Bonjour and a bon voyage

Danette Goulet

NEWPORT BEACH -- Until they spoke, there was no way to tell which

students would hop on a plane to head home to France and which would stay

here.

Friday, students and families gathered outside the Newport Beach

library to bid farewell to their house guests of two weeks. It marked the

end of the first leg of the inaugural student exchange program with

Newport Beach’s sister city of Antibes, France.

“What I like are [the] very interesting schools [here] and [that they

are] very different from French” schools, said Claire Massimi, a

15-year-old student who attends Audiberti High School in Antibes. “They

are a lot friendlier here.”

While the crowd of teenagers -- American and French -- looked the

same, they are accustomed to significantly different lives.

French students expounded on the many differences they noticed on

their two-week stay in Newport Beach.

The greatest variations in lifestyle, they said, were in the spacious

roads and the atmosphere at Newport Harbor and Corona del Mar high

schools.

“At schools, it is more strict in France,” Massimi said. “It’s nice

here. [There’s] a lot of space. The streets are big. Classes are

different. In France, we cannot talk or stand up. Here it is very noisy.”

Jordann Benhamouda, 15, said he enjoyed how friendly everyone was

here, but he added that he’s not quite ready to leave the wonderful

French food behind.

His classmate, Polo Sattezzi, on the other hand, was nearly ready to

abandon his home country for the big stores here, such as Best Buy and

Jack’s Surf Shop.

Even more excited than the French exchange students were the five

sophomores from Newport Beach who will depart for their two-week stay in

Antibes on April 7.

“It’s been awesome,” said Amanda Rubenstein, 14, a student at Corona

del Mar High.

Rubenstein said she was excited but a little worried about her ability

to speak French.

“Ten minutes an hour we spoke French,” she said of the past two weeks.

“Their grasp of English is a little better than our grasp of French, and

they’ve been struggling.”

But that worry could not dampen her excitement.

“They eat shark, frogs and snails there,” she said. “Also, the

schools, they said, were a lot different. And I know we have Disneyland

and amusement parks here, and I wonder what they do to pass the time

there.”

It is the city’s first exchange program in a 13-year relationship with

the French city and one they hope to continue, program coordinators said.