I am not going to do a post for this past week at school. I am sorry, it is just too much. Mostly, Monday might as well have been a year ago. I don't really remember it. Sorry!
So on to this past weekend...
AFS weekend! Saturday afternoon Ilyess walked me to the train station at Part Dieu (10-15 min away walking)where I met up with Emily and Marina, the other AFS girls from Lyon, and quite a few other AFSers that had taken a train to Lyon in order to catch the train to Anjou. On the way down I sat with Yuka, a really cute Japanese girl who speaks a very little English and even less French. We had fun though... she is very very sweet. We didn't do very much that afternoon, we went into groups with people that speak the same language, I was with the other two Americans, two girls from Finland and a guy from Denmark... we were supposed to do written activities about what we liked and didn't like about France and what we expected, but mostly we drove the volunteers crazy and talked. We had a very good dinner after which I could hardly move and then the Student Ambassadors (french kids going to the US for 2 weeks) "organized" activities. Musical chairs! I almost won... it was really funny to see everyone fall on the floor when they missed a chair though. After that we talked a little bit and then a bunch of us went up on the roof and listened to music until a volunteer came up and yelled at us that some people were trying to sleep and being on the roof at night was dangerous and blah blah blah. Either way, that ended that.
We woke up the next morning and ate breakfast- really yummy yogurt, bread and jam. Apparently you drink tea and hot chocolate out of bowls here, and Moroccan tea kills French tea in a bag. Just not the same. After that we played really really stupid games for a while (Leeettt me see your funky monkey!) Which I think mostly exist to make you feel as awkward as humanly possible so that you get used to the feeling for when you do stupid things with your french friends and family. That and so that they can take really silly pictures of 50 teenagers pretending to be monkeys. We went back into our groups, ore writing stuff... this time though we wrote a letter to our future self that they will give us as we leave, which is actually a pretty good idea. After that we just wandered around for a while, then ate lunch. All of the families brought something, and they prepared a few salads, and by the end of it none of us wanted to move. People here are really addicted to anything chocolate by the way.
After lunch we walked up the hill/mountain (this was no small hill, ok?) to an old castle. On the way up Marshall and I found a small cave filled with brush that would have been really cool to explore otherwise, wild blackberries that can not compare with east Texas berries from the farm, and some grapes growing over a fence that were... wow. One of the most delicious things I have ever had, but they didn't taste much like a grape. Very very good. At the castle you had the most beautiful view of the valley and I cursed myself for forgetting my camera, and the wind was blowing really really hard.
Not much happened after that... we went back down and left with our families. Malika's husband, Sara's stepfather had arrived from Morocco by the time I came back and I met him for the first time... he seems very nice. Otherwise that is about it.
Away from the timeline though: It was so so so much fun. At one point I was sitting at a table where I was speaking french with someone across from me, on my left two guys and a girl were speaking spanish and on my right some girls were speaking English, at the table there were two people from Paraguay, another two from Bolivia, one from Peru, one from Mexico, one from Latvia, one from Finland and me, from the Untied States. It was like that all weekend, a mixture of languages (often half in English, half in French) and a mixture of countries... there was someone from every continent except Antarctica. It is so cool to see how similar, and different, each culture is, and to be able to say I have friends from all over the world now. It makes Austin feel very distant, but in a really good way. It is liberating and amazing and... wow. I really wish I could describe it for you guys back home...
Love and miss you all.

Les Mots:
renifler- to sniff
respirer- to breathe (I can't right now)
tousser- to have a cough
all of these terms relate to the fact that I am pretty sure someone gave me a cold this weekend. Darn.