January 12, 2005

Bonne Année (Happy New Year) Everyone!

I hope you all passed a wonderful holiday season. I thought I'd let you know how I spent my French holidays!

School got out the 17th of December and on the 18th my host family and I went to their house in Brittany for Christmas (we took the cat, too!). We spent the first part of the week finishing Christmas shopping in a town near by called Quimper. For Christmas Eve, we ate fois fras (goose liver), which I'm not a big fan of. Escargot (which I do like!) and the traditional Christmas cake 'log' that they eat for the holidays there. You can buy all different kinds. Ours was made out of vanilla ice cream. YUM!

After dinner, my host dad was too impatient to wait till Christmas morning (which I found really amusing, usually it's the kids!) to open the presents, so we opened our presents Christmas Eve. My host parents gave me a stuffed animal that was rabbit because they know how much I miss my bunny at home! And a towel for the pool, because I swim a lot after school, that had a traditional Britannic person on it and a text, translated says "staying cool in Brittany” and candles and incense that smells like cinnamon and my host sister gave me an alarm clock that looks like a flower and my host brother gave me a book of fairy tales about Brittany. I was able to understand it just fine, too!

Christmas day they had friends over for lunch and the after noon. Their friends have a son who works in England studying laser technology to accurately predict when and how strong a volcanic eruption will be. He was really interesting to talk to, because I used to live in Washington State near the Cascade Mountain Range, and in particular, Mount St. Helens, so it was fun telling him about the history of the mountain. We ate lunch - turkey, oysters and some other kind of shell fish, though I don't know the name of it. It took me while to convince myself to eat the turkey because when we bought it was dead and the feathers had been plucked... that's it... feet and head still included. Wow. That was a little more alive than I prefer to see food I'm going to eat! But it was very good.

We went for a walk along the coast after lunch. It was absolutely beautiful, the walk anyway. The wind was blowing at about 85 kilometers per hour and it started raining JUST as we got back to the car. Perfect timing! My family in the US, of course, called me to sing Merry Christmas to me.

For dinner some other friends of my host family came over. They had two girls, 12 and 6 and an 8-year-old boy. I had fun playing with the little girl because she wasn't able to play the Nintendo with her brother and sister, so we played games on my computer. She thought that was really neat. For dinner we ate a "raqlette" which is a specific type of cheese melted over potatoes and deli meat. REALLY yummy! We went home the next day because my host dad had to get back to work.

Monday after, I had my first voice lesson with a voice teacher, who is also an English teacher at the high school. The rest of the week I finished homework, read a book for French class, and enjoyed not having school! For New Year's my youth counselor let me go see a friend who is a Chilean exchange student in a town near by, Orléans. We went to one of her friend's house for a party. We all stayed up terribly late, of course, and danced and shot off fire works and had fun! I took the train home at 4 the first and the BACK to school Monday.

This week, I started in a different class in the high school, because in my previous class there was a Norwegian exchange and we always spoke English together because we were having trouble having conversations with the other girls in the class. So, now I'm in a class where I have people to talk to and only in French, so it improves my French much more (though my English is going downhill as you can probably tell from this e-mail.) The class is much larger and lively, so it's made the past week much more pleasant, and the Norwegian exchange student is finally starting to be less shy and talk to other people (I don't have that problem, I'm not very shy!) So, I think the change is beneficial to both of us, I know it's much more easier to pay attention in class now! We're also coming near to the end of the second trimester and, considering I'm in a foreign country and taking classes in a foreign language, I'm doing really well in school! I also started giving an English class to seven adults at a place that's similar to the YMCA in the United States, but not quite. We just started this week. We have seven more one-hour sessions. The adults are all very nice and willing, so I think the class will continue to go as well as it did the first day.

I also changed to my FOURTH host family last week. Although I loved my last host family, this family is a better place for me because they're kids still live at home (the last family, they were both at university) and they live in town, so it's easier to get around on my own. I really like them. They're very nice. I know the next few months living with them are going to go really well.

I hope you're all doing well, too. I miss everyone!!

Bisous, Aimée Shaw