my time in FRANCE
At the beginning of the year my mum was very keen on me going away to France for a couple of weeks during TY to go to a language school and learn some extra french. I was pretty happy with this idea, two weeks in some sun for a change, beside the beach sounded pretty good to me. I went away with my friend Josh Watson and his mum brought us to Dublin airport on the morning of April 9th. And so we were left to our own devices for two weeks. Once we arrived at La Rochelle airport our first impression was how absolutely tiny the airport is. There was only one baggage carosel ! When we came out of arrivals we were met by our host mum for the next two weeks. Her name is Hanta and she could not have been nicer to us for the duration of our stay. The weather on our first day was only ok. From the airport we took a couple of short bus journeys back to the apartment we were going to be staying in. The apartment itself was very nice, Josh and I were sharing a room for the two weeks and simply due to the fact that i walked into our room after him meant that he got the bigger, bottom bunk bed. Lesson learned, barge past josh in future. That evening we just ate dinner with Hanta and the other two students she had staying with her while we were there.
French classes
During the weekdays we were in class in the school. The school we were in was called Inlingua and i really would recommend it. The location of it was absolutely ideal for me and Josh as the school itself was right beside our apartment complex. Our first morning in school we had to be in by 8:30 for a small breakfast kind of thing but it was more an opportunity to meet some of the other students and the guy based in France who was responsible for organizing mine and Josh's trip. On the same course as me was four other Irish kids and one Australian girl. There was one guy and then three girls from Ireland and we got on really well with them. We then had classes from 9 until 12:15 then a lunch break until half past one. Some days this was all of the class we would have for day but most of the time we would have another french lesson from 1:30 - 4:45. One thing that we did during our lessons was that we did a french aural and did the first section of a leaving cert exam.
dAY tRIPS
Over the course of the two weeks, we went with our language school on day trips to Ile De Re both on the Saturday of our first week and on the Friday of our second week. The purpose of these trips was for surfing. I was extremely excited for this as I had been surfing on a couple of occasions before but only when I was a little bit younger. The first time we went over to Ile De Re we cycled there. This was exhausting and took a very long time. We cycled for about three hours before reaching the beach we would be going surfing on. So for our first lesson we were just taught the basics of surfing, how to catch and ride a wave and how to stand up. Our first outing none of us managed to get up and properly ride a wave but we all had an awesome time. The following week when we headed over again we took a car thank goodness. This time al of us felt much more confident on the surf-board and we wasted no time getting up and riding the waves. Granted the waves were better the first day but I still had a really good time surfing. This was without a doubt one of my favourite parts of the trip and I hope I get to surf again sometime soon.