Le déménagement (The Move)

Posted by Aaron in Journal

This past Sunday, I moved host families.  With the Rotary Youth Exchange, most exchange students change host families every three months.  My new host family consists of me and my host mom.  She has two children who no longer live at home: a daughter who is an exchange student in Brazil and a son who is studying in the south of France in a city called Pau.  For the moment, I also live with an Australian exchange student, Rachel, who will be going back to Australia in January (she arrived in January 2011, so she will have completed her year abroad when she leaves in January).  We speak to each other in French sometimes, but it’s just easier to go off in English sometimes.  Rachel will be leaving the weekend of my birthday (my birthday is December 16th).

We live in an apartment.  I’ve never lived in an apartment before.  I must admit that the most awkward about it is that there is only one bathroom and it’s very easy to hear everything that goes on inside this restroom.  I don’t think I’ll ever get used to it.  There is also a cat that lives with us.  She kind of gets on my nerves sometimes when I’m sleeping, and then she scratches on my door to get in, and then once she gets in, she starts walking all over my stuff and then comes and sleeps on top of me!  Definitely not the best thing in the world, but I’ll survive.

The apartment is farther away from my school than my first house was.  It takes me twice as long to get to school on bike and if I take the bus, I have to get up one hour before the course starts in order to get there on time.  It’s very tiring, but that’s that.

Wednesday, I watched a French film at the movies called “Hollywoo” (no, I did not forget the “d” at the end).  It is one of my new favorite movies!  Most of the movie takes place in the United States and the movie is in both French and English (whenever the characters speak English, there are subtitles in French).  I hope I can buy this movie on DVD before I go back to the United States.  It made me feel like I was in the United States again for a while.