the weekend before lyon

The weekend before we left for Lyon was kinda … interesting. Because we hadn’t planned further in advance for the trains and everything, we ended up leaving on Monday instead of Saturday or Sunday like pretty much everybody else. This choice was made primarily because the price jump between Saturday and Monday was fifteen euros, give or take. On Friday (the 22^nd) afternoon Collin’s girlfriend Rachel got in from Barcelona, where she’s studying this semester. I didn’t meet her right away, though. I ate lunch with some peeps and then hung out in the CIREFE cafeteria doing some homework type things while I waited to Mark to get out of his class. We were supposed to meet Amanda and Julia at the SNCF office to buy some train tickets to Grenoble/Annecy. I put the slash there because Amanda kept changing her mind. Actually first I believe she was planning on going to Nimes? I don’t even remember anymore. She started plans for a handful of cities before finally settling on one. Then she was surprised when Mark and I hesitated to jump in on the plan with her. At the time I was just happy that I had managed to some up with a light outline for the week, one which put us actually leaving Lyon every other day. So we had a fun ten minutes or so standing in front of the boutique feeling (or at least I did) like the meanest people in the world for agreeing to meet up and buy tickets, then finally agreeing that we actually didn’t want to. In the end it turned out just fine, of course, because that’s how things are, but at the moment it was horrible. After that little endeavor Mark and I went to the minimarché and got snacks, then walked to the Parc Thabor, where we (surprise!) ate the snacks and watched ducks. There’s this, like, almost duck zoo on the edge of the park. Small children come and look at the birds, and they are adorable.

On our way back through Place Hoche to the bus stops at Place St. Anne, we ran into Collin and Rachel. Rachel is hilarious and amazing. I wish she were studying in Rennes, because she’s so much fun. We got introduced and Rachel grinned and said, “I’m sorry about this but I was supposed to tell you that you look very tall today?” It’s a running joke…haha, so funny. When will you people realize that I’m tall EVERY day? It’s not like I change my legs every night…or do I? After our chance meeting, I kinda started to hurry, because I had told my mere that I was coming home for a while, then heading out to Collin’s for dessert crepes. Haha. If only I had known that when I said “crêpes,” which in my mind is almost always totally completely translated as “for dessert,” in her mind it was translated simply as “food.” So I got home and realized that I wouldn’t be eating anything at home that night. Oh, that was a fantastic moment. I played it off pretty easily, especially since I knew that Collin still had about a million left over penne noodles in his fridge from our fantastic night of noodleness. I headed back into centre ville after an hour at home, and on the bus met up with Jessica, who had ended up eating alone because her family was gone. I laughed pretty hard then, because just before getting on his bus, Mark had gotten a text from his mere telling him that he would be on his own for dinner that night. We all should have just eaten en centre ville, but “free” food is “free” food. We were just looking at spending the entirety of the vacation week eating out. Anyway…Mark and I wolfed down some hastily heated baked penne and then let Rachel and Collin serve us crêpes. They. Were. Amazing. Rachel made fried bananas……which, when added to Nutalla, equal: yum. Then we watched some Shrek again, trying to actually finish it. We didn’t. Just after 12 we all left and headed to our beds. Oh, beds, how comfortable you are at one in the morning…

Saturday was a really good day, I thought. I went with Jessica to the gare (train station). She was early, so we sat out front for a little bit and she ate her peanut butter and confiture and nutella crepe, and in the middle of that time Mark texted me. Pretty much everyone had left town already (it was interesting to see how empty the city could be on a Saturday morning-weirdness). When Jessica left to board her train to Vienna (so cool, the opportunities we have) I took the metro to Republique and Mark and I got galettes saucisses for lunch from the marché. We walked around a little and then decided that we didn’t really truly know the city that well, so we needed to find something new to look at. We looked at a map and found a park that was relatively nearby which we hadn’t heard of and decided to walk to it. The fastest way to get there was to cut through Parc Thabor, which we did, and in so doing, we ran into Rachel and Collin again.

It’s like they were stalking us, seriously (and in view of wanting to be as honest as possible, I totally just typed “stocki-“ before I changed it to “stalking” and I just wanted you all to know that…haha “they stocked us” beautiful). The fun part was when they didn’t see us walk by and I threw a bit of tree-ness at them. Ok, so we were on a path below them, on the other side of some bushes. They wouldn’t have seen us unless they were looking for us. And it wasn’t big tree-ness. It was a little nut thing. Like, the size of a walnut. Tiny. Harmless. Mwa haha. It truly is sad, how I find entertainment. The four of us ended up walking around the park and then going to see Juno together.

I’ll take this opportunity to comment on French/English traductions. Translations. I’m not sure how many of you saw Juno (if you love teenage angst and awkwardness and Aaron Sorkin-esque banter, go see it, I loved it) but it was chock full of slang. I don’t know if Juno said one word that didn’t have some crazy twist of insanity. The problem with this is that none of it really transfers into French. I mean, seriously, they don’t have a word for “creepy”. Or if you want to say that you were ignoring someone, you have to say “I paid them no attention” or something like that. So all the slang got glossed over, and there were some super obvious times when we Americans were guffawing and no one else was. So sad. One of the main peeps says “Wizard” all the time. This, as most people should know, is a synonym for “cool”. Haha…in French it’s “ma magicienne”. “My magician”? What? Ok…

Another problem with translating here is getting over the cultural slang. The French have two main types of slang. There’s argot (say “ar-go”), which is pretty much normal slang, like instead of saying C’était très bien fait, le film (The film was very well done) you’d say Le film était vachement cool, quoi (The film was “cowly” cool, what). The French end almost all of their sentences with “quoi.” Literally, it means “what”… depending on the context it generally means, “hey are you listening” or “agree with me now.” So if you’re learning French and want to sound like you know what you’re talking about, start saying “quoi” all the time and when you’re annoyed with something say that it’s vachement nul (say “vash-mah nool”). There are other words but I’m getting the feeling that teaching people more French curse words maybe isn’t so much the way to do things.

So back to Saturday…After le film we went to dinner….um. I can’t remember where. It was a place…oh, we went to a crêperie! First time ever in an official one, you’d think that I’d do it all the time since crêpes are a Breton specialty, but no, it was the first time. Ok, now I’m remembering…we started with aperitifs, des kirs Bretons (Breton Kir: Cidre and cassis…which would be alcoholic cider with fruit juicy stuff added in) which were so yummy, and then we had our galettes, full of meat and cheese. At least, they were as full of meat as French people make them. The idea of a French sandwich is a baguette sliced down the middle with one piece each of thin lunch meat and cheese. Then we shared dessert crêpes and delighted in the fact that all of it only cost, what, twelve euros each. Something like that. Maybe it was less. No, wait, it was less, it had to have been, because the final bill was paid for with a 50 euro bill that Mark wanted to break, and he ended up getting a little bit back…ok nevermind, twelve each was probably right.

Haha…how’d you like my stream of consciousness? I thought I’d just leave that the way it is.

After dinner we tried to walk off all the deliciousness and only got a few blocks before crashing onto a stone bench at Place de la Parlement (which is the same as “parliament” pretty much, and means “talking”… “Place of Talking”) where we watched hippies play with fire. It was a lot like being on Pearl Street in Boulder with all the street performers. I had my camera and tried to take some pictures, but I couldn’t get any good ones without going and standing right next to the hippies, and there was no way I was going to do that. Hippies in Colorado are at least usually nice. Hippies in France are quite often les SDFs (Sans Domicile Fixe aka homeless dudes) and are kinda creepy and scary and always seem to have at least one or two dogs, and no one knows why or how. Apparently they don’t have enough money for a house but have enough for dog food? What? Ok…

But the fire thing was pretty sweet. One guy had these two chains with sphere things on one end. His friend came up and lit the ends on fire and we were all excited because there was fire and spinning and since it was dark (10 pm at least) it was so cool and then all of a sudden THEY WERE FIREWORKS and I just wasn’t fast enough with the recorder on my camera and I missed it. I know, I know, I suck at life. You’ll just have to take my word for it that it was really super cool.

The next day was Sunday. Michel took me to the Musée des Beaux Arts (say “moo-zay day bow_zar”) to see an exhibit of paintings of the American West. Yeah, I thought it was kinda funny, too. Michel’s an artist and a painter, and loves history to boot, so he loved it. It was a very small exhibit, though, and we went through it in about an hour or a little more. It was so strange to see maps of my own country and to know that the people around me weren’t necessarily familiar with the regions or the stories. Apparently Buffalo Bill visited Rennes one year, I don’t remember which. It actually made me sad. I don’t remember ever being sad when I read about other Buffalo Bill stuff in the States, but here, it just hit me even more how much of a spectacle we made things. I don’t know, it was a strange feeling. Afterward we grabbed Virginie and Elisa from their house (I’ve figured out that we eat with them every Sunday night) and went home.

Another thing I love about Sundays is the afternoon walk. When the French say that they’re on a break, they mean it. No work means NO WORK means “I am going to sit here and think about being productive while watching rugby/soccer/reading a book.” It’s fantastic. Then there’s the walk, where you go to the canal and let your dog run loose and see almost every person who lives nearby but don’t say hello or nod to anyone. Unless, and it’s only in special cases, you want to A. Cuss them out for cutting you off or B. Laugh at your dogs who are sniffing one another or C. Do something totally American like tell them you’re sorry for stepping in their way.

A strange thing about the canal etiquette here is that bikes don’t care about you. You’re expected to somehow be able to hear them coming up behind you on the packed trail. This is, you might have guessed, almost impossible. In Colorado if you’re on a bike and you’re coming up on some pedestrians who don’t know how to walk in a straight line, you say “On your left/right” and they move and everyone is unhurt. In St. Grégoire if you’re on a bike you just ride and if someone doesn’t notice that you’re there, tough, you get to yell at them or better, turn around later on the trail and glare at them as you ride by a second time.

The only time it’s acceptable to actually acknowledge or talk to strangers here is when someone nearby does something idiotic, and you “accidentally” catch the another individual’s eye and you laugh together. Of course, this is only possible if, after the initial chuckle, the laughter is immediately quenched and you continue to stare straight ahead. Preferably in the direction of nowhere. Or there are a couple moments when you’re allowed to laugh with the person. For instance, I was on the bus two weeks ago in the afternoon.

I went to the back to find a spot. I was riding alone and sat down across from a mom and her daughter. The grandma was sitting to my left. The girl’s birthday was coming up, and the adults were talking about what they were going to do party-wise. They asked the kid what she wanted for cake. Actually, they had to ask a couple of times, because this little chica was totally into playing with her Winnie the Poo toy, and wasn’t really paying attention. Finally she looks up and, still messing with the toy and sounding rather uninterested, says, “Well do I have any cousins coming?”

Her mom smiled and said she thought so, probably.

“Ok. Boy cousins and girl cousins?”

“Yes. What kind of cake do you want? Chocolate? Strawberry?”

“I want both of them.”

“Both of them?”

“Yes. Chocolate cake and strawberry cake and the boy cousins will eat the strawberry and the girl cousins will eat the chocolate.”

“What about you?”

“I’m going to eat both of them because I love them both.”

At this point I was grinning so largely that I couldn’t help myself, I pulled my eyes off of this adorable piece of magic (she was going to be 7) and looked at her mom, who grinned back at me. That moment was fantastic for so many reasons. The most obvious reason is that French people don’t smile for no reason. I (rather, her daughter) earned that smile. Also, the exchange of happiness over that one overheard conversation proved that I understood their French, which actually had a twist of Arab to it, I’m pretty sure. It’s amazing how happy I get when I understand even the smallest things.

Like the television. TV here isn’t a leisure activity for me. It is for mes parents, but not pour moi. If I want to understand, I have to pay attention. Lucky for me news stories aren’t very long. But the moment a couple days before vacation when I discovered that –holy cow- I understood the TV without really super investing myself in every single story and word…man, that was a great moment. Really really great.

21 février

So on Wednesday night (I’m pretty sure it was Wednesday, I don’t think it was Tuesday) we had a party at Collin’s house. By party I mean, we made our own food. Collin’s famille d’accueil is on vacation right now; they have been this entire week. So he’s been alone in his house every single night, which, I’m sure, was super duper fun. We’ve been trying to put together a study session so that we can go over all of the French that we used to think that we knew but that in all reality we have found we don’t know at all. We thought, “Hey, we’ve got time tomorrow night. Let’s make dinner and study French and be amazing!”

After classes Jessica and Mark and I went to the marché by the university and got penne, sauce, meat, salad stuff, cheese (le petit Breton…oh yum), and wine (of course). Oh, and we got a box of crêpe mix for dessert, and of course a monster loaf of bread. By 18h00 we were in Collin’s rather small kitchen putting together the dinner stuff. The kitchen is smaller than my bedroom, not to mention it has kitchen appliances in it (yes, I know, what a surprise); and the fact that we fit Mark, Collin, Jessica, Sophia, and me in it all at the same time is pretty much phenomenal. Of course there was always at least one of us who was just standing off to the side, wondering if they were supposed to be doing something.

Here’s something funny about the French: they don’t really believe in spices. They like sauces. Not spices. Unless, of course, you count salt and pepper as spices. I’m not sure that they really count, though…So we have this .35 kg of boeuf, and we need to make meatballs, and I’m just fine with rolling it up and throwing it in the pan, but no! Mark says that there have to be spices, because how can you even think of making meatballs (balls of meat! Haha cause you can’t say “meatball” in French….boules de viande!) without putting spices in them?!?! And bread crumbs! You have stale bread?! Let’s put it in!

What spices did we find? Salt, pepper (which are possibly not spices, since they’re, what, rocks and…uh….plantage?), and some really really really old thyme. At least, Mark said it was thyme, and I believe him. I’m proud to say I made the salad, which contained some of the best pieces of carrot and tomato ever. I’m not just saying that because I cut them up. I’m saying it because I put that piece of carrot in my mouth and it very nearly melted on my tongue. Tellement belle…so beautiful…

I also rolled the balls of meat, yes, aren’t you proud of me, mom, I know how to make balls of meat which are all exactly the same size. Unfortunately, I can’t then pick up the skillet that they are in and flip them in the air and catch them again like Collin could…The only thing about our dinner that wasn’t perfect was the monster amount of noodles we made. So we’re college kids, right? We should be familiar with pasta and how much feeds how many. Ha. Ha. Ha. Jessica and I, while at the market, had had a choice between little baby bags of like .3 kg and monster bags of 1 kg. Looking back…haha…we totally could’ve gone with the baby bag. Should have, in fact. Because did you know that 1 kilo of pasta is more than two pounds? I do. Now.

I helped Mark strain the penne and then put them in the bowl and HOLY COW that’s a lot of noodlage. Seriously. Once we got everything on the table I couldn’t help but laugh every time I looked at the overflowing bowl, which we barely ate the top off of.

The cheese was on the table three minutes before it was utterly demolished and even then I turned around and Jessica was trying to get some last morsels off a piece of rind. The wine was pretty good, too; it’s amazing the quality you can get for E7 a bottle…when you have a friend who knows wine, that is. During dinner, in order to make up for the fact that we knew we were definitely not going to be studying, we watched Shrek in French. Ironically, when I got home, Shrek 2 was playing on TV. Weird.

Jess and Sophia and I had to leave in a little bit of a rush because our last bus from Rennes to Saint Grégoire is at 20h52, and it was 20h18ish when we left Collin’s house. Mark caught up to us at the bus stop and tried to make us feel guilty for eating dinner and then leaving the boys to clean up. Mwa haha….and now Collin still has leftover pâtes in his fridge. Wow. We are SO amazing.

Sadly, we didn’t get to make the crêpes, but we have dessert plans for tomorrow night. Once more, to Collin’s house, to make dessert crêpes (aka NIGHT OF NUTELLA AND FRUIT!)! If you can’t tell, I’m super excited. I love crêpes. Especially since here, whenever I’m eating dinner, I always feel weird eating a lot cause my frère d’acceuil Pierre has been eating with us a lot lately cause he has an internship in Rennes, and he literally eats nothing. Ok, so not very literally. But last night, for instance, we had chicken and green stuff (spinach? Veggieness?) and these wonderful, beautiful potato balls, and what did he eat? A single piece of chicken maybe the size of a thumb on steroids, and three potato things, which were a little smaller than ping pong balls.

Dumb French people making me feel like I eat too much. To top it off, he doesn’t like sugar. Luckily my père LOVES sugar, so there’s always some yummy thing for dessert if I want, but I just feel so weird eating in front of Pierre, like I should eat as much as he does. Psh. Like he’s critiquing my French AND my eating habits. Haha…

17 février

I really should be doing my homework right now. Then again, it’s not due until Tuesday. Of course, my internet isn’t working right now, so why I’m writing this I’m not exactly sure. So…..how’s it going? I’m fantastic.

Last week was our first official week of classes. It was good, I mean, nothing terrible happened. Jessica finally (by Friday) got all of her Seuil/Avancé classes figured out. She’s doing half my level classes and half the level up classes. Just to keep things spicy, you know? Mark got an email back from his advisor telling him (a week too late) to make sure he was in an actual university class. He is still dealing with that. Everyone else is pretty much settled, though.

I decided not to ask to move up into the Avancé niveau. I could have, easily, but something just kept on popping (haha the first time I typed “pooping”…sorry) into my head: Seuil is for perfectionism. My writing test is what got me into this level. Sure, I can understand pretty much any French that is spoken to me, especially in class (standing in line for the bathroom at a bar, not so much). So I’m going to stay here, work on my little perfectionism complex, and be the better for it at the end of the semester. Oi.

Right now I have a pile of papers on my bed, all the papers that I’ve gotten this week. More than half of them are notes and handout-type things, but about five or six of them are short little essays that I’m going back over and correcting. Actually, that’s not technically homework, really I should be writing new stuff. But apparently I’m not so hot when it comes to prepositions and a couple verbs ending in “-dre.” Apparently.

I’m reading the Life of Pi in French, I think I already said that in one of the last posts. I think I understand everything. Mark and Collin also bought books to read (The Hobbit and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, respectively) and I discovered that I’m the lucky one: my book isn’t written in passé simple. The passé simple is a French past tense that is only used in literature. Something about making it easier for writers, or whatever. Haha…the thing about passé simple is that sometimes, the verbs don’t even resemble what you’re used to them resembling, so you’ll be reading, and you’re doing good, and maye even congratulating yourself for getting so far in the book, and all of a sudden your brain goes “HEY WAIT WHAT THE HECK WAS THAT?!???” And then you have to spend a couple seconds figuring out what that verb was.

So my book’s written in the normal past tenses and that makes me happy. Although, for my next book I think I’ll go for something a little more challenging. Yes, it is supposed to be leisure reading, but I still need to be doing more French. Yesterday I think I spoke maybe for an hour in French, tops. Not good. Bad me. Bad….me.

I decided that having Fridays off is really cool. Three-day weekends are the way to go, baby. Of course, there’s the whole running out of things to do…or not being able to go inside a building and be warm unless you buy a E3 drink. Not fun. Everything in Rennes closes down at 9pm. Everything but the bars. And some of the cafés, which then turn into bars and no, no they do not serve any more hot chocolate after that. Not fair.

I almost forgot to talk about Valentine’s Day. Ok. That’s it. Haha….yeah, actually, I forgot that it was Candy Day, until I was in class that afternoon and my teacher said something to the Chinese kid behind me. And then I was like, Oh yeah…I’m supposed to be eating chocolate and feeling sorry for myself today…So after class I went with Abby to the marché and we bought dark chocolate and ate it on a park bench in the sun. It was pretty amazing. Dark chocolate + Raspberries = Best Idea Ever. That, or my new favorite breakfast food, which is two pieces of toast, one with raspberry confiture, the other with nutella, sandwiched around a banana. Oh man. So good…

Friday night we got free drinks. That was pretty sweet. I ate dinner at a Chinese place in Rennes and then went with Collin and Mark to a wine bar…where suddenly we met up with about 15 other program people. I’ll just say that large groups of Americans should not travel as large groups of Americans. It gives me the shivers. In the states, ok, yeah, sure, be in big groups. But here, things operate on the mini scale. We were there a while, and then half of “us” left, and the other half walked down to a normal bar.

Right after we ordered I went down to the restroom, which was interesting. The French don’t care about a lot of things. So there’s this bathroom. It’s got a sink, a urinal, and a door leading into where the toilet is. People just stand in the bathroom, waiting in line. I’ve kinda gotten used to finding the bathroom in places and waiting in line for the pot while French dudes just come up and pee standing right next to me. Awk-ward! Rather, kinda funny, especially when no one else cares. While in line a girl standing next to me asked me a question. Not only was it really loud in there and I couldn’t hear her, she spoke really fast and with Argot (French slang). I asked her to repeat it, and when I still didn’t catch it she asked where I was from. I think I physically felt my shoulders slump.

“America.”

“Oh, I’m going to study there!” Of course you are, I thought. You all do. But then we had a nice, short, franglais conversation while standing next to the guy who was peeing. When I got back upstairs, all my friends were grinning and telling me that I missed the best thing in the world. Apparently the bartender had come up to the table with our drinks, but when he took the first one off the tray, everything got unbalanced and he dropped about five bottles of cider onto Sophia’s lap. The plus was that we got free drinks. The minus is that now Sophia needs to get her coat drycleaned, and it’s probably gonna be hyper cher. She and Jessica, who’d been sitting right next to her, smelled just lovely the rest of the night.

At 00h30, Jessica and Sophia and I got on our bus to go home. The fun part of that was being with all the highschoolers. The drinking age in France is 16, so it’s always pretty interesting when we’re out late at night. It doesn’t matter if we’re in a bar, or leaving a movie, there are drunk teenagers everywhere. It’s like they’re following us. In the states there are still drunk teenagers, but they’re generally hiding behind buildings. Here they have a problem with 12 year-olds buying beer and stuff from the marché. 12.

There’s also this relatively new law in France that makes smoking in public places interdit (forbidden). So wasn’t it a nice surprise when we were on the bus, and not only did those kids pull out cigarettes, but some pot too. That was nice of them. I got home smelling like stuff I don’t smoke; I can’t wait for tomorrow if for the only reason that lundi is washing day.

Saturday Jessica and I met at the canal near our houses (it takes about 15 minutes for me to walk to her house) and walked for a little bit before we wandered back to her house, met up with Sophia, and did a little exploring of Saint Grégoire. We found the mall. And Target. Get this, it’s spelled “Géant,” pronounced [zjay ah]. You know how at home we all say that we got stuff from “Tar-get” and pretend to say it with the French accent? Yeah, it pretty much sounds like that. It was nice. What’s funny about the French malls is that you’ll be walking and window shopping, thinking to yourself, “Shoes, shoes, jackets, bookstore, boulangerie, tshirts, creperie, shoes, shoes, boulangerie…” They sell bread everywhere.

Oh, some definitions:

Boulangerie: bakery

Patisserie: bakery that sells sweet things

Creperie: makes crêpes, galettes

Epicerie: oh wow I can’t remember…something with spices….

Charchuterie: Butchery

Librairie: Bookstore

Bibliotheque: Library (yeah, that one’s confusing)

We bought a box of five pains au chocolat, went back to Jessica’s house, stuck them in the microonde, and started a cute French chick flick which I didn’t get to finish cause I had to go home for dinner. After dinner I went back to the centre ville (downtown Rennes) and met Collin and Mark and that’s how the Night of What Not to Do began.

I call it that because while nothing major went wrong, tiny things did. I laughed then, and I laugh now, but for future reference:

Samedi soir: no one does anything. Some bars even close early (10ish).

All the college kids are gone by this time. All the highschooler’s parents have grounded them for whatever happened the night before. There literally is almost NO ONE in the city on Saturday nights. It would have been fine had it been warm. We could have just sit outside and hung out. But non, it was freezing, and in order to sit inside somewhere we would have to buy something.

Collin and I were being bums and didn’t want to spend any money. I felt kinda dumb, actually; it was almost my fault that we were en ville without anything to do…Mark had said he was bored, I knew Collin’s family was gone for the weekend, so I just told them to meet me at République. How was I to know that Saturday night was the night that everyone was somewhere else? Well, that was leçon #1 anyway. Instead of just giving up all the way and heading home at about 10:30 (My bus had come in just after 9) we tried rather half-heartedly to find something else to do.

It didn’t work. We found nothing. At 11 we were standing in front of the kebab place (and I use the phrase “the” kebab place quite loosely, there are really hundreds of them) trying to decide for the seventh time what would be worth our while. Finally Collin says, “Ok, I’m gonna go home.” I pulled out my phone to check the time and started laughing. “What?”

“My last bus was four minutes ago. I have to be here another hour and a half.”

The guys looked at me, and seriously, I’ve never felt like a more horrid person before. You know, like that party pooper who, unlike all the other party poopers, actually does try to be fun, yet always seems to find themselves in situations where they can’t do anything right? Yeah, that was totally me. Haha…we ended up at Collin’s house for about half an hour, and I got home just before 1am, lucky me. At least that time there wasn’t any pot. Although I’ll have to hand it to Collin and Mark, they didn’t desert me, though if I had been them I totally would have been working that plan out in my mind.

This is why it kinda sucks to be in the suburbs. Of course, if anyone else wants to go running or be outside, they have to walk to a park, whereas I have a canal literally around the corner. And I don’t have to hike to the bus stop, like some people have to. And I do love my parents. But when I go out with friends and have a public transport-inforced curfew, I get kinda annoyed. What’s more is Jessica and Sophia found out the taxi ride from Rennes centre ville to my stop in St. Grégoire is E20. Split three ways that wouldn’t be too bad. Also my dad told me today that one of the last girls who lived with them would always walk home, no matter what time it was.

I’m not sure how I feel about doing that, but it is only 6km. Not too bad, and it’s all along a main road. I don’t know. I’ll probably call up a friend en ville before trying to hike it. As much as I love walking, I hate getting lost even more.

[…]Now it’s almost dinner time, instead of early afternoon…..not that it really matters to you what time it is, but that’s what it is. We’ll probably be eating in 45 minutes, but of course I’m already hungry. Virginie and Elisa are over tonight, and I think Pierre and Lola are coming too. Sweet. A night of not knowing what in the world anyone is talking about! Yay! Haha….actually it won’t be too bad. If I really need to know what’s going on Michel will notice and fill me in.

Today I went to an art exhibit with my père. It was at Les Champs Libre (The Free Fields…yeah I dunno). It’s a new building, and actually pretty. If you know anything about French architectural theory, you’ll maybe understand what I mean by “actually pretty.” The short version is that when you’re French, and when you’re building something, what counts is what is going to end up on the inside. No one cares that everything is made out of cement and no one can tell the houses apart. It’s built, tada!

But this building is only half cement, and has glass and decorative rock, and it’s pretty sweet. I’m actually not exactly sure what all is in it, but there’re at least a handful of museum showrooms and a library.

The exhibit that we saw was of Bernard Collet (I’m pretty sure I spelled that right). He’s an artist who has made hundreds of posters and publicités for music festivals, books, banks, you name it. They’re super creative, and I really liked his style. Cooky, is the way I’d describe it. He was just so incredibly imaginative. There was one piece, which wasn’t actually a poster, but it was a room made up to look like an artist’s studio. In the middle almost against the wall was a desk, on asleep on the desk was a giant bear. The thing with the bear is that it was actually a human mannequin dressed to look like a man who’d fallen asleep while working, but wearing brown gloves and with the head of a bear. The room had the sounds of snoring playing.

My favorite part of the sleeping bear was that there was a dream cloud suspended over his head. A projector was showing what he was dreaming about. Best dream ever: He was a ninja bear in the forest fighting a robot who really liked to dance. I smiled a lot watching that movie. There’s just something about robots and lasers…..

On the way home we almost went into the Musée des Beaux-Arts (normal art museum), but we didn’t have time. Michel promised that we would go soon. There’s an exhibit there of –get this – American western art. Haha. I still would like to see it, and Michel really wants to see it, so I look forward to next time.

And now I just wait for dinner to be ready. Well, technically I think we’re just waiting for Pierre and Lola to come. I’m pretty sure they’re driving in from Vannes, though, and I don’t know how long that takes. I was just having fun playing with my cousine Elisa. She likes to steal my shoes and try to lock my door. Actually, she did figure out how to lock the door to the sale à manger, haha. She’s adorable.

Another good thing about when Pierre gets here, besides being able to eat, is that my wifi stopped working, and I haven’t been able to get on for a couple days. I didn’t say anything at first, 1. I didn’t know how to start 2. It happens a lot in the states and I thought I’d be able to just wait it out 3. I didn’t have the faintest idea how to suggest fixing it.

But then when Virginie came she brought her computer and tried to get on and it didn’t work for her either, so yay, I didn’t have to do anything! Wow, what a loser I can be. Oh well. I’ll be assertive some other time. I just hope that he can get it to work again, or knows who to call to get it to work (he is the one who set it up in the first place) because I was supposed to be doing Lyon/vacances research this weekend and haven’t been able to.

Oh yeah, that’s the last thing. Does anyone else just love that we have two weeks of school and then a week-long break? Cause I know that I love it. I love the French and their mandatory vacances. Magnificent idea, that. So from the 25 février to 1 mars, I’ll be in Lyon…along with the rest of France, apparently. Going to Lyon over winter break is like going to Aspen right after getting two feet of snow. Everyone else wants to do it too.

But I’m still looking forward to it