Good News!  I finished my first real book in french.  Granted, it was originally a Spanish book and translated into french but still….I read it in french and not spanish!  ‘Le Monde du bout du Monde’–The World at the end of the World.   It was a good story about Japanese ships whaling illegally off the coast of Chile.  And despite that description, yes…it WAS a good story.  haha.

Next up, ‘L’Amant’–The Lover, a true french book in it’s original french.

While my reading skills are coming around the home stretch, my speaking lags far behind.  It’s gotten a lot better and I have a lot more confidence and I’m less worried about making mistakes and have more faith that people can actually understand the things coming out of my mouth but I still have a looooooooong way to go.  :p  I know its improving even though the old dude taking tickets on the train the other day made fun of my accent–like TRULY made fun of me.   (Like, acted like I had a major speech impediment.)  Oh those stinky franchies!  (Sorry unstinky franchies for making you take the rap for one belittling dude–oh smell!)

Today it poured buckets and they closed school early.  (Even though it was sunny when they closed school–the rain MIGHT come back!) So…while the students waited restlessly to be released (they were released in waves so I still had to keep a few in my class) I told them ‘on peut parler en francais’ –we can speak in french.  So while I started the class in English, we ended up chatting away in french and it was kind of fun.  I usually pretend I don’t speak french (which is not too big of a stretch) but I finally broke down and just chatted because its hard to have a good conversation with students when all they can say is ‘I live in Beziers’ and things like that.  Some of the students have pretty decent skills but I wanted to include everyone (and be included as they were speaking french to each other anyway.)

So….I had no class today, went home early and hopefully (I feel awfully lazy saying this) it will continue to rain and I won’t have to go to school tomorrow either.  Instead I can stay home and crack my french book.  :p