Voila!

Voila! Here I am, in France! When I first arrived my groupe traveled to Sommieres for a short orientationm then a week ago we retourned to Montpellier and moved in with our host families. I love my hostparents! They're so sweet. It's an older couple, orthodox Christian, and they have been so nice to me, helping me with my French, etc. We have these in-depth conversations about religion and life at the dinner table every night; it's pretty cool.

This has been our first week of classes in what's called the préstage, which is like three weeks of language and civ classes before we start at the university in September. Those are pretty straigh-forward and not overly difficult , which is nice, but it means I don't have much free time right now.

Our group of UNC students is fun. We what 14 girls and 1 lone guy, and a few of us get together to do something most evenings. In August, Montpellier has wine tastings every Friday, so a group of us went to that last week. I've discovered that I don't like wine; I want to acquire the taste before I leave but at the moment I can't drink more than a few sips of it. Even here in France where it's legal for me to drink and people don't drink to get drunk like they do in the US, I still have zero desire to drink, and I haven't yet decided if I'm going to go out with some of the other girls and try a drink or not sometime. Any thoughts?

So far I love it here, but I do miss people, and I miss being on campus. I think the hardest part of that is feeling somewhat left behind by your friends because you're not with them doing the things they're doing, something that's exacerbated by the 6-hour time difference that makes it hard to talk to people at all. But this is a beautiful city that I'm quickly falling in love with, and I can tell already that I'm going to be really sad when I have to leave.

En France

I am in France! I'm currently in the Paris airport with about two hours to go before my flight leaves for Montpellier. I'll arrive in Montpellier and then head over the program office, from where we'll leave for Sommieres for a few days for orientation. While I'm excited to be doing this this semester, right now I'm mostly just kind of intimidated and a little overwhelmed. I haven't yet been forced into a situation where I need to make conversation in French, and I think once I do that I'll feel a little better. I can read all the signs and such, but I have to listen hard to understand bits of the conversations going on around me. I think it's just going to take a little while to get used to everything being in a different language. So far there haven't been any problems though, which is good. I'll have to take a taxi once I get into Montpellier; that makes me nervous. Hopefully there will be other people there from this program that I can split it with, but I don't want to count on it.

Once we get to Sommieres, I'll be internet-less for a couple days, and after that, I'm not sure how soon or how often I'll be able to get to an internet cafe, so I'm not sure when my next update will come, but hopefully it won't be too long. We move into our host homes I think on the 16th, which is also really nerve-wracking, but should be okay. My host family is an older couple whose children no longer live with them, but I think some of their children are students in Montpellier and they have a grandchild that's around some too. I'm more nervous about the language than anything else. I don't want to misunderstand something and cause problems.

I really want this semester to make me fluent. It's kind of overwhelming to be so surrounded by French, but at the same time it's exactly what I want, because it's the only way I'll become fluent, which has been my goal since I first started taking French. Hopefully it will work!

Summer is ending

Tonight is my last night in my host home. I'm sad; I'm going to miss them while I'm in France. I love having kids around to play with and snuggle with and hang out with. The four kids here are so fun and so cute, and my hostparents have been so awesome this summer, and I can't believe it's already time to leave. It's kind of hit me all at once that summer is ending and I'm about to leave everyone and everything for a semester, and I know I'm going to have a great time in France, but at the same time, I'm kind of like, What was I thinking? I think it's just going to be hard, especially after this summer, after I've built all these really close relationships with the other people in the Institute and with my hostfamily and with people in the church, to just up and leave all that. I kind of feel like I'm abandoning it. But I will be back in four months, so maybe I'm just being melodramatic. But I do love my hostfamily, and so appreciate everything they've done for me this summer and how sweet they've been to me, and I'm going to miss them all a lot. I'm going to miss my room here, with my roommate, and hearing the children at 6.45 in the morning, discussing life with my hostparents, just being a part of the family here. I love that, and I'm sad I have to leave so soon.

Here we go . . .

I'm back from Central Asia! It was an amazing trip! I'll admit it, I almost didn't want to come home. While I was there, I journaled every day (quite the feat for me), so now that I'm back, I'm going to type up those journals and backlog them here so they look like they were posted on the day they happened. It may take me a couple days to get them all up, so I'll leave this post up til they get done. The posts should be relatively in depth, but if you have any other questions about the trip, feel free to ask!

*For safety reasons, I've changed the names of our guides and of a few people who went on the trip with us who are going to be moving there next year. I also won't mention the name of the city we were in, but will just call it "our city."