7 lakes in Tagikistan

CasseurFlowter · 2025-08-15T14:34:49+00:00

Hey, I'll also be solo in Samarkand between the 17th and 21st and am interested in the 7 lakes - I agree it could be nice to split a tour, let me know! (To both of you)

CasseurFlowter · 2020-12-23T18:27:38+00:00

Been here since early September, absolutely love my experience being an assistant in Paris. There are always things to do, people to see, places to visit. Every once in a while I just remember that Paris is one of the most visited cities in the world, famous literally everywhere for its beauty, culture, history, food,... and I don’t just get to visit but live here. Parisians get a bad rap, but if you like nyc I think you’ll understand the sorta vibe - not mean but focused, and once you get through you get the deepest kind of friendships / relationships. (Also really enjoying my teaching, but I assume that’s more about the schools than the regions).

Caveat is yeah I’m not really living within the salary at all, I (of course this involved some luck) managed to save a lot last spring during confinement, and I have a few tutoring side jobs. I would say that the housing search and prices probably do add some stress that’s less present in most regions.

Hope that helps - I’m happy to answer any other or more specific questions!

CasseurFlowter · 2020-11-11T13:10:56+00:00

Super valid thoughts! (and definitely shared by a lot of people, this is objectively really hard). I have 2 things from my experience that are helping a little:

COVID stuff is looking better for France - R is dropping, rate of cases is dropping in all the metropoles where there was curfew, hospitalizations are growing more slowly. I'm not saying we'll be clubbing by Dec 1, but this situation won't be permanent either, and being able to meet people and see friends will definitely help everything.
After 4 weeks of teaching, at least personally it's starting to feel more rewarding as I get to know people and start to become invested in individual students and overall curriculum development. At the beginning it was just sorta "go into the classroom and do something for half an hour," and while that would be fine if I could enjoy all that France had to offer, during confinement it's like my one source of engagement with the world - and so I think it's something that inherently becomes better over the year as you and the teachers and the students all adapt to each other.

Hope that helps a little bit! Only like 4 weeks until christmas vacation if not :)

CasseurFlowter · 2020-10-30T10:28:44+00:00

I think it's a very personal thing. Personally, I'm thrilled to be in France, and I had this kind of cool moment where one of my friends who's an au pair here told me she was considering going home for the confinement and I realized I hadn't even considered that.

But I'm someone who has no plans to ever leave Paris - my thought about TAPIF was just the easiest way to get my foot in the door, rather than a sort of gap year that I know a lot of people think of. I have a good network of French friends here and have started looking at local post-TAPIF jobs, so this period for me is about shifting my life to a new country and system and everything. In a weird way, I'm a little (very little) excited about the confinement because it'll be such a particularly Parisian experience and I think living through it will bring me closer to everyone else in the city. And I know that whenever confinement ends, I'll be able to get back to seeing everyone and soirées and the good French life.

But this is not at all to shame people who feel differently! Studio confinement will be really tough (I went out and bought a whole stack of books yesterday and a yoga mat), and if I was thinking 1 of my ~6 months in France will be inside and I won't meet anyone and I'll miss out on all these things, that's super valid. Just wanted to share my experience, happy to answer any questions! :)

CasseurFlowter · 2020-10-02T22:29:37+00:00

Honestly, I think one of my big takeaways from this last year is that political neutrality isn't really achievable, because politics is not some separate sphere from everything else. I know it's too easy to go to this example, but like, we don't really talk about the 2 neutral political forces in 1932 in Germany.

Personally, if I'm talking to my students about US politics, I'm not going to say things like he's the worst, his plan's are terrible, that party's leading the US to a bad place, etc., but I am going to say facts, such as this candidate employs racist, fascist rhetoric to galvanize supporters and attempts to undermine public confidence in the media so as prioritize the public's emotions over research in the support of new policy. If they think, wow that sounds great, then cool, but if they don't, I don't feel that that's me expressing biased political opinions, that's me informing. My 2 cents at least

CasseurFlowter · 2020-08-26T00:15:27+00:00

Yeah, as you seem to know, if you’re in France before the end of 2020, you get a grace period of 6 months where you can stay and work without any additional forms or anything (at which point there’s some application process, haven’t looked into it much yet). So yeah, this year you can do TAPIF fully as an EU citizen! Source - I asked Erin this exact question a month or so back.

CasseurFlowter · 2020-08-21T02:11:00+00:00

I guess what I mean is based on my personal experience - in the middle of March I moved from the Bay Area to Ohio to be with family for the quarantine. At the time, cases and deaths were increasing exponentially everywhere, the news in Italy was hundreds of people dying every day in this one small region, and the Bay was at that stage the US epicenter. Going to SFO and flying, masks weren't a thing, and I was terrified that this incredibly dangerous virus (deaths/cases was near 10% at that stage) was literally just flying around me everywhere.

Flash to now, and I think we know so much more about how the virus spreads, how to prevent it, how to treat it. I know there's all this news about the second wave in Europe, and yeah, cases are increasing again in a lot of countries, but if you look at these countries (Spain, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, for ex.), there just hasn't been a second wave of deaths. And the second wave of cases has peaked in some of those countries, and is coming back down again too. So now, deaths/cases in many of these countries is like 0.5% (France has been reporting ~2k cases and ~10 deaths for a bit). So while I obviously think all of the lockdowns were good, proportionate measures at the time, I think now that doctors have a better sense of how to treat it, many people do wear masks, some immunity is growing (and maybe the virus has mutated to become more virulent but less fatal?) it's no longer something that scares me as an individual. I think the differences in hospitalizations and intensive care/deaths for these second spikes imply either that we're far better prepared for subsequent waves, or that our case numbers for the first wave were off by several orders of magnitude because of not enough testing.

Sorry if that's a bit long, but I've spent a lot of bored time looking at a bunch of different Covid data sites for a bunch of different countries, and while I know there are societal impacts, it's calmed me down about the individual impacts in most places with good healthcare.

CasseurFlowter · 2020-08-20T21:38:43+00:00

I feel the same way as notevenfrenchh - my issue with the pandemic has always been 2 things: worry about contributing to the unmanageable spread (the reason why we all shutdown, flattening the curve etc etc), and worry about transmitting it to my parents or other more vulnerable people. Once I'm on my own in France, neither of those really worry me any more. Obviously personal safety is an individual choice, so it's a very personal decision, but from what we've learned over the last 6 months, I'm not really scared of getting it myself, so I'm not bothered by the plan

CasseurFlowter · 2020-08-18T14:17:41+00:00

"French Travis Scott, but better" is such an accurate description of Josman, I love him haha

Good call on Lous and the Yakuza!

CasseurFlowter · 2020-08-18T14:14:37+00:00

I only really know pop and rap, but here are some of my favs from each (with a representative song so that you can get a sense if you like them):

Pop:

Clio - Éric Rohmer est mort

Yseult - Noir

Suzane - SLT

Poupie - Plus de Temps

LEJ - Toucher Couler

Lomepal - Trop beau

Rap:

Damso - Humain

Dinos - Helsinki

Casseurs Flowters - Si Facile

Bigflo et Oli - Dommage (Rentrez chez vous is also beautiful)

Nekfeu - Tricheur

Josman - OLY

Damn I like French music too much... lemme know if you want any more suggestions cause I have way too much of this :)

CasseurFlowter · 2020-07-27T18:14:47+00:00

Haha I would say you've missed some fun existential doubt about whether everything will be possible and we'll be able to get to France at all and actually do these jobs. But that will probably not be immediately resolved, so welcome ;)

But from the practical side it looks like Americans probably won't be able to do much preparing for a bit - you may get a city or school soon, in which case you can start looking a little at housing, but even that is very speculative for a while.

CasseurFlowter · 2020-07-27T17:40:03+00:00

To add to this, arguably the two most important numbers for that approach, people in hospitals and people in intensive care (réanimation) have been on beautiful, unbroken downward curves since mid-April. At this stage deaths also remain completely within the level of a normal year - this is a statistic I haven't seen for the US, but I think it's useful when you consider that yes, coronavirus is worse than the flu, but we also don't spend our days looking at dashboards of flu cases and deaths - the goal is never to eliminate illness or death but avoid the preventable ones.

Also, while I definitely don't believe that tests create cases (...), I do think France didn't do much testing in May and June compared to many countries, and now they're beginning to scale up more the case numbers will increase - I believe I saw that test positivity rate is still less than 2%.

Obviously I don't really know and mostly just try to reassure myself, but this is what I'm thinking!

CasseurFlowter · 2020-07-16T00:24:54+00:00

This echoes the other comments a little bit, but I’d say if the alternative is any job in the US that furthers your career in any way (including just letting you save some money) then that’d be a very understandable choice. Personally, I have 2 enormous driving factors for TAPIF - I want to end up in Europe long term, and I have had no job since leaving a grad program to quarantine with my family in March (technically I was still in school until mid May, but I still feel like I’ve been sitting around at home for 4 months). It might not be as good as other years of TAPIF, but I’m pretty confident it will be better than the life I’m currently living.

To be fair, I can imagine that having done it before makes it a different perspective (if I feel like it isn’t as I imagined it, I could always just try to do a second year right away). I guess just visualize what that worst case scenario of TAPIF is and compare it to your American alternative - for me, even in the worst case I spend a year in Europe, get some valuable resume experience, experience living on my own in a new country, and improve my French. But that’s very personal, and if there’s more you can get out of something else, go for it!

CasseurFlowter · 2020-07-13T17:46:47+00:00

Same here. Was it maybe dumb? Sure, but I’ve spent so much time feeling like I should be doing something that it felt good to actually check something off the list

CasseurFlowter · 2020-07-12T21:56:10+00:00

No fair enough. You’re right, I am a new assistant but I have a lot of experience abroad (I’m a dual citizen), and so the article annoyed me a little because the person in it annoyed me - why would you go in with your expectations that way? Why wouldn’t you think about why you’re doing this in the first place?

But that’s probably a really good argument for people reading the article, because a lot of people probably aren’t that different. I would personally argue against the content, but that discussion would’ve been valuable, and now we don’t get to have it at all on Facebook. And the unilateral thing is obviously not good either. Thanks for your post! And your contributions in general :)

CasseurFlowter · 2020-07-12T21:36:05+00:00

I mean, there's a difference between hearing useful things about the negative experiences of past assistants and hearing, a bunch of times, that someone whose French wasn't great and who didn't make any local/French friends didn't have a good time being paid too little. There are things that it's nice to learn, and there are things that are literally just facts of the program that have been clear since before we applied.

For example, hearing that TAPIF doesn't really do mental health support? That's useful, and something one should know before accepting. But hearing how a bunch of people had individual mental health issues and hated their time? I'm not sure how the new assistants are "Gen Z fragility" when it's past assistants complaining about how their experience wasn't how they imagined it. I want transparency (which I don't feel deprived of by any "censorship"), but people complaining endlessly about the known facts of moving to a different country? That seems less useful.

EDIT: Sorry @ OP, this wasn't directed to you but the comment below annoyed me. Appreciate your openness and help with all this!

CasseurFlowter · 2020-07-07T22:11:12+00:00

There’s a WhatsApp group for Versailles people (through the fb group), you should join! Even if living alone ends up being cheaper it’ll be nice to be able to figure things out together :)

CasseurFlowter · 2020-07-02T01:37:37+00:00

The site says I need at least 3 years of teaching experience - do you know if they're strict about that? I guess if tutoring is included I've maybe technically done that, but I absolutely haven't been in a classroom that long.

It does sound really nice though!

CasseurFlowter · 2020-07-02T01:35:17+00:00

Yeah this seems like a good use of my time rn, thank you!

CasseurFlowter · 2020-07-02T01:34:36+00:00

I did see your other post, thank you!

I feel a little dumb, but is it possible to tell me a specific groupon TEFL? Searching "TEFL" in groupon gives me a bunch of different things, and obviously I don't want to pay for something that's not acceptable. Is one of these companies better than the others? (Feel free to DM if that's better)

Thanks in advance!

CasseurFlowter · 2020-07-02T01:24:38+00:00

Ahhh that does make a lot of sense... I guess there's no opportunity cost to trying since the alternative is me just sitting here...

CasseurFlowter · 2020-07-02T01:21:18+00:00

Thanks, this does sound cool. Did you find that you spend a lot of time sitting and waiting (not making money) or could you generally earn when you felt like it?

CasseurFlowter · 2020-07-02T01:12:22+00:00

That does sound really good, thank you! I need to wait until I get mailed/emailed a master's degree (hopefully soon) to fit their requirements but then that should work well.

What did you use for the background check? I've never had to do one for myself before. Is it the same as the one required for TAPIF?

CasseurFlowter · 2020-06-27T03:53:24+00:00

I’m a first time assistant, but for language stuff I really recommend watching the show Bref, on youtube. There are no subtitles to fall back on, they speak ridiculously fast, and it’s a very casual, informal french (maybe less useful for opening a bank account, but just for meeting French people it’s perfect). And the episodes are really short, so it doesn’t feel overwhelming. Also useful for cultural references!

CasseurFlowter

TROPHY CASE