Madison's Caen Update

My time in Caen so far has been very busy but I am glad to finally sit down and reflect on what this experience has already given me. I arrived unfamiliar with the city, the school, and the students and it was difficult at first having no idea what to expect but the university and international society have made it very easy to feel at home in Caen. Living with other international students creates the sense of community I was hoping to find and my classes are great. The professors here are very helpful and friendly, and I still can’t believe I am taking all of my classes in French! 

In addition to my academics I have been lucky enough to experience other things like traveling around the UK a bit as well as Deauville/Paris to visit past exchange friends and my correspondent Mathias. I’m so glad I have been able to stay as close to Mathias and his family as I have and I definitely plan on continuing to visit them throughout the semester- it’s so nice to have a family in France! 

February with Andrew

February was a pretty easy month for us here in Deauville, mostly because we were really just on vacation the entire month! During the time that we were in school, I started a Skype exchange with SCAPA in Lexington. My children had never seen any Americans before other than the three of us here, and were simply amazed (in a good way. They loved getting to meet everyone and hear Americans speaking French). In this Skype exchange we assign challenges between the Lexington school and my school here in France. The first challenge between the two schools was for SCAPA to learn the first verse of the French national anthem (La Marseillaise) and for my group to learn “My Old Kentucky Home”. I’m very proud of how hard my kids worked to learn this song, and how eager they were to learn a little more about Kentucky and its history. 

During the vacation I decided to do a little European tour to visit my friends. I first left Paris for Ireland where I spent a few days in Galway on the eastern coast, then headed back to Dublin to revisit the city and my best French friend that lives there. From there I left back to Poland (because Poland is a country worth visiting more than one time!). My friend Magda pulled out all the stops and took me to a village in the south on the Slovakian border called Zakopane. We spent the 6 days I was in Poland there relaxing in a cabin nestled in a small valley, eating local smoked cheeses, dancing to traditional Polish music, and even taking some time to drive to Slovakia (a new country for me!). 

From there I left to The Netherlands to see a friend who did an exchange with YFU (Youth for Understanding) at my high school in Kentucky. I hadn’t seen her since the last time I did a sister cities program (2015). To say that I am still grateful for this work opportunity would be an understatement. I’m so lucky to be able to see all these amazing places and have the opportunity to be reunited with my friends on this side of the world.

Until next time!

Andrew

Winter in Deauville

We have already reached and exceeded the halfway point of our time in Deauville. Currently, it is the February holiday, and I chose to stay here in Deauville and use the time off to explore more of the town and areas nearby. Jessi, our roommate from Nashville, and I have had time to soak in the unusually sunny Normandy winter weather, revisit some of our favorite cafes now that the weather will permit outside seating, and venture off to new restaurants and shops that we had overlooked before.

We keep pretty busy with teaching and after school activities during the week, so there’s not much time for anything else, so we prioritize cooking at home and sharing a meal together every single night. When we do have free time, we usually spend our time together, as this experience has made good friends out of all of us. In mid -January, Andrew and I traveled to Paris for a concert of an artist we both enjoy very much, and took full advantage of the winter sales, stocking up for the rest of the cold weather. We also spend a lot of our free time walking down the boardwalk of the Deauville beach, breathe in the sea air, window shopping in Deauville, and spending future paychecks in our heads.

When the weather picks up a little bit more, we anticipate longer days in the sand, with picnics and our music, and continuing the traditions of spending hours at the café, reading, people watching, eating and drinking, and chatting. We can’t wait for the market to return to the Deauville center, where you can find unique clothing items and local foods.

Until next time!

                                    -Elizabeth

A few pictures from a trip to Omaha Beach

November with Elizabeth

What an exciting month it’s been here in Deauville! As we enter the holiday season, we are surrounded by the beautiful lights and cheer of Christmas time. While we are thinking of our family back at home, we are all counting our blessings and feeling the holiday spirit in other ways.

In Mid-November, I celebrated my 23^rd birthday with a weekend in Paris. Upon my return to school, I received about 30 drawings from my students as a birthday gift. I kept each one of them, and they remind me how much joy the children bring to me with their loving hearts and genuine spirits. Later that week, we celebrated Thanksgiving with a Deauville native, Fanny Hubert-Salmon, who spends a lot of time working in Lexington. I also discovered that Fanny and I have a connection back at home as well, through my dad, and one of her best friends. It was a humbling reminder of how small the world really is.  At Fanny’s home, we shared a delicious meal, with all the American fixins’ we could find. Fanny brought back corn bread mix from the last time she visited Kentucky, we had some makeshift cranberry sauce made from dried cranberries, green beans, sweet potatoes, mac and cheese, homemade rolls and cinnamon butter, and a chocolate hazelnut pie. In lieu of a turkey, which can be hard to find in France, we had a foie gras stuffed chicken. It was delicious. It was so wonderful to connect with someone who knows and loves our hometown so much. We got to talk about Kentucky basketball, and other sports, something I didn’t realized I missed so much until we talked about it. We are all so grateful to Fanny for opening her home to us. It turned what could have been a sad, homesick day into a wonderful experience of love and friendship. I hope that we will be able to continue our friendship upon our return to Lexington.

This past weekend, we also got to share in the illumination celebration in the center plaza of Deauville. Four kilometers of lights in total were strung around the city, decorating the trees and the light posts and forming a beautiful tent of light over the main roundabout in the city. Our students sang a song for the town that they had been practicing for weeks, and then with the push of a big red button, the town was transformed into a beautiful winter wonderland. This next month is sure to bring even more holiday cheer as we celebrate the season with our new friends, and see the delight in our students’ eyes as the magic of Christmas draws nearer.Our day to day life here as a TA in Deauville has settled into a nice routine. There are early days, when we have to be at the school to greet the students before class starts, and there are later days, when we get to grab a few extra winks of sleep. I start my day usually at the nursey school, where the kids treat you as if you are a celebrity walking through their halls. Every time I walk into a room of my students I hear a chorus of, “Elizabet! Elizabet! Hellllllo! ‘Elllooo!” (The ‘th’ at the end of my name is impossible for most of them to pronounce, so we just go with Elizabet.) I start my days with songs usually. Songs that teach greetings, or how to say their name, or even just classic nursery rhymes. I think I sing “Itsy Bitsy Spider” about 20 times a week. And then, we learn English through games and stories. Since I teach in the nursey, it’s a lot of me talking, and them playing, but it is an important building block in their English education. On Fridays, they get stickers, usually with English phrases on them, as a reward for a week of hard work. The stickers are a huge hit. Every day, we eat lunch and spend recreation with the kids. I have formed some special bonds with a handful of the kids, and I have learned that seeing the world through their eyes is something that adults often overlook, and because of that, we miss out on a lot of joy and wonder that the world has to offer. After school, the students have after school activities. When we aren’t helping out in the bigger groups, we are each responsible for our own activity. I run the English club every Tuesday, and we play games, make crafts, and watch movies that expose them to some American culture and a little bit of English language. One of their favorite activities was creating Halloween masks, and playing Thanskgiving bingo. They loved it! At the end of our days, we are tired, but we feel fulfilled and satisfied in the role that we are playing in these kids’ language and cultural education.

Until next time! Happy Holidays from Deauville!

                                    -Elizabeth

TA Andrew Coburn's December in Deauville

The month of December flew by way too fast. Now that we were in the full swing of things with vacations and holiday events quickly approaching, we kept plenty busy! While Deauville may be a small town, they don't skimp on holiday decorations and festivities. The season kicked off with a lighting of the entire town, including hidden light shows in different parts of the city. There was a little confusion amongst the TAs as to why the kids all the sudden started singing a song called "Noël Jazz", but it ended up they had to sing it at the lighting ceremony in front of the citizens before pushing the big red button to light up the town (it's now a house favorite). The festivities didn't stop just in town but continued to the school. The children worked for WEEKS on small crafts that they eventually sold at a school Christmas market where they raised funds for their class trips. I also worked with three of my classes to send Christmas cards to two elementary schools in Georgetown, KY, and Tulsa, OK. The exchange went off without a hitch and it was great to see how both cultures handled the objective. One of the Georgetown schools even learned how to say 'Merry Christmas' for their paired class!
      The best part about December was our second two-week vacation. For this one, the girls and I separated again. My first day I finally got to go to Omaha Beach and see the D-Day Beach and walk through the American cemetery. It was quite the eye-opening experience. I again returned to Lyon to spend Christmas with my host family and get another Frenchmas (French Christmas) under my belt. From Lyon, I left for Poland to catch the tail end of Polish Christmas festivities with a local friend and her family. I celebrated New Years there with a beautiful fireworks show, then headed back to Deauville for several days of rest. The girls left the Saturday that break began and headed on a 13-day adventure to Spain (Barcelona, Valencia, and Madrid). There they got to tour many well-known museums, and spend time in some much-needed sunshine and warm weather.

        December was a hard month with spending Christmas away from our family, but we were all grateful to spend it with our newly made/established families. We're all back to work now and even more ready than before for whatever comes our way this next month! 

-Andrew

Warsaw, Poland with one of my best friends, Magda.

Christmas with my favorite "sisters"!

Omaha Beach Sculpture

Andrew Coburn's Deauville October Update

Using September as a month to settle in and really get going, we hit October full on. It took about a week or so to really get comfortable with being up in front of my kids and teaching them something that literally comes naturally to me. However, after some careful planning, I finally began to get the hang of it. In the first period of teaching I covered topics of introduction (asking names, favorite things, where they lived), and weather. Each day (except Wednesday) there are afterschool activities. Tuesdays there are two slots reserved for the Americans to take over, one cultural, and one hands-on. We took turns each week covering each. Elizabeth and I covered Kentucky one week with a reading of B is for Bluegrass and some derby coloring sheets, as well as making Halloween masks and watching kids Halloween films. In the hands-on, I taught the kids Dodgeball, Ninja, and how to make ice cream in a plastic bag. We will continue these until Christmas break where we will be covering topics that we choose over the course of the second half of the school year.

         It’s not October without Halloween! My kids were overjoyed when I turned on the projector to show a Halloween presentation complete with a picture of me in a clown costume from several years ago, and a French Halloween song my teachers used to teach Halloween vocabulary words in my high school French classes. I also took this moment as a way to plug in Transylvania University's 'Pumpkin Mania' which astounded the children. On the last two days leading up to our first vacation, we held Halloween parties in the two countryside schools and learned just how much we (and the kids) love Spooky Bowling, regular bowling, but with bottles decorated to look like ghosts. The night before vacation we participated in the Deauville Halloween party that was held in a WW2 German-occupied villa in town. The party included a pumpkin carving station (ran by the TAs), a haunted house, mystery boxes, and a haunted underground bunker.

Using September as a month to settle in and really get going, we hit October full on. It took about a week or so to really get comfortable with being up in front of my kids and teaching them something that literally comes naturally to me. However, after some careful planning, I finally began to get the hang of it. In the first period of teaching I covered topics of introduction (asking names, favorite things, where they lived), and weather. Each day (except Wednesday) there are afterschool activities. Tuesdays there are two slots reserved for the Americans to take over, one cultural, and one hands-on. We took turns each week covering each. Elizabeth and I covered Kentucky one week with a reading of B is for Bluegrass and some derby coloring sheets, as well as making Halloween masks and watching kids Halloween films. In the hands-on, I taught the kids Dodgeball, Ninja, and how to make ice cream in a plastic bag. We will continue these until Christmas break where we will be covering topics that we choose over the course of the second half of the school year.

My creations this year!

During this month I did a decent amount of traveling both with the girls and alone. I took a weekend to surprise a sister from my host family in Lyon and used my layovers in Paris to revisit some sites (since the last time I was in France was 2015 with Sister Cities). Afterward, a local friend gave me a tour of the neighboring cities of Honfleur and Le Havre (where I also spent 3 days during the first week of vacation). With the first big vacation coming up at the end of the month we all decided it was a good idea to get out of Deauville and see some close by cities and countries. The first weekend we all hopped on the train to Paris where the girls spent a weekend while I continued to Reims to see some old friends. I then continued on to Le Havre, and a teacher at the Deauville elementary school gave the girls a day tour of Honfleur. The second week the travel bug was really getting at us, so we booked tickets on Brittany Ferries, and sailed off to London where we spent 5 days discovering the city, eating lots of fish and chips, pies, and drinking lots of tea. While the two weeks of vacation have been nice, we are excited to be back home in Deauville and are already looking forward to our next adventures in Europe and in teaching.

-Andrew

Palais de Justice and Notre Dame Basilica in Lyon

 London!

London Bridge wasn't falling down that day!

Getting to know Deauville- 2018 TA Elizabeth Whitlock's thoughts on the first month in Deauville

The first month or so in Deauville have been filled with new experiences and adventures. From getting settled in to our new home, finding exactly which local boulangerie has the best tarte aux fraises, to meeting our new co-workers at each school, every day here in France has held new excitements.

We three Americans spent our first few days discovering the world around us. The city of Deauville was nice enough to give passes to the American Film Festival here, which we took advantage of and saw a few great films and even spotted a celebrity or two. We passed more time by digging our toes into the cool sand of the Deauville beach. Wrapping up on the beach in a sweater and jeans was definitely a new experience for me, but seeing dogs and babies playing in the sand and watching horses trot along the waters’ edge made the chilly breeze totally worth it.

When it comes to our experiences at the school, all three Americans were nervous to start. Myself in particular was incredibly nervous to meet the kids for the first time, but the children are completely excited to see you, meet you, hear a little English, and find out about the strange far-away land you’ve come from. The teachers and counselors we work side by side with are incredibly kind and helpful. They are excited for our journey as well. Being surrounded by friendly faces makes the transition of moving and working in a foreign country a bit easier.

Though Deauville is a small town, there are shops, restaurants, and cafés tucked away down a random street, so if you allow yourself to just get lost for an afternoon, you can find some real hidden treasures. It is surprising how there are many elements that remind me of Deauville’s sister city and my home, Lexington, particularly in the stables where the horses are boarded near the hippodrome. I feel right at home.

In the coming month, I am very excited to get further into teaching. As of this blog post, we have completed our first week of classes, and are still acclimating and getting all the butterflies out. The kids are so sweet, and are one of the most rewarding parts of this experience.