So I was recently told that I should post something considering it’s now been nearly four days, and my last post was an advertisement (calendars are still for sale- help send another student abroad!).
Since my last real post I have done… not much. Really that could be considered a good thing; that my life here is now routine enough that every other turn doesn’t seem like a marvel to be shared.
Monday was a typical school day. Can’t remember anything particularly noteworthy expect that for the first time, one of the servers at the cafeteria gave me a serving of the vegetables without my asking. As most of the students file down the line, they ask for one of the meat and one of carbohydrate dishes being served (pasta, couscous, potatoes). I am one of the few who regularly makes a special request for the vegetable dish, in my ongoing effort to eat a moderately balanced lunch every day. The workers who serve the food are really friendly and joke with the students as they file past. Probably thanks to some of my early stumbling requests they now brightly greet me in English and as of Monday are kind enough to remember my preference for veggies.
Tuesday I once again had no PE, and since that combined with my lunch made for a four hour gap during my day I did like the French and went home to eat. It was very relaxing and I even took a short nap. After school, I figured out what I’m going to do in the hour between school getting out and my weekly Rotary meeting. It wasn’t an issue until it started getting dark outside when I get out of class at 6:00. Last week, I asked a Rotarian (who previously had told me that she lived nearby and to ask if I ever needed anything) if I could go to her house for the intervening hour. She said yes and so after my physics class- in which I absolutely bombed the test she gave us, prompting me to ask for some one-on-one vocabulary help in the future. It’s hard enough to copy the notes in French, let alone understand them at the same time- I made my way on foot to her house which was not at all far away. Her fourteen-year-old and her daughter’s nourrice, or nurse/babysitter as many French children with working parents have, welcomed me and we talked in the kitchen until the Rotarian got home from work in a rush and then drove us to the meeting.
Wednesday I finished at noon, as per usual, but instead of eating and then heading to volleyball practice I joined the some of the other girls from the team to take the bus to a volleyball match at another high school in town. The volleyballs coaches met us there (one of whom is my Rotary counselor, have I mentioned that? He’s a PE teacher at my school and he’s absolutely great. Very reassuring, which is exactly what you want in a counselor). Once we were there we found that only three girls from the senior division had come, including me even though I’m only in the senior division because of my age; I’m still too new at the sport to compare with most of my teammates skill-wise. With the one cadet who had come, that made a team of four. So the match was automatically forfeited, but we still played for fun, with the help of two girls from the other team playing with us. After the match my counselor gave me a ride home with one of the other players, and I did homework until it was time to leave for rugby at 6:45. The practice officially starts at 7:00 but since we don’t usually start until 7:30, I take the bus that gets me there late instead of early.
Thursday after school I went to my second host family’s house for dinner. It was wonderful to see them again- I think that each host family is going to be even better than the last during my year here. I’ll have two host siblings, a brother who is in his early twenties and a sister who is 17 and in her last year of high school. We set the date for when I’m going to move, several days after Christmas. After dinner together, my future host mom and sister stopped by the local public gymnasium where my host sister plays and referees basketball matches. Her mom is also very involved with the basketball league there, so it was nice to see the place and some of the players which will likely be figuring in my life too very soon.
Friday is generally a long day for me, since I go straight from my last class at 5:00 to rugby which is in a suburb a little ways out of town. It’s a bus ride where I get a lot of my reading done. Which is a good thing since I have plenty of books assigned to read, all in French, and my reading pace and general lack of time has put me some ways behind my classmates. My day this Friday, however, was made even longer because I had my once-every-other-week class which starts at 8:00. This Friday I gave a PowerPoint presentation for the first time since getting here. It was nice to do some public speaking, even if my group was less than motivated during the making of the project. I, of course, am in a place where I don’t have to worry about what grade they or I got so I was just able to enjoy the simplicity of putting together and giving my piece of the presentation. It may seem that I have enumerated a number of school work difficulties I experienced this week, but this last Friday I also had a triumph later in the day when my History/Geography teacher handed back the tests and told me that she had, for the first time, graded me like everyone else and that I had received a grade about equivalent to a B.
Which brings me today, Saturday. This morning I had class, as usual, after which I walked into town to meet up with Hana the other American exchange student in Bourges. We got sandwiches at a pastry/sandwich shop on the downtown main street, which were made with freshly baked French bread which I can personally attest makes for all the difference in the world when it comes to sandwiches. After eating we met up with Joseph, the Taiwanese Rotary student who is also hosted by Hana’s club and goes to school with her, to go buy the ingredients to make apple pie. This is our personal Thanksgiving celebration, and now that we have all the ingredients necessary we’re going to meet up tomorrow afternoon to bakes the pies at Hana’s host family’s house. I’m really excited about this since it’s been a long time since I’ve had a slice of pie, and I can’t want to introduce Hana’s host family and possibly mine to the dessert.
After heading home from Hana’s house, I took a nap, did some homework, and then got ready to go to a movie with Laurie, and her sister and brother-in-law (the new parents). We saw the fourth Twilight movie, which Laurie and Coralie really enjoyed. My favorite part was the setting in the Pacific Northwest, with a good number of shots set in woods which might well have been out of my childhood. My friends from home may be proud of me when they hear that I was able to restrain myself from commenting on things like the logging industry in the Northwest during the course of the movie. Experience has taught me that I am frequently the only one to find such commentary interesting, and I had a feeling that my host sister was probably more interested in the werewolves than the freshly logged timber behind them. It may also be of interest to some of you to note that Robert Pattinson’s acting was much improved with the help of the French voice actor who was dubbed over him. His lines weren’t nearly as stilted as usual.
Tomorrow I’m looking forward to- baking pies and then going to see a movie with a friend from school. I’ll tell you how it goes… and if I managed to find the time to do the homework I always intend to do. (It’s nice to spend a year not worried about school, and yet at the same time I already have a feeling that I’ll be more focused next year than I would have been otherwise. This period of adventure and adjustment has already got me to thinking more seriously about what I want to do in the future, and though I don’t yet have an answer, I think that thanks to my year on exchange I’ll take less time getting there in the long run).
So there you have a blow-by-blow of what I did for an entire week, ending on an oddly introspective and philosophical note. I hope you enjoyed this post that took me so long to get around to writing.
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