applause, applause, life is our cause

I've had an Internet outage in my dorm for a few days now. Today marks a clear low: It's raining, gray and chilly in Bordeaux. I've made a lot of progress on homework during my long day of classes, and there's no way I'd rather spend this evening than chatting on Skype with friends and family. Blurgh blegh blah.

sometimes i say i'm sorry even when you say i don't have to

i promise to buy batteries for my camera so this stops being so dull and wordy

Yesterday was Easter, and a pretty lonely and boring one too.

My day went like this:

Woke up and saw the overcast sky, cookie cereal with Colin, shower, agonized over what to wear to lunch, decided on jeans with a cute white top, changed my mind, changed my mind back again, waited for Pierre to pick me up for lunch, lunch with Ethan and the Thomas family (escargot, lamb, roasted vegetables, crème brûlée), home, felt lonely, changed into a dress (because everyone knows that on Easter, you have to wear a dress), started homework, Skyped with Grandma, Grandpa, Aunts Laurie, Barbie, Susie, Uncle Rick, said goodbye, peeled the stringy part out of green beans, danced around my room to The Kooks, finished the green beans, cooked steak dinner with Colin, watched Weeds with Colin, ate cookies with Colin, said goodnight to Colin, went to sleep.

I certainly mean no offense to Ethan, the Thomas family, my family in Cincinnati or Colin when I say that yesterday was "lonely and boring." But it was, as far as Easters go. And I'm not sure why.

Maybe I'm ready to come home.

that's what she said

My friend Cody Meinhardt came to visit me from Paris this weekend. Cody and I met in our orientation group at DePaul in August 2006. Since I transferred to Kent State, we've been in contact only through Facebook, but since he has been studying in Paris this year, he decided to make the 3-hour TGV (Train Grande Vitesse - look it up) ride down to Bordeaux.

Cody also doesn't have classes on Thursdays or Fridays, so he arrived Thursday morning and I picked him up from the train station. Typical Bordeaux weather - intermittent rain, wind, temperatures in the 50s Fahrenheit - had been predicted but it turned out to be a beautiful day. We met Colin for lunch on campus and then I gave him the walking tour of the city center before we reunited with Colin and Ethan in the late afternoon. In the evening, we went to the Frog & Rosbif, an English bar, where the boys ate amazing looking hamburgers (I had an incredible veggie burger) and we all drank beer brewed on premises. It satisfied our commununal mal du pays (homesickness).

The weather took a turn for the worse on Friday but Colin, Cody and I ate breakfast at Karl (unlimited bread, Nutella, confiture, butter, and honey with hot chocolate served in a bowl with whipped cream on top. Then we went to the Musée d'Aquitaine, where neither Colin nor I had ever been before. It was mostly arrowheads and bones dug up in the region, but it was free and a perfect way to get out of the rain. In the evening we went to see "The Burning Plain" starring Charlize Theron and Kim Basinger. I highly recommend this film. Afterwards we all (Christoph, Gudrun, Monika, Alexandra, Massimo, Magda, Colin, Cody and I) went to dinner at Peppone, a wonderfully authentic (even Massimo admitted it) Italian restaurant that I discovered with my parents when they were here in January. Then we went to Dick Turpin's, another English pub, where Raymond met us for a beer.

Saturday I had play practice all day. Our theater class will be presenting an original play on May 15. It's about a troupe of actors who are putting on "Cyrano de Bergerac," but they're really untalented and unprepared the day before the curtain rises. The first act follows their hopelessly ridiculous rehearsals on the eve of the play's debut, and the second act shows their presentation of the play. I play Roxanne, the female lead. We rehearsed for about 8 hours and made progress, but it's hard to pull a play together when most of the actors are only taking the class because it's a requirement.

When I got off play practice, I hopped over to Casino to pick up a few groceries for my vegan curry, which Cody and I whipped up in about 25 minutes before heading to Val and Mariah's for a vegan dinner. It was incredible. I love having friends who love to cook (and who are good at it). There were stuffed peppers, cinnamon quinoa, soup, salads, and even chocolate cake! Tons of wine, too, of course. I wished that more of our French friends had been able to make it. Most of them have rarely, if ever, heard the French word for "vegan" - végétalien - and don't believe that eating that kind of food can be enjoyable. Oh well, more for us!

Sunday morning Colin, Cody, Massimo and I went to the market on the quay and grabbed some mini canelé before putting Cody on the tram to the train station. We introduced Massimo to some of our market favorites, like fricassée de calamars with potatoes and salami and cannelettes, which are crêpes that taste of canelé.

I spent Sunday afternoon/evening in bed, resting and daydreaming...

Such a delicious weekend.

soleil et beau temps

I'm still sick. I've traded fever-like chills for a hacking cough. Still, it's beautiful today, and warm (73 Fahrenheit) and I won't be stopped from spending the afternoon outside on the lawn with a book.

I also have a rock-hard baguette, eggs, milk, and maple syrup. Looks like French toast for dinner.

sticks and stones

I know I've been a really deplorable blogger lately. I've completely glossed over my trip to Italy, which was fabulous. Colin and I spent six days in sunny Rome visiting all the major tourist attractions on a student budget, meaning we decided not to pay to see anything. As a result, we settled for seeing the Colosseum from the outside and didn't visit the Vatican Museum (this is still something I would like to do someday, with the right tour guide). We did, however, make a mandatory one euro "donation" to Santa Maria della Concezione, a church whose crypt was decorated with the bones of over 4000 monks. Talk about macabre interior design! Chandelieurs constructed from rib cages, walls stacked with femurs and skulls, and a few monks who were completely whole and mummified from the dry air. Some had skin on their faces, still, and bits of their beards. Gew. It was unbelievably creepy and cool, simultaneously. It looks like this:




(We weren't allowed to take pictures, so photo credit goes to http://www3.sympatico.ca/tapholov/pages/bones.html)

In other news, Michela just spent five days in France with me. We started with a couple of days in Paris and finished back in Bordeaux. It was just what I needed after I've been feeling so homesick lately. More on that (and pictures) to come.

I'm sick. I think I may have the flu. Body aches, sore/achy throat, pain in my ears, and a headache that comes and goes. And on my way to the grocery store with Colin this morning, I tripped when I was jumping over a barrier at knee height and fell flat on my face. Most of the damage seems to be on my knees and the heel of my hands.

An inscription in Santa Maria della Concezione reads, in several languages, "What you are now, we once were; what we are now, you shall be." No kidding! I feel like I'm falling apart.

let me tell you what i do when my day is over (let's get this party started)

I've picked up running again, which feels really good. The weather has been generally in the mid-50's Fahrenheit and sunny, which is a nice change after the usual gray drizzle that is this city where I live.

Next to my building there's this small block whose perimeter, I think, measures about a quarter of a mile, which is perfect for keeping track of how far I run as long I don't mind running in circles (which, of course, I don't). So yesterday I did ten laps or about 2.5 miles. I'm not sure how long it took me, but it was short enough that I didn't collapse and long enough that I felt pretty awesome and glisten-y when I got home. (Girls don't perspire and we definitely do not sweat - we glisten.)

Today when I got home from class I changed straight into leggings and a tee shirt and grabbed my iPod, prepared to do at least eleven laps. (Wow!) Then I bumped into my friend Vincent, who was on his way home from class. I was supposed to give my first English lesson to Vincent only an hour or so later. After a quick hello-goodbye (or "salut-à toute," as it were), I was on my way, suddenly painfully aware of how ridiculous I looked, running in circles. So much for that. I took off in another direction and tried to zone out to my music instead of dwelling on the tedious job of mapping out my route afterward to find out how far I'd run.

About two minutes in, I was reminded by my legs locking up that I had forgotten to stretch last night. After 23 minutes and 28 seconds (I added up the lengths of the songs on my iPod playlist) I absolutely had to give in to the pain. I walked it off, meandering home to stretches and a hot shower awaited me.

My English lesson with Vincent went pretty well. Since it was our first, we just talked in English for an hour and I noted the mistakes that he repeated. Next week we're going to work on his English résumé. All throughout, though, my back was seriously hurting right here:



Oh! It aches. I should probably be alternating hot and cold every 20 minutes but I can only make hot (dry rice in a dish towel closed with a hair tie).

The major downside to my back hurting is that I'm quite uncomfortable sitting in my wooden desk chair, to which I have duct-taped myself for the rest of the night and into the wee hours of the morning pending the completion of some serious homework. The upside of being taped to a chair is that I've been able to do the laborious task of mapping out my run. Turns out my circle is actually .32 miles, meaning I ran 3.2 miles last night. Tonight I ran much less, only 2.4 miles.

This post has already consumed much too much of my precious homework time. Taking an Aspirin like a good girl and signing out for the night.