The First Week of Adventures

So, clearly blogging is not my calling. I have been planning on writing something every night since I have been here, but I’m a little bit behind. I’ll give just a brief overview and some highlights of the past few days.

Sunday: Wow! I certainly very tired from the long trip. I slept for an impressive 15 hours and finally woke up at 11:30am. I guess I really needed it after having missed a night of sleeping. After waking up, I had my first experience with the shower in my apartment. It was certainly an entertaining one. When looking at the shower on Saturday, I hadn’t thought anything strange. I saw one of the hand-held shower heads sitting on the side of the bath and a place to hang it on the wall above the bath tub. However, little did I realize that there was no shower curtain. Let’s just say, I never realized how important it is to have a shower curtain in order to avoid covering the entire bathroom with water. Haha. After conquering the shower, I had my first meeting with the other 4 students from Penn and our program director. We took a quick tour of the area around the University and had a nice cup of hot chocolate and a little afternoon snack before we all returned home. I took the metro back by myself and surprisingly didn’t end up lost….

Monday: Unfortunately the excessive amount of sleep the previous night lead to some difficulties in sleeping for me. It wasn’t until 8am that I finally fell asleep. Luckily our first day of our orientation didn’t start until 2pm that afternoon. We had a really funny course on intercultural communication where we talked about many accidental mishaps in communication. Then we went to get our French cell phones. Let just say that what should have taken an hour ended up taking much longer! None of us understood how to buy credits and how to pay for a cellphone without purchasing a plan….

The Rhone River

Tuesday: We had a great introductory French class. After lunch we had a cooking course!! We went to this tiny little cooking studio. We had the most delicious lunch. We made a puff pastry with onions, pine nuts and rosemary, a chicken dish with a balsamic vinegar and sundried tomatoes reduction, and finally la piece de resistance: the chocolate cake. It was literally the best tasting chocolate cake I have ever eaten!!! After that we spent the rest of the afternoon walking and exploring the city, doing a little bit of shopping for all the things that everyone forgot to bring with them to France.

Wednesday: We had a cinema class where, unfortunately, I fell asleep during part of it while the instructor was sitting directly in front of me. I was tired, it was boring and then he turned the lights off, what can I say… After that we had another French class where we ended up talking for the most part about all the little differences we have noticed between French and Americans. I returned home for dinner tonight as usual. Ever since I got here, whenever my host mom says the name of her son, I kept thinking she was saying “petit beau” (little beautiful). I knew this couldn’t possibly be correct so everytime she said his name I would listen intently trying to figure out what she was saying. I finally realized that in an old email from the family I had a list of the names of their kids and I discovered that his name was actually Thibaut, pronounced almost the same, just without a tiny bit of a “p” sound at the beginning.

View of Fourviere from the bottom

View of Lyon from Fourviere

Old wood balconies on the oldest street in Lyon

Roman Theater

Swiss clock from 13th century in the Cathedral in Lyon

Thursday: We had a great excursion with Annick up the Fourviere by the funicular to the Basilica. Despite the freezing cold and the fog, it was still a beautiful view of all of Lyon and the outside of the basilica was very pretty (under construction until March, so I will have to return then to see the beautiful décor inside and the view from the mountain without all the fog). After having a nice hot chocolate, we began our descent down the mountain by foot. We passed by the remnants of 2 Roman theaters that were very really cool. A lot of it had been reconstructed in the 1930’s when it was discovered, but there were still some of the large stone pieces from the Roman era. As we continued our descent we saw the oldest street in city and a little corner where there were still wood balconies that remained from many, many centuries ago (the only ones left in the city). We made it to the bottom to the Cathedral that serves as the most important/powerful church in the city. It was built between the 12^th-15^th centuries and was very nice inside. There was a beautiful clock inside made by the Swiss in the 13^th century that had so many incredible moving parts. After our excursion we had our first real, relaxing French lunch. We found a little hole in the wall place where I had a great salad and a delicious crepe (my first one since being here!) and some great white wine. After that, we returned to the University to take a French language test to find out our level (somehow I placed into the highest level taught at the University – C1) and to work on choosing our courses. After a few hours of frustration with the course search I returned home to continue working on it. I’m sure I’ll figure it out, but right now it is very complicated because there is no centralized list with all the courses taught at the University like there is at Penn. It is really a mouse hunt to find the time schedule for each department with the courses being offered (because French students just take one subject, they don’t get to choose like we do in the states….)