This Tuesday was an extremely long day. It started out with two long, boring hours of History & Geography. I don’t really like this course because I don’t do anything. The teacher dictates notes and the students write them down, naturally, but writing in French is a bit difficult to begin with, and then writing it fast is even more difficult, naturally. French words are not pronounced the way that they are written, kind of like in English. 99 percent of French words have a silent letter at the end of it, sometimes they even have two silent letters. So, I am exempt from all work in this class. It sounds fun but I have trouble finding a way to occupy myself. Usually I take notes from a grammar workbook or something like that. Sometimes I pass notes to other students in my class (oops!).
After History & Geography, I had lunch with one of my best friends here at school, Ben. After lunch we had a break for a few hours, so I went to a bookstore to buy a English/French Vocabulary book that I had been planning on buying. After that, I went back to school, to the library, and went through it just to pass time. After our break, my English class and I went to the movies to see the film “The Help.” We have an assignment that we have to complete about the film, so it wasn’t all fun and games. I had actually seen this movie a few days before I left the United States. It’s a great film, in my opinion.
Then, after the film, I went back to school for my theatre course. My greatest trouble in this course is that I am not able to stop smiling whenever we’re doing an exercise out-of-the-oridinary. My teacher told me for one specific exercise to do it without a single smile. That is probably the worst thing you can tell me if you don’t want me to smile. Whenever people tell me to not smile, it makes me smile because I know they’re watching me to make sure that I’m not smiling. So, as you can imagine,I smiled.
After our theatre course, the class and I went to a small community theatre to see a “play”. On the way there, we all stopped to get something to eat. I went to Subway. While I was waiting for the other students to buy their food, and Asian man came up to us and asked where the “Hôtel de France” is. He asked it in English though. I know well that the other students weren’t going to be able to explain to him how to get there, and the man was already lost, so I explained it to him (in English, of course). I felt so useful. I hope he found his way there. My directions were quite simple.
The “play” (I put it in quotation marks for a reason) was not a very good entertaining for various reasons. For one, the seats were extremely uncomfortable. They were actually wooden bleachers. This theatre was more of a black box and the audience consisted of about 30-40 spectators. The final reason that it wasn’t as enjoyable to me as it would be to other people is because I couldn’t understand it! I am still not able to follow entertainment in French. I’m starting to understand songs in French, but sometimes movies and plays go too fast for me. I can understand people when they talk to me because they don’t speak that fast and they know that I am not a native French-speaker, so they speak at a fair level. Anyway, so I was not able to understand this play but all it was was two people having a fight for two hours. There were also shocking graphics in the background. They had projectors projecting backdrops and other things like that. One backdrop, which lasted about 45 minutes, was the bare chest of a woman and as the projection lasted, it lead down to reveal her pubic hair. This isn’t that big of a deal, but I was highly shocked that my theatre teacher would bring us to see this and that the school would allow it. But in all honesty, French people don’t care. They walk around the beach nude, the teachers never say anything whenever a student says a cuss word during class, etc…
After the play, I rode my bike home for thirty minutes in the rain. It was actually a drizzle, but it was a bit uncomfortable. I got home and went straight to bed. That was the end of my exhausting Tuesday
An Exhausting Tuesday!
Posted by Aaron in Journal
This Tuesday was an extremely long day. It started out with two long, boring hours of History & Geography. I don’t really like this course because I don’t do anything. The teacher dictates notes and the students write them down, naturally, but writing in French is a bit difficult to begin with, and then writing it fast is even more difficult, naturally. French words are not pronounced the way that they are written, kind of like in English. 99 percent of French words have a silent letter at the end of it, sometimes they even have two silent letters. So, I am exempt from all work in this class. It sounds fun but I have trouble finding a way to occupy myself. Usually I take notes from a grammar workbook or something like that. Sometimes I pass notes to other students in my class (oops!).
After History & Geography, I had lunch with one of my best friends here at school, Ben. After lunch we had a break for a few hours, so I went to a bookstore to buy a English/French Vocabulary book that I had been planning on buying. After that, I went back to school, to the library, and went through it just to pass time. After our break, my English class and I went to the movies to see the film “The Help.” We have an assignment that we have to complete about the film, so it wasn’t all fun and games. I had actually seen this movie a few days before I left the United States. It’s a great film, in my opinion.
Then, after the film, I went back to school for my theatre course. My greatest trouble in this course is that I am not able to stop smiling whenever we’re doing an exercise out-of-the-oridinary. My teacher told me for one specific exercise to do it without a single smile. That is probably the worst thing you can tell me if you don’t want me to smile. Whenever people tell me to not smile, it makes me smile because I know they’re watching me to make sure that I’m not smiling. So, as you can imagine,I smiled.
After our theatre course, the class and I went to a small community theatre to see a “play”. On the way there, we all stopped to get something to eat. I went to Subway. While I was waiting for the other students to buy their food, and Asian man came up to us and asked where the “Hôtel de France” is. He asked it in English though. I know well that the other students weren’t going to be able to explain to him how to get there, and the man was already lost, so I explained it to him (in English, of course). I felt so useful.
I hope he found his way there. My directions were quite simple.
The “play” (I put it in quotation marks for a reason) was not a very good entertaining for various reasons. For one, the seats were extremely uncomfortable. They were actually wooden bleachers. This theatre was more of a black box and the audience consisted of about 30-40 spectators. The final reason that it wasn’t as enjoyable to me as it would be to other people is because I couldn’t understand it! I am still not able to follow entertainment in French. I’m starting to understand songs in French, but sometimes movies and plays go too fast for me. I can understand people when they talk to me because they don’t speak that fast and they know that I am not a native French-speaker, so they speak at a fair level. Anyway, so I was not able to understand this play but all it was was two people having a fight for two hours. There were also shocking graphics in the background. They had projectors projecting backdrops and other things like that. One backdrop, which lasted about 45 minutes, was the bare chest of a woman and as the projection lasted, it lead down to reveal her pubic hair. This isn’t that big of a deal, but I was highly shocked that my theatre teacher would bring us to see this and that the school would allow it. But in all honesty, French people don’t care. They walk around the beach nude, the teachers never say anything whenever a student says a cuss word during class, etc…
After the play, I rode my bike home for thirty minutes in the rain. It was actually a drizzle, but it was a bit uncomfortable. I got home and went straight to bed. That was the end of my exhausting Tuesday