A Weekend in Nancy

Hey guys--I know this post is long overdue, and everything I’m updating happened actually a few weeks ago. Late is better than never!

Periodically throughout a year abroad with AFS, there are obligatory weekends with the other AFSers in your chapter. Because Alsace only has three people, we joined up with the Lorraine chapter in Nancy for our weekend. During events like this, we have loads of activities to try to get us to express our emotions and talk about our cultures and all of that stuff, but mainly, it’s just to hang out with other exchange students. Yeah, we all have friends at school and people we connect with, but the only other people who get it are people who are going through the same thing.

There are only three people in Alsace (myself, Caroline from Denmark, and Lorena from Brazil), so we took the train from Strasbourg together to meet up with the Lorraine chapter. We had a bit of free time in Nancy, so we wandered around a little bit, bought some incredibly overpriced macaroons, and generally had a great time.

Caroline is such a cute human. 

For dessert on Saturday night, we all brought dishes from our home countries. I brought the traditional American pie and Abi (the other American) brought chocolate chip cookies.

It tasted like wholesome family values and freedom. 

Eating American food made me weirdly homesick. In general, when I get homesick, it isn't for America; I miss my best friends, doing theater, my boyfriend, my brother, or my parents. I miss my people, but not my country. Eating American food, though, made me really miss my country. I miss California--the fields, the hills, the ocean. France is beautiful, but France isn't home. 

 

Myself and Abi--we spent a lot of time talking about how we miss people who hug and big Sunday brunches. 

However, there are few things that sugar can't fix, and homesickness is not one of those things. Our chapter has people from Brazil, Argentina, Costa Rica, Turkey, Germany, Denmark, Norway, Bosnia, China, Italy, and the USA. There was definitely a lot of chocolate to go around. I thoroughly enjoyed myself.

We were staying in a really beautiful chateau-turned-youth-hostel. When the woman from AFS picked us up from the train station in Nancy and told us we were going to a chateau, I thought I had translated something wrong. We're staying in a castle? 

 Yep, we stayed in a mini-castle. Because France.

The grounds were gorgeous. We took advantage of the gorgeousness and Lorena's fancy new camera.

Pretending to be Julie Andrews in the Sound of Music. 

Shameless white girl photo shoot. 

Indie girl band album cover. 

The main room of the chateau being rented out for a birthday party, and they invited us outside to watch them shoot off the birthday fireworks.

After the fireworks, we all sang happy birthday. We sang it first in French, and then in the other ten languages represented. It took a while. Everyone was too pumped up from the sugar high and the fireworks to get any sleep, so we wandered through the woods, played foosball, and just messed around for a few more hours. 

Alessandro getting his t-shirt signed in different languages. 

After about four hours of sleep, we all got up again for the typical french breakfast--coffee and bread, with Nutella or butter. We went for a walk, did some more activities, and then all parted our separate ways. 

Denmark and Italy 

#alsacefilles

The selfie stick the most glorious invention of our time. 

  Yep, it was a pretty rad weekend.