Puddles, Phones and Planning

What goes up must come down. I woke up this morning with a headache (champagne does that to me sometimes but I don’t have enough chances to drink it to remember!) and just as I wanted to go out the heavens opened. Not ideal as I’ve already been the crazy English guy soaked to the skin wearing only a t-shirt this week…

I decided to wait out the rain but this came at the price of meeting someone who insulted my French. I wasn’t too chuffed about this and even if I do speak French like a Spanish cow (French idiom there for you, courtesy of my friend Sam) I don’t need to be told – I’d never tell anyone I thought their English was crap, mainly because that’d be bloody rude! As I’ve said in other blog entries, it’s incredibly difficult for me to gauge how good my French is because the range of responses has been so varied. Today didn’t clarify anything. Meh.

I don’t know whether it was because of everything else or if, as Donné thinks, I’m just running perfectly to schedule but today was also the first day of homesickness. As I tweeted, life is a lot easier when your best friends are 10 metres away (sometimes they even bring you TEA) and when you can be confident of always being understood in public. Luckily I have friends who kick me right back to happy when I’m down and won’t let me feel sorry for myself so all was well in the end.

This being the case, I set off in a more optimistic mood and with the Avenue Q soundtrack blaring in my ears. I’m yet to find a day that can’t be improved by some kind of connection to Avenue Q. The lady that served me at Free was incredibly helpful although due to some kind of bank card issue I have to wait for my SIM card to be delivered rather than getting it there and then. My phone, however, does not know this and is being a bit of a pain about working for O2 now it’s tasted another network. This means that I am without my (slow, rubbish, expensive) mobile internet upon which my life has depended for almost a fortnight and also pretty much unable to call anyone until my new SIM arrives some point within the next 10 days. When this happens, I’ll update you all on my life.

Today’s wifi of choice was McDo – although I’ve used them less than the shopping centre, there seems to be one woman who is never not working and seems to be worried about my apparent McDo addiction. I considered shouting ‘I’m not here for the fries and the décor, I’m here for the wifi’ but wasn’t quite brave enough… that, and no one would’ve understood me.

I had an email today from one of the profs asking me to record a poem, making use of my native-y voice. The poem is a fairly simple affair named ‘Chicago’ (I don’t know the poet) so should not have posed me any challenge… ha! It took me the best part of 45 minutes to record the thing and some of the failed attempts contain a colourful and interesting range of English swear words. ARGH! Who needs to be able to read, anyway?

This puts you up to date with my life – I’m now going to go and plan my first few classes. Exciting stuff, I’m sure at least someone would agree!