School, host family, weekends, etc

Well, now I know for sure that I will be changing host families. I will live with my current family until sometime in the second half of November. In the meantime, my family, our contact people, AFS, and I are going to try to find a family in the area. If we can find a family near Romont, I will be able to stay in the same school. I am hoping this is the case because I think my school is pretty good, the people are really nice, and it would be hard to start somewhere new. However it is not guaranteed that we will find a good family willing to host in the area so AFS will also search in the city of Fribourg and the other cantons.

Last Sunday I went to an AFS bowling thing in a town called Morat- my AFS liason and her daughter went to. I got to see a few of my exchange friends as well as meet for the first time some students from New Zealand and Australia who have been here for 7 months. After bowling one game (I won! but I'm not sure how though...) we took a tour of the town. It was interesting because it wasn't really far from the city of Fribourg but everyone was speaking German.. I am still not completely used to that.

What can I say about school....? I have a lot of free time, which is sometimes nice (when I have a lot of homework) and sometimes a drag (when I have nothing to do.) Here in Switzerland, summer vacation is about 6 weeks long, which means that during the school year there are many more long breaks. I have one week of school before two weeks of vacation. I have no idea how I will spend all of that free time and I am actually dreading it because I know I will be bored out of my brain. If I lived in the city I could explore but here there are just a lot of fields and barns.. It is pretty expensive to travel so I will probably do it a bit with my exchange friends (maybe take a trip to Berne) but not a lot. So.. if you want to send me an email, sometime after this week would be a good time to do it because I won't be at all busy.

I can't think of anything really interesting that happened in school last week... Math class has luckily gotten easier as we moved on from binary relations and are now working on square roots, powers, and factorisation, which I have studied extensively in the US. In fact, I think I understand better than most of the class, which is a relief. I thought school here would be really hard because it's in French but so far it's way easier than in the US, due to a combination of not being expected to understand everything, having lots of free time, and having already studied many of the topics. In IT class my teacher asked me to say the words 'Iowa State University' to the class because it was in an article we were reading about the history of computers. In English the class took a writing exam about Friendship.. the teacher asked me if I wanted to take it but I opted out. One funny thing is that my whole class (especially the boys I sit with in chemistry) are absolutely amazed by my graphing calculator. Here they are not used in high school, in fact I think some of my classmates had never even seen one before, so for them it is futuristic technology. I made sure to say 'in the US it's obligatory' because I felt a little silly that I had such a big calculator, haha. Sadie, if you are reading this, the girl that sits next to me definitely admired the Never Again, JK, and Heavenly Andersquid scribbled on the case. In geography we are learning positioning on maps and about topography and such, which I guess makes sense when you live in a hilly country. I learned a bit about the 'Swiss system' (of course the Swiss have their own system of map positioning) which was sort of interesting.

I should tell you a bit about the people at school... In my class I talk to a lot of people. Berenice is a bit lost in the clouds and, from what I can tell, always asks silly questions in class, but she is really nice. Sometimes she speaks to me in English to practice and I don't mind because her English is so terrible that we end up clearing up any confusion in French anyway. Adrienne is a friend in my class who I walk around with (with two others) during the morning break. She did an exchange last year from here to German-speaking Switzerland, so she knows a little bit what it's like. She is really nice and has said that if I have any problems with family or school I can talk to her. Margaux is another girl in my class, she is really outgoing and always says hello and I feel like I can joke a bit around her which is good. And there are others too, who are friendly. Basically everyone is friendly and I wouldn't feel embarrassed to ask for help from anyone.

Other people I know, probably better, are Martine, Agnès, and Renauld, who I sit with on the bus. They are part of a bigger group of friends who I talk with in the morning, and are all really nice. Martine and Agnès are really interested in American culture, and ask me lots of questions, which is cool and good for my French. Martine has said that this winter I can go skiing with her and friends because her family has a châlet in the mountains. She also said that if I change host families and I need help finding a new one I should tell her because she will ask her parents if they know anyone (I am definitely going to to this.) Agnès and Martine are who I went to the festival in Romont with, two weekends ago. Also they have invited me to go to this choir they sing with on Fridays, and I probably will. Obviously this shows why I don't want to switch schools; I've already been welcomed here.

So, that was school for the week... Friday I went with my host mom to a 'souper de classe' for Laura, which was basically a fundraiser. About 15 students are going to Burkina Faso so it was an evening to raise money for that. It was okay but kind of boring and went until 12, so I was dead tired.

Yesterday, Saturday, I went to Fribourg in the early afternoon to meet my exchange friend Sakshi for a movie. Fernando, another exchange friend, also came.. Since the English movie options were slim and no one really felt like watching a Woody Allen film we decided to just go out for coffee and desserts instead. I had only seen Sakshi for a little bit last weekend and we hadn't really had a chance to talk, and I hadn't seen Fernando since the end of language school, so it was a good chance to catch up about how things are going for everyone. Fernando and Sakshi go to the same school in Fribourg, so they see each other sometimes, but they filled me in on their lives and I filled them in on mine. It is nice to be able to talk with people who are going through many of the same adjustments I am.

I went with Sakshi to her host family's house around 5:30 to spend the night there- her host parents and brothers were all going out for the evening. We talked for hours about all sorts of topics (cement houses in India, what Chinese food is like in India, and surviving on a raft in the middle of the ocean, to name a few) and cooked pizzas in the oven. After we watched one of Sakshi's favorite Hindi films ('Jab We Met') which was an amazing intercultural experience because she explained basically all of it to me. She could tell me when the subtitles were completely wrong or translated weirdly and tell me what they weer actually saying. It's really cool because Sakshi speaks English as well me (it's used exclusively in school in India), but she can also speak both Hindi and Tamul with the same fluency.

This morning we woke up and ate brunch with her host family. Around one I took the bus to Fribourg, then the train to Villaz-St-Pierre, then I had to walk for around 45 minutes to my village because there's no bus on Sunday.. but luckily the weather is really warm this weekend, around 70 degrees, so it wasn't a huge problem.

I've uploaded a few photos from September and up until now in October (I've hardly taken anything), they can be seen here:
http://picasaweb.google.com/fuzziepotato/SwitzerlandSeptemberAndOctober#

And now another question to answer! If you have more, please ask!

- 'I continue to be intrigued by your English class - have you noticed any particular aspect or area of our language, that stumps or frustrates your classmates the most?'

I think for most of my classmates the pronounciation is hard. For us, it is second nature to know that 'foot' is pronounced differently than 'boot'... but French is pretty standard in the pronounciation (it's read how it's written) so the differences are hard. Since there are so many irregularities in English it's sort of a nightmare for them to have to read aloud. Verb tenses are also really diffucult for them (when to use 'I ran' versus 'I was running' versus 'I had been running', versus 'I had run' versus 'I have run' etc, etc)