Ice Dancing on the Discoteque Rink

Let's see, let's see...

Tuesday we woke up and went to school (I KNOW SOMETHING NEW AND EXCITING!) We had lunch at St. Nicholas (or a similar name to that) which was good and cheap. I had a quiche and some sort of coconut tart. Conversation class involved us talking about movie stars and whether or not they should be involved with humanitarian campaigns. After school, I came back to the house and decided to try and go for a run. The run was pretty much a fail though. I thought I would just run around and take random twists and turns, but run in the area of my house instead of the centre ville. Half way through my run, my iPod freaked out and stopped working so I stopped to try and fix it. After being unsuccessful for 5+ minutes I gave up and looked up to decide where to go next and I had no idea where I was. Not being somebody who runs often I got a little panicky and started walking in the direction I thought was right. Luckily I have a decent sense of direction and was able to find my way home fairly quickly (though I was close to getting on the freeway to Barcelona.) When I got back to the room though, the little lamp on the table made a loud noise and the bulb went out. Then our computers stopped charging, and then when I got in the shower it was scalding hot and suddenly freezing. We found out when we went down to dinner that the house didn't have any gas, that's why the room was freezing cold, the water was freezing cold (and maybe why our computers stopped charging?) Since there was no gas to cook dinner we ate pate (which is good if you don't think about what it's made out of for too long), salad, ham, and cheese. Though apparently I made a faux pas. When everyone was serving themselves the pate the cheese plate was right by my plate, normally when we have a cheese course the cheese isn't on the table until it's time to eat it-but today it was on the table so I thought it was part of dinner. So, while others were serving the pate, I served myself some cheese, but my host mom laughed at me and said something about having two courses on my plate at one time OOPS-another piece of french culture little known to the American student! However, my mistake wasn't as big as the one Kate made next. After dinner everyday we have a piece of fruit or yogurt for dessert. Today, we were clearing the table for the last course and Kate started gathering cups-I mentioned to her that we might still have yogurt so we should wait but she's just way more helpful than I am! When the host mom saw her bring the cups into the kitchen she said, "what are you doing!? how are we going to drink now?" When we finally sat down to our dessert (I had chocolate pudding) the host mom threatened Kate with a dictation, I think it was a joke but with our mom it's very difficult to tell-she WOULD do something like make us write a dictation... Since we didn't have our computers, Kate went to sleep soon after dinner and I finally finished reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

When we went downstairs for breakfast (already running late) there was a giant plate of onions and a note asking for them to be peeled and placed on the table in the garden. Given that we've had such a problem with our host mom liking us I figured we should do them all, so we did it as fast as we could and were only a couple minutes late to school. After school on Wednesday we went back to Chez Canaille for lunch. I had Gnocchi with red sauce and a Crepe Sucre. We had a nice leisurely lunch and then decided to go get our train tickets for Nice. But, when we got to the train station we found out tickets for this weekend were 90 euros! Everybody thought that was a little ridiculous so we decided to go check out how much the busses were only to find out there are no intercity french busses. Apparently the trains believe they will lose business if there is a domestic bus line so they have a monopoly on domestic transportation (and with prices like that they WOULD lose business so I guess they're right) we were supposed to meet a couple people from the group to go ice skating at four so we hopped the train to go to the rink. The ice rink was like nothing I've seen before. there were hills and tunnels and disco lights! Not having skated since I was about 10 I thought I did pretty well (only falling once...) I'll expect a call from the olympic team any day now... especially since ice dancing means you don't have to jump-I could do that right? When we got home for dinner and sat down our host mom thanked us so much for peeling the onions and said she had so much extra time because of it she made an apple tart for us for dessert that night. She said she knew we did it because she'd already asked everyone else in the house if they'd done it-which means she thought we'd be the last to do it... oh well. But the onion tart that they made was really really good, it was flavored with mustard. We had pate again for an appetizer and the apple tart for dessert. YUM! After dinner Kate had a job interview and I went to meet some of the girls for drinks (I might have told my host mom coffee...) We all got really girly drinks tonight, I had a Coco Loco, and a French Coffee and Le Petit Nice and then some sort of warm lemony drink at the Angleterre. Then we went home (a very quiet night)

Today we went to Cafe Georges for lunch. I had pumpkin soup (which was AMAZING) and some kind of quiche which was only okay. But it was very affordable. For conversation class we discussed what we thought about "baby drop off boxes" at least from what I understood of the conversation... After school I went for a run again but this time I tried to stay where I knew I wouldn't get lost and it worked out a lot better. The weather was beautiful today so it was really nice to run (mid fifties I even wore a skirt without tights... in January). Before dinner, our host mom told Kate she was very rude for coming into the house with saying Bonsoir (Kate had headphones in) oh well. Dinner was Vietnamese tonight-green beans with ground beef mixed together and white rice (with an orange for dessert)

Tomorrow: we find out if we can go to Nice and Monaco (hold your breath and pray to whomever your deity of choice may be for us)

What I'm missing today (besides the people I love): Mexican Food... enchiladas...

Things to do soon: Plan Barcelona and Italy!