Yes, yes, I know.....
It's been over a month since I've written. In my defense, the last month has been crazy and I've been all over the place (not having a great internet connection anywhere). Plus it's been a little hard to make myself sit down and write a blog post when I know I've missed so much time, and there's so much to tell ;P In any case, today I am DETERMINED to finish this post and attempt to catch everyone up on what's been going on here in France...
So first things first. I have switched families to a temporary host family I will be staying with until the end of November (when I am scheduled to go to my original second host family). It was a very quick change...I got a call from my counselor the night before the October vacations here started (for the Toussaint festival) to pack my bags because the next day I would be leaving to go on vacation with a new family--the Chamarets--and that I would be staying with them afterwards. I never even spoke to my first family before leaving...they came home that night after I was asleep, and left the next morning to go to Mexico for their 2-week vacation before I woke up. I'm just gonna say that we didn't really "mesh" well, that family and I. But I wrote a note to them thanking them for hosting me....
The vacation was awesome! I actually just ended up going with the grandparents of this new family (who are very involved in Rotary) and my new host brother (Arnaud--14). There is a single mom and a girl who is my age (Celine) too, but they had to stay home because of work and school. We left Friday evening to go to La Baule, a city on the Atlantic coast. The grandparents own two apartments right on the ocean with a spectacular view! We went to the market Saturday morning to buy fresh fish, shrimp, and strawberries, then spent the next two days relaxing and walking in town (where we all gazed longingly at the beautiful things in the expensive stores...although, I have to say, I don't think I would buy a Burberry scarf for 400 euros even if I had the money...;P) I also went running along the beach, which was really cool cause I've always wanted to do that :) On Sunday afternoon we left for Brive, a city in the southish-central-westish France (to be exact ;P). The car ride was a very long 6 hours....partially due to the fact that my little host brother, although very sweet at times, can be a tad bit abnoxious. Maybe it was his singing nonsensical words to an English rap song at the top of his lungs for about three hours (even when his grandparents asked him to stop 87 TIMES) or maybe it was that I got super car-sick...but I was VERY happy when we finally arrived at about 8:00 p.m at Arnaud's aunt Christines's house (hey, I have an aunt Christine too! :P). The house was really nice...it sat at the top of a big hill overlooking the city, and at night it was so pretty when everything was all lit up :) The next ten days were very busy.....the first week, it was just us at the house with Christine and her husband, Jean-Bernard (and their 4 cats and hamster). We visited a very old village from the 1100's one night with the local Rotary club (which was awesome!), explored Brive, drove to Perrigaux (I KNOW for a fact I spelled that wrong) to visit Christine's son, Bertrand (it's a really beautiful city), went searching for chestnuts in the woods (they eat a lot of those here in fall....and they're delicious! I'd only ever heard of them in Christmas songs "roasting on an open fire" ;P), along with a bunch of other stuff. Mostly I was just happy to be around people all the time and talk with them in French (as I mentioned in an earlier post, I was alone pretty much all the time with my other host family, not giving me much of a chance to improve on my French...there's only so much useful conversational French you can learn in school :P) And it was absolutely gorgeous down there in the country, because there were tons of trees in their full autumn glory (very poetic sentence Claire, I must say ;P) Unfortunately I remembered my camera, but forgot the darn charger.....and, having my luck, my camera died about 2 minutes after I turned it on. So I have almost no pictures. Sorry everybody! On the weekend, starting Saturday, there was a huge family reunion that lasted until the next Wednesday. There were about 40 family members who came (they do this every year during the vacation of the Toussaint), and those five days were jam-packed with activities. Saturday we met for lunch at a restaurant, then all squeezed into a tiny room to hear a presentation by two WWII vets who fought in France during the war (really cool, but I understood very little cause I was at the back of the room :P) That night, we all went to a family member's barn for a dinner that lasted until midnight (and yes, it was filled with wine and delicious cheeses, and an AMAZING cake made by Jean-Bernard using chestnut flour...I think I had about five slices ;P YUM). Sunday was more relaxing, and we saw everybody in the afternoon just to hang out. Then Monday we all went for a hike and a picnic. We climbed a big hill, and at the top we found an awesome spot where we could all sit to have lunch with an AMAZING view overlooking a river and the hills that were covered in all the different-colored trees. It was a very "French" picnic (as one of the family members told me)....we had cheese and fresh bread with ham and hard-boiled eggs and tomatoes. And, of course, they found a tiny nearby pub in the middle of nowhere to drink "les aperatifs" before lunch and coffees after ;P Only in France...:) After the picnic, we toured a very, very old Abby. It was sooo cool, and the architecture was beautiful! That night Christine had some of the people over for dinner at her house. Tuesday was the day of the Toussaint...it's the day of the dead pretty much. In the morning there is a mass, and then everybody goes to a grave and prays and leaves flowers (usually Chrisanthemums). After we did that, everybody got together for lunch at a restaurant and then we went to visit the house that Bernadette (Arnaud's grandmother) grew up in. She told me that during WWII, they kept a Jewish family hidden with them (but at the time, she didn't even know about it!!). On wednesday we left in the morning for the long car-ride home. It was a very busy--but fun--vacation! Oh, and I totally forgot to mention some of the interesting things that we ate: okay, the specialties in the region I was in in autumn are duck and fois gras...at almost every meal and restaurant we were served a big chunk of fois gras (goose liver that is super fatty cause they force feed geese through a tube until their liver swells up to the size of a balloon.....NOT my thing....please, no more! ) Here...I found the technical definition: "French for "fat liver") is a food product made of the liver of a duck or goose that has been specially fattened. This fattening is typically achieved through gavage (force-feeding) corn, according to French law." Yum, yum! They also usually served malgrais (no idea at all how to spell that)...it's like duck bacon or something that is mostly a huge piece of fat with a tiny little sliver of meat. Hmmm. They also have tons of meat in France that is like mystery meatloaf that you get at the butcher with chunks of all different colors and HUGE peices of fat and I have absolutely no clue what it's made of....and I didn't have the guts to try a slice :P I also didn't have the guts to try "tete de veux"....veal head. Yep, it's literally the head of a baby cow all mashed up in a big old soup container and you heat it up in a pot and VOILA...delicieux! (Or maybe not...I don't know, and I NEVER WILL). For those of you who know me, I LOVE trying new foods....but there comes a point when even I need to draw the line. ;P Otherwise, we had a lot of great foods too ;)
Now I am at the Chamaret's apartment in the CENTRE VILLE of Rennes...YAY! No more getting up at 5 a.m to get to school :) And it takes about 5 minutes to walk right to where all the stores and restaurants are. I have my own room with plenty of space and a great view out my window. I don't know why, but I love living high above the ground (we are on the 6th floor). I guess I'm just weird :P And the grandparents live in the apartment right next door, so we see them a lot too which is nice. The only thing is that there is only internet in one room on their home computer for the moment, and I don't get very much time on it (Celine and Arnaud often use it for school work)...so it's a little hard to get online to write and update my blog. I've been here for the past couple of weeks, and last weekend we went to La Baule again (with everybody this time), which was a lot of fun :) They took me to visit Guerande where they get salt from (Sel de Guerande) that is super famous in Brittany (they use A LOT of salt here :P). And there is a fortified medieval village with a castle there too. Awesome!
Besides all the traveling, I've been very busy here in Rennes with school and hanging out with my friends outside of school, and working endlessly (and I think finally improving!) on speaking French. Oh, school. It's not exactly a bag of laughs (wait, is that the saying? I think I'm forgetting some English things :P). The other day, I was in Science Economiques-Sociales (or SES for short) with Kiana (my awesome Norwegian friend) and EVERYBODY in the class was talking. I said ONE word to Kiana, and the teacher called me out in front of the whole class (just me!), yelling at me, and she was like (only in French): "Why are you in my class? You don't finish your homework, you don't do the tests, and now you are talking during the lesson. What's the point of you being here?" And I just kind of sat there and had no idea what to say and everybody was staring at me and finally I just said "Je ne sais pas." (I don't know). I was so annoyed! I'm super respectful in class and I sit there and listen for hours on end even though it's almost impossible to understand and I try my best...doesn't she understand how hard it is!?! Oh well. She's kind of unpredictable I guess, cause yesterday she was all smiles :P Anywho, I've been making some good friends now, which is great :D I hang out with Kiana all the time (we are regulars at a local cafe in Rennes where we go after school during the week and drink coffee ;) ), and I've also made some French friends. There are two girls in my class--Chloe and Louise--who are very nice. Chloe invited me to a jazz concert with a saxophonist and pianist who played music to a Charlie Chaplain film and pieces from the 1920's...it was really cool! Her parents organize concerts and her mom is a professional violin player.
So that's the news. I'm sure once I post this I'll think of a bajillion other things that happened that I forgot to mention, but this will have to do for now because I think my fingers are about to fall off!
I miss everybody, and hope things are going great back in good old MN (or wherever you are ;)) I also miss the snow!!!! (It rarely ever snows here....I heard probably once every other year, and less than an inch!) :(
Let's all hope I can write more often now....;P
Love, Claire
