To sum up the past 3 months...

Ok, to start off I know it's mid-November and I just started, but I kept getting asked to start a public blog (I have another on livejournal but that's for personal complaining more than anything), so now that I've seen so many students using this so I made another gmail (I forgot my other one... let alone why I made it), and started this.

So, to sum it up I arrived at 7:20pm (locatl time) in Nantes on August 27th. I met my counsellor, Gerard, and his wife, Liliane, at the airport. I forgot what the word 'faim' was then. Ok, I take that back, I knew the word but I forgot HOW to RESPOND to that (the pathetic thing is, it's just 'non' and I already knew that). The car ride from Nantes to Bressuire is about an hour... that was one... quiet ride. Gerard and Liliane talked, but it was always like... awkward when I was asked something and had to respond.
3 months does a lot.
So I got to Argenton Les Vallees, where they live (it's 17km outside of Bressuire), and unpacked in one room. I had to switch 4 days later cause I was only in that room because they had friends over. Stayed in the 2nd room for the rest of the month.
I took a bus at 7am to arrive at school at 7:30am. That required my alarm to go off at 5:50am. Going from barely being able to wake up at 7am to being on a bus at 7am is very different, let me tell you...
October 1st I switched to my first host family, the Akdims. I'm staying in their son's room (he's on exchange to Australia). There are still some... conflicts going on between me and them but they're nothing serious, just their way of communication (with me) is not the best.
I ride the bus with my host sister every day. wake up at 6:10am (well, my alarm goes off then... and then 6:25am... then if I'm not up then Im out by 6:35am). Walk (sometimes run) to the bus stop at 7:05am, take the bus at 7:15am, arrive at school at 7:40am.

For the first month of my exchange I was in a class called 'premiere S' ('S' being 'sciences', ou en francais, 'scientifiques'). It was demanding and challenging; I was doing PHYSICS in French. Believe me, you think senior-year physics in the States and Canada is challenging... translate 3rd year university into French and that's what I was doing.
My 'proffesseur principale', like my homeroom/advisory teacher, suggested I switch classes.
I'm now in 'premiere ES', economic sciences. I like this class more, it's not as insanely demanding, everyone is really nice... yeah, I dunno what else I can say about that.

I came barely able to get out a coherent sentence.
My first two real conversations with outbound exchange student to Oregon, David, were... wow. All I can say is looking back on them now, I'm eternally thankful and surprised he understood me.

I'm constantly mistaken for a Canadian Francophone too.
Why?
"C'est ton accent".
You see... the American accent is.. I can't think of any particularily tactful way to put it. It's 'plain'. There's no French sound to it, you're speaking as if you would in English. Now French 'r', some words don't have the right spin to it, etc. Sometimes more than others I can get the 'r' out, but often I can at least do the cat-coughing-up-furball R that is the French 'R' (it took one 2 hour block of my French class in mid-September to decide that's how it sounded). I still have a bit of an accent, as I found out last night more specifically (I said "c'est pas normale" and my host sister found this amusing because I was saying the special-loud-muffler motorcycle that passed by was just that, too loud, and it's not normal. She said she also liked how I said it and repeated it almost exactly like I did and I noticed it more then, with the more English-sounding R in 'normale'), but generally I apparently have a French accent.
That comes at an advantage and disadvantage.

The advantage: people understand me quicker
The disadvantage: as I already stated, people think I'm a French Francophone. So, when they speak, they think I'm a native French speaker and they speak like I'm one of them and then I don't entirely understand them. Half or 2/3rds, but often never full. That's just recently; it happened a few times in September and October and I just wouldn't understand a thing or too little amount of words to make sense of it in my head.

Yeah...
I saw Mamma Mia in mid-September in French. I only caught 10 french words that entire movie.
Yes, it was so little I counted.
I went to High School Musical 3: Senior Year last night. I understood 2/3rds of the French portion of the movie. I could have a conversation with some of Charlotte's friends who showed up as we were waiting for her mom after the movie (who went to see "L'echange", aka the title "Changling" in English I believe) in French... while he spoke broken English to that made it a bit more of a challenge (the broken aspect).
The disadvantage to English-created musicals dubbed into French...
The songs are in English. The dialogue in in French.
Talk about confusion! I always missed a few sentences following the songs because the switch of instinctive-English-mind-back-to-French-mind takes me a few moments.

I've had 1 French dream and it was bilingual. That was in the beginning of November and I was listening to and speaking some French I didn't even know.

Yeah, guess that's all for now. I just better remember to update this...