So it is the start of the first week of the Christmas holidays here in Montpellier and most students at my French Language School have left. Some have gone for a few weeks over the Christmas holidays and will start their French classes again in January but some unfortunately have left Montpellier for good and are starting a new chapter of their lives. It is exciting for all of them as the experience of learning French in France has grown them a lot and now they have a whole load of new doors open for them that come with developing language skills. I however am staying over the holidays for work and although I have plenty of things to do there is a little something missing. I won’t have the constant support of the other French students around me and I was a bit apprehensive as I miss my friends already and it has only been a couple of days. I was apprehensive, not anymore. Here’s why.
Photo Sharing of Our Time Learning French in Montpellier
The students on my French course in France and I had very full schedules during our time in Montpellier and we were constantly taking photos of all of our adventures. Whether we were just having fun in our French immersion classes, doing one of the activities run by the ILA language school or touring around Montpellier. We were doing loads! Pretty much everyone was taking snaps on their phones so everything was well captured. We would always say make sure you send me this or that but all of us often forgot. So with the aim of keeping the past few weeks alive in our minds we decided to create a Facebook group and add all of the students we knew at the ILA French immersion school. This turned out to be most of them as certain people had connections to other people that others had never met and vice versa so the net was cast widely. A big group of us who stayed at the ILA student residence were leading the way as we had naturally spent more time together than those with host families as we were all living together. The students staying with hosts were very involved as well and also had some great photos of the stuff they had been doing with their new French families.
I for example had stayed with a host family before coming to the residence so I had lots of pictures of my time with them. They were mostly of their dogs which I couldn’t get enough of. There were two of them and they were always waiting on the steps outside the house when I got home from my intensive French course which was just lovely. Michelle, a German girl who was with a host family posted some photos of her visit to Provence where her host mother had taken her to meet her uncle Christian and his wife Michelle. Christian enjoyed refurbishing old clocks and Michelle had been round his very cool workshop and taken a few photos that were great to see.
Keep the Spirit of the French School Alive
Sharing photos isn’t a new idea obviously but we made an agreement that we would only post one a two photos a day. This way we weren’t swamped by hundreds of photos by dozens of people at once. We could enjoy a small selection of photos each day and look forward to reliving each memory one at a time and savouring it whilst at the same time extending our time of enjoying it. This has worked really well and I really look forward to my daily stroll down memory lane.
The other students at the ILA French Immersion School have some brilliant photos of their own experiences as well as loads of wonderful photos of us all together. Some photos are just obviously great as they are of some gorgeous part of Montpellier with all of us together but even the little ones of us on our respective French courses are great as I remember the feel of my lessons and wonder how the dynamic of the other classes worked. I imagine they were all brilliant in their own way.