How Long Until Winter Break?

Well, here I am at the end of my second school week since vacation and I’m already counting down until February break. I am becoming so french and so in need of my vacation. At the end of February, I will get two full weeks of vacation. And the second week, I am going skiing in the Alps with my host family. I am so excited. It was something I really really wanted to do, and I’m going to get to. So, here is some cultural info for those who don’t already know. France is divided into three zones for the sake of vacation. Rather than letting everyone go on vacation at the same time and shutting everything down, each of the three groups has a different vacation. For Christmas break and Vacances de Toussaint(early November) I think everyone is together. But then for February and Easter break, they are separate. I think that it overlaps a bit though, so that families in different zones can vacation a bit together. Like maybe Zone 1 has two weeks of vacation, and Zone 2 starts their first week when Zone 1 starts their 2nd week. Then Zone 3 would start the third week so that they overlap 1 week with Zone 2. So then the people who are stuck are those in Zone 3 who would want to be on vacation with those in Zone 1. But, I think the order of the zones changes each year so you overlap with different people. This year, the zone where I am is the last group to get February vacation, so we have a full 8 weeks before break. But, 2 weeks down, only 6 to go.

So, let’s see. What else is new with me? I’m almost done with two weeks with my new host family but I’m so comfortable here already that it feels like much longer.

I went to the movies, an activity which I really enjoy here because I feel like I’m working on improving my French, getting an insight into the culture, and having lots of fun. Marie and I went to see a movie called Hollywoo. Hollywoo was super fun for me because it was about a French girl who goes to Hollywood, so it was half in French and half in “french person trying to speak english.” And the parts that were in English were with subtitles, which I didn’t have to look at. So, I really got to take advantage of being bilingual to enjoy the skipping back and forth between French and English, which might have been confusing for those who didn’t understand the English. The movie included lots of jokes, and my French has now progressed to the level where I actually understand a lot of the jokes, so I was proud of myself.

Here is the link for the preview of Hollywoo. Do your best with the parts in French.
       http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAOGjrtQcD0

Actually, if I do say so myself, my French has gotten pretty good. My accent is still pretty horrible and speaking is definitely not my strong suit, but my listening comprehension is increasing by leaps and bounds.  I guess that is the result of living in a country where all I hear is French(excepting every song I hear on the radio in English.) I find it much easier to follow what the teacher is saying in class. I still have trouble when the teenagers are speaking amongst themselves in the courtyard because they talk really fast, but besides that, I’m doing pretty well. School is still really tiring, but much less than when I started and was constantly struggling just to keep up. Now I even manage to talk to my classmates about life in the USA(more specifically, whether McDonald’s is better quality here than back home) while taking history notes.  Of course, that does make the history notes harder to keep up with, but it makes class more interesting.

A lot of people say you know you have a language down when you start to dream in that language. Well, for the first few months, people kept asking me if I had dreamed in French yet, and I always had to say no. In fact, if someone had asked if I had dreamed in English, I would have said no too. I think I was so exhausted for the first few months that if I was dreaming, I certainly didn’t remember it. But, I can now officially say that I have dreamed in a foreign language and understood what I was dreaming.(Before coming to France, I once dreamed about Euro Disney in French, but I’m 90% sure it was just a lot of gobbledegook and I just thought it was French.) Once upon a time, a fateful night during Christmas break, an 15 year old exchange student went to bed. Just kidding, I won’t give you all the details. Well, maybe I will.  It was a nightmare! I had a nightmare about going back to school after break. I had forgotten my notebook for TPE and my teacher got really mad at me. She started yelling at me and gave me 2 hours of detention for Friday afternoon. And then I started crying and just saying I wanted to go home. I woke up in the middle of the night shaking, and it took me a few minutes to realize that I still had more than a week before school started again and that my teacher would not yell at me. But quickly, my shakes of anxiety from my nightmare became shakes of excitement as I realized that I remember what exactly my teacher had said to me, and that it was in French. I had just had my first dream in French! The next night I had another nightmare in French, this time I was climbing a mountain to get to my new host family’s house(which I had never seen before) and I was racing the clock because someone was going to come pick me up and I only had five minutes to get to the house. When I got to the top of the mountain, there were no houses there. And my school friends were at the bottom of the mountain, asking “Ça va, tu l’as trouvée?(How’s it going? Did you find it?) So, another French dream, but another nightmare. Luckily, Nicole’s host family gave me a dream catcher for my birthday and I haven’t had any nightmares since I hung it up in my amazing new room.

Since I have been giving you updates on  my cool SVT class throughout the year, I have to include this. No, I didn’t get to cut open an eye this time. We spent two classes studying hallucination induing mushrooms and LSD. Our teacher drew a diagram explaining how it works and sneaks into the synapses between neurons in your brain and sends fake signals. It was super interesting, and something I imagine we would not normally study in the USA if our topic was about how messages go from your eyes to your brain.

So, I decided a while back that I wasn’t going to take the bac Français(the big French test at the end of the year that all of the students in Première take.) It is analyzing texts and writing essays. And there is an oral component where you have a text and a question, with 30 minutes to prepare, 10 minutes to answer the question and then 10 minutes of interview. So, anyway, I was standing in the courtyard with some friends during break today when my principal teacher came over. She said, ‘So, you’re going to take the oral for French.” Not a question, just a statement. I raised my eyebrows in panic, and she said “Don’t look at me like that, I put you on the list.” I mean, it’s one thing for me to write the essays during the 4 hour tests and make lots of mistakes and not understand the question. It’s something totally different that I’m going to be trapped just me and a panel of teachers who will be grading me on my ability to analyze and answer questions about a text that I will most likely not understand. I mean, I just started participating in class about 2 weeks ago. Just simple things like raising my hand to answer a question in SVT or to argue with my philosophy teacher. And now I’m going to have to try to analyze texts in front of a panel. Oh boy, this is going to be fun. And to top it all off, they start in less than 3 weeks. It is just a practice for the kids in my class(as in the note counts in their grade for French class, but it isn’t the official bac.) It is what’s called a bac blanc. 

Since it’s finals back home and I’ve been seeing facebook posts from my senior friends, I think this is a good time to make a comparison between the states and France. I’m going to anonymously quote a specific post which I think sums up the situation of being a high school senior in the USA. I hope the poster is ok with this.

My thoughts: "during second semester I'll have way more time to bake cookies and cupcakes for everyone!"

Hmm, and why is that? Because as second semester senior in the USA, you have already taken the SAT, you have sent in your college applications, you just have to pass your classes but your final grades aren’t that important, and a lot of the senior teachers just sort of succumb to the pressure of senioritis. Even seniors taking Ap classes have a month at the end of the year after AP tests to write graduation speeches and make French music videos.  Basically, the last few weeks of school are a total piece of cake for the seniors, who already have one foot out the door and toward college. Par contre(on the other hand) the seniors in France are stressed until the last day of school. They absolutely have to pass the bac at the end of the year or they will have to redo the entire school year. They have to get good grades to be able to go to the university that they want. The pressure doesn’t lessen until the day the bac is finished, and then it is the anxiety of awaiting the results.

So, there’s your bit of culture in addition to all of the stories from my life here. I am doing fabulously here in my new host family. I have even started to talk to people more at school and to make jokes. Overall, life is definitely starting to become fantastic here.

I have plans to make chocolate chip cookies and to go see Twilight this weekend. Should be lots of fun. And most of all, I’m already done with my homework so I have no stress.

Sorry that I don’t have any pictures in this post, but considering that I live right in the middle of the town that you already have lots of pictures of and I haven’t been doing particularly picturesque activities, I hope writing will suffice.