L'étranger

Je suis très fatiguée mais je voudrais ecrire dans mon blog.

My mind is absolutely reeling at all times. Whether it is struggling to keep up with my host mother's patiently slow French, allowing me to watch Amelie while typing in English on my blog (that's what I'm doing now), or taking a complete break from the language to skype with my friends at home in English. It doesn't matter what I'm doing.... French just keeps creeping in. Some words just fit better and I find myself speaking with a certain air of Franglais even without meaning to (my friends here can attest to la même situation). My vocabulary is intensifying.... but I find myself learning an assortment of very odd words like scholarship and bottle opener that are not always the handiest. I'm also making a habit of asking my host mom "Comment dit-on....?" at least 27 times a day. The nerd in me is realizing it doesn't matter how many times I hear a word, I really need to read it and have a visual representation to remember new vocabulary. This makes it difficult to learn just through conversation.

All of the mind-reeling aside, Tours is a very relaxing place to visit. I am just constantly consuming food (fromage fromage fromage fromage fromage... et beaucoup de pain) - but also art, music, architecture, people (consuming people?). There is just no end to the beauty in every day activities. A walk to school involves walking by building older than anything in the United States (everything is just SO old - in the best of ways). Family dinners mean conversations on politics, education, healthcare, art, books and life lasting hours. The sight of a castle hardly phases me anymore but I have also consumed enough wine to actually start having an opinion on it. So much consumption is both expanding my pallet as well as transforming the extraordinary into the merely mundane.

Enough of my ramblings - I'm sure you dear readers are looking for some specifics. Every day is exciting and new and very French. Language classes continue to improve my French and I am becoming closer and closer with my comrades. It's hard to be friends with 70 new people - but I'm finding I enjoy everyone I meet in the Sweet Briar program. Every day my friend Katherine and I finish class, decide that having another crêpe with nutella might be excessive, and then have one anyways. Every morning I speak French for three hours and every afternoon I go to an art museum, a castle, a wine tasting. The evenings are topped off with some of the best meals of my life with some of the most enjoyably conversation possible. The night life in Tours is enjoyable but in such a small town we Americans seem to overrun it a bit - and we frequent the same two places every night. I can't complain too much however - where else can I get a fruity drink the size of my head?

This afternoon was quite enjoyable. My host mother invited Amara and I to go to a wine tasting in Vouvray - an area right outside of town famous for their wine - similar to Champagne. I am learning quite a bit about wine and am enjoying sampling certain kinds, comparing. It's quite exciting to actually know what I'm talking about a bit (kind of... okay I'm faking it)

I think of this scene of The Parent Trap every time I swirl my glass around, smell it and take a sip (fyi - the swirling around thing is to figure out how sugary/not sugary the wine is for white wines and how old it is for red wines.... cool right?) Just watch 1:07-1:40 though.... or all of it because The Parent Trap is one of the best movies ever made.

Anyways it was a very enjoyable day. We went through the winery's museum which was HUGE and all in French (duh) but I managed to learn a bit about how wine is made. Then we took a little drive, somewhat against the rules perhaps (je ne sais pas??), through the grape fields. It went on forever - I've never seen so many grapes!!- and was probably one of the best things I have experienced here so far.

Well I'm going to finish watching Amelie. Merci for reading and Bientot!

Clara