Salut faithful readers,
My adventures this week are not nearly as exciting as those reported last week, where I recounted my life story-well, just the October vacation part-in as many words as possible. And then followed that up with another anecdote explaining my new writing gig. Really, most of my work this week concerned my correspondence with National Geographic.
As a bit of future background for you, I should explain that next weekend I am going to Rome! I leave Wednesday afternoon for Paris, where I will stay with my friend Abby at her new apartment. Then on Thursday morning bright and early I catch a flight to Rome, where I will spend the weekend travelling with another friend from my October vacation, Haley. So, what with my week being cut in half, I had to prepare extra articles this past week so that I don't have to spend my first trip in Italy on my computer, researching and writing in French. That would be a slight buzz kill, in every sense of the term.
I ended up preparing three articles this week. One was posted on the website yesterday. It is about a class at my school that is travelling to Senegal to complete a two year project, where they created tricycles for handicap Senegalese children and now have the opportunity to present them face to face. I will post the link to this article below, so if you did not get enough of me in English you can read even more from me in French! Or at least check out my new photo for the website. The other articles I will not reveal here, as I don't want to spoil the surprise for you. Looks like you'll just have to keep checking back for updates.
Now you might be wondering, with all of this time and energy spent on researching, interviewing, and writing for a National Geographic position that is not my actual job, do I spend time working at all on teaching? And the answer is yes...but not as much as you might think. This is through no fault of my own; you see, half of my classes were cancelled this week due to various teacher absences, few of which I knew of ahead of time. So while this freed up additional time for me, I mostly spent it working on writing anyway. However, I am excited for a new project in two of my classes, where the students will be studying different aspects of their own choosing of American culture. Some topics include cinema, sports, food, presidents, etc., and they will be writing letters to various sources in the United States for information. It should be fun to hear what their take on American culture is when they have finished.
I witnessed an amazing cultural experience here this week. On Tuesday, I was invited to a wine and cheese tasting adult education class, which is normally quite expensive but I attended for free. The teacher works at my school, and is an incredibly friendly and gracious host. So I learned more about wine on Tuesday night than all my other nights, ever, combined. And this was the whole French experience; observing the color first, then smelling the wine to determine its composition, then swirling the glass and smelling again, to finally tasting it, with and without cheese. I have never felt so French in my life, and I can say it was one of the coolest things that I have had the pleasure of doing since I arrived. A close second was seeing the Adventures of Tin-Tin last night; the movie is a Spielberg film that is yet to be released in America, so ha! I saw a movie before you all! Never mind that it was dubbed over in French...but the animation is incredible, and I would recommend seeing it when you slow pokes back home have the opportunity. So that's all for now, quite enough I am sure, and hopefully the next time I write will be post-Italia!
Here is this week's National Geographic article: http://www.nationalgeographic.fr/actualite/un-americain-a-vannes-episode-2-voyage-en-afrique/7912054/
That's all folks
Tommy
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