Wow. This is it, tomorrow morning way too early… I’m going home.
And it’s not that I don’t want to go home… but I don’t want to leave, either.
I have to go soon- I need to pack- but… I just had to say this.
Also, it’s now feeling like summer. As in: I walked outside and it was just like whoa there I thought it was all cool here. Guess not.
But, yeah. That’s it, I guess.
I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I’ve been meaning to make this post for something like… what, a week and a half now? Some of the things I’m talking about are from not the most recent weekend, but the one before that. So, I’m sorry. But enough apologizing, I should get on with this.
There’s a pool table in… I guess it’s sort of like the commons? It’s a room where people gather, at the very least. I’d never played pool before coming here; at times I’m surprisingly not bad, at others I’m exactly as awful at it as one would expect a raw beginner to be.
One of the nice things about being in the part of the countryside where the Relions live is that there are horses everywhere. I like horses. Have I mentioned that on here yet? I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned that on here yet. I went with them to visit their friends, about a five-minute drive, and there were horses and I was excited. Then I walked home with Marius and Violette and we went through their… pasture? Paddock? I’m not a hundred percent sure what I should be calling it. But it’s actually really big, I didn’t even realize it was theirs until we were almost to the house because most of the way it looks nothing like the one little bit next to the house.
Also, you can see so many horses on the drive to and from school. It’s excellent.
I have more to say here, but for once I actually took notes on what I want to write, and I think if I don’t post this now there’s a fair chance I won’t, so I promise- actually promise- that I will post the rest of what I meant to put here in a post-trip post.
You know, it’s funny.
The first couple weeks I was here, I desperately wanted to eat matzo and had a very intense drive to play the violin. And I don’t get homesick, not usually, not in any way you’d recognize as homesickness.
But I think that that was actually homesickness expressing itself in me. In kind of weird ways.
And I’m not homesick now, not in ordinary ways. But… I do keep thinking about home. Don’t get me wrong: I know I’ll be disappointed when the time comes for me to leave. But I don’t think that I’ll be sorry to go home, either, even if I will be sorry to leave.
Are kittens capable of retracting their claws? There’s not one, but two kittens here, and I get the impression from them that they can’t.
So this week I discovered that one of the girls in my SVT, Physique/Chimie, and (one of my) Maths classes- I think she’s my friend? I hope she’s my friend? I would very much like for her to be my friend?- is exactly one year older than me. We were talking about birthdays- I don’t remember quite how we got on the topic- and I told her when mine was, and she was just like no way that’s my birthday too. It’s funny, out of the numerous people I’ve met with February birthdays, the vast majority of them have them clustered around the same day mine is, and I have no idea why.
I think I may be making friends, at least a little bit, with the kids in the journalism club- Sneha introduced me to them, she’s the girl I was talking about earlier, she’s part of it.
Today, I went with Elizabeth, Juliette, and Juliette’s friend on a walk across the field next to her house, through the woods, and to the little castle there. It’s really very pretty there. Juliette fell walking back, but she’s okay now.
I feel like I would- or at least might- be able to figure out how to do the sequences and series from one of my math classes if only it weren’t in French, but as it is it’s really quite difficult to parse.
Nothing particularly remarkable happened today.
I did go bike riding with Violette, and that was fun.
Not last weekend, but the weekend before that, I went to a horse race, which was fun. It was the kind with sulkies, and trotting horses. Question: Who thought it was a good idea to give jockeys white pants? Seriously. White pants. For racing. On a racetrack that at best isn’t packed earth, and at worst is an absolute soup of mud. I got to pet the horses.
We had school today, naturally. Although tomorrow- Wednesday- is our last day this week. One of our classes was the physics/chemistry class, and we did chemistry. Which was fun.
We’re in two different math classes. One of them is math-in-English, and at a lower level than we are, although the British English sometimes makes parsing the meaning difficult, and the other one, which we had today, is in French, and dealing with sequences and series, which I don’t believe we’ve begun yet. In my defence, I think I might’ve been able to figure out what was going on- and I wasn’t totally hopeless, although I was pretty lost- if the class had been in English.
There’s a castle not too far from my family’s house, not a very big one. I’ve only seen it from a distance, as of today; I hadn’t seen it at all before, but Violette and I went past the turn off to it on our bicycles.
I know I said I’d recap the past few weeks a few weeks ago. I know I should’ve been making posts for the past week. But- and given past experiences, I should’ve already learnt this- I’m not good at recaps, and when I try to bind myself to doing them, I inevitably wind up doing nothing, because I’m so stuck on the recap and can’t move on. So: I’m moving on. There is a chance that I’ll eventually do proper recaps of the past few weeks, but it’s unlikely; don’t hold your breath.
Now that that’s cleared up, let’s talk about today.
I actually like riding the bus; I like watching people, too, and the places. Of course, it’s all necessary research for my project- to successfully do it, I need a feel for what life’s like here- but it’s also a thinly veiled excuse to go places. I like going places.
I’m not exactly sure why this is, but I find it easier to interact with Violette, Juliette’s little sister, than I do Juliette herself. Maybe it’s because with Violette, conversation comes from doing things, whereas with Juliette doing things comes from conversation- I think I’m better at the former, especially in a language that I do not know well.
I don’t think I’ve mentioned this already: they have a trampoline. A trampoline. It’s very fun to play on, and I finally can do front handsprings (well, bounders, but they’re pretty similar) and I really hope that I’m not picking up fifty thousand bad habits that I’ll have to eradicate once I get home.
And they have three cats, and one of the cats had a kitten. It’s absolutely adorable.
Yeah, I know this is supposed to be a blog about my adventure- or adventures, as it may be- in Angers, not in England, but I’ve been way too lazy to make a blog post up until now (yeah, yeah, I know, I should get on that- and I am going to recap the past three weeks, just not now) and here I am. In England, with my host family and another family that’s their friends.
We haven’t really done anything much so far, since we just got here. It took… twelve, thirteen? hours to get here. Not fun. Not unfun, just… not fun. Especially given how we had to leave at 2:30 am to get a ferry that left a 9:00 am to spend the next three hours driving here, to Wotton-Under-Edge.
I predicted, before coming, that I was going to end up being a translator. I was right. I’ve already been enlisted as a translator by Violette, Juliette’s little sister, and her friend whose name I really should know, can’t quite remember, and definitely can’t spell, to translate for them and another little girl in one of the nearby houses, who does not speak French (presumably) and they wanted to talk to.
Also, I meant to publish this yesterday. Whoops. But, anyway, I’m still in England. It’s weird to be on the other side of the language barrier- the person who understands all that’s going on instead of the person who catches every fifth word and has no idea what anyone’s saying.
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