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Update time! The Swedish are long gone now, but it was a great week. Spoke ENGLISH... they really are amazingly good at their second language, the Swedes. They were all cool, and we went to an Aquarium! Luckily I knew the Swedish word for fish so I could understand half their conversations. Unfortunately I can't go to Sweden on the exchange with my class... I was disappointed.
There's me wearing my disappointed accesories/expression. I suppose I save 400€ and get a week of no school. Still... Sweden! I could have seen Swedish things!

So lately I've... been to school. That's about it. The maths teacher expects me to understand when he explains things. 'What is it that you don't understand, Holly?'
'Well, um... maths?'
Yeah. He also expects me to do the tests. Luckily none of the other teachers do, so it's a-o-k. This year doesn't count hurrah. Only two weeks of school left until the next holidays. Monday is a public holiday for Easter... but Good Friday (which was yesterday) isn't! There were easter eggs with lunch but I have not seen one single hot cross bun in France. I'm looking forward to hiding bunnies in the garden tomorrow... then eating them. As well as bunnies; the Easter bell is popular here. Yep, the easter bell.
Regard the easter bells next to the gold rabbits.

There's a lack of Cadbury here... but here's the first Cadbury product I found in France!

Luxury cookies! They were good. Also ate some Cadbury Fingers with Rachel. Sorry for making horrible jokes about fingers, Rachel! Really.

Here is a cat with two different coloured eyes. It was on an island that we went to.

Here is a car the same as Claire's Dad's. I was excited...
Here's Léa's favourite new hat. Un ananas.

There are my current host parents, Christophe and Isabelle.

There's Marie Charlotte wearing my sunnies, which the French love. Score!
Here's one of the two cats. Osiris. He's pretttty cool.

The local rope factory (now a museum) calles La Corderie Royale. When the French people in my class tried to translate the name into English, they called it The Royal String Factory. Hahaha string. Large string. The factory is really long so they could make long rope. Why not just fold it?

http://viewmorepics.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewPicture&friendID=35715766&albumId=10064

There are my myspace pictures. Look at them! If the link works that is. Try myspace.com/endocringe if not.

Tonight I'm going to a party... my first French one. They just don't have parties like us. Maybe in summer... who knows.

Lots of love from olly.

Today was awesome.

Yeah, like the title says, I'm enjoying myself like a fish in lemonade. Today, as usual, I went to school and really wanted to sleep in French class. I have not read the book they keep talking about and am really not interested in the pluperfect tenses used to raconter l'histoire of the main characters.

The day got better after French class. Went to McDonalds for lunch with a few French friends and saw some teachers there, was pretty hilarious. It was like we were cathcing them doing something naughty. 'We don't usually eat like this, promise!' I managed to spend double the Australian price on a McChicken meal, because French Maccas is crazy expensive. In fact France in general is expensive.

After lunch, the most exciting thing happened... the Swedish exchange students arrived! There are about thirty of them and they're here for a week. It's pretty cool because the Swedish don't speak French, and the French don't speak Swedish, so I've spent the last few hours speaking English! Also eating delicious afternoon tea consisting of bun things with melted nutella inside... oh my god goooood. The Swedish girls were all like 'The food is so fatty! I am a step class instructor!' Yeah, one of them has her own step class at the gym. So yeah, this week instead of normal classes we're doing a bunch of excursions, like the aquarium and an island. And it's all in English!

Funny thing about France... I don't suck at sport here! In Australia I'm generally the worst in the class, but here I'm average. It's bizzare actually enjoying sport, but there you go.

In other news, my host Mum's 'liste' is through to the second round of town council elections. On Sunday I got the riveting opportunity to watch the votes being counted one by one at the polling booth, then go and celebrate in a cold room with really nice bread. It was good. There is another election this Sunday between the two teams who got the most votes. Therefore my host parents are absent at campaign meetings etc most nights, and since Marie Charlotte is in Germany, me and Léa get to cook dinner together.

About Léa: She is awesome. She buys me things, like lollies, postcards and a scarf. And a Kinder Surprise. I've never met a more thoughtful almost 12 year old. The scarf is so cool that I will post a photo. One day.

Fin.

Il y a un mois!

Yep, today I have been here a month. The time has definitely flown! In Australia a month is like a year. The months here in France are more like a week. I can tell 2008 will be gone in no time.

This week I have spent a lot of time on the bus. It comes in the morning at 7.37, or 8.26 depending on what time my first class is. I say to the bus driver 'bonjour! un ticket, s'il vous plait', give him (or her) some money and a ticket comes out of the machine. Today I got a bus card, so no more tickets for me - I just show the card with my photo on it and then scan it on the scanny machine. Yeah, the bus. It's pretty cool. Actually compared to outside the bus is warm. It has been freezing here this week! It basically snowed during recess time. Well, it wasn't exactly snow, but there was frozen water falling from the sky. I was very impressed. And cold.

School is pretty cool. The people in my class are so nice! Ok, so none of them really make an effort to talk to me, but when they do, they're cool! On Tuesday some Swedish students are coming to stay for a week, which is exciting for me because they don't speak French, just Swedish and English! It'll be sweet. Maybe they will sit in physics and be baffled like me. I decided that instead of attempting to understand what the class is doing, I'm just going to read the textbook and try and figure out what a force actually is.

- VECTEUR VITESSE D'UN POINT DU
SOLIDE.
1-1 Notion de référentiel.
· Considérons une mouche,
assimilable à un point, qui reste "collée" au plafond d'une voiture qui avance
sur une route rectiligne horizontale à la vitesse constante V = 20 m/s.
- La
trajectoire de la mouche par rapport au solide Terre est une droite. Par rapport
à la Terre, le vecteur vitesse de la mouche est constant, sa norme a pour valeur
V = 20 m/s.
- La trajectoire de la mouche par rapport au solide voiture est
un point immobile. Par rapport au solide voiture la vitesse de la mouche est V'
= 0 m/s puisqu'elle reste "collée" au plafond.
Cet exemple montre qu'il faut
toujours préciser le référentiel par rapport auquel on étudie le mouvement d'un
mobile.
Remarque : Si la mouche se met à voler dans la voiture son
mouvement par rapport au référentiel "Terre" sera très différent de son
mouvement par rapport au référentiel "voiture".

Yeah, that's physics! The maths is similar. And the chemistry. I love history though, it's funny because we have two different history teachers, one who teaches in English and one in French... sometimes they teach us the same things which is amusing. The english history teacher is hilarious because yeah. His accent. Ahahaha. The French one reminds me of Mr McCarthy because he is cool. He's everyone's favourite.

Today we had an English test. I hope I aced it... I think my story was actually really boring because I can't help using simple english lately. The other kids in the class write better stuff than the year 11s at my school. They're seriously good at English, and they do two other languages as well! I skip Spanish classes but I do German... it's a bit crazy, yeah. I can now tell the time in German. Es is halb elf.

My host sister Marie Charlotte is currently in Germany. Talked to her on the phone today. She's looking forward to seeing kangaroos and koalas at the zoo tomorrow. Ha! She loves them. She's pretty awesome.

Oh, today we went to visit the grandparents who live in a little nearby town called Fouras. It is extremely beautiful with a gorgeous beach and also a large castle. Less than 5 000 people live there but in summer the population goes up to 20 000. There are all these cute little pizza shops and bakeries and french things! Yeah!

Today we ate duck for dinner. I'm not the world's biggest fan... yet. I do find myself liking different things here. I like licorice and blue cheese now, and I prefer dark chocolate. Weird... probably won't last long.

Ok, I'm off to bed. Will post some photos in the future!

Love from holly.

Trés bien!

Ok, so I've been in France for three weeks. I suppose a blog is a good idea so I'll never have to send out group emails... yeah. How bout I start with everything I've done since I left 24 days ago? That'll be fun.

Well, on the sixth of Feb we made the trip to Melbourne Airport for the flight out. It was pretty damn exciting - you'd think you'd cry, leaving everything and everyone you know behind for a year, but none of us did... too much adrenaline I suppose. The worst bit was my 36 kilo luggage! I'm a fool, yeah... I really didn't think it'd be 36 kilos. I was pretty lucky they let me through!

Awesome Aidan and Krafty Claire came to see me off at the airport, as well as my family.
Here they are pictured in an Irish pub situated conveniently in the international departures lounge. Hmm.

So, we walked through that departure door and oh my god, it was time to go. The flight to Bangkok was a looonnnggg nine hours, but at least we had those personal TVs... gotta love 'em. I played poker on mine and watched Hairspray in french as well as a movie called Ensemble, C'est Tout, which I highly recommend.

We arrived in Bangkok at some really early time and walked into the extreme humidity! Was pretty crazy. We checked into our hotel which was quite niiice. I managed a whole two hours sleep. Here's the view from the hotel room window. Sorry it's sideways, I can't work out how to rotate photos on this thing. There was a bar in that pool which I found pretty cool... didn't actually go in cos I forgot my bathers!

At midnight, it was time to go to Paris! We were all as excited as fish and the twelve hour flight went really quickly. In Paris, we had to part! I was sad. Got to hang with Charlotte for a while cos her host mum got the flight time wrong and didn't turn up. Could have been a disaster but it turned out fine. I took my flight to Bordeaux, all by myself, sitting next to an old Spanish man who used to be a PE teacher and was obsessed with rugby. Luckily that flight was only an hour long. It was daytime so I saw the Eiffel Tower from the plane! Well, I found it exciting.

Alain from my Rotary club came to pick me up from the airport and took me to lunch at a portugese restaurant... it was awesome. He told me alll about the different kinds of cars in France and also the speed limits. One of my favourite topics of conversation, personally. It was in English though, and he told blonde jokes which was hilarious.

Next I arrived at my first host family! When I arrived, only 11 year old Léa was home. She's the coolest girl in the world - you can see her dancing the Tecktonik which is immensely popular in France. Look up the video clip for Alive by Mondotek. I love it!

Yeah, so, Léa showed me around the house, offered me some champagne. I had water. The house is really nice. It's big and has lots of phones and is kind of a terrace house and here's the view from my window:

and also the cat on my bed. I love the big European square pillows. Sorry, these photos are sideways as well... I don't have the software for my camera and the computer is in French!

My host mum arrived home next - she's really nice and never cooks anything with avocado in it. After her, Marie Charlotte, my other host sister, got home. She's gorgeous and really cool. I think I spent a lot of that night in my room, tired to the extreme after being awake for sixty or so hours, except for a few naps. My host father got home and gave me a giant Australian flag which was nice of him.

On my first day here we drove to see the sea. It's really nice but of course it's winter so no beach for me!

The best part is the boats. There are also some really pretty islands around here which I can't wait to go to one day.

I happened to arrive on the very last day of term, so my first two weeks here were school holidays. That sounds good but I actually got pretty bored by the end of it because we did a lot of staying at home. I did go out with Marie Charlotte and her friends a few times, that was good cos I got to meet people. Unfortunately a lot of them were boys with bikes and cigarettes who thought they were really cool... yeah. One day we started playing basketball with a stranger, that was fun.

That's Marie Charlotte, my host sister. She has relatively good taste in music, except for Simple Plan.

In my first week here we went with some friends to La Rochelle, a gorgeous nearby town. I bought the best black trench coat (only 50 €!) and a cute purse. We met up with an american guy called William and it was so nice to speak english! My french struggles.

La Rochelle is pretty pretty. Go there.

In the next week of the holidays I did not much. Lots of phone calls and emails and msn and myspace and even letters & postcards... was good. I did almost order raw meat at a restaurant, that could have been a disaster. It's served with a raw egg - I know cos my host mother ate it. Eew! Luckily the food in general here is pretty good. Like, normally I hate paté and blue cheese but here they're ok! The bread is of course great, and the desserts and the everything.

School started on Monday but my first day was Wednesday. I have good subjects: french, advanced english, maths, physics/chem, history/geography (half in english cos my class is so smart!) biology, german and PE. They're all pretty damn difficult, especially maths and physics. And German. Luckily my class isn't too crash hot in German so I might learn something. There are really nice people in my class so that's good... if only the food at school wasn't so revolting. They served us sauerkraut! Eeeeew.

So, that's my last three weeks made short. Well not that short, but I probably could have written a novel. Thanks for listening... à bientôt! Bisous!