Snow Day! (Kinda.)

It snowed yesterday, and by ‘snow,’ I mean steady, heavy snowflakes the size of quarters.  And by ‘yesterday,’ I mean from when I awoke at 6:45 AM ‘til I stopped staring out the window at 6:30 PM.  All day.  Despite all that constant weather, it barely accumulated: when I finished my last class at 6 PM, slush had just begun forming on the pavement, and I could still see the tips of the grass on the ground.

So even as I watched the snow plopping down from the sky from the warm comfort of the staff room, I began thinking of ways to stamp down the inevitable cries from my students for a snow day the next day.  I had already witnessed the faces glued to the classroom windows that morning, upturned towards the grey sky and shining in hopeful anticipation, and I vividly remembered how disappointed I would always be when it didn’t snow enough to cancel school.

But then the teachers began expressing the same wishes, and my brows furrowed.  No really, I could still see grass; the pavement was clear.  Why in the world would we have a snow day the next day?  Then Lydia informed me that even though the school rarely if ever formally cancels school for snow, if the kids’ buses can’t make their routes, most of the school doesn’t show up the next day.  As the meteorologists were predicting arctic temperatures for the next day, even though the amount of snow on the ground could be generously called negligible, it would most definitely freeze overnight, making narrow centre ville streets dangerous and country roads nearly impossible to navigate.  For a region as dependent on four-wheeled transportation as mine is, icy roads are a definite impediment to a regularly-scheduled program.

I officially dubbed ‘icy road day’ the French equivalent to a snow day.

Snow!

I can still see grass.

Hee. Lamps.

Side note: when I came back from lunch today, I saw one of my kids rolling balls for a snowman.

School aids went classroom to classroom right after 3 PM yesterday to warn kids that buses to towns in the region of Maine-et-Loire would leave immediately, and buses to the Sarthe region would leave at 5 PM, and from then on, the kids were pretty much lost to the storm swirling outside the windows. (I know the link is in French, but if you scroll down to the Sarthe section, you can see a video!)

I couldn’t find it in my heart to blame them.  Snow apparently rarely happens here (hence all the hubbub), and since in Chicago it’s pretty much a winter staple, I had missed my white Christmas and random snowstorms and snow-covered trees and icicles.  Though the snow didn’t end up amounting to much, it was still fun to watch, and fun to hear them complain about how hard the commute would be the next morning.

While the local evening news talked almost exclusively about how the snow affected every little thing in the Pays de la Loire, I honestly never expected the fallout to be as bad as the teachers predicted.

The next morning, the news still lamented the bad weather and icy roads (though to me the slush was actually better that morning), and when I arrived in the staff room, only a handful of teachers chatted by the coffee bar.  Marc warned that all buses from both Maine-et-Loire and Sarthe were cancelled, so possibly only 10% of students would show up this morning, and the number would decrease throughout the day.

Well, my bad.

It was my pretend fire.

Karine and I walked to our first class together, and while normally the hall would be filled with lounging, screaming teenagers, this morning a maximum of fifteen roamed the corridor quietly and a bit aimlessly.  Only one of them belonged to us.  We spent the first half of the class just talking and the last half working on his written English.  Boring, and I totally could’ve slept in, but maybe our nine o’clock would be better.

It was, but only by two students.  So we translated idioms for most of the hour instead of working, though I’m sure the two boys in the group thought it constituted as work.

During the break at 10 o’clock, other teachers recounted similar stories: Romain had three students, Nathalie four, and one of the Spanish teachers had just two.  Many teachers knew more than a couple kids were ditching, as they were either from La Flèche proper or were lodgers at the school, but the kids were clearly taking advantage of an ‘icy road day’ as well as a national appel à la grève (call to strike, of course) for primary schools and those who supported primary schools.  Catherine told me our 1 PM class was cancelled today because they were taking a practice test for their important exam, so I only had one more class today at 4 PM.

Lunch was strange: what with more than half of the food service workers, students, and teachers absent, they only opened half of the Self, and the tall, open building seemed almost gaping.  (The heat in the Self also seemed to be taking the day off, but that’s another story.)

Muriel cornered me after lunch as I wrote this post in the staff room, announcing with a wry smile that we didn’t have class together at 4 PM anymore: the class of terminale l’s originally had four students, but as they had four hours of class with the same teacher that day, the school sent them home after lunch.  Fabulous!  As I have been feeling ill since Saturday night (either a bad cold or a mild flu), I gladly skipped off to my room and back into bed.  One of the strangest ‘calm’ days of my life, definitely.  And with the weather looking like it’s going to stay well below freezing for the rest of the week, we’ll see if more ‘icy road days’ happen or if they really were an aberration.

And now, a flashback!

Vacances de Toussaint Day One: Travel and Lyon

In true Becky fashion, something had to go wrong with the travel arrangements.  Despite having written down all the pertinent information for out travels before I bought our (thousands of) train tickets, I managed to book the wrong day for our bus to Annecy.  Easily fixable: the ticket was exchangeable, and there was a bus available for the same time on the day we wanted.  Perfect.

We also needed to buy return tickets from Lyon, as I kept foolishly hoping an option would pop up on the SNCF website that didn’t including circling all around La Flèche before getting there, like a dog before it lays down in its bed.  But Karine offered to pick me up from either Angers or Le Mans if I needed it.  So we would buy tickets direct to Angers.  Easy.  Done.

And then Amy discovered her picture had disappeared from her Carte 12-25.  No problem: we’d go to the post office, get a new one taken, have the guy at the SNCF boutique at the La Flèche bus station tape it in — fabulous.  Only not, because the La Flèche post office doesn’t offer that service, and as it was a Monday, most every other store that did offer it was closed.  Okay.  Maybe they’d accept another photo ID as proof.

Well, the guy at the SNCF boutique wasn’t too pleased (“C’est obligatoire,” he said, tapping the empty space where the photo should have been.  That didn’t need translation), but when we reassured him we would get a picture in there before we left Le Mans, he seemed begrudgingly satisfied.  So yay.

We hauled our massive backpacks to the bus, stored our picnic lunch of baguette sandwiches, carrot sticks, cucumber slices, apples, and dried apricots, waved au revoir to Verity, and braced ourselves for a day of travel.

For the first time traveling together to places unknown to both, the day went rather well.  All of my preparation was well used.  The train from Le Mans went by rather quickly, especially since there was a re-occurrence of Inexplicable French Crying Baby.  (This time, the entirely French mother had the situation well in hand.)  When we arrived in Lyon, I realized I clearly hadn’t adequately prepared myself for its massiveness.  Living in a small town and only occasionally visiting other city-like towns had spoiled me, so when we lemming-ed into the main room of Lyon Part Dieu (I know: hysterical), and humanity crashed on my head, I was thrown for a loop.  Had I really been away from a city that long that I didn’t know how to react to people rushing more quickly that I was?

It took more than a couple minutes for me to find my bearings behind a boȋte, and then we proceeded to find public transportation information (whoa), and we discovered that Lyon sports buses, trams, and a metro (whoa!).  I quickly jotted down the three connecting metro lines we had to take to get to our hotel, and we followed the rush hour crush.

Finding our hotel was easy enough, and the room was a slight upgrade: I had definitely booked a room with one double bed, but our room had a double and a twin!  It’s the small things, really.  However, the single plug in the room, as well as the fact that we lived next to both the stairs and the elevator slightly made up for the extra bed.

We wandered our general area — not too far, as we still didn’t own a map of Lyon — and found a restaurant that seemed somewhat affordable.  Upon seeing food prices even at off-the-beaten-track establishments, we mutually decided on splurging for the first night and basically living off the land for the next two.  However, on our stroll, we did manage to glimpse Old Lyon up in the hills, and even in the waning, cloudy twilight, the jack-o-lantern-toothed buildings seemed to say, “Don’t worry; we’ll take good care of you.”

Vieux Lyon up on the hill.

I then ate my first profiteroles on this sojourn in France, and I nearly cried in happiness.  I would probably savor that memory when I eat a baguette sandwich for the third meal in a row.

Mmm. Profiteroles.