Blogs from Tours, Centre, France, Europe - page 5

Sometimes it’s hard to describe exactly how far away my house is from the university, so today I have a small illustration: When I left the university today, it was sunny—cold, yes (it’s been around freezing all day) but the sun made it alright. However, about halfway home from the university it started snowing. HARD. Before I knew it, gusts of snow were blowing in my face with huge flakes fluttering everywhere. Then, about a block before I reached my house, all the snow STOPPED. The weather dramatically changed TWICE. In other news, the past two days have been pretty good—I’ve been enjoying lounging around in my house with no one else here, spreading out all my stuff over the entirety of the kitchen table and chowing down on all the homemade bread that was left ... read more

This weekend was so fun. I already wrote about the Saturday excursion to Amboise, but I haven’t written yet about how Friday night late Marie and Clare (22 and 10 year old sisters) came home for the weekend. Friday afternoon the family had told that Marie and Claire would get home around 10:45 Friday night and that they were both (but especially Claire) looking forward to meeting me! I was in my room that night and I thought that I heard them come in, but I didn’t want to go downstairs to butt in on family time, I was going to wait and see if they told me to come downstairs, but around 11:10, I decided that I should probably stop looking up travel plans for April break and go downstairs to introduce myself. I go ... read more

Monday was fabulous—I didn’t have class until 4 so I woke up leisurely and went downstairs to help myself to breakfast (yogurt and toast—obviously the bread is the homemade stuff). Then I found a bathroom on the first floor that I didn’t know was there before! Exciting! (A house with three bathrooms—I feel like that’s a lot! And there could potentially be another one attached to the parent’s room, but I feel like that’s one of the those things that I’ll never know for sure…) I met up with Allison, Denise, Maika, and Steph around 2 to check out the art exhibit that’s in the hôtel de ville right now (city hall) which is being advertised all over town—we went and it was sweet, but it was only like a room of modern art things, and ... read more

Starting Monday, my schedule becomes more normal for the rest of the semester. And by more normal I mean, it rocks. This week is the worst week ever because we have our intense language classes at the Institut, and our real university classes are starting. Thank you Bucknell, for making them overlap. NOT. Yesterday I had class from 9-12, 1-6. Today, 9-11, 1-5. In all our free time (there was so much) Allison and I worked on our paper that’s due tomorrow—after slightly widening the margins, changing the font, and bolding the periods, we have four pages. (Single spaced…ish. Technically we put two spaces between each paragraph…haha.) I’m not normally a fan of lengthening essays this way, but in this case it was completely necessary, especially since the main point of the paper was to work ... read more

The French don’t work…they have kids. Today we had class like any other day—it started at nine at the institute, with each of us presenting some sort of French article that we found (for homework). Today, Carl’s article was about how the French had “lost its reputation” as the place where the least amount of work was done. (Although it was still up there—only Germany and Holland beat France.) My article that I found was about how International Living magazine just announced that France is the number one country for quality of life. This spurred a discussion and our teacher telling us a lot more about French culture. Before you read this, make sure you’re ready to pack up and move to France RIGHT NOW. First of all, there is a MANDANTORY five weeks of vacation ... read more