So it's been less than a month since i last blogged. I think we can count that as an improvement? woo!
Life in provence trundles on at it's own meandering pace. Since my last post, the weather has turned from warm and sunny, to damp and rainy, to freezing cold and sunny (believe me, this is possible with 40kph winds), and is now comfortably settled back to being warm and sunny. So warm and sunny in fact that i have eaten outside on two consecutive days and have walked around in sunglasses and a tshirt without goosebumps. More on that later.
A couple of weeks ago i received my first housing benefit payment! Since it was the first one, i was owed for november and december, which meant that i got two month's worth in one go (a sweet 460€ no less), and then last week i received january's payment. All this on top of getting my salary meant that i went from being only just in the black to being nearly 1500€ in the black. whoah. being me, the only thing i could possibly do to mark this occasion was go shopping. so i did. i spent a very happy afternoon in sephora choosing a new perfume for myself, and eventually settled on chanel coco mademoiselle (when in rome...). I also went hunting in the vintage shop here and got my hands on an absolute find. an old barbour bedale waxed jacket. it looks like this:
the one i have badly needs re-waxing so is a little paler green than this. it also has a tiny scratch/rip on one of the cuffs, but generally i am very pleased with it! I discovered that new they cost £190 and are going on ebay for around £100. I payed a grand sum of 40€ for mine...
Kathryn came to stay unfortunately on the wettest weekend we've seen in Avignon for a good few weeks. that said, i hope she had a nice time seeing where i've been spending my year. We went to marseille on the saturday and had a wander around. we were limited as to what we could do comfortably by the weather, but we did do a bit of shopping and go for a coffee in a very important café. i'll put a picture up. 10 points to whoever can identify it's importance.
Saturday was one of my friend's birthdays, so to celebrate a group of us took the train down to the cote d'Azur to spent the day by the beach in Cassis. If you've never spent a day on the cote d'Azur, i recommend stopping everything and booking flights immediately. It was beautiful!! The weather was so unbelievably warm and the sky was the most clear, gorgeous blue i have ever seen. we went and got ice cream (kinder flavour... omg!) on the beach, and sat by the harbour and ate moules frites in the sunshine for lunch before walking it all off hiking along the cliffs around the coast. myself and nicky have since vowed to spend every other weekend after the winter holidays by the sea.
here are a collection of photos from the day:
the port. lots of pretty coloured boats.
yummy ice cream.
myself and nicky in the restaurant waiting for our moules. note the choice (lack) of clothing.
the moules arrived. complete with a bucket for the empty shells.
the view from the top of the cliff we climbed to.
sitting triumphantly at the view point. our feet were tired by this point.
sat on the beach watching the sunset. 
So as you can see, it was pretty beautiful. If you wanna come and visit and spend the day then let me know! The following day was equally as gorgeous, so obviously a sunday lunch outside with a tartine and a glass of rosé was obligatory.
In terms of work, i have recently started conversation classes with the teachers I'm working with. This is completely alien for me, because the only times i have ever been in this kind of intimate teaching situation before in my life was when i was having conversation classes to improve my french, so my instinct is to speak french the whole time, not english. I suppose also that it doesn't help that i'm teaching primary school children here, because even though i do teach them how to speak english, there is still a lot of explanation in french involved. after 5 times of explaining instructions to any particular game in english and failing miserably, it is soooo much easier to just switch into french. So that means i instinctively start explaining something to them (the teachers) in french and they stop me going "no no eeen eeengleesh!". fatigant.
I'm also starting private tutoring this week. It is the son of a teacher at one of my schools who is in 6ème at the collège and is apparently very shy and struggling with talking english at school. So my job (i think) will just be to turn up and chat to him. I'm hoping it goes ok. either way, i'm getting paid 15€ per hour to do it, so happy days.
A group of us went to see the King's Speech at the cinema last week - I really really enjoyed it. I'm not sure i've been to the cinema and enjoyed a film so much in ages. We're quite limited here as to what british/american films are shown in VO (version originale), so i was so pleased to see that this was showing. I read an excellent article on daily mail online (no, that's not an oxymoron) about it last night. Also i had no idea that Geoffrey Rush was actually australian. oops. Off to see Black Swan on wednesday this week, so hoping that'll be good too.
I should probably go now and get on with my hectic evening of drinking tea, eating patisserie and watching biggest loser. only three weeks to go and I'll be back on english soil. HOORAH. Hopefully I'll blog again before then. If i remember.
Lots of love xxx
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