Here Goes Hannah: It’s October!!!

Hey everyone! Now that I’m all settled into school, I can start blogging again :) Also my mom reminded me that I needed to reassure everyone that I’m not dead. A lot has happened in the past month! From a visit from my Brazilian sister, Isabela, to traveling to Nantes to visit friends, and don’t forget sitting at school playing tic-tac-toe with my classmates.
One thing that has made school a lot more fun is having another exchange student in my class! Annick is from Holland and speaks great english (which is a death trap for me). We try to speak french, but every so often we can say something stupid in english and die laughing. But the best part is whenever I feel completly lost in the lesson, I can be reassured that it’s not just me.
Guess who is going to Florence, Italy in March? Moi! My art-plastique class is going for 6 days to go to art galleries and stuff. Along with the Spain-Paris trip and the Europe tour, I’m going to have a very eventful spring!
I’ve really realized how many differences there are between British and American English. I always thought that it was just little words that made the difference, along with the accent :P But it’s really how we describe things thats very vague. For example, my English teacher wrote on the board 5 ways to introduce a document. Out of the 5 there, Americans only use one, "it’s about", and the others, like “it tackles the topic of”, just made me giggle.
Like I said earlier, I got to see Isabela for a day last month! It was so refreshing to see a familiar face. I had a rotary weekend the only weekend that she was free, so she came one wednesday when I only had an hour of school. My parents told me that they would probably wait for me outside the high school with her, so I was pleasantly surprised to see a happy brazilian smile walking towards me. Then came the hallmark moment. We spent the day going to the castle, shopping, walking around and then came home for dinner. Even in 3 months, so much had changed in her life! She warned me that when I get back, everyone will be different. More so my friends than my family, but a year can completely change someone. It was really sad to say goodbye, sadder than it was at the airport when she was leaving her exchange to go to Brazil. We knew that we would see each other in France when she left the first time, but now we aren’t so sure when our paths will cross again. But we both know that we will make a huge effort to see each other again. We also pinky promised that she will take me to Vegas on my 21st!
That weekend with the exchange students, I went to Normandy. We went to Omaha beach and climbed up Mont St. Michel. For those of you who aren’t history gurus, Omaha beach was where the Americans landed to liberate France from Nazi Germany. The beach was so beautiful, but I just got the chills looking at the horizon and knowing that 70 years ago there would be planes full of brave people that died for our free world. It was crazy to see the 9,000 graves with the names of ordinary people, like John from New Hampshire. We always learned about all the people who died, but it was different to actually stand surrounded by their graves. After that, we went to another war museum and then drove for two hours to a city close to Mount St. Michel. I was so busy that day, that I didn’t really concentrate on drinking water. Right about then, my head started pounding and I drank about 3 peoples water bottles. At first I assumed that I was just dehydrated and all would be well soon, however I knew later that I was sick. But I still carried on like everything was okay. It was so nice to be with the crazy, lively exchange students. I love being with the spanish speakers so I can try to pick up parts of their conversations, but whats even better is going to a group of people speaking another language and just completely eavesdropping and understanding nothing. We had a good weekend, but I was very glad to go home and sleep. I woke up the next morning and I could barely talk or swallow because my throat hurt so bad. I told my host parents that its hard enough speaking baby french and if I had to go to school that day being completely dumb, I couldn’t survive. So I watched “Ghost Whisperer” in french and drank Vanilla tea.
Last weekend I went to the beautiful city of Nantes! There are a ton of exchange students there so we had fun wandering around, shopping and going to cool places. I stayed at Florencia’s house (the Texan girl) with Daniella (from Mexico) and we had a fun time! However we didn’t go to bed that late because I had a train to catch and we were “going shopping” the next day. At about 20h we realized that tomorrow was sunday, which means that NOTHING would be open tomorrow. I bought a pink blazer as a souvenir because I didn’t really have time to shop till I dropped. The next day we went to La Tour de Bretagne and stood onto of the city. As much as I liked it there, I’m glad I got Sablé as my city. Everyone knows each other here and there are a lot less weirdos.
Have an amazing week guys! Drink tons of pumpkin lattes and listen to pandora and watch netflix for me :D Also, if anyone has a killer pumpkin pie recipe, email it to me! I would love to show my family some American culture.