Thousands of Afternoons Ago IV

The second day after I arrived in Vichy, I decided to change the hotel. It was far from the school and far from the other hotels or rooms in which the students, I have already met, were staying.  I walked the streets until I found a nearby hotel with reasonable rates. It was owned by an old provincial couple. The wife did not seem particularly friendly, and I thought maybe if it was not for the many empty rooms in the hotel, she would have gladly refused to accept me. I guessed she might have had a previous bad experience with foreign students who flooded the city every year. It might have been something else. I did not know.

The teacher of my morning classes was an attractive tall and slim lady in her early forties. Short black hair and black eyes. She would be nice and smiling, and in a second would swing mood and become tempered. In her good moments she would sing and ask us about the songs we loved. She would even flirt discreetly with one specific guy in the class. In her bad moments, we would become silent like hushed up kids in the kindergarten.

In general I won’t feel very comfortable if a moody person approached my close circle. I try to avoid unpredictable people. With Marie Francoise, we had the normal healthy distance between a teacher and a student, so I did not care much about her swinging moods. I even liked her, maybe because I found her character interesting, or because I liked (and still like) people who sing to themselves without caring much who might or might not listen (A dentist I visited recently kept singing while he was checking my teeth. I was amused and did not feel disturbed).

It was the peak of summer and heat was bearable though, compared to the sun in my hometown. And Joyce Sim's Coming Into My Life and Princess Erika's Trop de Bla Bla were constantly aired on the waves.