J'arrive à Nantes

Phew, I made it! You would not believe how exhausted I was by the time we got to the hotel last night. I got one hour of sleep the night before I left... Then caught just a few hours on the plane... And a catnap on the train... By the time we got to the hotel, I'd been up some 52 hours with only one hour of real rest! Let's just say that compared to the crampy seats in the plane and on the train where you doze off and wake up ten minutes later with a crick in your neck, the bed in the hotel room looked like heaven!

I haven't met my host family yet. We just arrived at the IES Center, where I'll have most of my classes, and met Mme Rochet, the assistant director who is the person we go to with any problems, etc. She speaks very slowly - or maybe I've just gotten used to hearing very fast French since we arrived! I understand more than I expected to, I suppose.

Traveling was... interesting, especially with two humongous bags that together weighed as much as I do. One of our taxi drivers looked at me and Katie when she picked us up and said, "All those bags?!?" Then, with a laugh, "At least you two aren't as fat as your bags are!" Wrestling the darn things on and off the train was a nightmare, but an extremely nice gentleman lifted all four of our bags onto the overhead rack - and back off again three hours later when we got to Nantes! Who says French people are rude? They did laugh at us when they figured out we were in the wrong train car, but that's our own fault. :)

We were so clueless, it must have been funny. The first thing when we got off the plane in Paris we had to show our passports to an official. It took me three times to understand what he was insistently repeating (in French, of course) - "Today is the 31st of August, no?" "Yes," I replied, baffled as to why this should be so important. "Your visa does not start until the 1st of September," he explained. Horrified, I realized that I'd read the date 1/9 as January 9th, instead of the European "backwards" way, and assumed it simply covered one whole year! "What do I do now?" I asked him nervously. "Oh, I'll let you pass," he said, "But by law I should not, you understand?" I thanked him the best I could and breathed a huge sigh of relief. But then, what else were they going to do, send me back??? Quel horreur! I'm glad he was willing to overlook that little detail...!

We wandered endlessly around the Charles De Gaulle airport looking for the train station, consulting various maps and getting directions and then walking in circles until we finally stumbled upon the correct bus to take us. We felt like the epitome of lost, silly Americans! Then we waited in line 45 minutes for the TGV tickets, and another hour and a half until the train left. The train itself, after the initial stress of getting on, was absolutely silent. You could hear a pin drop. Katie and I were afraid to even move for fear of drawing even more attention to ourselves! And this went on for 3 hours!

We ate dinner at 6 at a cute little restaurant near our hotel, which, at that hour, was completely empty save the two of us! (The French dine late.) We had a hard time reading the menu and ended up sort of blindly ordering. We ate the bread while we waited for our food to arrive, unaware that we'd ordered things that you put ON the bread to eat, kind of like bruschetta... It must have been funny watching us try to figure out how to eat our meals. (I finally asked for more bread.) If only we were as amusing to ourselves as we must be to everyone else, I'd be having the time of my life.

Actually, it is pretty fun discovering and learning these new things. Nantes is much bigger than I thought and a little overwhelming. The river is wide and calm and spanned by beautiful old bridges. There's a huge chateau that I can't wait to visit, and an old section of town accessible only by foot with cobblestone streets and little shops that I'm just longing to explore.

Well, now that I've written a whole novel about my first day, I think I'd better stop! Hopefully I haven't been too boring. But c'est la vie...