Les Silhouettes de Sophie : PRUNE, CISL, and a host of other acronyms

Something I have learned (and something that my study abroad program leader noted) is that French people in the university system love acronyms. So this entry will be an entry of acronyms, to the best of my ability:

August 27^th-30^th: CISL

If you were to say CISL to anyone in my UCEAP study abroad group (50 or so UC kids all from different campuses around California), you would hear an almost instantaneous groan. CISL (a student-centered hostel in Lyon) is where I stayed for the first three days of my program. It is also where some other people, who chose apartment instead of homestay, had to stay while they looked for an apartment to rent. The groans you would hear had nothing to do with the people who worked there, they were all really nice! It had to do with the fact that we only received breakfast (between 7am and 9 am) of yogurt “nature” (which means really really plain), a cereal that resembled corn pops, and “compote” (i.e. jam). Also, the fact that none of us realized that they don’t provide towels or hand soap so we had to pay 1, 60 euros to rent a towel while we were there. But mostly, the fact that it had THE most horrendous wifi I have ever encountered. I could barely send an email, Facebook chat never worked, and even trying Facetime or Skype was hopeless. Moreover, every 5 minutes you lost your connection.

So now that I have had my official CISL rant, these first few days were good despite all of this! We bonded quickly over all of our first-world problems (which actually ended up being harder than we expected and made me feel very spoiled to live in a place where I could always contact my loved ones). We all stuck together within the program and went out the first night to the river to sit with the other university kids on the Berges de la Rhone. It was really beautiful. In these first few days, the city was still a mystery to us and so, throughout the day, we would explore Lyon and try to get our bearings. Here are some pictures of the first three days J

The first night along the Rhône

My university-Lyon 2

Grand group of girls from my program :)

View of the Rhône

Only Lyon!

Apparently "Danielle" became "Tania"-he couldn't understand my accent….this Starbucks cost 5 euros by the way….which is like 8 bucks, not a good deal in France.

Touristy Lyon picture!

August 30^th and 31^st: LPWDH (Le premier week-end de homestay-the first weekend of homestay)

On August 30^th at 10am, my host mom, Bernadette, picked me up at CISL. All of us homestayers were waiting in the lobby with our luggage and a stomach full of butterflies. I met her and the first thing she said to me was, “Tu es Danielle?” (Are you Danielle?) and I said “Oui, bonjour” (Yes, hello), she said “Bonjour, je suis Bernadette.” And I could not for the life of me remember how to say “Nice to meet you” in French so I just said “Bonjour” again like a parrot. She looked a little confused and said, “You speak some French, right?” in French. I said “Oui, je parle francais” and luckily, we had a conversation about ten minutes later that proved to her that I truly was able to speak French!

My first day in my homestay was great! I could tell already that I was going to like my homestay family. Once I got to the apartment with all of my stuff, Bernadette introduced me to her youngest daughter. I think meeting her was the first time I “bised” anyone, which is not correct French but which is what two of my friends kept calling the French greeting. You give others that you meet “bisous” (which means kisses) but instead of actually kissing them on the cheek you put your cheeks together and make a kissing noise into the air. In Lyon, it is one kiss on each cheek, but in other parts of France, it is more or less. Then they gave me a tour of the apartment and let me unpack. A few hours later, Bernadette and I went for a walk around Lyon and she showed me la rue de Victor Hugo (shopping), la place Bellecoeur (the largest plaza in Europe I think), and Vieux Lyon (which is the part of Lyon that has been around since the Middle Ages). I was able to carry on a long conversation with her and she bought me my first Lyonnais specialty-a dessert called “brioche praline”- which has pink pralines (sugared almonds) inside a brioche bun. It was so good!

After that, I met two of her other children and tried my hand at listening to a family speak together (it did not go as well as I had hoped). Then I went out with my friend, Amber, to meet her and a French guy, Alexandre, at le Parc de Tête d’Or (which is a beautiful park that also has a zoo!). Finally, I returned for dinner with Bernadette; we ate upstairs on her friend’s terrace and it was truly an mélange of language and culture. Her friend is Croatian and speaks Croatian, French and English. Her friend’s niece was there and only speaks Croatian and English, and Bernadette speaks French and a small smattering of English. So at any given moment, any of those three languages were being spoken. That is something else I love about being here in Europe, a large majority of people speak more than one language.

There were many more things that happened that weekend, but here are some pictures to show you:

Le cathédrale de Saint-Jean (seen on my walk in Vieux Lyon)

A deer in Le Parc de tête d'or

Sunday: Exploring the basilica de Fourvière with Amber

View from the top of the hill called Fourvière

Panoramic (view from Fourvière)

September 2-12: PRUNE

This entry is getting long so I will keep this short. But the next step after this first weekend was….my birthday but I think I will put that on a different post! Or, better yet, you can ask me about it J It was a lovely day, although I started out being worried about it because I was away from home but my host family sang me happy birthday and made me a cake and I went to The Smoking Bar for my first “legal in the U.S.” drink!

PRUNE, however, is the next acronym because that is the name of our “stage” that precedes the actual French university classes which starts Monday. We had 40 hours of class (one class that worked on writing, one on oral presentations and one on the area in which we are studying) in two weeks and three long tests. I learned a lot in these classes, about French slang and how the university system works (it is very different from ours, but I will leave that for another entry). I also met a lot of different people, girls from Frankfurt and England, many others from UPenn, and Georgetown. Today was the last day and now I am free! And Monday we start real classes. Now you are all caught up. If you read to the end, you most definitely get a gold star. Bon travail!

I don't have any pictures of the stage itself (that would be boring….mostly people in classrooms) so here are pictures of Annecy, a beautiful lake town that I got to visit courtesy of the PRUNE program and also 33 euros.