As the title of this latest post implies, I have more big news! Today, I found out what town and school I will be working in! And I am going to.......(Drumroll, please!)..... Trier!
[This is a map of the journey I will make from Hornchurch, England to Trier, Germany. Click on image to make it bigger.]
For those of you who don't know, Trier is a town in the South West of Germany near the Luxembourg border. It has a lot of history (particularly Roman) and looks like such a quintessentially German town. I have never been before, but my parents visited once and said it was lovely. To be honest, I don't know anything about it so I am currently stalking the Trier tourist information website for insight into the town that will be my new home for a year. If you fancy seeing where I will end up, here is the link!
http://www.trier-info.de/english/index
I am teaching at a Realschule (the equivalent of an English comprehensive) just outside of Trier. From what I've gathered from the school website and my haphazard translation skills, the school is fairly modern and was founded from two schools that merged together a year or so ago. From the look at the number of staff, the school doesn't seem to be particularly big, which is nice as it's more personal and also because I am awful at remembering names. Oh, that's going to go down so well when I start taking lessons. I will be one of those teachers who still doesn't know your name at the end of the year, or gets you confused with someone else in the class who looks NOTHING like you... Anyway, I digress...
Now, that I have told you all my "big news", I had better tell you how I found out about it. It all started with an email today from the education authorities in Rheinland-Pfalz. My reactions were as follows:
1. Hyperventilate
2. Feverishly try to translate the formal German language
3. Hyperventilate
4. Text a friend asking for help
5. Hyperventilate
6. Get excited.
As you can see, I did a lot of hyperventilating in a relatively small period of time. You may think that I am being a drama queen, but I'd like to see how you would react if you got a formal German email with an about a million page contract (also in formal German) with all sorts of scary things mentioned in it like insurance etc! I must say that it freaked me out a bit, at first! Especially when I ascertained that I have to attend a training day in Cologne on 27th August (I have to go straight to Trier and start work from this course), which clashed with my time working as a London Ambassador for the Olympics. NIGHTMARE! Thankfully, I was tremendously lucky and managed to change my London Ambassador dates to a couple of weeks before at the same location. Even more hyperventilation and possible nervous breakdown avoided. Anyway, the long and short of it is that I have to read this contract, sign it and send it back to the education authorities. Unfortunately, I can't do this for a bit as I am going to Spain tomorrow and then have my final second year exam when I get back. I want to read the contract thoroughly and understand exactly what I am signing before I return it. How sensible of me. I must say though, it's all starting to feel very real now. Extremely scary/exciting!
So there you are folks. I now know what I'm doing, where I'm doing it and when I'm doing it. And thanks to this blog, so do you!
I hope I haven't bored you to death with my digressions and panicking!
Thanks for reading,
Bel xxx
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