Le Printemps!

Bonjour encore ! It is finally springtime and much has changed here in France since my blog posts in February.

A la Catho…

At school, everything is going very well. I adore all of my classes and my teachers are so great. In histoire de la musique, we listen to a very interesting variety of music and we just finished learning about the romantic period of music in France with Berlioz, Gounod, Bizet and my favorite, Saint-Saëns. In philosophie, I find it incredibly difficult to pay attention, so I have begun drawing and doodling, which has been highly amusing. Traduction (translation) is difficult, but I know that in the long run it is going to be one of the best classes for me of the semester. Histoire de France is still a really awesome history class. However, the teacher loves tangents and sometimes I feel like we spend more time interrogating and comparing all of our cultures than learning about history. My language class is becoming more and more intense as the semester goes on, and it’s really crazy to think that I have only a few weeks of actual class left before exams start. I have quite a few papers to write in the next few weeks and also a few presentations to give so I’m hoping to get a good start on them over the next week.

Le Bénévolat

I’ve done a bit of volunteering during these past couple months, and it has been a great feeling to be even the smallest bit involved in the community here. I went into a class at my university to speak English with students who are learning it as a second or third language, and I also went to a middle school and taught about ten students various questions and phrases in English related to vacations. It was so much fun to teach them and help them along. Perhaps the most interesting volunteering experience here was with something called the Banque Alimentaire, which is the food bank here in France. I went to a few different supermarkets where I distributed bags and collected goods to be donated to the food bank. I had some really good conversations with French people, and also encountered some who were much less inclined to give, mais c’est la vie.

Les Aquarelles

I had a concert with the Aquarelles in the middle of March and it was so much fun! We got together rather early in the afternoon to practice before the concert that night, and I spoke so much French that day. I talked a lot with the other girls in the choir, met some of their families, and also talked with other people who were performing in the concert with us. The majority of the songs we sang were in English, and our director forgot to look up the translations of the songs for the audience, so he asked me to be “la petite traductrice” (the little translator). So, before every song, I would tell him what each song was about, what they represented, etc. Needless to say, everyone in the audience knew I was American, but I was so happy to show that I was competent in French. Since the concert, I fell sick and then had spring break and have not been to any practices. I will not be able to do any more of the concerts because I will be gone, but my time with les aquarelles was so much fun while it lasted.

Holidays abroad

St. Patrick’s Day! For this fantastic holiday, my friend Jess and I got all decked out in green and went out to the bar the often frequented, klypso. The night before, we had gone and decorated the whole thing because we had some awesome ideas and they told us we could have free drinks if we decorated. Perfect, right? I ended up not staying out too late that night, but it was a good time with my friends.

A few weeks later came Poisson d’Avril (April Fools Day). In France, the typical thing to do is take a paper fish and stick it to someone so that they don’t notice that they’ve been walking around all day with a fish on them. Well, I was not ‘fished,’ but my language teacher played a terrible joke on us. She came into class and told us that we were really awful at writing and comprehension and that we needed to do dictées that were noted. For those of you who don’t know, a dictée is when someone reads a passage from something, and you have to write down what you hear, so it is a good exercise of comprehension and grammar. Anyways, the words and sentence structures in this dictée were terrible and as she continued to read, we all lost any hope of doing good. Soon enough, she smiled at us, laughed, and said “Poisson d’Avril mes amis!” Oh, we were so happy it wasn’t true.

Poitiers

Jess and I went for a weekend to a place called Futuroscope, which is a virtual theme park. I thought is was so incredibly cool! We saw this little movie called Les Astromouches, which was about little flies that go on the Apollo 11 mission to the moon with Neil Armstrong. It was such a cute little 3D story. We watched a few other movies with really cool effects, went through a sensory sort of attraction where we experienced how things would be if we didn’t have our sense of sight, and then a ride called les danses avec les robots (the dances with robots), which was insane! The greatest part was being able to watch all of the movies and understand everything that was said. All of the movies were in French of course, but I had virtually no difficulty in comprehending the words and content. That, my friends, was a big moment in my realizations of my progress.

Les Mecs

Okay friends, I guess this is the part you have been waiting all year for. There’s a boy. A French boy. While having a French boyfriend was something I never anticipated, when does life ever present exactly what you expect? Anyways, his name is Donald (pronounced like Doe-nahld), he is 25, and works at the hospital here in town, loves sailing, and is a pretty great guy. He plays guitar and can sing decently well, which is always a plus, haha. We have been going out for a couple months, and it’s been fun! He isn’t been like the creepy or egotistical French guys that I’ve mentioned in previous blogs. He really likes me and respects my ideals, and I appreciate that so much. He and I both know that I am leaving in June, so we’re enjoying the time we have while I’m here. So…voilà!

I hope you all feel relatively caught up with what has been going on in my life since late February since I last wrote. Also make sure to check out the Spring Break entry I posted just a few days before this post. A plus tard!