And so it begins...

The morning after the marathon day in Paris (I'm pretty sure we were walking for at least 14 hours), I headed to Gare de Lyon along with eight other people to meet our advisors and the rest of our group. We made quite the group—nine of us towing our luggage through Gare du Nord, onto the metro, to Gare de Lyon. When we finally met our teacher, there was a group of about 25 of us all together. We checked our luggage into the consigne (luggage storage) and then took a bus to Saint-Michel to go get lunch. We ate lunch by the fountain and then crossed the street to visit Notre Dame again. There wasn't much time that day to visit all the sites we wanted to see, so we took some pictures outside Notre Dame and then we continued through Paris.

We spent the whole day operating under constant threat of rain, so our group never stopped for long at any particular site. And the day seemed to fly by. I knew that we only had a few hours to spend in Paris before we had to catch the train, but I didn't realize just how fast that time would pass. It was a blur--just a few hours after my friends and I had left the hostel, we were all headed back to Gare de Lyon to wait for our train. 

Our train left from Gare de Lyon at 4:00 PM that day, so our group headed back to the train station around 2:30. We headed to the hall where the “Grand Lignes” depart, grouped all our luggage as tightly together as we could, and sat around talking and playing card games until it was time to board. It was a good way to get to know each other and the perfect way to pass the time while we waited.

Penn State had booked first-class tickets from Paris to Besancon, so I got a very comfortable seat for the ride in. It was about a three hour ride to Besancon, and I slept as peacefully as my dog does for almost the entire ride. I woke up when the train was about a half an hour outside Besancon, so I enjoyed the scenery and waited anxiously, excited to meet my host family.

When we reached the train station, everyone gathered their luggage and crowded out onto the platform. There was a man from the CLA (Centre de Linguistics Applique—my school for the summer) waiting for us, along with a row of people that turned out to be the different host families from our gorup. I bid farewell to my newly-made friends as they headed out with their host families. Eventually, there were only a few of us left on the platform. I was comforted by the fact that I had another student living with me, so we could at least hang out with our professor while we waited to figure out what was going on. Just when we were leaving the platform, three more host families came up—they'd been waiting in the lobby of the train station, thinking we'd come out there rather than waiting on the platform. That was the first time I met my host mother, who I'll just refer to as Astrid (because it sounds cool and I don't want to use her real name).

 I live with Astrid and another Penn State student—Pearl. It's just the three of us, unless we spend a weekend with our host father and Astrid as well. He works in Switzerland, so he lives closer to the border. That first night was interesting—my French was pretty bad at that point, so I had a lot of difficulty understanding what Astrid was saying. I spent most of dinner just saying “Oui, oui” without really understanding what it was that she was saying. The dinner was a very nice dinner, and then Astrid let Pearl and I go to get settled into our rooms. I was so tired at that point that I just unpacked a few things, checked my facebook and email, and crawled into bed, wishing that I didn't have to get up so early the next morning to take a placement test.