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