Grincheux, ou tout simplement français?

Grumpy, or just French? Thibaud looking unimpressed posing for me while I distract him from his laptop. I don't know why, but it seems that all French people are brought up to keep their faces carefully neutral, they don't tend to smile in photographs and a lot of the time you can't tell what they're thinking. Depending how how much contact they have had with other countries, whether it be going there, living there or simply watching television or listening to music from there tends to affect the animation of their faces while they are talking to you!

Thought for the day, taken from another Blipper, I don't remember who unfortunately, translated from a Polish poem...makes sense of life in general really:-

I didn't believe that I would cross that bridge,
And now that I am standing on the other side,
I don't believe I crossed it.

Slept in late this morning until I had to get into school for my one lesson of the day...and even then, a half an hour one at that! Today was my three troisième INTER girls, working once more on our dossiers for their brevet (exam, coming along at some time in May). The girls were really enthusiastic and we got a lot of work done, I'm starting to know the materials they are using backwards, which is great for me I guess, as most of the stuff they are doing I genuinely had no real idea about before. Don't get me wrong, I did some research on them before starting to teach it to them!

My afternoon was spent with Thomas working on the questions for the Pub Quiz on Monday. Now this might not seem like much to us English people...but as there are no pubs in any other country but ours (and, well, Ireland!) herein lies the first problem. Once the idea of a pub is explained ("well, it's like a bar...but it serves food, and, well, alcohol but not in the same way as a bar, and erm, it has a jukebox?" You try explaining it to someone who clearly thinks you're talking about a bar!) Thomas, being on ERASMUS in Ireland knew exactly what I was on about so off we went attempting to write a pub quiz for over ten different nationalities. This is a lot harder than it sounds, as a lot of questions are really specific to certain countries...it is on Monday, hopefully it will go okay! The only annoying thing is because we wrote the questions, we can't actually take part in the quiz...although we have discussed possibly forming our own "Creators Team" and seeing how many of the questions we can a.) remember and b.) get right. On verra!

Once we had finished the work I ended up staying and spending time with the rest of the Coloc'. Well, they were all there to begin with actually, Thibaud deciding that the couch where Thomas and I were sitting would be the perfect place for a nap, on us (I'm not even joking!), Pierre generally supplying us with the music playlist and general chitchat and distractions when trying to find questions, and Flavie doing her own work. So what I really mean is that we all ended up spending the evening chilling out together and listening to music/watching television/YouTube etc. and being joined by the lovely Simon later on. I had a rather strange moment in the supermarket with the boys, where I was speaking to my friend Caroline on the phone (she came to England first, I'm used to speaking to her in English) in French because I was with the boys; then getting really confused and mixing the two until finally settling on English. I guess it is a good thing that I automatically start speaking in French but it can be a bit unfortunate sometimes!

Need to get a proper night's sleep at some point in the near future; it is starting to have a knock-on effect on how much I can understand.