(Written May 4th 2025) I am standing at the central bus station in Marseille. My bus is delayed by ten minutes, although I think this is intentional, because the allotted bays are full – three spaces between two companies. That’s fine by me though, because mostly I’m reading my book…
Tag: france
A Belated Update
I am coming to you today from my bed, surrounded by piles of my clothes, paperwork, loan items to return. To my left, the open IKEA hanging and shelving unit is mostly bare. Everything is stuffed in my big bag by the door, for a practice weigh. I am trying…
Unexpected Music | France
When you travel, you never quite know what you will stumble across. You can plan all sorts of things but you never know really how things will go. Today, I’m talking about the joy of that. I have found France to be a very good “stumble upon” place – although…
Jeanne d’Arc died here | Rouen
Normandy is split into two halves – Haute-Normandie and Basse-Normandie. Previously, I lived in Haute-Normandie, which is itself split into two smaller sections. My former sleepy little city, Evreux, heads up the smallest region, Eure, and did not feel like any kind of capital (ahhh, just like home!). The larger…
The Haven and Some Kind of Paradise
Le Havre One of my first real weekends away during my last contract was to Le Havre. In fact, it was a little more than a weekend, as there had been a problem during some maintenance at the school, resulting in the water being turned off and the school essentially…
Back Again | French Riviera
Well, it’s been a long time since I’ve written here. I have been back in… well, Europe, for over two months now (actually today is day eighty(!) so I told myself I absolutely had to get this posted today). Not just France, as some travels have already been had. (More…
Opulence | Paris, Again
Another set of holidays has passed in my part of France. It was my last fortnight off. Then six weeks of teaching, and my contract will end shortly into the next lot of holidays. They say time flies — but have we considered the possibility that it teleports? The evidence…
Pere Lachaise Cemetery
This is a much more recently written post for me. I visited the famous Pere Lachaise Cemetery just two weeks ago, and wrote this during my visit, while my hands turned a series of different colours from the cold. I hope you enjoy this little visit with me. You get…
What am I actually doing? | Assistant de langue
When you apply for this program, you don’t really know quite what it will look like. In the lead up, I tried to find as many different blog posts as I could done by former assistants to try to get an on-the-ground perspective. Now that I am in here, I…
Marseille Adventures
After my time in Nice, I moved on to five days in Marseille. I had expected to like it more than Nice, and so had planned to spend my birthday there. It didn’t quite go as I expected really. I did have the smoothest train catching of my time to…