where I was today) for not telling me they were bringing a new English teacher in. Well it's not quite like that. Basically I was told that for the three eldest classes (CM2, CM1, and CE2 CM1) there would be a high school English teacher coming to help bridge the gap between secondary (or college) and primary education. When this happened, I was to spend more time with the 5 younger classes (CE1/CE2, CP and the three Maternelle groups) but they weren't sure when she was coming. I said this was fine but could I please have at least a weeks notice because otherwise I would do unnecessary preparation for the older kids and not enough for the youngers, and was told 'of course!'. So I turn up the next week having prepared for all 8 classes and am told 'oh, we tried to call you last night, you're just doing the younger classes because the teacher was here last Thursday, so you can just spend extra time with them.' Ehhh great, so an attempted call the night before= a weeks notice. Not wanting to complain, I smiled and said 'yes of course that's fine but I haven't really prepared to spend longer with the little ones' and was told 'oh don't worry.' Eh, yeah right, don't worry, well it's not you that has to go unprepared to entertain a bunch of 3/4/5 year olds in a foreign language and underprepared for an amount of time which is frankly too long for their attention span. I coped, because I always have a few extra things up my sleeve for emergencies, but have to admit I was a bit (very) pissed off with the way it was handled. Moreover, in a few weeks it's the older kids 'Challenge Langues Vivantes' which is like a day of games and activities in English related to a theme- this year 'La Maison'. So I had prepared a four week plan of work which would get the kids up to date on the words for the rooms of the house, and objects in each room, which I was told at the start of the year would be what they'd need to know. And just when that four week plan was about to start, this new prof comes in, and I've seen what she's doing with them and it's nothing to do with the challenge. So in now 3 weeks I go with the kids to the Challenge and they will probably do very badly and not know anything and I will feel guilty even though it's not my fault. I'm pretty angry about this too as I was looking forward to the Challenge and now it's set to be a shambles I think. I did leave some of the stuff I prepared at the school today with a note for the English teacher explaining about the challenge, so fingers crossed she might cover it but it's out of my hands. To make matters worse, she goes on maternity leave in a couple of weeks and I'll be back with the kids again- so what the bloomin' heck is the point of that, a few weeks with her and then I'll have to work out all over again what they've been doing and retailor my lesson plans- the whole thing is a mess and just writing about it gets me annoyed.

But my anger is mostly dissipated by the fact that, while I'm only teaching the little kids, I can leave school nearly 2 hours earlier and get the earlier bus home, meaning getting back at 5 and not 6- score!

Well I'm off to skype with C- he comes in a week and a half, wayhey!!! :D Hopefully this current mood of writing frequent blog posts will continue, and I'll write again soon.

This Fire(nze) is out of Control

Oh my giddy aunt, it's snowing!! Can't quite believe it, in Provence and in March. Pros: Possible 'snow day' and no school tomorrow (everything really does grind to a halt here when there's snow on the ground) Cons: Wet feet- all of my boots and shoes have long ago lost their waterprooficity except my hillwalking boots but don't really fancy wearing them out and about. So if I do have school I will most likely have soaked socks and cold tootsies, *sigh*.

I have decided that I will just hope it will be a snow day tomorrow and instead of preparing for school, will write a blog post and try and keep this thing rolling. First, would like to briefly mention the weekend which consisted of a Friday night Algerian (i think) fashion show in a Maison Pour Tous which featured some amaaazing dresses, photos to be added sur facebook soon. After this, getting home about 11, S and I made a cake, a Shokonusskuchen (sp?) or chocolate nut cake, with rum, yum! It's now Sunday and most of it is gone, oops. So much for the regime. Anyway back to chronology, on Saturday we started off the day in a similarly regime-ruining way at Utopia with a breakast of croissants and biscuits and brownies, oh my! Followed by some short films about the current situation in Mexico which were very touching and enlightening. Then about 12 we had to rush home and change clothes, and put together a packed lunch before heading out in Cl's car to Fontaine de Vaucluse, where we climbed a hill with some of Cl's uni friends. It was a really great day, and at night we went back to one guy's house whos birthday it was and ordered pizza. That was what the Shokonusskuchen was for by the way, the birthday. And then today I've been working out how to go home in April, and for how long. I'm thinking of trying the train, which is sure to take all day but I'm bloomin' fed up of airports plus I can take as much luggage as I can carry on a train- no 15kg limit.

So that was this weekend. But I wanted to use this post to describe my holiday in Florence in early Feb. I went with S and with D, a Sicilian friend who's also an assistant, and we stayed there about 4 days. It was absolutely amazing and I took sooooo many photos which I am still in the process of uploading onto fbook. The hostel we stayed in was fine, a bit shabby but clean, although they did try and fob us off into a shared room instead of the private room we'd ordered, plus it was terminally freezing at night until they gave us a small storage heater which I hated leaving on, being a bit of a paranoid freak and thinking it was going to set fire to the place. But ca est allé as they say. During the trip I even learned a little italian, spoken not written so I can't really put it into the blog without looking like a misspelt fool. Nonetheless, rest assured that my Bonjournos and Bellissimos were fantastic *cough*. We visited all the usual tourist attractions, and even managed to take a daytrip to Siena, but what I really want to document (so that everyone can laugh at me of course) is that I had one of the most silly language barrier confusions of my life. We went to this amazing vege cafe named Brac (reccommended to us by an italian assistant whose sister works there) twice during our stay, and the first time, after our meal (a delish seitan tortellini for me) we decided to order coffee. Now, I am a relatively recent coffee convert, and can only drink the stuff with a fair amount of sugar and a lot of milk, but I've recently gone off milk and taken to using soya milk instead when I can, but it obviously isn't very widely available in cafes. But I had noticed that it was listed in the menu that coffee with soya milk was available and so, after D ordered two cafes, I ordered a 'latte de soja' vaguely remembering that that was what was written on the menu. Looking rather bemused, the waiter told me that they were out of soya milk, so i told him 'oh ok then i'll have just a latte' in french (he spoke french but not english). He still seemed a bit confused and said in italian 'latte caldo?' but i didn't understand so just nodded away...

Anyone who speaks Italian probably knows what's coming next. You might have guessed it anyway. The waiter brings D and S their expressos, and brings me a lovely glass of hot milk. At which I ask D 'why do I have hot milk? I ordered a latte?'. And she replies 'yeah that is latte.' And I cotton on that latte means milk and that therefore when I go into starbucks and ask for a soya carmalatte, they understand me because we're in a coffee shop and because in English 'latte' would usually signify coffee, but if I ask in Italy for 'latte' without saying 'cafe latte', I am asking for milk, and I will get milk. I drank it by the way, but forgot to take a photo to bookmark my shame, so here's a blog entry instead.

My embarassing experience in Florence... or something like that.