Voyage des Premières

Voyage des premières aux USA, New York du 5 au 12 mars 2016

Tous les soirs un groupe différent va envoyer un message pour résumer la journée! Le voyage est super et l'expérience est géniale!!!

Each evening a different group will send a message to sum up the day. The trip is great and the experience is awesome!!!

NEW YORK JOUR 1

"We arrived at the hostel yesterday evening after many hours in the plane, it was even the first flying experience for a few of us! Both the hostel and the meals are very nice and we were also able to choose the groups for the bedrooms! Today, we had to wake up early to see the Gospel at the FCBC baptist church in Harlem. The jetlag and the alarm clock were difficult but we are fully enjoying our days, NY is great!! The Gospel experience was very interesting! It was full of energy and then a woman gave a sermon. The atmosphere was impressive!

Later we visited the Guggenheim Museum; there were sculptures, paintings by Edgar Degas, Manet, Picasso etc. As it is modern art, some works of art were intriguing while others were puzzling. After having lunch, we visited Greenwich village where we saw Bob Dylan's flat! In East village, we had some free time so some of us went in thrift stores, and others in big shops on Brodway Av. Seems like taking the subway is always a challenge! Public transportation is clearly not well developped in the US. But thanks to the experience we gained today, it sould be easier for the next days!

Talk to you tomorrow!"

NEW YORK JOUR 2

Good morning!

We started the day with the Empire State Building visit which was amazing and very exciting!!! Then we had a short time in Union Square to see the organic market before we went to the highline. The views of NY were splendid and the path very beautiful and enjoyable to walk on! We ended the afternoon with the visit of the Met museum where we had a good time.

We are writing as we are waiting for the diner , prepared by groups purple and blue ;) this scares us but we'll see!!!

See you soon!

NEW YORK JOUR 3

Today we went to the MoMA museum where a guide presented different works of art to us during an hour. Then we were free to visit the museum in groups of 3 or 4. Finally we watched the students' presentations of the paintings they had prepared previously. Then we went to St. Patric cathedral where a group presented us the history of the cathedral. We were lucky that the facades were no longer in renovation so we could contemplate the cathedral fully. We ate on the side of the cathedral and then we visited the cathedral rapidly. After that, we had around 4 hours of shopping time on 5th avenue. The meeting point was the world's largest shop in the world ! In groups we went from shop to shop either acquiring small "souvenires" or shopping for clothes. Another important activity was trying every kind of food that we could find in France in order to see if there was a difference. The major one was the size of the sodas and the pizzas. We eventually stumbled upon time sqare while getting out of a famous fast food. We then gathered to the meeting point and headed for a classical music concert.

Best regards from Yohann and Camran on behalf of the group.

NEW YORK JOUR 4

Today, two groups headed to Summit high school to meet the American students. We took the train from Pennsylvania Station to Summit, which was a 50 minutes trip. Then, when we got to the high school, the people we were paired up with took us to their classes (history, PE, maths, AP algebra, biology, chemistry, art or even literature...). We attended three of them, different for each one of us. At lunchtime, we ate with them and talked for a bit until the fire alarm rang! We all had to get out of the school on the parking lot and waited until it was over before to take a group picture with the Americans. We had to go back to the station in order to take the train back to Pennsylvania Station at noon.

Meanwhile, the two other groups visited the museum of Natural History and ate lunch in Central Park at Strawberry Fields, a place in which there is a place to commemorate John Lennon.

The afternoon, the 4 groups joined each other on the campus of Columbia University for a visit guided by a Freshman French/Poli-Science double major. He explained us the life at the university, the campus, the classes, the dorms and the activities that the university organizes while walking all around.

After that, we all went to the Rockfeller Center and had free time for half an hour before to go to Time Square and spend 20 minutes watching everything from the red stairs before to go to Hard Rock Cafe to eat dinner, where we also celebrated Mrs.Chabani's birthday!

Then we went back to Time Square and had a free time of 20 minutes to go around in the gift shops and the Disney store.

Finally, we made our way back the the youth hostel.

We are loving New York and enjoying it so much!! The weather today was very very nice and some of us were even in t-shirts : it got up to 23 degrees Celsius! With no wind!

We hope you all spend a great day and enjoy our emails and pictures.

Cyrène in behalf of the group.