Nancy, Europe and school for the past month!

Hello everyone! I am so sorry that I have not written in so long but I hope to fix that by writing everyday for the next few days about all the different things that have been happening. The last time I wrote I was going to Venice and then on to Nice. To sum those trips up they were amazing! Venice was like no other city I have ever seen, canals and gondolas streaming by and the best ice cream ever invented. Nice was also wonderful, considering we were right next to the Mediterranean Sea :). However vacation had to end at some point and we headed back to Nancy to start school.

School started as a series of placement exams to test which level we were all in. I immediately started to freak out when I heard almost perfect French being spoken by some of the students and I thought I would be placed in a beginners class. The next two days were filled with orientation and paying for our school fees. They also gave us the impression that we would start the process and fill out the paperwork to receive our student card and health insurance, but we were in for a lesson on how the French bureaucratic system worked. In the end we were left in limbo for about a week and a half after classes started (them always promising to do the student card the next day), then finally having us fill out the paperwork. Some advise to new coming study abroad students is to make sure that you triple check to make sure you have ALL the documents needed to get any sort of necessary document in a foreign country. I would also contact the people in charge to make sure you have all the documents. After we filled out all the many forms and paid our money all of our documents needed to go through our school and then were sent to another main office to verify everything and then were finally approved! After 3 weeks Eric and I finally got our student cards. However for health insurance we needed to go to the main office of the insurance company to get that straightened out, which is a whole other story! All this was a lesson to Eric and me on how other countries operate and shift power around. I will save the fun adventure of trying to get our residency permit for my next blog because that is still an ongoing process.

The start of classes was a bit of a shock to me and Eric because we were so used to moving around Europe and visiting different places on our own schedule. School definitely brought us back to reality. Eric and I ended up both being placed in level 4 of our system at CAFOL which is a French learning program for foreign students. Level 4 is the highest level and is a great but extremely challenging level to be in. In my opinion most people in the class speak French a lot better than me and most have also been in France for quite a bit more time than me. However, I think it is a positive challenge because I am tested everyday on my French and I am in a continuous quest to learn the most French I can learn while on this study abroad experience. The teachers in all my classes are very nice and good at teaching French to a group of people from all corners of the world. There is absolutely no English spoken in any of our classes so we have to understand all the French or else. Fortunately our teachers do not speak as fast as the people on TV and are open to answering questions. A lot of the classes are 3 hours straight which can be pretty draining, especially early in the morning. Yet, for the most part the classes are interesting so we are not sitting idle for 3 hours. One of our classes is a french culture class, so we learn about the actualities going on in France and learn the humor behind French jokes. I am sadly running out of battery power so I will have to talk more about classes in my next entry and I will also tell everyone about the "french apartment" Eric and I now live in. Oh and stay tuned to learn about our trip to Bruges and our experience at the french circus!

PS I forgot to mention that the first days of our classes were graced by a strike (greve) on the transport system. What would France be without protests!