I'm a big kid now!

OK after the long week of orientation and my weekend of being a reclusive Disney princess wannabe, the next week went splendidly. We started our first official week of actual classes, so my schedule during the day was back to what I’m used to, which was very nice. In the morning I speak French with my family and then go to school, where I take my classes and bring my computer so that I can use my internet, and then at the end of the day I go back home to speak more French with my family and sleep. This pretty much sums up my second week in Nantes. I’m taking classes in French Theater, The Religion, Society and the State in Modern France, Art History, Grammar, and Phonetics. Theater is fun, but the professor speaks pretty fast, so that’s interesting. We’re reading a classical comedy right now, it’s Moliere, the French Shakespeare, so the piece is a bit hard to understand, but fun to read anyway. Religion Society and the State will be my hardest class probably, because I’m not very interested in it, at least not at the moment since we’re reviewing the 19th century so that we understand the background of what led to ‘Modern France’. So it’s just like a history class, but in French. I haven’t had Art History yet because the teacher was sick that first week, but I’m looking forward to it. Grammar is pretty self explanatory and not to difficult, so that’s going well. Phonetics is quickly becoming my favorite class because the professor is really nice and I think the subject matter is interesting. It’s nice having specific instruction on how to move your mouth to make the crazy French syllables that don’t exist in English, especially when you think you’re saying things write but totally are not and have an accent that some people can’t understand. So after a week of classes, Friday night I attempted to go see a play with my friends that our Theater professor had told us about, but we got lost and couldn’t find the theater, so we gave up and went out for a while. Saturday we had a trip to Mount Saint Michel, a really cool monastery, and Saint Malo, a small ocean village. It was quite lovely and fun, the pictures should have appeared in the upper right corner by the time I publish this. Saturday night after we returned a few friends and I stopped by the grocery store and picked up some extra food for a salad and bread and cheese and went back to my host parent’s house and cooked ourselves dinner and hung out. My host parents left Saturday morning for a week long trip and told me that I could have some friends over for dinner a few nights so that I wouldn’t get lonely. Needless to say I took them up on it, because it was nice to fix myself something for once and just have a quite place to chill with friends. Also, my host mom bought me tons of food, I think that she thinks Americans eat a lot, cause she’s constantly feeding me lots and lots of food. It might also be because she anticipated me needing extra food to offer to the friends I would be inviting. But she still feeds me lots on normal days too. Maybe it’s a mixture of both, but it doesn’t really matter, so moving on. I was a total shut in all of Sunday. It was nice to not see anyone, at all, all day. As an introvert this was just the day I needed to recharge. Since my host parents were gone, I got to sleep in without worrying about whether or not they expected me to wake up at a certain time. Fix myself food, whenever I was hungry and not worry about when they were going to feed me or expect me to leave. I got to lounge around in my pjs all day long and do nothing but read and goof off on my computer without any worries at all. It was bliss! Again, being a total shut in, and not pushing myself to get out and meet people is not really what I came here for, but I figured I’d take advantage of this day because it’s probably the only one I’m going to get this entire semester. At least that’s how I justified to myself at the time, and it’s too late to go back and change things now. And that pretty much wraps up my second week in Nantes.

C’est tout!

Peace.