The Substitutes :: Les Remplaçants

French high schools don't have substitutes for just one day.  It requires a pregnant teacher, or something, to even consider looking for one.

My English Literature teacher told us she'd be gone Tuesday for (insert forgettable reason).  Instead of the groans I was used to hearing, everyone was exclaiming exclamations of happiness.  (Forgive my lack of vocabulary, I don't care, I'm in France)

it's like summer vacation again

It all just reminds me so much of a university.  At least, from what I know from the movies, my high school is similar to college (that's confusing for French people college is a middle school and université is college).  

The cafeteria food is, while I wouldn't say host mother level, very good for chefs that have to cook for some thousand kids in two hours.  It's certainly better than the defrosted plastic that my American high school serves us.  

plastic, boxed, plastic, defrosted, and there is at least one nugget that is cold

My high school has dorms.  I always thought that that was just for snooty private schools or, well, colleges. Though the reason my high school has them is for students that live far away.  So, you know, the normal reason.  It might be hard to imagine for someone that lives in the city.  It's because my town is surrounded by a lot of country and farms.

Everyone looks older too.  Maybe it's just me, I've never been around so many girls that use as much make up as French girls do.  I'm not saying that French girls look like clowns, just that my friends and I hadn't really worn make-up fashionably before.

French girls are the version on the left

Maybe it's that.  The sense of fashion.  All the boys here have it too, or at least, they dress well.  I haven't seen anyone wear a simple t-shirt in ages.  They always dress it up with a scarf (boys too) and a necklace (less boys) and a jacket.  I can't really give a dissection of high school French fashion, though an incredibly vague thing that I could tell you is that there are always skinny jeans, leather bags, and scarves.  It just shows how unfashionable I am that I didn't know all that before.

There's also the structures of the classes themselves. This is where I pulled from the idea of colleges.  We go in the class, we sit down, and we copy the lecture of the teacher.  I wouldn't say that it's very interactive.  More like notes are pounded into our head, and then we leave to attempt recovery before going back for more.

we have no idea why either

France is making me grow up.  I highly recommend it for maturity purposes.  I'm learning how to cook, a vague sense of fashion (insert head pounding), how to read people.  When I can't understand what they're saying, body language does help.  

for example, here she is clearly thinking about pounding the teacher's face in