Gymnastics in France

So I just competed in my first competition a) in France and b) in 10 years since I stopped training. It was definitely a different experience. First the warm up was in a separate room and there was no actual floor to practice on rather, a bunch of small mats placed on the floor beside eachother. So we had an hour to warm up in this room, with the vault going into a foam pit. Then it is competition time. So we head into the other room and there is no presenting of the teams at all, the competition simply starts. They give a total of 1:30 minutes per event as warm up. I started on floor. I hadn't heard my music cut before so it was a little iffy with the ending but I threw my back tuck which was good :) Then it was onto vault. First, I've never competed on the newer round horse so that was different. The runway was a thin piece of carpet that is rough and actually physically hurt my feet to run on! But I survived! Beam was my final event. I managed to stay on (mostly) :) but it wasn't bad. Then came the scoring. This was also my first competition with the scoring system where a score could be more than a perfect 10. They give you a start value which gets added to an execution score of 10. SO basically you could get a score higher than 10. I then had to go coach my other athletes for their competition and then it was finally awards time. After everything, I still managed to qualify eventhough I only competed 3 out of 4 events. So how that is actually possible I am not even sure. Their system is a little odd, and for each level only a certain number of gymnasts qualify. Some levels had 15 competetors but only 13 qualify. It had nothing to do with specific scores but rather simply numbers. So overall it was fun but not as fun as it used to be when I was back in Canada. My old teammates weren't there and my coach was good but not my original one and the other competetors weren't as friendly either. I enjoyed myself, but I had a lot more fun when I was back home (and 15 years old :))