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!