Before I came to France, I really believed I would have only French friends. But by the end of my seventh week, and even now in the middle of my eleventh or twelfth, I don\u2019t have any that I see very often. And no, I don\u2019t wear berets when I go to class, I don\u2019t know all the French slang; I often wonder if I\u2019m not really living \u201cla vie fran\u00e7aise.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s true that I\u2019ve met several French people, but it\u2019s harder than I thought to become close with the \u201cnatives.\u201d French students my age already have their circle of friends, like I have mine in the States. The French, however, are not the only inhabitants of Toulouse. I go to a very large public university, Le Mirail, where there are almost 400 ERASMUS students from all over Europe. These students are the perfect study abroad friends for me. They gave me a friendship I wasn\u2019t expecting, but that I desperately needed. Like me, they came here to learn French, and thus they speak a version of French that is easy to understand \u2013 which was especially important when I first got here! They come from throughout the continent \u2013 England, Ireland, Germany, Russia, Portugal, etc. Even if they\u2019re not French, they\u2019re European, and I never would have gotten to meet anyone like them if I had stayed at home. When you\u2019re in a foreign country and don\u2019t know anyone \u2013<\/em> and even when you\u2019re in your own country, for that matter \u2013 there\u2019s nothing you need more than friends. My first few months here have been a bit like being a college freshman again \u2013 tons of new faces, new names, new events. And although you know you won\u2019t remember them all, you\u2019ll remember how you felt being a part of it. And you never know which of those new faces belongs to your next best friend.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Before I came to France, I really believed I would have only French friends. But by the end of my seventh week, and even now in the middle of my eleventh or twelfth, I don\u2019t have any that I see very often. And no, I don\u2019t wear berets when I go to class, I don\u2019t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4846,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[30101],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2170","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2-la-une-in-english"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/toulouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2170","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/toulouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/toulouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/toulouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4846"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/toulouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2170"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/toulouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2170\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/toulouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2170"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/toulouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2170"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/toulouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2170"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}