It's Vacation Time

Ha ha! to all of you people going to school in the USA. Today is Friday, so for starters, I only had 5 hours of class. And, vacation has officially started for me. It has for all of us, except Lucas, who has school tomorrow. I did have to take a really hard SVT test which included writing paragraphs about the communication between the brain and the ovaries and how neurohormones affect the menstrual cycle. Sounds like fun in English, right? Now, imagine trying to do it in French. Needless to say, I ran out of time(everyone did, and the other kids were doing it in their native language) but I think I might have done ok. It was hard to be organized within my paragraphs because it took me so long to write a sentence that I would forget what I had written in the previous sentence and what I had been planning to say. But, I mostly understood the documents, and I kind of felt like I knew what I was talking about. So, overall, not awful. And when the bell rang and I turned the test in, I got to console myself with the fact that I have 8 days off of school. My host family and I are going to their grandparents’ house for a week which should be fun (well, all of us except my host father, who has to work.) We are leaving Tuesday and coming back Tuesday so we will have a day to get ready for “La Rentrée,” which is next Thursday. And Monday, my friend Federica from Italy is going to take the bus to Valenciennes, and we are going to explore town a little bit. I can guarantee that we will hit at least one(and possibly more) bakeries. And, when you go to a bakery with someone else, you get to get two things and split, so you don’t have to choose just one.  Enough rambling, the point is: I’m excited for vacation. Although, I am sad that Halloween is during vacation and I will not be trick-or-treating or dressing up. My English teacher came to school dressed up with a long purple coat and a purple witch’s hat, and it was nice to know that at least one other person at the school will be thinking about Halloween on October 31st.

Although, the school sort of had an unofficial Halloween on Monday. We had the annual cross, which is where all classes stopped after lunch. The entire student body walked over to an athletic track nearby. And then, it was races. First, it was all of the girls in 2nde. Then all of the boys in 2nde. And so on. The course was a lap and a half around the track, a lap outside of the track, and another lap and a half around the track, which added up to about 1.5 km. Well, being Miss Competitive, I decided that I wanted to win. I succeeded. I beat all of the other girls in 1ère!  I got a medal and I had to do the bis with the director of the school(who had run with the 1ère boys and was consequently quite sweaty.) Everyone got a mars bar at the end, but I got two because I won. My friends were joking that I had changed the history of cross at my school, since how many Americans would be down in the books as having won the cross at a Private French High School. It was a really funny experience. Some of the teachers showed up in spandex running shorts and ran the cross. Some of the students dressed up, and it reminded me a lot of the Bay to Breakers in San Francisco, where some people come in crazy costumes and others are there to win. Overall, it was a really fun afternoon(made even better by the fact that I normally have 4 hours of class on Monday afternoons, but we skipped them.)

And they're off! The boys of 2nde running the cross.

Some costumes.

I won the cross, and I was also the only one of the top 3 that bothered to hang around for the medal ceremony. They had to go track down the other two girls to give them their medals. And, our school's director in his fancy spandex running shorts. He ran with the 2nde, 1ère, and Tle boys.

The top three girls from Première. I tried to shake their hands after the race, and they looked at me like I was crazy. And, you can see lovely northern France weather.

Some of the many dressed up runners, although I think the warrior gets my prize for being most crazily dressed.

I had a bit of an AFS weekend last weekend. It started on Saturday night when I went to a local theater show. It was in Ch’ti, which is the local dialect of the north. A lot of the regions here have a local dialect, or version of French. Of course, that made the show practically impossible for the 5 AFS students there to understand. But, it was still fun. My host family hadn’t wanted to go to the show, so I went with two other students and their host mom. Afterwards, we went back to their house and had a sleepover. Tita, from Mexico, had made a lemon pie filling dessert, topped with whipped cream, and she had made one for me, since they knew I was coming for the night. I stayed up late talking to Federica, and it was fun to be able to be honest about our experience here, since it is really easy to relate to other exchange students. In the morning, we went to the AFS hike that our chapter had planned. It was more of a stroll through the countryside, but it was great to hang out with the other students. At one point, a cow managed to get itself on the wrong side of the barbed wire of its pasture, and it was mooing loudly, trying to get back to its companions. Luckily, my host dad and one of the other host dads came to the rescue and opened up the barbed wire so it could go back in. The cows were so funny. When the lost cow got back in, the 4 cows galloped around their pasture like 5 times, mooing happily. After the hike, we went to a pottery shop where the artisans showed us the kiln and explained the process of making pottery at their workshop. After that, we went to a park and had picnic. I basically sat there and ate for about two and half hours. We made sandwiches on fresh baguettes. We had chips and cookies. We had bread and butter. Each family brought a different dessert, and we could try practically all of them. Cookies and cakes and mini waffles and everything. The adults and some of the students started playing pétanque, or boules, which is a very traditional french game. And some of the students played basketball. The weekend was fun, and it was nice and small, since it was just my chapter of 8 students and their families, and a couple of girls from the chapter next-door, instead of the 35 kids from all of the northern chapters.

Federica and our breakfast set-up. Notice the Nutella taking center stage.

Afs friends from Switzerland, Italy, Argentina, Italy, and Malaysia.

My friend Nicole and the picnic setup.

Alexis watching as Clara's boule threatens to knock his away from being the closest.

One of the AFS volunteers throwing her boule. Everyone else hovers around and oohs and ahhs for good and bad shots.

I always thought that crutches would be the same no matter where you went in the world, but that isn’t the case. Here, well, I can’t really explain it, but I’ll post a picture. They are really different than American crutches.  

French Crutches

American Crutches

Soccer practices are going well. I scored in the scrimmage last week, and I won the shooting game on Wednesday. The other girls jokingly accused me of cheating, and when I asked how I had cheated, the said I had paid the goalie. It was funny that the jokes and the teasing at soccer practices are the same all over the world, or at least in France and the USA.

So, I got an answer about why we study birth control methods at our catholic school. The government sets the standards and all the schools have to follow them, private or public. So, we study birth control at our school.

The final of the Rugby World Cup are this Sunday morning, and France is playing New Zeland. Most people I have talked to think NZ is going to win, but they are still planning on watching. The consolation match was this morning, and the school had the game turned on in the lounge during break for the people who were really interested. I think I will try to watch the finals on Sunday of I can.

Carla Bruni, the wife of Nicolas Sarkozy, the French President, announced the name of their daughter on her blog yesterday. It is Giulia. I had multiple people at school today telling me that I have almost the same name as the daughter of the French President. Personally, I don’t like the way the name looks with a “G,” but I am probably biased.

For anyone interested in grades: 15 out of 20 on my history homework about WW1, a big improvement since my 11.5 on the last one, but 10.5 on the history test. We have a 3 hour DS coming up in history and I know I’m going to have a really hard time.  21/20 on my English test(big surprise.) And we had another English test, but I might not get full credit, since one of the questions was translating a paragraph into French, and I don’t think I got the verb tense or all of the vocabulary right. 20/20 on my DNL (history in English) test. 18/20 on my physics test, but only 13 on my lab. French: So bad it didn’t get graded. My teacher is just going to underline the grammar mistakes for me, so I can work on improving the French.


My host mom made crepes yesterday for an afterschool snack, and when we got home today, there were donuts and applesauce filled pastries waiting for us.

Koh Lanta and pizza tonight, and no guilt about not doing my homework since I have 12 days to do it.