New Year, New Start?
Hey everyone! Bonne Année, Happy New Year etc!
January has brought my dreaded return to Lille. I have now been back for ten days, and a lot has happened since then. At the start, I felt that empty, painful feeling of loneliness. I don’t know how many of you have experienced this, but the feeling is not a force to be reckoned with. It deflates you and exhausts you. It makes you paranoid, like nobody back home is thinking about you and there’s nobody in your new home who cares about you. In a nut-shell it sucks, and it epitomises my first week. For a change, and this may surprise some people, but school was my only escape. My flat which had become a shrine to my boyfriend and family and best friends turned into a place I didn’t want to be in, because I had just left them all behind.
School became my refuge. I wanted to do extra classes, although there were none.
This quickly changed on the first Thursday of my return. Not only was I up at 5.30am, but my lovely 8-10 class were being wee arseholes to me. They usually get involved but I suppose their way of dealing with the holiday blues was to detach from school, unlike myself. So the two hours dragged in. Next was break time, where my responsible came to me to ask me to prepare a lesson on Scotland for my two segunde (kids between 15-17) classes. “Yes, no problem” was my response, “Is this for tomorrow?”. She replied, “No, well yes, I mean every Friday until the end of the year.” That’s right, I have to come up with 14 weeks worth of lessons on Scotland. How the hell? The main problem is that the kids English is poor, and therefore I’m limited in what I can talk about! Disaster. To finish off this horrendous day where it was starting to feel like ‘old’ times, I had the class from hell next.
Imagine the worst kid in your second year high school class, you know, the one who was a total prick and who always carried on and who came in smelling like hash and had 4 babies by the time he was 16. Multiply this by 25. This is what made up my next class, with the slightly inexperienced stagier teacher. At the start of the lesson, the teacher puts new class rules on the board for them to copy. They do so…not in their copy books, but on their desks, their hands, and any other thing that wasn’t paper. Then she threatens them with not benefiting from my teaching. Uh-oh. They then noticed me and start shouting things in English, pidgin English. Random words like “England”, “Sex”, “Beautiful”, “New Year”, and “Sex” are hurled at me. Then one boy stands up, with another. He shouts, “FULL MONTY”. He then proceeds to start stripping, while his compadre hums the theme tune. Luckily, he only gets as far as his jumper before the stagier steps in. She starts screaming at the top of her lungs and then…bursts into tears. I mean, proper sobbing about how much she hates the class and how horrible they are. So disaster day. I went home, sobbing myself at the fact I could no longer drown myself in my work for fear of being accused of operating a French paedophile ring of some sort, and couldn’t feel comfortable at home, as the constant reminders of the people I had left behind got me down.
Then Saturday came. It’s amazing how much you under-estimate a simple night in. But with those girls, it was fabulous. After a strict cleaning regime on the Saturday, my humble little flat was ready to play host to 8 of the most amazing girls ever! Some people throw themselves into friendships on their year abroad, just for the sake of having anyone to talk to. I’m glad to say that these are girls I would happily be friends with for life. Each of them contributes a healthy dose of reality into my life, with boy problems, homesick problems, rent and food costs…all things I can relate to because at some point we’ve all went through it. It’s like my own little family right here in Lille. If anyone looks at my face book pictures from that night you can see genuine happiness on my face. It was exactly what I needed, and we are doing the same this week!
It’s only 9 days til I take my ass to Brussels and catch a flight home for the weekend and I’m so excited! Even though I’ve just left, and even though I’ve got my Lille ladies to support me…there’s no place like him!
Speak soon lads, bisous xxxxxxxx
