Le almost - weekend

My first weekend in Rennes was cool. On Friday I had to go to the university to meet the rest of the group. Since I live in St. Gregoire, this means taking the bus and the metro, which takes about half an hour or so, depending on if I hit them at the right times. The problem with doing all this in France is that I'm a very timid person when it comes to public transport, so I was terrified until the moment after dinner on Thursday night when my mere told me that my pere was going to go with me as far as the metro the next morning, to make sure that I didn't get lost. I was so happy about that, you have no idea. It was good that he came, otherwise it would have taken me a while to figure out how to validate my dumb little ticket. ("Oh, that slot") I also happened to meet Sophia and Jessica on the bus, so my pere left us at the metro station and we went the three of us to the university. Another reason I'm glad I met them: no one had really said which stop of the metro I was supposed to take. I mean, I could read and tell that there were two stops I could take, but as for finding the building.....oh man. Thank you God for friends.

So we met up with everyone else in one of the little rooms and we were all talking in French. Kinda. You know. We were trying. We were there at 9h30 and did some "And how are things" sort of talking, and then at 11 we had our written French test, to put us in our levels. That was scary. There was a picture to describe, then we had to write a dialogue to go along with the pic, and lastly there was an essay and a huge monster section of fill-in-the-blanks. It was terrible. The last part, I mean. Oh.my.gosh. Do you know how hard it is to fill in little holes in sentences when A. you have no idea what the thing's actually about and B. there is no word bank? Ridiculous. Utterly preposterous. But you know, great for figuring out which ones actually have a vocabulary. Apparently I don't. Whoops.

But then it was over and Hugo took us over to the RU (resto universitaire) (cafeteria) and that was an experience. Everyone wants to eat at the same time and there are a hundred people in line but will they put in more tables? No. Of course not. You must wait. Patiently. I guess it didn't help that once again we were moving in packs. Ten people are kinda hard to fit around one table.

After that we had something else, I think it was with Andrew? Haha....hope it wasn't important. Maybe that was when we did paperwork....hm...ok. Whatevs. We did whatever that thing was and then a group of us left and wandered Rennes for a while. Mark and Sarah and I went to a cafe which I don't remember. I mean, I remember. I had hot chocolate. It was cute. Just don't remember the name of the place, oops. And then we went home.

And that's when my life pretty much ceased to be even remotely interesting. Some would argue that it never was (shut up) but hey. It's still kinda weird to eat with my French parents, and to feel like I need to be here all the time. But I love them. A lot.