Hi everybody
I've been busy discovering how to create a blog. It feels amazing to think that I'm sitting in France writing one.
This is a private blog for now, designed to keep all our friends updated and may contain personal information so please keep the link private.
I've just pigged out on baguette viennoise - a less rich form of brioche, which is made as an extremely long skinny breadstick - and a bowl of coffee...I feel I've deserved it though, after world war 3 with Amby (did not want to get out of bed) and the walk to the two schools and back again.
Luckily all is now well. The kids are at home with me having lunch (home made soup - merci Memere!), and all are at peace. Amby is upstairs reading the tale of the flopsy bunnies to Alex.
Last night we started phase 2 of the garden (le jardin). It may not look much in the photos but it took a while to dig, all to the accompanying comments of our neighbours. They are a great bunch, all very irreverant and prone to laughter (usually at me). But thats ok because I'm able to give back as much as I get!
13th May
I haven't yet shown you the house we live in.
Its 3 floors plus a basement, and there are stairs to navigate both from the road and the courtyard. The land is separated from the house via a communal path that only the neighbour uses. The toilet is downstairs next to the entrance and the shower is on the top floor next to the attic and spare bedroom. Each 'etage' has 3 room on it plus a landing. The views in the near are of a laundrette, but further on we can see a lovely old farmhouse nestled between green pastures and dramatic skies.
All in all an odd but charming little house and one I am extremely grateful for.
Food...probably my favourite topic. I must admit we have been going silly over the bread, although I have only succumbed to croissants twice so far. Cheese deserves it's own topic, but last night we had our first raclette, which was amazing.
With raclette, cheese is sliced into squares and grilled under a raclette griller or mounted to a raclette machine and sliced off in hot melting slices. It's served over potatoes (normally boiled but we had ours roasted) and accompanied by cornishons (tiny gherkins) and pickled onions, several varieties of cold cooked meats (charcuterie) and tiny portions of raw meat that are cooked on top of the raclette grill - in the past I've been served kangaroo and even horse! Luckily last night it was the more staid duck, beef and chicken. What else can I say? it was all served with the ubiquitous glass or two of champagne...
Here's a selection of less exciting food from my fridge. I haven't been bold enough to visit a market yet, and have instead kept to supermarkets and boulangeries to acclimatise my shopping skills.
School (l'école)
check out this link for a simple guide to pronunciation http://www.languageguide.org/im/school/fr/ (http://www.languageguide.org/french/) requires a pc/laptop with sound.
We have had to change schools as I am STILL not driving grrrrrrrrrr. So the kids attend schools not to far from where we live - within a 15 min walk, instead of in the next village (a 30 min walk). This is not bad unless you have to battle the rain, which is why we were all a little sick this week. Still I'm amazed to see so much rain and appreciate the help it gives our garden.
Amby's school is like an old fashioned nightmare conjuring teachers ruling the roost with rulers snapping at knuckles and sloping desks with integrated stools in regimented lines, in front of a dusty blackboard. It's a massive 2 storey building once used as a boarding school for boys. Despite this it is charming, and even with the curriculum being in french it seems easy enough to understand.
Amby is understandably (? even with attending a French/English school in Australia) behind in her conjugations, her times tables, her history, her additions of thousands, her long multiplication of thousands, her divisions, and this is without the expected lag in comprehesion (both oral and literal) and writing (it's done differently here, being France!).
I've been having tremendous fun in helping her with her homework. So far we are getting through the present, imperfect and future tenses of the verbs AVOIR and ETRE and applying them to sentences. We are doing a long multiplication crash course and practicing times tables and additions so she can spit them out at any given instant, rather than the labourious working out she had been doing (with secret finger counting).
Today we learned about making PLURALS of french nouns.
For words ending in OU we would normally add an S to the word, the exceptions being 7 ou words that end in X (e.g. Hibou becomes hiboux, chou becomes choux)
For words ending in AL we would normally convert the AL to AUX, the exceptions being 5 words that simply end in S (e.g. cheval becomes chevaux, however festival becomes festivals)
All other words generally end in S, however if the word ends in S, X or Z it normally does not change at all.
Confused yet?
We still have to learn the AIL, EU, AU, EAU and IRREGULAR PLURALS
if you are interested in learning more, try this site http://www.english-to-french-translation.com/translation-articles/english/translation-article-plural-of-french-nouns.htm or google 'making plurals of french nouns'.
Alex attends Maternelle, where he is in the 'petits'. Next year he will graduate to 'moyens' and the year after is the 'grands', and after that is the next stage of schooling. I love the school - it is very small compared to his last school which was part of the bigger school. Now he only has to contend with up to 5/6 years and it's much less daunting for him and much more like the nursery he attended in OZ.
After a few days he has been able to give me a kiss and a wave and walk in like a big boy. We normally stop in at the boulangeie on the way to get a little something for breakfast first, and I collect both he and Amby at lunchtime, speaking of which, I must dash as it's that time right now.
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