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Published: January 31st 2010
Monday was fabulous—I didn’t have class until 4 so I woke up leisurely and went downstairs to help myself to breakfast (yogurt and toast—obviously the bread is the homemade stuff). Then I found a bathroom on the first floor that I didn’t know was there before! Exciting! (A house with three bathrooms—I feel like that’s a lot! And there could potentially be another one attached to the parent’s room, but I feel like that’s one of the those things that I’ll never know for sure…)
I met up with Allison, Denise, Maika, and Steph around 2 to check out the art exhibit that’s in the hôtel de ville right now (city hall) which is being advertised all over town—we went and it was sweet, but it was only like a room of modern art things, and we weren’t allowed to take pictures. We were there for probably twenty minutes, so we decided to get our routine afternoon pastries before class. I got a chocolate éclair which was absolutely amazing. Then we went to our DELF class which was the longest two hours of my life. Everyone was bored out of their minds. Our professor is the typical French professor who is incredibly boring. That class will NOT be a highlight of my time here. But it’s only four hours a week, so I’ll survive.
Monday night there’s a restaurant/bar/pub place that hosts a “café des langues” which is kind of like international student night, where supposedly you can meet lots of other foreign students in Tours, so after dinner Denise and I decided to check it out—we got there probably around 9:10 or so, and the place was packed!!! We seated ourselves at the only table left, which was kind of off by itself—most of the other tables were booths that were almost connected, or my comfy arm chairs gathered around a communal table—we each ordered an “élephant rose” (or pink elephant) which wasn’t actually that good, but we had fun chatting with each other, even though our table was really awfully placed as far as meeting other people. We decided we’d try again next week, but come earlier in order to get a better table. I got back to my house around 10:30, to which my host parents responded, “oh, you’re back early!” (We’re all trying to figure out what time to come back in order to not look like losers to our host parents. Apparently 10:30 is too early, even on a Monday. I’ll aim for 11 next Monday. Although my host parents haven’t been to any parties yet, Annie’s host parents were out Saturday until 4am and can’t believe that we don’t all stay out until that late. We decided that on weekends Annie can come to my house and sleep in my extra bed until like 5am, then go back to her house so her host parents think she’s cool. Haha.)
Tuesday we had our weekly Bucknell rendez-vous at 11:30, which is my only class Tuesdays. Afterward, we went to our usual panini place and ate in le cave (the basement), then Allison and I went to try to get library cards—after browsing around the library and finding the books we wanted to check out, and struggling with communicating with the check out person, we realized that we didn’t have all the correct pieces of ID and such to get a library card. We’re trying again today.
Then we went shopping—there are sweet sales in France in January (I got a sweater for 8 euros—sweet) And we went to FNAC, which is kind of like Borders meets Best Buy and I bought a tweener novel by Meg Cabot in French. It’s called Jade and so far is pretty good—exactly the kind of book that I read in middle school—a 16 year old girl from Iowa goes to spend the summer with her aunt and uncle who live in New York City. Pretty hilarious but it’s fun to read because it’s easy French! Yay!
Then Tuesday evening at 6 we met our “godmothers and godfathers”—sounds weird, right? I guess all the International students get assigned a real live French student who will be nice to us. Mine’s name is Marie and she’s nice, but we ran out of things to talk about pretty quickly because I can only hold my end of a conversation so far in French, we covered where we were from, where we lived, what we were studying, etc. pretty quickly. But we exchanged emails and said if I have any questions to ask her. So I guess that was nice, in addition to being incredibly awkward.
Yesterday (Wednesday) we had our first Tours Artistique class, where we get to learn about France, especially the area around us—it was really interesting and our professor is really nice and enthusiastic, although it’s kind of difficult to listen to a lecture in French for two hours straight no matter what the subject matter is. Then Professor Westbrook and Mme Fazalley met us after class and showed us where this building thing is where we can go and do service learning by helping French African students practice their English so they can pass their tests and not get sent back to Africa. It’s kind of far, and yesterday was probably the second coldest day since we’ve been here (the first coldest day being the day that we had a mandatory walking tour of the city—we have the worst luck). However, it was Wednesday and therefore the Marché des fleurs was in the street and so pretty! We have a project for one of our classes on some aspect of Tours—and whatever we chose we were suppose to interview a REAL LIVE FRENCH PERSON to help us write our paper.
So Allison and I chose the marché des fleurs as our topic. Long story short, it’s kind of intimidating asking these vendors weird questions, especially when they’re trying to sell flowers to people—we didn’t want to encroach upon their business. So we went down the Let’s-just-have-Allison-buy-flowers-for-her-host-mom-and-ask-questions-while-buying route. This however did not work so well. We went up to a flower booth place and browsed at the flowers wondering exactly how we were going to casually find out information. So Allison picked out her flowers and we tried to ask this vendor guy questions while paying. But I don’t think he understood our accents very well. I attempted to ask him if he personally came and sold flowers every Wed and Sat, to which he replied, yes, this market happens twice a week, throughout the entire year. Allison then attempted to ask him where the flowers came from. He was like, what?? And she was like, WHERE?? And he was like, hang on a minute, and motioned that he would put the flowers she had just bought in a bag for her to carry, then handed it to us and waved us au revoir.
So we left, less 5 euros, but plus some flowers—and with essentially no more information. Dejected, we went to her house which was close by and pretended like we were going to do work, when really we just dreamed about our upcoming February break for about two hours until our DELF class from hell.
Wednesday night I returned home around six or so to find Bea cooking in the kitchen. I “installed” myself (that’s the word the French would use anyway) at the kitchen table to chat with her while she was making dinner—she’s in the equivalent of her senior year here, which is really hard (because she’s a genius, and if you want to get good grades in France, you pretty much have to study all the time). So at her school, now every Wednesday until the end of the year she has a 3 hour exam in one of her classes (this week it was her combo physics-chem class). So her new thing is to make dinner on Wednesdays because it’s relaxing and something to do that’s not studying. This week it was a cheese soufflé.
I sat there for a while chatting with her, and offered my help. She asked if I had separated eggs before, to which I was like, yes, so I separated eight of them for her, but of course I broke the yoke of the first one. Haha. I think the egg shells are thinner than at home or something. At least that’s what I’m telling myself.
So we made delicious cheese soufflé—however it took slightly longer in the oven than expected. We had already had our soup course, but when it was time for the main course, the soufflé wasn’t done in the middle yet! Oh no! What can we do? Well, chez du Chazaud, this is no problem whatsoever. Since it would take 20 more minutes, why wouldn’t Bea and Marguerite take advantage of this time to practice music and play some nice piano/French horn music for us? Haha—it was fabulous. I think I might have been placed in the most prodigal family ever. And I love it.
When the soufflé was ready, it was obviously delicious (all thanks to the eggs being separated—ok maybe not) and we had fruit salad with mangos, kiwi, and pineapple for dessert.
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Mom
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Flowers! Soufles!
Wow, Valerie! Your life sounds pretty cultured and exotic compared to good ol' Tualatin! Keep up the humor. . . and good luck with an interview of a real live French person! Can't wait to hear how it turns out.