La rentrée

Okay, holiday's over. I'd be lying if I said I hadn't idly looked up flights to Portugal - "I deserve a little summer sun" - but it's time to... procrastinate do something useful. Arrrggggh it's so frustrating! I'm currently procrastinating over the world's worst application form. I get it, standardised application forms make life easier for HR and also cut down the number of people who just spam out their CV to anything vaguely appropriate, but why do you need an application form in which every field has a ridiculous character limit so that I'm constantly running out of room to type basic things like my nationality (yes, "New Zealand" must be one of the longer ones even without adding in "/British", but still) or the name of my degree (again, the name of my degree is long, but it's hardly a fecking essay). Anyway, as you can tell, this is driving me *insane*. Breathe.

Furthermore, I have a little Google Calendar app on Chrome and it has suddenly started counting down the hours to midnight every day. I think it's mocking me because I no longer have anything in my calendar, ever, unlike when I was working when I used it to schedule everything I did. So it just counts down every day like "tick, tock, you're wasting your life". Even worse, sometimes something I'd scheduled way in advance still pops up in the calendar to say "ha ha, so you thought you had enough job security to pencil something in six months in the future? You fool!" I may possibly care too much about what the GCal app thinks of me...

I am trying to do some useful things though. I have been following a course on coding at codeacademy.com. I know what you're thinking, "you? Gwan? Coding? Hahahaha!" (or you're thinking no such thing, since we've never met and you have no opinion on my coding proclivities). But I was talking to my friend Rick (he of the blog guest appearance) about this, and that was pretty much his reaction, and I was all "fo shizzle ma nizzle, Ri-bizzle!", because that's totally how I talk off-blog. Moving on, yes, Gwan, coding! Finally, perhaps the "basic HTML" written on my CV will be true!* It's actually kind of fun at times, although at other times it's really frustrating, since it (like real code) doesn't actually tell you precisely how to fix your errors, and I have a tendency to instantly forget whether I'm meant to be typing "color:blue" or color:"blue" or color=blue or some other permutation. (And why can't these things stay the same in each coding language?!)

*Just to be clear, this isn't a lie per se - they did make us build our own websites from scratch at uni, but I did a half-arsed job of it and then promptly forgot everything I'd semi-learnt. I think this counts as "basic".

I also have done a few Spanish lessons on duolingo.com. I've signed up for quite a few of these language-learning websites in the past, but this is the best one I've come across so far. I like the mix of repetition and introducing new elements, and that it tests you across the four skills (reading, writing, listening and speaking - although speaking's a bit weak, for obvious reasons) without resorting to boring lists or flashcards. It took me a while to realise you can scroll down for extra grammar tips, I thought at first you just had to sort of infer these things, but if you speak French or another European language, things like the adjective agreeing with the noun will probably be pretty intuitive anyway. I don't know enough to judge whether everything's completely accurate or up-to-date, but it seems quite good to me.

So, maybe since I've written about those things on the blog, I'll keep doing them? Any bets??

But la rentrée ("the return" - back to school/work/being an unemployed bum) isn't all work and no play. It's also an opportunity to catch up with all your mates who have also been away on holiday. I don't know why, since almost all, if not all, my friends here are women, but on Friday I was totally "oh my god, it's such a pleasure to hang out with a bunch of such intelligent, funny, strong women who are all pretty much my age" (nothing against 20 year olds, but I did kind of get tired of being older than nearly everyone when I was an assistant and my first year in Tours).

I started off the evening by cracking open a bottle of champagne and catching up with Liz at my place. That champagne has been looking at me every time I've opened my fridge for the past two months, and I think I've shown heroic restraint by not drinking it till now, but I couldn't stand it any more! I think we managed to cover only about 5% of what we got up to in our holidays (London for the Olympics followed by Serbia for her), but it was great catching up and we turned up to the guinguette (an hour late oops) to meet the other girls with that sort of warm, giggly buzz you only get from champagne.

At the guinguette, we met up with Laura, Philippa, Marcia and Caroline, none of whom I'd seen from between a couple of weeks to a couple of months, so there was much to discuss and many laughs. We made up a very multinational group - two Americans, an Australian, a Scot, an Englisher and me, the Kiwi. After the guinguette shut down around midnight, we said goodbye to Liz and Laura (who presumably had to get to a rendezvous at the Goblin Market), and it was off to the Pale for an alarming amount of shots (we were actually playing some sort of Snap!-based drinking game, like a bunch of 16 year olds, ye gods). 2 am closing rolled around, at which point we somehow ended up going to an "after" at the home of some French friends of Marcia's. I have no idea where they came from, suddenly we and an Irish man who also materialised from somewhere and let me steal his cider (which probably means I was all "YOU HAVE CIDER! GIVE ME CIDER! COME TO PARTY! BRING CIDER!") were just all heading off with a bottle of wine Marcia managed to cajole out of the bar staff - not sure if that's legal, but I doubt the French authorities are reading this. And then we stayed up at this house party, drinking, talking and - I kid you not - listening and singing along to Pink Floyd until 7 am. It was actually light and Marcia (who somehow managed to sleep amidst all the Floyd) was up and making pancakes by the time I left.

That was probably super boring to read - nothing like a lengthy description of a night out you didn't participate in - but I had the best time! It really was like being a teenager again, with the added bonus that there was no need to sneak up the stairs pretending to be sober at the end of it. Plus I stopped drinking after the first bottle back at the after (they then served up a bottle of muscat or something equally horrible, so I was saved from drinking more in spite of myself) so I didn't even have a hangover yesterday. Hurrah!

You can drink your wine and eat it too

I've had quite a busy week (for an unemployed bum. And I apologise to anyone seething with rage at posts filled with fun and frivolous purchases. I assure you I spend most of the time weeping and self-flagellating, but I save that sort of thing for my BDSM blog).

We had a picnic in the park on Sunday to celebrate someone getting her PhD approved, which was very nice. It wasn't sunny, but at least it didn't start raining until that evening (and then all day Monday). Then I went home and watched delayed coverage of the Grand Prix, which, contrary to all expectations, was actually very exciting (although I'm still a bit upset over what happened to Hamilton).

Since then, I've been running around going to the gym and working on my CV and other such scintillating stuff. I walked all the way to the Pôle Emploi the other day because I thought "right, I'm going to go there and work on writing cover letters in French without distractions and see if someone can help me with the French" only to find that there is only one computer there with a chair, all the rest you have to stand up at, and all you can do on them is look up job notices on the Pôle Emploi's own website. And when I asked if I could get help writing in French, they gave me a pamphlet designed for French people who can't read and write well (and I don't mean to sound snarky, but examples of people applying for factory jobs in very simple French are not much good to me) and enrolled me in a general workshop in like a fortnight. And told me that the job I wanted to apply for was only open to disabled applicants (which, of course, is a noble initiative, but it's just discouraging every time you come across something else that you don't understand about how the system works here). I know that sounds very whiny, and I know no-one forced me to move to a non-English-speaking country, but it helps everyone if you help us dirty immigants to speak better French and get jobs. And blogging about it helps to vent some of those frustrations.

Wednesday was hot hot hot, with actual sunshine. I went to a garden party, if you can call 20 or so people having drinks and nibbles in a garden a "garden party" (the Queen wasn't there, let's put it that way), which was nice. I spilled red wine on my new dress and had to wash it with detergent in the kitchen sink, but along with washing it properly when I got home, that did the trick, yay. (I'm a big believer in acting immediately, no matter what stain-busting equipment you have at hand, to get rid of stains.) In a brave move, since there will often be sudden thunderstorms in the evening after a hot day here, they set up a TV in the garden so I was able to happily ignore the football until it got to the penalty shootout after an undoubtedly exciting 2 hours of play without a goal.

On Thursday night it was my turn to have Liz and Charlie around for dinner. We have a sort of 'supper club' where we meet up at irregular intervals at each other's houses for dinner. It's a bit tricky because there's a ton of stuff Charlie won't eat, starting with onions and garlic!! This time, I made spinach, feta and chicken pasties and for dessert, the pièce de resistance:

That's no ordinary glass of wine, that's rosé jelly (jello to our American friends)! Basically, you simmer rosé with sugar, add gelatine and pour it into a glass with berries in it and voilà, hours later you have yourself a wobbly paen to the noble art of finding new ways to consume wine.

Cheers!

I didn't want to give the game away, because I think half the fun is bringing out a glass of "wine" and then the big reveal that it's jelly, but I ran the idea of a jelly-based dessert past Liz, who begged me not to do it, because as Canedolia mentioned recently, the French for some reason think the English can't get enough of eating jelly. And, indeed, Charlie found it hilarious to the point of making a video of it wobbling. But I thought a rosé dessert was too cool not to do! So, how did it taste? I did a little test pot of it and thought it was just okay when I ate some on Thursday morning, but maybe my palate just wasn't ready for wine first thing in the morning, because I actually thought it was very nice when we had it in the evening. Just the right amount of sugar and a nice flavour. The frozen berries were a bit seedy, but oh well.

After dinner, Liz went home and Charlie and I met up with Marion and went to a bar and then a club. Tomorrow is Marion's last day in Tours, boohooooo! Now I will (probably) be back to being the only Kiwi in the village. She doesn't yet know where she'll be living, her boyfriend is looking for an internship and in the meantime she'll be going between London and his family's place in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais. They're leaving some stuff in storage here, so I'll probably see her again, but it's still sad to have a friend leave.

We ended up partying with some cute French and Belgian pilots

I also bought these super-cute fold-up ballet pumps from Redfoot shoes in the UK, after Liz sent me a coupon code for their half-price summer sale (which may be still on, let me know if anyone wants the code, because they are really quite expensive). I haven't worn them yet, but it does seem you get what you pay for - the uppers are real, soft leather, and they have a gel sole, so they seem like they'd be much more comfortable for walking than the cheap pair I bought at H&M, which had basically no sole, so it was like walking on the pavement in your socks or something (plus they were too big and fell off all the time, so I gave them to Liz).

In case anyone doesn't know, the idea is you wear them out of an evening and then switch to your high heels when you get wherever you're going, and they fold up as shown and go in a little pouch in your handbag. I look forward to actually wearing heels some time, because with having to walk everywhere and the cobblestones and so on, I never do any more!

Gainfully unemployed

Good news, I got an email today (yes, in a "French govt dept masters the ability to email" shocker) saying that my application for unemployment has been accepted - and I will be getting paid a couple of hundred euros more a month than I earned back when I was a language assistant! Thus proving that battling through the mean streets of Tours with a hangover last Friday to drop off my attestation d'emploi was worth it. I won't be counting on anything until I see the money in my bank account, but looks like I should get paid next week or so, for three weeks' worth, since the first week of unemployment apparently doesn't count.

Being the end of the month, today was coincidentally also the first day I had to log on to the pôle emploi website to update my status. During my initial interview at pôle emploi, my counsellor informed me that I would have to check in once a month to say what I'd been doing for the last month. So I logged on, expecting to fill in information about the CV workshop I'd been on and the jobs I'd applied for etc., only to find that you need to check about 7 boxes saying that you hadn't worked, or been sick, or been pregnant, etc. for the last month. And that's it! I was chatting with a friend, who's had more experience with pôle emploi, about this later, and apparently they do pretty much nothing to make sure you're actively looking for work. Coincidentally, the Guardian is looking at unemployment in Europe today. Their bit on the Pôle Emploi mostly focuses on youth, by which I think they mean people a bit younger than me, but it rather depressingly sums up that "There is no real device for the young, long-term unemployed graduates, which is a fairly new category in France". Still,  to put a positive spin on that (for me, as opposed to all those poor young graduates), at least I have multiple degrees and a few years' work experience, so theoretically that may make me more employable than at least some of the huddled masses...

Also out there making money is my friend Rick, whom you may remember from his recent visit to Tours. If you wondered why he looked so at ease in the guise of Louis XIV, it's because he's just come into some money by winning Jeopardy! (Or, rather, he won the money last year but the episode only just aired and I was previously forbidden to mention the subject he told no-one, as per the confidentiality agreement. Am I allowed to say that?) We never got Jeopardy in New Zealand, so I don't really understand all of how it works, but I understand it's a pretty big deal over there, and I am duly impressed, especially with the smarts on display! If you don't mind using possibly dubious streaming sites, you can watch him in action here (on Putlocker).