tu viens d'où?

Last night I had a lesson from 6-8 which my boss interrupted halfway through to ask if I would be cool with teaching the lesson right afterward from 8-10 because the other teacher wasn't feeling well. I said sure (goodness knows I could use the hours!) and even though I didn't know any of the students, I was just going to use pretty much the same lesson plan because they were around the same level.

It ended up that only two older doods showed up, despite it being an eight person class. And guys, when you get a group of nervous people together to speak a foreign language, they tend to freeze up. It put me in a weird position because the topic wasn't really all that great and it was mostly a discussion based lesson. These two older doods weren't very talkative, I had never met them before and I was sorta unprepared for the situation.

About and hour and twenty minutes in, I decided to throw the lesson plan aside and just have a casual discussion with them, asking them questions about themselves and their interests, correcting their grammar when necessary, and they ended up asking me about where I was from. When I told them Arizona, they lit up -- because they each had not only been to Arizona, but to Tucson. And there's nothing quite like a french person, who is so in love with their own country and culture, language, people, food, history... Telling you how amazing your home is, how beautiful it is and how friendly the people are and lovely and blah blah. I was practically bursting with pride hearing such high praise of my hometown from FRENCH people, who most of the time respond with "ah, air-ee-zohn-ah? wehr ees eet?" or "you must be vehry cohld 'ere een Frrrrance."

Anyways, we talked for nearly fifty minutes about their travels around the southwest and the west coast, from San Francisco to Death Valley and Las Vegas to the Grand Canyon and these two older guys were kind of exactly as I imagine older french men to be: somewhat outdoorsy, very family oriented, successful in their careers but not too concerned with money and even if they were wealthy, they're more interested in simply enjoying life, quite calm and relaxed, and once I got them interested in a topic, they were of course total chatterboxes. I showed them on the giant map other good places to visit on the east coast and told them that if I had my way, I'd visit the pacific northwest without a doubt.

Basically, it was one of those I-can't-believe-I'm-getting-paid-for-this moments (albeit getting paid very little) but still -- plus I get a bonus for picking up a last minute shift. Awesome possum.



xoxo