Everything’s Coming Up Mil(es)house

BONJOUR!

I’ve now been in Le Mans for just under two weeks and it’s possibly been the most hectic two weeks of my life thus far. With a to-do list about a mile long, it’s been a matter of trawling through countless apartment avertissements, contacting countless landlords and receiving countless rejections due to our lack of [insert name of absolutely useless/irretrievable document here]. Finally, after about three days of endless googling & ogling estate agents windows, we stumbled upon a new ad for a three bedroom house right in the city centre and the following day were on our way to view it. Turns out our landlady, lovely, chic & slightly terrifying Sabine, only rents the place out to students and threw her middle finger up to French bureaucratic nonsense & required hardly any paperwork. RESULT. The house is truly beautiful, somehow managing to look like a withered old cottage from the outside and yet utterly modern on the inside. It’s partially attached to Sabine’s house (the fanciest house I have EVER seen), and so we’ve come to the assumption that we’re probably living in the old servant’s quarters. But that’s fine.  

So a few days ago, we packed up our temporary flat & almost broke ourselves (& actually broke Alicia’s case) trying to avoid the dog merde as we dragged our bursting suitcases to our new address. Since then it’s been an endless cycle of arranging rendez-vous, whether it be with the bank, the internet provider or the truly delightful creperie down the road, gabbling in words we hope are French and leaving with half a forest’s worth of paperwork.  Thankfully, it hasn’t been in vain. I now have a French bank account, the sim card for my French contract’s in the post and we should have fully functioning wifi within two weeks. Until then we’ve taken to lurking in Mcdonalds (as I am now) and befriending a crazy man who runs an internet/Telecom place.

In between the bureaucratic argy bargy, I’m also starting to fall in love with this new city. It’s not too big to be an overbearing labyrinth and yet not too small to be bored by within a few hours. I love the way that really old cathedrals & buildings randomly appear around street corners and manage to seamlessly fit in with their modern counterparts. I spent my first day getting lost in the Cité Plantagenet  - a maze of really old houses which look over the Sarthe river – and eventually found a really nice spot next to the water to sit with a book & obligatory first day croissant. Big fan of rivers.

Last weekend was le Patrimoine, where a lot of the normally inaccessible monuments/buildings are opened up for the public. We took the opportunity to have a wander round Cathédrale St Julien, which in itself is a beautiful building, not all that impressed by the usually locked rooms though, not gonna lie. Then we popped up to La Musée de Tessé and took advantage of the unusually free entry to be very confused by a French tour guide wittering away in the ancient Egyptian section, walk up and down about a thousand stairs and be highly amused by Peter Capaldi’s doppelganger in a painting from some era that I wasn’t paying any attention to. That night we returned to the cathedral and Cité Plantagenet for La Nuit des Chimères , which was about as bizarrely French as France can be, and watched all manner of strange images be projected onto the buildings, accompanied by some of the creepiest music imaginable. Quite odd.

& thus concludes this half-hearted attempt at a blog post. Very much looking forward to starting work now, and meeting the other assistants when they arrive - as well as our third flat mate. Hi Annika!  I’ve still got loads of nonsensical university paperwork to do but I’ve had enough of paperwork for this week (& possibly forever).

A plus,

X

Cité Plantagenet

View of the city

La Sarthe 

Best galette ever. 

Someone was obviously having a much better time than us in Muséee de Tessé...

PETER CAPALDI <3

Cathédrale St Julien

Nuit des Chimeres

HOUSE <3

Ma nouvelle chambre <3

Castleford, UK → Le Mans, FR. Eleven hours & 547 miles.

BONJOUR A TOUS!

I've arrived in Le Mans! After months of filling in endless paperwork, half heartedly packing a suitcase and saying temporary goodbyes to friends and family, it never occurred to me that today would actually happen. But happen it did. This morning I said goodbye to my parents and pets (sob sob, I miss you, Columbus!) and felt a bit like Bilbo Baggins as he starts his adventure to the Lonely Mountain. Unfortunately, a group of dwarves and an elderly wizard didn't barge into my house with a contract to sign, and I instead received an arrêté de nomination/work contract in the post a few weeks ago, informing me that I'd be carrying out my year abroad in Le Mans, a small city in between Paris and Nantes. I'll be teaching English as a British Council English Language Assistant in three primary schools, with ages ranging from three to eleven. Yesterday, I found out how old a three year old actually is and now I'm absolutely terrified; having a slight phobia of small children could make this job VERY interesting.

Earlier this afternoon I hopped on a plane from Leeds Bradford Airport to Paris CDG, and shortly after, a TGV train to Le Mans. I decided to splash out on first class with the additional, truly bank-breaking €2 on top of the ticket price and I've well and truly fallen in love with trains all over again. No more nasty Northern Rail, these chaps are BEAUTIFUL. I heaved my suitcase - just under the 22kg weight limit, self-five! - onto the top shelf of the racks and enjoyed ninety minutes in my own armchair with a good book and marvelled at the passing French countryside. Parfait.

I was picked up at the station by one of my lovely responsables and a few short minutes into our conversation gave me the crushing realisation that despite studying it for nine years, French will always be an absolute nightmare. Cependant, I'm certainly looking forward to improving it, regardless of how many awkward situations I have to endure - I'm sure there will be many. I'd been in the hotel reception less than a minute and somehow managed to fall over a plant pot, almost resulting in a nose-carpet situation and being crushed by 22kg of rolled up clothing, European plug adapters and Yorkshire teabags. No-one said a word.

Hopefully with a little less clumsiness - unlikely - I'm planning on spending tomorrow wandering around my new city, while I wait for another assistant, Alicia, to arrive so we can move into our temporary flat. Then the fun jobs like finding long term accommodation, opening a bank account and even more paperwork can start, how exciting! 

It still doesn't feel real that my year abroad has actually started, despite writing this from my French hotel room, whilst watching a bizarre rendition of dubbed, French Criminal Minds. The next nine or so months seem like an absolute age, but it terrifies me that they'll be over in hardly any time at all. I'm determined to make the most of it, and have spent far too much of Summer planning trips to Copenhagen, the Northern Lights, the Berlin Film Festival, Barcelona and as many French cities as I can get to. As David Tennant’s 10th doctor used to say before hurling himself into some catastrophic, intergalactic, mine field, ‘ALLONNNNNNNS-Y’.

Let’s hope it’s exactly twice as exciting. X

Packed!

Manchester plane - missing my favourite, rainy city.