Last week was my first full week of teaching. Things are going very well--the kids and teachers like me, I generally get my message across, and some of them at least seem to be learning things. Right now I'm planning my lessons for this week, trying to figure out how to teach Halloween and how to not get way ahead in my classes that I'm going to end up seeing two more times than the other classes. Its interesting how much difference there is in terms of how quickly the different classes pick up not only the material but also what I'm asking them to do.

Thursday night I went to a concert at Blois's only small music venue, which happens to be right near my house. It was good to see interesting looking people who were older than lycee age. The music wasn't very good, but it was definitely worth the 4 euro subscription fee (for the year, now other concerts are discounted) and commitment to volunteer there in the future.

This weekend was a big conference/ festival called Rendez-Vous L'Histoire (means "Meeting with history") that was really four in one--lectures and debates on the theme "Opinion," lectures and debates having to do with historical subject matters, literary cafés, and a film festival with films that either had to do with the theme of opinion or history. This is more stuff than is going to happen in Blois for the rest of the year. However, it was so overwhelming (and all in French) that I only managed to go to one thing, which was about the importance of history for contemporary intellectual life and which was way over my head. I might go to some stuff later today, but I have lesson planning to do. There was also a counter-summit called "Rendez-nous l'histoire," which was put on my some radical anti-mainstream-media groups (Plan B and ACMED) that I stopped by for a while today. I could actually follow some of what was going on, and it was pretty interesting, including a discussion of the relative merits of holding the counter-summit versus having tried to get involved in the main event and reaching a larger audience. Unfortunately I had to go home to drop off some stuff and now I don't know whether I'll be able to get out again to hear more.

Its also very cold here!