The weeks are going by faster and faster, only 1 more and then I have a 3 month school holiday! I swear in France, they have my holidays than not (definitely not complaining).

Seeing the new host family was great, everyone was just as happy and friendly as I remember. Remember how they have 7 dogs, 9 cats, 10 or something rabbits and a million geese and ducks? While now half the cats have had kittens so there were 16 two week old furballs blindly stumbling around – I think I turned into a puddle of mush, I’m not a cat person but it was really cute.

The weekend was pretty laid back – just family life, but it was nice to be a part of it. I had a four hour snakes and ladders marathon with Melyssandre (11) and spent the afternoon being taught by Florestina (7) how to read snow white in French. Even though I am now able to hold conversations easily, reading is a totally different story because everything is pronounced differently than it appears. Florestina looked pretty smug teaching a 16 year old ;D

On the Sunday Elizabeth (16) and I went to a nearby town called St Macaire where there was a dance recital with some of her friends in it. Kids of all ages were preforming hip hop and jazz dances, improvising here and there. It was a really chilled out atmosphere and I adored watching the 6 years toddle about the stage forgetting the dance moves (it made me remember my nightmare ballet days when I was 5… *shivers* never again!).

As for the school week: I had a lot of tests, teaching aren’t cutting me much slack now (except French class and history because that’s just out of this world hard) so I have to do all the tests now. One of the easy tests was P.e: Volleyball. Virginia and I were paired together and well…hmm… I may have served it a bit too hard because she broke her finger. It’s safe to say I won’t be hearing the end of it for a long time!

Here’s the one thing I regret this week. In Europe all schools have practices for what to do in a terrorist attack. Apparently an alarm goes off and everyone goes into classrooms, teachers lock the doors and then people put desks and chairs in front of it and then duck under the remaining desks for cover. However I am not one hundred percent sure because our teacher let us all go before the alarm went off because he didn’t want to do it. We all left the school and my friends and I got ice creams instead. I was pretty disappointed because you never know when you might need put those practises into action. It was a bit chilling that the very same night there was a terrorist attack at the Manchester Arena during an Ariana Grande concert. It’s a little scary sometimes when I think about being so close to all these attacks, I always felt so safe in little old NZ.

Differences:

TV: The host family that I am currently with doesn’t have a TV so I hadn’t really experienced French TV until last weekend. We all watched Disney channel and it was the weirdest thing seeing shows that I’ve seen in English before with a French voice over. Basically all the channels had exactly the same shows, just with a voice over.