12/2

Teaching today was great. All of my classes went super. I’m really starting to get to know each of the classes and understanding what works best in each class. Games seem to be the best in every class and stickers work amazingly for the young one. In some of my classes I started with days of the week and months of the year and in my other classes I finished up the lesson from last week, which was numbers. For some reason the numbers 12-15 are the hardest for them to say and remember in all of the grades. But today is the first Thursday where I wasn’t worn-out by the end of the day. Not to mention the snow really helped as well. It’s been snowing for 2 days now, on and off. Nothing is sticking but it’s still really nice to see it coming down. Really makes it feel like Christmas.  

12/1 Rabbit Rabbit

WOW can’t believe it’s already December! I’ve been in France for 2 whole months.

Charlotte and I needed to get out of Laval for the day. As much as I really love Laval, it can get kinda boring and old really quickly. Our friend Liz went to Vitré a few weeks ago and loved it. It’s only a 20 minute train ride west from Laval and about 8 Euros for a round trip. The town is super cute; it looks like an old ski resort town. All the buildings are old and rustic looking. It was also snowing that day so it made it that much more enjoyable and picturesque. 

OK so there was this room in the castle with a bunch of dead animals. It was creepy, but they stuffed these frogs and put them in such funny poses. Kinda creepy and kinda funny at the same time, but at one point these where actaul living frogs....

11/30

Class cancelled! YEHA! I know right, how lucky am I. I only work about 8 hours a week and one class gets cancelled so now I have to work 7 hours. Sometimes life is so hard here in France… hahaha jkjkjk. So what did I do with a whole Tuesday off you ask! I made turkey soup and homemade bread.  We actually had quite a bit of turkey left over and I decided since I tackled a whole turkey, why couldn’t I make turkey soup too. The task was really quite daunting at first but all in all the soup came out amazing and everyone really loved it. I also bought way too much flour for the big dinner and I needed to use it so I made about 40 dinner rolls to go with the soup.  Great dinner!

11/29

Video teaching is the worst thing every invented! The worst! I can promise you this. My friend Sarah and I work together for our video conference. They paired up all the primary English assistants to work together on the video conference. Each group has a middle school out in the middle of rural France. The first class we have is probably the equivalent of 7^th grade and they think they are so cool. They think they are too cool to talk in English and participate, and that they have the ability to talk whenever they want to. Get this, there is an actual teacher in the room and she is no help. I’m telling you guys it the most frustrating experience. The kids are constantly talking, they don’t listen to me or Sarah, and their actual teacher won’t even try and get them to listen, she is too busy worrying about the clicker (control that operates the TV).  So here is a little background on the actual conference set-up, it’s like a fancy skype system. On our TV screen we have a picture of the whole class and a picture of me and Sarah. So this teacher that they have finds it necessary to hold the clicker the whole time and when every a child is answering a question she feels it necessary to zoom in directly on the child’s face.  Now you may think this is helpful to us but it’s NOT. Because the class is so noisy and she won’t stop them, we find it difficult to see who the actual culprits are, not to mention she goes so fast with the clicker from one kids face to another, it makes me sea sick. It’s the most annoying thing in the world, constantly going left to right or up and down. I would never recommend this for any school system anywhere.

OK, so I know there are a lot of pictures, but there are so many more and I couldn't decide which ones I wanted so I just put a lot.

This one is Charlotte and all the ingredients that go into the stuffing that my friend Robin chopped up for me.

Theses are the pumpkin pies that Robin made from a actual pumpkin. So I called my mom at 6am on a Sunday morning about these pumpkin pies. Robin and I were getting worried because they had been in the oven for over an hour and they still were really soupie in the middle but they turned out great. Sorry mom about that early wake up call but it really was a pumpkin pie emergency. lol

This is turkey #1, not to be confused with turkey #2. Turkey #2 was chopped down the middle.

This is turkey #2 all finished. I also called my mom a few more times after the pumpkin incident to get more instructions on cooking 2 turkeys at one time in a small french over. The result was that I ended up taking out the bottom rack and rested the actual pan on the floor of the oven and putting the second bird on the middle shelf and rotating each turkeys every half hour. I also put the birds in at 1 pm thinking they would be done by 3pm but they weren't. They were cut and ready to eat by 5pm.

My friend Doug helping me out!

We had tons of food, this it the list of food and who made what:  

Turkey:Jen

Mash potatoes: Sibel and Michelle

Sweet potatoes: Liz, Laura K

Neaps n’tatties (turnips and potatoes): Charlotte

Potato Pancakes: Alicia

Peas: Laura

Carrots: Laura

String beans: Stephanie

Corn: Jen

Stuffing: Jen

Mac n’cheese: Sarah, Anna

Special brussel sprout dish with bacon: Sibel and Michelle

Cranberry sauce: Liz

Gravy: Jen

Rolls: Doug

Corn bread: Liz, Stephanie

Robin made name tags of all the food with both the English and French translation.

Mom the stuffing turned out great!

There was about 25 of us there!

All the desserts, here is the list and who made what:

Pumpkin pie: Robin

Apple pie: Jen

Vanilla Ice cream: Maiten

Apple Crumble: Doug

Cake : Liz

So this is my apple pie, and yes that bottom corner is my other apple pie that i sorta left in the oven for too long! The crust was just a little crunchy.

It was a great dinner but I know know what most mothers go through and why Thanksgiving is luckily only once a year!

11/27

Time to buy the turkey! So Charlotte and Liz went with me to pick up the turkey that I ordered earlier this week. I made sure that we got there kinda early, I really had no clue what to expect, and I was preparing for the worst. I wanted to give us enough time, so if for some reason the turkey still had all its feathers on it they could take them off or if they gave us some crazy looking thing I could get something else instead. But fortunately everything was good. They didn’t have a big enough bird so they gave us 2 four kilo turkeys. Unfortunately they still had their heads on them. At this point I would like to thank my dad for preparing me as a child for what I witnessed at the butcher shop. I kindly asked the butcher if he could cut off the heads. At that point he whipped out this HUGE cleaver and then Charlotte and Liz went running out of the butcher shop. Yes Dad, your years of hunting and hanging dead animals around our house have come into handy. I’m not saying I enjoyed the beheading, because I didn’t but the French butcher did make fun of my 2 friends for running out of the shop as fast as they could and not me. So thanks again dad. The birds both weighed a little more than 4 kilos a piece and together they both cost around 80 Euros. So the three of us walked 30 minutes home with 16 pounds of turkey. Once we got home we then ran into the problem of storing the birds. Both Liz and I had to rearrange our little mini fridges and take our shelves out in order to fit them and then we each took a bird.  

Christmas Lights and Fireworks

So for the past month or so the little city of Laval has been hard at work putting up lights all over the city. They have stuff hanging from trees, these crazy looking circles in the river, and they put up a huge frame over the bridge to hang lights. They really went crazy; I mean there isn’t a place in Laval that doesn’t have some type of light hanging from it. So I was getting kinda of excited and on top of that all the Frenchies kept saying how great these lights are.  At 5:30 we all walked down to the little light show.  (oh btw, (dad this means “by the way” I know you’re not all up on this high tech stuff…hahaha) its freezing here in France, so I tend to wear many layers, this night was no exception, tights, leggings, jeans, long sleeve shirts, t-shirts, sweater, fleece, a big jacket, scarf, gloves, and a hat…. I’m definitely not used to this weather and everyone else makes fun of me cause everyone else is from a place in the cold. Canada, England, Scotland, and Milwaukie. ) They started off the lighting ceremony with about 15 minutes of fireworks. They were good, the fireworks didn’t go that high but they were pretty decent. Then came the lights, I think these pictures explain it all. They are super tacky and they look like aliens saucers.      

11/25 Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving! It was great to skype with you all today!

11/24 baked ziti

Made dinner for my friends tonight, baked ziti and then for dessert I did a dry run on the apple pie to prepare myself for Thanksgiving. Both turned out great, I used white sugar for the apple pie instead of brown sugar.  Also, funny story, British people have no clue what baked ziti is. No clue. I had to repeat the name of the dish like 10 times and still they called it everything else but it’s actual name. Charlotte (Scottish) kept calling it noodle city and Laura (England) could not comprehend the word ziti if her life depended on it. They both kept asking, “What is a ziti?” I tried to explain to them but I still pretty sure they have no clue what the dish is called. Oh well they both still really enjoyed it.