Great weekend ;)

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Bonsoir a tous!!!

After rereading some of my blogs, I realized that the things that stick out the most in my head don't come across as the most pleasant! I just wanted to write to stress how truly happy I am here. No, they don't shower often, but that's because they don't like to waste water. The French way of living is very natural and green. I've learned to not waste as much and the importance of saving electricity. I'm living in such a beautiful city, with a wonderful and loving host family, eating the most delicious and healthy food, drinking the most amazing wine, learning the purest French, and teaching over 100 students how to speak English. At 22 years old, I'd say thats pretty good! Believe me, anything unfortunate that goes on here is highly outweighed by the good. Everyone has bad days, bad luck, and moments when you want to shrink down to the size of a piece of dust. It's normal! It's just funny when it happens in another country in another language because it's a whole new level of awkwardness! For some reason it's so funny to be humiliated in a country where you probably won't run into the same people again. hehe

This weekend was so great. I spent Friday at the high school until 1:00 and then just relaxed the rest of the day. I knew I'd be having a lot of fun on Saturday, so I wanted to make sure I got enough rest! Zack, who's placed in Orleans, came to visit me on Saturday for the night! Loic (he was in Akron this past Spring with this same program...when the French come to America to teach) came to meet me at the train station to show Zack and I around Tours! Zack ended up missing his train, so we had two hours to kill before he arrived. Loic showed me a little bit of the city including the beautiful cathedral, great shopping areas, Place Plumereau ( love it Madame B!!), and a boulangerie where we bought pain au chocolat the size of my face! YUMMY!!!! After picking Zack up from the train station, we went to Place Plumereau for a drink and met some of Loic's friends. It's unbelievable how friendly people are here. People who say the French are rude must be meeting the wrong French people because I haven't met one rude person yet and I've been here for 1 month! Anyways, Loic then took Zack and me to dinner and then we bar hopped for the rest of the night! We met people from America who are English assistants in schools and spent some time with them too! I'm finally meeting people my age here and it's really nice to have people to hang out and tour with! Loic, being the angel that he is, drove Zack and I back to Fondettes which is about a 20 minute drive from Tours at 3am. Fun night!

Today, Zack and I woke up, had breakfast, and waited for my host family to come back from horseback riding. We helped prepare lunch and ate all together for about 2 hours! Thierry, my host dad, has his PhD in History so he and Zack were talking up a storm about history. We had so much fun at lunch...I'd say today was probably the best day i've had with my host family so far! It was fabulous! After lunch, we were going to walk around in the city before heading back to the train station. We were waiting at the bus stop when we remembered that the bus system is different on Sundays. Turns out there was no bus...and the 20 minute drive to downtown Tours turned into a TWO HOUR walk!!!Oh my Lord, you'd think I'd look like a barbie doll with how much walking we did! Sheesh! My feet were hurting so bad that I had to call my host family to come get me once Zack's train left. There was no way I could walk 2 hours back home! They picked me up right away and felt so bad that we walked so long. I waddled back into the house, washed my feet ( definately wore the WRONG shoes for the hike!), and waited for dinner. We had yet another delicious dinner, great conversation, and goodnight kisses!

Oh I forgot to mention, Veronique (host mom) gave me my first assignment yesterday. I spent 2 hours reading and answering questions with her. I'm not going to lie...I was dreading it the whole time. However, now that I think about it...she's taking time out of her day to help me improve my French. Though it's not the most exciting, it's helpful and necessary for me to it. There's no way not to improve by doing all this. I did enjoy working with her and I'm actually looking forward to doing it again. My next assignment is to write a paper so we'll see how that goes! 😊

All in all, this experience has been great so far. I was so worried about being so homesick that I wouldn't enjoy anything. I am homesick...but I get to see my family and keep in touch with friends over the internet. I'm always connected and that itself helps me embrace and take advantage of every opportunity here. Thank you all for being so supportive and following me on my journey! I hope you all are doing great...miss you!

I'll update again soon! Take care!

Bisous!! 😊

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Comments

[Adam]

Nice
Sounds good Alana...miss you. I'm sure you are doing great! Love you.