District weekend - now with added outbounders!

That's right, our new recipe for your favourite district weekend now comes with TWICE AS MANY EXCHANGE STUDENTS! And they all have bright blue blazers to identify them as outbounders (French people leaving France on exchange to other, non-French countries).

District 1720 REPRESENT!

We spent a night in Neuvy Sur Barangeon (my host mum and I road-tripped it for nearly 3 hours because we may or may not have gotten lost) and I got to see all my friends again! Some of them for the last time before they left France...June and July are just going to be emotionally draining.

All of these people are going to be LEAVING ME!!

The whole first day/afternoon was just us chilling out, lying around this...youth centre? I'm not completely sure, but there was a war museum, dorms, a restaurant, bikes and a giant, life-size chess set. What more could anyone want? (Apart from chess. Ick.) So we rode bikes (and got chased by a DOG who tried to EAT US) and ate croissants and played basketball and wrote on each other's flags.

Me with some Frenchies!

After a super-formal, full-of-important-Rotarians dinner, everyone went spazz and had a party!! I love that at every Rotary weekend or camp, there is always a DJ hanging around somewhere. But it was a really great weekend - and I met a girl who's going to Sydney who is already more Australian that I probably will ever be. She's blonde, LOVES sport (plays rugby and SURFS! And about a billion other sports) and when I saw her she was wearing a shorts and t-shirt and looked like she'd just stepped off the beach. So no worries about her trying to fit in! Me fitting in with the French people, on the other hand... I NEED NEW CLOTHES!

Today is the 4-month mark. I'm already a third of the way through my year! Seriously, I feel like I've been here forever (not in a bad way!) because everything's just seems normal now. Yeah, everything I watch on TV is in French, all the people I talk to talk in French, homework is - OH WAIT, I don't do homework! MWAHAHAHAH!!!
Although I did do a Bac blanc today. I'm pretty sure I did alright, it was sort of the same as the stuff I'd done in biol and food science last year. The Bac(calaureat) is THE BIG ONE like TEE, but the exams are spread over two years. Today was the mock (blanc) for science (biology/physics and chem) and in a few weeks the REAL Bac exam for science will happen but there's no more science after that.

Buying a presidential mask of Francois Hollande's head = 10 euros
Pinning it to the back of my blazer and scaring people by pretending to be Lord Voldemort = priceless

School is going better too - I'm still really strong in maths! I got 5.5/20 in my last test! And that's awesome, because I beat at least 2 people in my class. Well done me.

There was also a war memorial service thingo with a marching band and everything!
I kept expecting the trumpets to break into the Last Post!

Not much else to say, have settled in fine and dandy with my new host mum and it's really handy living a five-minute walk from school - I can just go home and get my ugg boots if I get cold or something. The weather is getting better, sun is forecast for this week!

Am chockers for June and July, have lots of voyages and stuff planned! Also the holidays begin! Because I'm not already permanently on holidays...

Emma stayed with me for a weekend and I showed her all the nooks and
crannies of Loudun! Which only took about a day.