Corte

The major event of the week was going to Corte for the welcoming meeting for all the Corsican assistants. Corte is the only university in Corsica, so is presumably where all the young people so conspicuously absent in Ile Rousse are lurking. None of us have a car, so we flung ourselves on the mercy of the Corsican public transport system and took the bus. It was mildly disastrous, as it was an hour late, and then we had to change onto a different bus, so a 40 minute journey required one and a half hours of waiting in the chilly early morning streets. But the scenery was incredible - Corte is in the middle of the island, surrounded by mountains, and as we drove inland towards Ponte Leccia we came over a rise into a valley and the whole thing was filled with cloud. The sun was rising and the sky pink, with the trees silhouetted like paper cutouts. Corsica would have been the perfect place for painters to invent aerial perspective - the hills recede green, blue, greyish lilac, it is very beautiful. Then we dipped down into the cloud, and the sun looked like the full moon through the mist, you could only see about twenty yards. It's a strange island, you can see what they mean when they say there's something mystical about it. Anyway, we waited in the freezing mist by a petrol station for half an hour at Ponte Leccia and didn't feel too appreciative, but the bus came eventually.

Our actual briefings were fairly unhelpful, lots of information about the structure of the French school system and an introduction to the yawning chasm between the syllabus for English and what the students actually manage to learn. Having spoken to Lija, the other English assistant in Ile Rousse, it sounds as if her lycée students are yet to master most of the primary school syllabus. They seem to want us to skim over everything so fast that the students won’t retain anything, but so that they will be able to say they have studied it. I’ve already run into this in my classes – they claim to know the days of the week, so I smilingly ask them to tell me, and everyone goes silent. Nevertheless, it was good to meet the other assistants in Corsica, for future long weekends away. We walked up to the citadel and looked out into the mountains; it looks like I imagine Switzerland, not Mediterranean at all.

On the way back to the station I had a cédrat icecream, which I think is called citron in English – it’s a lumpy citrus fruit about the size of a pineapple, with thick peel that they candy. We got lost, and I asked a woman with a baby the way to the station, and she walked us there. We talked for about twenty minutes, about Corte and her experience of Corsican racism (she is Moroccan), and I was really happy to actually manage a real conversation with someone. She worked in hotels, so I think she was used to English tourists, and was speaking very clearly for me.