So I'm here! For those of you who are wondering, I'm safe and sound. Things have been a little different since my host mom's father passed away and so I'm staying with a member of the rotary while they take care of the funeral and such. However my host family seems incredibly nice. But I've gotten ahead of myself; time to backtrack.
Back to the beginning.
Saying goodbye was hard especially with my parents. I flew into Philadelphia with Jericho, who's from Alaska. Unfortunately we couldn't sit together but we got to hang out at the airport so that was nice. The flight to Philadelphia was uneventful except for the person I was sitting next to talked to me for so long my neck hurt from turning my head to the side. I got some sleep on the plane but not much.
At the Philadelphia airport we met up with the other Rotary students with whom we were flying. I went with the students from the west coast to get food since I already knew them from the San Francisco trip. On the plane I didn't get to sit next to any of the rotary students. The TV mounted on the seat in front of me was also broken. A few seconds into trying to watch Date Night, it froze and didn't unfreeze for the next hour, even when the flight attendant reset it. She was really nice though and let me move to an open seat that had a working TV. There, I watched Date Night, 500 Days of Summer, and part of an episode of Bones. It was then that I realized I was sitting next to Jericho. But since we were about to land I switched back to my other seat. It was closer to my backpack in the overhead compartment.
I had a 6hour layover at the Paris Charles de Gaulle airport but it felt much shorter than that. We split up with most of the kids staying in the Paris area and all the students going to the same gate stayed together. At our gate area I went off with two other students to get a quick lunch. After that we took a nap on the floor. Countless people stared at us as they passed but we were all so jetlagged we couldn't have cared less. At some point another student from India arrived but I must have been asleep then. She was on our flight too. Everyone on our flight rushed off as soon as they started boarding since they didn't post the gate until it was time to board.
The flight to Strasbourg was fast--only an hour long. I met up with my host family at the airport. Right off the bat they seemed really really nice and that impression has remained the more I've gotten to know them. However as I explained earlier I'm staying with a different family for the weekend. It's almost better this way though because since they're rotary they're helping me figure a lot of the particulars that I wasn't aware of before. So if anyone who is going to France on a Rotary exchange is reading this just so you know you should talk to someone in Rotary about setting up a bank account. The family I'm with right now has a daughter who works at a bank and so is helping me set up an account so they rotary can put my allowance there. She's also going to help me get a French SIM card and since I'm doing this with my Rotary club and all my temporary host dad is going to pretty much make sure the Rotary is going to pay for my phone bill zhich he says they should do anyways. So it's all pretty convenient. My current host mom is also taking me to visit one of her friends who has a daughter going to the same school as me.
So that's about it for the story part of this blog. Now it's time for all that's different.
I suppose one of the first things I should talk about is the keyboards since I've got one right in front of me. For one thing it's taken me the better part of an hour to type this up and only now has my speed increased. There are far more keys for punctuation here since they need ones for letters with accents. I hope to post a picture at some point but basically the top row of number keys looks like this instead &é"'(-è_çà) so that explains some of my confusion. I also have to use the shift to get a period. Where the w normally is there is an a and where the a normally is there's a q. To show you how different it is, if I were to try typing The quick fox jumps over the lazy dog on this keyboard the way you would on an American one it would look like this: The auick fox ju,ps over the lqwy dog: To put it simply typing is difficult.
Everything here is smaller. The village in which I'll be living is really small, probably the size of downtown Issaquah at the most. Everything seems very consolidated though. Even to the point where the cars are smaller (I have yet to see a 7 person car) and they only have one plug per outlet. I'm living on the top floor of both host families so the ceiling is slanted in both rooms. I have to crouch to get into the bathroom. I have also hit my head on the ceiling twice and once on the bottom of a desk.
While I'm in the city now and my host family lives in a little village just outside of the city, both houses are very wood-based if that makes any sense. They both also have very narroz stairways that aren't big enough for two people to walk side by side comfortably. I know for sure the house in the village is double timbered (I think that's the word for it) but I don't think this one is. The house I'm in now is much larger than my other one but I think I like the other one better. They have a very Asian/African influence to their home if that makes any sense. My bedroom has Buddhas all over the place and there are African masks up on the walls. There are a lot of orange and brown colors as opposed to the white and green colors here. Both houses creak though. There's practically no carpet except in a few rooms in this house, none in my host family's house. There's carpet in my room here but it's thin and not soft at all. So EVERYWHERE I go I feel like they can hear it.
I've learned that it's impolite to keep your hands in your lap during meals. I have yet to get rid of my reflex of sitting on my hands or keeping them in my lap.
Speaking of reflexes, money is handled differently in France. As I discovered at the airport (and possibly read in my French culture book) you're supposed to put the money down on a mat in front of the cashier, as I did, following the actions of the man in front of me. Then they put their change on the same mat and you take it from there. I put my hand out though of course, by reflex.
Everyone has a dog. I had read that in my book but of course it's hard to tell from a book what is true and what is assumed or simply out of date. In this matter though it's true. My host family has a dog, as does the family with whom I am staying now. I also went on a with my host sister Marilou (I stayed with my host family for a few hours to pack a small suitcase for the weekend and have a small snack) and there were too many dogs there to count. Their dog Sam wasn't interested in many of the other dogs which was nice but one barked at her and started a chain of barking that traveled to at least half a dozen other houses, which goes to show how many dogs there are here.
Waking up this morning was weird. For one thing I went to bed at 8 and woke up at noon. Sleeping in so much probably wasn't wise but I couldn't help it; I was so tired. I'm still tired though so hopefully I'll be able to sleep tonight. I woke up countless times during the night though and the first time I was so disoriented it was crazy. For one thing, my bed at home is in the opposite corner so I expected the room to be where the wall was and vice versa. I had also dreamt about both being in France and going to school for my junior year. In one dream someone came into my room here and told me I should put all the clothes that were in my host family's closet into the plastic bags you get when you get your clothes from the cleaners'. In my other dream I had forgotten to do an assignment in Mr Baynes' math class from last year and since I was in his math class junior year he needed to check that I did it. It was odd. So I half-expected to be home and half-expected to be here when I woke up in the middle of the night.
It's also really hot here now. Like around the 90's. So I'm dying of heat but I really don't want to be the only one wearing shorts since no one I've come across except the daughter here is wearing shorts.
It sounds weird but the toilets here are different. They have practically no water in them and they seem smaller and really deep. The stalls in the airport were different too. Their locks had the thing outside of them that changed to red when it was closed so you could tell if it was free or not. It seems to me that all our bathrooms should have those here. It'd save the awkwardness of uncertainly testing doors and everything.
Speaking of locks, both bedrooms I've been in have locks but they aren't on the doorknob, they have actual keys and locks. The doors also don't fit snugly into the doorframes. They come to the very edge of the doorframe and close like that. It's far more airtight that way but it' hard for me to tell when a door is closed or not.
Well despite how long that post was I'm positive there are things I've forgotten that I'll have to add later. But goodbye for now.
Au revoir.
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