For my last post, I guess I’ll talk about the end of my exchange year and the benefits I feel like I’ve gained from this experience.
The end of my year in France was by far the best part. By this time, I was extremely comfortable with the language so I could easily converse and joke around with my French peers and host family. There were also a lot of events during the end of my year that contributed to its greatness. My European bus tour ended on April 22, and on the following week, a musical festival called le Printemps de Bourges (“the spring of Bourges”) was held in my town. People from all over France came for the week to listen to bands, sell merchandise in the stands, and enjoy the overall atmosphere that a music festival usually fosters. My friends and I went to see C2C and Mika; Mika turned out to be a great performer, and you can listen to one of his major hit French songs that he performed at his concert, “Elle me dit”, here.
In May, I took a 4 day trip with my host sister Léna to Paris; her brother Johan lives there with his girlfriend, so we showed us around and took us to all his favorite spots including le Parc Chaumont;
Montmartre, the artsy neighborhood home to the church le Sacré Coeur, where we also got to see
this guy perform (skip to 6:17 if you want to see some really crazy stuff!); the Eiffel Tower, and much more.
At the end of May and the beginning of June, my family came to visit me! We spent a few days at Bourges where my host families met my real family, then we traveled to Nice in the South of France for 3 days, and flew back to Paris. This was the first time I saw my parents in 9 months, and it was the first time my parents went to Europe, so it was a really special moment in all our lives.
June brought the end of school (finally, done with high school!), lovely weather, and hanging out with friends each and every day. I felt closer to my exchange friends more than I ever had before; since the bus trip, our bonds only continued to increase, and when my first friend left at the end of June, it was extremely hard for all of us to say goodbye. These were the first friends I made on my exchange year; they supported me in the beginning went things were hard and I missed my family; they were the ones I looked forward to hanging out with after a long day at school where I was that quiet foreigner. With my exchange friends, I was just like them, away from their family, away from their “life”, always eager to taste something interesting or go somewhere new. These people understood me the most during my year, and they understand me the most now when I talk about the experiences we shared. Now, it was time to say goodbye, and it wasn’t easy.
By July, there weren’t a lot of us left. During the first week of the month, I spent a week in Noirmoutier, a cute town on the west coast of France, with my boyfriend at the time, an exchange student from Paraguay, and his host family.
I spent France’s independence day, July 14, in Paris, where I saw the fireworks show next to the Eiffel tower. I left on July 16.
It’s the weirdest thing going back home after not being there for over 11 months. I was so ecstatic to see my dog, and of course my family, but once I was back in my house, I felt like I had never left. I felt like the entire year was some sort of dream that never actually happened because all those relationships I built during that year were now so far away from me that they hardly seemed real. To this day I sometimes feel like the entire experience was a dream, and I tend not to talk about my time there. It might sound snotty when I say no one here will really understand me or my experiences in France, but it’s true. An exchange year is a lot deeper than a vacation or a year of traveling; I became much more confident, more comfortable in my skin, and more independent. I guess you could say I grew up a lot in this year.
I’ll leave you with this video I made during the last few weeks of my time in France, and hopefully you’ll understand more of what I’m talking about.
(music: 4,000 Iles by Fauve)
FIN
