Goodbye (part two)

This is the last night that I'll be in my apartment in Périgueux! It is no less strange than it was yesterday...

Tomorrow I'm getting up early because I have a long list of things to do before I meet with my landlord in the evening. It's all very do-able, but I want to get up and get a move on tomorrow so I don't feel rushed.

This will be my last post in Périgueux, so I want to talk about my last week of teaching and some of the other celebratory things we did this week. It was a good last week here!

Little ducklings on the path by the river today. (Random, I guess - but they're cute!)

The last week of teaching was fairly uneventful. I didn't even have all of my classes because there were exams going on. Most of my classes were normal, though a few of them had little parties to say goodbye. The kids brought food and drinks and then we played games (I stayed in the classrooms with the teachers rather than taking a group to teach on my own). One group of seventh-graders wrote all over the board at the end of the class:

For some reason they started drawing animals. My favorite part of this board was "Si you soon" (a phonetic misspelling) that someone unfortunately corrected to "See you soon" before I could take a picture. Also "good nyt," another phonetic misspelling - and a mix-up between "goodbye" and "good night."

This class could be a handful but they were generally nice kids. A little girl brought me a note that said "For Mégane" in which she thanked me for English class and wished me a "bon retour!" to the US. It was very cute.

I wasn't sad to say goodbye to teaching, though I was very sad to say goodbye to my tutoring students, Anna and Matéo, the kids that I tutor on Tuesday. They were the first students I started tutoring this year. I stayed for dinner, as usual, on our last evening and played badminton with them. We went to a play after dinner - put on by the students at the high school - which was actually pretty entertaining. Afterward we had to say goodbye and Anna wouldn't let me go and was starting to cry - I didn't want to say goodbye either! Matéo assured me that it was okay because we're going to Skype. I had written them notes to say goodbye so when I saw their mom at school on Thursday, she gave me some notes and pictures they had drawn for me:

Anna drew a picture of us playing outside her house and Matéo spent a long time drawing the Eiffel Tower for me so I could remember France.

I'm definitely going to send them both postcards while I'm traveling - and I'll have to buy some when I'm at home as well!

That's how my week with students went, though I also tried to do a lot with my friends this week as well. We took advantage of the nice weather and had drinks outside a couple times, and Friday night we went to an English pub where we sometimes go to play their trivia game. (I can't remember if I mentioned this yesterday - if I did, oops.) Our team tied in the main round of trivia and then won in the tie-breaker round - thanks to me since I knew four of the five answers...but also cause I can write really fast. We got five free beers out of it!

Hooray! The tie-breaker round.

The winning team. We were "Noche Flamenca" because afterward Azahara and Eve danced flamenco as a show for the bar!

Flo's birthday is Tuesday (the day I leave) and he's turning 30, so there will be a party for him. Since I won't be here, we also got together last night at Eve and Flo's and celebrated. We got him a book of recipes involving cheese and a party game where you have to solve mysteries. We ended up playing games and eating pizza until almost two in the morning, and had a nice night. As I've said before, I'm really going to miss the friends I've made here!

Tomorrow evening we're going to go out for dinner since it's my last night! Very sad!

My goal is to also write a blog post about general thoughts on living in France - and the things I'll miss. I have about nine hours on the train on the way to Nice on Tuesday, so I'm going to try to write that then. Otherwise, salut depuis Périgueux pour la dernière fois! Ciao!