life...

I'm watching Aussie songs on Youtube... Khe Sahn! Run to Paradise! Reminds me of deb balls.

France is going really well. Not too much has been happening, just good old school. I got the german teacher to teach us 99 Red Balloons, which is exciting. Only 6 days left until holidays! There's another Rotary weekend and I'll hopefully be seeing les chateaux de la Loire. Lots of pretty castles!

I love pasta. Went to the pasta shop the other day. The lady got chatting and I found out she was an ex Rotary exchange student. It's always exciting to meet people who've been on exchange. This was one of those ladies who knows the whole town... she knew that my little host brother had bought carbonara pasta three times in the last week.

I should go to sleep now. School tomorrow... yawn. I may possibly fall asleep in philosphy again. Actually it's really interesting at the moment, we just started language. Since I want to do linguistics this is good.

Goodnight!

Frogs

As you can see, I'm super cool. These super attractive glasses got broken at Morgane's party...
Exchangies are cool.
Check out the brilliant Aussies of 1690 and our fabulous blazers...
GREEN TEAM DREAM TEAM.

Today we had a fire evacuation drill in the rain.

Convenient!

School has taken up its rhythm... sigh. I do like it but getting 14/20 in English is somewhat discouraging when it's my native language. Philosophy is getting harder and harder to understand. 'Je vois des chapeaux et des manteaux...' Thanks, Descartes and Merleau Ponty.

Yes, I'm aware that my blog writing is turning into some kind of strange abstract thing. I blame school.

The other weekend we had our first Rotary meeting with all the exchangies from this district. The newbies are seriously cool, I love them all already and am kind of cut to be leaving in less than three months. Yeah, I'm looking forward to seeing everyone in Australia and eating Mee Goreng noodles but there's so much here that I'll be leaving behind! Never realised it was going to be quite like this.

However, I'm going to make the most of the rest of my time here.

Regular week.

The cleaning lady came into my room. I can tell because EVERY SINGLE OBJECT IS PERFECTLY NEATLY ARRANGED IN ANALLY STRAIGHT LINES. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate having a clean room, but she really didn't need to arrange the three bobby pins that I left on my bedroom table perpendicularly. The stack of magazines is now nice and straight. My souvenir can of Foster's is aligned with the purple cup. My camera charger's cable is neatly rolled. My glasses and sunglasses are next to each other, facing the same way.

I assume she has too much time on her hands.

This morning I had toast for breakfast.

I have a lot of homework and feel like I should actually do it but really would prefer to stay in bed all day. The teachers consider me like a normal student - the philosophy teacher even asked me to read some of Freud's writing out loud. I shook my head.
'Why don't you want to read, Holly?'
Obvious answer! ACCENT. But I just said 'because' and he was satisfied. Marion read, and she reads well.
Now we have an essay to write. Apparently I have to find a paradox in one of the questions 'Does one choose one's friends?' or 'Is there an object of desire?'
Both of these questions seem a bit... hmm.

I had a good couple of weeks hanging out with the Finnish girls, Emma and Katariina. They're leaving this weekend!

Insurance is not an appealing thing to occupy myself with. I really should go and see the blood test people. Ninety euros just to find out that I'm O+. I can take anyone's blood but only other O plussers can take mine. I feel a bit selfish really! Does one choose one's blood group? The answer is no.

Busbusbus.

Changement de famille

Well, here I am in my 4th family in seven months. The Penavyres.
The two parents are really nice. It's their second marriage so it's a kind of Brady Bunch... he has two sons and a daughter, she has two daughters.
The house is HUGE and so is my room. I've taken over the room of one of the sons who I've never met. He's twenty and collects lighters. There are HUNDREDS in the bedroom. I must post a photo. The other son is Edouard, who is turning eleven on Friday. He likes cats and rugby and Renan Luce... we spent a couple of hours together this afternoon. I'm less scared of little boys now. He tried to impress me by jumping down seven stairs at a time.
Two of the girls are called Charlotte, and one of them is at home now. She's 20, really nice, cool bedroom. The other girl is in some other country - she seems to spend her life overseas. She even lived in Australia.

Today I thought I'd lost my phone for a few hours. Turns out it was just hidden in one of my school folders, and kept hiding until I got my literature homework out. I think they're actually expecting me to do homework this year... damn. I already summarised each scene of Romeo and Juliet in year 10! Why should I do it again now?

It's really cool having other exchange students here, even if they're not staying very long. I made friends with some Finnish girls, Emma and Katariina. Trop cool. There are also two Germans who both seem to be rather shy. But still! I'm not the only foreign person!

There was a really weird man on the bus the other day, yelling at the kids up the back about the dangers of alcohol. It didn't look like he took his own advice.

Languages are cool.

School's in

The new school year has officially started. Yay! I wasn't looking forward to it, and the first day wasn't promising, but today was actually really good. My class consists of about 26 girls I don't know, three boys I don't know, and Marion. Marion and I both changed from the science to the literary stream so we're clinging to each other in this ocean of novelty. Neither of us are missing physics and we're both loving philosophy. It's seriously interesting. Maths seems relatively possible, and the history program looks good. We had a history test to divide the class into three groups... don't think I'll be in the best group. The teacher thought I was ridiculous for guessing that JFK's middle name was Francis. It's Fitzgerald, for future reference. And IDH stands for indice de developpment humain.

SUMMER

Well, my first French summer is just about over and I figure I probably should blog about it. So, let's go in chronological order.

Le Bateau Albina

Inside of boat with Anastastia, 15 year old host sister

Here is the boat that I went cruising in with the Giambiasi family for the first half of July. It's a 15 metre long Jeanneau 46 with three rooms and things like that. I'm not too much of a technical boat master myself but it's a nice boat. Motor, goes really fast... Yes.

We went from La Rochelle to Brest, stopping on the way at the Ile d'Yeu and Concarneau. It would have been more pleasant if the weather hadn't have been cold and grey but it was still pretty cool to be on a boat. Novelty!

Our cabin

Coming into the bay in Brest

Once we had arrived in Brest, we went to the Maritime Festival... thousands of gorgeous boats everywhere! There was one huge Russian boat that Anastasia in particular loved, seeing as her mother is Russian and she could eavesdrop on the conversations of the russian sailors...

Anastasia and I

Part of the Russian boat during a light show...

The pretty Brittany coastline

Halfway through the boat trip I returned to Rochefort so I could go on the Atlantic Youth Rotary Meeting with all my southern hemisphere buddies in the south west of France. It was pretty awesome, we're like a little family...

Me at Marqueze, an old style Landais village

A Beach

We were rowed about on a lake

And much wholesome family fun was had by all.

The trip ended up more dramatic than we expected with a car accident in the Pyrenees. The driver managed to make the car flip over while asleep at the wheel. Although Maree from New Zealand was taken in a helicopter to hospital which was pretty damn scary, we thought she had spinal injuries, she's okay now. The driver and the passenger were both fine. Personally I broke a little bone, the 4th Metacarpal in my left hand. Little bone needed operation so now I've got 4 screws and a metal plate, as well as a cool story about an ambulance ride and hospitalisation in France.

A dodgy photo of the xrays from the day of the operation. The white blobs are the plastic thing that I have instead of a plaster.

Since coming back to Rochefort, I've spent the month of August doing not much... there was the operation, then I went with my host family to their holiday house in Fouras, a nearby small town on the beach. It was good, if not just a little bit slighty boring... I passed the days reading Enid Blyton books and playing Brain Training on the Nintendo DS (my brain is 22 years old). The nights were spent hanging with my host sister Marie Charlotte and her friends, which was sometimes great fun and sometimes booo-ring. Depended on who we were with.

Lea and Marie Charlotte waiting for the train

Karena and I on this train

Bensimons, France's favourite tennis shoes...

So there's a really short and incomplete summEry. School goes back in a week's time... not the thing I'm most looking forward to!

Lots of love to everyone, looking forward to seeing you all when I come back in only 4 months!

Look, I'm wearing a hippy costume!

Yep. Voila me and Cecile at a par-tay. We're having another one tonight, and there are 16 bot

tles of chamapgne in the frigo. This is because Cecile got AWESOME marks for her 'bac', like the VCE, and also she's going to Mexico. Good luck Cilou!