Settling in in Saint Mar sur Mer

After a wild first week in France, things finally started settling down. I found a place to live (hooray!), visited my schools for the first time, and met a ton of my ridiculously adorable students.

We'll start at the beginning. I found a place to live! I'm renting a room from a directrice (basically a principal - except sometimes they actually teach classes) of one of the other elementary schools in the area. My bedroom is in the house she grew up in, and she and her husband (and incredibly adorable cat) live right next door in a smaller house.  Sometimes her family comes to visit, as does a wonderful pastry chef that I'll get back to later, but otherwise it's just me and my friend Ashley in this big old house. When we're here, our lives consist mostly of eating the cheapest food we can find (#mysalaryiszero) and watching random Netflix movies (we literally use a randomizer). French Netflix is wild and we've already found some absolutely terrible movies.
The downside of this house is that it's in Saint Marc sur Mer, which is west of Saint-Nazaire and farther from work. The commute to each of my schools is like an hour (one way), if I don't stand at the wrong bus stop for twenty minutes (yeah, that happened). The upside? It's like a ten minute walk to this beautiful beach:

In other news, I started my job (finally). During the first week of October, I started orientation, which consists of completing a bunch of paperwork and learning how to teach English as a second language. I also went to visit the three elementary schools where I'll be working. They were short visits; I basically just introduced myself and met some of the staff. 

This past week was my first week of observation. I spent several hours at each of the schools, going from class to class and taking notes about the students and teachers. Everyone has been so kind and welcoming. The teachers are so sweet, and the students are amazing. At my final school I had a posse following me around during their afternoon recreation. They know I'll only speak to them in English, but I do a lot of gesturing and pointing and they're all so incredibly curious about what I might be saying. Plus I teach them how to say things like "cell phone" and "motorcycle," which is apparently the coolest. 

I was only supposed to be observing, but I was sitting in on a gym class and the teachers would only take half the class at a time, so I quickly became surrounded by the others. We introduced ourselves, counted, and played "point to something that is...[insert color here]." I absolutely adore these children and this job, and I haven't technically even started teaching. 

Not a lot else is new here.