Fougères

On Saturday we went to Fougères to see the castle there. It took about an hour to get there by bus, though we noticed that it would have taken about 25 minutes if we had had our own car. The ride there was gorgeous! Everything is green now, since the weather has been going absolutely insane for the past few weeks. It will be rainy and freezing one day, and then sunny and in the 80°s the next. The grass doesn't know what to do with itself besides grow...a lot.

Once in Fougères the four of us (Me, Jess, Mark, and Collin) jumped out of the bus, which had been ridiculously warm, and headed to a boulangerie for some nourishment. The boys got their sandwiches while Jessica and I sat on the side of a fountain and broke into her bread and camembert (man I'm going to miss that cheese). A little girl was running all over the plaza waving a toy fan thing in the air. I can't think of the name of it right now, of course it's probably just "fan thing", but it's one of those spinny things that you swish back and forth to get the colored fan moving. She had like six mini fans on a big red plastic stick, and spent a good chunk of time trying to figure out which way to run in order to get the best wind.

The castle at Fougères is pretty cool. It was built in 1166. It's remarkably intact, and shows off the first drawbridge ever...at least, it still has the tower that had the bridge leading into it. The bridge itself hasn't been there for a while, though you can see the new stones which were laid to fill the hole. We got a 3 euro half hour tour of the insides. It was, of course, in French. I understood a good chunk of it, but the guy was just so excited and was talking so phenomenally fast...it was difficult. Maybe if I were taking architecture with Mark and Jessica and had already heard all the terms that he was talking about, maybe then I would have been able to pay better attention. But no. It wasn't meant to be.

We got back into Rennes around 17h30 and headed up to St. Grégoire (yes all of us) and met Sophia at E.Leclerc to buy stuff to make dinner. Leclerc is huge, about the size of Super-Walmart, and sells about the same things. We were there for an hour, and finally came out with the makings for chicken, pasta and cream sauce, and fruit salad. Haha sometimes it's just ridiculous, how long it takes us to do things...

We got all the way up to Jessica's house and discovered that it wasn't, after all, as empty as it was supposed to be. Her host sister Lucie and Lucie's bf Gerard were there, making their own dinner. Luckily, my host parents were gone as well, leaving my apparte completely open for a quiet dinner party. Of course, we listened to music and were probably talking much louder than normal French people would talk while we were eating dinner on the terrace, but hey. We totally deserve to be able to actually make our own dinner and clean up after ourselves every once in a while.

The boys made the chicken and cream sauce, while the girls occupied themselves with the fruit salad and setting the table and then standing around and wondering why there wasn't more to do. It was a really good dinner born out of me showing Mark where the spices were and him exclaiming "Oh, real spices! Real un-French spices! Curry!" and Collin taking charge of the sauce. It had ananas in it--pineapple. Yummy.

After the boys left to walk down to the bus stop at almost midnight, Sophia and Jess and I watched the Incredibles on the laptop in the living room. It was brilliant. I love that movie.