It's Vacation Time #4

Well, I'm on to Spring Break. Being in zone 3, we are the last group to get to go on vacation. It is cool because it means that once we get back, we just have 5 weeks of school left.

The week leading to vacation was quite normal. We had a few tests and homework, but a lot of the week was spent telling us about what we need to study for our block test week when we come back. We don't have any homework during break except to study for all of the tests when we get back.

Friday, my class finished at lunchtime because our last class was moved to Thursday morning. I decided to celebrate and went out to lunch with 2 friends. Then one of my friends and I went to the movies together. We went to see the Lion King in 3D, and it was cool. Actually, I had never seen the movie(or if I had, I was too young to remember it) so it was awesome. It was really funny because there were probably about 15 people in the theater, and it was all adolescents except one adult and one little boy. So, the two of us weren't the only silly teenagers that went to see a cartoon.

On Saturday I had a handball game, and my team won against a team ranked higher than us. I even scored a really good goal, which I was excited about.

So, vacation plans. This weekend has been pretty chill. My family is doing some spring cleaning, repainting a few of the bedrooms, ect. The weather has been horrible, cold and rainy, so it feels more like November than late April, but that's ok.Then on Thursday, we leave to drive to the South and go to my host grandparent's house. We will stay there until the end of the Second week, coming back in time for the 2nd round of the Presidential elections on Sunday.

So, let's talk about the elections. Here, there are 2 rounds. In the first round, which is today, there are about 10 candidates. When voting, you go to the voting polls and take the little papers on which the candidates' names are written. Then you take a little blue envelope that says République Française on it. You go into one of the little curtain surrounded stalls and put the paper of your candidate into the envelope. Then you go to the table and show your ID card, your little voting card(which they stamp so that you can only vote once) and put your envelope into the box. You keep the other little papers and throw them away later. If you are going to be out of town for the election, you can have someone else vote for you, but it is complicated. They have to be someone who votes at the same voting place as you, and you can only vote for one other person. Let's say I'm going to be out of town. I have to decide which of my neighbors I want to have vote me, tell them who I want to vote for, and mail a special form to the voting office which officially says that I want that person to vote for me. Then when that person goes to the polls, they make two little envelopes, one with their vote and one with my vote. You can't vote by mail here. The polls in my town close at 6:00 pm and then the votes(which are all in the box) are counted. The results are sent to the city hall of the town, who then sends them to Paris for the final results. At the end of today, we will know who the top 2 candidates are. They will move on to the next round, which is 2 weeks from tomorrow. And the winner will be the President for the next five years. I got to go to the polls with my host dad today to see how it was all done. It reminded me of going with my mom when I was younger and I got to do the little punch card and get a sticker that said "I voted." And I always loved seeing the adults around town wearing their "I voted" stickers all day to show their patriotism.

So, that's what's going on in my life for the moment. I'll be sure to keep you up to date with any earth-shattering news (not that I'm really expecting anything.)

Another Week of Day to Day Adventures

So, another busy week finished, and oh boy was I happy to get to the weekend. So, let’s talk about the week. Thanks to the Easter weekend, I didn’t have to start school until Tuesday. It was our second week of swim in P.E. and the focus was on freestyle technique(and we should note that here, freestyle is called “crawl.”) Since we go to the community pool, after break, we all grab our swim bags and walk to the pool. Then, we head into the locker rooms(it’s actually just one really big locker room for both genders and there are little locking cabins where you change.” We put our stuff in the lockers(you have to use a euro to take the key out, but once you get your stuff out, you get your euro back. Once in swimsuits(and it’s interesting to remark that all the girls wear one-pieces and all the boys wear speedos or speed shorts, since the grade is based on your time) we head up the stairs and separate in the shower rooms. Showers before and after the pool are compulsory, and we also have to walk through about 5 inches of water to clean our feet. Then, all 50+ of us students are squished into three lanes and told to swim eight 50-m laps for warm-ups. After that it is a few 100m swims, sometimes with kickboards or fins, and we finish off with one or two 50m sprints. The actual test for the bac that those in my class will do next year is 3 50m sprints, one freestyle(crawl) one backstroke(dos) and one breaststroke (brasse.) Even though we have an hour and 50 minutes for P.E. we really only spend about an hour in the water. Once back in the locker room(after showers where everyone washes their hair and everything) everyone changes, and then there is a rush for the few hair-dryers and a bit of pushing to get a spot in front of a mirror. Our teachers have to come through telling everyone to hurry up and forget about redoing their hair and their make-up so we can get back to school on time for lunch. So, anyway, enough about P.E. I’m sure it’s not as exciting for all of you as it is for me.

So, I had my first substitute teacher of the year this week. Here, they don’t give you a substitute just for one hour of one day. Here, we had an entire week without french class since the teacher was gone before we finally ended up with a substitute who will take us through until vacation. The teacher is nice enough, but it is hard to adapt to a different style of teaching of a class that I already don’t understand. And the worst part is...we’re starting poetry. Already my classmates don’t understand the poems, so I don’t have a chance.

Some of the kids at my school are currently hosting Spanish students for the week. At the beginning of the year, some of the kids in my class went to Spain and stayed with host families, so now those kids are here and staying with the kids in my class. My school even took down the French flag and put up a Spanish flag. Apparently the bus ride is 24 hours, so when the kids arrived on Thursday afternoon, they looked dead on their feet. They will stay for the week and leave again next Friday.

Friday was a nice normal friday with it’s nice two hours of math and no french class, and our usual Friday SVT test. Really, I feel like we have a test almost every other week. This one was all about the steps of protein synthesis, from transcription to translation. After school I got to have my guitar lessons and I can now officially play: Wonderwall, Boulevard of Broken Dreams, and Hallelujah, as well as lots of exercises. I really enjoy having the guitar as something to practice when I’m not at all in the mood to do homework.

After guitar, despite the rain, I looked through the pantry, consulted my recipe. and then headed to the grocery store to pick up my ingredients. Actually, one of the best parts of baking is deciding what I’m going to bake, looking through all of the dessert blogs and comparing recipes. Since I had plenty of time on my hands, a list and a shopping bag(so I could blend in and not draw attention to myself) I spent a long time just wandering up and down the aisles. I discovered that they do sell oreo’s in a normal french grocery store. They are just about 4 euros( more than 5 dollars) for a package of 8. No big deal, right? I was disappointed in being unable to find rice krispy cereals( since we have a ton of marshmallows leftover from Diane’s birthday party and I wanted to make rice krispy treats) and I also couldn’t find graham crackers(disappointing since I wanted to make s’mores.) The grocery store in my town also has a little section with stuff from around the world. In “taste of Italy” we find pasta sauce, spices, and some specific pastas. in “taste of mexico” we find tortillas, salsa, doritos cheese sauce, and some spices. in “taste of germany” there is some random stuff and...krusteaz blueberry muffin mix. and...in “taste of the united states”...drumroll please: betty crocker fudge brownie mix, pepperidge farms chocolate chunk cookies, maple syrup, and mini jars of skippy creamy peanut butter. Anyway, enough about grocery stores. I’m just weird and really enjoy walking all around grocery stores. Actually, I feel like there are probably a lot of things in my own grocery store back home that I never really bothered to look at, so I can’t wait to come home with my newly opened eyes and explore my own local store. Really, I think that applies to everything. I feel like there must have been so much that I took for granted, that I missed, and I can’t wait to reexamine everything from my new perspective once I get back.   

So, once home from the grocery store, I put away my ingredients and attacked my homework so I could have it done for the weekend. That way, Saturday morning, as I got up, my first thoughts were on breakfast and my cookies. Since I needed to start using up all of my candy from christmas and easter, I made peppermint bark stuffed chocolate chunk cookie bars. I whipped up a batch of chocolate chip cookie dough by hand(and that means everything by hand. I wasn’t in the mood to risk breaking my host mom’s hand mixer so...I took a knife to a giant bar of chocolate to cut it into chunks, creamed my butter and sugar with a knife and a whisk, and mixed everything together with a wooden spoon. Actually, I managed to give myself a nice blister from so much whisking. Anyway, I split the dough in half, pressed the first half into the pan, put in a layer of peppermint bark, and then put on a second layer of cookie dough. They turned out fabulously. Actually, here is probably a good time to throw out a tip I learned from my food blogging: when making cookie bars or brownies, line the pan with a big sheet of greased aluminum foil. Then, once you let the brownies cool in the pan, you can just grab the two sides of the foil and lift it all up. It makes cutting even squares a million times easier, and turns that annoying cleaning of the pan into just a quick wipe down.

The cooked cookie bars. It was impossible to know when they were done because I couldn't see anything and a toothpick test just hit the peppermint bark layer and came out chocolate coated. The foil was brilliant,  since after waiting an hour, I could just pull the whole thing out and chop my cookies into bars.

 So, the cookie bars turned out fabulously, even better than I was hoping for. The layers of white chocolate and dark chocolate of the peppermint bark stayed relatively intact, making a vein that ran through the bars, but the peppermint bits sort of melted and spread into the dough, spreading just a slight peppermint flavor throughout. I can’t wait to make them again. But, I know that the next time I make these, I’ll be stuffing them with twix bars to get a nice caramel and shortbread layer, too.

The finished cookie bars. They really were just great.

 I took the cookie bars to my AFS orientation on Saturday afternoon. They disappeared in under 15 minutes, so I would say they were a success. The orientation itself was...well, an AFS orientation. We spent a lot of time just sitting around talking, waiting for things to get started. Then, the volunteers decided that we needed to do an energizer, but none of them wanted to lead it so I ended up teaching a roomful of adults and teenagers how to play “Hunter.” Then, we talked about the dates of our activities and the rules for traveling, and had one-on-one interviews to take about how everything is going. That was it. I feel like we could have done everything in 1 hour instead of 3, but I guess the volunteers decided to give us lots of time to hang out and talk together, too.

The best part of Afs activities is just hanging out talking with the other exchange students.

Saturday night, I had a handball match. We won by three goals against the team that is ranked #1 and was undefeated until that night, so that was cool. I didn’t play much because our coach really wanted to win, but I didn’t really mind. I was too stressed that I would totally mess up and we would lose by one goal or something, so I was quite happy just clapping and coming in when my teammates needed a quick water break or had a slight injury. That was with the club handball team. With my school handball team, we are qualified for the national tournament, which is exciting. It is the week we get back from vacation, and we will leave Wednesday afternoon, play on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday morning. The only problem: that is the week of “les épreuves groupés” for the juniors. “Les épreuves groupés” means we have a week of school(well, actually is is Wednesday to Monday) where we don’t have class, we just have back to back long tests. It is like practice for the real bac when they will have all of the tests back to back without a ton of time to study for each one individually. So, that means that when we get back from the handball tournament, all of the juniors on the team will have to make-up all of those tests, and it’s not like we will be having extra study time while at the tournament. Personally, it’s not that big of a deal for me, but for the other girls on the team and in my class, it is really causing a problem.

On Saturday night, while chowing down on flammkuchen (which is sort of like pizza but with a really thin crust and cream and cheese and onions and ham, rather than your normal pizza toppings and tomato sauce) I talked a bit about politics. The first round of the elections are coming up, so I thought you all might like to know how the system works. Earlier in the year, the socialist party had a primary, but they were the only party to have one. Now, we are coming up on the first round of the real election. Apparently there will be about 10 candidates, including the current president. Everyone(well, it’s not required to vote, but most people do) will go to the polls and vote for their candidate. Then, the top 2(which we are basically assuming will be the socialist party’s candidate and the current president) will go to the second round, 2 weeks later. The other candidates who lost use that two weeks to barter with the winning candidates. For example, let’s say the representative for the moderate party got 5% of the votes in the first round. He might go talk to Sarkozy and say “Hey, I’ll tell all of my supporters to vote for you in the second round, but once you are elected, I would like one of the appointed positions in your government, like maybe minister of defense or something like that.” Even though I’m not a huge fan of politics, it was really interesting to learn something new.

So, that’s the dealio. My food blog reading hobby continues, and I now have a list of about 50 desserts(and at least half including the combination Peanut butter and chocolate) that I am dying to make. I also wanted to think about creating my own food blog when I get back and this blog becomes useless. But, there are a few setbacks. For one, there are apparently a bunch of copyright issues to be careful of, since copying and pasting a recipe to make your own pictures if just too easy. And Secondly, a lot of what makes reading food blogs fun is when the writers put their own twist on recipes. Like, they will link to the original, and then tell you all about their inspirational adjustments. I’m still learning how to succeed when exactly following a recipe, so I wouldn’t have much insight to share except “Hey, if a high schooler can do it, so can you.” So for the moment, I’ll just keep talking about what I make and we’ll go from there.

My host parents are home from their weekend away(a sort of business trip combined with a weekend out of the house and away from some stress) and life is on a pretty normal rhythm. There’s one week left of school and as the French say, “Vivent les Vacances!”

Easter Weekend

Easter is over, and I have two weeks left of school until Spring Break. I’m sure I’ll have lots of homework and tests to fill those weeks. For starters, I have a history test on Thursday, but instead of studying, I decided to write all about the Easter weekend.

 Thanks to an Easter package I received, I had an egg-dying kit, so I died hard-boiled eggs with one of my little host brothers. He colored on the eggs with the wax crayon, I died them with the vinegar, and he put the stickers on. Let me tell you, it was quite weird to by putting colors on the brown eggs. The pink didn’t show up at all, so I was stuck with just green and blue as the only usable colors.

My decorated, hard-boiled eggs.

Around 500 pm when she got back from her handball game, we had her real birthday cake(her homemade chocolate cake for her party didn’t count.) This was a raspberry cream, puff-pastry cake, with a raspberry sauce poured over the top. We all gathered in the dining room and pulled out the fancy dessert plates to celebrate.

My host sister's real birthday cake.

After sunday easter mass, we walked back to the house and the littles did the Easter egg hunt. Here, they only hide chocolate. Outside, the Easter bunny hid plastic bags with big chocolate filled chocolate eggs inside. In the house, the Easter bunny hid little chocolate bunnies and eggs, wrapped in the little foil wrappers. I decided to help the Easter bunny a bit and donated lollipop and coin filled plastic eggs that I had gotten from the states, and the hard-boiled eggs were hidden as well.
Once all of the eggs had been found, the big ones were distributed to their owners to serve as place markers at the table. We all sat around in the living room and talked while eating appetizers until lunch was ready, when we moved to the dining room table.


 The appetizer was a sort of apple slice, sour cream/cream cheese, and salmon stack. The main dish was couscous, ratatouille, lamb shoulder, and garbanzo beans with tomatoes. It was all really good, and we ate so much that we didn’t bother with the cheese course, even though we had sliced the bread and had special cheese. We went straight to dessert, which was just incredible. We had a raspberry cream tart as well as a chocolate tart. The chocolate tart was amazing, and the raspberry tart was even better. We also broke into our yummy chocolate eggs.

The incredible raspberry macaron topped vanilla bean cream raspberry tart.

The awesome chocolate hazelnut tart.

After lunch, there was a foosball tournament upstairs, which lasted a fair amount of time.  As the tournament was finishing up, I received the message that my host sisters were going to play a board game and did I want to play. (In a house with three stories and at least 4 iphones, texting messages is easier than yelling them up the stairs) So, I headed downstairs, ready to learn a new game. And what did I walk in the dining room to find...? Only my favorite board game of all time: Settlers of Catan! I was so excited not only to get to play, but to play with people who already knew how to play so that I could skip the first 30 minutes where you have to teach people how to play. I lost the first game, having been boxed in to the center of the board, but won the second round.

Boy was I glad that Monday was a holiday and I didn’t have to go to school. Just like after christmas eve and new year’s eve, today was a nice recovery day, slow-paced and relaxed as we all prepared for the 2 busy weeks to come.

Shifting the Perspective

Hey everyone, I’m back. If you’ve been wondering about last week’s non-existent Friday blog post, here’s the explanation. I wasn’t really having the best two weeks, and when Friday rolled around, I was in absolutely no space to try to write a blog post. So, I just put it off and sunk deeper into my wallowing mood. I was at the point of surfing dessert blogs and counting the days until July to stop myself from crying. So anyway,  it was not the best of times for me and I was not in a good space.

Today, I went for a run in the park, trying to clear my head and just spend some time outside to think. After successfully doing 6 laps around the park in under 28 minutes, (and don’t ask, I have no idea what that corresponds to in miles or kilometers,) I went to the bakery and bought my first palmier in months. I took it back to the park and sat on a park bench, eating it one little layer at a time and enjoying the sunshine. I watched a group of boys playing three vs three soccer and another man trying to learn to juggle bowling pins. In that moment, I was really relaxed and started to look back at my week. I realized that I hadn’t really had two bad weeks at all; I just needed to change my perspective while looking at them. I thought back at all of the little things that had happened, and how each of them had been a little bright spot. So, maybe I didn’t have the best weeks of the year, but there were plenty of little things that I could have so easily let slide right by unnoticed if I hadn’t taken the time to really look for them.

So here we go. Stories to be told coming your way.

To start off, here’s a picture from the game’s day that was actually a few weeks ago. I like having fun group pictures on my blog, so here’s one just to get things going.

Playing cards at the games afternoon

 Two saturdays ago was my school’s open house equivalent, called “La Journée Portes Overtes” or “the open door day.” It was a chance for people who are thinking about sending their kids to our school the next year could come and get a tour. My class had been told by our teacher that we were required to help out, so I signed up to help with guided tours, since that was what my friends had signed up for, even though I knew there was no way I could give a guided tour of the school. So, at 9:00am sharp I was at school and had picked up my nice “Lycée Notre Dame” t-shirt and gotten my instructions. Mostly, there were too many helpers and not many people wanting tours, so it didn’t really matter that I was useless. I stood around by the doors for a few hours making the brochures(sliding the map and the questionnaire into the day’s schedule) and then at 11:00 it was time for our STEP routine. My P.E. teacher had asked us if we wanted to perform our STEP routine at open house to show off which sports are offered and earn a few points of extra credit. We ended up on the stage in the courtyard without even having the time to do a run-through, which explains why we look so silly. But, I attached the video anyway. Feel free to laugh at us, if you want.

The poster for the "open house" as well as some of the student artwork being shown off.

Ophélie, me, and Laure at the open house in our fancy Lycée t-shirts. I think that at the end of the year, I'm going to ask my friends and classmates to sign my shirt to make a souvenir.

In the rec room the history department had set up an exposé about the french army through the ages.

They moved the foosball tables from the rec room into the quand for open house and even the teachers started playing.

 The week after was my week “off” from school because all of the juniors had to present their semester projects. I used the week to take health online and try to knock out a few of my requirements for when I get back to the USA. We had great weather so in the afternoons, I took a chair outside and worked in the sun.

On Thursday, I presented my semester project about type-1 diabetes. It was a rather frustrating experience, actually, but I managed to answer the most of the jury’s questions so I think it went ok. Friday morning was a French essay test, this time written about whether Writers, with their passionate and skilled argumentative writing could contribute to the development of new freedoms. Following the French model of sitting on the fence, I wrote “Yes, they can contribute...” but “...They have limited power.” Actually, my essay sort of turned out to be a history of right and freedoms in the United states, as I mentioned the Emancipation Proclamation and Martin Luther King’s “I have a Dream.” It was definitely not an easy essay test, but I think it went ok.
  
Monday morning meant going back to school and getting back into the rhythm of “normal life.” My french teacher was absent so I ended up with an extra hour of math and an extra hour of physics. Actually, my French teacher was gone all week, so I got a whole week without any french class! Plus, now that I don’t have my semester project on Monday afternoons, I finish at 3:30 on Monday instead of 5:30. That means I only have one day per week when I finish at 5:30. Wednesday, since my French teacher was absent and I normally start class at 10:00 and then have 2 hours of french, I didn’t have to start school until 1:30 pm. Then on Thursday, the whole school had the afternoon off while the teachers had a meeting.

I took advantage of that afternoon off to go see Titanic in 3D.  I had never seen Titanic, so it was really fun. We were worried that since the movie had come out on Wednesday, there wouldn’t be enough tickets, so we tried to go straight to the theater to pick up tickets at 12:30. The movie was at 1:25, so then we would have enough time to pick up some McDonald’s before the movie. So, we hopped out of the car in front of the theater only to realize that it was closed. So, we rushed to McDonald’s and ordered quickly. Boy did we get there at the right time! As we sat down to eat, we glanced at the line and it was almost to the door. We met up with my host sister’s friends and then headed back to the theater where a few other people were gathering to buy tickets, too. They didn’t open the doors until 1:20, for the 1:25 movie. We bought our tickets from the electronic machines and rushed in to get good seats. It turned out that after all of our stress, the theater was at least half-empty and we had great seats. I don’t remember if I mentioned this before when I talked about going to see Star Wars, but here in France, you buy and keep your 3D glasses. They are nice and even somewhat comfortable, compared to the flimsy yellow ones that we just toss back into the bins as we leave. The movie was great, and I loved it. The music really is incredible. The 3D was subtle, but I think it did add to the movie. For example, when Rose comes down the stairs into the main dining room and Jack is waiting for her, with the 3d the stairs come right out toward you and you feel like you are at the foot of the stairs, too. And when the people jump from the sinking boat, the 3D effects are pretty cool, as well. It felt good to go out and be a normal teenager, going to see a movie with friends.

Easter is the Sunday(as I’m sure you are all well aware.) It’s interesting to note that we have Monday off from school, but that’s it. Zone 1 is now on vacation, and I have 2 more weeks of school before my spring break. Holidays here are designed around having equal time between each break, rather than around specific “holidays.”

So, that’s the update. Easter plans include an Easter Egg hunt for my little brothers. I celebrated Easter a little bit today by sharing a lot of Easter candy I had gotten in packages. I brought boxes of Peeps and Chocolate covered rabbits, tootsie pops and bubble gum eggs. During break, I shared them with my friends and people in my class, who were all very excited to have real, American candy. It made me smile to see them taking pictures of the pink and yellow Peeps rabbits. Some of my other friends were stuck taking the wrapped, chocolate-covered marshmallow rabbits and taking them home because today is “Vendredi Saint” and they were doing what is called “Pain Pomme.” That means that on Good Friday, they only eat bread and an apple for lunch.  Except, since they had bought their cafeteria meal already, they decided to do “Purée Pomme” and just eat mashed potatoes and an apple for lunch.

Well, I guess that’s all for now. I hope everyone has a great holiday weekend.