La Premiere Semaine

I have officially been here for one week. It's crazy. I feel like I have been through a years worth of ups and downs. So many new things and way too many emotions. Last night I made a vow to not eat anymore baguette while I was here and take it easy on the sugar filled items (I could already feel the pounds being added on). This lasted exactly 24 hours. Tonight we had pasta and it just didn't taste quite right with out the bread. :) The first day of school was painful. I felt as though I had walked into an alternate universe. Of course I knew things would be different, the language, the people, the food, the culture, etc. But it's the little things that catch you off guard; like how everyone writes in cursive all the time and when one hasn't even practiced cursive since second grade (like me) it is impossible to read, or the fact that the wonderful smell after it rains in Santa Fe isn't the same here, or that I have to walk up 3 flights of stairs to get to my first period class most days. These little things, if you let them, are the things that get to you the most.

I have since learned that my French professor is infamous for his awful handwriting, and that it's important to layer because its freezing in the morning and extremely hot in the afternoon, and that no, sadly, walking up multiple flights of stairs does not burn off all the calories from eating baguette all the time. It's the little things too, that can get you through a day (and by day I mean a few hours) like figuring out that I did indeed remember to pack my favorite pair of jeans!! or that my new little sister, Malou, gives me a thousand hugs a day, or that stupid phrase that AFS grinded into our brains "it's not good, it's not bad, it's just different".


School is hard for me on multiple levels. To begin with the way they teach sets a completely different learning environment. At prep, we sit in circle and talk, everyone talks, or to be a bit more accurate, the teachers encourage everyone to talk. In France the teachers lecture. For the first few days I sat in total and complete fear that a teacher would direct a question at me and I would have no idea what they were saying and pee in my pants. I now know that teachers don't ask questions that they are not going to answer themselves. It also very important to take notes, and not the little notes on the side of the paper or on your hand (the kind I'm used to) no, I'm talking hardcore notes. The kids here underline the different titles with a ruler, it shocked me. At prep I could have cared less how straight a line was, but not here. Each student has multiple colored pens (never, ever a pencil) and they have learned to write what the teacher is saying while he or she is saying it instead of after the teacher has messily scribbled it on the board. I am trying my best to learn to do this, but I'm still using a pencil. I happen to like having the option of making a mistake and being able to fix it. It just makes me feel better all around. (I keep two fairly large erasers with me at school)

Today I had my first test. It was for Spanish class. Definitely not level 1 Spanish. The teacher speaks in Spanish for the duration of the class and we are supposed to answer difficult question. We are not learning how to conjugate verbs (as I was expecting). My first day of Spanish class consisted of me being utterly confused, chewing my lip consistently and trying to figure out what everyone was doing. I was given a simple sheet with a translation of all the common used terms, so I slipped it into my binder and started copying notes from that day's lesson which needed to be memorized by Friday for the teacher was going to pick someone at random and orally quiz them on the subject. Holy shit. I was not chosen. Yessss! But we did start studying a ridiculously difficult exercise in the workbook and we were told that we have a test on Monday (today).

This weekend we went to visit Carole's parents (they live two hours from Chateauroux). Her brother and his wife had recently had a baby girl, Flavi and she was being baptized. Road trip!! And what was an extremely long Sunday. Carole has five other siblings and each one has multiple kids and there are many, many cousins. So sixty or more 'family members' attended this baptism. It began at 11, services ended around 1 ish and then began the feast which consisted of a lot, a lot of food and Champagne and wine and whiskey and traditional ice cream alcohol thingies. I should know the names, but by 5 I was totally fried and starting to stress about my test. After what I can only assume was hundreds of cheek kisses we started to head home around 8. We got home at 10, I drank some hot chocolate and started studying. Pierre-Yves spent a lot of time translating the exercise into French and English with me and I spent a lot of time with Sarah on line with her teaching me how to correctly answer a question.


I slept for a few hours and then drank lots of coffee (they have caramel syrup in the house so yummm) and bolted out the door. Fast forward to Spanish class. Before the professor was there I noticed some kids studying that first sheet of paper I had been given. I hadn't even glanced at it, I hoped nothing from it would be on the test but I knew that I would be fine as long as I was able to read the questions and take lots of time. I sat down and the teacher went off in Spanish and kids pulled out a sheet of paper, so I did the same. I looked at my friend, Julie and asked if the test would be given orally she looked at me like "duhh". Uh oh. I started to panic, so I just closed my eyes and took deep breathes and told myself it would be fine. Sadly while doing this I missed the directions (they were in Spanish, so I wouldn't have understood them anyway). The teacher would read us questions, we would write them down and after go back and answer them. This could have been such an easy test, you know, had I studied the correct sheets of paper and oh yeah understood the directions. So basically that equals me trying my hardest and starting to cry multiple times and then looking down really quickly so no one noticed.


I came home for lunch and of course my family asked me how my test was. My eyes were so wide. It took about five different word combinations and sentence configurations before I got my point across. I was extremely embarrassed and had no idea how everyone would react. Silence. Then Carole double checked that she had heard me right and started chuckling and then we were all laughing about it, which made me feel a million times better. Live and (burn) learn, right? Carole seems to be one of the people I communicate with very well and she is one of the people, along with my three sisters (who do really love teaching me) I connect well with. And now after two hours of sleep last night, I am exhausted so bon nuit! xx