France: Homestay & Language Immersion

After an overnight flight, your Global Works leader greets you at the airport and takes us to our accommodations in the city center for a chance to rest and settle in. Throughout the next few days, we visit historic and cultural centers such as the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower, Picasso Museum, Musée d’Orsay. In the evenings, we engage in immersive French language reviews through games and activities designed to facilitate our language immersion.

From Paris, we travel south by high-speed train to Provence, one of France’s most popular regions. We stay in Avignon, a beautiful walled city and home of the Palais des Papes. We spend our days exploring the city ramparts and learning about the history of the Pont d’Avignon. We have an exciting scavenger hunt in the marketplace to practice our French with local vendors. We also visit the nearby Pont du Gard, an impressive Roman aqueduct and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In the evenings, we have homestay orientation activities to begin preparing for the next stage of our journey!

We make our way to Carcassonne, a traditional French town near the Mediterranean, where we are welcomed into the homes of our new homestay families! This is an excellent opportunity to test our language skills, make friends, and absorb the many cultural differences found in day-to-day living and conversation. We spend evenings and weekends with our homestay families and during the days we meet as a group for service projects, exchange activities, and cultural visits.

During our days in Carcassonne, we serve the community alongside local volunteers through historical restoration projects. Past projects have included rebuilding ancient walls at an 11th-century chateau, removing invasive plants from a historic shepherd’s refuge, and constructing walking paths. We work with the communities to determine which heritage sites and monuments require our attention year to year

It’s not all work and no play; we take breaks from our service sites for local cultural activities. We see beautiful stalactites and stalagmites on a tour of a giant underground cavern and take time to visit the beach on a Mediterranean excursion day! In the evenings, we have time for cooking lessons or pot-luck dinners with local families. We will visit the winding streets, turrets and ancient walls of the iconic medieval city to learn about the region’s history…all cultural activities that will help hone our French language skills!

After saying goodbye to our homestay families, we board a private bus and drive 1.5 hours to the Toulouse airport for our flight home. We are sad to leave, but excited to share our stories with our family and friends. Au revoir la France!