Trying to describe my first two and a half months here in Rennes, France is one of the most impossible tasks I have ever tried to do. What with school trips to abbayes, cathédrales, and châteaux, vacations with my host family to the coast of Bretagne, a completely different school system, and exploring all that the city has to offer, each day has been excitingly different and could merit its own article. However, I will try and do my best to illustrate the experience I have had thus far.

I am attending School Year Abroad France for my full academic junior year. School Year Abroad (or SYA) was founded in 1964 with just one global site; but as of this year’s installation of its newest site SYA now has five schools around the world: France, Spain, Italy, China, and the newest, India. SYA is an academic program for high school juniors and seniors that focuses on teaching students to “gain mastery of another language, a new perspective on themselves and a deeper understanding of the complex world beyond our borders.” I go to school with sixty-four other English-based students (while the majority of the school community is American, there are also students from Korea, Singapore, and Mozambique) in the city of Rennes, the capital of the western French département of Bretagne. Rennes is a city with around 200,000 inhabitants in Rennes itself, and an additional 300,000 inhabitants in the surrounding towns. Rennes is a very cultural city, with both the French culture and the Bretagne sub-culture. Until the past century, the majority of the people of Bretagne still spoke their native languages: le Breton in west Bretagne, and le Gallo in north Bretagne. Although the regional languages have sadly been diminishing, the pride the people of Bretagne have for their culture and history still lives strong. Rennes is also extremely active, during both day and night; there is always something new to discover.

I go to school in an old maison in Rennes’ centre-ville, where six of my eight classes are taught completely in French by native French teachers (l’histoire, l’histoire de l’art, la langue française AP, la culture et société française, la littérature française AP, et la prononciation). We are given the opportunity to eat lunch for free at two nearby lycées, or if we prefer we can eat at any one of the local boulangeries, cafés, or buy assorted snack foods from the Marché Plus. The school schedule is extremely different here, for we try to mimic the French system as much as possible. Although every student has a different schedule, four days a week classes can end as early as 15:30 or as late as 17:05. Every Wednesday is a half day, which can mean for some students only two periods from 8:10 to 9:45, or as it is for me five periods until 12:25. As for extra-curricular activities, the school itself does not offer any athletic or artistic programs. It was up to us within the first month to find what we wanted to do within Rennes, try it once or twice, and then make a year-long commitment to it. Rennes offers an extremely wide range of opportunities for activities with nearly every sport or genre of art one could wish to find; I myself chose rock climbing and Gaelic football.

Every student in the school lives with a separate host family either in Rennes or one of the surrounding towns. My famille d’accueil lives 10 minutes away from the city center and consists of a mother, a father, their three sons ranging from ages 17 to 22, and a cat named Tilia. Only the 17 year old lives at home, but the second oldest attends college in Rennes and visits frequently. Unfortunately the oldest son is going to college at McGill University in Montreal, and most likely I won’t ever get the chance to meet him. My host family is one of the greatest parts of my time here. They are extremely caring and have done everything possible to make me feel like I am truly a member of their family, while at the same time allowing me to become a more independent individual.

I have done three major travels so far with my school. The first trip was to St. Malo, which is on the coast of Bretagne. There we were allowed to spend the day freely to do “comme nous voulons”, whether that meant swimming in the nearly freezing water, walking around the medieval wall that surrounds the town, or entering the town itself to sightsee, shop, or just relax at a café. The second school trip, during our two week vacation at the end of October, was a four day trip to the Loire Valley, where we visited six very different châteaux, as well as a cathédrale and an abbaye. This past weekend we went to Mont Sainte-Michel, an abbaye composed with both roman and gothic architecture. The abbaye is on the top of a mountain that resembles an island, for it is surrounded completely by sand and water which change with the tide differences. Our art history teacher warned us of the quick sand around the abbaye, but regardless many of us still ventured out in search of the quick sand, nearly drowning while trying to pose long enough in it for a good picture.

Although there is a never-ending list of things I have loved about my year so far, the most rewarding experience is observing myself slowly but surely integrate into the culture of Rennes. At first, the 65 of us were just one big group of obnoxious Americans; there were those of us who yelled in public, others who had no idea how to dress like a French teenager (a scarf and some dark clothes go a long way), and others who simply couldn’t speak French beyond the common “bonjour” and “comment ça va?”. At a café we stuck out immediately, no matter how hard we tried. Often when attempting to speak French to the locals, they would assume we were tourists and respond to us in broken English. However, over time that all has changed. I still have not yet mastered the French language, but I have definitely made strides, along with the other students at my school. Like many students at my school, I have independently made French friends who I can carry on conversations with without much difficulty. I can now easily navigate myself around the city, either by bus, metro, bike, or foot, without having to unfold a giant map and ask random people on the street where I am. Without doubt, the locals still have no trouble realizing I’m American when I speak; however, they no longer treat me as just a simple tourist, but rather a true inhabitant of the city. It has truly been, as cliché as it sounds , the best couple months of my life up until this point, and I cannot wait to find what else Rennes, as well as France and Europe in general, has to offer.

A la prochaine fois, Alex