One thing I have noticed since moving over here is that nothing, NOTHING that you want to sort out that would be simple in England is simple here. Wednesday morning Louise and I went to see a few apartments and found a pretty perfect one. It's on Rue Jeanne d'Arc which is a pretty central street (as central as you can really get seeing as from that street you can get to almost every other main street in Rouen. The only downside is it's on the fourth floor and there is no lift so it's quite a work out to actually get to the apartment itself. However, we're pretty cool with this as the amount of crap I'm eating I think I could use the work out. The apartment itself is absolutely beautiful, really spacious and nicely decorated, AND IT HAS A HOB which is a big thing in French unfurnished apartments as they don't usually include any kind of kitchen stuff. So we'll need to somehow obtain an oven. God knows how but somehow. So the fact that we have actually found an apartment we like and that we can afford is a good thing. However, there are of course a million other hoops to jump through. We need this documentation and that documentation and we need a French person to be our guarantor. Hopefully our mentor teachers will do this for us. If not we are screwed. Right now I am praying that the estate agency hold this apartment for us til Monday because at this rate there is no way we are going to get all the paperwork until then, especially as I don't even know if my prof will come through with it or not, I just really hope she will. Sigh.
On a lighter note, here are a few things I have learnt over the past week:
1. FRENCH PEOPLE DO NOT UNDERSTAND THE CONCEPT OF JELLY. I'm serious. You know how we have stereotypes that French people always eat snails, frogs legs etc? Their one for British people is jelly. They find it the strangest thing ever, they just cannot comprehend it. I thought it was just the students but then a teacher genuinely came up to me in the staff room and started telling me how all English people eat jelly with peas in it (what?) and refused to believe me when I told him that definitely wasn't a thing. If it is then it is probably eaten by like one 91 year old man in a village in Yorkshire.
2. There is a man in Rouen who drives the smallest car ever. It's pretty much half the size of a smart car and it blew my mind so much I almost stopped at a crossing just to take a picture of it. Bright orange too.
3. There is a specific chocolate bar in Rouen that does the best hot chocolates in the world and I will be taking everyone who visits me there. And the waiter is very cute and speaks English.
Right, I'm going to have to go to bed as I have to be at school for 8 tomorrow to shadow a pupil. Joy.