Monday, April 23, 2012

I can’t believe that I only have one month left in France!!!


Monday: I was lucky enough to have a bit of an extended vacation because my French class was cancelled Monday morning (unfortunately that means that class will go a week longer, but I’m happy for now!). Instead I slept in and spent pretty much the rest of the day editing my photos from my trip to Spain and working on my presentation for my history of Lyon class. Monday evening, my host parents were gone because they were spending a few days at a chalet in the mountains with some friends, so I had a low-key dinner with my host brothers.

Tuesday: Tuesday morning I spent my time practicing my presentation about 10 times ( I was really in panic mode). After that, I made some lunch, relaxed for a bit outside and then headed to my history of Lyon class. I did my presentation and I thought it went pretty well. After each presentation, the professor asked the students a few questions. After mine, the questions that he asked seemed pretty irrelevant to my presentation. I did my presentation on the changes in the function of the hospital in Lyon during the 15th and 16th centuries and he spent the whole question period asking me miscellaneous questions about the hospital during the 18th and 19th centuries…. I told him that I had read some stuff about the entire history of the hospital but that I had focused on the end of the middle ages, however, he just kept asking questions about other time periods. Oh well… I hope he is nice to me and gives me a good grade!! After class I came home and had a nice dinner with my host family. After that, I worked a bunch more on internship stuff for this summer and talked to Seth until past 2am.

Wednesday: Luckily Wednesday morning I was able to sleep in for a little bit. My host family invited me to have lunch with them because everyone but Thibaut was hope. The night before when we had a delicious salad with cucumbers in it, I told my host mom how much I liked it and that it reminded me of salads that I make a lot with just cucumbers and tomatoes. So, for lunch she made me a salad with just cucumbers and tomatoes. Since I love cucumbers so much and its been a long time since I had any, I save those until the end. My host mom was so worried that I didn’t like the salad and was very relieved when I told her how much I liked it. We had a great conversation and I had a really enjoyable lunch. After lunch, I headed to tennis class and was very happy that it wasn’t raining like the forecast had said. After class, I came back home and spent the rest of the afternoon writing my independent study project and editing my pictures in detail that I will be using for my final dossier. After that, we had a nice low-key dinner with just my host parents. During dinner, we were talking about some oranges that my host mom had that were only really used to make wine or jam. I told her home much I love to make raspberry and strawberry jam at home so she asked if I wanted to help her make jam after dinner. This type of orange jam takes multiple days to make so Wednesday night we cut up all the oranges, soaked them in water, added sugar and put them in the fridge to soak for 24 hours. After 24 hours you have to boil them for 2 hours. Then let it sit again for 24 hours before putting it into jars. It was really nice and we had a tea afterwards. It was a really enjoyable evening with my host parents. After that, I spent a little bit more time working on my project before going to bed.

Thursday: Thursday morning I met up with Barbara so that she could help me bounce off some ideas about my photography project. After that, I went home for a bit to grab some lunch before heading over to my political history of health class. It’s so weird that after my class finished on Thursday, there is only one more week of class left! Following class, I met up with Dana at a little café called la tasse livre where we had delicious nutella steamers (steamed milk with nutella). After that, I went back home to have dinner with my family. Thursday night I spent packing and working on my independent study project.

Friday: I woke up on the early side Friday morning and met up with Marie to go to class with her. We sat in on her nutrition class. I was very happy that I actually understood everything that was going on in class. It was interesting because there were only about 30 out of over 300 students who actually showed up to class because most of them just get notes from someone. Also, after class was over, all the students applauded for the professor. Apparently in large lectures the students applaud for the professor after each lecture. After class, we went to meet up with Gregoire to go get lunch. We had lunch at this place called Entrecote on Place de la Republique. We had a delicious salad with walnuts, followed by steak that was cooked so perfectly with so incredibly sauce and fries, followed by a strawberry tart. It was a fabulous meal! After that, I headed over to the Part-Dieu train station to meet up with the Penn group for our excursion.


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