I have to say, the week wasn't terribly exciting. But in any case, je me lance:
Tuesday:
In Theater we had a panel of inspectors come, and for some reason it gave me nerves despite the fact that they weren't judging us, but the teachers. In any case, it was a pretty fun class: we did a lot of little exercises in place of a long rehearsal, which was a nice change of pace. During my favorite, you had to come on stage, take seven steps, make some sort of confession, do an action to go along with this confession, and walk off stage again. It's hard to explain, but it was really quite funny watching it. Evidently we made the teachers look good, because we heard in class on Friday that the inspectors had given them a glowing review. So it was a nice day. And we got out an hour early (again on account of the inspection).
Wednesday:
Nothing memorable. I took a run for the first time since January (a real run-- PE doesn't count) out to the house that could be a chateau. I asked Catherine and she didn't know, but she thinks it's very possible since there are a lot of private chateaux in the region.
Thursday:
No school because the teachers, students, and buses were all on strike. My bus line was still going, though, so in the afternoon I went into town, got myself lost, and then got myself un-lost just in time to catch my bus home. It was fun. Lea had a bunch of friends over and wanted to make them a cake, which translated into I made them a cake, because Lea doesn't know how to cook and six eleven-year-old girls in the kitchen at once means into a lot of sugar going in every direction, which ends all over the floor. But I didn't mind; I like baking. And I got a piece of my creation, so all the better. The cake turned out okay even though I didn't beat the egg whites correctly. I'm bringing the recipe home; it's better by a factor of a thousand than the one I use, and slightly easier (except for the egg whites. You have to beat them until they're foam, basically, which takes a while).
Friday:
Not much that was memorable. In English we're talking about the history of Northern Ireland, which I was always kind of fuzzy on, so I've been learning something, too. In the evening, Catherine called to arrange for me to get a ride out to a reunion with other AFS students in Orleans. And that was it.
Saturday:
I got up late after staying up until one in the morning on Facebook chat, packed, read for a while, and then Catherine picked me up to go to the train station. I didn't see any of the AFSers when we got there, so I boarded the train by myself and read more or less the entire way there (about an hour and a half). When I got off at Orleans I had about ten minutes of panic because I didn't see anybody from AFS there either, but once everyone had cleared out of the station, one of the AFSers saw me looking extremely lost and asked me if I was Angela. Greatly relieved, I said yes and joined the group.
We took a tramcar most of the way to where we were staying and walked the rest. From what I could tell it was a boarding school of some kind; there were classrooms and a cafeteria in one building and dorms in the other. After we left our things in the rooms, we did a couple of group activities. There was a mix of students from abroad studying in France and French students preparing to go abroad, and the different groups did different things. Our first activity was to name all the aspects of French culture we'd discovered so far on our stay. None of us were quite sure how to answer such a broad question, so we said mostly things like cheese and baguettes and strikes. The volunteers weren't impressed.
Next, we watched while the French students did another activity. One of the volunteers read a story to one of the students, who had to memorize it and then repeat it to the next student who came into the room. The original version was two pages and extremely bizarre (about a Miss Sausage competition in Montrose, Minnesota and one girl who sabotages/assassinates the rest of the contestants in various ways); by the time it had gone through all fifteen students, it was one sentence and still pretty bizarre ("En fait, il s'agit d'une saucisse qui se casse quelque chose sur la tete" = okay, so it's about a sausage that breaks something over its head). The point was to be careful what you say to people about your experience abroad, because things distort and exaggerate themselves in the retelling. But much more amusingly demonstrated.
I also finally met my AFS liaison in Tours. Her name is Aziliz and she studied in the US a few years back (in Minnesota in a little town called Arly or something like that-- have you heard of it, Dad? She hadn't heard of Wasica). She was really nice; we talked for a while about French cinema.
After dinner, we did another activity where all the French students were paired up with the exchange students. The French students were given a piece of paper with a geometric design on it and we had to re-draw it based on their description. The catch was that we were seated back-to-back and we weren't allowed to ask any questions or for them to repeat themselves if we didn't understand. My design turned out wrong, but I was kind of close, if I flatter myself. It was hard to hear with everyone talking at once. There was a brief break, and then we did another activity. It was a fake ceremony of a kind, difficult to describe, all done in complete silence, and at the end, we had to do an analysis of the imaginary culture. At first, it was assumed that women were inferior in this culture (all the girls were seated on the ground, and the boys were in chairs, and when water and bread were passed around, they were placed directly into the boys' mouths whereas the girls served themselves), but after the volunteers informed us that the earth was considered sacred in this culture, it turned out that women were actually the superior ones, since they were allowed to touch the ground. A lesson in making assumptions about different cultures. Interesting enough, if it did go on a bit too long. I ended up going to bed at around one in the morning and I was one of the first ones to go to bed. And we got up at seven the next morning. Hence why I was too tired to write Sunday evening.
Sunday:
We did a few more activities in the morning, still along the theme of cultural misunderstanding, and had a big lunch with all the pastries at the end that the French students had made. During the afternoon the students hung out and played various games while the parents talked and had their own meeting. Rachel (the other American student in Centre) and I talked with a French student headed to the US next year, and then a student from Brazil joined the conversation and we ended up trading ways to say 'shut up' in various languages... in general, just fun and silly things like that. It was really nice to meet everyone like this and trade experiences. I'm looking forward to the next one.
Monday:
The day started out really foggy and beautiful, but it didn't do much to lift my spirits. It was interesting to think, though, that this time a month ago, I was getting up in the dark, and it gave me something to be thankful for.
We started out the day with a four-hour French exam. Yes, four hour French exam, you read that right. And I thought the ACT's were miserable... It was entirely analysis of poetry, and luckily the poems were fairly recent and in language that was easy to follow, so I didn't have any trouble with the comprehension. What was frustrating was that it took me much longer to write my analyses than in English, and my observations were in much simpler and childish-sounding language, which was embarrassing. Usually writing in French is easier for me than speaking because I have more time to think, but the fact that I was writing longhand and in pen made it difficult for me to go back and correct my mistakes. That and the fact that I thought I had four different things to write, where in reality I only had two. There were two parts to the exam, one initial question and then three different analysis options. Evidently on the second portion, we had the choice of which one we wanted to write, but this wasn't clear to me: this was my first test in that class, and it wasn't marked on the paper that you were supposed to choose one (I checked afterwards to be sure. Four times). I actually wouldn't have known that I only needed to do one until after the test, when Laurene asked me which option I'd done. And I said, "You could choose?" So that was rather annoying, because I'd rushed a bit and done all three rather superficially, whereas I could have done one much better and more in-depth. But oh well.
After lunch, we had an hour and a half science exam, combined Biology and Physics, over the eye and vision. This was easier; I understood all the questions and knew exactly how to answer about 75% of the time, knew how to answer but wasn't sure how to phrase it about 15% of the time, and had no idea for the rest. The trouble was that I hadn't understood the directions, and ended up having to rewrite the test entirely on different sheets of paper when I was only halfway done with the physics and then had to rush through the end on that, so I'm not thrilled with how that went either, but it seems like I had an easier time than most of the French students from how they said it went for them afterwards. Still, by the end I was rather frazzled, so I bought myself a Nutella crepe at the stand by school while I was waiting for my bus, and after that I felt much happier. The fact that I didn't have to do the math exam improved my mood, too (it was over material from the beginning of the year that I wasn't there for, so there was no way I could have taken it). At home, I translated a letter for one of Catherine's friends and went over later to deliver it. She (the friend) was quite nice and told me all about her travels around the States. She loves Miami. She really, really loves Miami. She would be a brilliant sales agent for Miami, I think. And then I came home and helped Lea with her English homework. Much calmer evening. Very pleasant.
The week seems calm, nothing much on the radar. I get out every day at four because of the way the schedule was rearranged to fit in the exams, so that's nice. On Saturday we're headed up to visit Fontainebleu (a chateau), which I'm looking forward to. We'll be spending the night and all of Sunday, and I don't expect to get back until later, so the update will be next Monday (as I said earlier). So have a good week, everyone, and until the next!
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