Ego bruising

September 25th


The woman who is my ‘responsable’ came to meet me today and took me round the two schools I’ll be working in – one very modern, named after Albert Camus, on the outskirts of Ile Rousse, and the other much older, named after a headmistress who worked there for 30 years, perched on a hill in Monticello, a village about six kilometers away from Ile Rousse. I got my timetable (12 hours of teaching a week, on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays) and briefly met all the teachers. The kids at least look endearing, and said hello in English when they spotted me having lunch at the lycée.

My ego is slightly bruised from speaking my toddler-level French all day and looking like an idiot generally – sweating a lot, failing to work out the paranoid button entry system in the bank, repeatedly trying to get into the driver’s side of cars… My patented 'surprisingly good accent; no actual French vocabulary' thing is becoming a problem – almost everyone I have met has exclaimed ‘oh, but you speak French so well’, and then become confused when I didn’t understand anything else they said. A particular linguistic highpoint was not understanding the word ‘quand’ today with the school secretary – she became slightly frantic, appealing to everyone in the office: ‘quand! quand! cest quoi quand en anglais?!’ before I realized that she wasn’t actually saying ‘CON’.