OMG I blew out the electricity!

Yup, my very first day, as the title of this post indicates, I blew out the electricity on the second floor of my host family’s house. More about this unfortunate event in a minute…..

Besides the current situation, my arrival in France has been a breeze. As one of only two Hamilton students in the program, my Vassar and Wesleyan cohorts have been very welcoming and I am looking forward to taking classes and hanging out with them over the course of the semester. I was reassured when I realized that we all have the same fears and worries about coming to France i.e. speaking French 24-7, adaptors for our computers, buying cell phones in France, and our lack of concrete info regarding our schedule. We were all freaking out a bit just sitting in the terminal at JFK because all the people around us were speaking French and then announcements about the flight starting coming in French (until boarding time when we got both French and English). It all got very real very quickly, before we even left NYC!

The seven and a half hour flight was your standard transatlantic flight. Too little leg room, hard to fall asleep, and the movies I wanted to watch weren’t available. I didn’t get to sleep as much as I had hoped but that’s ok. You should have seen us on take-off though. I think every single one of us had a big smile. I know I couldn’t help it and I saw that the other three kids in my row couldn’t help it either. We are all really freaked out going into this but there’s no turning back now! We might as well just jump right in head first.

So, now the electricity story: I was all settled in my host family’s really cute house in Bordeaux. I was picked up at the airport sans problem, spoke nice French with my host mother Marie Christine, took a shower, got a bite to eat, and was attempting to get my computer stuff all figured out. Massive failure. I couldn’t get my computer nor my alarm clock to work in the outlets in my room. Then I tested the power strip I brought, to see if that would work. Well, the second I plugged in my power strip, boom, the lights go out. I hear my host mother say something downstairs, but then I turned on my light and it worked no problem. Ok, so maybe I caused that little outage but everything seems ok…right? Nope. I think I fried the little decorative lamps in my bedroom. One of them is made out of bottle caps and the other looks like it could have been handmade too. I really should have learned about electricity and currents and stuff way back in freshman physical science class. I didn’t learn it because I brought the power strip to another plug in another room. This time I got a little ‘pop’ when I plugged it in. That’s when I thankfully stopped and my host Dad, Patrick, came home. Well long story short, I blew out the fuse for the second floor and I don’t think it’s back to normal yet. I feel really bad because here comes this stupid American with her power strip and blows the fuse within mere hours of her arrival. I hope they don’t hold it against me for the whole two weeks, things started off so well. Hopefully my gift of maple syrup tonight will make them forget this whole little incident happened….wish me luck.

A bientôt!