By Ysis Bouche
Hi, I am Ysis Bouche, I am a foreign exchange student from France and will be living here for the next 10 months in Fresno, California to live the American Dream.
My project started in France, when I came across by pure chance on social networks a girl who had been 10 months in the United States in an American high school, and who had lived what anyone would want to live I think. That was about two years ago. I then started to take an interest in this project, and I spoke about it to my parents. To my surprise, they never disagreed with this project, although the price was very high. So all together we started to do research, to buy brochures, to have more information, then we found an organization which organized this kind of big project. The project really started in June 2021, when my parents started to pay every month, we knew that now everything was launched and that I was finally going to live my dream.
To tell you a little more, I have always lived in France, not always in the same place. For 10 years, I lived an hour from Paris, and since 2015, I have lived an hour from Toulouse, in the south of France. I left France on Friday, Aug.12, 2022 and I arrived in Fresno where my host parents came to pick me up around 7 p.m. So it's been a week since I arrived, and my life has changed a lot, and not in a bad way.
There are many differences between France and the United States. Some fairly glaring differences, first of all, are the size of things here. Everything is big, the cars are huge, the roads too, the food. Then there are things that the wave covers as the time we spend here.
Like the class schedules, classes here start around 8:30 a.m. and end at 3:30 p.m. In France, they start at 8 a.m. and end at 5:30 p.m. And it's super cool to have less course time in a day and with a lot more possibilities in terms of subjects. Here, the classes are much livelier, the teachers are very close to their students and that's something I really like, because there's less pressure here.
In addition, I try with my host family to go out as much as possible. Last weekend I discovered the city of Merced a little bit, and then throughout the year, we have trips planned. Like going to Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Lake Tahoe, San Francisco, and many other places that we haven't talked about yet. My parents really want us to discover as many places as possible, they don't want us to be bored, but at the same time, they don't want us to be too overloaded with my foster sister, because it's true that the time difference is a bit complicated at the moment, and fatigue is very present.
The beginning of the adventure is a little complicated, but the days go by, and it's getting better and better because my family and my friends are far from me. But I have a new family for the next 10 months and everything is new. I went to my first football game on Friday night, and it was amazing. I feel like I'm living in a movie, and all my friends tell me the same thing, that they feel like watching a movie by watching everything I'm starting to discover here.
There are lots of things that I look forward to discovering during the year, and holidays that I look forward to celebrating. Like Thanksgiving or Christmas; see all the decorations in the different districts, just like in the movies. American life is something you only live once. I know I'm incredibly lucky to have been able to come here for 10 months, and I'm very grateful to my parents for letting me go. Without them, I could never have done it. So I'm going to make the most of my year which I think will pass extremely quickly, and also benefit my loved ones who allow me to do this incredible adventure.
I talk a lot about the positive points of coming here because you shouldn't be negative, but of course, everything is not perfect. I miss my family a lot, and rebuilding a life in a country that is not ours, in a language that we do not master is something very hard, and over time things evolve and things get better. . But when the language is not mastered well enough, it is difficult to want to communicate as one would really like to. Everything is only temporary, and everything will get much better with time.