June 6th - 10th: Laying Low

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I'll start this with information relevant mostly to those of you back in Michigan, I will be returning on July 4th in the late evening! A number of factors influenced my decision to do so, but I won't go into them here. How exciting, I know!

So since the champagne tasting on the 5th of June, not all that much has happened. The next Sunday, June 6th, was a free day, which means we were given the entire day to do our own thing. Oddly, everyone seemed to sleep in until 11:45am, at which point we all woke up and hung out on Facebook for a while. Facebook is a way of life here since we really don't have all that much to do during the weekdays, so you'll probably hear me reference it a lot. Then, in the evening we began our project for our Project Management class, which is to plan a conference for SWE (Society of Women in Engineering). This was chosen by the 3 girls in my group because I think they have already done it before in real life, so it really aids us in our project, especially since the class is running behind and we have a little under two weeks left to do all our stuff. After that, we went back on Facebook, watched the movie "Step Brothers", I think, and then went to bed. Overall, a pretty uneventful and relaxing day.

The next day, classes resumed. We only had Project Management from 10a-12p, so that wasn't too bad at all. After class, a few of us went to the Walmart/Meijer equivalent here in France, Carrefour. At Carrefour, Jason and I were very successful on our trip, purchasing stuff to drink, snacks, and best of all a pack of 11 full-length baguettes for 4.20 euro. Following our trip to Carrefour, we returned back to the dorms. All the girls went downtown to go shopping so the guys hung around at the dorms. We did what we usually do these days during the week, which is sit around on Facebook, gossip, and listen to music. After a while, we went outside and played some soccer while we waited for the girls to return. We never saw them come back, so we went inside and resumed our previous activities. Later, Amanda came in only to inform us that they had returned more than 3 hours ago and we had missed them. This was quite unfortunate, but once we had all reunited, I think we watched another movie for the rest of the night. Again, pretty uneventful, but also relatively stress-free.

On Tuesday we had French, Project Management, and French Civilization. French was French, exciting as usual with good ol' Francois at the helm. I still am not convinced I learned much French, but he was fun so it wasn't so bad. In Project Management, we presented our project topic, as did everyone else. Then the teacher lectured the rest of the time. In French Civilization, he told us more about our final presentation, and our group decided to do it on the Guillotine, so that should be more exciting than the class itself. In the evening, about 15 of us went downtown to a rugby bar called Les Furious. It was a very interesting and unique place because it had some wall decor that seemed to be of vikings or barbarians or something. The people who ran the place were really nice and everyone had a lot of fun there. Around midnight, we all headed back. I was tagged in a bunch of photos at this place, so feel free to check it out. On a side note, that is the case for a lot of the trip. My camera was dead for about a week, so I just let other people take the pictures and tag me. So, that's a good way to see more pictures than just mine. Cool.

On Wednesday, we had just Project Management and French Civilization, and it was just more of the same stuff, so I'll omit the gruesome details. Wednesday night, we just hung out in a large group and talked for pretty much all of the night. Our group for project management also got together and made nice strides on our project, so that was good. This was one of the days with almost nothing exciting to post here, so I apologize for the dryness of this day and actually, this entire post.

On Thursday, things got much more exciting after class. We had the standard French, Project Management, and French Civilization classes. The exciting part of this was that this was the final French language class, so no more waking up at 8:30am! Aside from that, nothing happened in class worth mentioning. After class, Amanda, Jessie, Alvaro, Jason, and I all made a run to the outlet mall to pick up some nice, button-up shirts for clubbing in Paris. This was a fairly successful trip. At the first store we went to, Jason and I bought matching brown striped shirts for 25 euro a piece with the approval of Amanda and Jessie. We moved on to another store, which was a little more hectic. Here, unlike the last store, they didn't even attempt to speak English even though the people we talked to admitted to knowing some. We found (matching, again) black shirts, but instead of trying those on, they had us try on other shirts that were the same size, except ugly and green. This confused us, especially since the sizes weren't consistent with the other store, and after a long while trying to talk back and forth with them (to no avail), we ended up getting our shirts for 30 euro, another good price. The trip in total was 2 hours, and we were very excited with the outcome. When we got back, we had to rush to do laundry because everyone wanted to go out. As it turns out, they left without us anyways, so there was no need to hurry. We ended up going out to eat pizza with some kids from University of Buffalo. Although they are all very nice, when they're all together the noise level in unbelievable and overwhelming, so that may be a one-time experience for me here. The pizza was delicious, as is usual in France. We even bumped into the UofM people who had ditched us, so we teased them for a bit with nasty looks and over-dramatized frustration. After we had some fun with them, we all decided to meet at Dixie's, a bar, after we finished dinner. At Dixie's, we played some games, made a lot of noise, and had an excellent time. Following Dixie's, we went to the Cotton Club and danced for a couple of hours. There was a lot of large-group dancing, so much so that at many points throughout our time there, no one else was able to use the dance floor. It was a lot of fun, as Cotton Club usually is. Following the Cotton Club, Luis, Amanda, Jason, and I had a very interesting walk back to UTT to say the least. I can't elaborate on that point, but let me just say it was a hoot. We arrived back around 2am after a 2 hour walk (usually 40 minutes), and I stayed awake for a while after that until I got too tired to stay up. It was a great end to a fairly low-key week, and a fun thing to do before we moved on to bigger and better things the next morning: Paris!!!

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