Filed under: Everyday in Lille
The Good: hail outside my bedroom window; Metro de Lille
The Bad: cheap boots splitting in the rain; far too much French, far too little understanding; I’m still the same weight I was before I started 6 weeks of aerobics (how is that fair???)
The Ugly: Noel Allen, the fuckwit
Lycee Cesar Baggio
Today was my first day; after much idle waiting in La Salle des Professeurs (Staff Room) at the Lycee Cesar Baggio, my professeur referent (who is assigned to look after me) introduced me to the directeur adjoint (deputy principal) and the secretaire; I then sat in on a class; then went home. Not particularly awe inspiring but …?
Baggio is pretty interesting: retro art noveau city, man. It’s well maintained, and has lots of orange and concrete. It’s a purely technical school: they teach mechanical engineering and so on here. Interestingly, most of my students are 18+ and pretty respectful. Teaching style in France does seem to tend towards teacher-centred learning, which I might shake up a bit.
Teaching is going to be no problem: French kids seem all in all better behaved than Aussie ones (I expected that), and there’s more respect for teachers. And much of everything is the same: schools are ridiculously disorganised and chaotic all over the world.
I’m settling in okay – I’ve found a cheap supermarket (the aforementioned one which sells printers but not notebooks), my room is comfortable, and the Metro (subway) rocks. Lille metro consists of two lines of driverless two-part slimline carriages which take me to work in fifteen minutes. I’ve met my other two roommates: middle aged Italian professeurs; one speaks passable English, the other none. I’ve not spoken to them much. Jean-Carlo (the non-English speaking one) came to my rescue this morning, gesturing comically at the fantastic mess I’d made by breaking a glass bowl: smashed into smithereens, and me with no idea where the broom, vacuum or dustpan was kept, and with no idea what the French words for broom, vacuum, and dustpan are. Besides broken glass, my only issues are I have no idea how to turn on the stove, or to start the washing machine (and everytime I go to ask the Italians, I can’t remember for the life for me what French for washing machine is – it’s laver. I’ll have to wait for my landlord (who speaks perfect English) to return.
The weather has been dreadful – but this is Lille, and Lille may as well be Seattle, apparently. Certainly there’s no lack of water! Not a big fan of the tap water so I went to buy bottled – at .17 eurocents a 2.5 litre bottle. Yes, that’s around 30c Aussie. Man, are we getting scammed on the bottled water market.
My big excitement this afternoon was this:
Hail outside my window!
Yes, it hailed. One more step away from snow …
which I don’t want to happen, because it appears the boots I bought to keep my feet dry lasted half a day in Lille puddles; hell, not even that. I hadn’t even arrived at my orientation on Wednesday, when this happened:
Never buy boots with the zip at the back.
Here am I, buying these boots back in Aus, thinking ‘Oh, the zip at the back is interesting’. My arse. The bottom of the zip was damaged and just splits its heart away. I had to walk a good 5-6kms with a hair tye holding my boot together.
However, on the bonus side, the Holeproof Explorer socks I bought ROCK: although I was squelching in water every step of the way, my feet stayed warm and relatively dry.
Having found out how much I’m going to earn, however, I may not be able to afford new boots till the end of the year – I’m going to a factory outlet mall tomorrow in a neighbouring town, to see what kind of prices I’m up for; but going on everything here, I know I won’t be able to afford it.
Other small issue: I’m not sure if theres fresh milk here. I’ve been drinking UHT with my breakfast, but I miss fresh milk to drink (UHT is … you know how it tastes, straight). No luck on the Vegemite or Weet-bix search, the only two staples from home I need in everyday life 
Absolutely so far my biggest problem is French. After two years of study, my French is still at a beginner level – I just can’t understand anyone. Understanding is important, as they went ahead and did our orientation entirely in French. I imagine next week’s training day will be also. In the end, I went home and looked up on the internet what I’m required to do, so it was okay, but I had a touch of panic during the session as I could catch words like ‘visa’ and understand that it was all really really important. But, the French thing is really bugging me; I need to become fluent at French yesterday, and no matter how hard I work now, its going to take six months to get there – by which time I’ll be packing for home.
Finally, Mum let me know how things been going with her case. All I can say is, if I ever meet Noel Allen again, I am going to rip him a new one and see how he likes it. What a fucking deluded prick. How can there possibly be someone so evil, and we don’t see it? We have the Hitler of the Pharmacy world in that man, right here, someone should assassinate him now before he goes all Pinky and the Brain and try to take over the rest of the world. What kind of person attacks someone so viciously, especially when he knows they’re innocent and he can’t possibly profit from it?!
I’m off, to sleep for a while and then contemplate some badly needed French study.
