Today I headed over to my parents where we had a family lunch with my brother, his wife and my young nephew.

After lunch we all headed over to the park to get out of the house a bit. It was a stunningly beautiful day, 27 degrees and without a cloud in the sky. The park was relatively empty too as many are away on holidays so we had the playground to ourselves.

The nephew wanted to play tag thinking he could outrun the adults. However as I had been jogging a bit, I could run around and play chasey with him.

In the end, he got tired and gave up as I could keep up with him much to his frustration. It was great to be sprinting around and not getting tired. I was going up and down the playground poles and thankful that I was still limber enough to do this – although I have to be careful.

Returning home with left overs, I decided to do a bit of French studies. I was meant to start an intensive conversation course of 2 hours every night this week but due to lack of numbers, the course was cancelled. I’m a bit irritated with this because last semester, the same thing happened! Of course, it’s not about the money (as we get a refund), but it’s more about the opportunity to just talk in an immersive environment.

On the week of the 25th, I start another course of 10 weeks. Every Tuesday night at 6-8pm, I will do B1 so I’ve decided to get ahead by doing the exercises myself first.

The Alliance Francaise runs all its courses in French and within 2 hours you’re struggling to listen, decipher and string a sentence together on French. There’s a lot going on so at times, I miss things. Doing these activities as pre work means that I’m revisiting and refreshing and relearning. I can ask more pertinent and well thought out questions.

I finished level B1.4 but decided to start again at B1 this semester for more practice. I’ll also commence another semester with Nathalie.

Nathalie runs conversation classes every Thursday over the semester at a local cafe. I enjoy going to these (not so much the Zoom sessions as nowadays I prefer in person events than online events) so I’ll sign up for another semester.

The time change is making it difficult for me to chat with my French friends so I need to find ways to continue speaking as much as possible.