I feel like I haven't learned nearly as much French as I would like to, but I've also been living on crutches, so to speak. I'm rarely forced to speak French and I have American friends. Maybe the silver lining of next semester will be that I'll finally not have a choice but to speak and learn French. After all, it's what I'm here for.
I also realized something yesterday, in abig way. The revelation hit me like a high speed supersonic TGV train. I've been throwing around names like "Italy", "Germany", and "France" like I'm going to a grocery store down the street. People spend their entire lives in one spot, never seeing the world and I'm getting the chance and have already booked tickets to some of the most amazing places in the world. I remember reading about these countries in history classes and thinking I'd never see them, never be there, and here I am about to hop on a train in a week and travel all around Europe. I feel like I haven't really appreciated the gravity of the opportunity that I have until just now.
Itinerary -
in one week I will be in Colmar, France. It's a cute little town near the border of France and Germany and it's adorable around Christmas time from what I've heard. It was a less known place that I chose because I stumbled upon it one day and it was labeled as one of the cutest, most fairytale-esque city in Europe.
Hopefully from there I will be taking a day trip to Strasbourg which I hear is somewhere that I really should visit. I'll check more into that and see what they have to offer.
From there, I'll be traveling south to spend the holidays with Melodie and I absolutely cannot wait. I'm so glad that she's letting me stay withher too because I think I would be a little homeless for a while if it weren't for her.
Sometime after that I will be coming back to Chambery and moving my stuff into a dorm and starting all over again. I'm excited about it though because this house would not be the same without Bridget or Amy to come home to.
Then on January 5th I (and my travel buddy, Michael Gunther) will be hopping on a plane and heading to Rome, Italy. I think this might be one of the things I'm most excited about because I want to go to the Vatican and Rome so bad I could just burst. Dream come true, really.
So - for the next month or so I don't know how often I'll be posting. I'll try and post at least once during or after a stay in a different place just to capture the feel and experience while it's fresh.
Monday story time though -
Today I had a lunch with the ISEP/ISEFE directors, so basically school officials. It was the Americans, the officials, and the two students who basically held our hands throughout this whole semester. We all got there and sat down and enjoyed a nice pizza and some non-alcoholic beverages. Very school appropriate, right? Ok, so then the two bottles of wine came out. No big deal, we drank them and continued eating. Then some candies with a popper inside came out, which I was afraid to pop because things like that scare me. Those came out, however, with two bottles of champagne. So, no big deal. I drank my champagne. Then I drank Amy's champagne. Then the bouche Noel came out. Then the macarons came out. And before I knew it, I was walking away from a school lunch with school officials slightly tipsy. Only in France, friends.
Only. In. France.
No comments:
Post a Comment