Bonjour, I'm at the beginning of another of my four day weekends. Another week of four hour classes, boring French law, cancelled European business law (3 out of our five classes have been cancelled), impassioned discussions of Malcolm X in my English class, trying to find out obscure words in French and then there's my understanding communication which needs more than a couple of words to sum it up. It is a cross between psychology, management and anthropol...

Bonjour, I've been meaning to update my blog about Lyon for ages but the longer I don't write, the more there is to write about, so the harder it is to write, so the longer I don't write. It's a vicious cycle. I'm well settled in Lyon now, although it's a strange kind of settled living in a country where you have to struggle constantly to be understood. The French are all that they are imagined to be and that includes not being the most tolerant when to h...

Bonjour tout le monde, I am finally settled in France, and decided it was time to update my blog. But, as tends to happen when you step outside of New Zealand, so many things have happened in the last few weeks, that I don't know where to start. So I'll start in Rome. I flew into Italy and spent four days there before going to Lyon so that I could see Sylvia on her way back from Europe. The first two days we wandered around Rome, watching the hoards of touri...

This will be my last blog entry, at least for this trip. I find it hard to sum up my experience in writing so I'm going to take the easy(ier) way out and make a list. First (to get the negative over with): 10 Things I Won't Miss About Kenya 1) The constant mutterings of 'mzungu, mzungu' under people's breath as I walk down the street 2) Marriage proposals, no where near as flattering as you think when they begin with 'I love you, because you're white' and en...

Hi everyone, the last few weeks have been more chaotic and busy than usual and I feel a bit like I'm being stretched in five different directions. Jessie and I are visiting children's homes. It's often an odd experience, we end up all over the city in obscure subrurbs and towns. We usually wake up and get home in the dark and spend most of the hours in between stuck matatus waiting Narobi's truly shocking traffic and then getting hopelessly lost. Luckily Kenyans ...