Le déménagement (The Move)
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.
Read MoreThe End of November
I can’t believe that it’s already the end of November! Time flies when you’re having fun! I’m a bit depressed that it’s already been three months that have passed, but I am cheered up by the fact that I get to live what I just lived two more times. In other words, I just lived three months in France. I have around seven months left here, so I am going to live two more three-month periods. That’s actually a really long time! When I think about how much I’ve done and learned in just three months, it makes me excited to think of what I will have done and learned by the end of the year. I can already communicate well-enough (in my opinion) in French. Imagine how I will be able to speak at the end of year! Maybe I’ll finally be able to fully understand movies in French (I can understand most of them, it’s just exhausting having to think about what they’re saying instead of just understand what they’re saying, as I do in English).
Someone asked me the other day if anyone in my family speaks French. As I was reflecting on this question, it occurred to me how weird it’s going to be that my parents speak English and Spanish, yet I speak English and French. When it’s said like that, it doesn’t make much sense. But when you hear the explanation—Spanish is the second language of my parents, so they only speak English at home. Therefore, I only learned English at home. And I lived a year in France, therefore I speak French whereas my parents never lived in France nor have they studied French, so they don’t speak French—it makes more sense. It’s still odd though.
Monday, I’m going to be an English assistant for an English teacher at my high school here. I’m excited! Before I came to France, I realized that I might want to teach English in France. As I’ve been living here in France and pondering on this idea, it becomes clearer and clearer to me that that is what I want to do. I see my English teachers teaching here and it looks like something it’d really enjoy doing! It would be a way that I can speak both English and French everyday for the rest of my life! And if I raise my kids here in France, I would only speak English to them at home. They’ll learn French at school and just in everyday life, but English is clearly not that easy to learn in France just living day-to-day. So they’d be immediately fluent in two languages: one of them being the most important language in the world right now and the other language being one of the most beautiful and THE most classy language in the world. :)
Next year, I REALLY hope that my family and I can host another exchange student! Preferably, a French exchange student. I want to “give back” to the universe all the help that French people have given me. People might think that I want to host a French student so that I can continue to speak French when I’m back in America. That is not the case. I want to be able to help him or her with American/English expressions, vocabulary, “we don’t say it this way, but that way” instances, etc… It’d be a way of me being an English teacher to a French person before I even leave high school! I can’t imagine anything better than that for next year!
I talked about this with the director of the Houston Rotary Youth Exchange, and he told me that hosting another exchange student would be my mission. In order for me to host again next year, I’d have to find another host family and have them commit to hosting and then present us two host families to the Richmond Rotary Club. And if they accept sponsoring another exchange student, that means that RYE Houston can send another American exchange student abroad. When Alan, the director, told me that, I took this mission personally. I though about last year when I was applying to be an exchange student and how eager I was to be accept into the program. And to think that if I hadn’t been accepted when I might have had a chance if a host club had decided to host an incoming exchange student. I might be able to make a difference to an American exchange student like me! So I am working as hard as I can all the way here in France to find people in Texas to host. This isn’t the easiest job, as you can imagine, but it is a personal mission of mine that I WILL accomplish. The summer when I was being home schooled, I was having a lot of trouble learning French and understanding it, which really depressed me because I wanted learn how to speak it and succeed in this subject! So one night, I prayed to God to help me become fluent in French in whatever way possible. Look at where I am now…
And as for the second year after my return to Texas, which will be my senior year of high school, I have my fingers crossed that my best friend from high school here in France, Ben, can be an exchange student and come to Texas. He has been such a good friend since I’ve arrived here. I mentioned the idea of him being an exchange student in Texas when I go back, and the idea highly interested him. Unfortunately, he can’t go next year because it’s too late to apply. So hopefully he can go the year after, which will be my senior year of high school.
Read MoreAn Exhausting Tuesday!
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
Pays-Basque
Friday, we didn’t have school for a French Memorial Day. My current host family went to go see their daughter in Marseille, and so I went with my second host family (with whom I have not yet moved in) to Bayonne in Pays-Basque. It is absolutely GORGEOUS there! It has a very particular style of architecture throughout. It is one of the most beautiful places I’ve seen!
I went to le Musée de la Mer (Museum of the Sea) and saw the seals being feed! “Seal” in French is “phoque” and it’s very easy to laugh whenever you hear that. I also learned “pieuvre” and “poulpe,” which both mean “octopus.” It’s really interesting learning words just in living. It’s like I’m a child all over again! One of the difficult parts about learning a new French word is learning if there are any accents on the letters (there’s the possibility of 5 different accents appearing é è ê ë ç, but accents kind of come naturally after a while) and the gender of the noun. For those who don’t know, in Latin languages all nouns have a “gender.” There’s no rhyme or reason to it except with humans and animals, but otherwise you just have to memorize if the noun is masculine or feminine. For example, “a table” in French is “une table,” and a store is “un magasin.” Table is feminine and store is masculine, but there’s not really a reason why. That’s just how it is. And so for us English-speakers who have the habit of ALL nouns being neutral, we have to learn whether a noun in French is feminine or masculine. It’s generally easier for people who speak Spanish, Italian, Portuguese or Romanian to know which gender each noun is, but they might not always be correct. Some noun genders differ in the different languages.
And so, today I got back from Bayonne. I went to mass at 6:30p.m., but it didn’t start until 6:45p.m.. There was some kind of dispute between people from the church and some weird man (I think he was homeless/drunk). It was kind of scary because this man started walking around near the congregation. We had no idea what he was going to do. The police eventually came and escorted him out of the church so that we could start mass in peace.
After mass, I come home and cleaned my room a little. It’s usually just my desk that is messy. After I finished cleaning my desk, I wrote an entry in my journal about today. I hadn’t written in my journal since October 22nd, and I never even completed the entry that day. I’ve been really lazy with my journal and with my blog, evidently, but I know I am going to regret that severely in the future, so I am doing my best to start writing again.
Read MoreLes vacances !
So far, the vacation period has been fun! The beginning of it was a bit rough since I had absolutely nothing to do. But for the past three nights, I’ve had a sleepover with my friend from Hawaii, Renée. Yes, she’s American even though she has a French name. ;) The first two nights, I spent the night at her house, and then she came to my house last night.
We went to see Paranormal Activity 3 last night. It was a bit creepy. It was better than the first one, but they’re not very scary. They’re suspenseful, but not scary. We also ate at a Chinese restaurant last night. I couldn’t understand the waitress because she had a Chinese accent in French, and it’s difficult enough for me to understand people who have a French accent in French. 
So I have no idea what I ordered, but it was good.
Tomorrow, I am supposed to go to Arcachon with my host family, if the weather is nice. If the weather isn’t nice, I’m not sure exactly what the alternative plan is. But I’ll find something to do. I’m reading a novel (in English) called Freedom by Jonathan Franzen. It’s an excellent story, and very easy to follow. It’s a fairly big novel, which usually discourages me from giving books of that sort a second look, but I had heard many good things about it before I bought it and I read the first chapter at the bookstore before I bought it (something I always try to do before I buy a book to make sure that I won’t lose interest right away). Whether I go to Arcachon or stay here in Bordeaux, I will pay my novel a due visit.
Read MoreLong Overdue Hello!
Hey everyone! Sorry that I haven’t been updating this blog AT ALL. Life is crazy here. I have taken a ton of pictures during my time here. I will try to upload some here and I’ll try to find some way to open up a gallery and post all of the photos. I’m sure it’ll be quite simple.
Speaking of the photos, I left the United States with two amazing cameras and their chargers. I forgot one highly important thing though: a transformer. There’s no way of charging the batteries of my cameras if I can’t plug the chargers into the wall! And I didn’t just need something that allow an American plug to be put into a European outlet, I needed something to convert the voltage too, otherwise my chargers would be fried. I knew right away as I arrived in France that I needed a transforme, so I made it a point to find and buy one here. Slowly, this task moved to the back of my mind and stayed there. A whole month passed and the task came back to mind, and then it slowly went back to the back of my mind. Finally one day when I was Skyping with my parents, my dad asked me if I had bought the transformer, and it made me really mad that I hadn’t!
A whole month had passed without me taking any pictures, and this is the beginning of my time in France! The most memorable time of it. So the next day, I went out and found one! It was exceptionally expensive, but it was well worth it. Now I can take as many photos as I want without having to worry about wasting my cameras’ battery life.
Last weekend, I went to a small town in Southwest France called Nérac. There was an event there for all of the exchange students in this region of France. Saturday evening, there was a “talent show” for all exchange students who played an instrument or did something that could entertain the audience. Some people played the guitar while others sang, some displayed different rhythmic and synchronized claps, and I, of course, sang! I sang a song in French called Les yeux ouverts. It’s the French version of the song Dream a Little Dream of Me. The song, in my opinion, sounds VERY romantic and classy in French. While I was singing it, my voice cracked since I hadn’t cleared my throat before I started singing, so that was a bit embarrassing, but I kept singing! I was really nervous, of course, but it was so awesome to finally have an audience to perform in front of.
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