Amiens

Hello again, I'm writing to you on a French keyboard, which I can't change to English layout, so my apologies if this post is riddled with spelling errors: rest assured, I'm not losing my fabled pedantry.

Speaking of my fondness for correcting people, I thought this would be a boon in a job such as this; I'd pictured myself pointing out grammatical errors with gay abandon and being paid for the privilege. Not so. I don't feel confident when one of my colleagues makes an error that I'm high enough in the pecking order to say anything- I don't want to step on any toes; and, on the whole, the students' english is so bad that unless the sentiment is utterly incomprehensible, I just don't bother. It'd take too long.
So far, my only interaction with the students has been them 'interviewing' me for a profile: this led to some interesting questions being asked- my favourite was 'are you bald?' to which I responded by tugging my ponytail (it transpired he meant 'are you bold?' [see what I did there?], which didn't occur to me, not because it's ungrammatical but simply because it's such an odd thing to ask). My least favourite question, which all three classes asked, without fail, twice, and which was then repeated at the bank, was 'do you have a wife and children?'- I hope to God I don't look that old.

On Friday, I went to Amiens for a conference for Language Assistants, which I honestly hadn't imagined was the kind of job which needed a conference. I won't bore you with the details of the talks; suffice to say they didn't tell me anything I didn't know already and if they did it was in French and I couldn't understand it. But I met some wonderful people while there: Naomi and Nicole, both Scots with whom I had lunch and very consciously tried not to discuss the referendum (no such luck); John, a Chicago native with whom I spoke a weird kind of pidgin composed of French, English, Spanish and Italian, with me not speaking the latter and he not speaking the penultimate, but neither of us wanting to concede and just speak our shared native tongue.
I ended up spending the night on a former Italian assistant's sofa, as part of couchsurfers. He actually slept on the sofa with me- we'd been Gentlemen and given up the bed to a lady who was also staying the night- and I managed to share a bed with someone without physically injuring them! #Progress

On Saturday, I went to the bank to open an account and I... think I succeeded. They didn't speak any English (naturally), and there were a lot of words I hadn't looked up, like 'interest', 'savings' or 'bank'. Still, the teller handed me something at the end, and it has my name and a bunch of numbers on it, so it's either a bank statement or I'm in the Matrix now.
She also gave me her number and I really don't know why so...winning?