Glad to be home

Thank you for you prayers! The trip to France was smooth: no pick pockets, no stolen money, no stolen passports, no lost cell phones, no lost kids, no allergy attacks, no sickness (except for me, when my body decided to destroy me and empty itself from everything since Valentine's Day during the night in the most violent way possible). I'm still recovering and gaining back my strength.

The weather was perfect: 60s to 70, full sun, not a cloud to be seen. In fact, most of us packed too warmly... all the reason to buy more ice cream!

We spent three days in Paris seeing as much as possible: the Eiffel Tower, the Champs Elysees, the Arc de Triomphe, the Louvre, the Musee d'Orsay, the Jewish Quarter, the Bastille, and the Latin Quarter. The next four days were in the south of France: Avignon, Beaux de Provence, Nimes, Cassis, Arles, Nice, Aix en Provence, and Monaco. I'll have to upload pictures later since I can't seem to get them off of the iPad I borrowed.

The (7) girls were awesome: such great ambassadors for our school. I'm proud of their behavior, their positive attitudes, their flexibility, their kindness and their appreciation for the French culture, even though the week was exhausting and incredibly full and their feet hurt.

My students experienced more culture shock interacting with the other American students than they did with the French. Oh, the stories... The other groups were from Texas and Mississippi and boy did they have little in common. My girls recounted some conversations and came away knowing the difference between "white trash" and "redneck" and "black people" and "N" (oh, yes, the word was used unfortunately). There were some other bad jokes towards my Asian student and my Jewish student that my girls were graceful enough to let roll off their backs. Sigh. I'm sure the other students are telling equally shocking stories to their friends about us Yankees. I tried my best to turn this into a learning experience: in college and in the working world, they're only going to meet more people with equally different views on everything under the sun.

We got back to campus at 7 pm last night and I made it to 9 pm before I simply passed out (we had been awake and traveling since midnight, US time). Luckily, it was easy to sleep through the night, but showing up for classes today was strange. Yesterday I was in France, today I have to teach. Whew. It's going to be a long week.