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Bonjour!
It is hard for me to believe that I am actually in France. At the moment, I am sitting in my bedroom in Nantes, home from a brief three day orientation trip with the IES Nantes group in Tours, France. This past week has truly flown by.
Tuesday feels like a month ago. My plane left from Charlotte and as I sat in the tiny blue airplane seat, fighting the stranger next to me for armrest room, I began to wonder what I had gotten myself into. I was a twenty-year old college student on an eight hour flight to Paris, France but I felt so much more like an eight year old headed to sleep away camp for the first time. Never before had I been on a plane alone so therefore I was very nervous. What if I missed my connection? What if I arrived in Paris and was incapable of finding the correct train to Nantes? Luckily, all of my worrying was for nothing. I made my connection in Newark with minutes to spare and arrived in Paris safely.
Once in the Charles de Gaulle airport, it was easy to find fellow IES participants-I simply looked for college-age Americans with matching blank stares, creased brows, and large rolling suitcases. Once acquainted with a few Nantes group members, finding the elusive Charles de Gaulle train station was not as hard as I expected. We found the correct platform and arrived three hours later in Nantes!
Since my arrival, I have had very little down time. After meeting my host mother at the IES center and lugging my embarrassingly gigantic suitcase up and down three flights of stairs (it was so big that door to my host family's tiny hatchback refused to close), I arrived at my Nantes house. It is wonderful. I love my bedroom and my family.
The morning after I arrived the IES students were whisked away on a blue tour bus for the orientation trip in Tours, France (yes we toured Tours...). We visited four châteaux: Loches, Chenonceau, Blois, et Chambord. All were magnificent, but my favorite was Chenonceau. It was very well kept with fresh flowers in every room and breathtaking tapestries and paintings. The surrounding grounds were beautiful too. I loved the hedge maze; it felt like something out of Harry Potter!
Although I am loving France, I cannot deny that this is proving to be a hard adjustment. First I battled jet lag and now it has sunk in that I will be here for four more months. France is beautiful and IES is great, but loneliness is unavoidable. I keep reminding myself that I CAN do this and I WILL do this, and in a few weeks my current worries will be a thing of the past, distant and blurry.
I will say that it feels nice to be back in Nantes. Even though I have spent three nights in Tours and only two in Nantes, Nantes feels more like home! If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed! - Emily Erdman, IES Abroad
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Thanks for posting. Your experience took me back to my Junior Year abroad with the CIEE program in Rennes in 1977. I had been in France one time before, but still was shell-shocked. Of course, now you have Skype and email - during my year I probably got 3 phone calls from home.
You will get through it and even though it seems like a long time now, you will always remember it being too short.
Grandma Erdman writes:
I’m so proud of you. I recall being in the huge de Gaulle airport and I loved your description of finding Americans with worried looks on their faces giving you a clue to your group. We miss you but are so proud of you and love every word you write home.
We miss you Em! It sounds like you are having a wonderful time though! And in case you were wondering, when we have the reunion tour in Tours in a few years, I will place a Goblet of Fire in the center of the hedge maze