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So, I was all alone in Tours for Sunday and Monday. Saturday was spent saying goodbye to Diana, my last friend to leave, who I accompanied to the train station. I had to wait until this morning to leave, so I had two days to kill. I originally bought tickets for todaybecause I presumed I would be working on Friday and didn’t want to rush my packing. As it is, it wouldn’t have made a difference if I had bought tickets for Saturday – the light smattering of snow meant that Tours airport was closed  for Friday and Saturday.

Sunday was good. I went to the board game club where the friendly woman I’d met the first time, Deborah, greeted me (as well as teaching me “vulgarities” because they were “part of the culture”). We played several reasonably simple games – Pony Express (great fun), Shadow Hunters (less so), Wanted! (not bad) and a random game with lots of coloured dice. For me it was mainly a way of passing a lonely Sunday, but it was good fun. I got to meet a few more people of my age too, which was kind of relieving considering the average age of players last time I went. I’m not sure how much of an impression I left on the teenagers though – I’m not very good in group conversations and tend to be very quiet anyway; add to this my language disadvantage and I was, as you can imagine, not very talkative. (Also, one of them was quite hot: this never helps.) Still, I got their names (Jude, Charly, Beranger) and will hopefully see them next time. And now, after leaving at 7am British time, I am finally home (got here at 4:15). Hooray!

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I am beyond disappointed. Apparently, the word Schnee is pronounced [∫ne], not [∫ni] as I have been pronouncing it for about nine years. The correct pronunciation is far less fun.

Anyway, yesterday was a snow day. It didn’t start off as one – I turned up to school in the morning and attended one lesson where I didn’t really do much. During this lesson, we were told that all buses would be cancelled after 2pm due to the snow. Marie (German assistant) and I thought this would give us enough time to eat, so we went to the Christmas lunch. It was pretty delicious – salmon for starters, what may have been antelope for mains (still haven’t figured that out) and then a dessert. We finished at 1:30 and went out to find... no buses. Apparently we had been misinformed. We heard a rumour, which we were unable to substantiate, that there would be buses to the town centre from a shopping centre about 15 minutes’ walk away. We got there to find that, again, this was not the case. So we hung around there for two hours until the woman Marie lives with picked us up and kindly dropped me off near the town centre.

I am fairly used to snow causing mayhem, so I didn’t take it too badly – in the worst case scenario, I was ready to hitchhike or walk home. I didn’t expect France to be as disorganised as the UK when it comes to snow though, so it was a little surprising in that respect. What was extremely funny for me was Marie’s incredulity at the uselessness of the French. She fumed about how in Germany this would never happen, that even in the worst snow they would have at least one bus per hour, and about how terrible it would be if you had children or something. So German. She even called her boyfriend to complain that “Es gibt zwei sentimeter Schnee und alle ist Scheiss!” (I hope that’s properly grammatical German: There’s two centimetres of snow and everything’s gone down the shitter).

Anywho, incredulous Germans aside, I got home in the end, so all ended well. Tours is really pretty in the snow; I wish I had a proper camera. I’ll hopefully be able to take some photos today though; it is snowing once again, and thicker than last time. I only hope my flight on Tuesday isn’t cancelled.

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On Thursday night, I went to my first local board game society night with Diana, an American friend. It was really fun – I love board games, and I don’t think I realised how much I missed playing. They have literally hundreds of games at the club; one group of people were playing Settlers of Catan, but I decided I wanted to start with something easier so there wouldn’t be too much of a language barrier (I am determined to build my way up to Catan though). We played this weird game where everybody is a railway baron from the early 1900s and you have to create railways through Europe – it was good fun, and I won! I think I’ll be joining the club next year. It’s a nice way of spending some time being social in French, and it also means I’ll be able to rent games and invite people to play in my apartment, which would be great.

Saturday was another good day. Rachel and I found ourselves alone in Tours (everyone else had gone to Paris) so we went to Blois, a nearby Loire valley town which, like the rest of the region, is steeped in royal history. We spent most of our time in the chateau which was quite stunning, although deceiving in that almost all the interior was decorated in the 19^th century by some random guy who apparently “tried to recreate the atmosphere of the renaissance” (how the hell would he know what it was like?!). Six kings of France lived in the chateau, which is where Catherine de Medici died. It’s also very well known for being the place where King Henri III, a moderate Catholic, had the ultra-religious (by which I mean evil bigot) Duc de Guise, who liked massacring Protestants, assassinated during the Wars of Religion. Oh, and the Estates-General were summoned to Blois twice in the 1500s. Overall quite fantastic!

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On Tuesday I met up with all the English assistants at secondary schools in the departement – about 30 of us – for a meeting about how being an assistant was going. I got a few good teaching ideas out of it but overall it did seem a little like a waste of a day which was only slightly ameliorated by getting to see people I haven’t seen for a while because they live in tiny villages in the middle of nowhere.

Wednesday was a good day though. I had the day off (as ever) which, coupled with not really teaching on Tuesday, basically meant I had a second weekend in the middle of the week. I relaxed a lot (read: excessive lounging) but did manage to tidy my room. In the evening I met up with Elisa, a Spanish girl who I had organised to meet over the internet for a language exchange. Weirdly, despite knowing loads of Latin-Americans, she was the first Spanish girl I met in Tours. Anyway, it went very well – we luckily seemed to have quite a bit in common, including a love of Flashforward. I’ll therefore be seeing her again in January. We spoke in English for a bit, and for a long time I was speaking in English while she replied in Spanish. This was good for my Spanish listening, but at present I am nowhere near confident enough to speak Spanish, and I think she understood and accepted this. Ho hum, give it a couple of months!

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So, the language festival was interesting – the turnout was low, as expected. I didn’t feel too guilty about not preparing my Gujarati lesson properly when only one man turned up. He wasn’t even interested in learning Gujarati; he just wanted to “meet the other Indian” as he was from Pondicherry. He also went to fetch his son, who was 16, and I just told them a few facts about Gujarat rather than teaching them the language (by the way, Gujarat is the only place you can find wild lions outside of Africa!).

On the bright side, I went to Chinese, Japanese and Persian lessons, all of which were interesting in their own way. I think it really just confirmed my impressions about each language. For example, Chinese grammar is incredibly easy: to see “I am English”, for example, one says “I am England country person”. To say “plane” one says “fly machine”. On the other hand, the pronunciation seems like it would be a huge challenge, especially considering pronunciation is one of my weaker points anyway. The same syllable can have about 40 meaning depending on context and tone.

Japanese is more or less the opposite. The pronunciation seems pretty easy thanks to simple vowels and consonants in a simple structure. On the other hand, not only is there quite a bit of grammar, but it’s very different from Indo-European grammar. However, I don’t think it would be so complex that I would be unable to tackle it if I wanted. I just don’t particularly want to at present.

Persian is entirely useless. I went there for a number of reasons: I am interested in Persians at present thanks to their politics, to Marjane Satrapi, to their interesting history which contrasts with their Arab neighbours. The language is related to Gujarati reasonably closely (they are both Indo-Iranian) and it shows. Gujarati has also borrowed a lot of Persian vocabulary due to centuries of Persian rule, making it even easier for me. In addition, there is no grammatical gender! On the minus side, the language struck me as slightly ugly on a phonetic level, so I don’t think I would wish to take it any further. The Arabic script also looks like a bit of a nightmare.

While I’m at it, I may as well briefly analyse the other languages I speak and “speak”: French, German, Spanish, Norwegian, Gujarati and English.

French – Perhaps I’ve just got used to it, but French no longer sounds so beautiful to me, and a French accent doesn’t make me immediately lust after a man, being associated instead with struggling students. The gap between the spoken and written word is huge and annoying. It still sounds nicer than English, though.

German – Impossible and horrendously ugly. Some of my German friends gave a lesson on German at the festival des langues. There was a comic moment when one of the students said she was Rwandan – the four Germans had a short discussion about the correct way to say “Rwandan”, couldn’t decide on one, and ended up suggesting “from Rwanda” as an alternative. Any language which is this irregular just wasn’t meant to be spoken.

Spanish – I’m getting really into Spanish. Latin American Spanish sounds beautiful to me, and grammatically the language is nice and simple. Spanish rocks

Norwegian – Probably the easiest language for English people to learn. Verbs are ridiculously easy and a lot of vocabulary is similar. I like how it sounds thanks to its tones, but there are still perhaps too many vowels.

Gujarati – Too many consonants. You know things are bad when you can’t pronounce your own native tongue properly. Grammatically I would say it’s quite a bit more complicated than Romance languages.

English – More or less impossible to analyse as it’s my natural language. Ridiculous spelling which is long due a reform, fairly difficult vowels for a foreigner and the ubiquitous diphthongs are really quite ugly in my view.