Hello friends, family, and lovers !!

Thank you for checking out my blog.  I hope to be posting here weekly or bi-weekly over the next few months.  As you may know, I'm travelling to France to be an English Teaching Assistant - a position I got through the Fulbright program and the French Ministry of Education.

I'll be in a high school in a town called La Seyne Sur Mer, and I'll be living in the next town over, which is called Toulon.  Here's a map- Toulon is featured on it!  Paris is in the top/center, and Toulon is in the southeast, on the coast, between Nice and Marseille.   I'll get to school on their public transport - which includes buses and WATER TAXIS !  I'm SO PUMPED to be living somewhere with WATER TAXIS !!  Tooooo cool for school.  (Speaking of too cool for school, I just learned that "playing hooky" in french is "secher les cours".... as a prof, I obviously won't be doing that.  Not that I ever did it as a student either.)  ANYHOO!

The French government is paying me about 800 euros/month (that's with taxes taken out) so I'm gonna be mega-rich, aka probably gonna go on housing assistance and potentially French food stamps.  ALL PART OF THE ADVENTURE !  I'm going to be living with another girl doing the same program, and Steph seems SUPER AWESOME.  She's in MD for the summer so we got to meet up for coffee, which was lovely.

I'm heading over NEXT TUESDAY where I'll spend a day in Paris and see my host family, then the day after Dad will arrive and we'll head down to Toulon to look at apartments together.  We'll go back to Paris for a few days after that and spend some time with some extended family.

THEN I'm going to FINLAND to see my wonderful friend Leevi (we used to be neighbors in Paris, if you want to see how cool it was, then click here - he took this picture from his window, of me at my window.  I'll be all over Finland for the week - Helsinki to his town of Tampere and his mom's summer house as well.

I'll be back in Toulon (hopefully in an APARTMENT!) the first week of October, so definitely expect more updates then!

Stay tuned!

Mucho amore,
xoxo
Samantha