Monday, October 10th, 2011
One day before my birthday! :) Oh ya. The sad thing is, here I have been 17 for a whole 2 weeks (I know, soooo old ;) ) and I still feel like my 16 year old self. I mean, at 16, you get to drive. 18 you get your independence. 17 you get.... to buy tickets to Rated R movies? And I am not even in the U.S. to enjoy this lovely convience! But seriiously, I don't feel like I even had a birthday, or that I am any older at all. Age is just a small matter, I guess, compared to everything else I have experienced.
So of course, I don't actually remember what happened detail for detail on this day. At all... All of the school days just blend together, and become one jumbled up mess with a WHOLE bunch of French and confusion and boredom and a million things all at once. Seriously, I seem to have more mood swings than a hormonal pregnant women. And it's not that they really effect anybody but me, but it's still weird. Someday I am going to write a book on just the feelings experienced by an exchange student. Because seriously, they are insane and unpredictable and if I could receive a little heads-up for what is down the road, I would be very appreciative.
Oh wait, that's a lie. I do know one thing... I recieved my brand new schedule today. Normally how it works in Belgium is that you have one schedule until mid-October, then you change after that and that is your permanent and final schedule. I knew this ahead of time, and gave my regualr class schedule to the school counselor so she could work her magic and put me in the classes I needed to be in. Boy was I suprised when I came today to pick it up and realized that I had a completely individualized schedule. Now, I mostly just have a LOT of French, like something crazy like 15 hours a week of French, 3 English classes, 6 art classes, 2 morale classes, 3 hours of PE, an hour of Physics, an hour of history, and a couple of etudes thrown in here and there. Oh, and when I say classes, I mean hours with usually the same teacher. And this is just a guesstimate, but unfortunately I still have a very full schedule. The reason I have so many French classes is because the counselor once again put me in a bunch of classes with the younger kids. I can safely say that by now, after having the schedule for 2 weeks, they are over the shock of seeing me in their classes. But really, I have one or two hours with each of these classes a week, so not only is it weird for them but it is weird for me as well. Sometimes I am with my class 6B, sometimes I am not. I miss random periods of art, or other classes. I have etudes when no one else does. I think my schedule is more confusing than the teachers themselves, who are always having to move rooms and have random classes of kids on random days only. Luckily, the counselor did mine and Tedde's schedules together, so we have like half of our classes during the day together. Almost every random little kid class I am in, she has too. And that's nice, because generally we just sit there quietly, working out of workbooks, and if I don't understand something or have a question about French, then she can generally help me. It's like having your own personal teacher follow you around everywhere... ;)
The one other thing that I do remember for this day though is that I started my second French course today! As understood by Pascale and I, I was supposed to finish out my amazing Thursday all talking classes, which goes until the end of November, and then I was supposed to start up the other class with the majority of the exchange students in the area. But, alas, some random lady called Pascale asking why I hadn't been at the classes. She explained the situation, and apparently I was still supposed to go on Mondays. Whoops. Pascale picked me up from school, we went to the house for like 30 minutes, then we headed out again so we could get the paperwork filed. Turns out not only did I NEED to get my carte identitie pour Belgique, I also needed to get a paper from my school, Athenee Royal Verdi, saying that I actually went there.
By the time the secretary was finished with the paperwork, I was like 10 minutes late to my very first class. The building was more like a community college, so I knew it would be a class with more learning than actual speaking and maybe, just maybe, *GASP* homework. But whatever French I can get, I am ok with it. I just want to be fluent now! When I walked into the class, luckily I wasn't really interupting anything because they had JUST started, I was suprised to see strangers I didn't know in the class. Like, full grown adults. Some I am guessing over 35... I thought that this class as well would just be Rotary kids, like my other one.
The actual class is much like a commuinty college class too... The teacher speaks in all French, the other students actually know what they are doing, and it's a pretty fast paced class with lots of note taking. So I definitely didn't come to Belgium to be in a college class... And although I know that any kind of exposure to French for me is good, it's a very difficult class. Today we were working on verbs and verb conjugations. Umm, I definitely had no idea had to do them in French before this class, and the teacher had a us fill out a complete paper full of verbs that I didn't even know the meaning to. It was a bit frustrating, feeling so lost and confused while the girls who can already speak French were messing around, texting under the table, and not even paying that much attention but still getting everything right. Remind me why I didn't really want to go to a Spanish speaking country again???
I left a bit early from the course, because I read my bus schedule wrong and thought that if I didn't leave right then, I would have to wait another hour after the class for the next one. The teacher was cool with it, because the class is 3 hours long and at least half the other people have to leave to catch their buses too. But when I got to the bus stop, I realized that I had read the completely wrong schedule and definitely could have stayed for the whole class. I didn't want to look stupid and walk back in when there was only 10 minutes left anyhow, so I stopped at this pita place for dinner (Pascale had some sort of meeting or something...) because everybody says that pitas with the actual pita bread are to die for. And oh boy, it was. The pitas here are made with some kind of weird bread and a weird meat and weird sauce. Well, at least the sauce I like on it is weird... But the are soooo delicious. Turkish pitas, something I will miss when I go home.
And so after getting a quick dinner I caught the bus, walked a mile up my road all by myself in the dark, scary, I know (but don't worry Dad it is very very safe!), and went to bed. So I guess, once I get to thinking about it, I can actually remember quite a bit of my day! But notice how none of it is school???
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