Ladies and Gentlemen, it's official!

Hello and welcome to my first feeble attempt at blogging. Please forgive my run-on sentences and tendency to ramble. For those of you who don't know me, my name is Lauren Gerken; the perpetual expat, obsessive baker and (if i do say so myself) cunning linguist. Follow me, if you will, on my (hopefully) epic quest to Stenay, France and my struggles in attempting to impart linguistic and cultural knowledge about the US and American English to French middle school students. Wish me luck. Anyway...today is a historic day not only because I've just gotten over my fear of publishing my disorganised jumble of thoughts and opinions out there on the web where anyone can read and judge them, but in fact because after months of waiting and worrying, my visa has arrived. Yes, on this day, I can proudly say that I, Lauren Gerken, am officially an English Teaching Assistant in the TAPIF program in the Académie de Nancy-Metz. Hopefully the unnecessarily sarcastic tales of my trials and tribulations of the coming year will be entertaining enough to keep you reading and maybe, just maybe, they'll be helpful to the next confused and scared batch of Assistants, who, in a year, will be exactly as nervous and unsure as I am now.