Wow, It's already been 5 months. With all the holiday festivities coming to an end, I'm starting to realize how much I love it here. I officially call Mandres-les-Roses, Paris, France my home. Since I last blogged, lots has happened. The first semester of school ended, and grades were sent home. I didn't do to bad for an exchange student, if I do say so my self. However, there are certain subjects where I struggle, like French. The good thing is that everything is getting a lot easier and I can now say I feel like I am fluent in French. Of course I still make mistakes, but I understand almost everything, and my host family has told me that I am starting to speak with the French accent and everything! My goal for the end of the year is to perfect my accent, so that when I talk people can't tell I'm American.
Since I haven't blogged in a while, I'm going to go by months to make sure I don't forget anything. I will also leave a blog after this for some of my pictures.
The first month I'll start with is December!
One tradition in France, during December and the beginning of January, is la galette. La galette is a cake type of thing where there is le fevre in the cake. Le fevre is just a little ceramic item. The tradition is to cut the cake and the youngest gets to choose who gets which slice of cake. The person that has le fevre is the king or queen. They then get to choose their queen or king. We ate this almost every week because my host family loves it, and now so do I!
Another tradition in France is how they celebrate Christmas. Normally, in the United States, we wake up really early on Christmas day to open presents, and spend the rest of the day with the family, and have a special diner that night. In France, it's different. We celebrated Christmas on Christmas eve. On Christmas eve, my host mom cooked a typical French meal with fargeau, salmon, and turkey. After the diner, we opened all the presents, then ate a delicious dessert! We spent Christmas day sleeping, eating leftovers, and watching the new movies I got for my host dad. Being away from my real family on Christmas was hard, but I feel like my host family is my second family now, so they made it a lot easier.
A couple days after Christmas, my host family took me to Belgium with some of their friends to celebrate the new year. We went to Bruges, the Flemmish part of Belgium. We stayed at center parcs, which is a place with little houses and there's an indoor waterpark! For new years eve, we watched fireworks, and when it was the new year we all gave each other bisous (kisses on each cheek) and said bon année.
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