Well. This Sucks.

So you know how we were supposed to do a home-stay coupled with taking French CONVERSATION classes? Well let’s put it this way. We didn't.  The ILSC Company kind of lied to us about a decent number of things and ended up violating their contract with us on multiple occasions. Let’s start with the home stay shall we? Well first off, they had an unaccounted for child that the ILSC company was not aware of (big nono), second we had a roommate that no one knew about, third; the host family was supposed to provide us with 2 meals a day as well as hold conversations with us over diner etc. Well, none of that happened at all. Claire and I never ate breakfast and when we came home for diner, either no one was home and we had a cold meal sitting on the counter for us, or the host mom made us food and left immediately after words. To top it all off, the house had a bug problem in our sleeping areas and numerous times I saw bugs the length and width of my pinky scurry by my feet, over my foot, up my arm, on the sofa and around my luggage.

Now on to the class situation. Well first off, let me preface this by saying that the French class they placed Claire and I in was VERY challenging. However, the class was strictly a grammar class when Claire and I requested to be placed in a conversational French class. Coming from America, it is very different in how it teaches its foreign languages, because for us unlike a lot of other countries, we learn grammar first, and never really get to the conversational portion. For the kids in our class that were from Brazil or Mexico, they had been in a conversational French setting in their classroom for years prior to coming to ILSC, and were only there to learn proper grammar usage. Claire and I had already learned every grammar tense there is for French and the class was a repeat of what we've been learning for 4 years in that regard, but in the class itself, the level of speaking French that everyone was at, far exceeded ours, making it very challenging to keep up with class discussions. We went to the head of ILSC and asked if there was any way we could switch out of our class and they came back with an affirmative, no. Needless to say, when my parents arrived for my birthday, they had already had a discussion with Claire’s parents were not pleased to say the least. We were pulled from the home-stay and the classes and instead stayed in my parents flat in Montreal and continued to conduct our interviews. It was very different but it was ultimately for the better. While we wish it had worked out, we know that if we stayed any longer with ILSC we would not be getting what we paid for at all.