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Nice's adventures haven't ended yet.  This time it's the after-dark giant float parade that winds around the city to honor the Italian traditional l: Corso Illuminé. 

For this entry, I'm really only including photos--they speak for themselves. 

During my vacation in Nice I took a (very delayed) train trip to Arles to visit my best friend Marina, who was also an English Assistant this year.  I didn't take too many pictures since I knew I'd be going back there for the Feria (running of the bulls!) the weekend of Marina's birthday, but I did get a fun picture of her rolling a cigarette and looking so European it hurts. 

If you've been keeping up with my schedule as a Teaching Assistant, you know that we have more vacation time than we know what to do with.  Basically it comes down to this: the French go to school for 6 weeks, then have a mandatory 2-week vacation.  In the middle of the year.  Literally, every six weeks.

When you're only teaching 12 hours a week to begin with, that vacation can seem daunting/exciting/tiring/or just poorly timed....when I get into a schedule, I like to...you know...stay there for awhile.  Enjoy the routine till it becomes too routine, then find a new routine!

But, I have to admit, I really enjoyed the French school/vacation system.  With two of my schools the vacations kinda cramped my style, but with my worst students, it could not come at a better time, any time it came.  Literally, I counted down to vacation, and sometimes even left early on the day it started.

For winter vacation I went to Madrid and Segovia with a dear friend for a couple of days, then returned to Nevers, had some unexpected adventures, and then found myself with a whole week of.....[crickets]

No, that's not true--if you know me at all, you know I'm WAY too high-strung to leave myself that much leisure time!  In fact, a couple of weeks before, on a stormy night that saw me crouching alone at the foot of my bed with an empty bottle of wine and a credit card in hand, I found a sweet deal on first class overnight train tickets to Nice.

That's right: I paid less than half price to take a night train to the French Riviera for a long weekend during Carnaval.

Cue envy.

The rest of this blog will be filled with the exorbitant amount of photos I took on that trip.  (Please, don't leave now!  You're so close to spiritual enlightenment or something!!)

On a slow day between vacations, I got to spend the afternoon with some good friends in the nearby town of Moulins.  They'd gotten married nearly a year ago and had yet to receive their wedding china, but it had finally arrived in the store in Moulins, so we piled into the car to go pick it up.

While Therese and I were in Madrid we took a day trip via bus to Segovia, which may be one of the most beautiful cities I've ever seen. 

Because of the awesomeness of the French school year calendar, we work for 6 weeks (which, especially at 12 hours a week, isn't much!) and then we get 2 weeks of paid vacation.  YES PLEASE.  I'm sorely going to miss that scheduling; it's been so nice to be so greatly rewarded for our "work" (read: entertaining adorable French children by pronouncing funny words from a language they've never heard before) by being given frequent vacations.  American workaholics could really learn a thing or two ;) 

After our Christmas vacation, we worked for 6 weeks and then had our confusingly-named "winter vacation;" I kept referring to it as "spring vacation" until I realized that we had one of those, too!  For winter vacation, a fellow English assistant, Therese, and I flew into Madrid to visit a friend-of-a-friend whom I'd never met but whom I loved instantly :)

We flew out of Paris, but first had a café and visited the still-drab (but soon to be magnificent) Jardin des Plantes. 

For anyone who has ever been in a long-distance relationship, you may agree with me when I say that Valentine's Day in the US can really suck.  Luckily, here in France, almost NO ONE celebrates it.  So, even though I'm separated from my beau by an ocean, 5,000 miles, and a 7-hour time difference, it was nice to almost be convinced that the day wasn't a holiday :)

Still, despite the distance, we did have plans!  Even though the internet is frequently out at my house, we planned to cook a meal together--using the same ingredients and making the same dishes--via skype, then eat it together with candles and wine and celebrate our second Valentine's Day together as a couple.  The time difference meant that I ate dinner at 2 a.m. my time, but it was worth it :)

In the beginning of our stay in Nevers we met an American friend who just got married to her French husband and is living in Nevers.  We became good friends, and she invited us to her 26th birthday party, the theme of which was "Sweet 16 Fiesta, 10 Years Later."  She and her husband made Mexican food, the cool people dressed up in costume (:P), we had a piñata and played games all night.

There is a group of people in Nevers who know each other only from CouchSurfing; that is to say that they were complete strangers until they slept on each others' couches.  Pretty fun system for budget travel :)  One night, this group met up at a bar, we got to introduce ourselves to everyone, and the very next day we were invited to tag along to a wine tasting in Auxerre with them.

Before taking James to the airport to fly home, we did what any good tourists would do: we camped out in a hostel for a few nights, criss-crossed the city, and took more pictures than either of us thought possible.  It was a great weekend :)

For the first time ever, in all my little trips to Paris, I saw the SUN come out!  Complete with blue skies--it was a real treat for my anti-French petit coeur ;)

As it was James' first time in Paris, we did the usual tourist-y things: the Louvre (even though we were there on a Friday night, we missed their open-late hours for students, which was a real bummer!),  la Tour Eiffel, Cathédrale de Notre-Dame, etc.  Thus, this blog will be mostly pictures with captions.  If you want the details to any particular story, just ask ;)

After my family left, my sweet boyfriend came to spend Christmas and New Year's with me :)  After touring around Nevers for a couple of days, we made some NYE plans: first we were going to go to Lyon for New Year's Eve, and then Dijon for New Year's Day.  We found hostels, booked our train tickets, and headed out, completely unaware that New Year's Eve and Day in France are treated like Sundays, and one of them actually was a Sunday, so we were hard pressed to find stores or restaurants that were even open.

Soon after the Fête des Lumières, my family showed up :)

They drove all day and finally arrived, and I met them by the cathedral and brought them back to my Hobbit Hole for some hot leek and ham shepherd's pie.  I think they enjoyed it, though we barely all fit in my tiny apartment!

I went to a party the other night.  And not just any party; this was thrown by a Spaniard, for his French and American and British friends, and there was no single language in common.  It was quite an experience. 

I'm really only writing about it here because I learned a new game from the British girls.  It's called The Cereal Box Game.

You set an open cereal box on the floor, and take turns "swan diving" and picking it up with your mouth.  After each turn, a little bit of the box is cut off.  It gets shorter and shorter, and you get drunker and drunker...

Recently I've been taking guitar lessons from a friend of one of my colleagues.  One day I went to Catherine's house (the most charming country cottage I've ever seen!) for lunch.  She knew I played guitar, because I taught the kids a song on the second day of class and she provided the guitar, so she invited her dear family friend Rémi to lunch so that we could chat.  He hosts guitar lessons every Thursday night at his house for a few hours, and invited me to attend.  Of course I couldn't say no :)

He also gave me a child-sized guitar to play on because all the Real People Sized ones were too big.  Womp womp.

It's rare that the sun comes out here, especially during the winter, but once it did while I was in the Cathedral de Saint Cyr.  The stained glass windows threw patches of colored light everywhere, and I had an absolute field day photographing it.  Enjoy :)

As some of you know, my contract here has me working a total of 12 hours per week divided among 3 schools.  One of those schools is in the city center of Nevers, and the other two are a half-hour bus ride away in a little town called Fourchambault.  The far away schools are my favorites, not only because of the teachers and students, but because the buildings themselves are so old and have so much character :)

I've already posted pictures of Chevillettes, so now I'm posting pictures of the other school in Fourchambault, l'École du Vieux Moulin.

Well, I've been back for awhile, but too busy having adventures to force myself to sit still for long enough to blog.  However, I've decided that I need to get caught up a bit before I have any more adventures (unlikely and we all know it) so that I won't be too bogged down when it comes time to blog about all of them :P

One factor that throws a wrench into my blog plans is the perfectionist streak in me; she wants everything to be in chronological order, but I'm starting to think it'd be easier to just write in the order in which the inspirations come to me :P

That being said....are you ready to hear about the time we made Baked Macaroni and Cheese at one of my schoolz?!

One of the teachers I work with asked me to send him a simple recipe that kids would be able to translate (with a little help) and that they'd enjoy eating....so I thought of the ultimate kid's food, the one and only mac-n-chee, and sent him the first recipe I came across.

Having never made Baked Mac-n-Chee myself, I have no idea if it was a good one :P

That Monday, we told the kids (level CM1, so about 9 years old) what we were doing...and they were SO excited!  They already knew the words for all the ingredients--butter, salt, cheese, etc--and had absolutely no trouble translating the directions; one kid raised his hand at the very beginning and said, "I know what this means!" then translated the line "Preheat the oven to 180˚" into perfect French.  I, for one, was really impressed!

We moved downstairs into the kitchen (which you may remember; I've already posted a picture from this very kitchen, one that involves a mini-fridge stocked with about 8 bottles of wine!)  The kids started measuring ingredients and mixing them together.  For some of them it was their first cooking experience.

After we returned from the Christmas market, we had a cross-cultural, multi-lingual holiday bash in the common kitchen at the Foyer where I live with Stephanie and Maisie.  Everyone brought something to eat or drink, and we partied like we were about to start our last week of teaching before Christmas vacation...mostly because we were :)

Even though the Marchés de Noël, or Christmas markets, are typically a northern French/German tradition, the tradition has migrated through much of France.  Even Nevers, petite little ville that she is, has a bustling one :)  Most stores had Christmas specials, but one weekend was set aside for an actual outdoor (=frigid) Christmas market, with stalls, artisan vendors, free samples of wine, cheese, baked goods, bread, and other goodies.  Our usual crowd of English- (and Spanish-) speaking assistants went, and we came home with some great buys!

During the second week of December I went to Lyon with a friend for the Fête des Lumières, or Festival of Lights.  Every year the city of Lyon hosts the Fête des Lumières and people come from all over the world to see the city lit up for Christmas.  This year, Nevers did its own version of the Festival of Lights.  It was nothing like the original (which we saw the following weekend, and which you can see in a few posts!), but it was still a lot of fun! 

The rest of the girls were in Paris visiting Disneyland (a very cold excursion for them indeed), but Jess and I stayed in for a relaxing, blue-skied, snow-filled weekend of Christmas lights in what we've come to consider our hometown: Nevers.