Anna spent five days in Normandy giving 10 hours of French conversation in Rouen, turning a private lesson into a walking tour through the French city of Rouen. The traveler met her outside Saint-Maclou church and booked the course after language schools in Rouen were full for the only week she could get away.
The arrangement was simple and unusually cheap. Anna charged €19 an hour, while language school tutors in Rouen cost €60 an hour. The traveler also kept the trip lean by reserving a studio apartment in the historic heart of Rouen for less than £60 a night and buying a combined ferry-train return ticket for £65 after traveling from Newhaven to Dieppe.
Anna and the walking route
Anna is a political sciences student at the University of Rouen Normandy, and this was her first pupil since she registered on Apprentus. She had signed up expecting to help kids with their homework, not to spend two hours at a time walking around Rouen while correcting French and acting as a guide.
The classes moved with the city. Anna suggested that the pair do the lessons on foot round Rouen, and when it rained she steered the conversation toward tea houses instead. The Dame Cakes salon de thé became a particular favourite, and Anna’s line for wet weather was direct: “If it rains, we can talk over goûter.”
Rouen versus Montpellier
The trip also fit a pattern the traveler had been trying to repeat for the last couple of winters: a week or so of brushing up intermediate French language skills in situ. Last winter, she went to a language school in Montpellier, but Rouen offered a different setup — one tutor, one city, and no classroom schedule.
That matters because the traveler says the language schools in Rouen were full for the only week she could get away, and those same schools said no private tutors were available before she found Anna on Apprentus. The result was a course built around availability rather than a formal timetable, with the city itself doing much of the teaching.
Five days in Rouen
By the last day, the traveler realized she had been speaking French for five whole minutes without pausing to find a word or struggle with grammar. For someone trying to keep French alive between trips, that is the payoff of this kind of arrangement: a short, local course that replaces a classroom with movement, conversation, and the streets of Rouen.
