The World's Smallest Shower.

Well, I am finally in France! My plane took off from St. Louis on the appropriate day and landed in JFK around 11. I found my way to the correct terminal but was told the AirFrance counter would not be open until 13:00 (yes I am trying my best to embrace using military time- I still have to subtract though) I was walking around the terminal and bumped into Ellen and Jason who came from the west coast and had been there since 6:30 am. Needless to say they were a bit slaphappy and we goofed around until more people showed up. Finally we got our boarding passes and made it through security. The five hour wait before our flight consisted of 15 of us being the loudest and happiest people at the AirFrance gate. We spent too much on airport food and commiserated on not being ready for our placement exam on Wednesday.

At 18:00 our enormous plane finally took off. This thing had the nicest first class I've ever seen in my whole life! Everyone's plan was to sleep but when confronted with the fact that each chair had it's own TV screen full of movies, games and tv episodes that plan was soon scrapped. Dinner was a choice between boef bourgignon and polluck, both of which I heard were quite good. Not surprisingly we were also served wine, bread, cheese, butter and a chocolate brownie - also tapioca and cous cous. After dinner was coffee which we all drank before realizing it was not the best idea at 2 in the morning local time. I was still able to get about 2 hours of sleep before landing in Paris at 6:30am- an hour early due to a strong tailwind across the Atlantic said the pilot.

The only excitement at the airport when all our luggage emerged except Doug's - they will send it to him when it is found. We met our on-site director Paul McDowell, affectionately to be called PMcD. We took a large coach bus to Angers stopping for lunch along the way, which offered up the first chance of ordering food in French- rather hilarious to watch us I'm sure. I was able to sleep most of the way (about 3 hours) so that was much needed.

We arrived in Angers and took a small tour of our college, L'Universite Catholique de L'Ouest (UCO). Our subset of this college is called CIDEF- it is for international students studying abroad. On an even smaller subcircle on the Venn diagram there is SUNDEF - the office just for ND students, it's not much but I'm sure we'll spend a lot of time there stealing PMcD's printer.

Ok, meeting our host families might have been one of the most hilarious things I've ever seen/experienced. We were all standing in an awkward circle with bags and bags of luggage (I did not bring the most, mom). One or two itty bitty cars or very nice SUV's would pull up and our host families would emerge. Usually it was just the mom, but in some cases there was a married couple, small children, grown children, an older couple, and even a grandma. We all basically sneaked peaks at them while trying to be invisible. PMcD would greet them and basically pry one of us out of the herd to receive our French kisses. He also had to explain the concept behind and give smoke detectors to each family to be placed outside our rooms- ND decided it was a huge insurance liability. It was quite enjoyable to laugh at everyone in turn and speculate about the awkwardness to follow, at least until it was my turn :) My host mom pulled up in a tiny peugeot and picked me out immediately- they had been given pictures. I got my French kisses and she got the smoke detector and we were off. I could understand about 90% of what she said to me, but I could tell she was speaking slowly. We went to her house ( I am only about an 8 minute walk from campus) where she showed me my room and let me unpack. I have a small but very nice room with a desk and large wardrobe, sink and the -you guessed it- world's smallest shower. I am just grateful for the very nice accommodations.

At dinner I was able to meet the whole family, Mr. Buffenoir is very nice and has a good sense of humor. There are two kids Nicolas (18) and Cecilia (14) who are also quite nice. Dinner was long with good food and lots of questions for me. I did my best to answer and we understood each other most of the time except for a few things- I definitely need a picture to explain mom's draft horse wagon setup. Every now and then the kids would go off rambling about something, Nico is a tennis fanatic, and my 90% comprehension which I was quite proud of would drop to about 5%. The parents could tell and would try to get the kids to talk slower. I am looking forward to seeing how much better I will be able to understand them after 4 months. I was given a house key and the code for wireless internet (I'm trying to not let this be the highlight of my evening :) ) After a little bit of Skype I was exhausted and went to bed. I slept till about 9 this morning and will have to leave soon to meet everyone else. We are going on a walking tour with PMcD and then to have dinner at his house. Tomorrow is my birthday and our placement exam which Mrs. Buffenoir assured me is good luck. I will post some pictures of Angers later. Headed out to meet Claire a bit early and explore. Much love. R