Caroline arrived about two hours ago, and we promptly whisked her out of the airport and over to Leatherby’s Creamery. She’s pretty exhausted from the trip, so I think we’ll wait until tomorrow to get some pictures.
Tag Archive for 'foreign_exchange'
02
Aug
Caroline’s here!
01
Aug
Caroline en route
Caroline, our French exchange student this summer, left Paris a little over five hours ago. She should be somewhere over the Atlantic right now. She’s scheduled to arrive in Washington, DC in about three hours. Unfortunately, the final leg of her journey from DC to Sacramento was rescheduled, and her arrival time here won’t be until ~21:30. The good news is that Leatherby’s, (ice cream and sandwich shop where we’re planning to eat after picking up Caroline), is open until midnight on Friday.
We’ve got some fun plans for this weekend, but I’d rather write about them after the fact. Besides, that way I can post pictures to go with the article!
Caroline’s flight is scheduled to arrive next Friday evening at 19:53, and we’re all pretty excited. It’s almost like Christmas, except it’ll last three weeks!
Several people have been asking us about hosting, how we found out about this, etc. Our daughters took/are taking French at Rio Americano. Their teachers, M. Hodgins and Mme. Murray, are both involved with the VIE exchange program. M. Hodgins organizes the biannual trip to France, while Mme. Murray organizes hosting for French students every year. If any Sacramento-area residents are interested in hosting a French student during the summer (usually 3 weeks in August), contact Mme. Murray–she was only barely able to place all the students this summer, due to a shortage of host families!
We’ve got some trips planned for Caroline’s visit, although Mme. Murray tells us that some of the most interesting things for the visiting students are (from the host’s perspective) purely mundane: Things like going to the grocery store, making dinner, going to school, etc. (Yes indeed, Caroline gets to spend the final week of her visit going to Rio Americano with Caitlin. We’ll have to come up with some fun things to do in the evening to make up for that!)
If it stays on schedule, Caroline’s flight will arrive in six and a half days. Well… 6 days, 11 hours and 56 minutes, but who’s counting? 
29
Apr
2008 exchange student
We hosted a French foreign exchange student, Claire, last summer. It was such a rewarding experience that we signed up again.
Claire was a Parisien, but we wanted to become acquainted with people from other parts of France. So this year we’re hosting a Marseillais (a person from Marseille) named Caroline. We’ve already had several email exchanges with Caroline and her family. She’s coming to stay with us for three weeks in August, so we’ll have 2.5 weekends for touring. (She arrives on a Friday evening, so that first weekend will be partially blasted by jet lag, I’m sure.) We’ll probably visit:
- Monterey Bay Aquarium (and Monterey itself);
- San Francisco, twice (keeping our SF advice in mind);
- and the Jelly Belly candy factory.
You may be asking yourself why we included Jelly Belly among such hallowed destinations. The fact is we already had plans to see “My Fair Lady” at the Music Circus this summer, so we needed to find something relatively quick and close to Sacramento for that day. Besides, Barb and the girls thought it was pretty cool the first time they visited the factory, and I’ve never been there.
We spent one day in San Francisco with Claire last year. It was a long day, it felt rushed, and we had to skip all kinds of cool stuff. This year, we’re going to try two trips to SF. And if we can work out all the details, one of those days we’ll bring along our bikes and go riding on Angel Island, through Golden Gate Park, and anywhere else we think to ride.
Finally, I thought I would post a useful web site that I found when Barb and Caitlin went to Sweden a couple of years ago: The world clock page shows the time in both Marseille and Sacramento. (Obviously you can customize this to show whatever cities you wish.) The city names on that page are linked to the current and forecast weather, which I thought was pretty slick. (Looks like it’s cool and raining in Marseille, while we’ve had a couple of 35°C days here in Sacramento.)
We’re all eagerly awaiting Caroline’s arrival in August!
31
Aug
Claire’s visit
Several months ago, Barb signed us up to host a French foreign exchange student. We were hoping to have our remodeling project finished before that time came, but unfortunately we were still living in a house under construction when Claire arrived. The poor girl spent three weeks living with us in less-than-ideal conditions. We took a few weeks off from remodeling and Continue reading ‘Claire’s visit’
