Wow! What a week! It’s been a bit of a long one as I’ve been pretty busy! The first three days of the week were the days of “BAC Blanc”, the first stage of the final year students’ exams. As my class was busy doing exams I was moved to a “deuxieme” class. This is the equivalent of year 11 in New Zealand. This was a pretty interesting experience as for the a start all the classes were a lot easier and I felt I was able to understand most of the French spoken. The other cool thing about being moved for 3 days was that I got to introduce myself and meet a whole different group of people. This really showed to me how far my French has come in this short time, I made conversation and friends with most people in the class using my sparkling new French without a hitch. Some of them even thought i’d been here for 3 months or more! I also manage to locate the sole contingent of rugby followers in the class and ended up talking all things rugby for the majority of the time! Thursday and Friday were pretty relaxed as everyone was exhausted after the exams. However they weren’t helped by the 3 hour biology marathon Friday afternoon!
The weekend has been great! After a slow start Saturday morning we were off to watch Germain’s first waterpolo match in the evening. Unfortunately they lost but he played really well and it was my first time watching a waterloo match live so I had a really good time! Sunday has been pretty awesome, we met my coordinator Bernard for lunch at the local tenpin bowling place along with two other exchange students and their host family’s. It was pretty awesome being able to speak to two other people from completely different backgrounds in a common language that was no one’s mother tongue. We discussed some of the culture shocks and changes we had experienced and also had a great time describing how France differed from back home! Lucca is a 16 year old Brazilian exchange student who speaks a whopping 4 languages! We shared a love for football (as he told me most Brazilians do) which was really great and he explained that once he had learned Portuguese as his mother tongue and Spanish from a young age French and English came extremely easily for him. Ning, also 16 is a Thailand exchange student, she speaks 3 languages (English, Thai and French) and was really nice. She said that moving from the massive city of Bangkok with other 10 million people to the french country side was quite a shock for her. She also said that as a people the Thai and the French are both very timid on the whole so it was extremely difficult making connections to start. I can certainly relate to this! Anyway, afterwards we enjoyed a game of bowling before we headed our separate ways. On the way home we visited then medieval town of Baume les Messieurs, and its abbey which has been standing since the 11th century! This place is so rich in history, its one of the things I love about France!
Back to school again tomorrow! Only one week until the holidays!!
