Bonjour,
When you land in your new country that you will now call home, you may be experiencing a thousand feelings running through your body at the same time. When you arrive there is no telling how tired you will be but lets just say SLEEP ON THE PLANE! When I landed I had maybe slept for 30 minutes. So I had been up for 20 hours and it was only 8 am. When then had to stay up till 10 pm. So in other words, I went 30+ hours with no sleep. So with that being said try your best to sleep on the plane and if you don’t get to sleep just keep a positive audited and don’t let your lack of sleep ruin the day.
The first day of orientation there is nothing going on all day. All of the students from different countries arrive at many different times of the day so you may be the first country to arrive or the last. Either way you will spend the day talking to people from all the world and will never be short of someone to talk to. This day was my favorite of the days (minus the lack of sleep) because I meet so many people from all around the world. Every one was super nice and wanted to get to know everyone so don’t sit in the corner with the people from your home country and make some new friends from around the world.
Also don’t worry if you don’t know french you will still make friends and understand the orientation because the whole orientation is in english and everyone spoke english to each other no matter where you were from!
Then the next day is orientation. In the morning group 1 will go to the Eiffel Tower and have a bus tour of Paris while the other group has orientation. Then after lunch you switch. When I had orientation because of all the recent terrorism we did not get to take pictures under the Eiffel Tower but we still got to take them from a distance. Here we also did some dance that I have no clue how to even describe but when you do it have fun! Shout loud and dance crazy. Don’t be the party pooper that just stands there because you will stand out more if you aren’t making a fool of yourself.
Then the next day you will leave for your host families at all times of the day. Some leave earlier and some later depending on where your family lives and what time your train leaves. If you want to hear more about meeting your host family you can check out my blog post Host Family Jitters and read all about it.
I hope this helped and if you have any questions about orientation I would love to help to the best of my ability!
Also you can go check out my video about both the New York Orientation and Paris Orientation –> HERE
à bientôt
xoxo Gina