Day 2 et beaucoup mieux!

My French is already getting better! I feel so much more comfortable speaking, even to people at stores and restaurants and stuff (read: real French people). It helps a lot that everyone here is very friendly and understanding of les américains. I'm afraid this will not be the case in Paris...but we will see in a few weeks.

Today was quite the eventful day. Tara and I woke up at 9.30 am for le petit déjeuner, which consisted of plain yogurt (not our favorite, but okay), Frosted Flakes which came disguised in a Muesli box (didn't ask about that one), toast with butter/jam, juice, and tea. It basically felt like I was having breakfast at my grandma's house...it was nice.

Afterwards, we decided to explore Tours a bit. We walked along the Loire, which is right by where we live. It was beautiful--so many pretty bridges, buildings, etc. After that, we decided to check out a Jardin close-by. It was pretty, but not as large as we had imagined. We also passed tons of picturesque fountains and old buildings...we stopped to take pictures about every 5 minutes.

As we were making our way home, we ran into Adam and Charlie who are both in our program. We decided to grab lunch with them at a place called Au Bureau (at the office? yeah I don't know.) It was good, we split 2 pizzas and I had my first legal drink!--an apple cider that was very very delicious.

Thennn we were off to an informational meeting which was fairly boring.

Apres, we went to get cell phones. A few days ago, I was telling my family, "There is no way in hell that I'll be able to explain to a French person what kind of cell phone/plan I need, etc." And then I got there, told the lady what I wanted, and that was it. Easy peasy lemon squeezy. Unfortunately, doing so only put me on a waiting list, and we had to go to a little program get-together before my name was called, but hey, at least I'm fully prepared for next time. I feel like I'm maybe a bit more comfortable speaking French at this point than some of the other students, which completely surprises me, seeing as yesterday I was essentially mute. Today I think I asked at least 3 different people for directions, and 1 person if I could take a chair that wasn't being used from her table. Sweeeeeeet.

I'm getting tired of writing...ok so the get-together we went to was basically everyone from the program at a café (Au Bureau....surprise!), and the directors bought us free drinks. Yippeeee. I had a glass of champagne and some extremely sweet white wine. I thought I would like it more the sweeter it was, but it was too sweet! Still not bad, though.

Then we came home, had dinner (spinach, salmon, and toast w/paté), then went out with other JYF kids. It was cool, but kind of hard to find places we wanted to go slash find people we wanted to hang out with. We stayed for quite a while though, came back around 2 am. I like that Tours is an extremely safe city--I'm usually extremely paranoid about getting robbed/kidnapped/molested/etc. but even walking back at night, I felt really safe. There are people out in the streets even late at night. It also helps that I have Tara to walk with, of course. I'm sure if I were alone I wouldn't feel half as safe.

A tout a l'heure :)