Honestly, Now

Cue startling revelation: (why did God invent denial?)

I made it through the first month.

I made it through the first month.

Read it again.

Read it again. You're not thrilled enough.

In celebration, I've had a rotten day and the heavens have opened to pour water down upon the earth in what I can only surmise is nature's way of laughing at me.

Well, you can't have everything.

In a tangent completely unrelated to happiness of any kind, I could begin mentioning school now. Mind you, this is going to sound a lot more interesting than in actually is. I wish my life was as cool and neatly compressed as my blogs are. You read through them and I sound like some sort of French-American superhero. Battling culture shock, one villainous emotion at a time!

(Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Oh. Um. Yeah, it's a plane. Nevermind.)

Anyway, school.

I suppose the first thing I should mention is that no matter how much sense it doesn't make to you, it's even worse for me. The exchange students here sort of have a motto: "Just go with it." You're not going to understand it right now, if at all, but you'll probably have a blast doing whatever it is. If it's not illegal, that is.

So the first event that springs to mind is how my entire class, boys included, ended up in the girls' bathroom. There's a story to go along with this, I promise.

So what happened was this: yesterday there was a strike. A big, fat, whole-country kind of strike. Naturally, everyone in my high school loves it whe this happens. About half my class was "on strike" themselves, but the half and I attended most of our classes that morning, with the exception of French class, which, as luck would have it, combined with our free periods at 1 to give us a three hour lunch. (I went down to the bakery with some friends and bought cheese pizza. So doing that again soon.)

Naturally, none of us wanted to stay for the afternoon, but our math teacher wasn't on strike, and we were obliged to stay. After math, a few kids went down to the office to ask if we had our next class, TPE, after the free period we were on at the moment, and they told us yes. Cue collective groan. (That class starts at 4 and goes until 6. Yuck.)

So, being the good kids that we are, we dutifully stuck around until the class was supposed to start. Then we waited in the hallway. And waited. And waited. Finally we all decided that enough was enough, and everybody was just going to go home. This worked out splendidly until we got outside, stopped to say goodbye and talk for a little bit, and saw our teacher walk out the front doors. Before he could see us, the twelve or so members of my class that were still there crammed ourselves into a stairwell that has a door leading to the outside. We booked it up the stairs and ran out onto the second floor, then quickly hid ourselves in the first bathroom we saw, and closed the door. After about five minutes of waiting, we decided it was safe, and snuck our way down the stairs, checking around every corner and looking through every window. The second we got outside, everyone broke out into a run to their bus stop.

And nobody thought it was at all strange.

-.:.-.:.-.:.-.:.-.:.-.:.-.:.-

It's tomorrow, and I've had an even rotten-er day. (Proper spelling and grammar have no place in my mind today.)

So, it's medical. And if you're squeamish, go away. Seriously. Go away.

I had this bump on my toe, which turned out to be a wart (which takes its place as number three on my list of totally gross words). It hurt like crazy, to the point where I was starting to develop a limp so I wouldn't have to walk on it. So, I finally pulled up the courage to tell my host family about it, and we went to the doctor this morning. He took care of it, and can I just say OW. I can safely tell you it will take a broken bone to force me back into that room.

The ending to it all is that I'm lying in bed cursing my misfortune and my body's inability to stay whole and healthy. My toe is throbbing, and I have a newfound respect for chemistry and why my teacher always told us not to let the chemicals touch our skin. Unless, apparently, you've got a PhD. But seriously, not doing that again without either anesthetic or alcohol (which I'm assuming from books and movies preform the same general function.)...

Oh, and I'm not walking anywhere any time soon. Hopefully this will get in the way of my school plans? (Not likely. Irony hates me.)

The Sound of One Hand Clapping

It's been a whole month since I left home.

In honor of this terrifying event, I've decided to answer a question every single one of you (Yes, you're all guilty.) has asked me at least a few times.

"How do you feel?"

There is, of course, a reason for my requiring an entire blog post to explain the simple matter of feelings. (Other than my melodramatic side being perfected by my current location.) There's no possible word in either of the two languages I'm able to manage that describes even half of my current feelings.

I'm afraid you're just going to have to settle for a lot of little words that describe pieces of it. Sorry. ("Aw, we have to read a whole blog post from a kid in France! Gosh darn it.")

Buckle your seatbelt. Most of these emotions are not at all pleasant.

The first feeling that I have here in France is (obviously) curiosity. Believe it or not, I didn't come here for nothing, or to get away from Washington for a year. I came here because I was curious about the language, the people, and the culture. I came here because I wanted to learn things, I wanted to learn the language. There's a reason I'm here.

The second feeling directly contradicts the first (of course, because what's life without a little conflict?): homesickness. I want to go home more than I can possibly say. I want to go back to where people speak my language and understand me when I speak. I want to go back to the place my friends and family are. I want my mom and dad worse than a fourth grader faced with summer camp. Every single thing here reminds me of home, because it's not home.

The third feeling ties in: guilt. I am here for a reason. I'm wasting my time whining when I could be spending it having an excellent time. This is a new country, a new experience. Hundreds of kids would die to be able to be in my place. What am I doing being such a baby when I'm so lucky?

The fourth feeling is uncertainty. I'm not sure of myself here. Every basic assumption I've ever had needs to be rethought and redefined. Am I a part of the family, or am I a guest? Am I reacting well in a situation, or am I showing my ignorance? Did the teacher just ask me a question? What did that girl just say to me? What is the teacher talking about? I don't know how to move or act in any given situation.

Next. Exhaustion. Speaking a different language for a good portion of your day is tiring. Having to rethink everything is tiring. Having to act like someone you're not for a whole day is tiring. Having to be around dozens of people at school and then six other people at home when you're an introvert is tiring. Doing all those things at once while battling chronic homesickness and culture shock is absolutely exhausting, and it's really no surprise that I fall asleep the second my head hits the pillow nowadays.

After that comes denial. The catch-all, denial is, and it's hard to squash. You never know what you're going to not believe next. Nothing has really sunk in yet. In Europe? Nah. Not going to see my parents or friends for a year? Yeah right. Nine months to go? Pull the other one. There's absolutely no limits to what your brain with block from your consciousness.

There are probably more I'm not thinking of. There probably always will be. It's very hard to put this feeling into words. But I suppose you can fit it into at least two:

"Exchange Student"

~Josie

The Photos You've All Been Waiting For.

Pay close attention, people, because I'm not going to say this again:

Pictures taken of me will never ever look good. Never. I am UNphotogenic.

This was at the orientation. The end of it, more precisely. The morning after the last sleep I got for a very long time.

The first meal I ate in France. Okay, well, to be fair, the first meal I ate out of America. We were somewhere around Spain at the time.

The REAL first meal I ate in France. I can see how utterly shocked you all are.

Some pictures of my room that I took only a few days after arriving.

A good example of what the houses look like here. This is the view from our porch.

The beach. I told you it was cliché. I want to go back...

Yeah. Really are no words for this one.

Okay, so I'm being yelled at to go to bed, and these pictures take years to upload, so we'll save the rest for another time. I've put up all the good ones anyway.

~Josie

The Art of Eating

I'm updating this way too often, but something tells me that none of you really care. So, my bad habit will continue. Onward.

This won't be a very long post, but I have to tell about one of the most essential parts of French culture before it becomes habit and I forget how strange it all is:

Food.

Now, the American definition of food is radically complicated. You can be a vegan, a vegetarian, allergic to milk or peanuts, a meat-lover, someone who doesn't eat sugar, someone who doesn't eat fat, someone who doesn't eat any number of things. First real difference in French culture: if they have cooked it, you will eat it. 

This isn't to say that the French aren't sensitive to other peoples' diets; they are, incredibly so. When I got here, my host parents both bugged me endlessly for a list of things I liked and didn't like food-wise. When no list was forthcoming, my host mother began making French Fries four times a week, reverting back to her (slightly stereotypical) assumed knowledge of American cuisine. They do, however, bring an image to mind (with startling clarity) of some black and white television program from when my parents were children, the father vehemently stating that little Johnny was going to eat at least a little bit of everything and "you're going to like it." If your mother has been so incredibly kind as to cook something for the family, you will at least try a bit of everything on the table, even if you don't like it.

The second culture divide concerning food came about when my host mother expressed some concern over the quantity of food I was eating (or not eating) at meals. (It's a travel thing, and also a bit of a culture shock thing that I'm still trying to get over: my appetite is about half of what it was in the United States, and that's better than last week.) Worriedly heaping what I considered to be way too much food onto my plate, insisting she was giving me a "smaller serving", she then proceeded to serve my host sister, by piling enough pasta on her plate that it looked like the serving dish for the whole dinner. Keep in mind, this was just the first course. My host sister is twelve. She ate it all, and went on to have two steaks. Suddenly my "smaller portion" was a godsend.

Since then, I have managed to convince my host mother that even if my appetite were back to normal, I would never be able to eat the monstrous amounts they consider normal here, and that I would like an even smaller portion that what she was giving me. She's now reverted to giving me portions so "small" she's worrying that she's starving me, and I still leave the table feeling uncomfortably full.

The third cultural difference is both wonderful and annoying. Lunch and Dinner are always eaten with the family, with the exception of school lunches on any day but Wednesday, when you get out at noon anyway and should promptly make your way home for lunch. Last Saturday, I was feeling exhausted from having such a busy week, and made the mistake of asking my host mother if I could stay at home and sleep instead of going to a late-night fair with the family. She blinked, confused, and told me that the family was going to have dinner at the fair. For her, this settled the matter. Being tired and unable to think clearly, I asked her why I couldn't just stay at home and eat a bowl of cereal, something that would definitely have been an option in America. She looked scandalized. (I went to the fair.)

However, having lunch and dinner with the family is a definite way to improve my language skills. It's also helping me feel more like part of the family, even more so now that I can understand more of their jokes and I'm not feeling quite so incredibly stressed out from all the traveling I did to get here. Also, French food is usually something you don't want to miss. Which brings me to my next cultural difference...

The food here is like nothing you've ever seen before. When I got here, I don't know what I was expecting. Gourmet something, maybe, small portions, twelve courses, and some sort of unidentifiable fancy sauce in little zigzag patterns all over square plates. (Like I said to my parents in San Francisco: "You just have to admit that square plates make everything look ten times fancier.")

What I got was something unbelievably better. At least in the south of France (I'm not even going to try and speak for the other parts, you might as well apply this disclaimer to everything I say on this blog), home cooking is one part amazing cooking, one part fancy, and three parts comfort food. Everything you eat here would be typical comfort food, I imagine, for a French person. It's what we Americans like to classify as "Good 'Ol Southern Home Cookin'", only less absolutely disgusting looking to the average non-southern person. Chicken, fish, pork, any kind of meat at all, but always made into the most delicious recipe possible. The only thing that breaks this rule is the pasta, which is absolutely tasteless because they never make any sort of sauce to go with it. You just sprinkle cheese over it. (I really should have expected this, but in reality nobody in my family eats all that much cheese.)

I also have found the most delicious non-dessert food item in the universe: baguette sandwiches. It doesn't matter what kind of meat it is, it can be anything you like, but it will ALWAYS be delicious. This bread is going to be hard to live without when I go back to America. (Fun Fact: It's completely normal to see a little old lady walk down the street with at least seven baguettes in her basket. It's also acceptable for my family of seven to go through nine baguettes in one day.)

The best dessert-item, though, also hails from France: it's called a pain au chocolat. Pahn oh shakolah. It's essentially a croissant, which are already delicious here in France, and it's also filled with chocolate. I have to get the recipe for these things. It's one of those foods where, once you've had it, you will never be able to go without it for the rest of your life. On extremely lucky days, there's a big bowl on the table at breakfast, covered with a paper towel, and when you lift up the towel, there are nine or ten pain au chocolat waiting for you. It's delicious.

So I'm kind of finding myself wondering why I'm missing the food at home so much.

~Josie Harris

So.

So, I'm actually starting to think at some point in this year, I might understand a full sentence. That would be an amazing change.

My French is getting better everyday, but that isn't really saying much, since it started out at "incredibly useless" and has since worked itself up to "speak slowly, and you have a 10% chance of being understood"...not to say that my French classes at school were in any way useless to me, because they weren't: they were great, in fact. However, the fact remains that you can take as many classes as you want, and you'll never be able to understand a language the way it's supposed to be understood. Big shock to my system, when I got here? You bet.

I've spent a lot of my time here adjusting to my host family. Coming from a family of three to a family of seven is understandably tough. So is having a little brother. (He can be adorable when he wants to be, which I think is the only thing keeping me from throttling him most of the time.) I like all of my sisters, though, which is great. I would hate to have disputes with them so early on, especially since we see so much of each other from day to day.

But enough with the boring stuff. Nobody cares about my relationships with people or my language skills, on to the fun facts!

Fun Fact 1: The keyboards here are ridiculous. (Every book about culture shock ever written is now screaming at me to rephrase that sentence positively.) Instead of the wonderful QWERTY system, they have an AZERTY system, which means that the W, the A, the Z, the M, and every punctuation mark ever are in the wrong place. Its amazing trying to type. Every time you want to use an A, a Q comes out instead.

Fun Fact 2: The Simpsons is translated into French and is officially the most popular television program among my family. It's actually easier to understand in French because I don't have to follow all the ridiculous political jokes. Also translated: Bones, House M.D., a few game shows...

Fun Fact 3: Weather doesn't always behave. I'm nearly sure I've mentioned this before, but the weather here can go from sweltering-hot-I'm-gonna-die to hurricane weather in an instant. It's crazy and great, since nobody here has air conditioning. Trust me, the wind blasting through your window is the only thing that keeps you sane some days. I am happy to admit, however, that it has officially gotten too cold in the nights to leave your window open. This is great, because it means that if you leave your window open in the evenings, you can close it at night, and not get too hot. I was getting so sick of waking up with millions of mosquito bites all over me.

Fun Fact 4: Today is September 11th. I wore an American Flag bandanna around my wrist the whole day. This prompted several question from my host family.....awkward questions from them. Yeah.

About time to go, now. I seriously need to make this headache go away...

~Josie Harris

Where Are We Going?

I just had my first day of school today.

Sorry for the post so soon after the last one, but I think the first day of school is something that needs to be written down.

So. School.

It's incredibly different. Now, I want you to go to your dictionary and look up the word "incredibly", and then look up the word "italics", because there's no way you're going to understand what I mean without me there to add the appropriate tone of voice. I was so lost the whole day.

In the useless hope of saving this train-wreck of a blog post, I'm going to go in linear order. Please keep arms and legs inside the train of imagination at all times and refrain from pointing out grammatical mistakes. Thank you.

The day started out with me nearly falling out of bed, having been woken up by my host sister's old alarm clock, which makes a noise I've never heard on this earth. A quick shower (to rid my hair of the last of the sea salt) and a tiny breakfast, and my host mom and I were off along the streets of Orange to get to the bus station and try to figure out how to be at the right stop at the right time. (Eventually we just went in the same direction every other teenager there was going. It worked.)

It took me all of five minutes by bus to get to the right stop. Another five minutes, and I was at the school. Five minutes after that, I was at the right room number. Ten minutes more, and the door finally opened and we were allowed out of the sweltering hallway. (Seriously. No air conditioning, tiny hallway, a million teenagers crammed in. It was boiling.)

My first class of the day was French. I spent most of the two hours I was in that room trying to pick up a couple words here and there. My dictionary was glued to my hand, I must have looked so studious, but in reality I was just trying not to get trampled in a stampede of French. At the end, we had a ten minute break, and I stood around looking like an idiot.

After that, I had History/Geography. It was mostly Geography. The teacher is absolutely terrifying, the kind that will take absolutely no fuss and expects you to live up to your "potential", whatever that is. We spent an hour talking about Europe and why it's the most awesome of all the six continents. (No, it's not a mistake, I mean six. Apparently North America isn't cool enough to be its own continent: it has to share a room with South America. Tough luck.)

Then. Okay. This is the best part. Then....I had lunch. Now, think about your own school lunches. Or think back to them. They were probably the same level of nastiness we have now. Maybe a salad, some sort of unidentifiable meat, a dinner roll that's either rock hard or tasteless, and all of it is absolutely disgusting.

French school lunches aren't like that. At all.

French school lunches are three-course meals.

I wasn't prepared for this at all. You get a tray, reach into a little bucket for as much bread as you want, and go down the lunch line until your tray heaps with restaurant quality food. We're talking some sort of fancy-looking appetizer, a main dish, and a dessert. And when I say that, I'm not kidding. The main course today was grilled chicken with a side of pasta with some sort of really delicious sauce. For dessert, there was a dark chocolate cheesecake with raspberry jam. I felt like a princess. (The rest of the kids were complaining about how much they hate the lunchroom, I told them about American lunches and they shut up pretty quick. I think they were horrified.)

So, that was lunch.

After that, I had cinéma. Or, at least, I was supposed to. Instead, I had a free period, because my teacher was on strike. Then I had another free period, because he was still on strike. Then I had another free period. I had three hours of cinéma today, and I attended none of them. Tomorrow, my French teacher is on strike. I spent those three hours reading Harry Potter in French, and I'm incredibly proud to say that I've now made it to Chapter 3. I this is the way French school goes, I'm really going to like it here.

Of course, not to leave anything out, the second I got home I had a mental breakdown. I'm afraid it was too much French at once for my brain to handle, and it shut down and started only responding to English. My host mother asked me if I was tired when I got home and I couldn't understand her. (This is something both she and everyone else have asked me a million times.) But there's something incredibly calming about reading A Study in Scarlet in English for a couple hours, and I'm over it now.

Fun fact: I understood every single thing at dinner tonight.

~Josie Harris

Turn Left at the Castle

I love how in this part of the country, you can go down to spend the day at a beach on the Mediterranean Sea, and on the way back home you can get out of the car and stretch your legs walking on the Pont Du Gard.

(Guess what I did today.)

Every movie you've ever seen with a beach in it was probably modeled after the one we went to today.  Sandy yellow-white beach, beautiful crisp blue water, gentle waves, seashells everywhere you looked. I must have collected about a million of them. It was so wonderful. The only thing I didn't like about that whole place was that every time you moved, you got sand in a new place on your body, and that stuff stuck to human skin like glue.

Anyway.

It was two hours down to the beach by car, and in my utter boredom, I think I've discovered the single most irritating thing about France. (I'm such a pessimist, I swear I like it here.) As you're going down the road, signs jump out at you from every (Every. Not kidding.) angle possible. Most of them make no sense to me, being an American. Every so often, a sign with come up with a town's name slashed out. This means that you've just left town "so-and-so". But here's the thing: after that sign, there's absolutely nothing telling you what town you're in now. The only time there's any indication of your location is three seconds after it becomes completely irrelevant. I thought I was going to go crazy.

But, um, on to other topics.

I'd just like to make it clear that my host family is incredible. I don't think I could have gotten a better deal if I had searched myself. They're incredibly kind and wonderful, and for the sake of their privacy I won't talk much about them except when it's relevant, but I'm going to put it out here that I absolutely adore them. Just so you know. Even when I whine, I still love them.

So.

I went to my school orientation on Friday. You can see a picture of it in the dictionary, right under the word "intimidating". It was bad. I understood almost nothing, and not a complete sentence to boot. All I can say is that I'm so grateful that my host mom and sister were there taking notes and trying to help me, or I wouldn't have gotten anything done. On the other hand, I do have my schedule now. Which I'll write down.

Monday:
8-10 French
10-12 History
12-1 LUNCH
1-4 Cinema (I have no idea.)

Tuesday:
8-10 Gym (yuck.)
10-11 Free Period
11-12:30 History
12:30-1 LUNCH
1-2 Free Period
2-3 English
3-4 French
4-5 Italian

Wednesday:
9-11 French
11-12 English
12-1 LUNCH

Thursday:
8-10 Cinema
10-12 English
12-1 LUNCH
1-2 Free Period
2-3 Math
3-4 Free Period
4-6 TPE (I don't know. Social Studies?)

Friday:
8:30-10 Science
10-11 Italian
11-12:30 Math
12:30-1 LUNCH
1-2 English/ECJS (?)

That's it.

I have to go now, wish I could talk more, but seriously, this salt is not good for my hair.

~Josie Harris