Lost in Translation

Hello to all of the people back in the states! How is life? Well here it is fantastic, with a dash of stress and constant confusion! We signed up for classes over the past couple of days and for the most part, it has been utter chaos!

Let me explain. First of all, 35 of the 40 students on my program at college juniors or seniors doing their study abroad programs. Therefore, they all need to receive credit for their semester here. In the exchange student program at the university (CIREFE) there are 7 levels of French that you can be enrolled in, and each has different classes that you are allowed to take. They base all of this on a test that we all had to take, blah blah blah. NOW, some of the other students had a level that they had to place into to receive credit, and some of them didn’t place into their required level. Obviously, this spells disaster. Keeping in mind, that our program (CIEE) advisors seem to have little knowledge of how the levels work. There have been lots of tears, hugs, maybe even a couple of yells. One girl is scheduled to graduate this year, and unfortunately she didn’t place high enough, which is forcing her to graduate late AND give up an internship in France that she had set up for next year.
But, enough about the disorganization of my program! Everything is great here! We just finished up our 2-week intensive French classes. We had classes for about 6 ½ hours a day. And at the end we had a gigantic test! Which would tell us if we needed to be place up or down a level at the university. I placed into the same level, which is what I expected. The next day we got to take another test! This it was an oral test. We went into a little room with a professor and they asked us questions and we had to respond accordingly. It was quite simple and I think I did fine. This test was to place us into a level for our oral expression classes.

What else has happened? Not too much, I start classes today (Monday). And it looks like I will be having Fridays off, and I wont have classes on Monday until 1 in the afternoon. So that means lots of travel time for me! But, we still haven’t been scheduled with the teachers who we will be interning with. So, that schedule might completely change within 2 weeks.

Mostly, my life is up in the air at this point! Nothing is concrete yet, and nothing will be for at least another 2 weeks. Mostly because of me not knowing when I will be teaching. But, I am keeping my head up, working through it, always looking to tomorrow.

My French mother is great. My house is good, and my friends are wonderful. I went to a club here in Rennes Saturday night, well more like Sunday morning. The clubs open at 11 and go until 5, so we went at midnight and party-ed it up! It was a great stress reliever, and I am so glad that I went.

So that is my life in a nutshell. I have just started to miss some things back home. Like going to soccer games, homecoming is coming up I think, or has already passed. I miss that kind of stuff.

But this is an adventure in it self and I love it. I don’t have a choice; everything is wonderful, how could I not love it?