As you may have guessed from the name of the site, I am Rachel Silver Tapley. In May 2007, I graduated from a small liberals arts school in central Kentucky called, appropriately, Centre College. My degree is in French.

In September, Joe, my boyfriend/fiancé/life partner, and I moved to France to be English-teaching assistants in public high schools. We live in Dijon.

I love languages–particularly ones I can kind of understand, a list that currently includes English, French, Hindi, Spanish, and Biblical Hebrew, in descending order of how confident I feel about them. I love everything about them–literature, etymology, semantics, syntax, phonology, speaking, listening, reading, writing. (If you’re thinking I’m a huge nerd right now, you don’t know the half of it. This makes my heart beat faster.) I’m not sure what you can do with all this in the real world, but I just got accepted to the graduate school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to study French literature, so that’s a start.

This blog will be about the time that Joe and I spend in France, as well as anything else that strikes my fancy. I hope there will be delicious food and fascinating trips to write about, and maybe also some hilarious (harmless) hijinx from my future students. Enjoy reading!