Annecy

Claire Stewart,

Independent employment, Annecy, 2012

 

After 3 months in Bordeaux I went on to be a receptionist in Annecy for a youth hostel organisation. It’s a small town about an hour from Geneva, in the summer you can cycle the 47km tour of Lac Annecy and relax in the sun, and in the winter it is snowy and lit up ready for the Christmas market with mulled wine and food from different regions/countries. My French had already improved a lot during the summer but working here took it to a new level. Nobody at work knew much more than “hello/thank you/how are you” in English so from 7 o’clock in the morning until I went to bed I was in constant French mode, as well as getting the receptionist experience – Something to add to the CV!

I was sharing a room with a German girl and we were the only two on placement there and not members of the family who ran the hostel, so in our free time we went to see French films, wandered through the town, and cycled/roller-skated around Annecy lake. This was brilliant for me because she didn’t speak a word of English and I don’t know much German so French it was, every second of the day. When her placement finished and she left in October I unfortunately had a broken laptop, nobody in Annecy I knew and not many customers, however this was a good opportunity to travel a little and rely on what was around me. I went to places such as Chambéry, Grenoble, Aix-Les-Bains and Lyon (a city I completely fell in love with!).

One of my main aims during this job was to gain experience that would be useful in the future if I chose to live abroad. As if he knew this, my boss often gave me lots of administration work including accounting, emailing and paper work. This was definitely the most important part of my year abroad in terms of growing up and getting on with it when at times I just wanted to catch a flight home. I stuck with it and it was definitely worth the perseverance!