Olly in France
January Year 2024

I feel like I have been here for months now, but it’s only been three weeks! on Saturday I woke up to the most amazing view out my window. It was raining outside, and the clouds were in the mountains!

This past week I had lots of fun and met lots of new people. At the start of the week, I got to meet my host sister Ambre’s God mother. We went to her beautiful house in another small town nearby, it was completely made of wood and inside there was cool art and small sculptures. She was really nice; she can speak English very well, so we had a nice little talk and I’m going to go hiking with her soon. We all had a great evening talking and eating crepes.

This week I have been trying really hard to figure out what my teachers are saying during class, and I understand a little bit but that’s better than not understanding at all. There are some classes where I don’t need to know exactly what they said to do the work. For example, sport, in sport we have been doing basketball. I am not very good at basketball, so I was a bit shy when I first started playing however this week, I think I surprised everyone including myself. We played some mini games, and I got at least four shots in which is probably the best I have ever done.

The way schools work here is so different from Australian schools. For example, for sport we just walk down the street to the court. On Tuesday a few classes went to a place where you can talk to people about their jobs, and everyone jumped on the bus I wasn’t even with my class, and they didn’t care. While in Australia you need your parents to sign for you to leave, then they do a headcount almost every five minutes.

Even though I wasn’t on the bus with my class I was with two other exchange students, one girl from the sunny coast and another girl from Swiss. Because none of us could speak French very well we sat down in the corner and chilled out. I ended up having the best conversation with Livia the Swiss girl. We talked about how we were feeling about everything, it was very reassuring because she feels the same as me, we talked about our friends at home and what we hope to get out of the exchange. She is the coolest person, we spent three hours talking and laughing together. We were joking about the stereotype that Aussie’s say nor instead of no, then not even meaning to I said I don’t know. Talking to her was definitely the highlight of my week.

The next two weeks are holidays so I’m super excited to go and do lots of different things.