It has been a long time in coming! I have finally arrived in France and am working on getting everything situated, which is a little more complicated than I was expecting. Arriving on the second of September was thought to be a good idea until I learned that the student that was to help me was a second year and had already started classes, so she is unable to help me for the majority of each day...the university also seems to not know what to do with me. I would like to say something about my travels to Nantes, France and how it wasn't as terrible or difficult as some had made it out to be. I met a multitude of people, a good portion of which were retired, and a host of well behaved children, none which cried for the entirety of the long flights. The language barrior doesn't seem to be all the bad, but then again it has only been two days. There are, in fact, a good number of individuals that I have met that do not speak French and whom I will be studying with--this makes me feel better. I have noticed that the French do not typically speak in the nice, slow, and understandable French that programs and classrooms expose you to; also, one of the biggest things that I have noticed is that they do not pronounce oui (yes) as "wee", but more like "way"--this may be an indication of difficulties to come.

I'm sorry that pictures are slow in coming, but as you can imagine life has been a bit crazy! I also apologize for any spelling or grammer mistakes within this post because I am temporarily working on a French computer--making this post a bit difficult. But I digress, I look forward to making new friends and exploring the city of Nantes.