Tomorrow will be the end of my first month in France! All I can say is what an amazing experience it has been thus far! When I arrived everyone seemed to speak so fast, none of the grammar points really seemed to make sense, and it felt like the 5 years of French i’d done at school were not helping me one bit. Now, I can happily say my French has improved tenfold. When someone talks to me now I can usually understand almost all of what they are saying and am able to formulate a reasonable response so that a conversation can actually occur; as opposed to the stuttering mess that happened when I first arrived. I am also finding it easier to understand what the teachers are saying at school and am beginning to pick up the super fast conversations between my friends at school. I am not going to lie, at times it can be super frustrating, especially that I have to be asleep so early due to the fact I am usually super tired from having to focus extremely hard all day. However the small frustrating things are always trumped by the knowledge that I’m in the process of learning a whole new language! If it ever gets too hard I always remind myself there is always the amazing French food which I can always turn to. :)
Anyway, brief recap of the week. It seems that global warming is a thing, on Wednesday afternoon I was informed by Valerie that the average temperature that day was 10 degrees! The scary thing about this was that the Wednesday before it averaged -10. Such a drastic temperature change was quite a shock. School continued as normal and I started playing football outdoors at the local club (had previously been playing indoors with them). I was signed up at the local club, Domblans, by Valerie and am going to play for them through to June. They train two times a week, Tuesday and Thursday and boy is it intense. Keeping in mind that this is a tiny club with only 3 senior teams, the skill level of some of their players is incredible. They have skills like I’ve never seen before and I have convinced myself that if some of those players played in New Zealand, they would be in domestic sides. They were all very welcoming and friendly and I’m looking forward to the games. Other than that the week has just been pretty standard. We did have some friends of Valerie and Stephane over today (Sunday) and need I say more, the food was once again amazing. I also have a new favourite drink, a tasty brand of apple cider from Normandy!
