Bitter-Sweet

A portion of my knit shop!

Bonjour à tous! Some good news, my exams are finished! They went much more smoothly than I expected. The test I was dreading the most was the speaking exam. It's okay if I'm given a prompt and asked to write a 150-200 word essay, but tell me to speak in French under pressure? You might as well be telling me to state the Gettysburg Address with 7 sticks of gum in my mouth.
We were given a random question and a few minutes to brainstorm ideas to speak about. Each of us then went into a different classroom and talked at a professor for 15 minutes. As soon as I walked into the classroom and saw my pronunciation teacher sitting at the desk, my stomach dropped. Not only did I have to speak French to a native speaker, I had to speak to one who specializes in how it's spoken! At the end, she said I did fairly well so I was happy.

The last few evenings have been spent out on the town with everyone; it's almost been nostalgic since our friends from Lewis and Clark left this weekend and we won't see them when we're back in January finishing our ICRP. But still lots of fun. We had a Christmas/farewell dinner earlier in the week where we ate foie gras appetizers and gave out Secret Santa gifts. There was a noticeable difference between it and our first dinner. We were talking and laughing with each other so much more. A game of telephone even went around the table at one point. We all have gotten to know each other so much better!

Christmas markets at
the foot of the cathedral

As for Strasbourg, things have seemed to calm down in this past week. The Christmas markets are not as crowded as before (one could probably walk through them at a steady pace with minimal stopping due to bottlenecks) and the continual snow gives traveling a forced casualness about it. I've been enjoying walking around the city on my own lately. It's so beautiful and festive. And it makes the trip even more fun that I know my way around quite well at this point. I was talking with one of the women that I work with at the knit shop today about how much I'm going to miss Strasbourg. I've fallen in love with it. Her solution was that I need to return someday. That pretty much has become a must. Maybe I'll be able to work at the shop again for a bit... Who knows!

Tonight my host mom invited me to join her, her niece and some friends for a tarte flambe outing. I'm excited to have been asked to go along, but also nervous since that means that I'm going to have to use that good 'ol French to the max.
I leave Monday to meet my family in Paris!! À plus!