Continued!

Bet you didn't think there'd be pictures, huh?  Well, here they are!  These go with the post before this one.

Who new that the sound of the mountain was actually cowbells??

That's my city, obviously.  And it was a game day, obviously!



This is that spinning bouncy house thing at the fair.

Almost 3 weeks in??

"In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted."  -Bertrand Russell

Hello everyone!  Let's see.. where to start.  I've been in school two full weeks now, and overall it's been a good experience.  I manage to understand nearly all of the history and most of the philosophy.  English is good too.  It was my favorite class for the first few days, but now my favorite is history.  We're studying the Cold War, which included a lecture on American culture :) which was interesting.  Since I studied the Cold War at the end of last year and I consider myself kind of an expert on American culture, so far it's going good!  As for literature.. the rest of the class read the Odyssey, by Homer, over the summer.  So I'm playing catch-up and trying to understand the teacher's really fast lectures on the Trojan war and I have no idea what else.  But it's getting better.  To summarize, school is sometimes hard but usually manageable.

Last weekend was a busy one.  Saturday morning, my host family and I drove up into one of the mountain, where we hiked an hour both ways to the top.  At the top, there's this huge cross that looks over the town.  The view, and the trail to get there, were amazingly pretty.  Although on the trail, I was mostly focused on my feet because it wasn't an even path and it went up and down a lot, with lots of rock to maneuver over.  After the mountain, we came home and ate. 

Then I went to the Fair of Savoy to meet up with a couple girls from my school.  We walked around, and that was pretty much it.  It was a little like a state fair, but with more vendors and less 'stuff' to do (like shows or magicians, etc.)  There was only vendors, a judo demonstration, and a spinning bouncy house.  (Picture a slow tilt a whirl, with a jumpy castle on it instead of metal seats!)  The other, main attraction was the exhibition, this year focused on Japan, which was actually pretty cool. 

When I came home from that, I went almost immediately to meet my ride to a Christian youth group.  It's made up of teens/college students from lots of different churches in town.  It was interesting and fun.  I'm going to continue to go there Saturday nights when I don't have other things to do.  At the end, there's always cake. Yum.  I love cake! 

Sunday noon, we went to a picnic at the tennis club.  Lots of good food there, too!  It was partly a potluck, but the families mostly ate things they had brought for themselves.  The dessert was shared though, and it was awesome!  Fig pie (which is good), chocolate cake (brownie cake), and cake of Savoy, which is a light yellow cake that is sugary and very very good. 
If you haven't guessed, the area I live in is called the Savoy region, fyi. 

Also Sunday, I went to the movies with some girls from school.  We saw Tamara Drewe, which is a British movie.  It was in English with French subtitles (their idea, not mine!), and since it was kind of a 'specialty' movie, it was in a small theater.  Seven rows, no previews, no ads before the movie, no popcorn.  The movie was okay.. funny at times but the characters weren't very likeable!  Maybe it's a British thing.  Who knows? 

That's all for now.. A plus tard!

First day of School!

"Nothing grieves a child more than to study the wrong lesson and learn something he wasn't suppose to." - E.C. McKenzie
This didn't exactly happen to me as in the quote, but I was almost in the wrong class!  Here the Premiére (Junior) class starts in the morning the first day, and the Terminale (senior) class starts the afternoon.  So this morning Lou took me to school and we went inside to try to talk to someone about my complete lack of a Spanish level sufficient to be in 3rd year Spanish (what the 1éres do).  It was a mess and we waited for people who weren't coming, but finally we found someone who was able to tell me "No, sorry I can't help you with your 1ére Spanish problem, but it doesn't matter because you're in Terminale!"  So we left.  We did some errands around town and then had to go exchange my 1ére books for my Te books (you have to buy schoolbooks here)  Originally I had been given the list of Te, but we thought it was a mistake and so bought the 1ére books instead.

Anyway, after waiting around a few hours and eating lunch, Lau took me back to school and we still couldn't find a person to talk to, so she left and I sat with some girls I met yesterday in an assembly.  There was a lot of quick French that I got the main idea of, then we went to classrooms by class.  The Te L (litterarie, it's my division of the grade, we mostly study French Litterature, languages and Philosophy) are a class of 30, containing 4 exchange students: me, Mexican and Brazilian boys, and another American girl.  In class we got our schedules of classes (it changes every day) and wrote down some important dates in our calendars.  Maybe an hour or two later, school was over!  I talked to someone about my Spanish class (turns out I don't have to take it), and then..

I walked to Centre Ville (the downtown area) with the other exchange students.  We walked around and looked at stuff and spoke French.  It was overall a good day! 

By the way.. my class schedule is excellent.  No math or science all year, and 3 days I start school at 9.  Wednesday I have 2 hours of class and the day is over.  Monday I have about 2 hours for lunch!  :)

A plus!