Pau is a great place to learn French and explore Southwestern France

Pau is a fun city to learn French. The staff in the USAC program and University of Pau are all awesome and the people in Pau are nice and generally patient with imperfect French. I stayed for a month in summer session 2 with a host family who were lovely and definitely improved my conversational French speaking and listening. Pau is in a great location to travel to Northern Spain or the French coast on weekends (about 2 hours and you can usually find a cheap train or bus ticket) and I had great trips every weekend. There is not as much to do as I would have liked in the actual city during the week after classes, but we had fun trying new restaurants and bars and saved most of the activities for weekends. USAC plans some excursions, and they were all great and gave me experiences I definitely would not have planned on my own.