Noumea day 1

If there is one word to describe my trip to Noumea, it would be bliss.

Quite literally a trip of my life. Immersion into culture, bonding with my school friends and enjoying the sun pretty much sums it all.

Many people do not know where New Caledonia is. When I try to explain that it's a small French island in the Pacific, near Tahiti and Fiji, many people jump to the conclusion "So basically France?"

Pas exactement- not exactly. How about 17,000 km away from France?

School WITH A VIEW! 

Nouméa is the capital of New Caledonia. Think crystal blue waters, white sand and lovely weather. Locals think that '18 C is cold'. Quite the contrary for us Melburnians. We experience freezing, wet winters! 18 C is lovely. 

The Age also wrote an article about it

Its tourism isn't as well developed as many other well known pacific islands but it really does have the potential. So it was a nice change to see that there weren't too many tourists lurking around. A lot of tourists notably from Japan, New Zealand and Australia. I went on an educational tour with my school via GET, which was quite professionally done! 14 students and two teachers.

The trip to the airport was actually pretty exciting, because we've pretty much all never been on a school overseas trip. The plane ride was only about 3 and a half hours, not too long. I sat with Eric and one of the school teachers. We watched quite a few episodes of Friends (my all time fave show) and by the end of it, we were struggling to keep our eyes open. Actually, I think everyone was quite exhausted despite the short flight because it was a reeeeally long day at the airport and arrived in the evening.

  Yi Shan has a Gopro so she took that everywhere. So handy for group selfies ha ha ha.

There were also several other schools from Australia.

In a later post, I will write about Amedee, an island where we went snorkelling. I would've also loved to see Ile de pins, but we didn't have time to visit there!

We had 3 hour French lessons each day at the language centre, Creipac. They were quite literally some of the best oral lessons I've ever had. Not only was our teacher incredibly encouraging & helpful, she made the activities fun and we all learned from our mistakes. More on my French lessons in a later post.

Anyway, on the first night, we didn't do much because we arrived in the evening. We all had a pretty magnificent burger and a taste of Orangina- the French version of Fanta except that it is less artificial and more bitter..I quite liked it. First night was at the hotel, so us students played cards all night, trying to keep quiet but that really failed. But what do you expect with a bunch of students running wild in a foreign country?

Actually, our definition of 'wild' is playing countless card games........

Next morning, trying to keep our eyes open.