What I Learned Today: You don't eat nutella after the age of 16.

Another day of orientation. It was really almost all useless. Well unless I had been planning to get super drunk every night and be rowdy around police officers, then perhaps it would have been informative. I am considering taking a class at an outside university after the academic lecture though. I’m not sure why since all she did was discuss French bureaucracy and inefficiency in action. I am still undecided at the moment. For lunch they gave us crab profiteroles, young duck with turnips and chocolate mousse. While the crab did not actually taste like crab, it was still not very appealing to me so I ate a couple bits of the profiterole part, a couple bites of the duck, some turnips (which were too sweet) and most of the mousse (but that was also too sweet).

After orientation, Abbey and Brad decided to venture out to the ‘burbs because that was the only place I knew of off the top of my head for Abbey to buy her cell phone. We had a great example of French inefficiency in action while trying to navigate the metro stop with our beloved and crippled Abbey (she’s on crutches at the moment if I haven’t mentioned that before). We took one elevator down a level and then had to change to a different elevator to go down another level (this was kind of miraculous in itself for France considering most metro stations only have stairs). We hit the elevator button and waited for it to come from below, waited some more and some more. Finally it headed up towards us, and kept going! Ok, we thought, it will catch us on the way down. So finally it comes down to us and we get on. We push the button for the level below us and watch the count down above the door for the requisite 30 seconds it remains open. Finally the doors close and guess what, we’re heading up again! We stop at the upper level, pick up some more people, make another stop at the level where we got on at and then finally down to the level we wanted in the first place.

We eventually made it to my suburb, got Abbey her cell phone and then Abbey and Brad agreed to accompany me to Monoprix so I could purchase a couple of forgotten grocery items and some tissues. After much debate I settled on some Kleenex with some sort of additive, though I don’t think they’ll be as good as my Puffs Plus Lotion and Aloe that I love so much. I’ll survive somehow (Abbey is rolling her eyes reading this, I guarantee it!). I then headed back to my apartment because my host mother was making me dinner for the evening and left Brad and Abbey planning a picnic in a nearby park.

When I got back to the apartment I collapsed on my bed and watched some more of the DVD my host mother gave me yesterday to help me improve my French. It’s a fairly recent movie called Une grande année (A Great Year) in French and has Russell Crowe in it. I’m watching it with the French dubbing and subtitles, and it’s quite enjoyable. We had dinner around 7:30 and my host mother served a delicious salad with lettuce, tomatoes and avocado with her homemade salad dressing. Then we had a casserole type dish that was cauliflower and hard-boiled eggs in a béchamel sauce with cheese on top. I ate the double scoop she gave me with a piece of bread and had an apple for dessert. We’re apparently having the leftovers for dinner tomorrow and she also made veal with carrots and onions for another night this week. During dinner my Marie-Claire spoke some about her family and also told me great stories of her and her friends sneaking out of their rooms during the summer holidays late at night to go running around with friends (notably boys – which was definitely not acceptable at the time), it was quite amusing. Apparently her father caught her and her sister once returning home at 4 o’clock in the morning!!

I have my language test in the morning so I should probably head to bed so I can get a good night’s sleep and not disappoint Michel by being placed in a remedial French course. I had wanted to review some grammar but I’m feeling too tired, perhaps on the metro tomorrow. Wish me luck!