Weeks Twenty Four and Twenty Five

What a couple of weeks

Last Monday I was really sick but forced my way through it and went to school.  It turned out that it was a pretty good choice. It was a sort of immersion day. We had two periods of the day that were set-aside for us to explore our passions. We had signed up different things a couple weeks earlier. I spent my two periods at the local university learning about two majors. I observed biology in the afternoon, which wasn’t that interesting, but in the morning I learned about their language program, which sounds really cool. The kids in the program are required to take a minimum of three languages. I would love to do that in college. It would really help me to study in France for this type of thing, I’m not sure how much I would get out ten hours of English per week, but I would love to study languages.

Monday was also the 18^th birthday of my friend Vilma, the Swedish girl in my school. To celebrate we had a little party at my house. It wasn’t huge and it was pretty mellow but it was nice to do something outside of school. We had a couple of friends over and we ate some pizza and hung out, not to bad a party.

This was my last week of school before vacation. There were only five weeks between the vacations but it was nice to get a little time away anyway. I took Saturday as a day of rest and didn’t really do anything. Sunday I had to get up early and get everything ready to leave. I went to the Pyrenees with another family to do a week of skiing. It was easily one of the coolest things I’ve done so far on this exchange.

The car was a little tight, it’s made for seven and we were exactly seven, plus all the food and ski gear for a week. We made the most of the 7 hour car ride though, it wasn’t to bad. We didn’t see much of the mountains the first night because there was so much fog but that had a different effect. We had to walk up to the main station to rent our material and the cold made the fog freeze in our hair so we all had completely white hair by the end of the walk. It really made us realize we were in a totally different place.

I decided against taking lessons because I thought I could manage on my own. It was pretty rough the first day. I fell down at least one time every time we went down a slope. I think that in total I probably fell about 20-30 times. Thankfully I didn’t get hurt but it was a little rough. I think a lot of it had to do with me being scared, the first day I was really getting used to the mountains and the slopes. After the first day I started to really improve though. By the end of the week I was doing the hardest slopes without much trouble.

We skied Monday-Friday 9-5 every day and a half day on Saturday. We even ate lunch on a bench on the slopes. Needless to say I was a little sore but it was amazing and so beautiful. The apartment that we had was right on the slopes, we could literally put on our skis and go. It was an amazing experience that I’m really grateful for, although I’m not going to lie and say that it wasn’t nice to come back to the constant Internet of the house.

I’m now at home for about four days and then I’m leaving for my first Rotary bus trip. I’m really grateful for these experiences and I think that it’s times like these that I’m going to remember years from now, looking back on this incredible time in my life.