How a Normal Week Looks

Life at Ecole Les Cedres, is not one of mystery and intrigue. It is the life of an individual casting off his native tongue and accepting with open arms the French language with all the rules, complexities and precise phonetics. The individual is consumed, engrossed, devoted to it (and often to socialization over English movies, card games, and pot-lucks).

And while a day consists of 6 hours of classes and another 2 hours of homework, there's still a fair amount of free time. French primary schools have 4-day weeks, Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. As a result, I have a 4-day school week as well so parents with kids don't have to worry about baby-sitters.

Tuesday night is most often an evening of craziness since Wednesday can be entirely devoted to recuperation. Last Tueday night, some of us girls engrossed ourselves in a excursion to the local cinema (oops! theater) to see La Môme (directly translated,"the female kid"). It's a French bio-epic about Edith Piaf, the most famous French musician of all time from the 1930s-1950s. It was an extremely French film, some of the art being lost on us but we still liked it. And of course, we found the most amusing part of the film when the Americans spoke French with heavy American accents tipping us into fits of laughter.

Friday, it was my turn to give an exposé. An exposé is when you speak confidently in front of your class on a particular subject in French for 30 minutes. It might be the most stressful part of the school experience. My subject was the history of embroidery in the United States and it went pretty well. In the end, you're just so glad it's over you don't care how you did!

Friday night, my sister and I went with another student to an English music/church service in Paris. We normally go to a French church on Sundays but decided we really wanted to check out Hillsong. Hillsong is a church denomination out of Australia (with the great music) so everyone talks like an Aussi. It was like one really cool rock concert, the English was great, and we're trying to justify returning.

Sunday, we went into Paris for church, covering our noses in the metro and pretending to be French. We've found a French speaking Baptist church we've loyally frequented since October. When I first started going, I understood close to nothing. Now, I regularly understand perhaps 70% of what I hear. "Context clues" makes up another 5% so all in all I fair well but it takes a lot of concentration. After the service, we eat lunch some of our other church friends before heading out for a Sunday afternoon walk or even just back to school.

Tomorrow, well tomorrow I'll hand in my homework, take a pop quiz and continue to willingly drown myself in French.