My online abroad 'sejour' starts

It has been over a month since I arrived here in france amidst, initially, all the confusion, anxiety, fear, and the various emotions one associates with panic. Needless to say, the situation has not changed drastically from this initial chaos. The first stopover was Nantes, for my French language course, which was recommended to us very, very 'strongly'. I would normally not mention such a thing, but the fees for this was an eye-popping 1000 Euros. All you European readers (if any) don't scoff at this. It is a huge amount for us to comprehend, atleast for a one-time payment. So the start itself was financially daunting and overwhelming. I prayed desperately for a lastingly fruitful course.
Seems like my prayers were 'presque' answered (Presque is the french counterpart of approximately - I have a fetish for this word..more to follow!). With us being 10 in all (and iitians at that), company was always ever-present. Our coursemates were 20 or so chinese students, all of them who looked below their mentioned ages (in some ways a desirable feature). I follow the 'presque' rule that whatever they mention, take 5 of it and they look realistic. But one has got to give it to them for their exemplary politeness...courteous, soft-spoken and 'toujour' (always!)cheerful. Their enthusiasm and zest in general cannot be questioned - they were ever-ready for all the course activities. Compared to them, we are raucous and totally outrageous beings!! OK..back to the course, the one thing that scared the wits out of us was the fine of 1 Euro (at the minimum) for anyone who would walk in late or would be caught talking in english (the latter rule was slackened during the latter stages). Imagine walking in 1 min late and having to shell out 1 Euro (60 rupees sounds more dramatic!) against all your wishes. But later we found that it was all in good cause as at the end we were given cute parting souvenirs, bought with the money collected. Our classes (all-indian) were taken by Madame Faezeh (was confounded by the name at first). Turned out that she was very helpful, encouraging and fun-loving; she made learning the language much easier and sort of a desirable side-effect of having fun. The oral comprehension and phonetique sessions were irritating at first (cause there was nothing comprehendable) and a tele-serial called 'Plus belle la vie' turned out to be hilarious even though it is a popular drama soap. It was later nicknamed 'Poubelle la vie' - check out a dictionary for this joke! The coursework all-in-all was slightly heavy but manageable. The best thing about the course was definitely the plethora of trips organized in and around Nantes. The best one (according to most of the people) was the one to the nearby vignoble. For the uninitiated these are sort of farms where wines are made, and that includes growing the grapes (raisins as they call them), waiting, waiting, still waiting and then collecting the ripe ones (using a really cool machine) and so on. I'll get to the interesting part : they served us white (not exactly vintage) wine and boy was it good !! I had five glasses in total which sent me into a world of my own....well not exactly but I remember feeling really light-headed. Then I sort of remember having a great time on the way back when we all (the indian folk) really let ourselves go.....please verbally only!!
And now that I am a little amazed at how much I have written (plus a little tired also) I will finish off this post. Stay tuned for more!!!