bah humbug scrooge mcgrinchy

im not huge on the holidays, but i do always love shopping at night with all the lights in the trees and the smell of snow in the air, right? but since im not at home, not with my usual crew, it's been a bit harder to find the holiday spirit - until this week, anyway. the christmas lessons rolled out in full force - super fun word scrambles, crosswords, guessing games, 'how did you feel when you found out santa wasnt real' annnnnd mariah carey. thats right, no jingle bells for my kids, we're listening to "All i want to christmas is yoooooou' and filling in missing lyrics. aka ive listened to that song about 30 times this week. heh. but it's been fun - the guys are all like "dude this song it too girly" and the girls are all "ooh elle chante trop bien" and they sing along. my 3e class yesterday took the cake, though. after a rather dismal session last week - long story short i thought i wasnt working with them, but then got an email the morning before class that i needed to talk about ALL 50 STATES, wft?, they didnt really like my little "did you know?" fun facts, whatever, and the teacher was like "umm no. that was not good." oops - i figured the song would be fun and then we could play a game or something, rather than lecturing "Christmas traditions in the US." oh my god. the guys started dancing in their seats and pretending to sing...i couldnt help but crack up, which of course egged them on even more...it was awesome.

my 4e sang "we wish you a merry christmas" to me, that was charming...

i had the MOST interesting/awesome teacher dinner with the crew from Jean Zay, my wonderful school on friday. Chantal's boyfriend, Michael, lives most of the time in London (he's english - a banker/chef/acupuncturist), so the first thing he said when he picked me up was that i could tell him how i really felt about living in france...although i vent a lot with the assistants, so i didnt have too much to say - i think he was mildly disappointed! haha, it was awesome though - he cooked this wonderful chinese dinner and the food just kept coming - spring rolls with lettuce and rice paper to wrap around the outside so as not to muss up your fingers, sauteed veggies and cashews (of course i took a lot of smack for being a veg, as usual, but he said that next time he'd make me tofu!!), grilled shrimp, beef and veggies, chicken and veggies, and a huuuge fruit plate with oranges, chinese grapefruit, lychees, and some other chinese fruit - and christmas cookies, baked by yours truly. it was a really nice evening, lots of laughing, violin music grace a Manon, chantal's daughter (6 yrs old, bilingual, cutest kid ever), and michael's weird super-sarcastic-to-the-point-of-being-bitter humor....fun times.

and of course, mandy and i baked cookies and rocked the christmas carols on thursday. i swear, france + mandy is turning me tres domestic. we had a mini-adventure baking chez moi, converting her american recipe into metric and ad libbing the baking of the sugar cookies - theres only one cookie sheet in my house, so we used a bunch of tart pans as well. they tasted good, but we shoulda looked for green and red sprinkles...oh well. they were still loved by the teachers in all my schools!

and in other news, my recruiter for the Peace Corps called on thurs, too, so thats moving along. we'll see what happens...sadly i dont really have a great background for enviro/health stuff, which is what i would like to do, since thats what im thinking about for grad school/real life, but it's understandable. the fact that im cpr certified helps in the health dept (although honestly, that might be expired, but i would renew it anyway once im back in the states) funnily enough she said that im a good candidate...for teaching...and asked if she could add that to my preferences. my desire to do the PC outweighed my daily dread of the classroom, and i said yes, i'll do whatever you want. urgh.

it's almost vacation!!!!