Week 1: Stalactites

I am sitting in the airport-where all adventures begin- when I get the dreaded notification: "Your flight has been delayed". So begins one of the most taxing travel days I have experienced. I proceeded to miss my connection in Chicago, Frankfurt, and my bus in Lyon to Grenoble. Finally, after 31 hours of traveling, multiple calls home and frantic texts I arrived at my final destination: a little hotel in Grenoble, France.

The past week since my arrival has been full of exploring and adjusting. I have wandered the streets of Grenoble with new friends and discovered new stores and ate amazing food (ex. the crepe below). I have learned to navigate the city using the tram. So far I have not gotten lost....yet.

Tuesday night was the night that I stressed about weeks leading up to my departure. Moving into my host family. What if they don't like me? What if I can't communicate at all? What if I don't like the food? I am happy to report that all my stressing has for the most part been for nothing. My host family is amazing. I live in a little apartment in the city center with three kids, the two parents, two birds and a cat. Day after day I am slowly increasing my ability to communicate. I am creating relationships and being able to spend time with each family member. After dinner every night we play board games. I am learning so many new games and it is an easy way to spend time with them without having to communicate a lot.

At the end of this week we visited the university I will be studying at: Université Grenoble Alps (UGA). We had orientation where we took a tour of the campus and they explained how our classes will be structured and graded. I will be in classes just for international students, and they will all be in French, because that will be the only language we all have in common. On Mondays and Thursdays I have four straight hours of French an hour break, then two more hours. It will be exhausting, but I am ready for the challenge. But....no class on Fridays! This makes traveling on the weekends a breeze :) Stay tuned for next weekends trip....

I'm sure you have been wondering, "why is this blog post named stalactites?" Well I have a story for you. On Saturday, my friends and I decided to hike the Bastille which is on a mountain towards the edge of town. We were about halfway up when an older French man goes, "regarder la la la" which is him saying "Look there, there, there". He was wanting to show us the stalactites on the archway we were about to walk through. We thought this would be a quick interaction, but no. We walked up the rest of the hike with him, for about an hour and a half. He showed us every stalactite as we walked by, learned about his children and his work, and talked about social issues in France. He was very proud of himself saying that not many people in Grenoble know about the stalactites. He even pulled over a younger french boy who was walking by asking him if he knew about the stalactites. This was not how I was expecting my first experience walking up the Bastille to go but I thoroughly enjoyed it. It was a great opportunity to practice listening and speaking French. I will never walk the Bastille again without looking at the stalactites.

I leave you until next time with a cute picture of my host family's cat, Sauri. We are becoming best friends :)