Week One

Tuesday, Feburary 19/08

Well, I made it. The first day was very difficult because I was very tired and really not ready for total french emersion. I am discovering how poor my French really is. My first plane took off at 5:30p.m. Canadian time and the Kausches picked me up at the airport at 11h45 (a.m.) the next day. Everything you could name in Canada is soooo different here! Even the keyboard. The z is where the y should be and the y is where the z should be, and all the shift controls are different too.

Let’s start with the towns. All the people cram themselves into clusters called villages. Between villages there is nothing, and everything essential (like a bakery, a pub, and a convenience store) are in the towns. If you need groceries, may have to go to a different town, or the city. To get from town to town, most people use only the train, and cars are used for a backup. Everything is soooo old and beautiful. This house is about 500 years old and inside, everything is built into the walls, like shelves, cupboards, beds, etc. The walls and ceilings are covered with very interesting, seemingly mismatching wall paper. On all the windows everywhere, there are no screens, because there are no bugs or mosquitoes. And because one can reach out the window, there are shudders on all the windows that are actually put to use! The roads of some villages are made of cobble stone and every village I have seen so far has beautiful old fountains every few blocks. Many of them have the head of a lion pouring water out of its mouth half way down the main spout.

The meals are different too. I think they eat more than we are used to... or at least more often during the day. And lots of bread and sweets, but somehow, all of the Swiss people (or at least a lot more than Canadians) are very in shape. Even older people have the body of what we might consider a younger person. I don`t know how they do it. For breakfast we have bread and butter or honey or sugary cereal. For lunch, one has the meal plus many snacks, like an apple, a chocolate bar, and a small loaf of braided sweet bread (un traisse). Most kids have hot meals that they microwave at school. And not just one sort of food for lunch, like soup or something, but they have a potato food, a vegetable, and a meat, like chicken or something. This is funny, to me, because for supper it is always cold meals. We have a basket of bread (sometimes cut in slices or sometimes a baguette cut in hand size cylinders then cut in half long ways, or a mix of the two) a platter of 3 or 4 different cheeses, herb and garlic cream cheese, and cold cuts. Oh, and for breakfast and supper we have tea. And on weekends there is special time set aside at 16h called `le quatre heure` just for dessert and tea.

For school, Jana goes to the new building part of Lycee jean Piaget. At her school, you are in the same class for all 3 years of high school, with the same people you stay in your own class room for the whole day and the teachers come to you. So far, I understand a good portion of the classes, especially English (haha), history, and health. I don`t understand math because we haven’t learned as much as them yet in Canada, and German and french are pretty much out of the question. Law, I kind of get, and I haven’t taken all of the classes yet. Today, the other exchange students and I were put in the equivalent of the ESL class (french for foreigners) and I felt really stupid. But I might take that class for a couple weeks and then take classes with Jana again. I don’t know yet, but I have to decide on Friday.The older half of the high school is very very old and soooo beautiful. If it were a building in Canada, it would definitely a very crazy museum of some sort. It is incredible to know that it is used just as I high school. And I think the students don’t even appreciate how magnifique it is. Both buildings are just a stones throw away from the beautiful lake Neuchâtel. At lunch, we can walk along the stones and sit at eat on benches as we watch the swans and seagulls and sailboats. Its really is unbelievable.

So, to get from the train station in Neuchâtel to the high school, you have to walk down the city, and I mean down the city. It built on a pretty sharp hill, and nobody would want to climb it, so instead, they built a train that carries you up the city. The engineering is very interesting, but you would have to see it to appreciate it. I could explain with a drawing when I get home. The Swiss are very technologically advanced. For example, overheads in school can project 3D objects, like a purse or a hand perfectly. And you can put a regular white sheet of paper on and read what it says! For anyone who is not in school, in Canada we can only project things that are on “overhead paper”, which is clear plastic with the words or pics or whatever printed on it.

Well, its 21h47 (quarter to 10) and I have to get up kind of early tomorrow. But tomorrow I only have one class! Economics. Then Jana has a huge test in math, so I get to explore Neuchâtel by myself.