I love socialism

On Monday, a nice teacher gave me a tv. This was great, but what was probably the most exciting thing about this was that he told me about free French as a Second Language classes, and they meet right across from where I live. Parfait! Since I don't have a roomate to speak with, this will really help me. Just think, I spent thousands of dollars to learn French at school, and it seems all I had to do was move to France and they'd teach it to me for free!

I have also been thinking about how good to me people have been to me so far. I realized that since I've been here, I haven't spent more than two consecutive nights in one place. This is because there have been various people putting me up and feeding me. This is how it's been so far:
Sept 20: Crappy hotel which had torn out the hotel listings in the yellow pagers in burb of Bordeaux
Sept 21-22: Hotel IBIS in Bordeaux Centre
Sept 23: Stay for free with one of the assistants in Bordeaux, he feeds me
Sept 24-25: Stay for free with Christine, one of the English teachers. She feeds me.
Sept 26-27: Move in with the boys at the dorm. I feed me. Poorly.
Sept 28-29: Stay with Christine again. She feeds me and takes me for an afternoon in Pau
Sept 30-Oct 1: Stay in my cell (which I rather like)
Oct 2-3: Stay with a teacher named Lucrèce in Pau so I could go to Dax for orientation on Wednesay
October: Today. Wow, that was nearly two weeks heavily sprinkled with free lodging and French cooking. Happy, happy, happy!

Going to Dax was nice. The meetings were boring, but we got our universay healthcare taken care of :-) and I got to meet a lot of the other assistants in the area. However, for the way back, the SNCF (trains) went on a surprise strike. Welcome to France. But, once again, I was fortunate to benefit from the benevolence of another assistant. This time it was the Portuguese language assistant who is French but of Portuguese heritage who was conveniently driving back to Pau. So, despite France's best effort to keep me stranded in Dax, I got a ride home(ish)!

Hopefully pretty soon my housing allowance will go through. Ahhh, welcome to France.