2/7/2012




What a crazy couple of days! After flying for 10 and a half hours, having a four hour layover in the Paris train station, and then two more hours, I finally made it to Angers! It is such a beautiful city, I love it already.
My host parents came to pick me up with my housemate, Tenzin at the train station, and took me home to their cute little house about fifteen minutes away. As usual, I was worried about what kind of host family and potential housemate I would get, but everything turned out so well. They are the sweetest and most generous people. 
The next day, Tenzin and I went to our orientation at school. All of the students in our program (about twenty people) were there and we did introductions. I knew a couple of the people from OSU already from having classes with them, so that was exciting. After the orientation we had a very....interesting lunch in the school cafeteria, and then our site director took us on a tour of the main city.

We visited this pretty church on our tour

The church is called, Cathedral Saint-Maurice d'Angers. It's a hike to get up to, but you get a great view of 
the city from the top.






3/7/2012


Today we got up early and went to our school to take a placement test for the term. After listening to our director speak for about an hour about information that we pretty much already knew, we finally started the test.There were different parts, like listening, reading comprehension and grammar. The listening section was the worst. There was about a minute long recording of a person talking, and several multiple choice questions to answer. The hard part was that there were a lot of background noises on the recording to make it more "realistic" but it actually just made it so muffled that we could barely understand what was being said. It was crazy.
After the test, Tenzin, our friend Laura and I went out to lunch. We found this cute little cafe in town and had baguette sandwiches and wine. It was a beautiful day, and it was really nice to just sit outside, sip wine and people watch.

We spent the rest of the afternoon exploring downtown. When we came around a corner, I saw what has become the highlight of my trip (so far). I'm not really sure how to describe it without first giving a visual:

This little marching band group marched through the town, and Tenzin, Laura and I followed them, fully amused, for a while. I hope that you all can see their little pantaloons and helmet-like hats. The lady blowing the whistle in the middle picture would yell something and they would all respond (I was laughing too hard to try to understand what they were saying). Sometimes they would play their instruments, and other times they would randomly march into one of the stores and harass the shoppers. They were all so into it, and seemed to be having so much fun, and it was probably one of the funniest things that I've ever seen. Some of our group went to a chateau today, but we decided to see it another time, and I'm pretty sure that this made our decision completely worth it :)
Tonight a bunch of us are going out, and I'm excited to see what the night life is like here!