Week Fifteen

I ripped my pants this week. I was trying to do the splits in the courtyard at school. we can just say that it didn’t work out exactly as planned. But that happened at the end of the week. Let’s start at the beginning.

Beginning of December means the beginning of an advent calendar. Apparently they are a pretty big deal here. People say that they are really just for kids but so many people have them and they aren’t just the kind you put candy into they are store bought awesome ones. Mine is made by Milka.

School is winding down for me for the holidays. This coming week I have the equivalent of finals in my classes. Every test is at least three hours long and my grade has about two or so a day. They start on Tuesday. I don’t have to do them all, just Math, English, and a smaller history than the rest of my class. I’m thankful I don’t have to do the real things because that might have been a little too stressful. This means that during the coming week I have a lot of free time. The week after my grade is doing internships all week and I don’t have to do one so I get an extra week of vacation. The two weeks after that are the actual winter break which is going to be a nice break from the regular school grind.

Wednesday, I started French lessons with a man from my rotary club. I speak pretty good French but I think that this will really help with pronunciation and nail down some grammar. It was a good lesson and I think I’m going to learn a lot from him throughout the year. He generally gives courses to the exchange students. I don’t know why he waited so long to offer them to me but I’m glad that I got the opportunity to start them.

Thursday during school we took a test in math during class. I wasn’t super confident about it because I hadn’t understood everything we had done. I even gave up early and started writing a letter but I reread the instructions and I realized I knew how to do the exercise and finished it. I was really proud of myself because it wasn’t something I had ever learned and it is pretty complicated. Derivatives, you try learning about them in French, they are hard enough in English. We got the tests back the next day, which I thought was amazing. If we had taken a test like that in the US it would take a solid week or two to get back the results. It turned out that I actually did pretty well, 16/20. I even got a question right that no one else in the class got right.

Thursday night the district governor came and talked at the Rotary meeting. My second host sister was there which made it fun. You could tell that the governor goes around to all the Rotary clubs in the district and gives the same speech. It was all about the history of Rotary and it’s projects. It was cool to see and meet him but he wasn’t super interesting.

As I said before, Friday at school I ripped my pants trying to do the splits. I had confidence in the pants because I’ve done the splits in them a lot of times before but this time was the breaking point. I started to go into it and then I heard a crack and they were gone. This was at lunch and I still had four more hours of classes after. I decided to just let it happen and sat in class with my crotch out for four hours. It was definitely an experience. I posted about it on Facebook and got almost as many likes on it as my album or all my pictures from France. I mean it’s cool but this is not what I want to be remembered for! You can see the picture below.

Saturday, we ran a lot of errands and were out of the house most of the day. I bought some new pants to replace the ones I had to throw away. While we were at a best buy type of store I weighed myself and found out I have gained some weight. I’m just taking it in stride and accepting it. Although, I was feeling a little bad about the weight gain so I ate a couple macarons to compensate for the sadness. I’ve resolved to not weigh myself until I go back. It won’t do me any good.

Another Exchange student left on Tuesday, this time Australian. They’re on a different school schedule than us too so she was in the same boat as Felipe. She posted a really nice and thoughtful thing on Facebook. It was really reminiscent of her year her and she talked a lot about how she’s grown and how much she’s loved her year abroad. It made me sad to see her leave but she did it very gracefully. I know she’ll be back in France one day; she loves it so much. I’m really going to miss her but I just have to remember that having friends all over the world gives me a good excuse to travel.