Apologies for this being a bit late again, I've been working on a different blog post for 2 weeks now but am struggling, so decided to do an update on my life one instead.
So where were we? Just after Belgium, I believe.
I managed to get ill (the couple of hours standing in a field in the rain in Vimy didn't help) so unfortunately after just one day back at school after the holidays I had to take to my bed with the flu. The silver lining to this cloud was that, as ever without the capacity to entertain myself, I got my YARP abstract written by the end of the week. Hurrah!
That weekend, and feeling better, a group of us from the building cleaned out the huge cellars underneath the building at the "request" of our landlord to be picked up as Sperrmull on the Monday. This wasn't too bad, until we got to the darkest corner of the biggest, fullest cellar and came across a white styrofoam box. When my poor flatmate opened it up, she found it was full of huge, dead tarantulas.
Cue general disgust and debate about what to do about it. We found out we should ring the fire service, so they turned up and were equally disturbed by what they found. There were around 50 of them, ranging from roughly the size of a £2 coin to well, a lot bigger. Anyway, they called for the Ordnungsdienst (the police but without guns, as they were explained to me) and after 4 hours a vet turned up, who identified them as illegal etc and got us to take photos to send off for a report. I'll do you a favour readers and spare you the photos, which were unfortunately saved on my camera.
Anyway, after the Tarantula Incident things got a lot nicer. I went to a Divali party at Gunjan's and then finally headed back to school to do some breadwinning on the Tuesday. My week at school was really nice. We learnt about Guy Fawkes' Night and with my English AG I taught them some colloquial English, at their request. Some of it was practical stuff but I chucked a few more interesting things in, for example my little group of keen yr 9s and 10s now have "Bob's your uncle" in their active vocabularly, which they were surprisingly thrilled about.
Then on the Friday after work I headed to Wissembourg, Alsace to stay with a uni friend of mine, Meg, and also to see another uni friend, Helen. It was a bit of a trek on the train (see below) but hey, when you think of how big France and Germany are it could have been a lot further away!
Wissembourg really is on the border to Germany, as you can see.
The town was lovely, so beautiful, and it was really interesting for me to visit an area I'd written a huge linguistics essay on for Multilingualism last year: people really do code-switch a lot, so the linguistics geek inside me was happy as anything.
On Saturday we had a very French lunch of baguettes, cheese, ham and amazing chocolate thingies from the local patisserie, then headed to the house of one of the English teachers at Meg's school, where a few other English teachers arrived. Then followed a beautiful hike up the hills slightly to the west, right on the German border (we actually walked into Germany!) amongst some beautiful ruined castles. Sadly it was very foggy, so we missed out on the beautiful views, but that did lend a very mystical air to everything when standing on top of the castles.
Castle Loewenstein :)
Cue Meg and I "It's like being in Helms Deep! Or Minas Tirith!"
A tree told us we were in Germany. Fanfare much?
Later, after 3 and a half hours proper hiking we were taken to a very rustic Tarte flambée house by the teachers, where we got a very French experience, discussed the amazingness that is the languages department at Southampton University and tried (and failed) to politely decline more Pfannkuchen than we could manage. Our French got a workout too, which was well needed.
The next morning we headed upstairs for lunch with the teacher who owns the flat that Meg lives in, it was lovely, and the family was really cool as they were totally bilingual French and German, and would swap languages according to who was in the room/leading the conversation. Switching almost seamlessly from French, to German, and back to French again, myself, Meg and Helen exchanged a few thrilled glances: if someone told me, aged 15, that in 5 years or so I'd be able to do that, I would have told them they were being silly and got back to my Macbeth coursework. How things change, and how pleased am I that my year abroad has become such an amazing experience on so many levels.
After lunch we headed out with Bergère, the sweet dog that belongs to the teacher, for a walk around the town, before watching a couple of episodes of Friends and making our way back to our respective German cities.
P.S: My long journey home was brightened up considerably by spending an hour on what appeared to be the Hogwarts Express. Since the end of the Harry Potter series it now apparently runs between Mannheim and Saarbrücken, incase you were interested.
An old lady came past and even asked me "Fahrkarten bitte", which I'm pretty sure translates to "Anything off the trolley dears?". Not 100% though, so don't quote me on that.
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