School’s Out For Summer!
Well. the last four weeks will be four of the most memorable ones of my life, I’m sure. Spent in the south of France, in the little village of Villefranche-Sur-Mer, enrolled in an intensive, eight-hours-a-day, full-immersion French learning course, housed in an historic mansion set in magnificent gardens overlooking the deep, blue Mediterranean Sea. Hard to top.. The only thing that could have possibly made it better would have been if I could have experienced it with Deb like we’d always planned. I know she would have loved it as much as I did. I thought of her every day I was there and I know she was with me in spirit.
This afternoon, in a flurry of champagne toasts, group singing, hand shakes and awkward two cheek kisses, we all graduated with flying colours and were cast back out into the big, wide world, pledging to continue on our quest for French fluency. While we bid farewell to friendships forged and went our separate ways, Ross was winging his way across the seas to join me.
Three of us caught an Uber to Nice, including Catherine (aka ‘Hawky’) who is a fellow-Aussie and an all round great human being I’ve met since being here. She is spending her post-school weekend in Nice with her husband before heading back home on Monday.
Ross was a sight for sore eyes when we met in our hotel in Nice, where we’d agreed we would rendezvous (see I’m already using my French). In actual fact, Ross was the one with sore eyes, after only having had 4 hours sleep in the last 30 or so hours. In a stubborn bid to ward off jet-lag he refused to have a nap, sticking to his highly contentious theory that a nap of any sort can worsen jet-lag. Consequently, we arranged to have a very early dinner, meeting up with Habab, my room mate and very good friend from French school, since she had a night on her own in Nice. I was so happy Ross got to meet her.
As we walked back to our hotel in the warmth of the night, the gusty winds of the afternoon having now died down, we were intrigued by a huge gathering of ticket-holders being admitted into a fenced off area right in the heart of town. There was a passionate speaker on the podium, sprouting French a little advanced for me to grasp from a distance, and his image was being beamed out to the crowd on a giant screen. We had no idea who he was or what he was so zealously talking about but there were some equally zealous hecklers bellowing their dislike of his little speech from outside the fence. What a mystery!
As the sky overhead turned a vibrant shade of pink, we made our way back to our home for the night, Ross stumbling through the door just in the nick of time before diving under the covers for a coma-like slumber. The violin renditions of Ed Sheeran classics are drifting peacefully up to our ears from the Frogslegs Restaurant down below. If I open the window wide and crane my head out, I can see the beach - an ‘ocean glimpse’ as they say in the real estate business.
Our French road trip starts in full-swing tomorrow. Can’t wait!
