Today I left for France. We went to the airport at two in order to avoid Houston rush hour. My flight was supposed to leave at 640 but it was delayed to 740. We thought that we were going to miss our train from Paris to Montpellier, but that was not the case. The flight was calm and I realized that I finally got over my fear of flying. I slept for most of the flight and I can honestly say that I was pretty numb about the entire thing because there had been so much previous planning involved that I could not even picture my self in France. After we landed the next for of stress was the passport check. I was worried because I am not an American citizen, but I flew by the check no problems. Later, we picked up our luggage and literay ran to the SNCF train station where we fortunatly caught our train. On the train I sat next to my friend Edith and our prof Dr. Bains. We all slept a bit, but also looked at the beautiful scenery. It was amazing. I have never seen so much green and perfect farmland. There were little cottages at every corner and white cows congregated in groups. The train was amazingly fast. It was the TGV speed train. It took us three ours to go 445 miles. When we were about 30 minutes from out final destination, our train had to stop because there was a farmers protest. They were protesting the extremely high gas prices. Here they cost about 2 dollars a liter. Its is extremely high, but they have some very good public transportation. Once the police took care of the rioters, we got to the train station and met our families. I am staying with a really nice lady and her son. Her son and I share a love of the Simpsons. It is awesome. Tomorrow were are going on a tour of the city with her son and the rest of the people in our group. I am very excited to be here. We had a wonderful dinner and I got to take a bath. I cannot wait to get aquainted with everything. I am loving this already.
