Author: sam_goeuriot

Today we started with getting our boarding passes and checking out luggage at 3:00. We were then able to hang out with our friends at the meet up place until everyone was finished – it was good to have all that time to say good bye because of the huge line to check our luggage. Then we took a picture showing everybody in the exchange: it felt like the paparazzi with all the camera flashes! After a little down time, we boarded the plane and began our 8 hour flight! There was a wide variety of options we could do to pass the time, like complimentary movies, tv shows, games, and a flight tracker to see how far we are! The dinner was excellent: it was ravioli or chicken ratatouille. It’s getting pretty dark out so they turned off the lights and gave us pillows, blankets, and eye masks with earbuds! Good night!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Today, we got a decently late start to school. we only had to be there at 9:30am, which was good because Ari and his exchange student had stayed the night over at our place. I needed the extra rest! We got ready and were about to walk to school, but Antoine’s mom offered to drive us all instead. Even though we were ahead of schedule (I think) we saw a group of students who were already leaving to get on the bus and we jumped out to join them. They then told us that we had to go back to the school first to meet up with Ms. Jones (I’m still not totally sure why there were two different groups). We ran and we got there fine. Running probably wasn’t actually necessary but everything was fine. After rounding everyone up, we all got on the bus and headed off to a place called LaserMaxx. It was a laser tag place with a few arcade games in the lobby. After checking in and getting situated, I played a quick game of foosball (babyfoot in French) and we both got to keep the bouncy balls that came out. It was only us and the French kids there today, but we still had to play laser tag in groups. When my group was called, I annihilated and came out third behind only my exchange student and Meghan’s. the next game, I came out second behind only Meghan’s as my exchange student threw a small tantrum. He’s quite zealous. We all headed back to school for an outside picnic lunch and chilled for a while. For the afternoon, we headed to a park a little while away from the school. Tori and I did our track workout while the others played soccer and splashed water bottles on each other. A few distance runners also ran laps. We ended up having to wait in the hot bus for a few boys before heading home because they totally disappeared on us. At the end of the day, I went home with my guy and showered. There’s also going to be a party tonight and I can’t wait!

Let me set the stage for all of our viewers at home: I wake up to the birds singing French songs outside my window. I shower and then go downstairs to finish off the few crêpes that survived dinner last night. After eating 3 crêpes piled high with Nutella I wrote a killer Instagram caption for my sister’s 18th birthday. (Happy Birthday Ayla, I love you lots) Finally I listened to the song “Magic in the Air” by Magic System to really get me hype before I stepped out the door prepared for a fantastic day filled with castles, school lunches, and goat farms.

Funny enough, we were given a test today. Since student tree is locked down and they can’t enter grades, Kimmy J and Sammy G will buying ice creams for the two students with the highest grades. The questions were like “How long did it take to construct the cathedral across the street?” And “What is TGV and acronym for?” Sadly I knew neither of those answers so it appears as though I will not be getting an ice cream today…oh well.

Sadly we did not see yet another castle; however, the goat farm incredibly fun. The goats were adorable, the cheese was fantastic, and everyone simply had a great time. I think that we all made some new, life-long friends. Oh and yes we did pick up some sweet boxy alert words for the portfolio project. N’inquiétez pas (don’t worry) we are learning more French with each adventure. This trip is mostly fun and games, but the beauty of each game is that we play in French. Love you all, see you soon!

We started a rather rainy Wednesday off with an odyssey. Through turmulous storms and by gargantuan bus, our bilingual team of brave warriors staggered through a local tourost-infested village to the ominous main entrance of le château Amboise. Sporting a misleadingly dainty facade, within the castle holds the perils of the medieval world.

Merciful leaders Kimmy J and Sammy G let their comandees loose in the previously mentioned tourist town after a thorough château scouting mission. English-translated guide books cast aside, our warriors made a valiant beeline for a local chocolate shop in hopes of finding gourmet nourishment.

Rounded up at last, les élèves mounted their transportation once again and began a heart-wrenching battle with bus nasea. After contending with the worst of it, the young’uns gathered up their lunch boxes for a beautiful lakeside picnic before beginning the rope course adventures.

This morning was pretty chill. Although we had to get up pretty early. I had brioche and jam for breakfast. Then we took the bus to the train station and walked to the group meeting place. The bus ride to Amboise was decent, I sat next to Megan 😊 the castle was kind of cool. I didn’t really like the flow of the rooms but the history was cool. We also visited the chapel which was small but really cool. Leonardo Davinci was buried there and that was a super cool surprise. I really liked the view from the balconies and area to the side of the castle. We also visited the garden like area and saw the homage plaques to Davinci. You could look out and see all of the town. Although we didn’t visit it, you could see the house where Lenoardo Davinci spent his last two years. it was not the nicest weather, but at least it didn’t rain on us. After the castle we took the bus to the climbing park. On the way there, there were these caves in the cliff side that were turned into many things. There were a lot of houses which was pretty cool. We ate lunch before “playing”. The park was pretty cool. They had many different levels of difficulty so it was like a family place. It was so cool, they let us do what we wanted on the courses and only chaperoned us from the ground. I went on only three courses, but they were the most advanced. They were super fun! After we carpooled with French Rachel, and Agathe and I went shopping for a little bit. We bought some food to bring to Axelle’s party. We rushed home to shower quickly, and we went to Axelle’s house. Overall it was a pretty good day 😄

Like every typical Monday morning, we had to start the day off at school. Elise and I were almost very late because the bus we normally would take came early and we missed it so we had to take a different bus that even she wasn’t too sure about… Although somehow we made it just on time after having to walk through some back road shortcuts. We split into groups once at the school to do some small activities. My group did “theatre”. We split into three smaller groups and were each given a scenario (Written once in French and once in English) to perform. We were able to use costumes that the French conversation teacher provided us with and before we could perform we had to come up with some sort of script. Our group decided to just have the whole scene in French, but other groups decided to have a mix of both languages. Our scenario was a situation at a bus stop when some crazy passengers either forget their cards or their cards don’t work. I played a crazy old lady, Meg was a weird man, Gregoire was a thug, and Phillipine was the conductor/driver. It was difficult to think of French lines and even harder to actually act them out but I think our group was still a success. The other groups were funny as well especially a group of all boys (Luke, Drake, Thomas R, and Bastien) who pretend to be at a zoo where someone falls into the bear exhibit and needs a superhero, “Jackson” (Thomas R), has to save them. After this we had lunch at the cafeteria. There were chicken nuggets (which were pretty high quality for a cafeteria), pasta, bread, and a variety of side options and dessert. Some boys played basketball while most of us talked while sitting on the window sills of the gym building. After lunch we split up into two groups- one (a small group of 10) had a cooking class with the school’s Resident Chef, and the other was my group: who went and saw a French film. I honestly don’t even know the name of the movie. When we got back from the theater we got to try some of the pastries that the cooking class made and they were so good! When this was all said and done a group of people went shopping and others went on their own separate way.

We are watching the French Open right now because there is a Frenchman playing right now, but later we are going out to eat at a restaurant which is exciting 🙂

Okay, c’est tout pour maintenant. Au revoir!!☺️

Today we broke up into groups of about 5 and did different things. My group went to the Tours’ town hall. Like every building in Tours, it is very old.  It is a big white building that kind of looked like a castle. The inside and the outside were both made of limestone. The inside featured beautiful handmade carvings, shown in the picture of the ceiling.  We were given a tour by the international relation person for Tours and some guy from Ohio who was doing an internship in Tours. The guy from Ohio was supposed to help translate, although he said nothing the entire time. We saw three rooms: the city council room, the “party” room and the marriage room. The council room looked the same as in the USA. The party room is rented out by people and is a large, fancy room. The marriage room is just a room, but is important because in France, all marriages have to be done in the city hall to be official. In the afternoon, we either went to a movie or cooked.

Today we went to Chenonceau, a castle about half an hour out of Tours. It is a castle that was built in the 16th century and is still maintained today as an impressive and beautiful national landmark. When we got there, we had lunch next to the river which flows next to the castle and after eating we headed onto the castle grounds to explore. A friend and I decided to go to the labyrinth on the castle grounds first since that seemed interesting, however, the labyrinth wasn’t much of a labyrinth at all. It was more like a tiny maze. After that, we went and checked out the castle, which was pretty good. It was a lot more interesting than the other castle, Villandry, that we visited on Friday, because it was bigger and had more interesting stuff other than just plain rooms. After we were done exploring the castle, we took a brief trip through the gardens before heading off to find the medieval village thing that was on our maps. On our way there, though, we discovered a playground that was sort of hidden away. Under the guise of “exploring” we went inside and swung on the swings for a while, despite the playground rules stating that it was only for 3-12 year olds. We figured that if there were a few kids who were clearly below 3 years old there, then surely they wouldn’t mind having a few teenagers there too. 

 

Today, we ventured out of our temporary residence of Tours for the bright streets of Paris.  Embarking on a musical journey, we each discovered ourselves through the power of sound.  To commence said embarkment, we found ourselves in the world of Asian music.  Each of us was placed seemingly randomly at a designated instrument, ranging from gongs to xylophones to one lucky soul even having the guts to lead all of the rest with the drum at the front of the room.  He shall remain nameless, but I will say that he did a rather exquisite job at accomplishing the aforementioned task.  Next on our musical venture, we made a stop in the great continent by the name of Africa.  We were each placed at a drum, although several of us were subsequently stationed at different instruments around the room.  Personally, I was placed at the sanza, and I played it quite well, I must add.  The entire room was filled with beautiful sounds and smiling faces, quite a sound and sight respectively.  Following a typical French lunch at KFC, the group readjoined for a visit to the museum in which we learned more about the instruments that we had just played while in the mental state of Africa, quite a learning experience indeed.  We subsequently spent several hours in a nearby park, assimilating with the local residents and tourists of the city in which we were in, Paris.  We then got on the bus for the long trip back to Tours and back to reality.

Today was yet another adventure in the lovely country of France. We began our day by going to the school to attend some classes. I attended a physics class for a full 3 hours. Physics is a challenging class for even the best of us in English, so one can only imagine the terror us students faced at the daunting task of attending this class. While we may not have learned everything we could have about physics, we did get to meet many new friends. For the first part of the class the teacher split the french students into eight groups. Then one exchange student was put in each group. This allowed us to become acquainted with many more people who we would not have met otherwise. The rest of the class was slightly less social and slightly more confusing as we got into actual physics stuff. However, we made it through and we soon ate lunch and embarked on the next part of our journey for the day. We followed our fearless leader Kimmy J (and our slightly less fearless leader Sammy G) as she lead us through the streets of Tours. Our final destination was a river where we were split into two groups. One group was sent with Kimmy J to look and walk through the famous cathedral in Tours while the other stayed with Sammy G at the river and went on a nice boat ride. The boat ride was a very fun and educational experience. We floated leisurely down the river as a guide explained to us some important historical facts about the river (with Mr. G helping us out by translating a bit). After our little joy ride we switched with Kimmy J’s group and went to see the cathedral. We took a very short walk from the boat to the cathedral and stood outside and, like the tourists we are, took plenty of photos. Mr. G also filled us in on some important historical facts, as well as some rules, that we needed to know before entering the cathedral. After entering the massive cathedral and walking around for a bit we managed to snap a few pictures of the beautiful stained glass and not break anything. It was overall another great day for our grand adventure.