London Calling ♥
Pascale History More

Howdy!

I am Pascale and will be living in London for a while. You can read all about my brain-dead tourist situations, embarrassing cultural mistakes and see all the pictures and videos I make. I will also post some proper blogs about the work I do to please my parents and teachers. I'd appreciate it if you left a comment. Use the links underneath the top picture to navigate.













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How to get to my room.

Saturday 5 February 2011 15:53

Have I mentioned that you have to walk through the London Chest Hospital to get to my room? It's quite tricky if you don't know where to go... let me show you;


Bonner Road, outside the Hospital on the pavement


Through the gates, up to the main entrance


Into the hospital, keep on walking until you see this back door


Go outside - ignore the Hospital filth and ambulances


You'll see this building right in front of you. This is Residence One.


Go inside, up these stairs...


On the first floor, take a right through this hall


Before you pass through the fire doors, you'll see room 101.


FOUND ME!

You will actually need a code to get into the building, and then a key to get into the room. Any burglars reading this won't get really far.
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My first Mass

Friday 4 February 2011 19:01


St Christina's School

Today I was in Nursery for most of the time. There's meant to be four adults there (two outside and two inside as the children can choose if they want to play inside or outside). Today one of the Nursery staff was ill, as was another teacher from Reception. Helen covered Reception whilst I covered Nursery. It's actually a lot of fun - it's basically playing with a bunch of 3 and 4 year olds, running around outside because there's monsters in the shed and all that.

Then at 2pm, I was about to witness my first 'Mass'...


The Chapel of St Christina's School

Mass. Mass is the Eucharistic celebration in the Latin liturgical rites of the Roman Catholic Church. The term is used also of similar celebrations in Old Catholic Churches, in the Anglo-Catholic tradition of Anglicanism, in Western Rite Orthodox Churches, in Lutheran churches, and in a small number of High Church Methodist parishes. The Catholic Church sees the Mass as the most perfect way it has to offer latria (adoration) to God.

So basically a whole load of singing and praying and worshiping to an invisible man up in the sky that I don't believe is really there. I felt so incredibly out of place... especially after watching the film Zeitgeist the other week (you HAVE to watch that, it's amazing!). I'm not Catholic and I'm 99% sure that the Priest knows this. He kept glaring at me as he was reading out these ridiculous stories from the bible. To make things a little worse, Gabrielle was sat next to me and behind me were a load of parents who are free to join the Mass if they want. They were all singing along and doing these little 'amen' and 'the holy spirit' things where you move your arms and I was just sat there, boiling inside, wanting to jump up and scream "THIS IS ALL BULLSHIT!" Especially when this Priest asked us to stand up and shake the hand of your neighbours and say 'Peace be with you.' I demonstratively didn't move a muscle, pretending to be stupid and foreign. I think from now on I might keep myself busy doing something else during Mass. That was once, and never again.
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Comedy Rocks

00:35


The Thames, looking LOVELY today!

Embrace yourselves; this will be a long one!

Today was interesting! School wasn't that special - Georgia introduced me to copying, ring-binding and laminating. It's easy work, kind of therapeutic and hypnotising once you're not automatic pilot. Later Justin, one of the Year 3 teachers, surprised me when he said 'Hallo, hoe gaat het met jou?' at the tea break. He's from South Africa (although he's not black and he hasn't got a foreign accent) so we had a nice chat about the Dutch language and that. Then after school I went to meet Carys and we both went down to the ITV Studios.


ITV Studios

Whilst McFly was doing a webchat in front of the windows, me and a couple more fans were just randomly standing in the background. They waved, we waved, people who were a floor above waved because they thought we were waving at them - anyways, good times! I'll see if I can fetch that video for you later.


McFly inside ITV, doing a webchat

After waiting for hours and hours in the freezing cold outside (it was actually freezing), getting recognised as 'That Dutch girl of The Cube' and 'That girl of mission:MCFLY' and 'PascaleDeBom from twitter' they finally opened the doors. We had priority tickets which basically meant we had front row seats. I was sitting right opposite of the middle stage (as there were three little sections of stage) right in between two massive cameras. Jason Manford was hilarious, as were a couple of the other comedians I don't know the names of. Mark was one of them, but I seriously don't know his last name... but he was funny. At the start when Jason asked where everyone was from, I looked straight at him and said 'Holland' as other people were screaming where they came from as well. 'Did you say Holland?' I nodded. 'World's gone mad!' that's number two I can tick of my imaginary list of TV show hosts that know I am from Holland. Not that it's getting me anywhere, it's just cool.


The set of Comedy Rocks

McFly played a couple of their songs in between the stand up acts and little snippets of their songs as well. Right in the middle of That's The Truth, Danny caught my eye and smiled as he saw me singing along. I wasn't sure if he actually had looked at me, but after the song there were people next to me who asked 'Was he just looking at you then?' Good times.

It's really late, and I have to get up really early, so I'm off now! Dripta is busy setting up viewings for me so I can hopefully find another place soon. Oh, one last thing, today someone told me that I sound like I come from London. FANX MATE.
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School Lunches

Wednesday 2 February 2011 18:21

I thought I wouldn't want to be eating the school lunches they provide but they are all surprisingly healthy! I haven't seen any greasy fatty pizzas or crisps - it's always something foreign with lots of vegetables. As a desert there's always yogurt or fruit, I absolutely love it.

Today I worked with two French sisters, one is in year 4 and the other in year 1. Both are struggling with the English language, so I got to do fun reading and speaking exercises with them. Today I also got my own folder so I can keep track of who I'm working with and what we all do together. Because Helen had a meeting with one of the teachers from the nursery, I helped out for about an hour in there as well.

I have mentally started a list of all the different countries the children and staff come from, and here's all the countries on my list so far: Spain, France, Italy, Croatia, Ireland, Scotland, Brazil, South Africa, Poland, Russia, Japan, The Netherlands, Sweden, Germany and of course England. It's quite the list, isn't it?

Anyway, tomorrow I am off duty at lunch time - if these people I e-mailed about viewings will just e-mail me back I could take Carys flathunting! If I hear nothing, we'll just have lunch somewhere and head down to the ITV Studios!
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Gay

Tuesday 1 February 2011 21:27

I'm not entirely comfortable with the whole Catholic thing at school. It's not like the religion is forced on me (they don't ask me to pray or whatever) but I get incredibly self-conscious when there's a priest having lunch at the same table as me. I'm lucky that I'm not with a classroom teacher, so I don't experience all the praying and the worshiping that goes on in each class, but today I operated in a Catholic point of view - it was awkward.

There was a group of little children who have problems detecting sounds in words - they don't necessarily understand it when words rhyme. So, today we were looking for words that end in -ay as an exercise to see that all these words sound the same, but all have a different meaning. All was fun and games, until one little girl raised her hand and said "I know one! Gay!"

It's not that I have a problem with it, but I could see Helen sit up in her chair and about to jump in to correct the little girl. This is where I usually wouldn't even have batted an eyelash. Gay is a perfectly normal word - it exists, some people are it, what's the big deal right? But then, now I'm meant to teach from a Catholic point of view. Before anyone could say anything, I said "Yes, gay, as in very happy. Good girl." SAVED THE DAY. No problem.

Today I met one of the speech therapists who comes in once or twice a week together with another speech therapist. I told her that we actually get speech therapy at our university and she was so shocked and amazed that she might as well could've burst into tears of happiness. She asked me to get a bunch load of information so she could see if she could do some work at teacher training colleges in England as well as on primary schools.

I just had dinner with Joselyn, and on Thursday I'm meeting Carys again. We're going flat hunting before we're heading down to the ITV studios for the recording of Comedy Rocks with Jason Manford. McFly's the performing band and we've managed to bag ourself priority tickets (she got 6, I have 2... I'm sure we won't need THAT many tickets, but they might come in handy anyway). In the weekend I might meet Maddie, a friend of mine from Norway who I didn't know had moved to London permanently! There's a huge Chinese New Year party happening in China Town on Sunday so we might go and have a look down there!

Also delighted to hear that some of my classmates are planning a trip to London! YAY!!
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First day at work.

Monday 31 January 2011 17:57

Today was a lot of fun! In the morning I had a meeting with Gabrielle, the Deputy Headteacher of St. Christina's School and she explained basically everything about the school, the systems they use and the school agenda. She's not from England, but her accent is so integrated that I can hardly tell if she's Irish or American... anyway. After that I started my day with Helen. Helen is a Special Educational Needs Coordinator - SENCO for short. Basically what we'd call a remedial teacher. She basically gets groups of children to her office which is a small classroom in itself from year one up til year 6. From year 3 on St. Christina's becomes a girls school, so there aren't a lot of boys.

Today I also met the only Dutch pupil on St Christina's! She's probably 8 or 9 years old and has moved to London with her family a couple of years ago - we had a conversation in English because she felt too shy to speak Dutch with me in front of her friends but I could tell she was excited there's now a Dutch teacher on her school!

From next week on I will do a lot of reading and speaking exercises with French, Japanese and Russian pupils who are still having a hard time grasping the English language. So basically I'm doing what I already did back in The Netherlands, but now I can't switch back to Dutch to explain something - I'll need to use pictures and describe things if they're not clear enough.

Last thing that I found incredibly funny; I was on playground duty today and there were 5 girls, standing up on a bench pretending it to be a stage, singing The Saturdays songs. They even did the names of all the girls in Flo Rida style before their song started singing Higher - amazing! I remember how I used to do that with my classmates to The Spice Girl songs! Anyway, good day!
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Sunday

Sunday 30 January 2011 17:34

So here I am. Internet on my laptop, completely out of tears (now that I just typed that I've started welling up again) and ready for my first day of work tomorrow. So much as happened this week - I've been running around like a mad person, from Bethnal Green to St Johns Wood to Wembley Park to Lewisham... but now there's nothing else for me to do but rest.

I went to get internet today at a T-Mobile shop, got special treatment from the manager because he said I was a good looking lady with a French name and he liked that. In the end I left with a discount because, and I quote, "we like girls with blonde hair here at T-Mobile." Bit weird, but you won't hear me complain! Tomorrow I start my day at 9am with Helen. We've had a conversation on Friday when I went to get my suitcase that was in her office. She's absolutely thrilled to have me help her out; she confessed she was incredibly worried at first having a Dutch girl coming over. She'd no idea what to expect, but after meeting me she was just happy that there wouldn't be a language barrier between us and that I've already worked on an English primary school before. I know what's expected of me.

The only thing that's on my mind now is that I need to go and look for a new place. I am paying for this room per week, so if I wanted to move out I only have to give a weeks notice and I can leave whenever I want. I need time to go around and have a look at these places, so there's a slight chance I'll just work mornings or afternoons for a few days per week in the first month here. So far the school's been VERY understanding (even people I don't know have been stopping me in the hallways and telling me that Jesus' power is with me and all that hoo-ha) so hopefully there won't be any problem there.

There's a couple of pictures up on my facebook page of the past week. Go have a look.

EDIT: I hadn't told you this yet, but I had found some Dutch food products in the kitchen, and Tony from Twin UK had also told me that he had placed Dutch girls in this building before, so I was thrilled that I wasn't the only one. But there's three floors in this building and the halls are incredibly long. So, instead of knocking on every door to ask if there's a Dutch girl living there, I put up a sad little note on the bulletin board downstairs in the hall, telling the Dutch people to knock on my door sometime. Right in the middle of skyping/twitcamming with Celesta, there was a knock on my door and guess what? There's a Dutch girl RIGHT next to my room. I had no idea. Apparently she also had her mother over yesterday, so I'm not the only one that's homesick right now. There were two more Dutch girls here, but they all moved out quick enough (just like I'm planning to do). The girl next door is also looking for another place. She has a friend over right now who used to live in my room but left this place two weeks ago. We have already made plans to cook dinner together every day, because this place is incredibly boring if you're all alone. YAY FRIENDS!
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