My Adventures in France: Constantly Confused (but learning)

Here is a list of some of the things I've learned from two weeks living in France:
1. Once you meet someone, you have to do 'la bise' with them every time you see them in the future.
2. I frequently forget to do 'la bise' and will just be like "Bye" and then walk away... oops
3. French teachers are slightly crazy...
4. French teachers, after a test, will go around the room interrogating anyone who received a less than superior note on said test.
5. People in France do not believe in turn signals.
6. People in France are, however, really good drivers.
7. A road considered a one-lane road in America is considered two-lane road in France.
8. The whole France-eats-smaller-portions-of-everything really does not apply in my host family, town, or school.
9. French teenagers are obsessed with kebabs and fries.
10. My school doesn't really do the whole homework thing very effectively.
I am always forgetting to do 'la bise' with people or I try to do it at the wrong times. Like I will think I'm about to leave, do la bise and then it ends up that my host family wants to keep talking with whoever we're with. Or doing la bise will just slip my mind and I'll walk away without properly saying goodbye. But people basically let me do whatever I want because I'm American. Do not be worried because I am, however, discouraging any stereotypes anyone has ever had about Americans.
Special thank you goes out to Mom for almost never cooking hamburgers or fries or eating fast food. When people ask me if I eat hamburgers for every meal, I can proudly say "no, I've probably eaten 2 hamburgers in the past year" or "Actually no, I was vegetarian for all of last year". And we all know how Americans supposedly have huge portion sizes? The portion sizes aren't exactly small here either. Yesterday for lunch at school, the menu was a plate (a really plate, not a Styrofoam one) full of fries with a hamburger (real one too) on top. And my host family eats so much! Maybe my family has just never really eaten a ton of food but I swear my host family eats way more than we ever have in the US.
Continuing with the discouraging stereotypes theme, anyone who has ever me me will know that I'm not exactly the loud, arrogant, stereotypical American everyone in France may have expected. In class, I try hard to understand everything and write down what I can of the notes we take. I've only been yelled at for talking twice and that was only because I was explaining how to do a math problem to the girl next to me. So in case, AFS ever reads this, I have been a very good 'cultural ambassador' so far and I've been living my life to the motto 'It's not good or bad, just different'. You're welcome.
So this week was, unfortunately, not as good as the first week. But the first week was so good, it would be really hard to top it. This week was more getting to know people, whereas the first week was just meeting people. Last week I was only really friends with guys. But now I'm friends with girls too! Tom (my Belgian exchange student friend) and I have a pretty good group of people we hang out with consistently.
This week was a really strange week in terms of communication. I'm having trouble speaking both French and English. When I speak English, it feels familiar but I can't always remember the words I need to form normal sentences. When I speak French, I occasionally with slip in a few words in English. Or I will start off my sentence speaking English and finish in French. Is this normal? I really need to stop doing that....
It is now Sunday. I have officially been in Doue with my host family for two weeks. This weekend there was an AFS reunion for all the exchange students in my region and their host families. My host mom drove me to another city to meet Laura, an exchange student from Brazil who goes to my school. Laura's host mother took us both to Angers where the reunion was being held. Before I left, several exchange students told me that other exchange students are always going to be your best friend during your study abroad experience. It's crazy how true this is. I became really good friends with several exchange students in Paris (Tom, Emma, Karianne...) but talking with them about all the weird things that have happened to us at school or with our host families this weekend was really fun. The people I hadn't really talked to much in Paris I got to have a conversation with and we all got to know each other a little better in the three hours we were together. We were all forced into a rather embarrassing situation in the main square of Angers (dancing, chanting, etc,...) but it was still really entertaining because we could image how ridiculous we probably looked. We ended up visiting a lot of central Angers and it was a really great time! Laura, and I left and here host mom took us both chez moi. We went to a party with a lot of people, dancing, and alcohol. It was a folk dancing party at the house of a man who makes wine... Just to clarify. I tried two types of wine and some champagne. Probably amounted to two small glasses. I was worried that I was going to get trippy drunk having not drank any significant amount of alcohol before but I just got a little giggly. yay for amelia holding her booze, but I don't think that I'll be drinking much anytime soon. Still isn't that appealing. What IS appealing now, however, is CHEESE. Laura encouraged me to try some French cheeses and I ended up really liking the two I tried. Last night was probably the French-est night of my entire life.
We got home from the 'party' at one in the morning. Laura and I had a nice conversation about studying abroad and then went to bed. This morning we got up, and went with my host parents to an amphitheater built in the 16th century in my town. Pictures for everything I've mentioned will be at the end! We got home, ate a healthy lunch of salad, rice and baked chicken and then we went for a walk around Doue la Fontaine. I attempted to screen-shot a few pictures of a map of Doue but they really weren't very helpful. So, relying on just on the information I've collected from 2 weeks here, we made our way to a boulangerie in centre ville Doue. It was a twenty five minute walk, but we did not get lost once! For that I am very proud. We bought a viennoise au chocolat, a pain au chocolate, a caramel eclair, and a chocolate corn flakes cookie (sounds bad but was amazing). We each tried a little bit of everything and then saved the leftovers for later.
Laura and I got back just before 3pm so that we could go with my host dad for a guided tour (guided by my host dad himself) of the troglodytes and sarcophagi. There were about twenty other people in the tour with us. We got to learn all about how people in this region lived under the ground from 500 A.D. to 900 A.D. And how the western part of France was actually submerged for a long time and Doue la Fontaine with it (facts not 100% sure are true, the tour was completely in French). It was really interesting to see where these people lived and how they survived underground. Altogether, it's been a really good weekend!
Now here are the pictures: