Updates...

Well, I fell off the earth again and just haven't had time to get to the all-important world of blogging... Plus, I haven't been thinking about much else besides my malfunctioning gall bladder, and I'm sure no one wants to hear much more about that! But the guilt has been eating at me, and an update is long overdue so here goes.

Gall Bladder

An obligatory update, I'm sorry. No new pain at all since the infamous ER night (thank god), but I did meet with a surgeon on Monday. (My doctor wanted to send me to the ER hospital, but they couldn't see me until the end of January. Plus, I'm a little scarred from that visit, so I found another surgeon's name on the U.S. Embassy website who supposedly spoke English--not so much true--and ended up getting a much quicker appointment date since he works at a private clinic. An aside: not entirely sure what the difference between public and private health care here in France is, besides perhaps slightly quicker care for a slightly higher price with private doctors/clinics.) The surgeon's name is Roland Donné, and he's a super nice older guy with perhaps the sweetest secretary on the face of the earth. He works at Clinique Saint Louis, which is a 10-minute walk from one of my schools (potentially awkward), and even though the clinic itself isn't much to look at and was a little maze-like inside, I think I randomly hit on a really good place. I went over my symptoms and he looked at all my medical documents. Then he drew this hilariously elaborate diagram of the digestive tract and where the gall bladder is and what its role is and explained that I have the classic symptoms of a problematic gall bladder so we should probably get that sucker out sooner rather than later. Keep in mind, this is still ALL in French. I continue to impress myself with the fact that even though I often have trouble following simple movie plots, I am somehow able to have in-depth medical discussions without any problems. Maybe it's more of a survival skill thing since we're talking about one of my ORGANS... Anyway, then we went back to the amazingly sweet secretary and they basically let me pick when I want to have the surgery. So my lucky day is February 3rd. Think good thoughts for me as they blow my abdomen up with air, stick a tiny camera through my belly button, and make three little incisions, which is miraculously all they need to extract the gall bladder and all those pesky little gallstones. Kind of amazing. And don't stop sending those good vibes after the 3rd because I am crossing my fingers for a quick recovery so I'm good to go to enjoy my birthday the next week!!! They're making me stay in the hospital for a couple of days after the operation so they can monitor things, but I really, really, REALLY hope it won't be longer than 2 or 3 days. I can't use my cell phone in the hospital and won't have internet access so it might be kind of brutal. My roommate is organizing a rotating visiting schedule on Facebook (Save the Date: Gall Bladder Extravaganza), which I find hilarious, and I'm in the process of gathering a million books to bring with me, but I still can't imagine that being in a hospital cut off from the world is going to be much fun... So that's that. But according to my surgeon, I can eat and drink whatever and can travel (London, here I come in 15 days!) so that was good to hear.

Teaching

Unfortunately, I've still had to be teaching while navigating this ridiculous world of the French health care system. C'est dommage. I think most of us assistants have hit a bit of a hump as far as our actual JOB here goes. Lesson planning continues to be a pain in the butt since nothing seems to work for some of the classes, and it's hard to tell if we're making any difference at all with the kids. Sigh. But I do usually have a good time once I'm actually at the school and doing my lessons. I only have two really crappy classes (I made one of them sit in silence for the last 5 minutes of class this week because they were so bad--LONGEST 5 minutes of my life) so liking 10 out of 12 of my working hours is pretty good. :) Although my favorite part of working in the schools last week had nothing whatsoever to do with students I actually teach. Two students who aren't in my classes had asked me before Christmas vacation if they could get my e-mail address to give to their mother because she is looking to find families in Boston for them to do an exchange this summer. Their mom e-mailed me and asked me to come for lunch to talk about Boston and my experience in Lyon. I was a little weirded out, but I went last week and it was adorable. Their mom has amazing English and lives in the cutest little house about a 2-minute walk from one of my schools. Her children are twins, a boy and a girl, and are the most adorable, well-behaved 13-year-olds I have ever met. We spoke in French mostly during lunch since they're only in their first and second years of English. But lunch was delicious, and I had such a nice time! It also turns out that they have a cousin who is my age and is a children's book illustrator. They showed me some of her books, and I actually really like her work, not that I have any power to do anything, but I'm going to e-mail her and see if she wants to meet up. If nothing else, maybe I will be able to add to my sadly pathetic number of French friends... But the point is that I fell in love with this family and want to do anything I can to help them set up an exchange in Boston. The mother would prefer two separate families with children around the same age somewhere in the Boston/Cambridge area, and she would fly over with them and is willing to pay for food, etc. and/or host students in her home in Lyon later on. She mentioned a 2-3 week exchange sometime between late May and late August. So, LET ME KNOW IF YOU KNOW ANYONE!!!

Babysitting

And of course I've been babysitting, as always. In fact, PE and Aurore were another highlight of my week last week. They were so happy to see me after Christmas vacation that I don't think either one of them stopped talking for the first 45 minutes I was there last Monday. Plus, PE had gotten this amazingly huge Star Wars lego battleship thing for Christmas so we spent most of last week assembling it. I'm sure his mom would LOVE to know that's what she's paying me for... But legos have always been a secret obsession of mine. I remember helping my brother put them together and secretly coveting all of them.  We still had a few touchy moments. PE continues to HATE doing his daily dictations with me, and he decided this week to make a bunch of stupid mistakes on purpose in the hopes that that would convince his mom that it wasn't helping so he could stop doing them. It definitely didn't work, and I feel so badly for him. He only made 3 mistakes in his huge dictation at school last month, which is amazing, but his mom isn't happy unless he has 0 mistakes, which is virtually impossible. It just makes me want to slap her and remind her that he's NINE years old and has the rest of his life to be stressed out. Good lord! Could he please just enjoy what little he has left of his childhood?!?!?!? In rebellion, I let him have snowball fights with me and Aurore everyday walking home from school since they're not supposed to do that either. Sigh.

Fun

Of course, the past couple of weeks have not been without fun. I went to the Gallo-Roman  Museum, and it was kind of amazing to see how incredibly old this city really is. Plus, the ruins and the amphitheater looked so pretty in the snow!

Lyon rarely gets snow and almost never snow that sticks. We've already had three pretty major blizzards so far--nothing compared to Boston or Maine--but last week it snowed for basically three days straight and we got 8 inches! 

Most of the city (and a huge portion of the country) kind of shut down since they just aren't equipped to handle that kind of snow. A bunch of us celebrated the blizzard this past weekend by holing up in my apartment in what we termed the Time Capsule (I mentioned the inaugural Time Capsule weekend in a previous blog in December). It was actually kind of an epic weekend with no less than 8 people at all times, and one night up to 11, hanging out in PJs and watching movies and bumming around. We call it the Time Capsule because we close all of the automatic shutters in the apartment and it basically becomes a cave and you have no absolutely no idea what time of day it is. 

Pretty hilarious. We couldn't decide if we were huge nerds for having a sleepover as 20-somethings or super cool because it was basically like a three-day party... 

Either way, it was a good time. And I have never eaten so well. We had Ruth's homemade soup on Friday night that was to DIE for, Sara's homefried potatoes along with me and Rachel's ginormous 18-egg omelet on Saturday morning/afternoon, Ryan's unreal chicken and veggie curry with rice on Saturday night, and Sara, Alicia, and Zane's chocolate chip pancakes on Sunday, followed by my chocolate chip banana bread. Yum. And I bet my gallstones loved every minute of it. :) We did take a couple of breaks from the Time Capsule and ended up relaxing the terms of the phrase to just include staying together as one huge group for a period of 48 hours or more because people got a little antsy being enclosed... On Saturday night, we went out for a huge snowball fight (that was sabotaged by two little neighborhood boys who took on all 10 of us--one of them had a killer arm and I wanted to recruit him for the Red Sox in a big way after one of his ice balls almost took off my head with this crazy spin!) and made the most adorable snowman (that we think the boys destroyed as soon as we came inside--sigh).

Then, covered in snow, we trekked to the store en masse for provisions. I'm not sure how soon we'll be able to handle another Time Capsule weekend--sleeping three to a bed, two to a slowly deflating air mattress, and more on the floor isn't exactly the most restful weekend, and it's a bit stressful hosting that many people for such a long period of time. But it was definitely a good time.

Last, but not least, I had the luck to go to yet another soccer game. Ben got free (really good!) tickets from work for the Lyon-Metz game last night so he, Patrick, and I went. And Lyon finally won! 3-0! It wasn't too cold, and they actually played pretty well. Yay! It was one of the playoff rounds for the Ligue 1 championship so that made it even more exciting that they won.

But even better (and seriously, what could be better than free tickets to a soccer game?!?!?) is that a group of us is going skiing/snowboarding in the Alps this Saturday. WOO-HOO!!!!! There's this cool organization that runs pretty cheap trips to some of the bigger mountains in the area so for about 65 euros, we get bussed to the mountain WITH a lift ticket and rental equipment. And with all this snow, I bet the conditions will be to die for. At the very least, it will definitely be better than the crappy ice that passes as snow on the ski mountains in Maine... I can't wait!!!