jeudi

Well here I am again folks. It's Thursday afternoon here and I've just had lunch. I think that there is something very lovely about the way the French make every meal into a bit of a ceremony, but having said that, it gets tiring. When I got home from university about 1.00 today there was no-one home, so I got quite excited and grabbed a bit of bread and paté and ate it standing in the kitchen!
I seem finally to have found my right level at uni. I still really struggle with the listening, but if I went too much lower I would be in pre-school I think. I actually have no problem hearing - people seem to speak very clearly - but I just don't understand. Hopefully one day...... There is still the issue of the local AFS man wanting me to be a part time student. He hasn't actually contacted me about it so we'll see. I do the official enrolment stuff and payment on Monday. On Tuesday night we've been invited out for an evening meal and there will be AFS people there including one of the lecturers from uni who speaks English. So that should help clear up any outstanding issues. (Or it may create more, but hey, this is all one big adventure, right? Hmmmm....)
I have made a friend at uni, and Judy, :-), I hope you are impressed. She is a Polish nun! It sounds like some sort of spoof really - Alison and a Polish nun. But there we are. She speaks a bit of English and she seems very nice. Already the workload is quite heavy and when I finish this I need to go and do my homework. Also, we have a test on Monday and have to do a talk with no notes, on Friday, about our arrival in France. It's all very interesting, but I have to say that I await with interest developments in the teaching component of the course. The prof doesn't want us to use the dictionary or have any help when we are doing activities, but for me that's what I need to do in order to find things out and learn. It's as if everything is a test situation to see what we can do. So it's pretty much a worksheet scenario and no reference mqterial. But it's early days and no doubt things will fall into place.
A couple of days ago when I got home from school Jean took me to a little village cqlled Saint Benoit. (There is a ^ on this keyboard but I don't know how to get it combining with the letters.) Anyway, it's a bequtiful little village, somewhqt reminiscent of the Cotswolds. It's pretty much a dormitory suburb of Poitiers, but has its own mayor etc, as all places seem to, no matter how small. It says the population is 7000, but it certainly didn't appear to be hqlf as big again as Stratford. It didn't even seem to be as big as Wakefield. (As you can see I'm moving about a bit geographically. There will be a test at the end.) Anyway, there is a lovely historical abbey, an aqueduct, and just generally lovely old buildings. And a police stqtion of course! I put in the photo of the Saint Benoit police sign especially for Hayden. I can't say that I ever used to consciously look out for the police, but these days I do. I feel like I am almost related!
The other photo is just to fill up the space - one of me at Futuroscope at a tricky little water spout area.
So that's about it for now. Tomorrow as soon as I get home from uni we are off to the Atlantic Coast for the weekend. Somewhere near La Rochelle I think. That should be great.
Amities.
Alison.