Les Rendres Visite de la Famille

Bonjour tout le monde!

Hope the Januaries of everyone are going just swell, here in France there are many people going in and out of the house. My uncle Sheridan came from Cyprus last weekend and I really enjoyed that because I hadn't really got to talk to him before, so to really see a Whipp for the first time in a while did some good. He just game for the weekend, but we managed to show him a fair amount of stuff, and know I'm looking to forward to going to visit him in Cyprus when possible! We also have Caroline, a Brazilian who's staying for a few weeks because she was visiting Europe with her boyfriend, and she went on the US trip with Quentin my host brother when he went on his exchange 6 years ago! She's been great and we've also done some visiting of things with her. Yesterday I hit the half way point of 5 months in my exchange! The year seems to be slowly gaining speed, I'm not sure how January went by that fast and I haven't even started to go on the Rotary trips I have :)

 Next week I'm going to Venice with my school and I'm supa excited! Carnival will be also going on there. Lately I've been doing quite a bit of paper work for that. I went ice skating again, and saw Django which was straight incredible!

I went to the Monte Carlo Rally near my school in Sisteron, which is basically an extreme car race where the cars go on all these twisty roads, and this race was international so that cool there were all these license plates from Spain and Italy.

I also learned to sew for the first time because I had some patches to put on my blazer. I'd say it was a hair above disaster, but now everyone can see it has a "Clay" touch.

As far as trips go I also signed up for one in Tuscan Italy where I go there for a week in a host family and then I get an Italian student for a week. I'm super stoked for that as well and emailed the Italian student today!

Will now try to wright weekly! P.S. Took the practice Bac (Bac Blanc) (super scary test at end of highschool) and if you don't pass the Bac you have to stay back a year, so there are some kids who are 19 or 20 in highschool.

À bientôt!

-Clay

New Year's Ski Hunting!

After Christmas, Quentin and Camille came back to the house, and it's great to get to know them more, because they are awesome people! Quentin and I went skiing, here it's a lot like Eugene in that there's Ski about an hour and a half and 3 hours away. I hadn't gone downhill skiing in a while so I was pretty nervous, and we were skiing with some family that were all super good, and the on the 2nd run we went on a ski path with a big "WARNING NOT FOR BEGINNERS" sign, so I was pretty hesitant. In the end it was really fun, and the view was AMAZING! It's hard to pay attention to what your doing when there's these immense mountains right in front of you! For le Révellion (New Year's Eve) I went with Dylan, Lucca, Imelsy, Rebecca and Danika (Canada, Brazil, Mexico, Canada, Australia) to a party of the host sister of Imelsy which was great! It feels a bit weird now that it's 2013. By the way Christmas was weird, I was really happy to be with a great family and I got some great presents (a watch, some perfume, a polo) I felt kind of bad that I didn't get more presents for my host family, so I'll make sure to get them some more in the future! After New Year's I went to a small town near Mont Blanc called Mègeve (near Switzerland/Italy!) to visit Pierrick my french exchange students that I had in the US for a few weeks last summer and I got to go skiing with him for a few days. The town was very elegant, with a bunch of wooden cabins, but it was REALLY chèr (spendy) because Mègeve is where all of French's most famous go to ski (we're talking like 200 euro scarves) and again the view was great! It was nice to meet Pierrick's family! In school I've finally changed all the classes I wanted, and now I'm taking Italien and Philosophy! Also my uncle Sheridan and I have organized for him to come visit at the end of January for a weekend! I'm excited for that! On a final note I watched a friend from school in hunting and though we didn't see anything I got to eat the meat+fat+skin of la tete de sanglier (hog's head!) Will post again soon!

Stay stellar everyone,
-Clay