De nouveau

French class tonight. Finally.

I'm supposed to be starting the fifth and final French class towards my certificate of fluency. Unfortunately, French IV--which I was to take from June to August--fell victim to that jerk Lack of Interest. Four people registered for it, and I was one of them. They needed eight, minimum, to hold the class.
So instead I'm starting French IV tonight.
It's at the Doon campus of Conestoga College, which I am not happy about. The Waterloo campus is about a fifteen minute bike ride from my front door. Doon is an hour and a half on a bus. Each way.

The commute time itself isn't what bothers me. It's just something to work into my life,  given that I do not drive. The problem is that the commute takes place on Grand River Transit busses. Sometime shortly after I arrived here in 1990, a decision was made that all future generations of GRT busses would have windows that passengers could not open.
The last GRT bus that allowed riders to breathe actual air was retired five years ago. Now, we all must subsist on some canned, synthetic "air" that makes me uncomfortable after fifteen minutes and downright woozy after more than half an hour. Longer than an hour on a GRT bus and it's all I can do not to throw up.

The price I have to pay to change careers.

On the plus side, I have the same teacher I've had for three of the other four courses. I know and appreciate his teaching style, which is methodical and time-tested, with lots of extra handouts for practice. The textbook, too, is a revelation--the kind of thing I wish we'd had for the first four courses. There's almost no English in it. New vocabulary is defined wherever possible with simpler, already known vocabulary. It's much more immersive, and that's a good thing.

Of course, that's three hours a week. I can read French newspapers and novels online and listen to French music, but what I'm really lacking is conversation. To that end, I'm going to start attending a French meetup in town here once a week, either before this course is over or just after it. Beyond that I'm not really sure what I can do. We'll see.  Meantime, back into the classroom I go.

Administrivia: there will be a slight hiatus in blog posts. I won't be posting for about a week. This isn't the sort of thing I would have remarked on three months ago, but I've been averaging better than a post every other day for nine weeks now (and that's a tiny fraction of the writing I've done).  Until next week, the Breadbin ovens are shut down.