Accomplishing several things in a single day has revitalized me. Perhaps this is the beginning of my true "adjusting and adapting" according to the W? You can decide. Here's a list, in chronological order.1. Last night (okay, so I meant the last 24 hours) I managed to find tickets for the Phoenix concert next week in Nantes. I had thought it was sold out, but it's been moved it to a bigger venue so that more people could attend! Their new album came out this spring and it's fantastic, AND the band is actually French. What better than to see them in their home country, speaking to the crowd in their mother tongue. I can't wait.
2. My only class today was Intro to Linguistics, at the university, which I have with two other girls from IES. With a letter from the IES Nantes director in hand, we were finally able to approach our professor and introduce ourselves (usually she's hounded by several students for questions at the end, and so we hadn't wanted to take up her time just to say "we're American"). The letter explains that we're leaving in December and thus we require a separate exam - in our short conversation it seems like the exam might be even easier for us!
3. I found a fantastic grammar book at my favorite Librarie (which is actually a French term for a bookstore). I must have looked at every French grammar book in the store, but when I leafed through the one I ended up buying I knew it was perfect. I'd try to explain, but if you know nothing about French subjunctive tense I might as well write in French! But basically, French grammar and all its tricky nuances will no longer be my enemy!
4. Every conversation I have with my mère d'acceuil (host mother) gets more and more interesting. We eat lunch together on Thursdays because we both have free afternoons. These conversations often turn to cultural differences; last night we discussed holiday customs, and today we talked about the contrast in societal philosophies towards education and jobs. These conversations are always quite fulfilling, not only because I get to practice my French with a sophisticated, friendly French woman, but also because I often re-discover many things about our society that I've taken for granted.
5. Heidi and I finally bought train tickets for our trip to Normandy this weekend... as well as our train tickets for Paris in December, which only cost 22 euro each! As the French would say, nous avons économisé - they have a single verb for saving money. We hadn't planned on buying our Paris tickets this early, but just before I was out the door to meet Heidi in town, my host mother told me that prices for Paris can get ridiculous if one waits too long, and in fact they'd just become available yesterday. And indeed, a one-way ticket to Paris, especially around Christmas time, can cost over 100 euro. Which is $150. (Thank you, exchange rate!)
6. We went to H&M after buying the tickets, just because it's always fun to try on clothes even without buying any. But this was by far the highlight of our shopping adventure. Quite randomly (especially in France where strangers never talk to each other), an elegant elderly woman, wearing a bright blue knitted sweater, came up to us and asked us if we were English or German. We proceeded to have the most pleasant conversation with her (in French of course). She told us about her simple life that she loves, how her granddaughter is just like us, how her half-sister never calls her, how she loves to knit (and had knitted a sweater like the one she was wearing in every color), and how she had returned to the store to thank an employee that had helped her over a month ago when she had a fall there. While we didn't understand parts of what she said, or why she had chosen to talk to us, it's needless to say we felt blessed to have made her acquaintance.
I'm looking forward to more days like this.
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