You Know You Are in France When...

You can’t find cupcakes. Anywhere. This can be slightly frustrating when all you want is a really good chocolate and vanilla jumbo cupcake, but I guess a hot Nutella Panini makes up for it... or a Nutella crêpe... or anything else that includes Nutella.

I wonder how many kilograms of Nutella the French consume per year? It’s probably some ridiculously astronomical amount.

But anyway, these past two weeks have been a bit crazy what with orientation, placement tests, and starting classes. I’ll try to recount the most important details.

The first day of orientation took place on the day after we arrived in Rennes—no jetlag excuses to miss school—where we talked about the city in general and what we were to expect. We got the bus and subway map for Rennes along with our KorriGo card that we swipe to go on the bus or metro—which is just another great thing about Rennes. They have a metro!!! I love taking it because it is clean, fast, and super safe. The buses are also very clean but they can get a bit interesting on the narrow cobblestone streets.

After our first weekend with our host families (I went to the beach at St. Malo for a day! See above picture) we had placement tests for math and French classes. Not too interesting. After eating lunch at the public school (we ate at the private school the previous Friday) we had a short meeting and then were let out from school.

During that short meeting we discussed how there was a massive transportation strike planned for the next day all over France. Since most everyone takes the metro or bus to school, it was decided that school should be cancelled for everyone’s convenience! No school because of a strike? Only in France! Most of us met up the next day in Centre Ville to go shopping, see the protest, and hang out with friends. It was difficult to find a bus, but it was well worth the time spent walking to get to know the city better.

The next day we had a scavenger hunt all throughout downtown Rennes which meant asking many store owners for directions (in French, of course!) to monuments and important buildings. It was incredibly fun and tiring at the same time. The above picture is of a beautiful building in downtown Rennes that is hundreds of years old!!

That Thursday and Friday we began classes, but the class schedules had to undergo some changes first.

The next post is for my recount of the first full week of classes… oh the woes of block scheduling.

You Know You Are In France When...

There is the occasional French song mixed in with the multitudes of American pop and rock songs playing everywhere, and I mean EVERYWHERE. Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face” and The Who’s “Who Are You” play in the supermarket, on the bus, and on the metro! It is truly fascinating (and a bit scary) to see the way American pop culture influences the world today.

But I’ll let this topic alone for now—on to explaining the endless night (and the better part of a day) of travel. Sound wonderful? Well, actually it wasn’t bad, considering how much time our group spent in different modes of transportation. This is going to be a really long post to get everything in!

Wednesday began for many people in getting up to catch a plane or train, or to drive to Boston. However, since I was on vacation for a few days in said city, I just took a cab to the airport where the SYA departure meeting was being held. I hung out in my mom’s hotel room for a while and then went to the business center to check my email from the States one last time. The business center, as it turned out, was right next to the small ballroom where the SYA meeting was, so I heard all these teenage voices chattering as I was saying goodbye to my friends in Texas.

Now, most people would think, “Okay, that’s not too strange….” Let me say though, that hearing some of the voices of your future classmates, before you see them for the first time, is very weird. The fact that I had only met one of the 67 attending kids was quite scary to think about.

So, experiencing this, and realizing that I needed to get down to that ballroom pronto with my two huge suitcases and my carry-on and my purse (basically a lot of luggage), I went to change and get all my bags. After I checked in with the coordinators, there was a big circle of my classmates to join. Everyone was talking and laughing and trying to figure out who was who from what we remembered of Facebook profile pictures.

We had our meeting and the parents got weepy and sentimental, and some students did too, but—everyone knows how it goes—no one would admit to it now. We walked across the skyway to the airport, checked in, and then went through a ridiculously long security line that took over an hour. Oh, and I got frisked by a woman security guard which is really really not fun even though I know it's for the safety of our country. At all.

But after that little interlude, there was more getting to know one another type conversations. Then we boarded the plane and had a blissfully uneventful flight. We landed at Paris Charles de Gaulle and got our luggage and then took a five hour bus ride to Rennes. Mayhem ensued as we tried to get all of the luggage to the school.

We waited around for while until we all got picked up by our host families and went to our new homes to sleep until the next morning for orientation.

And so concludes the 1^st “day” at SYA France