Travel with parents, part 1

I finished teaching last Friday.  My parents arrived in Toulouse on Saturday!  After a great last night with my friends, I slept a whopping 4 hours then got a ride to Toulouse with Birgit and her boyfriend in his awesome Volkswagen camper van to meet my parents at the airport.  Spent Saturday night in Toulouse, showed my parents some of the sites in town and ate in a awesome restaurant.

Sunday, we got up and picked up our rental car then headed out of town to Albi.  It is beautiful.  Despite it being Easter sunday, the town was hopping and most things were open.  It is the birthplace of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec so of course we had to see the Toulouse-Lautrec museum and the city's really impressive cathedral.

Albi cathedral

We spent the next few days visiting some of the Cathar castles in the region around Carcassonne.  In order not to clutter up my blog with a poorly researched history of the Cathars, I'm just going to link the New York Times article that inspired the trip. (even if you don't read it, I suggest looking at the slide show because his photos are way better than mine) Anyway, to make a long story short, the Cathars were persecuted by the Catholics so they built fortified castles in really hard-to-reach places, i.e. on the tops of rock cliffs on the tops of mountains, so each visit requires a steep hike but offers awesome views across valleys and they look super impressive and mysterious especially in their crumbling state.

Chateaux de Lastours

Chateau de Quéribus

Chateau de Peyrepertuse

We did the hikes for some of the chateux and chose to photograph some from below.  There really isn't much once you get up there--they have mostly been left as they were after they were attacked, so they are pretty much just piles of rocks. They still look really cool!

Tuesday night we ended in the city of Foix and spent the night there, right under its castle.  These pictures were taken from the skylight of our hotel room!

We got to Tarbes yesterday to spend the afternoon and evening there.  I got to show my parents all the sights (LOL) and have a great dinner in a restaurant that I never could have taken myself to, and they got to meet some of my Tarbes friends.  This morning we went to Tarbes' awesome farmers' market to get some local wine, cheese, and produce, and then we headed out of town.  We're now in Bayonne, the capital of French Basque country and will spend the next 3 days seeing all the good seaside towns including Biarritz and some great little villages.  As I say about every place I've ever been in France, this one is the best!!!

Reflections

My time as a teaching assistant has officially come to an end.  I still have lots of exciting travels planned before coming home, but I wanted to take a few minutes to reflect on my year teaching.  In January, I made my first ever New Year's resolutions, which were basically goals for the second half on my time here.  They hung next to my bed for four months, reminding me of what I wanted to accomplish.  Some of them, like cleaning my room every two weeks, were just way too optimistic, but I would say I accomplished all the important things I wanted to. 

The most important resolutions had to do with learning French: make more French friends, and read more in French.  I definitely made more French friends and although I still haven't done that much reading, more than half of it was in French.  I don't know at what point, but sometime along the way I decided I could start saying I'm fluent in French, which I definitely wouldn't have before.  I hung out with a lot more french people and I feel really comfortable speaking French now.

I also resolved to give better lessons and like my students more.  I don't know if my lessons were better, but they were definitely more fun after the Christmas break, both for me and for the students I think.  And I did really start to like some of my students.  Obviously, you can't win them all--there were some classes that were just as poorly behaved and disinterested in my lessons, but most of my classes were made up of really nice and fun students.  For the second half of the year, I mostly just played games with them as opposed to trying to teach them stuff, which turned out to be a fun way to get them to speak and hopefully once they realized they were having fun in English class, they would be more interested in the actual lessons.  All in all, the second half was way better than the first, and I was pleasantly surprised by some groups of students that turned out to be both interested and interesting.

Unrelated: I forgot to write about this when it happened, but a couple of weeks ago my school had its "Carnival".  Most schools in France do this, and since real Carnival (Mardi Gras) is during the winter break they do it a week or two after the break.  This was the Wednesday after I came back from London and it's basically just like Halloween--the students all dress up in costumes and classes are cancelled between 11 and noon so they can have a costume competition.  I was really impressed by some of their costumes- they were really creative and got really into it.  Here's a photo of me with some of my favorite students in awesome costumes:

Wine Weekend

As in all of France, the Southwest home to an excellent wine region.  This weekend, the four Americans decided to check out what our region has to offer.  Saturday morning, we borrowed a car and headed north to the Madiran region to visit, taste, and buy.  We couldn't have asked for better weather--it was clear and sunny, and we got all dressed up in our cute sundresses.  On the way, we stopped in the village of Madiran to have lunch at a cute little family restaurant.  I think we were the only customers, everyone else there was part of the family.  We ate very very well and, in the French style, spent about 2 hours à table.

I also took pictures of my food, for mom:

Appetizer plate

Confit de canard--the best dish the southwest has to offer

After our decadent lunch, we kept driving, ending up in the village of Viella, which is surrounded by wineries.  The first was the Chateu de Viella.

Our future home?

We tasted most of their wines and picked up a few bottles, and the nice lady in the tasting room offered us a free bottle to take home as well!  We weren't ready to be done so we visited a second, smaller winery, owned by an older couple and their adult son.  We got to taste all their wines and see the sheds where they age the wine in giant metal tanks before bottling it, and walked around the vineyard a bit.  Here are some photos of the property:

(not related to wine) On Sunday, Nancy and Samuel, the two Venezuelan assistants, decided to cook us a huge Venezuelan lunch.  There were the two of them, the four Americans, and some of our friends from the engineering school--Venezuelans and Colombians.  The lunch was awesome, obviously.

Can't rotate the photo--Nancy explaining the food to us

For my dad--a different and WAY better way of making fried plantains

It was actually my last full weekend in Tarbes, and although I'm obviously really sad to leave, I feel like we're doing the most we can together these last few days so I'm not disappointed at all.  I've made some amazing friends here and as always, the best and worst part of travelling or living in other places is that you meet people from all over the world who you may not see again and even if you do, it's only every few years.  We're all still in denial at this point, and won't let each other talk about it until the day we leave.  Everytime anyone starts saying "I'm really going to miss you guys!" they get yelled at and we change the subject...

As for my classes, I'm having a mostly positive last few sessions with them.  I'm getting some hilariously mixed reactions when I tell them it's their last class with me--most of them are sad but I have the occasional dud groups who don't care at all or make a really lame effort to pretend to be sad.  I saw one of my favorite classes this morning and we talked about American high school--I gave them a little quiz about it then showed them some of my pictures of important high school events like prom and graduation.  They loved seeing the photos and finding out what things are different from their high school.  Most of them said they would prefer to go to high school in American solely because we finish school at 3pm every day (they sometimes have class until 6 in the evening).  As is everyone in France, they are shocked that we don't get a 2 hour lunch break but said they would gladly sacrifice that to finish earlier.  I have my other favorite group this afternoon and since they didn't have class last week I asked the teacher if I could have the whole class instead of half.  Yesterday Molly, Hadley, and I spent the evening making cookies upon cookies upon cookies, and mine were for this class, so they will be tasting that great American delicacy, the chocolate chip cookie.

London

I've been back for a few weeks but finally getting around to writing my post about the trip to London.  I was there from March 21 to 26th and spent a very very full week, which may explain my laziness about posting.  The teacher who organized the trip crammed as much as we could do in 6 days but of course there are still loads of things I want to do there--I'll just have to go back!  I got to spend the week with my colleague Eva, a young (my age) Spanish teacher who decided to chaperone the trip to practice her English.  We got along really well, spoke a pretty equal mix of English and French, and always wanted to do the same things with our free time so we spent a really agreable week together.  Additionally, most of the students on the trip are not in my classes, but were really nice and interesting and we had a lot of fun together.

Here are some pictures from the first day: we went to the National Gallery and the London Eye (a huge, overpriced ferris wheel that offers a great view of London)

Lions in Trafalgar Square

View from the London Eye

Inside the "bubble" that you sit in on the ferris wheel

The second day, we had a tour guide in the afternoon who came on the bus with us and told us all kinds of things about London.  She mostly took us around East London, and we spend a lot of time visiting and talking about the Olympic Park for the 2012 Olympic Games.  I admit, I was a bit skeptical when they announced back in 2005 that London would be hosting the olympics (especially since I happened to be in France at the time, and Paris was another contender!), and since London doesn't seem like a city that "needs" the games as an excuse to revive a dying city or anything, but I was wrong.  East London is actually very poor, dangerous, and run-down, and the facilities they're building will all be re-used afterwards to benefit the neighborhood in some way, and they have already added new train lines that can bring people from East London to the center of town.  Additionally, it's a really "green" project: 97% of the materials that had to be removed or destroyed to build on the site were recycled into the project, and besides the media parking, there is no parking in the whole olympics park--all the spectators must take the commuter trains and walk.

One of my other favorite things about the trip was the visit to Hampton Court, Henry VIII's palace just outside of London.  Not only was it a beautiful castle, but I have always been really into Tudor history so it was awesome being in the palace where so much of the history I've read about took place.

A great group of students in Hampton Ct gardens

Hampton Ct palace at sunset

We did a lot of museums during the week and my favorite was the Victoria and Albert Museum, one of the world's best art and design museum. We mostly let the students visit the museums at their own pace so they could see what they found the most interesting, and at this one they all blew ahead of me as I spent hours drooling over tapestries, drawings, jewelry, stained glass, etc.

Courtyard of Victoria and Albert Museum

On the last day we visited the Tower of London which was awesome.  Different parts of it were added in different periods so it basically covers English history throughout the ages.  It is also home to the crown jewels which was one of the coolest parts.  The building that holds the crown jewels is actually a huge vault with really intimidating metal doors and intense security.  Of course, no pictures allowed in there.

Tower Bridge from the Tower of London

In conclusion, I had a really great week in London and of all the places I've visited so far this year I think it's the one I want to return to the most.  I love how saturated it is with history (and history that I know!) and how diverse it is.  The population is really international, the different neighborhoods are all really different, and it has lovely parks--it's the city in Europe with the most green space.  Plus everything is just beautiful!