Hey everyone,
I
just wanted to say yay for having published my 20th post which may not
seem like a big thing to many but for me, being someone who has never
liked writing or reading too dearly, it is an accomplishment. Think
about it, 20 posts some abridged to one page or less and other reaching
to around 4 pages and if we give an average 2-3 pages for each, that’s
around 50 pages of freestyle writing about my particular French
experiences abroad.
Also,
I have never really been too good at keeping deep contact with many
people at once so establishing one source from which all the people to
whom I would normally, in person, retell my adventures is really nice
for me. It also gives me one space where I can respond to the thoughts,
comments, and suggestions of my fellow readers instead of being all
cluttered between several social networks and email addresses.
I
am now in my last three weeks of my internship. After my I finish my
internship I am off to Serbia to attend one of my best high school
friend’s, formerly Evita Sonner and now Evita Jovic, 3rd wedding (Same
person just different locations with different groups of people. Next
week I am off to Barcelona, Spain for 5 days with my bulgarian friend
and one of her friends. For both of these big trips I will not hesitate
at all to take lots of pictures and post the best of the best on here
with full stories.
Here,
July is when summer vacation starts for schools which means my hours
change as do my responsibilities. The whole atmosphere is actually
changed. The other interns with whom I was working, (Ibn, Foussenou,
Maura), are also now in vacation. I believed I had mentioned at one
point that the internship was required by their schools just as
community service is more commonly required by US universities like
Wittenberg. Now there is a new group of interns working with me, two
girls and three other guys. The youngest is 15. We had our first meeting
together last Thursday and started going over rules and ways to use
common sense to keep the children out of danger. We are doing these
workshops now because during the vacation month, we will be chaperoning
many field trips for them and need to know basic safety guidelines and
how to always be in control of the situation even if we aren’t. We did
some readings and split up into groups to make presentations on the
first day and were sent home with further online reading. Some of the
situations included where each chaperone should be seated or standing
when in a car, minibus, or the metro, rules for going into the pool for
beach trips, how to handle different types of situations, etc.
I
won’t be participating in all the field trips but we are going tomorrow
(Th. July 11) to La piscine à vagues, de base loisir de créteil. Below
are 2 sites giving a bit of info about it. If I’m not mistaken I think
it is a waterpark.
There
is a field trip every day until even after I am gone but I will not be
going on all of them. My main job now is to go with other interns and
workers to the gymnasium and organize sports and games. All the kids of
the neighborhood are signed up to have access to this but not all
actually show up. Even less will show up due to the beginning of
Ramadan. For those of you who don’t know, I guess it’s a type of fasting
only during the day that lasts a month long. It is from 3:40h-22h here.
I can’t explain much more because I’ve had it explain to me just that
way and not the entire history and reasoning behind it. I should also
mention that it is for the muslim people and not the entire France
although there is a big muslim population.
I work not from 9am-1pm, an hour break, then 2pm-5pm. I will go into more detail later but I am without a computer currently and so I don't know how pictures will be.
On
another note I wanted to mentioned a way to pick out where the street
markets can be found. Many of the formal places can be picked out
because there is a very typical look to them even when they are not
running. You will see rows of metal poles in the form of boxes normally
connect in some manner with a blue tarp rolled up and pushed over to one
side on the top of each one. I am not sure how many of these have
recognized names that differ from the streets where they can be found
but if you do as much wandering and walking as I do, you will start
seeing here these are and it is nice to make a mental note of street
corners and landmarks to be able to look them up later if you don’t
currently have the time to just walk through. The ones that I’ve noted
fall on the Rue Ordener and I can’t remember landmarks but it was going
through the Line 12 Jules stop. Another big one is starts at the back
entrance of Line 4 stop Barbés-Rochechouart. Since I get off at that
stop every day I can tell you that the market is open all day wednesday
from sunrise to evening. The ones that I’ve walked by just by chance
seem more fruit/meats/fish oriented by there’s always been other nick
nacks from shoes, undergarments, kitchen utensils and even toys. One
thing I noticed at the Barbés market is that you can find decent formal
and semi-formal clothes like a button-up collar shirt for 5€ and dress
shoes for 15-20€. Now, I can’t vouch for quality but I can say that they
look just as good as the store bought ones.
There
are even informal markets where people don’t have stands or anything.
One is in the exact same area on the same stretch of pavement. People
will lay out there things on pieces of clothes and most of it are
smaller items like batteries and there is a much smaller array of
options.
Thanks for reading and until next post!!
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