A Good Start to the Semester

Time here is flying by.  It’s crazy to think that this semester is almost halfway over now.  The autumn semester definitely has a different feel to it than the summer semester did.  We spend a lot more time in class, and there are so many students in the CIEF program that our schedules are staggered, so we don’t wind up with as much free time to explore.  It is a really good program though; I’ve learned a lot of French in the time I’ve been here.  There is a lot of casual conversation, so the vocabulary we learn tends to be more useful, and native French-speakers tend to have insights to rules of the French language that we never would learn back in the US.  We played Taboo in class the other day, which was really fun.  I think we’re going to try and buy it so we can play in the residence from time to time.  The majority of my friends here are Canadian now, although there are a couple of Norwegians and Colombians that hang out with us.  There is one other girl in the residence from California, and there is a school-group here from Wake Forest in North Carolina, but they live in host families so we don’t tend to see them as much.  Autumn semester has more of a ‘real-university’ feel to it.  We spend most of our time in class or doing homework, and when we have free time we tend to play sports, watch movies or go out drinking.  I tried beach volleyball for the first time last week, that was fun.  Yesterday CIEF hosted a trip to Geneva, Switzerland.  It got off to a rocky start, as there was a miscommunication between the school and the residence and it was never relayed to the students that the departure time had been moved from 6am to 7am, but the rest of the day was great.  Geneva was a lot cooler than I had expected.  Naturally they sell Swiss Army Knives and watches everywhere, and their ‘claim to fame’ is basically this huge spout of water in the middle of the city, which isn’t really my idea of an amazing attraction, but the city did have a lot of other things going for it.  We took a tour of the Red Cross Museum, which was very modernized.  Everyone wears headsets which sense when you walk into a new room and give you an introduction.  They can also give you more detail on exhibits that you are interested in, and there are certain parts of the museum where there are screens with life-size figures projected, which your headset can tune in to and you can listen to their stories.  The museum also has archives of every prisoner of war they have record of, so that people can glance through books and try to locate their family members.  I think I easily could have spent an entire day in that museum.  After the museum, Stephan (our guide and one of the teachers from CIEF) took us on a tour of the city, showing us all of the major sites.  It isn’t a very big city, but it has a lot of history.  We went past the United Nations, which was really cool.  Apparently if you aren’t there on a Saturday, you can actually tour the building.  We had a few hours of free time in the afternoon to roam the city before heading back, and Stephen showed me and a couple of my friends a nice fondue place where we ate lunch.  Someone should definitely start that trend in the US, fondue is wonderful.  And naturally, we bought as much chocolate as we could carry before heading back to the bus.  All in all, it was a pretty good day.