Since I waxed at the world last time and didn't get to talk about my trip to the Loire Valley, here it is, along with today's update.
LOIRE VALLEY
-Chenonceau was nice, but a tiny bit of a letdown. This probably sounds uber spoiled and unappreciative, but it's not like I haven't seen a huge mansion before, faux-furnished and with a million gaggling tourists speaking in every which tongue.
-Wine tasting was OFF THE HOOK. That is to say, getting drunk for free was off the hook. I think I had about 6 glasses. (!) It was really fun to see everyone open up. I got to talk to some people really freely who I never normally would've talked to, like Natira and Kaylee. And it was nice. :) I wish we all had more time to get to know one another and party together. I really wanna get drunk with everyone.
-Chambord, by contrast, was brilliant and so much fun. This was mostly due to 1) the amazing double-helix spiral staircase which is made of white/taupe marble and amazingly fun to go up/down and also look at and 2) BOATING. I'll admit, me and Candace failed on our little bike trip à deux, but being on the boat on the river with Analiese, Candace, Jose and Iris was definitely the best part of the day. We made a really good group and the pictures were beautiful and the weather was beautiful and the breeze was blowing and I felt as relaxed as I've felt here in a long time. Compared to uber-urban Paris, being out in the country was freaking amazing.
-Tours was a nice little town, and it'd be nice to spend more time there. Our hotel bathroom had a shower you could actually hang above your head (SCORE!!) but there was literally NO shower curtain or barrier of any kind (what the fck?) so I basically made a flood in the bathroom. -___-;;
TODAY (Monday July 20th...my 23rd day here!)
-Class is SO BORING. I could not care less about passé simple. But it's good that we're moving onto prepositions...a nice much-needed and somewhat-never-learned review.
-We went to Marché des Puces! If you take line 4 all the way to the top (Porte de Clignancourt) you enter into a magical world where lots of different people are trying to sell you objects of every size, shape, age, color, and price range, on the street. Clothes, shoes, accessories, furniture, drug paraphenalia, ethnic things, modern things, antiques...it's like the UCI vendor faire x 10000000000. They have a lot of cheap vendor faire-esque clothes and items. Sometimes the merchants are little too aggressive...I tried to stay away from the hip-hop-blasting, loudly-shouting, overcrowded "modern clothes & shoes" section and drifted more towards the quite, cute, quaint, old-people-antiques section. MUCH more my thing, at least in this situation. (I'm such a marm! I never want to go out, and I'm tired all the time, and now I like old people antiques. Jesus.) I browsed a whole lot and ended up getting gifts for my freeeeends WHICH SHALL REMAIN SURPRISES. :)
-Me and Candace had fun playing FIND OBJECTS. We looked on the ground for things. I found a ripped letter from 1958, a coin from Finland, and basically a bunch of metal things (a spiral, a coupe-papier, a screw, some random sticks, etc.) While we were walking I looked around and we were in the outskirts of Paris, in the ZUP, and I was reminded of La Haine.
-Afterward, we did AMELIE TOUR 2010. If you haven't seen Amelie, you won't appreciate this part. We went to Gare de L'est, where she meets Nino, where she keeps seeing the phantom photo-taker, where she gets trapped at night, where they keep showing the clock, etc. Obvi it didn't look the same, but you could kind of recognize it. Then we did PHOTOMATON just like in the movie, except it was different cause it was all modern and not cute and antiquey. -_-; THEN we went to LES DEUX MOULINS in Montmartre, the restaurant where she works! Except there was no tabac and no glass sign! But other than that stuff looked pretty much the same! We got drinks there (RIDIC expensive) and took touristy pictures (I forgot my CF card and so took pictures on Beth's camera, much to her dismay.)
ANYTHING ELSE I'VE BEEN THINKING
-Good things about homestay: I get my own room (most share), my host mom is nice, she cooks dinner every night for us and listens to my preferences, I can improve my French by talking to her, she helps me or tries to help me when I don't know where something is, the cats are cute
-Eh things about homestay: it's pretty small and dingy and old, there is cat hair EVERYWHERE on EVERYTHING, my towel and clothes smell bad and kind of like mold, I think because she line dries them, she's sometimes weirdly demanding/not considerate (i.e. after I slept under just the comforter for just one night, she took it away and said I can't use it because it's not hygenic for me to sleep under it and she'd have to wash it.)
-I think I need to stop eating chocolate/ice cream and drinking Orangina every day. Did you know?! In the kitchen of every house there are two faucets: one for water and one for Orangina! It runs in the rivers here! :)
Oh, how I could go on, I have soooo many pensées, but I need to do my HW and upload my pics and OtHeR ShItZ.
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