Tif retourne à l'école-Tif returns to school

Who would have thought Montpellier, France would be where I would return to school after all these years.

I was fortunate enough to go for 1 week with my friend Janet, to try to improve my French and meet lots of great people. Which I did both of, I hope.

Our host couple Magali & Gilbert. They were absolutely darling and so fun to spend the week with. Magali met us at the train station with big hugs and kisses, so we knew right away it was going to be great.

This is where we started each day. Breakfast all together -with lots of French!

(This is actually dinner, Gilbert was normally in bed when we had breakfast).

They had a German student staying with them as well, his name was Moufred.

Once we had eaten it was off to school for the three students. Moufred's French is very good he was there to improve it for work therefore he was in a different class than we were, but he was so kind and walked us to school each day. We chose to walk to school which was about a good 25 minute walk. We loved the exercise and got to see lots of sights that way.

Here I am at school!

After school and dinner it was off to our "French" lit room (they don't believe in overhead lighting here) to try to remember the things we had learned and to do our homework. This is where it was handy to be living with Magali. She helped us complete our homework and explain to us what we were supposed to be doing.





















Our cute french "mom and dad". On our last day Gilbert got up in his Jammie's to see us off. They called us Les Filles (girls), so when we commented on Gilbert being awake Magali said it was because Les Filles were leaving. Magali stays very busy with her job as a full time mom.

The two classes. On the right was the class in the morning, and on the left was the conversation class in the afternoon. The other students are from all over and it was so fun to get to know each of them a little. I loved that so many were here to improve their life in some way, whether for school, work or personal.
We learned lots of different things about each person, and a little about their life. My favorite was in the photo on the left #76, every class something would come up about sleep. Either not enough, or that was his favorite thing to do on the weekend, or big windows in a bedroom is not good because it's hard to sleep- it just cracked me up.
The classes were great, I just wish I had more of them. French is tricky and I feel like a small school girl learning her ABC's, it really shouldn't be this hard. The school was well organized and had very good teachers.

A few of the sights around town. The two buildings on the bottom are both painted. Look carefully and you can see the people are not real, nor is the big window with the reflection of the church. Pretty impressive!

Little did we know that in January they have SOLDES, their annual sale. In France nothing goes on sale and so somehow they need to clear out their inventory, so once a year they put it all on sale. Some stores put everything on sale and others put a few things. We had been warned it was "catastrophe". We decided to go check it out after class on Wednesday. Many of the stores were closed on Tuesday to prepare. We could not believe all the people, they were coming out of the woodwork, and all with bags in their hands.

Here is the garden in front of Magali and Gilberts home. They had told us in the summer this is really something to see, and I am sure that it is. Gilbert works very hard to maintain and beautify his garden. I would love to see it someday in full bloom.

Thank you both for a wonderful week!