My host family consists of two parents, Dominique (dad) and Fran�oise (mom) and their 19-year-old daughter L�a. This is the family that I live with on a daily basis, but it is not their full family! They also have four sons, all of which are older than L�a. One of them lives in Ireland and another is engaged and lives pretty far away. However, two of them live close enough to come for lunch on the weekends and the occasional dinner.

Usually it isn’t a problem to have an extra face at the table, but today both of the closer sons came for a big lunch of raclette cheese and potatoes! I was so nervous…

…and now it’s over. And I did it!

We started with “apertifs”, which are drinks like wine, whisky, etc. that you drink before a meal. Then we moved on to the table and ate the raclette. Luckily, my real family has raclette for dinner so I was familiar with what to do. There were a few times when questions were directed towards me that I had trouble comprehending because my host brothers speak so quickly, but I was able to eventually figure them out and respond.

After that was a dessert of apple tart, which was absolutely amazing! My host family started arguing about French politics, which I first of all don’t know much about and second of all couldn’t understand when more than one person was talking at once! At one point, one of my host brothers leaned over and asked me if I knew about the political system. I responded no, and he said “c’est nul,” which means “it sucks.” Luckily, my host sister wasn’t big on discussing politics either and the conversation eventually ended.

At that point I thought that we were done, but my host sister suggested playing a board game. They had “Destins,” which is the same as the American game of “Life!” So I played that with my host sister and one of my host brothers. And guess what – I understood everything! Even though I knew most of the rules of the game already, the board was entirely in French and I still had to maintain conversation with my host siblings as we played.

Finally, when that was over I grabbed my laptop and showed my host family the Google Map images of Penn State, my lake house, and my permanent house. It was nice to give them a perspective as to how large PSU really is; they still can’t believe it’s a town of 45,000 students!

So, despite my initial fear about not being able to talk or understand 5 French people talking at the same time I did it!

I consider it an accomplishment, and I’m giving myself a pat on the back 🙂