This week was chocablocka! From eating rabbits, school dances, la dune de pyla and a day of sight seeing in Bordeaux, this week has definitely been one of the best yet!

Lets start on Thursday lunch time, lining up at the school canteen. Every week the menu for the week is posted up on the canteen wall and I always read it to try learn new words for the food. “Le Lapin” was written on the board, I knew it meant rabbit already but I thought perhaps I was confused with all the new words, I mean eating rabbit?! No way! Turns out I was right and it’s totally normal to eat rabbit in France, everyone was very excited to have it because it’s not often you have it in a school canteen – it’s expensive. Next time I get the opportunity I will try it, but I couldn’t stop thinking about our rabbit Wendy back in NZ and felt too guilty!

The next day I turned up at school to see the best sight ever – people dressed up in Harry Potter robes!! There was also spidermen, astrix and obelix characters and lego men walking around. Friday 19th of February marks 100 days before the terminal students (last year of school) take the baccalaureate exams or BAC. Each school around the country does something different to celebrate it, but at mine they all dressed up and made a dance routine. Terminal students choose one main area to focus on (Economics, Science or Literature), and each group was dressed up to a different theme, my favourite was definitely harry potter (not bias at all 😉 Economics dressed as whatever they wanted and 2 girls dressed up as the All Blacks! I was so excited and asked for a picture straight afterwards (unfortunately I haven’t figured out how to load pictures from my cellphone onto the blog yet). To finish the dance, all 100 students did the Haka as well and I nearly flipped from excitement, it was so cool!

To mark the first day of the holidays, Elisabeth, Denis, Louise and I went on a mini road trip to the largest sand dune in Europe called ‘Dune de Pyla’. “The dune has a volume of about 60,000,000 m³, measuring around 500 m wide from east to west and 2.7 km in length from north to south.” – Wikipedia. It was incredible! The sand was a lot whiter than in NZ, giving it the appearance of snow, Louise and I had an awesome time burying each other and making sand angels. I’ll let the pictures to the talking for me.

The following day (yesterday) Lina and Louise took me on a tour of Bordeaux – one of the more well known cities in France, an hours drive from here. The driving in France never ceases to scare me, throughout the whole trip we were driving at a steady 130 km/h, which had me gripping my seat my seat the whole time! I’m glad I didn’t do an exchange to Germany because they have open speedways!! Elisabeth dropped us off at the tram way, it’s a really good transportation system with stops all around the city. For the following 8 hours I was dragged around seeing every nook and cranny, and going full on tourist mode with my camera. I think I have fallen in love with the old buildings – they are just straight out of a fairy tale!