Kendra in France

Submitted!

2012-01-13T12:45:00.000-08:00

I just submitted my TAPIF application. It is due on Sunday, and I was starting to worry that my recommendations wouldn't come in on time, but my good ol' French professor from Fall '07 (WHAT UP UMASS GRAD SCHOOL) came through at the last minute.

The two main choices I had to make were a)where do I want to request placement and b)what grade level do I want to teach?

As far as grade level, I ended up putting no preference. The choices are primaire, which is kids as young as 4-5ish up through about 11, or secondaire, which is middle and high school. Y'all know how my class behaved when I was in high school (read the rest of this blog if you don't. Highlights include water fights in biology, singing in chemistry, a history professor with the most intense underbite in the world screaming in my face, and a class psychologist to figure out why we failed so hard at life), so I am understandably hesitant about throwing myself that again. On the other hand, teenagers are hilarious, they would speak some english, and I think I get along with them pretty damn well. I have more experience with little kids, but working in primaire takes more work than in secondaire. The kids don't know as much, and the teachers sometimes expect you to teach a whole class. When it came down to it, I think I could do either and am just going to let that be out of my hands.

Location, however, I stressed about. A lot. I could have put Aix-Marseille, where I was last time, but I want to see something new. I ended up putting Paris as my first choice even though most things I read recommended not doing that because it is way expensive. Whatever. Caution to the wind. I'm gonna have my loans payed off so damn soon that I can make it work. Also, I have friends in Paris, and, as I've learned from living in a place people actually want to visit, people are more likely to come play if it's (relatively) easy to get to me. They divide the country up into regions so that they don't get 8,000,000 applicants for the same place. You can only pick one from each region. Picking Paris meant that Aix-Marseille, Lyon, Corsica, any of the DOM-TOMs (The Reunion, Guadeloupe, other over seas territories), Bordeaux, and Nice were all out of the picture. My second choice was Toulouse for southern weather, proximity to Spain and my old host family, and a generally enthusiastic group of assistants from previous years. My third choice was Reims - the region to the right of Paris, because of proximity to big cities and about a kajillion other European countries. I could be placed anywhere though, and honestly, I'd be into whatever at this point.

Now I have to forget about this whole thing... put it out of my mind until April when I get word on whether or not I was accepted into the program and where I've been placed.

Until then!

2011-12-28T12:26:00.001-08:00

I am applying to teach English in France for next school year. I can't tell if this is me "being adventurous" or "running away from my impending adulthood" or something else entirely, but I'm not hating it.

JOIN ME?

www.tapif.org

In any case, this is as good a topic as any (ok, the only appropriate topic) to continue with on a blog called kendrainfrance. How freaky and exciting! Right now all I am waiting on is my letters of recommendation. I heard back from the French professor at UMass I took a class with in Fall 2007, and he said he'd be more than happy to write one for me. I also sent an email to J-Ham. She is my favorite, but I know that she is often too busy to write recommendations happily, so I hope she will be able help me out.

Since the gap between the last post and this one is just about 4.5 years, I'll give you an extreme-cliffnotes-version update on my life thus far.

Hampshire: Went to college. Made friends! Over 4 years changed my concentration from linguistics -> neuroscience and music -> pre-med -> bioethics -> health policy and ethics. Lived on campus. Lived off campus. Partied. Got snowed in more times than I'd like. Fell in love! Fell out of love! Lather rinse repeat! Worked over the summer in San Francisco, at Harvard, and at the 5 colleges. Stopped eating gluten, all my health issues magically disappeared. Wrote my thesis on genetic testing and families and disease identity. Moved back to San Francisco. Worked at a camp as the office manager/nurse. Left that job to work at a Clinic in SF. Moved into the city with some sweeeeeet roommates. Dealt with death. Spent a lot of time with my family. Got Maya and Izze to move here. Dealt with death again. Can't stand my job - I have nothing to do all day.

That pretty much brings you up to date.

I love living in SF, and I ADORE being near my family, but I'm not tied down right now. I have a lease that goes month-to-month in August, no significant relationships keeping me in one place, no kids, my loans are more than half paid off, why on earth would I not apply for something like this?? We'll see. There is a chance I'll chicken out and decline even if I get accepted, but I can't say no if I don't apply, right?

2007-06-23T15:01:00.000-07:00

(ok, it is now... um... friday? and I am going to fix this blog and then update at the bottom.)
((and now it is the thursday after that friday. BLOGGING NOW!)

I can't believe I'm leaving in 3 days. This defies words.

Ok, what do I have to talk about -- lots of things I'm sure. OH! Paris. So, today we'll do Paris, my oral exam, Fête de la Musique, and My last day with my friends.

It's like midnight and i'm freaking tired, so i did an outline and i'll fill in the blanks when i get the time -- probably tomorrow night my time or maybe even monday sometime. we'll see.

Paris:
thursday: I woke up really early in the morning with Christophe to go to work with him (otherwise I wouldn't have a ride to the Aix station) and we got some coffee. We did two clients, had more coffee, and then went to the TGV station at around 8:45 (my train was at 9). Me being the wonderfully talented person that I am, I managed to lose my tickets right after getting there, but found one of the security guards looking for it and was ok. I got on the train, all was well, listened to music, chilled, and got to paris. In paris, I realized that hey guess what, I had NO money on me, and the metro machines weren't taking my card. GREAT! so I called Olsen freaking out and ended up bumming 1euro40 off of some teenagers after several unsuccessful begging attempts. I took the metro to the Belleville station and got over to the apartment. That night we went out into the city and met up with Mr. Farges and his wife (who is swiss) and we had couscous with them. It was pretty much an awesome night, and makes me really wish I'd taken harder math just to have had his class.

friday: We woke up, went to this garden with amazing comfortable chairs, found a park with lots of play equipment and zane played, then went back to the apartment. Marina (a girl who was planning on going to hampshire who'd been studying french in paris for 5 months) invited me to go get coffee with her, so I flung myself into Paris on my own (LOVED IT) and we chatted and chatted for about 4 hours. It was pretty amazing. I bought myself a snacky dinner at a Casino (supermarket chain) and sat in front of the Pantheon to eat. I got home andddd we chilled.

saturday: Anastasia wasn't feeling well in the morning/didn't sleepy well the night before, so Olsen, Zane and I went to this little park near the apartment. There were lots of other little kids who asked me questions in french and they were incredibly cute. Someone had emptied a bag of birdseed into the bushes so there were about a kajillion pigeons everywhere. Later on I decided to go wander about the city by myself, so I found myself near the Centre Pompidou and there were street performances going on all over the place. After about 2 hours of wander time (I think it was sufficient) I parked myself in front of the museum and watched this crazy guy do tricks. I took lots of pictures and if I can find a cord to connect my camera to the internet I will put them online this weekend (I think it is like the 7th-8th this weekend... yeah). I went back to the apartment and we talked about lots of hippie things.

sunday; I don't remember what we did in the morning, but around 6 I met up with Chris (french/american kid who IS going to Hampshire) and Marina (from before). We hung out around the city and had an all around awesome time. (alliteration... YES).

monday; We went to Versailles, ate in the gardens, I was going to go take a tour of the castle but it is closed on Mondays so instead I wandered around the surrounding area (I really enjoy wandering in unknown areas, can you tell?) Found a cool little shop and bought a scarf and some presents. I ended up chatting with the shop keeper for like 15 minutes. She was about my age and was really nice. It made me feel better about speaking french because at this point I'd been speaking in pretty much only English for a while.

tuesday; Tuesday SUCKEDDDDD. Sort of. I thought my TGV was at 7:04 so I left the apartment at 6ish. Missed the metro by about 5 seconds and had to wait another 12 minutes for the next one, so I was freaking out that I'd miss my train. Got there just on time, but wait! It isn't at 7:04, it is at 7:54. I wait, some guy starts freaking out on his phone at someone named Catherine. He was seriously screaming... in english... it was awkward. I get on the train and find that my lovely darling ipod has decided to erase all of my music. I die a little on the inside. 3.5 hours later I arrive at Aix TGV which, for the 99% of you who have never been, is in the middle of freaking nowhere. It is now 10:30. The next bus for Salon? definitely at 2:40. I call Christophe kind of in a panic and he says he can't pick me up before 1. I look for other options. I find a bus that leaves for Aix centre ville every half hour. I've missed the last one by like 2 minutes, so I wait for the next one. I arrive at Aix centre ville and find I've missed the bus by one minute. ONE MINUTE. I'm starting to freak out a little at this point. The next bus is at 12:40, so I wait and do Sudokus. I see Delphine and... other... guy... at the gare. I take the bus and get to Salon at 1:30. The last bus was at 1:20, the next is at 2:40. I almost cry a little, but then I walk around looking for someone, nobody is in Salon, so I call Vio and she lets me come up to her apartment. We talk and I chill there until my bus and go home and pretty much collapse.

Oral exam:
I got there at 8 am, but considering that the test was alphabetical and my last name is BEChtel and not AAAbechtel, and given the fact that I was 7th on the list of 8, I assumed I'd be going a little later on in the morning. I now understand why they say "when you assume, you make an ass out of (yo)u and me." I was freaking 2nd. I definitely started stressing at this point. I got into the room and she gave me the prologue of Les Confessions by Rousseau. Not the worst possible, but definitely not a text I was hoping for. The blond girl who is in S who went before me pretty much stared at the teacher for 20 minutes without really saying... well, anything, so I guess that made me look better. I was super stressed so I didn't speak as well as I could have. My accent was craaaazy noticeable and I kept repeating myself, but it's all good. I hung around for a while but I was kind of in a shitty mood because of some problems I was having with some of the girls. I went to Daniele's house (my theater teacher) and she gave me a copy of the play I was in.

I was kind of torn between going with Vio and her friends to Aix for fête de la musique or staying in Salon like I'd planned, but finally i ended up going to Aix. Best. Decision. Ever. We has such a crazy fun time. When I first got to Salon Vio wasn't picking up her phone and I found Pauline so we hung out for a bit. Then Tibo came by so she left and I finally got a hold of violaine. We went to her house for a little bit. Her friends picked us up in front of the Cinémas and then we went to her dad's house to get the camper. We drove that to aix, parked in the parking (lot) "Krypton" and took a bus into the centre ville. There was this one crazy percussion group that was marching through the streets -- they were wearing red teeshirts and white cloth pants and they had some really amazing rhythms. They were impressive. We ate pizza that was croustifondante (crunchymelty) played "cap ou pas cap" which is kind of like truth or dare without the truth, so I guess "dare or dare". It literally means are you capable or not, so I think you get the idea. There was this one place where there were what we called "sound walls" with techno and everyone was dancing and we found sophie and hung out with her. She was hilarious. She wanted to keep dancing so we left. We wandered around some more listening to more music, found another sound wall and danced some more. I saw Pierre and he was tots hitting on me, but it was just awkward because he'd never ever talked to me and he was kind of drunk, so it was... yeah... bizarre. We left around 2am when all the music stopped suddenly. Vio saw someone doing Bolas and she asked if she could for a little while because she'd been spazzing all night about forgetting them in the car. We walked back to the parking lot, got a little lost, but finally found it. They sang tryo. It was a beautiful night. We slept in the caravan and had pound cake and nutella in the morning. We all went over to Vio's house and I ended up staying and playing with her puppies. Afterwards we went to Salon just for a little bit and then we went to Mallemort on her scooter. She was planning on seeing her boy, but he was in Marseille so she stayed at my house. She invited me to go to a party that night but I couldn't because the grandparents were staying over. I said she could stay at my house if she wanted because she said she didn't want to go to the party if I didn't go, but she ended up making other plans... after all, it is Mallemort. Bad. Death. There isn't a lot to do, and by there isn't a lot, I mean there is absolutely nothing at all. ever. We had dinner with the grandparents and then we all went over to Nichole's house. She is one of the sweetest women ever.

On Saturday the 23rd I had my last day to really see my friends. I sent a text message to everyone saying that I was going to be in the city all day and to come say good bye to me. I woke up, went over to Nichole's house to say goodbye. She gave me a novel and a book of poetry. I went to Salon around 11am and nothing was open. I went to the Grain d'Arome and had a coffee and wrote in my journal. I started to get hungry so I got a kebab and ate it at the Château. I was getting lonely (it was around 1ish) so I called Océane and she came by for a little. We walked and chatted. I saw Carlotta when we were in front of the lycée Then Wilfrid came around 2 and we went to the Bièrie and talked and laughed about our theories about the homosexuality of certain boys in our class. It was kind of the best ever. It turns out that it was also Marie la blonde's birthday celebration, so I got to see her and coralie and anaïs and thomas also. Pauline and Alexandre came to see me, everyone wrote in my book. We laughed and chatted about the year. It was very low stress, until I said I was leaving at around 8:30. Coralie asked when we could see each other again before I left and I said, well next time I'm in france I guess. She hadn't understood that I was leaving so soon and cried kind of a lot. I got sad too and left with Alex and Pauline. We parted at the corner of the lycée and the ciné and then it was my turn to cry. A lot. Damn, even writing this now is so hard. I miss them so much. Anyways, I was going to go to this party that Vio had invited me to go to to see her for the last time, so I did. It was kind of awkward beacuse I didn't know anyone, but it was ok. At night she walked me back to where Geneviève was going to pick me up and we drove her back to the party even though we only had two seats. On the way back Geneviève started sobbing and I did too. I can't go into any more detail right now because it is just too sad. Anyways, we got home and all was good and I was happy to have seen people, but it was definitely very bittersweet.

YAY! I filled out the outline! Aren't you proud of me!

Well, tomorrow I'm having oral surgery (funfunfun!) so I should have lots of down time to update my life from last day in france until now. I still have a hard time believing I'm seriously here. There are definitely moments that are more difficult than others, but considering, I think I'm doing pretty well.

(oooh now you guys get to wait some more (sorry) and try to figure out my outline. Wait until my words fill in the blanks. And sorry about the lack of updates lately, i've been kind of crappy at the whole dealing with leaving thing in the last week or so.<--- this is what I wrote before I updated the outline)

love kendra

2007-06-13T03:17:00.000-07:00

Hi everyone. This isn't going to be an amazing blog, so yeah... get over it.

I'm leaving for Paris tomorrow -- super excited. I need to get away a little to figure some stuff out anyways and it'll be good to not be at my house for a while. I'll update as soon as I get back to tell you all about the crazy awesome time I will hopefully have had with Olsen & Family.

As far as here life, things kinda suck. I took the written section of my Baccalaureat tests and I think I did pretty well on all of them. We'll see I guess, I get my grades online on the 5th of July. Things aren't going too well with me and my friends. I don't know what happened but apparently there are a couple people that don't really want to see me before I go, or that they have other things to do and aren't really concerned by that. I guess I'm being kind of selfish, but come on, I'd think the fact that we might never see each other again could maybe motivated them to put other shit to the side for just the tiny week I have left (5 days in paris, 7 here in the south including today). I'm not even sure that our Fête de la Musique plans won't fall through, which would be pretty much the biggest bummer of life since we've been planing that for at least 2 months. I'm trying to stay as upbeat as possible but I'm feeling kinda shitty right now, so excuse the lackluster quality of this blog. It's about as fun as I'm feeling right now.

Oh well.

At least I'm looking a little more forward to coming home after all this.

See you all soon,

kendra

2007-06-09T02:59:00.000-07:00

This week has been, bizarre at best, and downright lonely at worst. That's right folks, all the french kids are trying to cram in that last moment of revision before the Baccalaureat exams, and they are pretty much ALL forbidden by their parents to go out before the last test. This makes life in the middle of no where extra special fun for me, because not only do I get the joys 45 minute bus rides into the city, I also get the delight of all my friends telling me that "Oops! we forgot to tell you but our parents don't want us to stay in the city today so we're all leaving in half an hour..." It's major fun time over here.

We did have one really fun night in the city. I went with Pauline, Diane, Charlotte, Julie, and Caroline to "Le Petit Mexicain" where the food is tasty as heck (although they will never convince me that the prices are good. 10euro for a burrito the size of my hand is CRAZY.) I was secretly cracking up all throughout the meal because they all ordered "fajitas" (it wasn't) and were horribly confused... If my life were a poorly written novel, this passage would go something like this;

"WHAT DO WE DO PAULINE!" they panicked. They watched in awe as Pauline, whose boyfriend works at Le Petit Mexicain, took a tortilla, spread the beans, then guacamole, then cheese, and finally placed the meat strips on top, all with seeming ease. She folded the tasty tasty food product in half, and started to eat. "No no! We can't possibly do that by ourselves!" everyone else cried, staring at the tiny pots of food before them. "It is far too complicated. Everyone! Quick! Copy exactly what Pauline does!"

I however, ordered "enchiladas", which, although super tasty, looked more like a slightly spicy gratin than mexican food. Ooooh those silly french people. I ate the jalapeño slices that I had been told by the waiter not to eat because they were spicy and everyone just kind of stared. I was in spicy heaven, and they told me I was pretty much going to die because of the powerful powerful spice I'd just eaten. haHA! Little do they know, when in get burritos that are normal size (ie el Cheapo 4lyfe) I pile on not only the hot sauce but also far more jalapeño slices then they could ever imagine. Mmmm... food.

Written tests are on Monday and Tuesday, the 13th I have off, I leave Thursday morning (the 14) for Paris to meet up with Olsen/Anastasia/Baby Zane. (SO STOKED), I come back down here on the 19th, I'm gonna spend the day in Salon, come home, study for my oral test on the 21st, Fête de la Musique on the 21st after my oral, (SO STOKED AGAIN) and then 4 days (hopefully) of crazy time before I come home on the 26th. Crazy!

For anyone wanting a countdown, I'm coming home in 16 days. Yikes. Expletive.

A rather interesting day

2007-05-31T14:16:00.000-07:00

I was planning on doing a detailed account of my last day of school, but then I fell asleep, so here is that blog along with other things afterwards. Enjoy!

Oh yeah, and MASSIVE picture update. Look for the albums "Theater", "Last Day of School", and "Carnival" (yeah, yahoo started working again :D) I'm serious about this being massive. If I get everything up there should be about 300 pictures. Wow... (UPDATE: OK.... after getting about 30 pictures online yahoo started failing on me again. Someone is going down. I'm trying to find another better picture service, but at this point you have "theater" and about 15 of my 150ish last day of school pictures.) (UPDATE #2... I got 200 pictures on to flikr (look to your right) and it told me that I can't add any more until I pay or delete some other ones. I swear some day I'll figure out a way to organize all of this mess. But anyways! You have about 30 new pictures on yahoo and 200 on flikr. Enjoy.)

So, last Thursday was the last day of school. I woke up and the lovely kind and gentle Benjamin was already in the bathroom. Oh happy day. Around 6:50 I decided that I really would like to go to school clean since I was not planning on coming home until late that night, so I started banging on the door saying 'BEN THE BUS IS IN 15 MINUTES PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE GET OUT OF THE SHOWER" and he kind of grunted and then slammed the door open. Apparently he'd been done for a while but was just chilling looking at himself in the mirror for kicks. I love mornings... can you tell?
I get to school, go up the hill to where my friends and I stand before the first bell. We're staring at the school, realizing we have Gavois and how this is just not gonna happen, so we decide to go get coffee instead of the first hour of class. We go to the Grain d'Arome and go downstairs and find more than half of our class there too... hahahahaha... Gavois' fan club.
Pauline and I get all excited about going to Italian because we had a project to take a picture with all of our teachers and this teacher -- let's just say a picture of her would be GOLDEN. The hair, the clothes, she has provided us with countless hours of entertainment throughout the year. We wait around for a while, and it turns out that she has decided to cut the last day of school. I was so sad that we didn't get a picture with her... She is crazy. Pauline and I went to the castle next door to the school instead and sat and chatted about how fast the year went.
Then we had math (again we were going for the picture) and he too cut school. What is this crazy french school system?! We took loads of picture in the hallway until the hall monitors came by and told us to leave, so we started walking out and took pictures in the stairwells. One of the hall monitors saw us and we thought she was going to confiscate the camera but instead she took a picture of all us and was really nice and out of character.
4th hour of class was Gavois again, and we looked at each other and said... hold on... is the last day of school really going to be ONLY history? No, I think not. So we went to monoprix and too pictures and walked all around the city for a while instead. It was a very good plan.

There was a concert at school afterwards with groups of student... it was sooooo bad. I took little video clips of the "musicians" because it was just that bad. Anyone know how to put tiny video clips online?

After "school" Diane and a couple of the other girls decided that we were on a quest to find this guy so they could stare at his never ending beauty. I was not as gung ho as they were, and unfortunately this put me in a pretty bad mood, but whatever, I got over it. I drank SO MUCH COFFEE because we went to every bar in the city looking for them and when you sit down you have to order. It was horrible.

All the girls left around 6pm to catch their buses. I went over to the table with Pauline and her boyfriend and we hung out until 7:30 when he had to work. I then went to his restaurant (petit mexicain!) and got tasty tasty food with Pauline and her mom. It started POURING rain to the point where I was outside for literally 10 seconds maximum and I was completely soaked. There wasn't a single hair on my head that wasn't wet -- it was like a shower.

Then, at 8:30pm there was a theater thing at the Casa Palabra which is this little middle eastern style tea place with a very cosy atmosphere. There were two text readings and then afterwards it was kind of an open mic thing. There was a woman who told an amazing story complete with voices -- I was completely enthralled, my friend Jade played accordion, and I sang. After the story I had to go because Christophe was picking me up.

Very cool day.

Friday I was going to go to Aix to a little get together that Diane's cousin was having, but it turned out to be WAY too much of a hassle to get there and back, and I wanted to go to Pauline's house on Saturday night so I ended up not going. We did, however, got H&M where I bought pretty things. I am going to go through hell trying to bring everything home with me...

Saturday I bummed around the house all day and then took a bus to Salon to meet up with Pauline. We went back to her house on her motorcycle and chilled there. Later on, Diane, Marine, Cyriel, Chloe and her boyfriend and Cyriel's cousin met up with us and we hung out in the little fountain building near her house. I was the only one that slept over though. The next day Pauline's mom drove me home. At home we were having the family celebration for Ben's birthday where he was amazingly douchy. He is just not a nice person... at least at his 16 years of age, he is NEVER nice. ever. I took a little video of him while we were singing happy birthday and the apathy just shines through. (again, video... online... how... please?)

And today is Monday!

Wish me luck with the picture update! If there are no new picture when you go look send me an angry email or an angry comment because seriously, this should be working now.

LOVE! Kendra

2007-05-28T05:04:00.000-07:00

It has been so hot lately that I've been wearing pretty much exclusively skirts/dresses. However, today it is windy and chilly.

Yesterday we had a huge picnic with friends of the family in the sun (sidenote, I saw a bunch of people I really like for probably the last time, but didn't think about it like that and feel better and not all weepy like I usually do when I see people for the last time), and me being ridiculously white and sometimes not all that smart, got really really sunburned. The funniest part for you and most painful part for me? The fact that I was sitting crosslegged so the sides of my knees/legs is burnt worse than any other part of me. Fun!!! I guess never really living in the hot hot heat makes me forget that I should probably put on sunscreen all the time. Oh well.

Diane had her 17th birthday party the other day and it was OMG so much fun. The only problem was that she forgot to tell me that we weren't allowed to go inside the house and I hadn't brought anything to sleep on... but luckily her, charlotte and myself decided to sleep inside on the kitchen floor, so we were cosy and warm on the linoleum, and everyone else was outside in the chilly night air. They decided to make us pay for this around 7am by BANGING on the door. I guess we kind of deserved it, but it didn't make me any less angry. I successfully yelled at them in french after they woke us the third time.

There is a fly in my room and he is bugging the shit out of me.

I have SO MUCH REVISION TO DO BEFORE THE BAC!!! I'm planning on not even attempting the science papers, the math is freaking easy (I got an 18.5/20 on the last bac blanc without studying, so i'm not tripping), but I actually want to succeed in french, so I bought the annales and am studying. It is kind of crazy. OOooh! I got a 12/20 on our most recent bac blanc in french, which means I was corrected by someone who doesn't know who I am and who didn't know I am not french. I know, I'm pretty much the best ever, worship me. Thing is, I couldn't be too externally happy about the grade since the two girls next to me had picked the same subject as me and had gotten an 8 and a 9 respectively. The whole class is kind of like "??!O_O?!!?" at my grades. I am more "!!!! :D!!!" I'm also pretty excited that Hampshire doesn't have grades. Yesssssss.

We picked cherries at the grandparents' house the other day. TASTY! A bunch of them were too ripe, so Genevieve made jam this morning.

Picture Update!!(Oui diane et pauline, il y a des photos de vous 2. Et pour tous ceux qui font du théâtre, il y a des photos du spectacle y compris les "kids" tout sale! Et moi avec la robe trop laide.) ((EDIT! Er, for some reason Yahoo photos is being a jerk and only uploading 7 of my 40ish pictures... I even tried doing one at a time, and it just isn't working. I'll try again later today, but if it doesn't work, I don't know how to fix it. Sorry!)

They just opened up a bunch of new stores in Aix (including an H&M) and I'd really like to go, but this week is a little bit busy, being the end of school and all. Oh yeah! I only have 3 more days of class, and one ends at 10am and the other at noon. It is crazy how fast this school year went by.

Hmm... I can't think of anything else at the moment. I have to pick classes on June 11th, and I have no clue what I'm going to do. I just keep reminding myself that we have add/drop period for the first two weeks and that I can shop around.

love kendra

Forgive the emo-ness of this post.

2007-05-22T11:12:00.000-07:00

Ah!! I'm a huge emotional ball of yuck right now. I have one month left in France. ONE MONTH! The result? A horrible division of Kendra into 2 entirely separate parts. Let me introduce them.

Kendra (pronounced ken-dra)
-So excited to go home
-Misses her family
-misses her friends
-stoked to start college
-ready to move on with her life
-done with life in France, wants to get back to normal life

Kendra (pronounced l'a-mér-i-caine)
-Dreading going home
-already misses her host family
-already SERIOUSLY misses her french friends
-wants to stay here and do Terminale with her buddies
-life in france is her normal life.

Whatttt? But Kendra, you ask, this doesn't make any sense! Most of those statements are contradictory! Seriously, I'd help you if I could, but I don't know how to even process my thoughts right now. You know what I'm doing? I'm avoiding it. I can't stop thinking about it, but I just numb myself to the thoughts because it's easier.

AHHHH! Why are France and San Francisco and Hampshire all so far away from each other? Why do I have such a hard time ending things?

A week ago I was SO ready to go home.
Now, this is the happiest I've been here, and it's ending.
But I still want to go home.
I just want to come back after I'm done being at home.
And then go back home when I'm tired of being here.

I guess the thing is, I keep thinking about if I were really French or if I were to live next year here in France, there would be so many things I could do because a) I speak the language now, and b) I have real friends now.

I feel so emo writing all of this. Don't take the pseudo cry fest all that seriously, I'll be fine. Sometimes I just need to write it down in English.

love kendra

2007-05-15T14:10:00.000-07:00

Ok, I swear I'm in the middle of writing an excellent blog entry! I'm just so busy that I haven't had time to finish it yet. I'm not going to be sleeping at home for at least 3 days this week (it is crazy theater fest in salon) so I'm not promising anything before Sunday, but I swear it'll be awesome and there will be pictures.

love you all,

Kendra

UPDATE! The new post is below this one. I don't know why.

2007-05-13T11:50:00.000-07:00

Happy Sunday!

I haven't updated in a while, but happily for me, this time it was not for lack of things to say, but for lack of time because I was out doing things!!! This is ridiculously exciting. Can you tell how excited I am? Really? Really Papi? (let it go...)

Ok, hmm... where to start. This might be a little out of order.

I only have a little more than 5 weeks left here and that scares the shit out of me.

Two weeks ago on Wednesday and Thursday we did our play 3 times for people from the school and parents. It went WAY better than I though it was going to be, which was refreshing considering I thought it was going to be horrible beyond belief. A bunch of my friends saw me sing for the first time and they were all excited for me and that made me burst with happiness. Oooh! Another most excellent thing, in the last week I've had at least 10 people tell me that they though I was either faking the American accent in the play or that I am French and just have a weird way of talking. Made me SO FREAKING HAPPY.

I've been hanging out with my friends every day lately and I am realizing that it is going to be so hard to leave. Yes, I miss everyone at home, and I can't wait to see everyone, and I can't wait to start college, and a lot of things here are crazy hard all the time, but I have a life here now. I have real friends. I want to finish school with these guys here too. I need to clone myself.

This week was the 18th Rencontres de Théâtre Scolaire which pretty much means that I lived in Salon at Violaine's house from Thursday night to around 2pm today. We were the first and teh last group to perform, opening night was Tuesday, and we did really well on the two shows. The first group was a lot better the Tuesday night and my group was better the Saturday. On Saturday all 3 of the balconies were full... there were so many people there, it was impressive. I keep wanting to use french descriptors... I have lost my command of the English language. Good job kendra. I saw about 9 shows and did a modern dance in the street performance, which was wacky but a lot of fun. We climbed on things and flailed about in the streets. It was definitely one of those things that I probably should be embarrassed about but totally am not at all. Most of the plays were pretty crappy, but the one done by the conservatory (with Mathilde and Violaine) was crazy good. I tried to take some picture of it, but they all came out blurry. I think I'm gonna go see that one again in June (c'est le 10 et le 20 juin je crois si il y'a qqn ici qui veut y aller avec moi)

Continuing on the theater thing, Christophe, Genevieve, Camille and I all went to marseilles the week before last to see a play that my neighbor directed. It was... bizarre. I didn't understand a whole lot (then again, neither did christophe and genevieve, so I feel better) but the basic subject was two women in a car talking about their childhoods for 2 hours. Yeah, it was long.

Last night I had one of the most surreal "french" moments of the whole year. I was walking home (to Vio's house) from our post theatrical celebrations and Jade (another girl who does theater, but not with me, and who plays accordion amazingly well) asked me to improvise with her. We were walking down the street at like 1 am with about 10 people, everything was abandoned and all the street lights were still on, singing and playing accordion/jazz. It was trippy. I've been having a lot of weird "moments" like this one lately.

May in France is the month of but-I-don't-want-to-work. Why you ask? Every single week in May has at least one day off. It is pretty sweet, except for the fact that we have our first tests in 20 days. Yep, 20 days... fun.

I haven't been to English class a lot recently because it is always at the same time as our practices/performances for theater, and I've just realized how much I can't stand it any more. It is such a waste of my time! Every time I talk she acts like I'm wasting her time, so I've just stopped talking pretty much.

I think this is a good size entry. I'll try to write more frequently for the last bit of time I have here.

Oh! I almost forgot. For those that stalk me via this blog, do you want me to keep blogging this summer/during college? Cause I totally will if there is an interest.

love you guys!

Kendra

2007-05-05T09:19:00.000-07:00

I know, I know, you all love me. This is why I managed to get a copy of the most glorious picture known to man kind. That's right, I got a picture of my History teacher along with the kid who dressed up as him for Carnivale. You ready for this?

Bask in the glory.

Love kendra

2007-04-30T12:44:00.000-07:00

Geneviève and Christophe got back from Istanbul and had discovered what they told me was the MOST AMAZING IDEA EVER and that they were going to take it, start making it in France, and become kazillionairs. They say they can't tell me about it, but that we'll eat it for dinner tonight and I will revel in the glory that is this ridiculously inventive idea. They even mention that I might steal the idea and make my own living the the US of A with magical food product.

You know what we had for dinner tonight?

Baked potatoes.

Something about putting other foodstuffs inside of a potato was an amazing and never before thought of idea. I go "we totally do this in America" and they got all depressed.

END!

2007-04-29T08:18:00.000-07:00

No parents + these kids = BAD IDEA.

That's what I thought coming in to this long weekend, and it is what I think coming out of it. We have not had any serious problems (thank god) but Ben can just be such a freaking jerk, and when there is no one with ANY authority (even the little his parents have) in the house, he takes over in his horribly egotistical ways and just crushes the spirit and life force of everyone around him.

Ok, it isn't as bad as all that, but let me just say I am damn happy that the parentals are coming home today.

I miss home. I love here, but I miss home.
I will miss here. I will love home, but I will miss here.

I had a good discussion about the lameness of Ben and Camille sometimes with all four of their grandparents. It was quite gratifying. Then it suddenly changed into a "this is why immigrants suck" talk and I got all firey on them.

Now that the going home time is coming closer and closer I'm getting all unstable again like I did last summer. Am I doing enough here? Am I making the right choice about next year? In any case I can't change anything now even if I wanted to so I am trying to be at peace with my choices. Hampshire will be excellent for me, I just need to trust myself.

I can't wait to talk to my family tonight.

2007-04-25T08:44:00.000-07:00

Picture update!

love kendra

2007-04-20T04:51:00.000-07:00

I have been in france for 8 months.
Why am I not completely fluent yet? I don't know. But it's pissing me off.

Things I've been obsessing over lately:

Regina Spektor. Amazing. Just freaking amazing. Download, listen, bask in the glory (or wonder why on earth you just followed my directions... she is definitely a love or hate artist)
Ouverture-facile.com This is a riddle game that is punching me in the face. It requires a little bit of computer skill, but really, just a little. Once you start you will be hard pressed to stop. (I'm on level 30 in english and 7 in french)
La Bieirie's poulet-curry paninis. Tasty as heck. I wish they were spicy though... mmm... spicy.
The fact that I am really not going to be able to narrow down the course selection that I have to 4 classes for next semester. Really really not.

I finally got my Carte de Sejour which tells me that I am a legal resident in France until the end of October 2007. Awesome. Next time I get asked for ID I don't have to explain why I don't have any (becauseIwastotallyanillegalimmigrantforacoupleofmonths).

It is finally warm again here.

Re the requests on my last blog. er... french teachers are scary. I will get picture the last week of class (the last week in may) but I can't guarantee that every teacher will cooperate. There might be some incognito missions going down soon. Operation teacher photograph. I need a better name.

Sometimes deciding between two very awkward situations is difficult. Sometimes I really like it too.

I really dislike how everyone lives so far away from each other in france... or at least in small town france. Now that I think about it small town america is probably exactly the same, except for 16 year olds can drive. This is very inconvenient

Bloggin' on the dock of the bay...

2007-04-13T10:32:00.000-07:00

Ok, I'm not on the dock of the bay, but how awesome would it be if I were? 'Very' is the response I'm looking for, although it would be even better if it weren't pouring rain right now.

I'm sorry if you ended up holding your breath between the last miniblog and this one like I told you to. As fiona so kindly pointed out, if you had done that, you'd probably be dead right now.

Today was the carnival at school. You know how we dress up and get all silly for Halloween in america? Well here, Halloween is nothing at all, but the school's carnival... woah mama! It is crazy. There was one kid who dressed up as my scary pirate history teacher (who I swear I will get a picture of before I leave. My life just won't be worth living if I don't,) and had his class later on in the day. He, as i would say to you if you spoke french, a peté son cable, which pretty much means that he exploded and told him to leave the class right now. I thought the kid was actually pretty nice about it because he didn't color black in between all of his teeth like I would have. Then again, tact is not always my strong suit. And now I'm thinking back to the numerous awkward conversations between me and Mr. K in class... hmm.

Christophe and I had a series of intense discussions in the last couple days concerning religous freedom and laïcité, which is lack of religion in governmental institutions or separation of church and state. I have to say, I love the guy, but we can get in to HEATED discussions. A basic summary, if you're interested, is that in France it is illegal to show anything having to do with religious convictions at school, including the head scarf that many muslim girls wear. However, people get away with everything except the scarf including crucifixes and star of david jewelry, religious symbols drawn on backpacks. We basically got started on this because in my opinion, he (along with the large majority of the french population) seems to feel aggressed (<-- my spell check is telling me this isn't a word, but in my head it totally is and I feel like using it) by anything that is different from the "French" standard. I was trying to explain my view that what other people wear, or put up in their windows or their car dashboard or anything like that, doesn't concern him at all. It got really hardcore -- we were outside until 10:30 on a school night discussing, outside, and it got cold. He even brought it up the next day during Will and Grace (another sore spot between us, even though it is a lot better than before) and we went back at it. I'm having a really hard time putting all of the things we talked about back in to English, so if you want to know specifics, ask me questions via comment/email.

We had our last session of class therapy today. I'm just happy it is over. 'Nuff said.

French presidential elections are coming up soon! I don't really like any of the candidates, but I think 1e tour is going to be Bayrou Sarko, and Sarko will win. I could be really really wrong though, I have no clue.

er... I don't have much else to say, except for that Will and Grace is no longer on TV and that makes me cry on the inside because I have no more TV shows that I like.

Love
Kendra

2007-04-11T11:06:00.000-07:00

Two things...

1) Real update soon, hold your breath
2) Picture update!

love kendra

Be warned... I exaggerate sometimes, but it makes for a better story.

2007-04-05T11:58:00.000-07:00

First of all and most importantly, play this game... SO addictive.

Actually, (as Midori would say) the most important thing that has happened since the last time I wrote has to be our sessions with the psy(cologue) in class. They have been, er, eventful to say the least. So there is the Natacha girl right? Apparently, without my knowledge, she has a MAJOR problem with me and decided that I am the fault of all of the problems in the whole class (even though she pretty much is) and that after I leave everything will be bouquets of roses and everyone will love each other and that basically I am a monster and the bane of her existence. She even went so far as to say all that but with words that were much less strong. Basically at this point our 'moderator' told us we have to have a "non-aggression" pact and that we are to pretend as though we don't know each other. This would be a lot easier on my part if people would stop putting us in the same groups and she'd stop being such a douche and giving me the stare down of death. Thing is, even her friends were trying to tell her that she was going too far at the last session in her "burn kendra at the stake" crusade, but she just wouldn't shut up. I had such a crazy urge to punch her in the face or to run out of the room crying last time, but luckily for me I didn't. What was hilarious, though, was when I was telling all of this to Geneviève, she says to me "why did you punch her? Even if you got suspended for 3 days, you wouldn't care! You're leaving at the end of the year"

The reason why I didn't punch her is because if I'd have done that, she would be right. I am a problem starter, and that it would give her MAJOR ammo. If I can keep my cool and throw word daggers at her, then I win. Problem is, this is WAAAAAY easier to do in English than in French. When I'm pissed off or frustrated or want to cry (this situation was all three) I have a much harder time speaking coherent French. OOOh I forgot. the thing she said that stung the most was when she refused to talk about it because "I wouldn't be able to understand so it'd be pointless" FOSIHJGOIJSFEIOJESGIOJGESJIO Of course I can freakin understand her. And if this weren't a public blog, at this point I would spout off explitives. Just thinking about it makes my skin crawl with anger.

OK! Next item...

I love my group of friends. They're seriously what I've been looking for all year.

I had a weirdo nightmare last night where I was shocked away when someone shot a gun. I don't remember exactly what happened, but I do remember that I heard the gunshot. It might have been something falling or I might have made it up, but I remember that it totally freaked me out.

The hand has their copies of HP7 reserved, do you?

There is an american guy from Wisconsin (but originally from Chicago) here with a friend of mine for about a week. I surprise myself at how much gangsta' culture I know. It is either really exciting or really depressing depending on how you look at it.

I can't believe I'm only here for about 2.5 months before I leave. Cuh Ray Zee!

Lost is getting weirder and weird, but with no end in sight.

I'm pretty freaking excited about Hampshire classes next year, if you didn't get that already from my last blog.

I really like comments. Please leave me comments. Please? You can do it anonymously and it takes like 0.3 seconds. And it makes me super happy. kthx.

love kendra

2007-04-01T12:50:00.000-07:00

I know this blog is kinda linked to the Hampshire site for all of the prospies to read. THEREFORE! This is a magical entry devoted to Hampshire and how freaking excited I am about next year!

First of all, a little letter I wrote to Hampshire;

Dear Hampshire College,

Thank you for giving me a HC grant again. I kinda love you more than any other college in the world for that. Also for the fact that you're letting me study pretty much anything I want next year and not forcing me into science classes. And giving me the NSS Scholarship. I'm not sure why I got it but I'm super happy I did.

Love, your admirer,
Kendra

I didn't really write that letter to the admissions office or anything, but I am pretty stoked (yes Darren, stoked) to slice just a little bit more off of that colossal tuition.

Fall '07 Classes were posted yesterday and at this point I'm deciding between 10 tutorials, 17 100 level classes, and 9 200 level classes, not to mention a class I want to take off campus. I really can only take 4 classes per semester. And I can audit like 8ish at the beginning of the semester. Fun. This is a tiny problem... I have no clue how to narrow it down. The one class I would like to take more than anything (too bad it's only for Div2 students) is called "Little Course of Horrors: The Psychology of Terror and Humor in Theater"

HOW AMAZING IS THIS SCHOOL?!?!! ('really really' is the answer I'm looking for.)

So all you prospective students who stumble across my blog... go to Hampshire. Better yet, apply, get in, defer for a year, go live somewhere amazing for a year, go, be just all around cool.

What else... Yeah, I'm pretty much spazzing with excitement about next year.

And I can't wait to sing again. I don't get to much here.

Grease is the way that we live

2007-03-29T10:15:00.000-07:00

Howdy ho kids.

I know this past week has been ridiculously amazing, I'm just trying to remember how...

OH YEAH!
Ok, so we had our Oral Exam for T.P.E. yesterday (Wednesday). This is basically like the internal assessment we had in IB History last year, but in group form and a lot more supervised. My group, up until the day of the oral, had pretty much done the bare minimum just to have something to turn in, so we decided that it might be a really good idea to get together in the dwindling hours before our exam and try and figure out exactly what in the whole world would we might possibly have to talk about for 40 painstakingly long minutes... We assumed it would be a lot like that last sentence -- as many filler words as possible.
So of course, we get pretty much nothing done. We eat, play a game, write an intro and conclusion (which will subsequently be left at Océane's house), play another round of the game, and go to school. They're kinda freaking out at this point, but I am surprisingly calm considering I'm about to pass the first of my Baccalaureat exams here. I don't know why, but seriously I wasn't freaked at all. We go in, do a little scene that we'd prepared from one of our sources, and then it is Océane's turn to talk... and she just completely blocks, so I pick it up. I totally save the whole thing pulling magical magical French and charm out of my butt. It was pretty much the best unprepared test I've ever taken in my life, and it was totally in a foreign language. I was freakin proud of myself. I still am. You should be too.

I've been hanging out with pretty much the same group of girls lately; Coralie, Dianne, Carlotta, Julie, and Marie. Je les kiffe trop, ces filles. Et Dianne m'a écrit un petit mot aujourd'hui disant "quand tu partiras, tu vas bcp me manquer". But seriously, they are excellent people and I'm stoked to have real friends like that.

Geneviève totally freaked last night because Ben is always on the computer and by always I mean from the SECOND he gets home until 9pm when Christophe decided all electronics except the TV go off, and camille is pretty much the same way with the telephone, so I'm actually gonna cut this blog a bit short and get off the computer.

p.s. Thanks to Noel whose Valentine's day package I got today, I have enough reese's and mac and cheese to last me many months. And yes, I know annie's is better, but I was having some pretty hard core cravings for the crappy orange stuff. They don't know how to make crap food in France. I guess that is a good thing...

2007-03-25T12:49:00.000-07:00

P.S. Picture Update! Atcho right!

P.P.S. I LOVE CAP DRAMA KIDS and you guys totally made my night.

2007-03-24T12:38:00.000-07:00

I've stayed over at two friends' houses in the last two weeks! Yay I have friends! On St. Patrick's day Océane and I went to the Casapalabra (no clue how it is really spelled,) and drank chocolate drinks and tea and played Mancala. We went back to her house and stayed up until like 3am. Yesterday I went to Pauline's house after school and we hung out, ate crèpes, watched the end of guitar head, and other such things. We woke up around noon today and I must say, that is first time I've ever done that in my life.

We went to Ikea today too, but I didn't buy anything. I'm starting to think about how very little space I have to bring things back with me. Already I know I'm gonna end up giving Camille quite a bit of my clothes (if she still wants them that is) because there is just no way that I'm going to be able to bring back more than I brought with one less suitcase. (Yes yes, when my mom left she brought the smallest suitcase back with her). Luckily my dad brought home the least usefull silly things that I brought here, but forgot to bring the frying pan back, so I have a frying pan.

And I'm stopping in London -- country of no liquid on airplanes -- where the baggage rules are pretty durn strict at this point.

I wish I could really explain how lame our science class is. The teacher keeps trying to teach, but I don't know why. Not a single person is listening or even attempting to look like their listening. We had one group singing, another sleeping, another listening to music, another doing arts and crafts (<-- I was totally in this group) , and every single week it is exactly the same. Poor teacher. If I were her I'd stop trying. It's good that she gets a couple of 'S' classes in addition to the abomination that is 'L' at my school. We really do suck at almost everything.

This Monday or Tuesday (i forget which) we have our first meeting with the psychiatrist. Fun. I'll be sure to post about it.

Kerr... I don't know what else to write. I hope I'm not getting sick again because then I'd have to punch myself in the face, but I've been really sneezy lately. Hopefully it is allergies.

END!

(love kendra)

FLIGHT HOME!

2007-03-19T12:43:00.000-07:00

Holy shit. I bought my going home ticket. Here we go! Flight information.
I'm really freaking out people.

I'm on British Airlines

26 June, Tuesday

Marseille -- London (Gatwick) 06:45am -- 07:40am

Airport Change

London (Heathrow) -- San Francisco 01:50pm -- 04:40pm

Total Trip Time: 12hr 45min

Oh my fricken frack.

On a completely different note, I've been hanging out with the group of girls that Cecelie and I wanted to be friends with since the beginning of the year. They're very close so it is kind of difficult to become part of their group, but ever since the whole Natacha incident they really have been making an effort to include me in their group plans. EN PLUS! It was hot last week so we went to the Bierie (a café near my school) after school every day and tanned... and by tanned i mean they tanned and I hid in the shadows because I don't want cancer when I get old and also because I tend to pretty much only burn. It is a really big sadface. But then it is all good because I feel all wanted and stuff which is awesome.

So Geneviève is looking at my hands while I type and she says they look like spiders because they go so fast.

That is all I am capable of typing right now. Party on.

2007-03-14T02:17:00.000-07:00

Dun dun dun DUNNNNNNN

Lets start out with Dad's visit. Pictures here! Along with probably the best sign in the history of the universe. (p.s. now that I've learned how to make hyperlinks, really not a big deal, but very exciting in my book, they will appear all over my blog. Fun for me, possibly annoying for you) Ok!

Wednesday, I went to work with Christophe in the morning, we left at 5:45am so I was pretty freaking tired. I went to Boulangerie Poulain and worked in the chocolate/patisserie department all morning. It was pretty sweet, both figuratively and literally. Mmmm chocolate. I now know how to temper chocolate, but only in C°, and the secret recipe for their tasty tasty coffee cakes, but I could never reproduce it without an industrial kitchen. There are not many pictures, but I took a few. When I get home from school (in like 7-8 hours) I'll post them on the picture site. I think we're in dire need of a picture update. At noon Christophe came and got me. We ate free paninis that were my form of payment and I said goodbye until Saturday and got on the bus. I took the bus for an hour and then switched to a train for about 3.5 hours. In my car there was an english couple with their daughter who had down syndrome. The dad pours his coffee all over himself, and I save the day with my french skillz and feel all good about myself. The daughter stares at me for the entirety of the trip after hearing me speak two languages. When I arrived in Nice, my heart was pounding SO HARD and I was super nervous to see my dad. I looked all around and couldn't find him -- turns out there was a 'right' way to leave the station and a 'wrong' way, or what I would like to call a 'less-right' way. Me being me of course, I took the 'less-right' way and was on the other side of the station. Fun. We ended up finding each other and took off down the ridiculously crowded street filled with tourists and construction. Dad had already been there, so the lady behind the counter kinda knew who we were. We put our stuff in the TEENY TINY room, sat for a bit, and then headed out to find something to eat. Even with a map, we managed to get royally lost and the "short 10 minute walk to old nice" that the nice lady behind the counter promised us turned into a "hellish hour and a half struggle to find nourishment, including walking past a soup van for homeless people and being kinda jealous that they were eating" (<-- this very well may be just my reactions to my stomach an may not be exactly accurate) We finally found our way back and got Kebabs, which aren't really kebabs, but more like gyros but bigger. They're pretty durn tasty, but these ones were not as good as the ones they have in Aix. Ooooh, I'm hungry right now. Ok! Finished eating, back to hotel, I slept, dad tried to sleep and didn't really succeed, but it's all good. Thursday: Wow, I wrote a lot for Wednesday. The next 9 ish days will be a lot shorter. Sorry, I'm lazy. We got up, got dressed, and went back to old nice to wander. Had pain au chocolats and coffees. <-- best breakfast ever when it's done right. Wandered, looked at stuff, ate lunch, napped, looked around some more, tried to decide what to do but instead wandered a whole lot more. I actually really like wandering. Christophe called and said we couldn't get the condo for that weekend, but that we'd come back for the end of the week and he asked if we could get train tickets back home instead of them driving crazy time there and back to come get us. It was no problem. OK SIDE NOTE! This protest just walked by the library... They were like 20 people, tops, but they had a lot of sirens to help them. They were yelling "Lute contre le repression sexuel!" Don't know where these kind of things start... but they end up near me. Almost always. Another side note, the library cat is sleeping on the copy machine and will NOT let anyone make photocopies. It is really cute, but I imagine that if I needed to make copies it would piss me off. Back on track -- We went out for dinner and were ignored for like 3 hours, but what we ate was really tasty. Back to the hotel near midnight, and I slept, and again dad didn't really.

Friday: Kinda sucky breakfast at the hotel. Sadface. Walking and looking at stuff again. for lunch... ummmm.... i have no clue if we ate. I don't think we did. And for dinner we had tasty pizza. It made me miss real pizza a lot. At this point the cat has been pried off of the photocopier. Pauvre Minou! We tried to get into a casino earlier, but we didn't have our passports. Oh yeah! We totally went to Monaco and stuck out like sore thumbs. It was kinda awesome. Some guy asked us questions in Italian, but seeing as how the extent of my Italian goes all the way to introducing characters in a story and saying that the mafia is good or bad, I couldn't really help him. Then he starts going caSIno, caSIIIno! And we got it and pointed. I'd imagine that in a country like Monaco, if you have French and English skillz, you can at least get yourself understood by pretty much everyone but the Japanese tour buses, but apparently there are italians with zero knowledge of any other language who come to lose large sums of money. Who knew?everyone except me I guess. At night, Dad went out again to gamble, but my legs hurt from walking non stop for a couple of days and I had some reading to do, so I stayed in the hotel and read a horrible book -- yes indeed another autobiography about men and their relationships with their mothers. Bleck.

Saturday: Quick breakfast in the morning, quick style packing, and then we caught our train back to Marseille. Train train train, bus bus, and tah dah! we're in Aix. So there is the Bellon's car, but where are the Bellons?!?! They're having lunch. So I call, we wait, they show up, and head on back to the house. I show dad around, he starts fixing things like computers and ipods. He is kind of magical like that. At night, we, did, something. I don't remember what.

Sunday: Dad and I woke up and went to the Mass in the old church in mallemort. The pastor... um... totally not what he's called since he is catholic, but I don't know the word right now... preacher? father? Whatevs, let it go, anyways, him, he tried to be funny during his sermon, but somehow jokes about hamburgers don't fly with the older crowd. He then made a parallel between faith and a fire in a high rise. It was logic at least. We got back home and did... something.

Ok, at this point I don't know what we did each day, so I'm just gonna list things that we did and you can put them in whatever order you fancy. Or maybe Dad can comment and fix my errors. noice.

Lunch with Christophe's parents and ben and camille's cousins
Dinner with Geneviève's parents -- we all had quite a bit to drink and the evening turned very very silly.
Aigues-Mortes -- an almost completely preserved fortified town that we walked all the way around
Aix -- Shopping, sight seeing, and beer. There was a lot of consumption of coffee and beer on dad's visit...
Avignon -- Christophe decided to give blood, we walked around, and finally went to H and M, because what is a trip to Avignon without that. Geneviève asked our server at the café what his accent was, he got kinda miffed and asked her to guess, she guessed belgian and he was even more miffed... She got really embarrassed.

OK! Back on schedule

Thursday: We got in the car in the afternoon and drove to Antibes to stay in Christophe's Aunt's condo place. Arrived in the afternoon, decided to go out to dinner that night. We went back to the same restaurant that Dad and I had eaten at the last time when we were ignored, but there was no one there this time. Everything was pretty much delicious and we left happy. We walked all the way down the harbor to the Negresco, the most expensive hotel in nice; These are totally per-night prices people. We saw hookers and really rich russian people with tiny dogs who spoke no French but a little English, so we got by. Drove back home around 12:30 midnight. I fell asleep in the car.

Friday: We went to Eze, and a beach covered in rocks, and at night we tried to watch Lost in Translation, but halfway through the dvd randomly switched to another lame movie. It was kind of the most disappointing thing ever. We went to the grocery store too, which is always fun.

Saturday: Christophe, Dad, and I woke up super early, got dad to the airport at 6, and he left. It was all very quick and early. I went back to the condo and fell back asleep until 10:30. Christophe didn't fall asleep and instead went out and bought a loto ticket.

I know this is ending kind of abruptly, but the librarian is closing down the CDI, so I gotta go soon.

I tried to get together with someone on the last day of break, but everyone was busy, so instead I did homework and watched illegally downloaded arrested development on my computer. I also succeeded at getting the internet on my computer, but the signal isn't strong enough in my room and it only works in the living room. Still... very exciting.

That's all folks! (<-- try explaining that to someone who doesn't speak English... very hard.)

love kendra

Not very long but...

2007-03-13T02:43:00.000-07:00

Wow guys. Just wow. My teacher would NOT STOP CALLING ON ME in french class and I just didn't know the answers. Nothing at all. I babbled about nothing for probably about 10 minutes of the entire class period. This totally deserves a drawing:

OK! Now that we got that over with -- my dad was here over break! We visited lots of crazy places and did things every day, and I'm gonna update this again tomorrow and be much more detailed because I have 2 hours with nothing to do at school tomorrow.

ok, until tomorrow,

kendra

A blog I wrote a while ago, but just was too lazy (and busy) to post

2007-03-04T10:15:00.000-08:00

Yay! Blog time!
I’m actually writing this on my laptop and I’m gonna transfer it to the internet when I’m done. I’m tell you this because I thought you’d all like to know that I’m so habituated with the french keyboard that I’m having a little bit of a hard time with the American one. Fun.
Ok, what did I promise last time? Theater, Drama, Dad, and other things I think.
Theater!
The class on Wednesdays is one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever done. We do a whole lot of nothing while the ‘advanced’ kids get to do a full play. Our scenes are stupid and I’m fed up with them. HOWEVER! We went to this campsite this weekend and had happy theater intense work time, and that was a blast – well, not so much the time we actually spent working, but all of the silly fun time was freaking awesome. I got there around 10:15 on Sunday morning and we set up camp. We did exercises for about an hour and they weren’t all completely pointless. In fact, there were a couple of them that I’ve never heard of before that were really good. I find that with this theater class I’m way less self inhibited than I was with the Cap group as far as exercises and improv go, but way worse at acting (this may be because of the language thing… I hope. Either it’s that or I’ve just forgotten how to act. HA! That would suck) Violaine, Romain, and Mathilde all slept there too and we stayed up chatting until like 3am which was pretty much awesome. It really did make me miss the atmosphere at cap drama because I didn’t know any of the people they were talking about or any of their stories and my stories were semi useless because they don’t know anybody I’m talking about, but it was still really fun hearing their stories and just chatting really quietly for hours. We also were in charge of food (the 4 of us) for the 4 meals we had and cracked up because there was a bunch of food but no cooking utensils. It reminded me a lot of when the hand went to Twaine Harte and ana and I had to make salsa using a meat tenderizer and a plastic baggie. At this point I’m feeling a lot better about the show we’re going to do at the end of the year. Still not ecstatic, but at least I’m not dreading it anymore.
Drama!
My class at school is apparently, and I quote, "one of the most immature classes with the least respect for each other and the rules that Emperi has ever seen." There were two different incidents, one with a boy named Pierre being pissed off by this girl named Caroline over a span of 3 months and finally being fed up and smacking her upside the head with his notebook and getting suspended, and the other involved NataCha (apparently it is spelled with a c) calling 4 of the girls in the class whores and getting 4 hours of the equivalent of in-house. She had to sit with the vice principal at her desk for 4 hours working on Saturday morning. In addition to all of that, someone for the Espace SantÈ Jeunes (young people health place) is going to come in to our class 3 times when school starts up again to talk about our problems. This reminds me of the scene in Mean Girls where they all have to talk about their problems in the gym with the principal who is totally clueless about how bitchy girls are. I’ll be sure to keep you all updated.
Dad!
My dad is definitely coming to visit me (ß note to self, in french ‘to visit someone’ is RENDRE VISITE and not VISITER. I don’t know why.) I’m pretty excited to see him and to show off my fancy francy french skillz. We’re gonna be in Nice for at least 3 days, and then my host family is gonna either come get us and bring us back or more likely they are going to stay with us for a couple of days in nice if they can get the little apartment-y place. (another note to self, pack) After that, I have no clue what we’re going to do, but hopefully we’ll find things.
As far as other things go…
I don’t know what else to say. I’m definitely getting closer with some of the girls in my class which is really good. I got invited to hang out with like 3kabillion people over the break (of course the first break I have plenty to do is the one where I can’t do these kabillion things because I already have things to do. Silly.)
I’m so excited about next summer and about college.
I don’t want to leave France either.

2007-02-27T11:42:00.000-08:00

Long story short, I wrote a fatty blog on my laptop and counted on transferring it here with my little usb stick, but usb stick stopped working. My dad is coming tomorrow and bringing me a shiny new one, so unfortunately you, dear reader, will have to wait just a bit longer.

sorry!

love kendra

2007-02-24T23:41:00.000-08:00

Ok everyone, another lame non blog!

I'm going away for the weekend, well, until monday night here, so I'll update tuesday ish.

Exciting things to write about? why yes indeed!

-The stupidest theater class in the world!
-OMG drama in my class at school!
-Dad coming to visit me!!
-Quite possibly other things!

Hold on to your seats and be patient k?

love kendra

My titles tend to be lame beyond all reason. This is no exception.

2007-02-20T01:31:00.000-08:00

Hi guys! Yes yes, this will be more than a silly paintshop drawing. It will be words AND a paintshop drawing (I don't have Italian today, hence the blog)

As far as the whole me and gavois thing goes, I ended up letting it go because he is a douche bag and nothing I can say will change that. Although, if he pisses me off again he wil have some kendra flame on his hands. Burning hot, well spoken (although much less well spoken since it'll be in french) calm, scary, anger. Or maybe I'll just start crying and try to make him feel really bad. That'd work too.

Camille and I had such a killer night last night. It starte doff with the normal, I don't know what else to do so I'm gonna bug the hell out of everyone, but in a really endearing way. Then christophe decided to attack her with a dirty sponge and I joined in and we got away and ran into the bathroom. We had to get him back for the dirty sponge thing because it was just gross, so we put our hair up on top of our heads in warrior woman fashion, then we covered our hands in shaving cream and ran out screaming into the living room and covered everyone's face with it and then ran back into the bathroom and locked the door. We waited there until everyone had stopped wanting to anahilate us and then everything was good. It was just a silly fun time.

The librarian is looking at me really strangely and I feel very uncomfortable. Oh yeah, she can see everything I'm doing on the computer, including my drawings...

fun.

Sunday we were supposed to go skiing (blech. I suck at skiing (see a couple of blogs below)) so I wake up at 5am (double blech) and stumble out into the living room and see Christophe at the computer. He turns around to look at me with this immenselsy sad look on his face. He tells me that apparently it is raning/snowing/sleet-ing in the mountains so we can't go because it would suck. And!!! that I can go back to bed. I was super happy and returned to the warm cosy cuccoon of my bed. SO Christophe is beeing all whiny all day because he really wanted to go skiing and he decides that we need to go out. Me and Geveniève joined him on an adventure trek near the sea in marseille. It was actually more like just something to do to get out of the house, so it was all good. We're walking along, and we find this nice little destroyed nazi bunker (the kind of thing I never thought I'd say) to sit on and rocks, and the water, and it was all just very pretty and nice and calm. Christophe decides to go stand out on the rocks because he is MAN and that is what MAN does. And then this big fricken wave comes up and he gets SOAKED. See picture.

Pretty hilarious if I do say so myself.

Um... Yay! I don't know what else to say and I am pretty hungry. . And someone needs to upload the last lost episode on to limewire, becaues I have a serious craving for some lost right now.

love you guys!

2007-02-13T01:33:00.000-08:00

I'm feeling far more into drawings than words right now...

love kendra

2007-02-10T05:34:00.000-08:00

First of all... WHY OH WHY DO I LOVE THREADLESS SHIRTS SO MUCH!!! There are at least 10 shirts right now that I would buy in an instant if I hadn't forbidden myself from buying any more of them. What a delimma! *sigh*

In other news, I have a lot a lot a lot of homework for French class. And I'm seriously procrastinating because it isn't due until Tuesday. Sweet. That is one really bad thing about block schedualing. It perpetuates procrastination (alliteration!) because nothing is ever due the next day. Ever.

Our second trimester is almost done and the meeting where all the teachers discuss how much we suck is the 19th, so I guess next week? What day is it? The 11th? Yeah. The 11th.

There was a party I was going to go to today, but the kid who's birthday it is got sick and the party was cancelled.

Concerning the last post:

This is true also, especially since I am no longer obliged to have hot chocolate every morning. OOOHHH It was soooo good this morning. I woke up and it was like 9:30 and it was just me and christophe and I sat and ate bread and really foamy tasty coffee. Ahhhhh I loved it. My butter tolerance is way higher than it used to be which may be a good thing or a bad thing depending on how you look at it. I'm actualyl kinda proud of that drawing. It makes me happy.

So now that there are actually a couple of french people reading this, Salut! Je ne sais pas quoi écrire vraiment, parce que chaque fois que j'essaie à écrire en français je fais que des fauts. Parler est BIEN plus facile qu'écrire. ET! En parlant de ça (parce que vous êtes dans ma classe non (sauf Val et Olsen qui parlent français mais que lisent mon (ma?) blog en anglias)) J'ai complètement raté le bac blanc qu'on a fait. Je peux écrire que les disserts, et Gavois me fâche (<-- Manon m'a dit que ça se dit pas trop, mais je ne sais pas quoi dire pour dire... eh... ça. Si t'a compris et tu sais ce que je dois dire AIDES-MOI!!)

Speaking of that (Gavois making me angry for everyone who doesn't speak french) I totally got into a mini fight with my him (gavois = history teacher) because he was supervising our french test and wouldn't stop yelling at people and I couldn't concentrate and therefore couldn't write at all, so I asked him (and I was suuuuuuuuper polite about it) if EVERYONE (not just him) could stop talking because we only had 10 minutes left and I had a whole paragraph to write still. He got pissy and after class said that my year here is almost over and it is clear that I haven't adapted to the way "we" do things in france and that it is my fault that i am unable to work when he is standing in front of me yelling at my table mate. I told him that I'd been in france long enough to see that it wasn't a 'french' habit, but more of his habit and that it was really only in his class where we are constantly interrupted during a test. He started blabing on about something and I couldn't take it anymore so I walked out. I'm gonna have crappy grades in his class for the rest of the year, but I don't care because it felt SOOOO good to get pissy at the authorities again. Ahhh.

OK, the blog is done, I think. That is a good note to end on.

Ahhh!! I have to sneeze!

love kendra

2007-02-07T02:46:00.000-08:00

Maddie drew this, and it pretty much exactally expresses my emotions at this point. I'm hungry.

A considerably less sad blog

2007-02-02T12:42:00.000-08:00

Hi everybody!
Hi doctor nick!

Ok! It is definitely Friday night... one of my favorite times of the week for oh so many reasons. Let me count the ways;

This is the longest amount of time all week before I have history again
Tonight is Sex in the City and Scrubs!!!
Tomorrow morning I can sleep in, which means I can stay up and watch aformentioned shows
My science teacher doesn't take roll, and I'm not taking the Bac in science at the end of the year, so if I want to catch the early bus by leaving halfway through class, I can. And I do.
Because it isn't Thursday.
Because my horrible Friday schedual is as far away as possible (meaning I've just completed another Friday of deth in a long stream of never ending Fridays)

Why, you may ask, do I hate my Friday schedual? I have 2 hours of French followed by 2 hours of History... That in itself is enough to make me want to curl up into a ball and sleep, followed by another hour of French, followed by 1.5 hours of either Physics/Chem or Bio depending on the week. My Phys/Chem teacher's voice give me a big headache and he is always trying to impress us with his knowledge of amazingly boring things like the answer to 2^12. We're in L(ittéraire) silly man! Your math jokes have no power over us! We shun your advanced studies in the fields of math and science! Shunnnnnn. (<-- if you didn't get the reference, look up "Candy Mountain" or "Charlie" on Youtube.com and watch the cartoon with the horses. It is quite possible that you will hate it, but it is fricken hilarious)

I am stoked this week because I'm lengthening the umbilical cord between me and the other foreigners. Yes people, thats right, I feel comfortable saying I have at least 2 friends, and a whole other group that likes me. YAY! I skipped out on the cafeteria today to go have lunch with a group of girls in my class that I really like and I didn't feel awkward!!!! Yeah, I know, I'm awesome.

Ok, time to thank people. A) Jessica Cresci, for being ridiculous and awesome and sending me Reeses and the most bizarre action figure I've ever seen in my entire life. B) Yia Yia and Papa for sending me more Reeses and always sending me candy and happy things.

I have lots of peanut butter cups now, and I will be the only one to eat them because all french are anti-pb and especially anti-pb&j. Not really all, just a lot.

I'm still jonesing for mac and cheese if someone finds an extra bunch of money to send it to me.

Geneviève and Christophe are sleeping right behind me 'watching' an especially lame TV show about... something. I don't even know what. There is an island and 5 houses on it and people are talking about the first time they visited the island and there is drippy piano music in the background. Gross.

I think I am going to go to Salon tomorrow to see a movie with Océane and Marine (my two friends that like me. They really like me!) anddd yes. I don't know what movie, because I don't know what is playing.

And!!! andddd!!! I got invited to a birthday party of one of the people that was at the new years party with me for next weekend. Granted, he kinda hates me a lot because I stopped him from harassing a rather disgusted but shy cecilie, but I was invited by his friends, who are my friends in my class, so I'll go, I'll crash, we'll have a party, it'll be great.

Today was the holiday of the crèpe. BEST HOLIDAY EVER!!! I feel fat. Not like I've become fat, but this is how I imagine it would feel if I were to become really fat. I have a sudden urge to exercise. Hmm...

I've definitely gained some weight, but quite frankly I don't care in the least. EW! I almost typed care 'kare' because in my head i heard the kkk sound and my finger went for the K. It was pretty difficult, but I got through it.

It is kinda late if you can't tell, and the half-structure that my blogs usually have is slowly collapsing, like a flan in a cupboard. (also like the Austro-Hungarian Empire.)(<-- If you didn't get it don't trip, you just aren't cool at all.)

I hate when I have a sentence to say and it comes out as if I'd put it into a food processor with a dictionary and there are words that don't belong and they're all in the wrong order and such. This happens more and more as the week goes on, climaxing around Friday after school, and then I sleep and my language skillz have time to recharge.

Someone asked me if I thought in English or in French the other day... I quite honestly don't think in a language most of the time. My thoughts are more... fluid... then before. When I'm talking in English I think in English and when I'm talking in French I think in French, but when I'm trying to write in French, a lot of the time I think in English, and when I'm writing in English, french thoughts will pop in and confuse my syntax, spelling, and grammar.

There is going to be a big dance in one of the months that start with 'M' -- either March or May, I forget, but I'm definitely going. Sweet? I hope so.

Its a magical Leoplurodon charlie!

g'night guys. I'm freakin exhausted.

Oh wait, I'm totally staying up to get my dose of not-lame-tv-translated-into-french-thereby-making-most-of-the-jokes-ridiculously-lame.

yeahhhh

kendra

2007-01-31T02:27:00.000-08:00

Ok wooo! Blog time.

First of all I gotta explain the skiing thing. We woke up at 5am to get on the road by 530, and drove three hours to get to the ski place. We got all geared up, and set out for the slopes. Then everything went wrong. Me, not knowing what the hell I'm doing, told them that I'd only skied once before, but that I enjoyed it when I did it. They took that to mean that I knew how to ski... We got into the egg cars that go ALL THE WAY up the mountain. Then, to make it even better, there wasn't enough snow for all of the blue and green slopes, so really I had the choice of red, black, and hard-level, which is with crazy things in the middle of the slope designed to kill you if you don't ski at olympic level. I freaked, tried to ski a little, fell about 10 times in a minute, hurt my knee, and then ben camille and geneivève went off and Christophe stayed with me. It took us 3 hours to get down the hill because we went in a little zig zaggy pattern that took forever, and I was freaking scared out of my mind. We decided that when we go again (holy shit were going again?!?) I'm gonna stay on the little kid slopes, and they said that don't know what came over them, it was their fault for bringing me up so high.

After my ordeal was over, geneviève decided she was done skiing too because she was in some pain, and we chilled while the other three raced and did silly things. It was actually pretty warm while the sun was still out and we sat at the café they have there and drake cokes and people watched and talked about really random things. Apparently once I get talking I talk pretty loud and so people stared a little bit... and geneviève laughed at me, and then I laughed at me too.

I am not skilled.

I've gotten sick like 20 thousand times in the last week, which really sucks.

I'm sick and tired of my theater class.

This blog update is lame, but I want to go eat because I'm hungry. Another half blog will come soon.

My concept of soon seems to be ridiculously far in the future if my last blog to this blog time ratio is any indication.

I have the feeling that this blog makes no sense.

have fun
kendra

Ow...

2007-01-28T11:57:00.000-08:00

Ok, this is another lame pre-post-post, but! I have put up new pictures.

They are considerably more happy than I was on the slopes. Enjoy.

(next post = soon)

Wooooooooooooooooo!!

2007-01-24T01:06:00.000-08:00

It snowed in Mallemort last night!!! YAY!

Only problem = now we have the wind and the snow, and that means that it is fricken cold.

2007-01-23T01:48:00.000-08:00

Hey hey kids!

I have passed the 5 month mark here, and that kinda freaks me out a little. In some ways it feels like way less and in some ways it feels like WAAY more. I'm starting to grasp the realization that I will be taking the Bac in French in a couple of months, and that I will most likely stress a lot and then fail. I have yet to come to terms with this realization.

I really don't like not being good at things.
I do, however, enjoy double negatives.

Lately... what have I been doing? I have no clue.

Cecilie and Maria came over to my house and we made chocolate friands from the tartine book of glory. Cecilie slept over, we goofed around and hung out with my host family. It was the first time I've been able to have silly relaxing fun time with a friend, which was really comforting. I know that cecilie and I get on each others nerves sometimes, but she is the only other one who can really relate to whats going on in my head. It is different with Maria because she lives with her Aunt and speaks spanish at home. Totally different.

Our class photo is today, which makes me giggle a whole lot. I thought we stopped doing that in like 6th grade! But no, here everyone does it up until Senior year.

Silly.

I'm going to try to motivate myself enough to get some pictures online. Hopefully that will work.

There are officially 4 people in my class that I strongly STRONGLY dislike.
I participate more in French class than half of my classmates.
If I write another sentence with the word 'class' in it, it will lose all meaning.

There we go.

Sorry that this is so random, I have no clue what to write.

The weather was randomly really warm for like 3 weeks, but now the cold is coming (back?). There was a huge storm last night and thunder and everything and I couldn't sleep.

I bought boots. They're black with stars, and better yet, they were on sale. The month of soldes is almost over.

We still haven't recovered my bag of clothes. This is ridiculously depressing.
My last hope is drama tomorrow... if she has it by then, I'll be happy, but if not I think it is lost forever. SADFACE!

It was totally the bag that ana and rachel sent me for christmas. gahhhhhh!! sucks.

Apparently it is the franco-allemand week, which is something to do with connections between France and Germany, but I'm not entirely clear on the concept. It is possible that there are germans at l'Emperi for this week, but seeing as how none of my friends take german here, there is no way that I'd know/meet any of them.

This tv show that we watch (not because it is good, but because it is something to do) had an episode yesterday talking about foreigners and accents. They said that the american and english accents in general were charming, but I totally don't think they are. They sound kind of annoying to me. This one woman spoke a little bit in her accent-y french and geneviève was like "OMG that is your accent exactly. Weird." Apparently it was pretty good for an american, but i still don't like it. The problem is that I can't really hear my accent. I know it exists, but unless I pay super attention and repeat a sentence after someone, I don't hear it at all. Then again, cecilie says she doesn't hear hers either, and hers is so thick that I tend to do french to french translation for her. Maybe mine is really thick too? I have no clue.

I've officially stopped stressing about my accent, but I still don't like it when people comment on it, or when I'm misunderstood. I also think it gets thicker when I'm tired.

Ok, hope you enjoyed all that. Nothing major going on.

yeah.

love kendra

This is a blog!

2007-01-16T01:25:00.000-08:00

Let's start right away...

Two weeks ago, it was still vacation. I was chillin' like a villan at home everyday, but seeing as I had about 200 pages of required reading to do in French and more than 1000 pages of other Frenchy reading, I was cool. That and I had my snurchy tartine cookbook and the kitchen to myself. Hello lemon cake! Whats up shortbread? Tasty. That is whats up.

The weekend before we started back at school, we drove to Antibes to buy a motorcycle product... a 125 to be exact, but really I have no clue where that is on the scale of motorcycles. It is somewhere in between a bicycle with a motor and a Harley. (vague, yes, I know.) Camille and I stayed up until 3 in the morning chatting, which felt really amazing because for the first time since I got here I am capable of just chatting, not having to think about every single word that I say and worry about whether it means what I think it means or not. *high five*

When I got back to school, I was really disgusted by my routine. I'd just gotten myself into this rut that I felt like I couldn't do anything about and I got all weepy for a couple of hours. I really think that this was the lowest point so far since I've been here, because before when I'd been sad it was usually because I missed people at home, but this was something entirely different. This was probably the most profound loneliness I've ever felt. So, Monday sucked pretty much sums up that thought.

And then there was a change in my rhythm that got me out of my silly rut. On Tuesday, we had a new arrival in our class! Her name is Maria and she is from Nicaragua, and speaks pretty damn good french for only having taken two years of lessons. She tends not to conjugate ANY verbs ever, but she has this amazing skill of getting her point across even if shes not speaking in any language recognized by the human race. It was really refreshing to have some new energy in my increasingly stagnant class. Cecilie was a bit pissed at first because this new girl is much more easily understood than here even after her having been here for four months, but I think she got over it as soon as she started talking with her a bit. I think that Cecilie and I need a little break from each other, because we've been pissing each other off A LOT lately.

In conjunction with what I'll call "sad Monday", I got all down on myself about my diminishing English skillz and decided that I need to start writing, so I created a Magical Help Kendra Retain Her Command of the English Language Project. Basically this involves writing down everything I'm thinking whenever I have free time. It is actually pretty awesome and I'm recording a lot more emotion and a lot less "we did ____ today... it was good" that i did when I was journaling regularly

(side note for Rachel: the little yellow book is more than half full, but it pretty much stopped at November. Lately its been a lot of re-capping, so you can see my new one too... i think. yes.)

I have been having some FREAKY DEAKY DUTCH dreams recently. They tend to include video game voices, ground that is somewhere in between solid and liquid, people who should be speaking french speaking English and vice versa, a gnome holding a sign, blue polar fleece, and singing. They're seriously starting to freak me out. Last night I dreamed(dreamt?) that I was back working at Peet's and there was a new manager and she decided to hate me and all the other people working there besides me and R!ck were robots... don't ask me why, I have nooooo clue.

This month is SOLDES which basically means that everything is on sale and oh so tasty. Logically, we decided to go to H&M on Saturday afternoon, when everyone was doing other things and definitely not shopping at the exact same store as us. I did however, score me some pretty ridiculous deals. Yay, new clothes.

Ok, so I've seen a couple of plays here, but they've all been in difficult to understand french and I haven't really gotten much out of them other than an evening of doing something other than staying at home or being at school. Yesterday, my friends, was a horse of a different color! We left school at 12:20, already this day is beginning gloriously, and went to Cavaillon where we met up with 4 other schools worth of theater enthusiasts. Annoying and great at the same time.(anyone who has ever been in a group of theater enthusiasts knows what i'm talkin' 'bout.) We divided into 4 groups and went off with the different actors in the play and did projects; I changed groups at the last minute because the one i was scheduled for included writing and the one I switched into was purely improv. Writing in french < class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_21" onclick="BLOG_clickHandler(this)">improv-y goodness, during which I became an ostrich with my head in the sand along with many other things, and then we had our time to eat. The french always have at least 2 hours to eat, and its a problem if they have less. I still don't completely understand that, as the district at home seemed to think that 30 minutes was just a little bit too much and that if we were bored for even a second panic would break out. Yeah, cause it did anyways. BACK ON TOPIC! After the 2 hour meal period, we filed into the theater to see "Froid" -- a piece about racism and xenophobia in Sweden written by a contemporary swedish author and translated into french. Yikes! Ok people, this is quite honestly one of the best plays I've ever seen. I was sobbing at the end. It was just... woah. It was freaking amazing. The boy sitting next to me was crying. Yeah, I know. Just wow, there aren't even words. Basically the story is about 3 neo nazi kids who have just graduated from high school. They're having their own little drunken party in the woods when the korean kid (adopted by swedish parents) who was in their class passes by them on the way to his graduation party. They make him stay and the four of them talk for an hour and a half but it is absolutely impossible for me to explain the story... i don't know, and they keep saying they're going to kill him, and they keep almost letting him go, and in the end it is the one who is the nicest and least racist and horrible of the three who ends up snapping and killing him. It was ridiculously well acted and waaaaaaaaaay too realistic. Shivers down my spine, for serious. We discussed politics on the bus, where I got more people to admit that not all americans suck just because the TV told them so, and got back to salon around 11. Mallemort, where I live, is kinda 25ish minutes away, so I slept over at a friend's house who lives close to the school. Then, in true kendra fashion, I left my bag with my clothes and stuff on the fricken bus. DSJIOGSJIODGS!!! I know. So right now I'm at school, in her clothes, typing. Party over here. Goal for today? definitely find the theater teacher and ask if I can get my bag back, because apparently she is friends with the bus driver.

Completely different topic!http://www.deannamolinaro.com/Stuff_That_I_Made/Books/BookTitles.html

Read those. They almost made me pee myself.

Ok, I think that is all I have to say. If there are silly mistakes, let us all remember a few things.
1. I haven't spoken English really since the Hawaiians were here
2. The keyboard is bugging on me and there is a serious delay when I type
3. The spell check is in french, so every word is wrong when I ask the computer.

LOVE!

kendra

2007-01-14T12:57:00.000-08:00

Hi everyone! Before you kill me with your thoughts for making you wait just a tiny bit longer for your next installment of the everyday and not all that exciting life of kendra, let me say this...

I love you.

Forgive me.

What the next blog will include:
-New Nicaraguan Exchange student!
-Kendra's new writing project
-dream fragments
-plenty of ramblings
-homemade Pastry goodness
-H&M
-The best (non)children's stories I've ever read in my entire life
-The reason why this is a lame half-blog and I'm not posting on Monday
-(Hopefully) glorious theater related activities

Until Tuesday!

Kendra

Joyeaux Noël et Bonne Année!

2006-12-28T11:31:00.001-08:00

We had our theater "performance" at noon on Friday. It was, as I expected, horribly lame, but! I think that some of the kids who are a little more serious about theater are beginning to accept me into their group. My little part was singing "Cry me a river" and the teacher made me sing it 3 times in different areas -- kind of annoying since is was OMG SO HUNGRY and the cafeteria was trying to close, but still, it was ok because people clapped and stuff and normally when we tried to do anything people laughed or just stared. It was really that lame. I asked and apparently next semester 15 of the 30 of us will be doing a real play and the other 15 will continue with the stupidest clown unit of life. The teacher picks who gets to do what. Hopefully I'll be lucky... yeah, cross your fingers for me.

After one of the lamest science classes I've ever had (followed only by the lesson where we got punished for singing), Christmas vacation began!!! On the 24th (Saturday) was the first part of the Christmas festivities. Christmas Eve = la Reveillon (I have no clue if it is masculine or Feminine or if I spelled it right, so yeah, thats the general idea of the word). Geneviève and I made a christmas tree out of cardboard (there might be pictures on my picture site by now, I'm really not sure if I'm gonna be too lazy tonight, but in any case there will be soon.)We had a ridiculously expensive meal -- Fois gras, A seafood that I forget the name of, various vegetable products, and BUCHE DE NOËL!!! Omg so tasty. And Fois Gras is one of the nastiest things I have ever tasted, animal cruelty aside. After our meal we waited up until midnight to open presents and I taught camille hand games like 'Ms Mary Mack' and 'Mailman mailman do your duty' and the cup game that I learned at Westminister Woods in elementary school. We had a killer time. However, the soirée was ruined by Ben, who decided to sit there, reading his fantasy novels, not talking to anyone and being a bastard in general and pissing me off until midnight when he said "Its midnight, give me presents" to which I said "You're really pissing me off and your attitude doesn't make me want to give you any presents" and then he said "then fine, don't give me any" and then his parents told him to go to bed and that we'd do presents in the morning. Ooooh he can piss me off SO MUCH and its worse than if he were my real sibling because I do have to restrain myself just a little bit.

CHRISTMAS MORNING!!!! There were a buttload of presents 'under' our christmas 'tree', and the cat was freaking out and rubbing herself up against everything. I got some suuuuuper gifts from both my real family (can you say tartine cookbook?!?!) and from my family here, including a cd of some music that is always on the radio that I really like and a giant stuffed hippo. Around noon we went over to Christphe's parents' house for the even bigger Christmas meal, where we, finally, ate our roadkill sanglier!!!(boar) I totally forgot it was roadkill until my mom reminded me over the phone. This is the kind of meal where you start out by eating way too much, then they tell you that there are 13, oh yes, 13, desserts, including another BUCHE DE NOËL!!! (again, possibly there are pictures by now) So, we stuffed ourself and chilled with the family.

Yesterday (wednesday) we didn't have a lot to do, so Geneviève and I called her mom to see if she wanted to go out walking for a bit. She called back a few minutes later in tears -- their dog had be hit by a car. I must say, it was kind of awkward for me, because she was crying a lot and then I was home alone with the crying grandma because camille wanted to be at gross boyfriend's house RIGHT NOW... so yeah, she showed me all her plants and explained the entire story of Jesus to me when she showed me her thorn of crowns plant. Apparently because I wasn't raised Catholic, I don't know anything about Jesus. I tried to explain that my family is Protestant and she just continued on her Jesus for Dummies kick. I was pretty stoked when Geneviève came back. We did end up walking for a long time and it was pretty ok except for the fact that it was fricken cold;

I forgot to say that it was -6C° on CHristmas morning. MINUS SIX!!!

My family got the Bellons all ipods for christmas, and let me just say this has been ipod week. I have spent so many hours trying to explain how to upload, download, import, and unplug these silly ipods... its not even funny. And Christophe still hasn't even tried because he is still working like crazy.

Tomorrow Camille, Geneviève and I are going to a Hammam, which I guess is like an Arabic Spa. I'm pretty stoked.

Yeah, I updated! How cool is that!

Happy New Year to everyone!!

love kendra

(if my english has started to deteriorate, please please forgive me... the spellcheck is in french, and therefore finds every word I write to be misspelled)

2006-12-21T06:42:00.000-08:00

PICTURE UPDATE OH MY GOODNESS HOW COOL!!

to your right.

(even better, now most photos have captions!!!)

Part 2!!!

2006-12-20T01:54:00.000-08:00

I got my report card the other day, and what a sad day it was for Ben. I got better grades than him in every single subject, including sports and french. Yeah, sadface. Even bigger sadface that he is only passing sports...

Grades!!! if you care!!! With comments!!!

English - 18/20
French - 10.6/20
Italian - 12.6/20
Math - 15/20
Bio - 8/20
Physics/Chem - 14/20
PE - 18/20
History/Geo - 10.5/20

We're not graded in theater, which I guess is good because I have no idea what they'd grades us on.

Speaking of theater, we have our "performance" (emphasis on the quotation marks) this friday. This basically means that we have people doing scenes and monologues and me singing, and all of us doing this weird step thing and this horrible horrible dance we learned between noon and 2pm over and over again until people feel like throwing things at us. I'm totally looking forward to it....

So yeah, I'm only not passing Bio, but considering the average grade in that class is a 9, I'm chill. The teachers also give us pretty harsh comments about the class and us personally. I'm gonna take a picture of my report card/comments and I'll post it when I do my next big upload.

Today and yesterday were red. This may mean nothing to you, but this is the devil's sentence to me. Basically how we pay for electricity is on a system of colored days. Before 6am and after 10pm is always cheaper than during the day. Blue is cheap, White is semi expensive, and Red is when we don't use electricity if we can help it. This means no heating, very few lights, no computer, no tv until 10, etc. The worst is definitely the no heating part, because they choose for it to be red when the temperatures are below freezing. Always. What we do is we light a fire, and everyone is in the main room all evening long. This can be good or bad depending on the mood of everyone, as you might imagine. Yesterday was good for a while and then suddenly everyone was in a hellishly bad mood (quite possibly caused by ben's bitchiness) and I went to bed early. Tonight I was planning on uploading more picture to my picture site, but since there is no computer usage during red days (at least not the amount of time it would take me to upload all of those pictures,) I'll put 'em up soon. This week I swear. What I have is a couple of on-the-bus-on-the-way-to-a-play-before-my-batteries-died pictures, one of the view at school in the morning, and a bunch of our run through for the "performance". I wish we did a real play... better yet a musical.

I got invited to a new years eve party!!! It is with some girls in my class who I've been trying to be friends with, so I'm pretty stoked about that.

I found this book on american culture in the library, and there are parts of it that are oh so good that I had to rip them out. Since I'm on the school computers (re:red days), I can't very well take out ripped out pages of a book from their very own collection, so for now, you're just going to have to imagine the brilliance until the governement decides that its warm enough to not charge us a fortune for turning on appliances. This book has made me realize why they think American society is the way they think it is -- because this is the only book on america, it was written by a french man living in New York in the 70's. 'nuff said.

As far as the Harry Potter game goes, you guys suck. I got two responses... Jessica won with 13/20 and heidi had 8/20 and she admitted that she only did it so I would write her an email. If you guys still want to play, you can, but seriously!!

I am told that people read this. I don't think I believe it.

It is 11:11 and I am fricken hungry. Nothing is open in this forsaken town until noon, and sometimes not until 2. Lame.

French girls are starting to look all the same with their tight pants and ridiculously fashionable jackets, their thick scarves, sweepy bangs and overly layered and high-lighted hair... It is freaking me out just a little bit.

That is all for now I guess?

<3 kendra

2006-12-18T00:59:00.000-08:00

Ok guys, lazer tag is officially my favorite sport. We played for my host-cousin's 11th birthday, and let me just say, I kicked their 11 year old butts by almost double. (This includes Camille and Ben too, so yeah, pretty much I rock)

Speaking of sports, I'm definitely not in PE right now, just because I really don't want to be and Camille is home today, so I am too. I know, be jealous.

However, on the OMG French is really difficult scale, I had a 4 hour essay test for French class on Saturday. I wrote 8 pages and almost killed myself. There are three questions on the written section of the French baccalaureat (which I'll be taking at the end of the year by the way) and you have to answer the first, and then you get a choice on the second. The first question was something along the lines of "What makes the connection between the reader and writer in published 'private correspondence', and what were the causes that inspired these people to write these letters" and the second was "Do published letters have meerely a historical significance"

Yeah, bow down before my french skillz.

Christmas is coming. Weird!!!

This is my last week of school before my next fatty vacation. Hopefully this one will be siginificantly better than the last. I'm thinking it will be since I know people's phone numbers and have completely mastered the bus system.

Ok, I have to take a shower and stuff because although I may be able to skip out on PE, I do have a history project meeting that I have to be there for. I'll write more later, so wait with bated breath!

and never ever spell that kind of bated 'baited'

love!!!
kendra

2006-12-10T06:34:00.000-08:00

We wish you a merry christmas, We wish you a merry christmas, We wish you a merry christmas, and a happy new... OH MY GOD IF THE CHRISTMAS MUSIC DOESN'T STOP I'M GOING TO KILL SOMEONE!

Hi everyone.
Yes indeed, the music hasn't stopped yet. At least the crappy street market has disbanded for the weekend, and has taken with it the screeching radios, but seriously -- everywhere you go you hear not only Christmas music, but really bad English Christmas music sung by french people.

The weather here kinda freaks me out. It isn't "cold" per say -- its in the 40s most of the time, so it is chilly, but not really COLD cold, but the wind. The wind killsssssssssssssss. I do say though, I seriously prefer too cold to too hot.

I am feeling really rambly with nothing to say...

OOoh! I participated in French class without being asked! The teacher was really proud of me and there were little whispers all around the class. It gave me serious warm fuzzies.
It is now second trimester, so my teachers are starting to expect work from me and Cecilie.
My science classes are such a joke. Half of the class starting singing last Friday during Physics and the teacher made them write "Je ne chantrai pas en cours" 200 times. (I will not sing in class)

I never thought stuff like that actually happens... I thought it was only the stuff of Saturday morning cartoons. (recess anyone?)

My hands are coooooold!!!

Guess what time it is?
It is definitely time to play a Harry Potter related game.

Here are the rules: Match up the French Harry Potter term with the English one, email it to me (if you post it as a comment people will copy your answers!) and I send you back your results. Who ever gets the most right gets... an internet high five! That and everyone who tries gets a happy, long, and rambly email personally written for them by me! How cool is that! (very very...)

Ready?

French
le Vif
Tom Elvis Jedusor
Cognard
Mimi Geignarde
Pattenrond
Gazette des sorciers
Mangemort
Détraqueur
Serdaigle
Pré-au-Lard
Poufsouffle
Crockdur
Fumseck
épouvantard
Poudlard
Portoloin
Beuglante
Londubat
Moldus
Rogue

English
Bludger
Tom Marvolo Riddle
Moaning Myrtle
fawkes
Howler
Boggart
The Daily Prophet
Muggles
Hogsmeade
Dementor
Snape
Longbottom
The Snitch
Deatheater
Crookshanks
Fang
Ravenclaw
Hogwarts
Hufflepuff
Portkey

Sweet! Ok now, don't cheat!

As you might have guessed from this silly silly game, I have re-started re-reading HP6 in French and this time am significantly more successful! I've already read about 250 pages (I know, how colameol am I?)

So! That is everything I have on top of my head (other than hair... Oh sweet jesus, forgive me for that joke) and yes. Have a ridiculously wonderful week.

Love kendra

Blog Product

2006-12-04T07:44:00.000-08:00

Happy December! It is suddenly a whole lot less cold than before… because that makes sense as winter comes on. (or, you know, not at all) Still hasn’t snowed yet, and I must say that I’m really hoping it does. I’ve never actually seen snow fall, and I think that it would definitely be worth the freezing temperatures… at least for a bit.

Today was the end of the first trimester at school and I am proud to report that I am passing French high school! As far as me being excited about getting 10/20s and things like that, I feel like there is something I should explain about grades here. Teachers grade ridiculously hard here. 10/20 is a decent score, even for the French kids. A 14 is a really good score. An 18 is a really really amazingly good score. A 20 is impossible except for in math where you can do something unarguable perfect. (A good example of this is my 18/20 oral score in English. I have no clue how that woman grades.) My “conseil de classe” is sometime today. This is a meeting with all of my teachers and the two class representatives, where they talk about whether we try hard enough or not, and then they write down all the remarks they make and send it home to us and our families. That is another thing about the crazy hard grading -- not only do teachers read everyone’s scores out loud in front of the class, they also write things like “your child obviously do no work at home and has never ever tried in my class. I will make sure that they are held back this year.” Or “Your son/daughter should not be on an academic path as they clearly do not have the mental prowess to perform in my class.” Yeah, it’s tough. I am REALLY happy that my grades don’t count this year. Christmas holidays start on the 23rd. Oh my heck! What is that? The good part is they last until January somethingth.

Geneviève is doing a lot better, and still has until next Friday off of work.

I’m kind of sick of what we’re doing in Theater class. We’re doing “clown exercises” which are all fine and good for a while, but after two months of them I get really tired of exaggerated emotions. Once in a while I’d just love to do something normalish. A scene that we get more than 15 minutes to work on? Anything? No… I guess not. Instead we get to wear clown noses. I don’t much like clowns.

I really hate masculin/feminin rules and Vousvoyement/Tutoiment (informal and formal ways to say ‘you’ (and for those of you that speak french, I think I spelled them wrong... oh well)). It makes life a lot more difficult. Today I accidentally tutoi-ed a teacher, and while she knew that it was just a mistake and not a lack of respect issue, two girls (who lately have been OMG pissing me off) were like “AHHH KENDRA!!! WHAT THE HELL DID YOU DOOOOO NOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!” and I was like “um… chillax people, sometimes I make mistakes,” but they kept looking back at me all shocked-like and my face got all red. I know the rules, it is just when I’m in the middle of speaking sometimes I forget. The other thing that absolutely kills me is, well I don’t know how to describe it, so I’ll write it like this;
English Translation – (1) “Nevermind” (2) “You are nice”
French Familiar – (1) “Laisse Tomber” (2) “Tu es sympa”
French Polite – (1) “Laissez Tomber” (2) “Vous êtes sympa”

Ok! Explanation. Number 2 has the article in it, "you," “tu,” “vous,” there you go. When I have the article there, I can conjugate the verb after it with pretty much no problems. However! When the article is dropped, (re: example 1--nevermind, as opposed to never-you-mind) I completely forget to change from familiar, which I use with pretty much everyone in my entire life, to polite, which I have to use with teachers and people who work at stores and things.

Don’t worry if you didn’t understand that whole thought. I’m not so sure it made sense.

The Christmas season has officially begun. This can be seen (and heard!) every weekend by the flashing lights hung EVERYWHERE and the obnoxiously loud Christmas carols that screech out of radio things hung on every streetlamp.
ahhhhhhh!!!

For anyone who knows my sincere appreciation of “the Christmas season,” you know what kind of pain this puts me in.

As far as reader interactivity, I feel like we need some on this blog. SO! Either tell me something to take a picture of and to put online (does not include teachers, sorry, mr pirate man will have to be an end of the year treat) or tell me to describe something in detail. This might also help my ridiculously rambling style of writing that pretty much seems to go nowhere.

And on that note! That is everything I can think of to write about for now!

Love you guys,

Kendra

Why I am awesome, reasons 1-10

2006-11-27T05:40:00.000-08:00

Why I am awesome
reasons 1-10
By Kendra B.

1. Because I got a 10/20 in Italian and she graded me on the same scale as the rest of the class.
2. Because I think I am passing all of my classes.
3. Because I am feeling very nearly bilingual.
4. Because I have magical powers that let me eat Nutella all the time and not get ridiculously fat.
5. Because I have eaten spicy food 3 times here in France (and I mean spicy by my standards)
6. Because I have friends at school who asked me for my number so we can hang out (OMG THIS IS HUGE)
7. Because I was totally on top of things and remembered to get a present for Camille for her Birthday tomorrow.
8. Because everyone in my class may hate each other, but as far as I know, nobody hates me.
9. Because I can start conversations with people I've never met and actually have them think that I'm not ridiculously stupid.
10. Because I'm definitely living in France.

Ok! Now that I am finished with that ego boosting and arrogant list, I will grace you all with the random, slightly boring everyday comings and going of my life.

My history teacher, Mr I-dress-like-a-pirate,-have-a-huge-underbite-smoke-a-pipe-am-a-communist-and-have-horribly-black-tooth-sized-spaces-between-my-teeth Gavois, and one of the girls in my class got into a fatty argument during a test. They yelled at each other for about 45 minutes. It was pretty durn awesome as far a standing up for student rights goes in my opinion, because he is a ridiculous man who should not be in charge of students. In other history news, we had a test on all of the countries in Europe. GEOGRAPHY PEOPLE! We don't do this kind of thing in America as far as I know. I'll take a picture of my lovely map when I get it back and I'll put it online for you all. I think that those Eastern European countries might just have killed me, because no matter how much you study, there is a point where Slovakie and Slovenie just look the same. (oh yeah, all the country names were in french too, which means that places like Sweden become Suède and Czech is spelled Tchéque.)

I went to an H&M with Geneviève and Camille. It was semi disappointing because I wasn't with Rachel and Ana, there wasn't killer pizza across the street, and we didn't take BART, but still people, it was H&M. I bought a black sweater with grey stars. (note to Rachel and Ana, this is the same sweater that I almost bought in SF but then didn't because the lines were too long. I ended up paying stupidity tax for it here, because the prices are exactly the same only in Euro. Thought you guys might like that...)

My jar of peanut butter is safe and sound. I eat it with everythign, but I am the only one who does. All the better in my opinion.

I was really gross cough-y sick this weekend, and went to a French doctor (quite illegally mind you) for the first time. This being France, I was prescribed 4 different kinds of medication. I am feeling much better now that I am not coughing up my Pneumos (<---- silly word that I think means lungs) every 5 seconds.

Life is going pretty life-y as far as I'm concerned. It kinda sucks that I wasn't able to see everyone who was home on Thanksgiving, but oh well.

Christmas will be semi sad.

LOVE!!! To everyone in the 650 and scattered around the country.

Kendra

Ohhh, bloggy goodness!

2006-11-19T01:40:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was 3 months. That freaks me out; It totally doesn’t feel like its been that long at all. On the other hand when I think back to when I arrived it feels like that was a long time ago.

Thanksgiving is coming on quick. Its going to go completely unnoticed here if my predictions are correct. I wish I could go home just for a weekend to chill with my homies. Christmas is going to be really weird here I think. I wish I could hear about everyone’s new college life.

I keep having really strange dreams that take place in San Bruno but are in French. I had a dream last night where I was talking to Miriam, my boss at Peet’s, and she was asking if I could fly home to take over a shift and I told her that I would. HA! No way.

Genevieve is home now and is off of work for a month. Christophe pulled something in his back and can’t get up for a couple of days. Ben has a cold. Camille pretty much is living at her friend, Lise’s, house this weekend. We have a hospital going on at the house with both parents sleeping in the living room and Ben up all night hacking coughing. Gross.
Hope that wasn’t too much information, but for serious, I fear that I will be next.

Speaking of injury/sickness, Nisha, the Thai exchanger, broke her leg playing basketball. Party.

I got my receipt for my demand for my Carte de Sejour. This means that all of my papers are in order and I’m legally allowed to be in the country (sweet, since my visa has now expired) and that now I have to wait for another paper telling me when my state mandated doctor’s appointment is. This would be the equivalent of the opposite of a party. I’m probably going to get my Carte halfway through my stay here. Silly French government.

In happy blog related news, this blog is apparently on the Hampshire website. HOW COOL IS THAT?! (really) So yes, hi to any random Hampshire people who stumble upon my blog. You should totally go to Hampshire if you like learning. AND!!! If you decided to take a year off in between high school and college they’re really chill about it and they save your scholarships if you have any. Pretty durn awesome. Plus you’ll get to meet me… excellent.

I hate history class with a passion. I got yelled at the other day for asking my neighbor the meaning of an apparently very important word for the lesson and he fuh-reaked on me for talking. I had some very insolent comebacks prepared in my head, but considering that this is French high school where you can get fatty punishments for being insolent I held my tongue.

The church service has just ended and the stupid bell Will. Not. Stop. Dinging. Oh.my.god.stop.now.it.has.been.going.on.for.like.10.minutes.

*Ignoring*

My hands are cold like usual. I am seriously not prepared for winter. And then after having thoughts like that I think about how I am choosing to go to college in Massachusetts where it is a buttload colder than here. Nice.

It is still dinging.

Peace out.

Love Kendra

2006-11-12T01:19:00.000-08:00

AHHH!! Forgive me! I know I suck for not writing! (goal to self = write more)

*commence blog*!!!

Ok people, French school is officially kicking my butt as of this week. I have a book of letters written by some random Marquise to read and a full fatty essay to write… hand write. They don’t type anything at all here. And that is just for French class. Considering that I have 9 other classes, yeah, swamped.

As far as politics goes; Yay for Democrats taking over both houses! I must tell you guys it was kind of a hassle getting any news over here. I actually didn’t find out anything about the elections until Wednesday night here. I’ve been talking politics with Christophe a lot here and let me just say that I still have absolutely no clue exactly how the French system works. I do know that they’ve run the government 5 different ways so far (5 republiques) and that some people are pushing for a 6th change.

The Hawaiians all left last week and we had a party at Manon’s house with, holy mother of Jesus, spicy food. I almost died I was so happy. Ooh!!! In other food news, I definitely bought Jiffy Peanut Butter yesterday and I am oh so excited. They all think that it is disgusting – freaks. Cecilie and I tried to go to the Mexican restaurant, but considering we went at 10:30, it was kind of closed like everything else. Sadness. Hopefully I’ll be going there this week because I don’t have Theater class. AND! I tried the Vietnamese/Chinese restaurant in Mallemort… meh… it was ok, but next time I’m ordering spicy and regular rice.

Jeez, I had a lot of food news!

Genevieve is in the Hospital following her surgery. She had some sort of cyst-product, and although she is in pain right now, she’s doing a lot better than even yesterday. It is really sad to see her in the hospital though. She’s scheduled to come home this Wednesday-ish, but not do much for about a month.

On a completely different note, I am totally almost caught up with Lost. I’ve been downloading episodes on Limewire and watching them on the family computer. The 6th episode is downloading right now as I type. By the time you read this I will hopefully be caught up. I think that it is pretty much the suckiest thing ever that they’re postponing the rest of the season until February... What is that?!?!

TV here blows. We have 5 channels, 6 if you count Canal + (the pay channel) which is unblocked from 4-7 on Weekdays (Will & Grace is definitely on from 4:30 to 4:55). Nearly all of the TV shows here are as bad as, if not worse, than the worst American TV. Not even kidding. Examples: (1) Star Academy – This show is like American Idol, except for NOBODY on the entire show can sing and they all have really bad hair. This plays every night and sometimes episodes are as long as 3 hours. (2) Jour J – A really annoying man with an overly expressive face talks about moments in the history of music, stars and television. Unfortunately, episodes repeat segments frequently and the actual segments have nothing to do with the titles… I don’t really understand this one. (3) Random game shows that don’t even deserve to have names – Think ‘game show network’ but with really old people and even crappier prizes.
The only thing worth watching ever is ARTE, a channel on the 5 made for both France and Germany that has relatively interesting programs in the evenings.

Christophe just walked in with fresh bread, (ooooooh yeah) so I’m gonna break my fast with some tasty tasty french product.

Love kendra

p.s. NEW PICTURES!!! The link is to your right.

2006-10-29T23:29:00.000-08:00

Hey hey hey people!

I went with Christophe to his work last Friday, which pretty much consisted of getting in the car obscenely early in the morning and driving around Aix going to different Bakeries and Patisseries asking them what supplies they needed. Being that I am the wonderful and charming (HA) person that I am, this excursion also included lots and lots of free pastry product and a full warm loaf of bread right off the oven. Oh yeah.

PICTURES!!! at photos.yahoo.com/kendrabechtel

Other than that...
I didn't get to go to the party Friday, which was kind of sad but oh well. This Tuesday Manon, her Hawaiian (Allison), Cecilie(for a little while) and another kid who lives in Mallemort who's name is Antoine, are all going to have a pseudo Halloween party. I say pseudo because none of the French are willing to dress up, and I don't really have a costume, so its going to go something like this: Manon, Antoine and Cecilie all as themselves, Allison as Hawaiian girl (she brought a hula skirt or something?) and me as KENDRA WITH SCARF and possibly tights!!! ooooh ahhhh exciting.

Nothing compared to my brilliant costumes of years past -- sock monster anyone?

On a completely different note! Geneviève and I planted vine/tree type plants in the garden to cover the walls. They are really small and silly looking right now, but if they decided to like us and grow they should be really pretty next spring.

People have been asking me for my address a lot, so here it is, once again:

Kendra B.
13 la cour Marius Taché
13370 Mallemort
France

I think I'll put that in the side bar ------------------------------------------------->
there
and the picture address too

For now everyone, I think that is all. Not a whole lot going on here, trying to keep on talking and staying upbeat. It really is nice to get letter/emails from home so thanks SO MUCH to the people who have written to me.

party on wayne, party on garth

love kendra

2006-10-25T05:14:00.000-07:00

I know, I know, I’ve been bad; I haven’t blogged in over a week. Apologies all around.

Thing have been pretty chill… Manon’s Hawaiian and all of the other Hawaiians arrived on Sunday afternoon. I met them at school on Monday and OMG do they not speak French… they’ve only taken half a year of French… ever…

Yeah

SO! That is what I’ve been up to the last few days… furiously translating for 8 excessively chatty 15 year old Hawaiians and the rest of the French speaking world who have all miraculously and simultaneously lost their English skills. It’s kinda like a party. The really good thing about this is I’ve come to realize that I can speak French. Before I was only focusing on the things that I couldn’t do because everyone around me could (hello?! Mother tongue anyone?!) but as soon as I’m surrounded by clueless and ridiculously loud Americans I start realizing that I am not far from fluent. Yes I make mistakes ALL THE FREAKING TIME, but!!! I can translate!!! And everyone on both sides understands (or seems to understand) me. It has been a really big ego booster, which I totally needed.

Vacation starts today! How sweet is that? We started school 6 weeks ago and we already have a 2-week vacation. SUH WEET! That is how sweet it is. I’m gonna go to a party for all the Hawaiians this Friday and I’ll take pictures and post them. I’m also going to go with Christophe to his work one day next week (he works with all of the Bakeries and Patisseries in Aix-en-Provence) and I totally take pictures of that too. OOOOH tasty.

This is pretty much just for Rachel and Kim, but I’m totally on a John Mayer kick right now and have been listening to him nonstop for about 3 days. Thought you’d love that.

Write me comments or emails people! I’d love to know that people are actually reading this!

Love to everyone

Kendra

2006-10-18T08:04:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was bizarre, so here is a recap:

Ben decided to leave like 45 minutes before the bus, and I refused to go with him so he could smoke with his friends, so I actually got to get ready for school calmly. It was awesome. I get on the first bus and we start 'a truckin', and then about 10 minutes later we stop. dead stop. for 45 minutes. Apparently there was an accident right in front of us. SO I get to school 40 minutes late, of course I have a big in class essay in french at 8 for two hours, and get my retard slip signed (late slip.. but the tops of the pages say "retard" in really big letters because that's how you say late in french) and try to manage a decent dissertation in french in an hour and 20 mins. Then I get to Italian and My prof asks me to give a fricken' ORAL PRESENTATION IN FRONT OF THE CLASS. I almost peed myself I was so nervous and I still failed even though I studied my butt off. This is probably due to the fact that I don't know really how to use the imperfect subjunctive tense in French, so trying to learn it in Italian is kind of useless and since this was the first time that I'd actually spoken Italian, i thought I did pretty good. I said something along the lines of "Article... speaks.... about.... girl... singer... named.... christina delà... songs are many... songs are poetry... end" after Italian I realized that I was done with school because my English teacher never shows up and that means that I never have class, but only when it's really inconvenient.* There was this kid putting on a one man show where he made fun of a famous fat french cook woman who cooks on TV and a singer. I didn't get it... at all. I'm finally doing an activity!!! I found out that there is a bus right after the theater class ends, and I met a bunch of the kids in the class, and they're really nice, so we're going to eat together tomorrow in Salon and then I am going to my first theater class in french in France!!* *run on sentence (written the next day post theater class, i.e. today)

I TOTALLY DID A MONOLOGUE IN FRENCH!

I know, how cool am I? (The answer is really really by the way)

The teacher, who's name I didn't catch, was kind of pissed that I showed up for the first time a month and half after school started. (Granted this class is only one time a week, so I only missed like 4 classes. Not good, but still lady, its not like I missed a lot. The class was super easy to follow.) After she yelled at me and I filled out a form about why I wanted to be in the class, she was nicer. She gave me a monologue to do during the class and we did theater games (nearly Identical to the ones we did at cap, but in French) and then practiced monologues. I memorized about half of mine, and then we all did them in front of the class. Most of them sucked a lot, but the teacher(s? there's another woman who watches but everyone calls Michelle) liked mine. :D! yay!

On the bus ride home I got into my first big argument FOR the US in pretty much my entire life. It was crazy. The thing is, people here try to argument like so:

them-- "So, all Americans are pretty much the worst people ever and they all love bush and the french are pretty much the greatest people in the world... just so you know"

me-- "yeahhhh, and you know this how?" (I need to know their arguments so I can demolish them in my next sentence. This is how I operate people, get with the program)

them-- "well in Charmed the people all live only for themselves and their money, so all Americans are like that right? And also, your rich people live all by themselves and we have no ghettos and poor people live right next to rich people."

me -- " wow you're really wrong. (insert my brilliant examples that I am only able to come up when I'm angry or frustrated) and that is why I never lose an argument. end"

them -- " uhhh in school they tell us that Americans suck"

me -- " So they must be right, if they told it to you they must be correct?"

them -- *head explodes*

me -- *does the debate victory dance*

Yeah, sometimes I think I'm pretty damn cool.

missing you guys and my language skillz like WOAH!

love kendra

2006-10-14T09:43:00.000-07:00

I have found a faster method of uploading photos, and therefore, you get more of them

http://photos.yahoo.com/kendrabechtel

enjoy. I hope that works. I'll be putting up pictures as I take them, but for right now there is the Patrimony festival that happened a month ago, and soon pictures of kids from my class and my birthday party product.

I've been informed that my misadventures in Italian is absolutely hilarious, so I'll share my progress in this endeavor.

Marie è francese? Si (accented i), è francese.

Sei Americana? Si! Sono americana!

Pieu leggere un giornale italiano? No, non pieo leggere i giornali italiani! <-- verb prendere is spelled wrong and conjugated wrong. I need to study.

YEAH! marvel at my langauge skillz.

(meanwhile, the rest of the class is learning subjunctive, so in all reality I still suck)

I really miss understanding everything easily.

2006-10-09T05:26:00.000-07:00

Omg guys, guess how old I'm going to be in 2 days... yeah... 18

I know, creepy right?

In other news -- We watched a scary movie last night (Amityville Horror?) and although I didn't think it was all that scary, Camille got freaked out and wouldn't sleep by herself, so she stayed in my room last night.

I am super tired now because she moves A LOT when she sleeps.

I totally have 100 percent in English. Sweet.

My Italian teacher gave me the first year book and has decided that thanks to this book I will be able to be at the same level as the rest of the class in January. That is totally not going to happen, but at least I have homework and will have tests that I am capable of doing. On my last Italian test I totally answered on of the 8 essay questions and my answer was nothing but a list of the "sports" that I remembered in Italian that looked like english with 'il' added at the beginning:

Giovanni participici il bici il skates il minigolf.

something like that. It is totally not even a sentence.

French is starting to kick my butt. I have major homework that I've already done twice incorrectly.

I'm gonna go have some nutella now. mmm tasty.

More pictures

2006-10-02T05:21:00.000-07:00

Manon, my friend here, is going to be hosting a Hawaiian student at her house for 15 days at the end of the month. Apparently said Hawaiian doesn't speak much french (that is where I come in handy) and I'm excited so I thought I'd share.

end

Another Picture!!!

This is after I fell.
Sadface.

PICTURES!!! FINALLY!!!

2006-10-01T05:30:00.000-07:00

My School. OOOOH!!! and Homework!!!

Unfortunately, It takes like 10 minutes to upload each image. That definitely makes me cry a little on the inside. THEREFORE! pictures will be uploaded sparingly until I find a better way to make this work.

Other than the fact that my handwriting is becoming obscenely neat and the fact that my school exists, not a huge amount has been going on here. School is becoming increasingly hard as the assignments are moving from "write your name and the profession of your parents on a half sheet of paper" to "analyze the tone of this 15th century French poem in an essay due tomorrow".

a bit of a jump if I do say so myself.

I have a fancy schmancy cell phone, because apparently thats the only kind that exists now. It is super pretty and takes pictures : Voila photo

http://www.digitalstore.cl/Telefonos/fotos_grandes/motorola-razr-blue.jpg

beauty.

My number is 10 digits long. I can't call out of country with it as far as I know (the instruction manuel is definitely in french).

For now, that is all.

2006-09-23T00:58:00.000-07:00

Hello to all…

The computer has been down for a couple of days (try a week) so here comes UBER UPDATE!!!

Friday: Rained incredibly hard, I waited for my bus in the pouring rain for 30 minutes. I was pretty much soaked all day long. Other than that, nothing much to report.

Saturday: Patrimoine Festival

I totally took pictures, and now they won't go on to the blog. Unfortunately this is a problem I'm going to solve another day.

Basically, all of france celebrates being French on this weekend. Mallemort decided to do this through song. Yeah…

Sunday: Drove around with Christophe and Genevieve for 2 hours and took pictures of crosses. It was odd. Other than that I relished the fact that I didn’t have school.

Monday: One month since arrival anniversary. Had a pop quiz IN ITALIAN. (failed by the way, but not as much as some of the kids in my class which is really really sad) Ran in PE. Sucked.

Tuesday: My amazing French skillz were marveled at at the dinner table when I said a complex sentence (oh yes, multiple subjects AND verbs) and didn’t make any mistakes. That made me really happy, and then kind of sad because I realized how happy we all were and all I did was ask Benjamin to write down his schedule so I didn’t have to wake him up early when he starts at 9. I got to play piano at school today… first time in a month. There are a lot of kids that play in the Cafet (little area with fooseball, snacky snacks, tables, and a piano) and most of them OMG suck.

Wednesday: SUPER SADFACE DAY!!!!!! Warning.

I totally take back the statement that I like riding bikes. Ok, I like riding them, I really really don’t like falling really hard while going down hill super fast after riding like 15 miles already. Yeah… I’m cut and bruised up for serious. Hardcore status.

Yeah I know, you wish you were me.

Thursday: Totally didn’t go to school today because I really couldn’t move. I gave myself a treat and watched Bruce Almighty in English without subtitles because I was WOW tired and pissed off at life for having made me fall. Really really sore all day long. Party over here…

Friday: Hobbled to school. Did an in class essay in French from 8-10. That is officially the worst paper I’ve ever written in my life. My grade will be, um, interesting? 2 hours of History – kill me now. He was having a hard time speaking for some reason and kept mixing up letters, making him say things like Jupon and Rassie instead of Japon and Russie, or Les crises lourt and les crises cons… that one was funny. After a while Mr.-I-dress-like-a-balding-pirate-gavois threw his hands up in the air and exclaimed “C’est une festivale!” (like a festival of mistakes, which totally exist. I went to one the other day. It was fun…) Cracked up about something ridiculous and stupid with Manon at lunch which was really nice. Until yesterday I hadn’t had uncontrollable laughter about ridiculous things since mom left. I am still sore. The most annoying part is that my elbow is super messed up on the outside so I can’t rest my arm on anything when I’m sitting down. Oh how tiring.

Today is Saturday. Nothing has happened yet.

I'm trying to read Harry Potter HBP in French because I gave up on Les Liasons Dangereuse. Words like Snape(Rogue) and Hogwarts (Poudlard) are different and confusing.

yay internet!

2006-09-17T06:10:00.000-07:00

Definitely big news... I had my first epic experience in France last Thursday. EPIC!!!

Story time: On Thursdays, I have 4 hours free between classes, and Natasha and Elodie, who are totally mes copines, invited me to eat lunch at Natasha's house and then I could help them with their english presentation and they'd proof my french essay. Sounds simple enough... we catch a bus to Natasha's house at 12:15 and are there before 12:30, and Elodie and I play with her dogs and cat while Natasha makes us lunch. (She insisted that we stay out of the kitchen.) So we start eating lunch and Elodie makes the mistake of asking what the dark-ish spread on our toast is, and Natasha says she'll tell us after we finish it. My stomach instantly turns... And now I have to finish it, because I've started eating it and it doesn't taste bad, so we finish... yeah it was pidgeon tripe. *gag!* Anyways, we watch a movie, do our homework, and leave her house at 3:20 to catch the 3:45 bus in order to get us back to school before 4; our class starts at 4:10. At this point I am totally chill, these girls have the same bus mindset as me, and we're gonna be fine! Wrong. We get to the bus stop, wait, and wait, and wait, and by now it is 3:50 and the bus still hasn't shown and so we freak out a little and start walking. (remember, this is 10-15 minutes away from school on bus... so we walk, and then we run a bit, and then we run some more, and then we get lost, like you do when you absolutely need to be somewhere 5 minutes ago. So we're wandering around and our French teacher and her husband drive by... so we run yelling after them. Natasha explains our situation and they drive us to the base of the school. We run up the hill to school (this is all in 85-90* weather mind you) and up two flights of stairs to get to the attendance office so we can be marked late and let in to our class, but its closed, so we run back down the two flights of stairs, across the court, down another 3 flights of stairs, and start looking for our classroom in Bulding B. We finally find it and walk in, dripping sweat and panting and our whole class, including ms british english teacher, CRACKS UP. So we explain and everything goes over well in the end, but still... crazy day.

The moral of this story is: do not ask what you are eating. Ever.

2006-09-13T02:21:00.000-07:00

Today I only had an hour of french and an hour of SUPER EASY math. It is kind of the coolest thing ever to sit in a math class and be able to anticipate everything while the other around you are struggling.

Math is easier than english. Is that bad?

British makes me want to cry a little because the grammar is so weird. She keeps putting in extra words and telling me I'm wrong about things that are super correct and asking me random questions about american pop culture and looking disappointed if I'm wrong or if I don't know. I don't like it so much.

I did my first homework assignment in french. It took me over an hour. I'll put up a picture when I can. We had a good laugh because when I was correcting it with Geneviève, I read a part of it outloud like this: (translated of course) "The poet advises the young girl to profit from her youth, and therefore her beauty, by using the verb spoon which is usually used in reference to flowers."

yeah -- spoon.
I mean "pick" by the way. Pick = Ceuillir (koi-ear), Spoon = Cuiller (kwee-year) (I think its spelled like that, but it might be wrong. My spelling is SO BAD!!!)

Hilarity.

Other than that, I've met another american exchange student with super bad vibes. She isn't in my class though, so all is good -- except for sometimes she follows me at lunch and its really awkward.

I haven't been able to say awkward in so long even though I've been in about a kabillion awkward situations. It is killing me.

Things are starting to feel normal here, which I think is a really good thing.

I still want a burrito.

2006-09-08T12:15:00.000-07:00

mmm... 10 hours of school today... that is a scrumptious thought. Bask in that for a moment. Yeah.

As far as school goes, its good, if not difficult. I'll put it this way. If you were to take your average Capuchino CP class of juniors, give them just a little bit more motivation and higher expectations from their teachers and parents and put them all in IB diploma, that would be french high school for you. Teacher don't show up, so we don't have class. I tried to explain the concept of a "sub" today and they thought it was the strangest thing they'd ever heard.

I got all 11 of my books today. They fricken cost me 120€! I hope I get it back, because I know at the end of the year I have to return them.

I got a little sad today in French class (FOR 3 HOURS) because they were going over writing technique and such, and nerd that I am I was getting all in to it, and I knew the answers, but only in english, so they all assumed I couldn't understand. I really wanted to tell her that you have to look for SYNTAX!!! only to learn 5 seconds later that the French word for syntax -- is syntax. That was fun. I have absolutely no clue what the homework is, except for that it has to do something with poems? and charts... yeah

and I don't know what my english homework is because the instructions are in french and as far as i can see they direct me to page 415 of a 200 page book. fun stuff. English class is silly though cause the teacher is british and she made me describe chips and then told me I was wrong.

The girls in my class are nice -- theres a good group of them who talk to me (and attempt to talk to Cecelie the Danish exchange student whose french SUCKS) at breaks and help me in class. They even made fun of my accent today which is good, i guess, because it means to me that they feel it is ok to joke around me. I wish I didn't sound like a hobo when I try to speak.

The cafeteria is good but strange. It kind of tastes like middle class gourmet -- like someone tried to do something really fancy on a tiny budget. (I think I'm on point with that one). I've had couscous royale and salmon product. The girls said that it is required that I try MacDo (mcdonalds) in france, because it is better? I'm taking them up on it, as much as I hate it, because I want to have someone other than Cecelie to hang out with. She is nice, but UBER clingy, and understandably so since I'm pretty much the only one who can understand her at all.

I keep seeing people at school that remind me of people at home. There is this one girl in particular who is like a tiny, girly, clean lindsay, but she isn't very nice. I don't like her so much, she makes me miss real lindsay.

Weekend tomorrow, which is kind of like Jesus and Santa and the Easter Bunny all combined.

I can no longer rely on my happy english books that I've been reading before I go to sleep (I've read over 1500 pages in the last week and a half) because I have been assigned Les Liaisons Dangereuse by October 6th, and it is gonna be hell for me.

Yay...

Whiggity Whack school schedule.

2006-09-05T04:29:00.000-07:00

School today, pretty much da bomb. There is another exchange student (from Denmark) and she speaks way less french than me so I suddenly feel all confident. There were also a couple of the french kids in my class who were really nice and made an effort to talk to us at the break. One girl in particular, Natasha, was super nice and offered to help us around and with notes and such in classes. Yay! and! I had someone to sit with on the bus thanks to Ben introducing me to his friends.

Here is my schedule:

Monday: 8-10 = Education Physiques et Sportives (aka PE... AHHHHH)
10-11 = Italian
11-12 = English
5-6 = Education Civique (yeah... I'm pretty much not going to that class)

Tuesday: 8-10 = French
10-11 = Math
11-12 = Italian
1-3 = English

Wednesday: 8-9 = Group one French
9-10 = Math
11-12 = Group two French (I'm not sure how the group thing works, but I know that I only have two classes this day. Sweet!)

Thursday: 8-9 = History and Geography
9-10 = Italian
10-11 = Math
11-12 = History and Geography
4-5 = English

Friday: 8-10 = French
10-12 = History and Geography
2-3 = French
3-5 = Biology/Physics

Saturday: NOTHING!!!!!!!!!! oh yeah.

My "home room" teacher is my french teacher. She seems to be nice, if a little strict. She was very good about explaining things to me and Ceciliy (the danish girl) after class, and she isn't too difficult to understand.

:D

2006-09-04T02:06:00.000-07:00

My official last day of summer has arrived! Terrifying... terrifying beyond belief.

The last week or so has been interesting, to say the least. What I've found is that at every gathering of more than three or so people, some middle aged man makes it his personal quest to make sure that I understand everything that is going on. Sure, thats nice and all, but when someone tries to explain a word to me, that I pretty much got the jist of, in their broken high school english which they are ever so proud of, it usually is a lot more confusing than just paying attention to context.

Camille and I are taking the bus into Aix today by ourselves, so I am excited about that.

I'll write about school next. Oh no.

2006-08-29T06:33:00.000-07:00

Today is my first full day here without mom. Yesterday was ridiculously hard, but i have to say that i'm glad that it is over. There was so much sadness leading up to that moment that when it was finally over I definitely felt some relief.

Now the hard part starts. They keep saying that my french really isn't bad at all, but I seriously feel like i stutter over everything. My hat is off to all the exchange students that do this without any language skills at all... I can't even imagine.

I'm really starting to miss my friends and family now. They are so good to me here, but you can only get so close when one of you has to think REALLY HARD just to ask how the microwave works. (it was ridiculously confusing btw.)

I'm starting to get the hang of the keyboard. My computer picks up the internet, but it is password protected and I'm not sure whether or not I want it in my room yet... too much of a time suck. I figure that I'll cross that bridge when school starts.

Speaking of which, AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

And the cards that Dad and Darren sent to Mom for her birthday just got here today. I can either send them back or read them to her over the phone, as you wish!

Write me an email... kendrabechtel@gmail.com , they make me happy.

2006-08-27T10:00:00.001-07:00

I have a tan.

Yeah, that is a big question mark in my mind too.

We got back from our crazy amazing adventure to the Cote d'Azure today. It was ridiculously beautiful. I still don't believe that I'm here. at. all.

I start school on the 5th of September. I'm pretty damn nervous, but excited too. I need me some friends!

My french is... cromagnon? but improving.

I just have to say, I am OMG jealous of pretty much every item of clothing that my host mom has.

as the back of Camille's shirt says,
Smoke, Peace, and Make love

or rather... as her mom said,
Just peace!

bisous
Kendra

2006-08-23T10:36:00.000-07:00

Today I got all of my papers together, including 4 id pictures (which mom and I walked down to the photo store and got all by ourselves thank you very much!), and mailed in my application for a carte du séjour. I also got my super nifty card that allows me to take the bus to school. I'll put up a picture when I get the time to figure out how. The only thing that sucks about the bus product is that there is only one bus in the morning, so I have to catch it at 7:25 whether or not i have class that morning. They told me sometimes I won't have class until 10 or so... fun.

Mom and I took a little tour of Aix en Provence today by ourselves. It was pretty much awesome. Tomorrow we are roadtrip-ing it to the Cote d'Azure.

Benjamin is bugging me to get off, so I'll write when we return!!

I hope you all are doing wonderfully

2006-08-18T12:58:00.000-07:00

holy shit i'm in france

my mom and i had a good trip and are glad to be here. i'm understanding a lot more than i though i would but i'm able to say a lot less. nerves i guess. this keyboard is ridiculously confusing.

i'll write again later

yay

2006-08-17T00:54:00.000-07:00

I'm packing up my computer now.

This is quite possibly the most terrifying thing I've ever done. Ever.

Goodnight guys, see you in a year. Remember to keep reading this and to comment; remind me how much I love you all.

Expletive...

2006-08-10T00:33:00.000-07:00

We called the consulate -- their phones don't work.
We faxed.
They called us back.
My visa is "not approved yet".
They can't guarantee I'll have it on time.

um... kay?

So, despite that, I'm having a going away party at my house on Sunday. I'm excited about it, but nervous. I have these feelings that it is only going to cause a lot of tension even though I know that it will be fun as well... I think I'm just freaking out a little bit and by a little bit I mean a lot.

My schedule for the next week. (I [hopefully] leave in a week)
Thursday: Appointments in the morning, Coldstone 5-9:30
Friday: Peet's 3-7, Chorus Line w/ Heidi
Saturday: Peet's 1-6:45, Coldstone 5-Close (that'll be interesting)
Sunday: Peet's 8-1, PARTAY 3-when the sun comes up, but probably earlier
Monday: Glorious glorious nothing
Tuesday: Appointment at 2, Peet's from 12-5. Again, interesting, and impossible.
Wednesday: Peet's from 12-5
Thursday: Mosey on down to the airport and scoot my booty to France after a wonderful celebratory breakfast with my favorite people. Hopefully.

2006-08-04T17:15:00.000-07:00

Here is my host family. Yay! (the picture is over a year old though, so they probably look quite a bit different)

And here is my address. How exciting. Mail me, or email me, once I'm there

Kendra Bechtel
13 la cour Marius Taché
13370, Mallemort
FRANCE

Still waiting for my visa. COME ON CONSULATE!

Lovely new smile!

2006-08-03T13:41:00.000-07:00

Before my appointment, and after

Two weeks

2006-08-03T09:26:00.000-07:00

Today is the two week mark. Today is also the day I get my braces off. <-- SO EXCITED!

I still haven't received my Visa. I think I'm going to call the consulate today before work.

I am freaking out about leaving -- I know that even if I weren't doing this and was going to college I'd still be leaving, but the whole thought of leaving everything familiar and dropping myself into absolute confusion seems a bit ludacris right now. Don't get me wrong; I'm insanely excited too. Excited, impatient, anxious, nervous... I don't even know.

I'm having a going away party on the 13th at my house from 3-8. I hope it ends up being fun, although at that point who knows what my emotional state may be.

Frustration and more

2006-07-21T11:26:00.000-07:00

ARG!

story time...
When I last wrote, everything had gone swimmingly at the consulate and I foresaw no problems as far as the pre-departure bureaucracy goes. I should have known better. They called my house a couple of days ago telling me that I was missing a few papers and that my fingerprints didn't come out. I HAD THE PAPERS WHEN I WAS THERE LAST TIME!!! I'd asked the man if he needed them and he'd told me no. And they should be able to see on their computer whether or not the finger prints worked. ahhhhhh.

They promised that I'd have it in 2 weeks, so I'm expecting it probably around the day before I leave. That is terrifying.

There are far too few days until I leave and that is depressing. 27 today.

Something else that is depressing; people's spelling on the internet. It really makes a little piece of me die inside.

Rachel and I don't do well with large flying bugs. Or large crawling bugs. Or bugs in general.

p.s. I'm working at Peet's in Millbrae, mostly on weekends. Visit me.

Just waiting now

2006-07-02T19:18:00.000-07:00

I got another email from my host family today. Apparently there will be a Danish kid and a Thai kid at the same school as me. That is such exciting news for me because I was scared I wouldn't get to meet any other exchangers. I also found another girl (via livejournal) who is going to France next year who lives in Pacifica. woot!

Braces off on the 3rd of August. ONE MONTH!

When you make people's jobs easier, you get what you want.

2006-06-28T11:38:00.000-07:00

I just got back from the SF French Consulate -- a wonderful experience since I had all of my paperwork in order. Now I just wait for the call saying I'm approved and that I can go pick it up. This is the final piece, I have my tickets, my school, everything! Crazy stuff.

I'm leaving for Paris non-stop on August 17th in the evening with my mom, and from there we're taking the TGV to Aix-en-Provence. This is seriously a testament to how unnecessary it is to go with a company if you know a family to stay with. Mom and I calculated it today and we would have spent about $4000 (USD) more at minimum if we'd gone with a company (excluding rotary, but I was a little too late for that, and by a little I mean about 6 months, so a lot)... so sweeeet!

I've started training at Coldstone, have two interviews for other jobs this week, and am getting some pick up babysitting thanks to the lovely and talented Val Liberty (thanks by the way... you're wonderful) so my money situation sould be improving shortly.

Amazing... I'm still trying to wrap my head around the fact that I'll be out of the country for a year.

When I go to pick up my visa (anywhere from a week to a month from now) does anybody want to have a city adventure day with me? its right by china town, so we can BART it to the Powell station.