Cinquante-neuf

Man, another week has passed.. Time really does fly. I only have a month and a half of life left in Switzerland, and I can hardly believe it. I'm just trying to enjoy the time I have left here (which so far I am, thoroughly) and get the most out of it by planning lots of things to do so that no time is wasted. 

This last week I had to go to school all five days.. horrifying, right? But it passed suprisingly quickly..

Monday my history powerpoint was due. I will have to present that in two weeks. We also had our geography test, which was on the Swiss cantons and their capitals, European countries and capitals, and the countries of the Americas, Africa, and Asia. I had studied and it paid off because I got a perfect score which will raise my geography grade since on the other tests (the non-map tests) I usually only get a three or four. As for the weather, it was really gross and warm out..

Tuesday a cold front came through and it was rainy in the afternoon, which was nice because before, the temperatures had been in the ninties and it was too hot to be comfortable in school. We had a math test which I got 5.3 on. In gym we did another rotation where we split into teams of eight to ten and then had to compete against each other at soccer, unihockey, and volleyball. I was with Bérénice, Andréanne, and Mahélia (another girl in my class) but because there weren't enough students the professors came to be on our team. We won at volleyball and lost at everything else but it was fun, despite the opposing team being really over-aggressive and competitive..

Wednesday we had drawing class. We are now working on enlarging an image from Les aventures de Tintin (they are classic Belgian comics from the thirties and onward) using a square grid.. personally I find this painstaking and I don't think it has much to do with art, because it's just copying, and not creating, but that's okay. We have to put Titeuf, a character from a modern Swiss comic series that has been super popular in France, into the frame. In mine he will be peeking out from behind a door.

Thursday was boring and uninteresting. In biology we went to the computer lab and looked up some pollutants organiques persistants (DDT and other such chemicals that don't break down in nature.) That's about all I even remember.

Friday was also pretty standard. We had our last history course taught by our beloved student teacher, who will, for the rest of the year, sit in the back of the class taking notes as the normal teacher takes over (who is not the best replacement ever..) Actually, though it was technically his last course, he didn't really teach anything because we just watched history presentations (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire, and Denis Diderot.)  In English class my teacher asked the boy who sits next to me about what he will be doing next year, because Friday was his last day of school. He is a semi-professional basketball player and will be touring Europe with the junior Swiss national team for a month or two.  After that he asked a bunch of others what they are doing next year, including me, and somehow this morphed into a exercise where my classmates interviewed me for forty minutes and the teacher skipped his entire lesson plan. I can't believe how hard it is to speak in English now.. it's still pretty easy for me to write, but to express myself by talking takes a lot of effort. I'm sure it will get easier quickly when I return but I was pretty astonished.

Yesterday we ate lunch early because Andréanne was going to get her haircut at 12h30. Around 14h00 I went to Fribourg where I met Sakshi. I had wanted to buy some comics to take home with me to the US, so we scoped them out. I ended up buying some from the Lucky Luke series, which I've read because my host family has them, and ordering some to pick up later from a series called Dick Hérisson which Andréanne recommended to me and I've borrowed from the library. Lucky Luke (pronounced "Lukey Luke") is a comedy/action series of cowboys in the American west, and Dick Hérisson is a detective/dark humour/circus freaks series (sorry, it's kind of hard to describe, though that pretty much sums it up) that takes place in France in the 1930s. After finding what I wanted we went to McDonald's because Sakshi wanted ice cream, but I didn't get anything. We sat down and she gave me a birthday present.. chocolate! After that we walked around before going home.

Today my host family and I ate a special birthday lunch for me together, and I got to choose what we ate, which was nice. We had sausages, chicken, and vegetables roasted on the grill. For dessert we had strawberries and meringues with double cream. They had also made a gâteau au vin cuit but everyone was too full to eat that. We went around 14h30 to go walking in this forest/marsh that has walking paths in it, for about an hour, and then when we got home we ate the gâteau.. I don't think I will be eating much supper tonight..!

Tomorrow and Tuesday we don't have school, which is pretty great. I am going to an AFS thing tomorrow and my friend Bérénice's house on Tuesday, but I'll write about that next week.