Bonsoir a tous!
Apologies for the late blog post. Things have been very busy since I have been back at home in the UK as I arrived back on Monday evening and was straight into the excitement of Christmas then. However, I now have some time to tell you all about my last few days in Grenoble and how it felt to leave after so long.
I am going to begin with Thursday and go from there as this was my day off work last week and therefore a day where lots of different things happened. The day started off with my last walk up the Grenoble Bastille where I got many stunning views of Grenoble and the surrounding French Alpes in the winter. This was incredible as I had a birds eye view of Grenoble with ghostly white clouds hanging over it and a blanket of snow covering the mountains in the background. In fact, it looked like the perfect winter wonderland! I enjoyed the scenery whilst I was up there as well as taking lots of photos (as always!). Once I had got back down into Grenoble I decided that I deserved a nice lunch out after hiking up and down the mountain so I treated myself to a Crepe from my favorite creperie. It consisted of melted cheese, poached egg, mushrooms, and ham so I was one very happy lady!
As the day drew to a close I started to get excited for the next event of the day......the work Christmas Party! This was a lovely evening as we had a lovely feast that each person had contributed to making and then spent a few hours having a karaoke night. However, it was at this party that I got emotional as it was the night when I had to say goodbye to quite a few of my work colleagues. I still had two days of work left but many people were not working on Friday or over the weekend so it really was a night of farewells in many ways. I was also presented with a beautiful leaving present (a Grenoble mug and t shirt) that I will treasure forever as they will always remind me of my four months living in Grenoble and the fantastic people that I met there.
My last day working at reception on Friday was pretty tricky as it was a 7:30am-4pm shift after only a few hours of sleep the night before due to leaving the party a little bit later than I had originally planned. Although it was tough, I did manage to keep my eyes open which is always important as a receptionist (obviously!). I then did a 10am-5pm shift in the restaurant on Saturday 20th to officially round off my work at Auberge Grenoble. This was a nice shift but it was very very busy as we had a group of 55 people eating lunch so there was a lot of service and later on a lot of washing up to do. Once I had finished the shift I spent the evening in my room packing my bags ready to go home and watched a film just before I went to bed which was nice.
On Sunday I set off for Grenoble Isere Airport early afternoon and got back to London Gatwick at 5:20pm British time. I then spent the night in Sussex with my cousins before making my way home on the national express bus on the Monday afternoon. It was so lovely to get home and to see my family after so long! I had a fantastic time in France but I did go through a period in the middle of the placement where I suffered from bad homesickness so it was definitely time to come and spend some time at home by the end. However, I will always look back on that time in Grenoble as a time in which I grew as a person, gained much confidence, matured, and also learnt a lot of French! And it is now just over a week until I start my placement in Spain so I have a lot of preparation to do in the next few days. I naturally feel a bit nervous about going to live in Spain for six months but I also feel very excited as I am hopeful that it will be as much of an exciting and rewarding adventure as my time in France was. But for now I will say goodbye whilst I do all of my preparation. I will be back next week to start the Spanish section of my blog so I hope that you will continue following my adventures in this new environment!
Thank you for reading my posts about France! I hope that you enjoyed them and are looking forward to the future posts about life in Spain!
A bientot/hasta luego/see you soon!
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