5/23/2025: Nantes school visits and barbecue

Bonjour! This is Georgi and Simone and we are so excited to share our second day in Nantes with you! 

We started our day with a bus ride over to our first school visit! During the first half of our day, we observed an École maternelle or a preschool! The first class we observed was a monolingual class taught only in French. We interacted and played with the students and also listened to them sing songs to us! 

After our observation, we had some time to ask the principal of the school Flore some questions. The second class we observed was a bilingual class taught in both French and Breton, the heritage language of the region. We got to see how they went though a lot of their daily schedule throughout the day which had a lot in common with the US. The students in this class also sang some songs for us in Breton!

For lunch we went to a local bakery/sandwich shop and got some food to eat at a local park. We loved watching all of the dogs walk by us and petting the sheep that live in the park!

After lunch, we went to our second school visit at the École elémentaire. For this visit, we split into three groups and went to different teachers classes. Almost all of the teachers and students spoke very little English, so Juliet, Patrick, and Simone had to be translators. We read a little book about Vermont to the children in English and in French and then they had the opportunity to ask us questions. We then observed and interacted with the students for the rest of their school day, chatting with them, learning games from them, reading to them, and letting them read to us. It was a great experience!

After a long day of being in and out of the schools, we made our way over the grocery store. Patrick decided it would be a good opportunity to look for Philip so we took the long way there… no signs of Philip unfortunately.

While the grocery store may sound uninteresting, you can never have a boring time in a place that’s three times the size of a Walmart super center. (I said it was like Guy’s Grocery Games on the food network.-Georgi)We split up into teams for the main course, dessert, salad, and the charcuterie board and we were off! Once we found everything we met up with Juliet’s sister Laura and got ready to depart. Unfortunately Claire did not get to ride the Segway because the guy would “lose his job” 

With the help of Alicia to guide us to the bus stop, we took the bus to Laura’s house for a barbecue dinner! We had so much fun laughing about loose cows, eating, and jumping on the trampoline. After such a lovely night, we tiredly made our way back to the hotel to prepare for the adventures of tomorrow!