just keep swimming just keep swimming just keep swimming swimming swimming...

I was hoofing it around the southern suburbs of Paris today looking for a stable residence and some guy stopped at a light was BLARING Men In Black by Will Smith. This may just be the highlight of my France experience to date.

Also, I might have a lead on a housing situation! I was down in Guyancourt (the town that high school I'm working at is in) and I talked to another Lycée there about renting a room for the next month at 25 euro a night. They were super nice and super flexible about it. This is not a super good deal, but it's a pretty ritzy set up and it's right by my school. The only problem is that it has no kitchen, so I'd be eating a lot of non-perishables for the next month. That starts next wednesday if I can't find anything else. So at least I have a short term plan of sorts.

Anyways, the real news is: while I was down there, I went to the University that is down in Guyancourt (which is the same town the High School I teach at is) and I went to this information desk and ended up talking to this dude for like 10 minutes where we basically just went around in circles talking about how shitty it is trying to find housing in the Paris area. He gave me a lot of websites I already had and it ended up with him being like well, Bon courage! But he also took down my e-mail address and said that if anyone came wandering up to him looking for a roommate, he would let me know about it. So, I walked around for most of the afternoon and made more dead end phone calls and when I got home about 4 hours later, I already had a message from him saying, Guess what? That a girl named Celia had come up to him not long after me and said she needed to find a roommate for her apartment. So I'm on the trail. I'll keep you updated on how that works out.

Tomorrow's my first day at the school, I get to sit on classes. I'm compiling a list of vocab that I think everyone english speaker should know and that conventional teachers are probably overlooking. So far it's short, if anyone has additions, please let me know.
1. Whack (as in: "They're expelling all of the Roma people from France, that's whack."
2. Bogus
3. Dope (ie, "Will Smith is dope.")

more to come, I've got to go to a language exchange dealie and eat some tacos.
later gators! <--- another possible phrase to teach?