Salut!

Where do I start? This week has been awesome!

Firstly, last Sunday Lina took me kayaking in the stream by our house called Le Ciron, it’s super shallow and calm with lots of fallen trees. We were just kayaking along in -2 degree weather – I couldn’t feel my hands and my poor toes were so frozen they could snap off – when we smashed into something. It didn’t take long to figure out what it was -ICE! The whole part of the river had completely frozen over! It was the coolest thing ever, we spent about 20 minutes trying to hack through the 3cm thick ice just to get around the corner. The others we were kayaking with were super excited too because apparently the stream only freezes over once every 5 years or something. One of the guys cut himself on the ice when he tried to lift some up, I had no idea you could do that!

The week went by pretty smoothly, I had a few more peanut scares at the canteen, and my friends are all saying that my french is getting noticeably better which is great. Classes are getting more interesting now that I can understand them a little bit better – however I have no hope for history and geography! One class is dedicated purely to the art of wine making and on Friday we went on a surprise class trip for half the day to  “Chateau d’Yquem” a stunning castle known for it’s expensive tasty wine. Unfortunately I couldn’t take any pictures with my camera because I left my sim card in the computer (well done Sophia), my phone was at 10% but luckily I managed a few semi-decent photos. The tour lasted for about 3 hours, and I sort of understood what the guide was saying because of her massive hand gestures, she was mainly talking about the process of making the wine. The castle itself was beautiful, surrounded by vineyards for as far as the eye could see!

That night after art class with my friends, I had my first flute lesson. My flute teacher Josiane speaks no English, but surprisingly it didn’t really affect the lesson because lots of musical words were Italian. The only difficult thing was the different names for notes, their values and scales. She found a challenging sonata with 3 different movements, I am really excited to learn it because it’s a duet we play together and it sounds really pretty.

Every Wednesday I go to a small typical french cafe and get a hot chocolate, I’ve come to know the lady who works there and she is very patient with my lack of french. When I went last Wednesday, she wasn’t there and instead a man served me. He asked where I was from and I said New Zealand, to which he replied “Is that near London?”. I was a bit shocked and tried to tell him it was near Australia, and he was like “oh! Tasmania!”, so then I mentioned the All Blacks and he still had no idea! I felt a little miffed after that but I guess NZ is all alone and insignificant to these large important countries. But he was the first person I met who didn’t know the all blacks, here they are worshipped more than their own rugby team. My friends watch all their games and have all blacks t shirts and merchandise – I swear they love them more than most New Zealanders!

Other than that the week was pretty chilled, I have done a lot of walking with Elisabeth and we had 2 fire drills from students setting off the alarms as a joke. Louise taught me a game called “Double” which is a speed game that stresses me out, but I love it, we play it a lot. We also went to a birthday dinner of people who are close friends of my host family – and they served snails ( I may or may not have chickened out and not tried them). Last night we watched Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Askaban in french which messed with my brain so much! The names of the characters and places were different which took a while to get used to, but it was still just as awesome.

Differences of the week:

1. French dinners are an art form, at the party all the meals lasted for 5 hours! We had a starter, entree, main, bread and cheese and finally desert! I felt like a stuffed turkey when I was finished. At school I am still getting used to the order of eating food and my friends always growl me for eating my fruit before the bread and cheese. It’s confusing as!
2. The star constellations are different. Call me an idiot but I was searching the skys for the southern cross for a good 5 minutes before it hit me that we were in the northern hemisphere!
3. The layout of books are different, they use two side ways arrows (<< speaker>>) instead of speech marks, and when a new person talks instead of skipping a line and having a new set of speech marks, they skip a line and use the marking –   Its quite hard to get your head around at first but now I think I like it more.
4. France is way better at recycling, none of the supermarkets I have been to supply plastic bags. Instead for vegetables and fruit they have brown paper bags, and if you want bags to carry things out of stores you have to take your own. Apparently it has been this way in Germany for ages but is relatively new to France. I think it’s way better and something NZ should definitely introduce.