End of Work Week 1

My schools are all very different. Tuesday I went to the second school. There are only 2 classes there who want my help, and I spent the 1st 15 minutes there being passed around between teachers, then following one around as she looked for more teachers for me to work with - to no avail. So it looks like I will be working only 1 1/2 to 2 hours there instead of 3 - I'm not crying. But it was a disturbing way to start out. At my Thursday school I'm spending 1/2 hour with 5 different classes, and they, unlike the other schools, had the documents that said what the kids were supposed to learn each year, which is helpful. Thursday evening I went out to an Argentinian movie/concert at the local cinema with my roommate Susie and my neighbors Lynn and Frank. The music was really good, and the guy had great stories like, "I wrote this song when I was bumming around France as a street musician on a tourist visa. I overstayed my visa, and the police made me leave the country, but at the Spanish border they required $5 to enter the country, and I didn't have that much money. So I couldn't go into either country, and I wrote this song." The movie was about a Maradona super-fan, it was very funny. Also on Thursday I got food poisoning, which I'm still recovering from, so I'm debating whether or not to go to Avignon this evening to watch the rugby world cup match, or whether I should count on France to win, take it easy, and go watch the final at the hug screen at La Defense in Paris next weekend. I'll be sad it they don;t make it through and I spent the last game that France was in with a stomach ache at home.

Provence is very dry. Looking out from my window, even the greens are tinged with brown. Because of this, like a desert, it doesn't hold heat, which is more and more noticeable as it gets colder. The mornings are cold, afternoons hot, and the evenings cold again. The sun is strong, and its direct light is the source of most of the heat. Even in midday, when I'm sweating in the sun, its chilly in the shade. And with the starkness of the always-sharp sunlight from the always-clear sky, I can't help but think about the astronomy class when I learned about the extreme temperature differences between sun and shade on a land with no atmosphere at all - the moon.