Sarah In France

I've been kinda bad about updating, I hope to get better, wah! A lot has been going on. There was the initial adjustment period where I felt really disoriented and off and "Why did I even decide to do this?" but now that's faded mostly and this all just feels normal. I'm settling into a routine, school's getting into swing, I have fun with my friends on the weekends, this is getting to be the same as last semester was around this time. Which is good, because that means it's setting it up for things to be as awesome at the very end as they were by the end of Tokyo. I'm glad all the uncertain emotions I had are gone and I feel much better about being here now. I've accepted French as the language here, no impulse to speak Japanese as my foreign language of choice, and I'm slowwwly improving in speaking it. Thanks to lit class, I discovered I can read it more or less dictionary-free, which is great. And things with my host family have been pretty good, too. For a while it was like "ugh, why did I do host family?!" but now it's all right. The other night it was just me and my host mom for dinner, and we had a pretty good conversation, I learned that they've traveled all over for my host dad's job, like China and Egypt and stuff, which explains all the miscellaneous artifacts from all over the world adorning the apartment. Friends-wise, our core group is expanding and we've been hanging out with more new people, most of which are pretty cool, and last night we went to a party at this guy Jeremy's apartment (he's one of the lucky independent-housing people, so he has his own place) and there were some cool people there who go to IES but I'd never really talked to or knew about before. I hope this continues to improve... I think of how I didn't really get to know people like Marius and Allie until the middle of the semester, but by the end they were some of my favorite people there...

And we had the first field trip yesterday, but it was weird. Except for the Normandy trip (which is so popular you have to write an essay to get chosen for it, and I didn't try) every trip is simply a day trip. Leave by bus in the morning, return by bus at night. This is extremely strange to me--where is our 4-night sojourn where we all get to hang out in each other's hotel rooms and bond?! I wish we could have some of those, sigh... so there are 5, and you choose 2, and first I was doing Giverny and Versailles, but since I'm going to Versailles with my mom when she gets here, I switched to Provins, and that was yesterday. Provins is a small medieval town an hour and a half outside of Paris, so they have things like the original castle wall around the city, some medieval tower keeps, old churches, etc. We explored the tower keep, it was really cool. There were souterrains too, underground caves, some of which used to have Masonic rites performed in them (cool!!!). And we had lunch at this restaurant there, duck which was delicious (I love duck now). But overall the whole field trip just felt kind of weird. The town was like deserted, we saw almost no one on the streets, and it just wasn't all that fascinating or cool. It was just... strange. On the bus, though, it felt just like the buses going to Nikko and Nagano, so I looked out the window reminiscing and being nostalgic and thinking about Japan! Pathetic, maybe, but I do miss it quite a lot. Oh well.