Forum De L'aventure

Friday was the "Forum de l'aventure" at my school, a big event that happens every two years. The school director kept discribing it as "exceptional", an "exceptional day, with exceptional hours, and exceptional events". There weren't any classes at all today, and we started at 8:30 instead of 8. The entire Lycee, around 650 kids, crowded into one of the gyms and spent the morning listening to speakers. We heard from a man who worked in slums in Cairo, a mountain climber, a mentally handicapped man, a man who was in a Nazi concentration camp, and a soldier. I paid the most attention to the man who was in the concentration camp, who was really interesting. I got extremely bored by the soldier and mountain climber. The mentally handicapped man was the favorite of all the kids. He made lots of jokes, some of which I caught, and, according to everyone, what he was talking about was very interesting and intelligent. Unfortunately, I could barely understand him, and after a while of trying to, I gave up. There was one other morning speaker, but she was lost somewhere in Cran-Gevrier (an Annecy suburb).

We broke for lunch and I ran into town with a group of my friends, we split up and bought lunch. I went with my friend Max to get Chinese, which takes a little longer than buying a sandwhich or a panini or something, but its totally worth it. You can get sauteed noodles for only 2.50 euros, AND when you get it to go, it comes in one of those white boxes that says "thank you" on the top in red letters and has pagodas on the sides. We rushed back to the gym to catch the lunchtime concerts, where two different bands played. The first had a few of my friends in it, which was kinda fun, it reminded me a lot of Open Mic back at VHS.

After lunch we started with the woman who was lost in the morning, she was a member of the European Parliament. I was happy because I could understand every single word she said, but the general concensus among my friends was that she wasn't the interesting. She talked a lot about water. After that, we split up into Mini-Forums. We all scattered about to listen in smaller groups (mine had like 150 kids) to the speakers. There were some additional speakers just there for the afternoon part, but I ended up with one of the morning speakers, the man who was in the concentration camp. He was really interesting, and I'm glad I chose that group. To finish off the afternoon all the speakers gathered again and left us with final words of wisdom. We all sang "Imagine" and broke free into the sunny day. For a day of doing nothing, I really was exhausted afterwards.

Also, today was April Fool's Day. Now, in France, the big thing to do on April Fools is to cut fish out of paper, and stick them to people's backs. It wasn't too widespread at St. Michel this year because nobody had any paper or anything with them as we were all listening to lectures all day, but you'd still see people walking around with fish on their backs. Why don't we do that in the US?