Volleyball and Hypermarchés

Yesterday was a pretty exciting day for me. It started off with me realizing I'm not going to be horrible in EPS (PE) class this trimester. Last trimester I was ranked as the fourth worst badmitton player- I'm not even that bad at badmitton in the US, but apparently all French kids are great at it. Yesterday volleyball started, and in the US I am terrible at volleyball. I was on a volleyball team for three practices back in 7th grade, before our team disbanded because we couldn't get enough players. In those three practices I learned how to serve, and nothing else. Yesterday we picked volleyball teams and I was one of the last picked, everyone (including myself) thought I'd be terrible. And then I surprised everyone by being fairly decent at it. My team won two of our three games. At the end of the class when the teacher was talking on about things she pointed me out as the best server in the class and everyone beamed at me. It was so exciting! I may get a decent grade!

After school I went to my next host families house to eat lunch and then go buy snowboarding boots. They are completely different from my current family, and right now, I really don't want to leave! It took until I saw what I have to move to for me to realize just how much I love the family I am with now and the life I have here. My next family seems nice, but its still going to be difficult for me to change. One upside to moving is that I'll be speaking more French. I talk to my host parents now in French, but to my host sister in English, at my next house I'll be speaking to everyone in French. The mother, Christine, speaks English well, but I'll talk to her in French unless I have a problem.

We bought my snowboarding boots and then I met my host sister and a friend of hers in town and we shopped and then went to a cafe and sat and talked. After that, we picked up some more friends and drove to Carrefour. The craziest place ever. When we got there, my host sister turned to me and said, "don't get lost." Carrefour is a HUGE grocery store. The kind called a hypermarché instead of a supermarché because it is just so huge. The parking garage was like four stories, and the store was insane. Gigantic and teeming with people. Where I am from, we think Costco is big, and I now know that we are very wrong. And yes, we were seperated from people in our group several times and had to use our cellphones to recconnect.