AFS weekend

The AFS weekend has come and gone, and now I have been in Lyon for exactly 4 weeks and 1 day. Saturday morning I woke up at 8:30, for some reason it is difficult to sleep in here. I ate breakfast with Laura, and tried to start my french essay. The French teacher asked me to write an essay on my AFS experience so far. Then I packed my bag for the AFS weekend. There are two other girls who live in or very close to the center of Lyon (other than Laura and I), so one of the was dropped off at our house around 1:00 pm to catch a ride with us to the trainstation. We took the train (it was my first time on one!) to the small town of Anjou, which is about 1 and 1/2 hours away from Lyon by car. We were met in Anjou by some AFS voluteers who the drove us up to the chateau where we first met our host families. I had NO idea it was a real chateau. I thought it was just a big house and we were all going to cram into the living room to sleep. Nope. when we arrived we recieved our room assignments along with the name of our roomates. I was in room 2007. My roomates name was Isabella, from Austria. Each of the rooms had a separate toilet room and sink room with a shower. We dropped our stuff of and then went back down to the outside patio thing. This is the point in time when I began speaking English, and didnt stop until 4:00 pm the next day. It was awesome! I forgot what it felt like to actually be able to communicate and say what you want when you want! There were a lot of familiar faces and I exchanged information with a lot of people over the course of the weekend. There were about 40 AFS students total from the Collines-du-Rhone region. We all introduced ourselves and got name tags. One of the volunteers introduced herself as "I am Emeline, I spend a year in Anchorage, Alaksa, last year"(!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) It was a crazy coincidence!! I talked to here later and told her that I remembered going to an AFS meeting where she did a presentation and made crepes with nutella! It was pretty cool. After that, we split into small groups and talked about how its going with our host families and school. I realized how lucky I am to have gotten such a great family and to have found friends already in school. Lots of kids were having problems with that. Then we had dinner and after that we were allowed to talk or wander around the grounds until midnight. I played games with a group of kids. The games were called ca touche: ca touche pas; ca touche pas: ca touche, black magic, and 4 is cosmic. They were all games where one person had played before, and knew the rules, and they would start spouting off numbers and we would have to figure out the rules to play. It was a lot of fun, but a lot of thinking for a Saturday night:). We got to bed by 12:30 and woke up at about 7:30 for breakfast, then we did energizers, such as let me see your funky chicken..I dont really know how to describe it, but you can find some AFS kids doing it under the eiffle tour on you tube, but Im not in it because my group was wandering off somewhere at that time, and other games like capture the flag with three teams but there is no flag. Then our host families came and brought pic-nics and we ate. So. Much. Food. I love all french food, I am going to be 50 lbs heavier by the time I get back to Ak! After we ate, the parents had a meeting, and the kids played more games. Then it was time to go home. It was a long car ride back, and I was glad when we finally made it. I finished my French essay, and then, even though I wasnt hungry, at dinner. We had quiche, which consisted of eggs, cheese, ham and bacon. It was good. My host mom also made apple tarts, but they were too hot to eat right away, and we were all tired (Laura and I because of the AFS weekend, and Claire and Michel because it was their friends 50th birthday party on Saturday night, and they stayed up til 5 am!!!) so we just ate the apple tarts for breakfast. Its normal here to eat leftover cake, pie, etc for breakfast:)
Today was a relaxing day. I had one hour of Math in the morning, which I actually finished my homework for (and it was right!!!), then I had a two hour break, it is normally just one, but the French teacher was absent today (so yes, I finished that essay for nothing!) and then we had one more hour of math and then one hour of English, though it was a new class that just started today. It is with a teachers assistant who speaks only English, she is from Vancouver, Canada, and is here to just talk to us and get us to speak more English (well not really me, but the French kids). After that, I took the bus home, ate some quiche for lunch and started this blog.