Day 5

I'm so exhausted. My brain feels like mush. It was by far the busiest day, with class from 9-12, strolled around the flower market for about an hour then 1:30-7 we visited Château Amboise and Leonardo Da Vinci's old house.

Flower Market





Château d'Amboise









Da Vinci's Crib





Class was much better today, although concentrating so hard to understand for so long really takes its toll on you. Touring around all day seeing everything was incredible, beautiful, fantastic...I was blown away at the sheer beauty of everything I saw today...it just really wore me out.

Sometimes I feel like I'm living someone else's life. A different country, language, room...new friends, family, food, classes...everything is new and different, and it all changed over in one day. I think I've adapted well, I'm continuously learning, but somehow I just can't grasp it completely. I think it's just caused an overload of really intense thinking and experiences into a very short amount of time, things you normally experience and think about perhaps spread out a bit more.

Being here has made me look at everything in my life in a new way. It's made me seriously think about things like future goals, plans, and hopes...things I've always thought I've wanted; wanted to do, wanted to go. It's hard to explain how. Your whole life you learn about everything you can't experience for yourself through some other means, similar to what I wrote about in the last blog, and these things are often taken into consideration for decisions about what you want to do, where you want to go, how you want to be. "I want to be a teacher when I grow up, I want to live in the country, I want to travel the world..." and you think about and want to do these things based on what you observe, but it's often very different when you're actually doing it, living it, being it. I hope I make sense. It makes sense to me.

I don't exactly know what I'm trying to get at, other than sorting out too many thoughts. I suppose I wonder about the order of how things work in the world and why.

I guess it's just that I've realized I make plans and decisions and work hard towards things that I want from life and what I want to give back, but they're things like I mentioned about seeing and dreaming, but now am experiencing and wondering. Am I making the right choices? Are the things that I've thought I've always wanted still what I want? Or do the things change, but principles remain the same?

"Life is a hard teacher because it gives the test first and the lesson later."

Goodnight.