French Trip 2019 - Day 5

All of us were tired after our fun day out in Paris, so luckily this day was easier on us than the others. Carrying on with the masonry focus, we were tasked with cleaning, weeding and laying more mortar on the walls. The group was more experienced at this point, so we had finished pretty rapidly, which meant lunch came fairly quickly (although we weren’t complaining). We ate breaded chicken that we had cooked, which was great as always. We tried out chiselling rocks so that we could rebuild the bricks of the wall that had broken, however the hardest part of this was finding the rock in the first place, which was pretty irritating. Funnily enough, this culminated in us stealing Miss Tyrell’s. We were shown how to chisel the rocks without splitting the entire thing. Out of all of the days that we had spent here, this day was the easiest, apart from the times when Lauren had to cook, which was always a danger to us all, but she did learn what a shallot was, so that was a bonus.

Today was also one of the days that Miss Tyrell had earmarked as ‘anglais interdit’, meaning that we weren’t allowed to speak English for the entire day. Most of us lasted the morning very well, but eventually English began working its way into our French, becoming ‘Franglais’. It was a good way of trying to build our French up, as were the frequent conversations we had with the locals of Saint-Maxence and the stall-holders who had installed themselves at the Abbey for the Orchid festival. Overall, today was enjoyable but intellectually challenging.