As you know, I’ve been teaching ESL classes to a bunch of happy ladies from the Middle East. I don’t know why exactly, but they like me a lot. Tonight was just the second class I was giving and they told me very bluntly, “You’re going to teach us more English after June” I felt as if they were saying that they wanted me to teach them during the summer, but they were talking about the fall and they had appointed me as their teacher. I wonder if they’ll keep their excitement throughout the spring and that they’ll want me to teach them more in the fall. I don’t even know if I’ll be asked to teach more or if I’d do it, but anyways, that was not the point of my post.

So those ladies like me a lot and they’re really friendly. When they got to the church (where we have our classes) a lady kissed a friend’s cheeks and then another, so we went around saying hi and greeting eachother with kisses. You Anglos reading this blog may not be accustomed to this practice, but we Frenchies casually greet people with two kisses on the cheeks. So for me it was just the normal greeting, just with people I didn’t really know. One lady gave me two kisses on the cheeks. I said hi to another and gave her two kisses… BUT to my surprise, she gave me a THIRD one. Ok Ok. No big deal. Then I moved to another lady and I gave her two kisses, she gave me a third (I thought, “Oh right, this one is from Lebanon or … so three kisses) BUT she added a FOURTH one and told me she was from… Algeria or some other places and there they give four not three or two kisses on the cheeks. We had a lot of fun just talking about that. I was saying that now I did not only need to remember their names (which is already hard since they’re different from what I’m used to), but I needed to remember where this one and that one lady came from so I would know how many kisses to give her. Crazy crazy.

I introduced them to the “Canadian A” well, it was not included in my lesson, but I happened to use it, so I explained to them what it was and how we had the sort of the same “A” in French (en) at the end of our sentences. I told them that they should not try to use it though. I guess that the fact that I used the equivalent Canadian A (maybe we could call it “Le EN Québécois) all my life and the fact that I spent two years of my life in Saskatchhewan sort of… “pre-disposed” me to the use of the Canadian A.

So that’s about it for my ESL class tonight.