As I get more used to life in Nantes, I strangely enough feel as if this is the life I have lived for a while. My room in my host family’s home is as comfortable as my own. The jokes and general antics of my 11-year-old host brother are a familiar routine. The friends I have made feel like friends I have had forever. In all honesty, I am blown away when I see a calendar and remember that I have been here just two weeks. 

Living abroad I expected there to be these huge cultural differences and an extreme adjustment. There are the little things that are quite different from the U.S., bread in France is kept on the table, re-usable water bottles are just not a thing, and when you go grocery shopping you have to pay for a plastic bag if you did not bring a reusable one. But other than these rather nondescript differences, I have realized that life here is really not much different than the life I’m used to in the United States. 

The biggest adjustment has been in terms of language. Luckily, I have almost no problem with understanding or communicating with the IES Staff or my professors. I think that because I’m much more used to a slightly slowed down French and talking in a more formal, academic sense, this comes easily to me. Because I have become quite used to and comfortable with communicating in French at IES, I’m surprised that I still have some difficulty with the language in my host family. This seems to come in waves. There are some days that I will chat away with my host brother, we’ll watch French TV shows together, and I won’t give the fact that these interactions are all happening in French a second thought. However, even the next day I will be unable to form sentences without hyper-analyzing every sound and pronunciation I’m making, asking my host parents to repeat themselves a little slower, or simply just giving them a look of desperation and confusion. These are the days that I think I struggle with the most. My host family is very patient and kind, when trying to orally work my way through a past-tense conjugation my host parents are more than happy to help me out, and work with me as I try to explain things in a roundabout way when I can’t remember the wording for the simpler way to express something. This is often when I seem to beat myself up the most. On these days where I feel like I can’t express what I want to say I feel as if I am silent. I will hear a funny comment at dinner and want to add to the conversation, but I just can’t find the words, so I say nothing. I know that it’s a lack of confidence, not a lack of ability, which is the most frustrating thing for me. 

In these moments of frustration and isolation I find solace in the kindness of my host family. Gestures such as encouraging me to take another bite of dessert, inviting me to watch a movie with them, or to accompany my host mom to the boulangerie shows me that French is not an obstacle or something that should render me silent. If my host family is able to brush off my frustrations, I should be able to too. I’ve heard that I have the best host family in all of Nantes, I am so lucky to be with them this semester, and to find this statement to be true!