Our First Week in Rennes: A student's perspective

This week, Connie L. reflects about her first week in Rennes:

To foreigners, the name of the city Rennes probably does not receive as many nods of recognition as more famous cities like Paris and Nice, but in some ways that makes the city slightly more French. It has all French trademarks of baguettes everywhere and cobblestone streets, but fewer tourists crowd Rennes, so most of the pedestrians are genuine Rennais and most of the shops and restaurants are intended for locals. If you must ask for directions, your only option is to parler français and (in my opinion) its harder corollary--écouter français. It is the perfect city for intensive language immersion, and the perfect city to get just a little bit lost in. I came to Rennes expecting and wanting to be challenged linguistically, and I definitely am, but I also found myself challenged in other interesting ways.

CIEE made sure the program is designed to be immersive both linguistically and culturally, so we come to know Rennes not as tourists, but through locals. We all stay with local French families for a month, where we learn about their lives and perform everyday tasks in French, from doing the laundry to talking about European politics during dinner while eating baguettes bought from the boulangerie. I take courses with teachers that speak French 24/7 to the participants, and I come home and speak French to my host family. I learn new vocabulary everyday, but I’m not only learning the language. I also find out something new about the city of Rennes, which is small enough to be cute but big enough to be interesting. We are allowed a good amount of freedom to explore the city on our own. I discover new routes, book shops, and cafes with my friends through an amazing public transport system of buses and metros that New York and LA can only envy.

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Nuances and little things. I learn just as much interacting with my host family as I do taking French classes in the morning. My host mom tells me that the French have different rules for cutting cheese depending on the type of cheese, and since according to Wikipedia there are 350-450 different types of French cheese, I really need a lifetime here to learn all of them. She tells me the proper way that the French eat their baguettes, split in half horizontally and placed on the table, not on the plate. And the way the French eat their leafy salads plié with a fork and knife, never coupé. One of the best things about living with a local host family instead of in a hotel or dormitory is that you get let in on cultural “secrets” that are probably not in your textbooks.

Rennes is one of those interesting cities on the border between modern and ancient. Ancient, not just old. There are still wooden and clay buildings from the fourteenth century next to the cathedral that somehow have not burned down during one of the great fires. But the apartments and the neighborhood of my host family is quite modern, with large glass windows and boxy angular shapes. My host mom tells me that with all the construction going on, the older Rennais say they hardly recognize part of the city anymore.

The CIEE Rennes Immersion program is truly immersive. It forces you to apply whatever French you know in different types of situations to different people in the very country it is spoken in. I learned things I would never learn at home, from casual French slang that are used too commonly to ignore, to very specific French dining manners and habits. I am thrown in every learning environment possible: lectures in classrooms, long conversations with host family, and asking for directions on the street. Alors, j’aime la France LE CHAMPION DU MONDE.