Dernière Semaine De Vacances

This would be like Episode 2 of "The Missing Chapters Of The Last Couple Weeks Of My Life."

The day after Halloween was Toussaints, or All Saint's Day.  We didn't really do anything to celebrate, but I pretended to make a big deal out of it haha.  I went to my Marion's house (her mom is my co worker at Bernaudin) that day to give her brother, Thomas, his first private English lesson,  and it was awesome!

He's 15 or 16, plays soccer and video games, and has a really hard time with English.  I found that surprising, because when we were first talking I showed him where I lived on Google Earth and like ten minutes later his mom came in and he started from the view of the globe and zoomed in all the way to my house.  The kid has a phenomenal memory, so I don't know why he struggles with the language barrier.  Maybe it's a left brain/right brain thing? He's really good at math, so I don't know.

Anyway, I told him a little about myself and he told me a little about himself, and then when he realized that I'm a gamer too, it gave us some common ground to talk about - while we played.  We got on his computer and played Team Fortress 2 for probably an hour and just spoke bits of English (but mostly French) while we traded off games.

Fabienne (the mom) bought pizza, and I think there was a seafood, four cheese, pepperoni-esque, and ham.  Pizza here is different, but it's still super good. So anyway, we ate pizza and then Fabienne gave me 20€ and her and Marion took me home.  Not a bad gig in my opinion!

I have no recollection of what I did Thursday.  I think that might've been the day where I was out looking for anything to do, hopping from store to store when I ran into my friend Alex at the register in a clothing store called Kiabi.  Turns out he was only working there for three more days, so it was cool that I saw him! He invited me to go meet up with his model friend and hang out as they went over their routes (for lack of knowledge of modeling terms) for the show that weekend.  Desperate to do anything, and also eager for the chance to meet another French model, I agreed to tag along.

I met Guillemette in her apartment that's actually really close to Ashley's, and after they had drawn out their routes we all went out to eat at this nice-ish restaurant called "Outre Terre."  For like 16€ I got an entrée of some kind of meat paté, duck for the main dish, and a little chocolate cake for dessert.  Apparently it was very French, which is why I got it.  As I said before, the weather sucked all last week, so I didn't have my camera on me to take any pictures :/

Alex invited me to go with him to visit Tournon on Friday, but I had already made plans with Ashley to make cookies so I had to decline.  The next day was just as crappy as it had been all week, as far as weather goes, otherwise known as perfect cookie making weather.  I met up with Ashley at the grocery store and we shopped for a couple of ingredients that I didn't have leftover from the last batch I made, which included a large plastic bowl I used to cover my head as we walked back to her apartment.

We put on music fit for the mood.  Turns out half the songs we listened to were from the Twilight soundtrack.  I thought that was funny. Waaaaahhhhhh it's raining, let's make cookies and get fat so we can put ourselves in danger (cardiac arrest) so our loved ones will come to our rescue!!! Bleh.

I ate my weight in cookies that day.  The dough turned out a little different than usual, as in it stuck like glue to my hands (until I licked it all off).  Fortunately, the cookies turned out fine.  It was a little hard to judge when they were done because they spread out pretty far, resulting in a crunchy outside but a chewy inside.  Apparently it was deliciously impressive to my British friends - a huge relief.

Oh!  That also was the first day I did laundry since I've been here.  I remember because I hung my soaking wet coat next to other hanging articles of clothing strewn across the room to dry.  If you would have walked into my room without knowing what was happening, you may have been...confused.

My host family has a (small) washing machine, but no drier, which is typical here.  They just hang their clothes outside on a big clothes hanger thing.  As I stated before though, the weather had been super crappy so obviously I had to bring the clothes inside. Also, it took a couple days for everything to dry...I wore athletic shorts for underwear for a couple days.

That was it for the week as far as I can remember, but the weekend gets more interesting.  I'll let you nibble on this post while I work on the next one, which WILL have pictures. Of French models. Yep.