Day 9 by Sydney

We started out the day at Ste Ursule with three workshops: French symbols, texting abbreviations, and cursive writing.  In the French symbols workshop, we did a matching activity with various French symbols including La Marianne, the flag, and the rooster.  After matching, we did a fill in the blank about French history and symbolism.  Even though the Americans didn’t know much about France, we succeeded by using the hint sheet and our exchange students.  The second workshop was about French texting language – for example, “slt” means “salut”, “mdr” means “mort de rire”, and “t ou?” means “où es tu?”.  In some of the examples, the long strings of abbreviations were completely incomprehensible, but my exchange student assured me that they don’t usually use that many abbreviations.  In the last workshop, we learned how to write French cursive.  For the most part, it was similar to American cursive, with the exception of capital H, which had an extra flourish.  After the workshops, we watched the movie La Grande Vadrouille, about three English soldiers who land in Nazi -occupied Paris.  They end up meeting three Parisians and all try to escape together.  It was really funny, especially hearing the English accent in French – it’s how I must sound to all the French people here.  After that we ate lunch and took the bus to Laser Maxx. Laser tag was really fun, even though I was ranked last.  The objective was to hit people on the other team with our laser guns and try not to get killed – it was pretty simple, but there were a lot of obstacles and interesting turns in the arena.

After, we took the bus back to Tours, where Marie and I got Starbucks.  Then we went back to her house and read French comic books.  Overall, this day was fun and different from what we’ve been doing so far on the trip.