Last Day in Montpellier

So today is my last day in Montpellier and instead of being able to enjoy it, I am running around like a crazy person trying to shut down accounts, send things out, pack up, do laundry, clean the apartment...So I get to hang out with my friends tonight for a couple of hours and then leave to catch my plane at 10:30am. This is not much fun. Actually, it kind of sucks. It's been a really depressing week in general, though today I'm not so much sad as just overwhelmed. There's just too much to do. Plus the landlady is making us wash all the sofa covers and buy new mattress covers, which I don't really have time to do really. And I have to shut down the internet today which means I won't have any internet tonight which will also suck since that is what I do with myself to not feel so bad about leaving. I didn't really expect to get so attached to this place, but I guess you can never plan for that. I am heading to Brussels tomorrow and meeting up with Jake, which will be nice. Then we get to start our whirlwind tour through Brussels, Amsterdam, Vienna, Berlin, London, and then back to Montpellier for me, and then home. 19 days and I am home again. Weird. All my friends are going home either tomorrow or a couple days after that, so I keep thinking that I am going home too, but I am not. I keep having to remind myself that I have a couple of weeks left yet. I don't feel like doing anything, I just want to sit and relax in my apartment, but now we have it pretty much emptied so it's not even really our apartment anymore. I don't like it. We're all rather subdued and I'm really bad at goodbyes...just kind of avoid them altogether usually. So we'll see how this goes tomorrow saying goodbye to my friends and to Montpellier, which is like saying goodbye to home again. I'll be back for a night, but none of my friends will be here, so it'll just be weird. Well I got to be off to send a package home to my parents with Christmas presents. Let's just hope it weighs under 7 kilos....Ugh.

Finals Week and Ick

This past week was a nightmare of school work. Though it wasn't technically finals week, all but one of my professors decided to make it finals week. So. I had 4 papers and 4 finals in 4 days. All in French of course. And anyone who has to tried to write a paper in a foreign language will know that a 4 page French paper takes about as long as an 8-10 page paper in English. So essentially I put off all my work until this past week, spent the whole semester NOT working because in the French university system, there's really only one grade a semester and it's the final. SO I didn't have to do anything all year for anything but grammar and phonetics, and then all the sudden I had to hyperspazztically get everything done in 4 days. Needless to say, from Sunday until Thursday, I got a total of 9 and 1/2 hours of sleep, with one night being an all-nighter. I wouldn't have had to do that IF my grammar teacher hadn't decided that we really needed to make up a missed grammar class and therefore we needed to have a 4 hour grammar class on Tuesday from 4:15 to 8:15 and then a 4 hour grammar final on Wednesday at the same time. That really took a chunk out of my work time. So everyday I spent the evening writing the paper due the next day and then I spent any other free time studying for the next final. By Thursday night I was downright exhausted and delirious, having just pulled an all-nighter the night before, and I had to take 2 finals. The staying up all night actually wasn't too bad. Jade and I stayed up till 5:20 am together writing our paper on the computer, realizing we had no way to print it out, and then having to handwrite it, and then woke up at 6:55 am to go to a final. Really, really a great day. While it did feel nice to work, I realized how HORRIBLE my french level really is. All in all, my french improvement might be a lot greater than I think it is, but to me it seems like I haven't really improved all that much at all. Which is depressing but oh well. You only get out of it what you put in it, and I probably didn't put enough into it. I can however basically read books in French now, which I guess is something.
So I leave next week...Here I mean. I keep forgetting that I am not going home because everyone else is so I keep thinking I am just going too. But I am leaving here and having to move out of this apartment and leave the friends that I have made, so basically it feels about the same. Now it feels like I am leaving home. I am leaving my bags with a friend here, but she is leaving on Tuesday so I have to pack up by then and just live out of a backpack until then basically. So my room is going to be empty more or less for the last week of my stay, which is just going to be really really depressing. Renee, Jesse, Jade, and I all sat around on Thursday drinking wine and talking about the semester and all that and it's just going to be so sad to leave them. We formed our little group and now it's breaking up to go back to PA where we won't exactly fit in anymore because we've changed but State College will forever be basically the same. Strangers in our own world really. I found this quote that I quite like from this great movie called l'Auberge Espagnol:
"When you first arrive in a new city, nothing makes sense. Everythings unknown, virgin... After you've lived here, walked these streets, you'll know them inside out. You'll know these people. Once you've lived here, crossed this street 10, 20, 1000 times... it'll belong to you because you've lived there. That was about to happen to me, but I didn't know it yet."
I like it. The thing is...none of us are going to be able to explain the experience to anyone because no one can understand. They weren't here, they don't know Montpellier or the people. They don't know what we've gone through. Other people have gone through similar experiences, but they were still different. I wouldn't really know how to describe this semester to anyone that wasn't here. I don't know. I'm starting to get more and more bummed out everyday realizing that I'll never be back here again like this. Everything that has become day-to-day routine now seems depressing because I realize it's going to end soon. It's getting difficult to imagine saying goodbye. When I got here all I wanted to do was go home, and now all I want to do is stay.

Paris

I went to Paris last weekend with my friends and we had a really good time. Everything went really well actually. We were quite lucky. The train ride was nice (we all slept the whole time because the train was at 5:30am) and then we easily navigated the metro to the hostel (thanks to my amazing metro ability haha) and the hostel was really nice. I remembered enough from my last trip with the Trethewey's that I was able to navigate everyone through the city pretty well and I remembered which stops to get off at and all that. We saw all the main sites again, including Sacre Coeur since our hostel was right there. We also found ourselves in the Red Light district at night looking for an ATM because it was right down the street. Saw the Moulin Rouge a couple of times, from the outside of course. We had our minor spats as people couldn't decide what to do or people couldn't keep their attention on things long enough, but overall it went really well. We went to the Louvre on Friday night because it's free for students between 6 pm and 10 pm. I spent a lot of money there because Paris is freaking expensive. But oh well. I guess you just gotta suck it up sometimes. I also got to see the Eiffel Tower at night glowing blue and then sparkling and I got a video of it sparkling all pretty. It was freezing there, especially compared to Montpellier where it never hits freezing, so we were all kind of suffering through the cold. But we managed to stay alive. None of us really wanted to come back because we were all rather comfortable in Paris, but oh well. Paris is just a really nice city. I enjoyed it as much the second time as I did the first. We also went to Versailles of course! How could I forget that. Unfortunately, it's wintertime, so the garden's weren't as impressive as they could be, but still Versailles is interesting. We almost missed our train home because I forget that the train station was 15 metro stops away. But we made it with 2 minutes to spare, literally. We had to run through the train station, which was pretty funny. We made it home just fine at 1 am. Then we were back to Montpellier and school again.
School is almost over which is nice but also not nice because I have a lot of work to do. I can't seem to get motivated to do any of it, so I am going to be stressed out this week trying to get it all done. It's the last week of class and most finals are during the classes, so I have next week pretty free. I might have a final for my one class, but I'm not quite sure. I have no idea when the final is, which makes things pretty difficult. Weird to think I only have two weeks left here and then I'm off to traveling, and then I'm off to home. Really weird actually. I've really become quite settled here I guess. Be weird to be back where people speak English. I will be glad to get to Penn State classes as opposed to Paul Valery classes, because they are terrible here. Other than that...I just don't know. I do want some Lipton Lemon Iced Tea though. They don't have lemon iced tea here! Disgraceful. haha. I do want to see my family too. Of course. I don't know. It's a weird time that would be impossible to understand unless you've been through it. Traveling should be fun. We have everything completely settled through the 1st of January, when we are going to London. All we have to do is find a hostel to stay at in London, which should be easy, and then I have to get back to Montpellier, which should also be easy. Alright well that's all for now.