Ca y est!  Les vacances sont arrivées, j'ai enfin le temps de mettre ma page à jour ! Mais bon c'est pas très grave, vu que les autres étaient aussi en retard que moi ! :-)

February 12th, 2006          (article en français)

Hey everybody !

     First, I want to which you a happy new year for 2006 (I know... it’s getting really late...). And as there is nobody on the computer right now, which is quite unusual, I take advantage of the situation to give some news.

I hope you’re all doing well. I know I haven’t been writing much since this summer, but I’m home only on week-ends and vacations.

    As you probably know, I am in a preparatory class to engineering schools this year, it’s kind of hard to explain to people who don’t know the french school system. To sum it up, I study mostly physics, maths and chemistry and I have about 40 hours of school a week. We have to work a lot, but I don’t really mind. I like what I do, and I love my class. I met very nice people in Faidherbe, and there is a very good ambiance.

    The lycée Faidherbe, is pretty close to my house (about 15 minutes by car, 40 minutes if I use public transportation), but I chose to sleep at school, to avoid losing a lot of time in the bus, and to work better. I share a room with three other girls - Aurélie, Diane, and Virginie - who are really nice, we are having a very good time together. In my class, we are ten girls for 31 boys, some of them also sleep at school (so we often go to the boy’s dormitory lol).

    Even though we spend a lot of time working, we also have a lot of fun? For instance, we sometimes play cards with the boys, sing with a guitar, put some music on and relax, go do some sport (we can do badmington, handball, tabletennis, weight training, jump rope, climbing swimming or track). I go to the gym once a week and I run, do weight training or badmington. We also go out about once every other week, on Friday nights, because we are allowed to come back to the dormitory at midnight instead of ten o’clock the other days. We organised a dinner at the restaurant twice last trimester for the whole class, which were a lot of fun. We also went to the cinema and once to the skating ring. Before every vacation, we go to the discotheque with the whole school. It is a lot of fun.

    When we go out and also around the school, we wear a hat called the “calot” (written “khalôt” by the “faidherbards”, the students in Faidherbe). It has a different color for each “prépas”. It’s dark blue for us, green for the ones studying biology, brown for the literary prépas, and light blue and dark blue for student preparing the concours to commercial schools. The lapel pins on the khalôt each mean something.

    My class made a blog, if you want to see some pictures. The address is hx3-212.over-blog.com.

    While at home, I enjoy playing the piano, when I don’t work and just relax. I try to see my friends, especially on vacations, but we are not always in vacation at the same time. My plans for winter vacation : sleep and relax !

I’m very excited about our trip to Alaska this summer. We are going to spend two weeks in Sitka, and then two weeks in Anchorage. It’s going to be really fun ! I will also lead a camp like last year in August. My summer will be very busy !

Enjoy your year, and I hope I will get to see you all soon.

Take care