Catégorie : Travelling

In 2011 and 2013 we made two trips to the USA : on the East coast and on the West coast during two months.

We loved this country, the people, their mentalities, and their culture. The people were very helpful, positive, open minded, respectful and they smiled all the time.
So in 2015-2016 we decided ( with my parents and my two older brothers) to participate in the American lottery, which offer immigration cards every year, on the internet. This lottery enables people to get the green card and to be permanent residents to live in the USA. Every continent has a maximal number of candidates (some quotas) to respect. Then, we must sent a lot of information about us, and a lot of papers: identity cards, passports, graduation degrees, medical certificates… We had to have compulsory vaccinations.
The US government sent us an e-mail to tell us that we had been selected, So we had to go to Paris for a medical examination, to have x-rays and to make some blood analysis. The next week we returned to Paris to go to the American Embassy to have an interview. After that, they told us « Welcome to the United States » and they took our passports to make our visa. How exciting ! Some months after we received our visas and we had until October to go to the United States to cross the immigration. So we spent 2 weeks in September in Virginia because we wanted to live there. We had visited a lot of different cities, a lot of houses with an estate agent, and we made beautiful meetings. Then 2 days after we came back home and we received our green card from New-York. So we must go to NY to get back our green card once we arrive in the US. We mustn’t stay longer that 4 months outside the USA so we must return there in February. We have until October 2018 to move to the US. So I will not take my degree in France. In the US, there is not a degree like in France. I am going to integrate an American high-school, then a university and later, I would like to become an architect, or a designer.

Moving to the USA is a really big challenge for us because we must leave our family, our house, our friends and it is very difficult to imagine but it is also a dream and we were very lucky to be selected. Let’s go for our American Dream in 2018 then !

  AFS is an association which organizes educational programs for students in more than 50 countries.

  I’d like to go to the USA with AFS because the USA is one of my favourite country in the world. I want to discover how they live overthere, how different school is, because many things in the USA are different from France : for example, the way they study, their food, their traditions (like Thanksgiving etc…). It really interests me to live like an American teenager for a while.

  Everything is so different, everything attracts me ! The language, the food, big American cities ! Every single one has its own magic, they don’t look the same. New York doesn’t look like Los Angeles. Seattle doesn’t look like New Orleans. I’m crazy about the USA and I’d like to discover this magic place !

By Kaitline Sisino, 1L

I went to Miami during the 2017 summer holidays from July 23rd to August 4th. I was a little bit nervous beause I had never taken the plane before, so it was my first time ! The flight was fine. When we landed, a man was waiting for us to drive us to our hotel. His car was really big ! Like in a movie actually ! We arrived at our hotel which was situated on Miami Beach, in Ocean Drive in front of the Atlantic Ocean. The hotel was very cool, beautiful, and original and the staff was very nice and welcoming. It was just 9 am and it was already warm ! In Miami there is a lot of humidity so my parents and I took some time to get used to the heat. On the first day, we visited the surroundings and we took a bus which showed us Miami Beach, Miami downtown and some neighbourhoods like Little Havana, Coconut Groove and Wynwood. Unfortunately, we did not have time to visit Little Haïti during the summer holidays. We spent a lot of time on the beach since we had only crossed the roadto go there ! The Atlantic Ocean was very warm. I had never experienced that before, because it was totally different from the Atlantic Ocean in France with a lot of waves and a cold ocean. We tried different food, many specialities from different areas. The food was delicious everywhere ! One day, we wanted to go to Fort Lauderdale because my Dad had read in The Routard Guide that there was a mall with 400 stores !!! So we rented a car for 5 days to have the time to visit Fort Lauderdale, Key West , the Everglades and Miami of course. Let me tell you an anecdote. We were on our way to the mall and we had taken the highway to Fort Lauderdale but once arrived at some point, we did not know where it was necessary to go. We were lost so we decided to go back to Miami. The next day, we took our time to do the ride again to go to Key West. It was impossible to leave without a ride because it was 3 hours away from Miami. We stayed the day to visit. Key West is a very typical small island with wooden houses. In the street, there are many pubs. One of the most original has walls covered with bills and bras !!. Key West is like a city of the old America. Key West is the last island of the archipelago of the Keys. After visiting the city, we wanted to spend the night there but all the hotels were full so we had to go back to Miami. On the following day, we went to see crocodiles in the Everglades. Once there, there was a park with different animals like turtles, parrots, emus , and of courses crocodiles. There was also a kind of animal like a vulture. So we visited the park but before we made a tour by airboat. It was really funny, we went really fast and we made a lot of U-turns, what splashed us ! It was a great moment ! After, we saw a terrarium with snakes. One afternoon we visited Miami Beach. We found the mall so we decided to go there. In Miami and Fort Lauderdale and maybe in other cities, malls are not like ‘La Toison d’Or’. it is a street with stores on both sides and it is totally pedestrian. Let’s talk about the neighborhoods we visited. First, we discovered Litlle Havana. It is the Cuban district. We went to a very nice bar with a band with an old man which was dancing very well. He had a sense of the rhythm. The area was very typical, we could imagine we were in Cuba. People were very nice and charming. Then we went to Wynwood. We saw beautiful stuff. At this level, this is not just graffiti but this is a masterpiece. The district was not the most welcoming… but you must go there to see the beautiful work. I may forget some things but here are the main parts.

No doubt, attending the EURO SECTION has helped me a lot for this trip. I was prepared to hear real English and I was in good condition to learn ! It helped me, I was not lost when American people spoke to me. I understood everything and I knew how to make myself understood. The language was not a problem and that encourages me to travel again !

By Camille Debard, 1ES2