Merry Christmas!!!

Hey everyone! Today is Christmas and we celebrated with my cousins here by eating a very French dinner last night, including every kind of course thinkable. Gifts from the French "Pere Noel" (Santa) were also opened :). Today we had the very Colombian tamales with my cousins for our Christmas repas. It was a nice mix of a Colombian and French Christmas. I will write more about it all later and about the trip to Cannes! Merry Christmas Everyone!

Some pictures of Paris, Alsace area and Belgium (Bruges)!

Bizarre Christmasy tree in Strasbourg
Strasbourg
Arc de Triomphe, Paris
Me at the top of the Eiffel Tower (on the freezing and windy side)
The most foggy night I have ever seen (while we were "In Bruges")
The main market In Bruges
Eric eating a giant "french fry" while in the Fry museum In Bruges
In Bruges
Me at a very Venetian looking bridge In Bruges
Vineyard in Alsace
One of the towns we stopped in in Alsace
Alsace

Countryside of France

A few more St. Nick Pics!

St. Nick Parade Photos as Promised!

Hey Everyone!

Well Im being terrible at writing these blogs but I vow to get better! Over this past month a lot has happened. Firstly I still do not have my residency permit and I haven't even seen a glimpse of getting it anywhere in the near future! We went through the first step of the process over a month ago and were told that we would recieve the next step of what to do by the end of november, but alas nothing has come. Even when we do get the next step, we have to schedule a doctors appointment and then go through another step! Oh well, it's really interesting going through the process of a sort of immigration into another country. It is no piece of cake, but I have to stop and think that getting into the US would probably be just as hard and even harder.

On a brighter note school has been going well, it is still hard though to get through those 3 hour non stop classes. At UC it's sometomes hard to concentrate for 50 minutes! The teachers are pretty tough but I definitely feel my level of french getting higher. I can watch french tv now without getting anxious trying to understand every word. I even bought some french novels that I am going to try and read. We have winter break in two weeks and we're going down to Cannes to enjoy the sea. It wont be extremely warm but it will be a lot warmer than here, and hopefully less rainy. But we will be back in time for christmas, to spend it with my cousins. It will be my first christmas away from home, so that is kind of wierd for me, but if I look at it in a different perspective, it is my first Christmas in France! There is definitely a big christmas feel in the city here, everything is decorated and lit up. However, that was more for December 6, which is St. Nicholas day, a very big deal here in this region of France. All of last weekend there were celebrations and people came from all parts of france to see it! We went to the parade Sunday night, which was exciting and very different yet also similar to parades in the US. I'll put up some pictures of it to give everyone an idea.

I also completely forgot to mention Thanksgiving! I am one of the lucky study abroad people who got to have a family member there on Thanksgiving! My dad was doing work in Spain so he took a few days off to come visit me here in France! It was so amazing getting to see my dad after all these months and being able to show him what I have been doing and where I have been living. He came just around Thanksgiving so he spent it with us. My mom sent over a ton of food items with him so we were able to recreate a little thanksgiving for ourselves! I even made a pumpkin pie, which my family here in France were not too keen on, but we loved it! On the actual day of thanksgiving though my dad bought us dinner at a couscous restaurant! It was really good, yet the strangest thanksgiving meal I've ever had! Sadly my dad had to leave only after a few days, but it was so great to see him and spend time with him, right when I was getting a little homesick.

Now im ready for winter break and ready to see Cannes! Ill let everyone know soon how things are going and also I'll upload those St. Nick parade photos!

à bientôt!

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!

Now For Some Paris Pics!

Evangelia in Monet's Garden :)