Almost Finished

Dear American friends, (In the words of my host mother who is always telling me to start by saying that.)

I can't believe I am here with my family for only two more weeks. I am honestly running out of interesting things to talk about...that means I will have to search. On the other hand I will tell everyone right now that I will probably only have time to write one more time before I go home. I have to finish my project for AFS Lorraine and my other school projects as well as start packing and all that fun stuff that comes with having to go home...I am not to thrilled about it. Oh well it can't be helped because at the same time I am ready to come see all of my friends and family and especially to start again with my normal non-french highschool. It's not that I don't like the highschool here it's just that I prefer my normal one. The dys are counting down and lets just say that the time went by really fast. It feels like not too long ago that I arrived and was to nervous to talk at school and everything like that.(though I will say that that feeling only lasted a week or so).

Anyway it's that time of year here that I will say that I hate shopping because here in France pretty much store has sales that everyone calls the "Soldes" It's even more annoying in the big city, but on the bright side almost everything is half off.=) And with school since we have to buy our textbooks and the books we use to analyze in our French literature class it makes buying books a lot cheaper. Personally, I feel like I am in college with that because it's like buying your textbooks and the schedule is similar to how a college schedule runs. Then there are also student dorms at my school for the students who live in towns farther away. The students come on Monday and return to their normal families on the weekend, so it's not exactly the same but similar. Another thing I find wierd at school is that we have two different types of homework, we have normal homework and DM's. The normal homework is the normal exercises and everything, but I learned that it's never graded and the teacher never checks to see if it's done. Then the DM is the same type of exercises except it seems like all of the students try their best to make the paper they write it on as neat as possible and the teacher actually comes around and grades it during the following week.

Now I have to ask myself what other random thing can I think of to talk about that's somewhat different or interesting. So I guess I found yself realizing this past week or two that every city no matter how little it is in France has a town crest. You can sometimes find it on a little gold circle in the street, and you can almost always find it on the town hall building or the most well-known public building. I asked one time why each city has one and I am a bit disappointed to say that sadly everyone I asked had no idea. I found it interesting and I tried imagining what it could be used for and still have yet to come up with an idea except for that it could be some sort of decoration. When I find out, which I plan on doing before I come back, I will try to tell you why. On that note since I honestly can't think of anything to say, Happy New Year again and hope to see everyone soon.=)