Kiwi visitors

It's been a fabulous 5 weeks or so since I wrote: all traces of winter have gone and spring is definitely here! At the tail end of winter I joined about 15 others from church & we went to a nearby ski station. It's HUGE!! Had a great time despite the cold, and even went on the mechanical luge.
In the past few weeks of class we've been learning how to construct a written or verbal argument in French. The style isn't so very different from how we do it, so the hard bit was memorising all the vocab; words such as nevertheless, conversely, furthermore..... We also began reading a new book together, & this one is a lot harder. It's the autobiography of a famous French author & it's good - funny at times too which is a bonus. Term 2 ended so a few students have left, some for other parts of France & others for various countries in Africa.
So that means it's holiday time again, & I feel like I've been writing that phrase quite often! And I have been priviledged enough to have 2 lots of visitors all the way from NZ! This meant I scored some vegemite which is a bonus :) The first 2 visitors were 2 ladies from the mission organisation I'm part of, & we had a blast. I really enjoyed showing them around and hearing a "normal" accent again! However, their travels were disrupted slightly due to some parts of the national train company striking. Anyway, they did manage to go on from me to the north of Spain as planned so it all worked out well.
My 2nd lot of visitors are John & Katherine Bennett, family friends. They came to me from spending a few days with his bro in Tuscany, and from here hope to go on to England and then Africa where John will attend a conference. Unfortunately it's not just the train strike that has disrupted their plans, it's also the cloud of volcanic ash and the fact that John lost his passport. From a selfish point of view it's worked out very well as we've had 5 extra days together and they've spoiled me rotten! We had 1 night in Lyon, then went on from there 100km south to a gorgeous city called Valence. It was very enjoyable sitting in the sun eating ice cream, walking around the massive park, and trying the local fare. (I couldn't however persuade them to try some snails with me.) They leave today or tomorrow from Geneva (when the passport arrives!) so then it'll be back to normal for me. Oh yeah, I've got some homework to do for Monday.... I think I'll try and ignore that for a little bit longer though. This awesome weather begs to be enjoyed!!