2 months out

Well, I've got a big essay to write and a physics test tomorrow so of course I'm on here posting unnecessarily so that I can maintain my position as the king of procrastination. Actually, I'm making a post today for a couple of reasons and they are good ones so I think I can justify taking fifteen minutes out of my school work to make a short post.

First, as we approach the half way mark of June it becomes necessary to comment that I've only got a little over 2 months until j jour. I've finally been able to get a date for arrival in Belgium so I'll be sending my visa applications this week and hopefully that'll work out okay because otherwise I'll be in deep merde. I'm not worried though, the people at the Belgian consulate (especially the lady in charge of visas) know me by now after all my annoying them so I'm sure they'll be happy to process my application quickly so they'll never have to deal with me again.

Second, I've found a great resource that I think any anglophone going on an exchange to a francophone country should know about. Through the apple program "Itunes" there are these thing called "podcasts" which are really just free downloadable audio and video broadcasts which you can subscribe to; these broadcasts cover pretty much all topics and are totally browsable so you can find whatever you're looking for. So anyways, while taking a look around these podcasts for the first time last night for fifa world cup videos I found in the "education" section a weekly podcast called "The French Pod Class." I downloaded the latest episode to check it out (it only took about a minute) and was totally surprised to find this whole French lesson, taught by a Frenchman named Sebastien, complete with conversations, grammar, a movie review, and vocab, all with running translations and explanations and also a few music breaks (playing French songs naturally) after which the host explained what was happening in the song. So after being so totally blown away by this great quality, 35 minute French lesson I went to the page of the broadcast through Itunes and found to my delight an additional 45 older episodes available. I found that in addition to all I had discovered in the most recent lesson, each lesson has an available transcript of the vocab and grammar covered and links to find the music played. Also, I found that the occasional episode comes with a video of about 10 minutes in length which shows some great French locations and common shops with explanations on their significance to French people. There are also things like book reviews and exercises with solutions, all of which relates to what is being taught in the accompanying lesson. Really I couldn't believe that this amazing broadcast would ever be available for free but it completely is and I'm having a blast getting all these lessons downloaded onto my computer so I can put them on my Ipod and have them to listen to whenever. Really for anyone taking high school French or for anyone like me going on exchange to a francophone country with an intermediate level of French this Podcast which you can subscribe to totally free is an invaluable resource so do yourself a favour and check it out because it's really cool.

So what I'll do is put the link for the French Pod Class website on the right sight of the page so you can go have a look once it's back up as it's down for the time while it's being remodelled. Other than that I think that should about do it for what I wanted to say, I'm sure I'll be posting a few more times before I hop the plane over to Belgique but for the next few weeks I'll be busy with exams so I'll take my usual leave of absence. So, à la prochaine. -Andrew