Sixième the Day! (or: You'll Rouen the Day!)

Yesterday I promised you cute pet photos. If that's all you care about, skip to the end. If you want more chatty descriptions of what happened today, keep reading in chronological order. However, I should warn you that you'll unfortunately get slightly less blow-by-blow commentary aujourd'hui. I know; you're crushed.

Why? Well, today was Wednesday. And while for some people, Wednesdays Are When We Wear Pink, but that has never particularly been true for me. Meanwhile, at Lycée Fénelon, Wednesdays are only half days for academics, and les étudiants are released back into the world considerably earlier than the normal 5PM cessation. Maybe then everyone goes home and lives up to their pink-clad Mean Girls potential, but based on the hordes of black- or grey-coated teens waiting at the bus stop just outside campus at lunch time, I would somewhat doubt it.

However, the day started with an ordinary academic schedule, and continued with a second class before the shortened day ended. In the middle, however, was a welcome breakfast where the American students and their hosts were greeted and made to feel at home by the head of Lycée Fénelon, presented with a commemorative exchange T-shirt, and invited to eat their weight in a glorious array of chocolate croissants and hot chocolate.

In both of the academic blocks, the visiting American students were invited in to be interviewed by les sixièmes, also known as sixth-grade students. Les sixièmes were learning basic English vocabulary and asked our visitors a series of prepared interview questions about their families and their future plans, and for the answers to grand lists of their favorite things: favorite cities, musical instruments, animals, colors, fast food restaurants, and many others. We were then supposed to help the sixièmes correct their English spelling and grammar so that they could use all this data to create Tinder profiles for each of us posters about each of us, with our photos and images of our various favorites surrounding us.

Students then had the rest of the day free to explore and to adventure with their host families. A number of people went go-karting:

Some explored the Cathédrale de Notre Dame in Rouen, as well as the Church of St. Joan of Arc, located on the site where she was burned at the stake.

And there were also opportunities to explore, go shopping, buy sheer kilos of candy and a purse, look at a clock so famous that it's ungrammatically male (no, really), ride a ferry, check out a dungeon tower, and fall asleep on the bus ride home, only to rap up the day by trying some new and fascinating foods with one's host family.

All those tourist options were spectacular, but sometimes just the natural surroundings were the best part of the day, or at least both beautiful and inspiring.

But perhaps not as enjoyable as the promised selection of oh-so-adorbs homestay pets. Tomorrow we travel to Giverny to visit Monet's gardens and explore the setting of some of his most famous paintings. But today, you get these: