I have been in Rennes for a little over a month and I absolutely love it! The city is really pretty and the local people are very nice, contrary to popular belief.
I have also been meeting people from all over the world! The school is very small with about three thousand students overall so it is very easy to meet other students.
The actual schooling system has been very different here which has been hard to get used to. All my classes have only one project and a final exam and nothing else, which has been strange because I am used to multiple assessments throughout the semester. Classrooms change every week so you consistently have to check and see where your class is for the week or you will miss the class completely. The school has been very slow with sending information to all the students. For example, our school orientation schedule was sent to us an hour after we were supposed to be there. Also we don’t have the same class every week. Sometimes you will have your class once every two weeks which is nice because you get more time to travel however the days you have class are long since you’ll have it for six hours for the day.
So far I have been keeping myself very busy here. Out of the five weekends I have been here I have only stayed in Rennes for one weekend. The first weekend I was here my roommate and I went to visit St. Malo and Mont Saint Michel. St. Malo is a small beach town right off the west coast of France with a walled in town area right off the beach. It was really cool seeing all the old buildings and experiencing the history. There was even an area dedicated to Québec because Jacques Cartier was from St. Malo and was buried in St. Malo, so we even got to see the grave of the founder of Québec.
After visiting St. Malo, we went to Mont Saint Michel which is the second most popular place to go see in France, after Paris. Mont Saint Michel is this little island surrounded by a moat with an ancient Abbey at the top that was built in the eighth century. It was absolutely amazing to see but it has unfortunately become a bit of a tourist trap. The buildings were converted into souvenir shops which took away from beauty of place. We realized that it helped to be in shape for this tour because you have to walk up a lot of stairs to get to around Mont Saint Michel.
Another weekend I ended up going to Sweden to meet up with a friend who was an exchange student in high school. It was a last minute trip but it was absolutely amazing! My friend gave me an amazing tour around Stockholm. It's a beautiful city that is also very clean. I saw all the downtown area of Stockholm, visited the real Swedish Ikea and was able to do a little shopping at H&M. I could walk through downtown Stockholm for hours as it was very old and historic. I also got to visit Gruna Lund, a theme park in downtown Stockholm that was really fun.
I was consistently mistaken for being Swedish during my trip – maybe I look a little Swedish??? In Sweden, most people speak excellent English and will speak English to you if they can tell you are a foreigner, but everyone kept speaking Swedish to me. Overall it was a great trip. I never expected that I would be visiting this interesting part of Europe.
The following weekend I went to Nantes, France with my two new Belgian friends and my new friend from Florida. It was a wonderful weekend where we saw this crazy mechanical elephant and this carousel that was based on the book Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne, who apparently came from Nantes. We also met up with a few other French students who went to our school which gave us an opportunity to practice our French. It was a really nice weekend with some new friends!
Last weekend I finally had the chance to visit Paris! It was an amazing trip that was organized by the university. Paris is such an interesting city with so much going on and it was fantastic to experience it. We saw L’Arc de Triumph, the Louvre, Notre Dame, the Eiffel Tower and we took a boat tour around Paris. We saw many things in a short period of time but it left us with a desire to go back and see more. We plan to return and visit other sites that we didn’t get to see like Versailles and the Catacombs.
It has been such a great experience here and I can’t even believe I have been here for over a month. I have had the chance to meet people from many parts of the world – such as Belgium, the US, Mexico, Lithuania, Germany, the Philippines, the U.K., Russia and Finland. Experiencing the French lifestyle and speaking French all the time has been an experience of a lifetime! Until next time!