Moulins-sur-Allier

Illtud Dafydd, English Language Assistant, Moulins-sur-Allier, 2103-14

I spent my year abroad as English Language Assistant in the 20,000 population, Auvergne town of Moulins-sur-Allier. The town was as French as Roquefort cheese or a beret with a local market every Friday and Sunday morning, two cathedrals dating back to the Medieval Ages and architecture only found in l’Hexagone. The salary I earned was fantastic, I may have been contracted to work 12 hours week, but I rarely fulfilled the dozen hours due to many reasons, none of them being my choice. This spare time gave incredible chances to do things. I played rugby for the local club, FC Moulins XV, I skid both in Auvergne and Alps mountains and visited friends in a variety of French cities. Despite it being a relatively small town, there was enough to do, and I spoke French from dawn until dusk. My time in Moulins ended in late April, which gave almost 4 months of summer. With this I decided I wanted to stay in France, so after a month of visiting the friends I had made in Moulins in Tirol and Amsterdam I headed to Pau to volunteer at an Emmaus Community. The three months spent in Village Emmaus Lescar-Pau was linguistically and politically fruitful, an alternative social system to capitalism and I spoke French throughout every day, either working in various workshops or at the dinner table.

I am incredibly thankful to my year abroad, I met an incredible variety of people, made some good friends, and putting it all into words is a very hard task without just quoting inserts of a mental diary. The British Council Assistantship programme is a great way to see parts of a country that you never imagined you would see, and the Assistants group in any given town is a very close knit one and you still receive an Erasmus grant as you would as a student. I hope my French has improved, I know I have matured thanks to the year and I appreciate a good lamb joint now back in Wales!