vive les vacances!

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i only have 4 more days left of school before my first vacation! i'm very excited. school here is interesting and everything, but i'd prefer traveling any day. my mom is coming and we're going to florence and milan together. it's going to be absolutely splendid. but enough about the future, what is there to say about my last week or so in lille? hmm...not much actually. i've been taking it very easy, doing some homework, sticking to my running schedule, cooking delicious meals in my room, just enjoying life and trying not to be stressed. i have to write my first real french paper for a class next week.....it's an explication du texte, and i haven't a clue what to do exactly because it's the ONE teacher that i can hardly understand because he mumbles....in french....and i just can't follow that. hopefully he'll explain it in detail more when he gives us the text.....we'll see. other than that paper, school is going fairly well. i hate my japanese class so much i'm going to try to switch into a higher level, the one i'm in right now is an absolute joke, and i'm learning things i already know, and i really just....well hate it. but i'm also worried that if i skip ahead a level i'll be completely lost (because the levels go by years and not semesters), but i won't know until i try it, and if the higher level is anything like the one i'm in now, i'm sure i'll be able to handle it. i mean....we don't even study kanji in the i'm in now....so ridiculous. anyways. what else? my meetings with my tandem partner are going super well. she is so cute, very typical french. her accent is atrociously french.....just as i'm sure my accent is atrociously american, but we have fun together, she introduces me to her french friends which is great (because all of my friends here so far are foreigners) and we hang out together, i'm actually have lunch with some of them on thursday. they're all very nice. and typhaine (tandem partner) and i have good conversations about differences between france and america, it's pretty swell. saturday we went to go see a movie together, Calouche, it was like a documentary on this famous french comedian who ran for presidency but then dropped out. it was incredibly difficult to understand, but it was also really interesting.....apparently he was really loved in france and i was expecting this movie to be a happy story of his comedic life, but it was more about how his life kind of fell apart at the end, with his wife leaving him, and some minor drug addictions, and it was really surprising for me, but even more surprising for typhaine who didn't really know that side of his life i guess. i dunno...i still thought it was a good film.....i want to watch it again with sub-titles.....so i can actually understand it. what other exciting things can i tell you? oh, actually something awesome. today i found a tiny little organic store in this covered market thing. and it had a lot of random stuff, but i found tofu!! and tempeh!! i was more excited about the tofu though, so i bought some, and made the most delicious tofu stir fry with all sorts of vegetables and i made rice to go with it. sooo good. i really miss asian food here. it's just so ridiculously expensive it you want to go out and get sushi for whatever, and being a poor student, i can't exactly afford 6 sushi rolls that cost 13 euro. so lame. well i know this entry is just a random rant of life in general, but i promise that the next update will include pictures and much more exciting stories.
until then. xoxo.

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