Monday: After arriving home extremely late Sunday night, I was exhausted Monday morning when I had to wake up for my early morning French class. After French class, Dana and I met up with Jose and Ansley to take Jose out to lunch for his 21st birthday. We headed over to Place Bellecour and found this adorable little restaurant called La Mere Jean. It was such beautiful weather that we were even able to eat outside! For lunch, I had an onion tart with a salad. I have had onion tarts before but this one was something completely different. It was sort of like a quiche and sort of like a little slice of heaven. We were all honestly shocked by just how amazing this tart was. Needless to say, I will certainly be returning to this little restaurant. After lunch Dana and I walked around a little bit before I returned back to the University for my meeting with Annick (the woman who is helping me with my independent study). We spent almost 2 hours discussing my progress, my observations the previous week at the market and my future plan of attack. I felt very reassured about what I need to be doing after our meeting. After meeting with Annick, it was already close to dinner time and I headed home. I was planning on going to Monday night dinner as usual, but knowing that I had to wake up at 4:45am on Tuesday go to take photos at the market, I decided to be smart and try to make it an early night.
Tuesday: Tuesday morning I woke up at 4:45am to get dressed and ready and to the market before 6:00am. As part of my photo project based on the market at La Croix Russe, I wanted to take some pictures in the pretty early morning light and to be able to see the vendors in the process of preparing their stands for the market. I arrived at the market at just a few minutes past six. Surprisingly there were only about 2 vendors there at that hour, so I headed to the nearest café overlooking the market to grab a tea and wait for some more vendors to arrive. Within the next half an hour, more vendors began arriving and I decided to venture out to the market. I began taking photos of the vendors in the midst of preparing for the market. Immediately I began receiving a flurry of questions for all the vendors asking me why I was taking photos and to promise them that I wasn’t taking photos of them (which I was, but will never admit to). A lot of them were nervous by my presence at first, fearing that I was a pesky journalist or nosy tax collector of some sort, but all fears were quenched once I explained that I was a student and what my project was about. After that, the vendors were all content to answer my multitude of questions and to put up with my while I photographed their stands. I had a fabulous time conversing with all the vendors and I learned a ton about the market. It was perfect to be at the market so early since there was almost no one else there. It was easy to take photos of the stands and it was much easier to speak with the vendors, because when it becomes busy later in the day, my questions understandably become much less important. I spent over half an hour talking to this awesome woman who owns this cured meat (ish) truck. She was so nice and I can't wait to go back and talk to her next week at the market! After spending about 3 hours at the market, I headed back home to take a nap – a well needed nap. Once I got up, I had some lunch, and headed to my history of Lyon class. After class I came back home, had dinner and then did some work on my presentation to prepare for my tutoring session on Wednesday.
Wednesday: I woke up yet again relatively early to meet up with my history tutor at the library. We worked together on my presentation I will be doing on the old hospital in Lyon. I am going to focus on the birth of the modern hospital in Lyon and the changes in function and causes of the shifts from the medieval hospital. After our tutoring session, I came back home, had a little breakfast and got ready for my tennis class. After a great day of playing tennis in the beautiful sunshine, I came back home to work more on possibilities for summer internships. I only wish I could get something figured out soon!
Thursday: As following with the trend this week, I woke up very early Thursday morning to start my first day teaching English at one of the local high schools. The first class was a group of 9th graders. My only instructions from the teacher for the hour lesson was introduce yourself and have the students introduce themselves. After that, I was left to fend for myself and figure out what to teach. If I had known ahead of time, I would have planned something, but I totally had to fly by the seat of my pants. After the introductions, I had the students talk about what they had done this past weekend and what were some of their favorite hobbies, etc… We quickly finished these disscussions and had quite a bit of time left. After unsuccessfully trying to get the students to talk to each other in English in small groups, I felt a little lost. Trying to wrack my brain for ideas, I realized that I have never really worked with older kids. I have always loved working with younger kids, but I really have no idea what to do with older kids. Finally I realized I could do some translations with the students and that was a major success. I had students come up with sentences in French and then we worked to translate them into English. The students were really engaged and interested despite some of my difficulties in describing why certain ways of saying things were right or wrong. The next class were students who were in their first year out of high school and doing a program similar to community college. For the first part of the class, we all watched a news clip about the rise in suicides in factories in China. After that we again broke out into groups. We discussed the report, but after that it was like pulling teeth. No matter what I asked the students or how hard I tried, only 2 students were really willing to talk. It was so awkward and I decided that I much preferred the 9th grade students! After that, I spent some time planning with the first teacher about what we will be doing for the next 2 months. Next I returned back home to have some lunch before leaving to go to my political history of health class. It was a fascinating lesson about the chronology of health reforms from the French revolution to the end of the 19th century. After that, I returned back home to pack and finish planning my trip to Milan for the weekend. I hope it will be a great weekend in Milan and I hope the weather will stay just as nice as it’s been this week!
I love your descriptions! Fantastique!
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