Day One

Or should I say Jour Une?

The French exchange student has been here for a day. I like her, but I'm not quite sure what to make of her.

On Facebook, she's a semi-boisterous party girl with lots of friends who likes to get real close to cute boys.
On her application to come here, she's someone who doesn't smoke.
In person, she's fairly quiet. And she smokes a lot.

It's a little bit of a challenge not to compare her to the kid last year, whom we obviously liked a great deal, and whose family we now like, too. (And its a measure of my personal insecurity that four days after they said they want to come to visit us here next year, I can think I think they like us, though I'm not really sure. )

This kid -- well, she takes some effort. It's not the English, which she actually speaks fairly well. It's not that she comes from a fairly large city, so we wonder how bored she might feel here in the country (and the implied challenge: do we need to keep her entertained?) And its not the Facebook image, though seeing her post something like Fuck, I passed my test, we gotta have a party when I get back makes me think a little less of her. (You couldn't just say you're happy you passed? Maybe not.) It's not even the smoking, though we don't like that; we're not here to change her life. (Though what we'll do when she runs out of cigarettes, we're not sure. Probably a modified version of Don't Ask, Don't Tell.) Even if she did offer my daughter a cigarette (she turned it down) or mentioned that she knows people her age or younger that have sex regularly (my daughter does, too; at least, they say they do) or do drugs (ditto).

There's just something about her that makes me think that the kid we see is a little wilder, a little looser than she appears to be. She's not scamming us....exactly. Just appearing to be more of a straight arrow than she really is. Like make sure she doesn't get the chance to have anything alcoholic at that graduation party tomorrow; she might overdo it. We have no reason to think she will; but she might.

Its an interesting experience.