qu'est-ce la fin ?

Bonjour tout le monde ! Je suis désolé de ne pas avoir écrit depuis si longtemps, mais maintenant que j'ai quelques instants pour le faire j'en profite.

Hello everyone! I'm sorry that I haven't written in such a long time, but now that I have a few minutes to do it I will!

I passed le baccalauréat! And I almost got the first honors, but I missed it by a few points! I'm really happy that I got it, and my host family and friends were really amazing that I got it as well.

Otherwise, time is flying by! For the past month I've been finishing up things that I wanted to see and do, hang out with friends for the last time, and just enjoy the end of my year in France. Wednesday I came to Paris to pick up my mom (there was a little misunderstanding as far as when she would get here but she's here and everything's fine). Then we saw the Eiffel Tour and then headed back to Châtellerault to meet my host family. Actually, only Lucie, Pierre-Louis, Pauline, and Benoît were home because Jean-François was in Germany on a business trip and Marie and Guillaume had to leave for school-related reasons.

So far since my mom has been here we've seen an international rose exposition, eating des foisses which is an AMAZING type of French bread, and then we looked at the exterior of a castle which unfortunately we were not able to go inside due to construction and renovation. We also went to a dinner party that my host family had at my house the night Jean-François got back from Germany, then we looked around Châtellerault at night which was very pretty.

Yesterday we said our goodbyes to my host family and they saw us off at the train station. We then got to Paris, ate a little brunch, and then came to drop off our stuff at my friend Alexandre's house, where we're staying here in Paris. Yesterday we got quite a few things in as well around Paris, such as Montparnasse, La Rue de Rennes, La Sorbonne, Le Jardin du Luxembourg, and Notre Dame de Paris. My mom LOVED it but I had her pretty wiped by the end.

Well, there's just a little update. I have to get going because we have another day here in Paris and then tomorrow morning we'll be leaving to go to Italy!

CIAO! Au revoir!

les révisions...

Hello everyone! I'm sorry I haven't posted on my blog for a month and a half...I've been meaning to but I'm REALLY busy studying for the final exams (starting tomorrow!). I've already passed my two oral exams, a French exam and an English exam. Starting tomorrow I begin a week of written exams and then June 29th I'll have my last exam, which is another exam in English but it's on history not comprehension like the last one.

SO! Basically I can't write much, but I just thought I'd let you all know that I'm doing really well and I'm trying to enjoy my last weeks here in France! Hopefully I'll be able to write a real update within the next week, and if not in two weeks. But I definitely have to get one last blog entry in before the end! I can't believe I'm almost there :(

Ok then, take care everyone and wish me luck!

CIAO!

P.S. If I do well on these exams, I'll get a real French high school diploma, which is valid everywhere in the European Union and even in the US!

vive les vacances!

Dakin devant la Joconde au Louvre.

Dakin in front of the Mona Lisa at the Louvre.

Bonjour tout le monde!  Joyeux jour de travail!  J'espère que vous allez tous bien!  Moi je vais carrement bien, je viens de passer une semaine à Paris et ensuite je suis allé directement à Marseille où j'ai passé encore une semaine à la plaaaage!

Hello everyone!  Happy Labor Day!  I hope that you're all doing well!  As for me I'm doing extremely well, I just spent one week in Paris and then I went directly to Marseille where I spend another week at the beach!

Friday (April 17th) I finished my classes at noon, at lunch quickly at school, said goodbye to my friends, and then ran home to grab my luggage, which I had mostly packed the night before, and I then ran to catch my train to Paris at 1 PM!  It was all a bit rushed...

When I got to Paris I met the family that hosted me throughout the week that I was in Paris, la famille Simon, the Simon family.  The family is made up of a mother, Christine, and her two sons Alexandre (17) and Antoine (23).  The family lives just south of la Porte d'Orléan, which is in the south of Paris.  The métro is just 15 minutes from their front door by foot.  Alexandre is currently a Junior in high school, and Antoine is a college student at the Sorbonne, one of the most well known universities in France (located in Paris).  Christine and her sons are INCREDIBLE and I love them to death!  They showed me all around Paris, I saw la Sorbonne, la Tour Eiffel, l'Arc de Triomphe, Montmartre, Sacré Cœur, la Tour de Montparnasse, le Moulin Rouge, le Café des 2 Moulins, la Seine, le Louvre, le Jardin de Luxembourg, le Sénat, etc. (the Sorbonne (university), the Eiffel Tour, the Arc de Triomphe (a large war monument in the form of an arc), Montmartre, Sacré Cœur (a church, but not Notre Dame), Montparnasse Tower (the highest building in Paris), the Moulin Rouge!!!, a famous French café called "The Two Mills Café" which was in a very famous French film called Amélie, the Seine (the river), the Louvre (the museum with the glass pyramid), the Luxembourg gardens (a famous garden), the Senate building, and much more!).  As you can see I was very very busy!  Buttttt the métro in Paris is AMAZING and I absolutely love it!  It's so practical and you can get anywhere in Paris quickly!  And then the bus system in Paris is equally as practical it just takes more time in a bus to cross Paris, with all of the traffic.  Otherwise I went to a couple of Alexendre's friends' houses to meet some real Parisians and discover teenage life in Paris.  All I'll say is that it's insane and very stylish.  Gotta love my Parisians!!!

After a fun-filled and crazy week, I was verrrry sad to say goodbye to the Simon family and leave for Marseille.  I had really integrated in the family and I really felt like just another brother to Alexandre and Antoine, who showed me around Paris.  But, life is life, and leaving is just as much of a part of the experience as arriving (...foreshadowing?...).  So, I took the TGV (France's high-speed train) and in not even three hours I was stepping out of the double-decker train into the train station on the other side of the country, on the Mediterranean Sea.  You should all look at a map and use this as an opportunity to learn some French geography!

Marseille was absolutely beautiful!  I loooove the sea so I already was really happy to be there, and I was VERY ready for some summer weather (which I'm sure all of you from Wisconsin can understand perfectly!).  In Marseille I was hosted by an American family affiliated with AFS.  The mother, Susan, is from Los Angeles, and she moved to France after meeting her late husband in Jerusalem.  Her son, Josh (who is more so French than American seeing as he has lived in France for most of his life), actually went to the outskirts of Chicago (USA was his second choice, after China) with AFS for a year.  After returning from the US and graduating from high school, he has become an AFS volunteer and that's how I ended up staying at their house.  The two of them are VERY busy with their own lives, special diets (to say the least), and such so I was a little on my own while I was at their house.  For two days I visited all of the touristic sights in Marseille, went to the beach, hung out with a friend from AFS who's from Pasadena and some of his friends, and slept A LOT.  Some of the things I saw were the biggest port on the Mediterranean, a beautiful church called Notre-Dame de la Garde which is actually the highest point in Marseille, seeing as it's on top of a huge hill (southern France is rather rocky and mountainous), another huge Cathedral on the sea, and the old quartier (district) which is called le Pannier (the Basket).  It was very relaxing even though I got a lot of stuff in.  Then I took the train to Toulon, which is about an hour from Marseille to stay at a friends house from my school here in Châtellerault for three days.  His family has two beach apartments in Toulon on the Mediterranean so I was invited to come.  I learned how to skim board, met his family (ALSO AMAZZZING!  His uncle is completely tarré (crazy) but he lives in Paris and he invited me to come for a week(end) with Alexandre (my friend from my school who happens to have the same name as my correspondent in Paris) ), met his friends (AWESOME), acted like a stupid American to pick up girls on the beach, and just had an all around good time.  Toulon is a very small, clean, and hospitable city and I think I actually preferred it to Marseille, which is the biggest city in southern France with approximately one million habitants.  But either way, both of the cities are on the Mediterranean, have gorgeous beaches and buildings, and the weather is GREAT!  I hope to make it back some day!

After my séjour (stay/trip) to Toulon, I returned to Marseille for another day (which I spent at the beach, it was great!), and then the day after I took the train back to Paris, where I took the métro to another train station for a connecting train, which broke down at a train station an hour away from Châtellerault, where I had to wait THREE HOURS to get another train to Châtellerault.  I left Marseille at 1 PM and I was supposed to get to Châtellerault at 8:15 PM but I didn't end up getting back until 11:00 PM!  That sucked big time seeing as I hadn't really eaten that day (except for a sandwich at noon).

So, there you have my vacation en gros (summed up).  I hope you are all doing well!  This weekend I'm just recuperating from all of the traveling and sightseeing.  Also, I'm nursing my sprained toe back to health, which I injured the first day skim boarding (it hurt like a mother!).  But otherwise I'm not really looking forward to going back to school on Monday, even though I only have two hours of class on Thursday, and no classes Friday.

Je vous aime fort et vous me manquez beaucoup!  Je me suis rendu compte qu'il ne reste que 10 semaines encore en France, et qu'on se verra très bientôt quand même (peut-être trop bientôt?  le temps passe trop vite!).

I love you all very much and I miss you all a lot!  I realized that I only have 10 weeks left in France, and that we will all see each other very soon nevertheless (maybe too soon?  time is going by too fast!).

À la prochaine =)

April Showers Bring May Flowers

Le poisson d'avril

What a busy busy busy last month I have had!  I cannot even begin to explain everything I've been up to.  First of all I'm going to point you all to the right hand side of my blog, where I've added links to the blogs of other exchange students that I know, or also go to my school.  That way you can see some other pictures and maybe (if you speak German, Norwegian, or Indonesian), you'll be able to read about the others' experiences.

I'm going to give you all a quick run down of what's been going on here in France, or at least in my everyday life.  I took the mock exam after my last vacation and it actually went pretty well.  Despite my scores being somewhat low, 6.5 in Literature, 7 in Philosophy, 12 in Spanish, 18 in English (written), 19 in English (spoken), 11 in History & Geography (all out of 20), I still have enough points that if this had been the real exam I would have received my French diploma!  Hopefully this means I won't have to study too much for the next month and a half of classes (that is to say, the month and a half of classes after the next two weeks of vacation I have starting tomorrow!).  Otherwise classes are going well, except for the fact that I feel really lazy and j'ai la flemme (I don't feel like doing anything).

My weekends have been VERY busy!  One weekend I went to Poitiers for an exposition on different activities in my region of France, in order to get an idea of possible things I can do in order to really take advantage of the time I have left in France.  This has really been getting to me lately because I only have a month and a week left of classes (of which only one week is a full week), and I'm starting to feel the time go by faster and faster!  It seems like I got off the train in Poitiers just yesterday, and yet at the same time I know that I only have two and a half months left in France!  It's freaking me out and I need to think about it some more.  A little reflection on the subject should do the trick.

This past weekend was le week-end de Pâques (Easter weekend).  I really am bummed that I didn't spend it with my host family, who are devoted Catholics, they did an egg hunt with the kids and they went to the grandparents house for an Easter meal!  But!  I was in Poitiers for the weekend performing a medieval show!  I had two roles, a Page and a Seer, and the idea of the show was to serve a meal for the audience while performing the show.  I made a LOT of friends and I was reallllllly sad when we had finished Sunday night with the last show.  So, Monday I called the director, and I'm actually going to continue doing shows with the company for three weekends, one in May, and two in June.  It's going to be so much fun and I'm going to get to see my new friends again!  I'm learning how to juggle, and maybe I'll get to learn how to blow fire!

I should also mention my college situation.  I heard back from NYU, my parents read me the letter over the phone, and I am sad to inform you all that I was not accepted.  However!  I will be going to UW-Madison this fall, which is an awesome school and I'm REALLY excited nonetheless!  I'll be closer to home, it'll be much cheaper (but still fairly expensive), and I'm going to get to see my friends (whom I miss very much!)  But most of all I'll get to see family WHO I APPRECIATE VERY MUCH AND I MISS YOU ALL!  I'll be home soon enough, don't worry.

Well, I'm off to finalize some plans that I have with my mom traveling Europe this summer, so I should be off.  The next time I write hopefully I'll have more to say, and more time to say it, but I'll just give you a heads up that it's going to be very interesting!  Tomorrow I leave for Paris for a week, and then I'm going to Marseille for a week, a large city on the French Mediterranean.

Keep a look out for a post in about three weeks!

Au revoir!  Bisous!

la fin des vacances

Gabriela et Dakin chez Lucie, la soirée "ne plus jamais"

Alors, je pensais que serait bien finir mes vacances par écrire un petit mot là pour que tout le monde sache comment ça va.

So, I thought that it would be nice to end my vacation by writing a little note here so that everyone knows how things are going.

WOOOOW.  It's been over a month since I've last written.  It's getting serious.

At the same time a lot and nothing has been happening around here.  Basically during the month of February I went to school non stop.  The first weekend of February I went to a friends house with some friends to celebrate her 18th birthday, which was really tiring but cool!  We STARTED eating dinner at ten o'clock and we finished around midnight.  So basically now you know that if the night started after dinner, it was a very long night.  But it was really cool and I had a lot of fun!  The weekend of Saint Valentines was an AFS weekend.  We were hosted by the AFS regional coordinators and volunteers in a small village south of Poitiers, about an hour by car from where I live.  We did activities such as French children's games, we danced, we ate A LOT, and we discussed how are year is going and what we're getting out of the experience.

The following week went by fairly quickly as I anticipated the start of my two week winter vacation.  That weekend I went to Moulins sur Allié to visit Eileen, a friend that I met in New York at the outgoing orientation.  We saw a movie which was pretty good (the French movie theaters are MUCH cheaper than in the US), we went to a few cafés, and I met some of her really cool friends!  At one point I was with three other Americans and it was very strange because it was the first time I had been with more than one other American since Paris in August!

Leaving Sunday afternoon was pretty sad, but it was just the beginning of my vacation so I had a lot to look forward to!  I didn't travel very much during this vacation, I only went to Poitiers a few times by train, stayed over night at my friend Jona's house a couple of days, and I hung around Châtellerault with some friends.  But I must admit that it was a fairly calm vacation during which I didn't do much.  It was great!

In fact, I didn't even do much studying for the practice graduation exam that will be all of this following week.  I reallllly need to get going to study a little today ^^ so that I won't completely fail the exams.

I hope everyone's doing well and I'll see you all all too soon.  Ciao!

les nouvelles sur université

Hello everybody!  I just thought I'd write a quick note saying that I have received some great news!  I have been accepted to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, as well as the University of Wisconsin-Madison!

UW-Milwaukee is my third choice, UW-Madison is my second choice...and so I'm now waiting on my first choice:  New York University!

Wish for the best and hopefully I'll hear back from NYU within the next month or so!

À très bientôt!

Noël, le réveillon, et janvier :)

Hello once again everybody!  I'm sorry that I haven't written in over a month but, comme d'habitude (like usual), I am SUPER busy!  And I've also been neglecting my own personal journal, SO...I need to get on that as well!

Well I'm just going to summarize the past month and a half!  The week before my Christmas break started was absolutely hilarious/typically French.  I didn't have school on Wednesday, nor Thursday because there were student protests and we were blockaded from entering the building.  VIVE LA GRÈVE!  

For the first 5 days of my Christmas break I went to Strasbourg on the border of Germany to visit my friend Carolyn (Caroline) who was in Elkhart Lake last year with AFS.  Needless to say it was very bizarre to speak in French with her but we managed ;).  Strasbourg is the Christmas capital of Europe and so it was so amazing to be there just until Christmas Eve!  The first ever decorated Christmas tree, from where the custom comes, was mounted in Strasbourg and so in the city square there was a HUGE Christmas tree all lit up and absolutely beautiful!  I also saw, briefly, the European Parliament which is also located in Strasbourg.  I met a bunch of Carolyn's awesome friends and they were so cool!  I missed them already when I got on the train to come back to Châtellerault!

Once back, I spend Christmas with my host family.  The kids loved all of their gifts and my host family got me an awesome book of aerial pictures of the region and an awesome plume with "J'écris, donc je suis" (I write, therefore I am) written on it ^^.  The day after Christmas I went to visit Jean-François' side of the family.  I think there were 22 people it was insane!  We seriously sat down at the table at noon and didn't really get up until we went to bed.  Insane.

Then, the day after we got back we left again, only this time we drove about seven hours to the NORTH of France (Nord Pas-de-Calais) to spend a week with Lucie's side of the family.  I saw all of the rural farms, the English Channel, Lille, and I spend the New Years with two of my host cousins at a huge 80's party!  It was so cool!  And oh boy was the champagne good!

The first week back to school after Christmas vacation was also really funny!  It SNOWED!!!  It snowed, I believe, two inches maximum, and the French would have had you believe that the sky was falling.  ALL traffic was stopped, I had two, not one, TWO snow days, and everything was closed.  Like I said...two inches.  AND, above all, I was told that it hadn't snowed like that for THIRTY years!  Within a few days the temperature returned to well over the freezing point and there have even been days that weren't cold with a sweatshirt on.  Quite a contrast to January in Wisconsin (especially this year)!

As of late I haven't done anything much that is noteworthy, except that last weekend I went to Poitiers, the capital of the region which is about 20 minutes away by train, to attend a going-away party for a German girl named Annika.  She's here for a six month program, so she will be returning to Germany this Saturday.  It was sad to see her for the last time, but I had a really fun night with all of the other exchange students and host siblings that came as well!  And this weekend I will back in Poitiers, to practice for a local show that I will be performing in.  It's a medieval dinner that we put on the Saturday and Sunday nights of the Easter weekend.  We're going to sing, dance, and put on little skits such as sword fighting and other typical medieval stunts.

Well, I have to be off and I realize that this post isn't the longest I have written, but I'll hopefully keep you all better informed this coming month ^_^

Au revoir et bonne année!  Goodbye and have a good New Year!