The Bike Ride That Never Happened....

Not much has happened since I last posted.  I don't really recall what I did last Saturday.  Probably groceries like I said I'd do.  Maybe some reading.  But Sunday....now that was quite a day.  Colleen and I met Emily at the Comedie, hoping to rent bikes and ride to the beach.  So, we went to the closest place and they told us they were all out of bikes, even though there were like 10 of them outside.  They must have been on hold for people, but grr, why couldn't we have them?!  So then we went to the tourist office, but you have to give them 150E just to rent one bike!  That's $200!!  You get it back afterward, but it's just not right handing over $200 for a bike you're using for half the day!  So they told us we could go to the train station and rent bikes there by just giving them an ID to keep until returning the bikes.  So we strolled over there and what do you know?  They were ALSO out of bikes!!  How does this happen?  We assume it was because it was a Sunday afternoon and since nothing much is open, everyone had the same idea as us.  But it just wasn't fair.  So we wandered back over to the tourist office (thank goodness all these places are nearby eachother) and asked about taking a bus to the beach, which really defeated the purpose: we hadn't really wanted to go to the beach just to go, we wanted to ride bikes to the beach.  But the bus idea wouldn't work out anyway because the next bus was really soon and the last bus to bring us home was in an hour from when we'd catch the bus to the beach.  We'd have to walk to the next 2 stops to get home, and we had no idea how far apart they were, or even if you could walk to them, so we didn't go to the beach.

Instead, we walked over to the Arc de Triomphe to see if we could walk up to the top (a lot of things were open that weekend because it was a Patrimony weekend or something like that), but the line was really long so we walked to the Plant Garden instead, which was absolutely gorgeous.  It reminded me of a mix between Sonnenberg Gardens and the Botanical Gardens (woot, Kelly!!  Botanical Gardens!!).  Then we went into the old Medical School because it had some old books on exhibit, which was pretty cool.  Emily read Dante in it's original form, so she felt very accomplished!!  Then we went inside the Cathedrale: it was massive and gorgeous!!  I would actually love to see a mass in there.  And yes, I did just say I would like to see a mass.  Haha, please don't all die of shock.  It's just that the cathedrale was absolutely gorgeous and I can only imagine it when it's filled up with people.  Or imagine a wedding!!  How pretty!!

Afterward we wandered around, ran into Maria and Arielle again (who we'd already seen at the Plant Garden), and then said our goodbyes.

This week has just been school school school.  What fun!!  Not really, though....  It went by so slow, probably the slowest week since I got here, even slower than the first week!!  Hopefully it picks up a little, geez!  I mean, France is great and all, but I want to be with my love and my Mocha and my family :)  My classes are going well.  However, by the hour and a half mark of my 3 hour classes I can no longer focus.  And then I'm completely exhausted afterward, even though I didn't do a damn thing!!  I've had 3-hour long classes at Buff State (Zola, for example), but a) Zola was a 5-person class so you were always involved in the conversation, and b) my speech class was half lecture, then the second half people giving speeches, which was entertaining.  But when someone tries going on for 3 hours about the basics of religious anthropology, you almost want to kill yourself.  I'm sure I'll get a bit more used to it.  Thursdays are the worst, though, just because it's 2 3-hour poetry classes.  I know everyone must be wondering at this point if I am intentionally trying to torture myself, and the answer is no.  They just both happened to transfer over to Buff State perfectly and had to be on the same day.  I'm so glad I have off Wednesdays to relax before my day of hell!!  At least my last class, Comparative Literature (Shakespeare and Petrarch....blah!!) keeps me up a bit more because the teacher is Justin Sane's older doppelganger and I am actually quite interested in analyzing English poems in my French class.  Haha.  I feel bad for those French students having to read Shakespeare in English, though, because that's even difficult for me.

So then yesterday Emily and I went out for our weekly lunch of crepes.  We are regulars now, and the waitress knows us and even asked us if we were students or just living here for fun or for jobs.  When we walk in she greets us like friends, it's rather neat!  Then we planned on seeing a movie, but we just missed all the afternoon shows, so we went back to her place to plan daytrips and then decided that since it was raining (it rained the night before and that day!!  I was in heaven!!  I didn't even want to take my umbrella out but Emily whined a bit, so I opened it up!!) we'd go to an exhibit called Le Reve Americain (The American Dream).  It was amazing.  It had photos of America, including some of people watching the twin towers fall, which I thought was kind of weird.  Our favorite was of an older couple holding hands and crossing a street in a small town to an antique store.  Very cute.  Then there was an Elvis exhibit, where some guys dressed up as Elvis and a photographer took pictures of peoples' expressions.  It was hilarious!  If there's a book out by these guys, I'm buying it!  Then we watched some short movies, my favorite being the one about Alaska, as it showed a 2 second clip of an old-school hockey game and a 30-second clip of Don Cherry and the poor bastard that has to work with him on Hockey Night In Canada!!  I was ecstatic and Emily had to deal with it, poor thing!!  Plus, that video had snow in it and moose, so it was clearly amazing.  Another cool one was about the videographer's great grandpa who had come to Cleveland from les Cevennes in France and it was just funny because it talked about how he gambled and the first thing he won the first time he played was money, a car, and a building.  Haha.  It just had typical pictures of him and his American wife, like with the car, the bike, the house.  But it was funny because at the end it had a quote from an old lady relative back in France saying something funny.  I don't remember what it was, but we were laughing so hard.  In fact, we were laughing through all these videos because we totally understood everything, and the French people probably had no idea what we were laughing at!  The 3rd video wasn't so cool, though.  It was about druggies in NYC.  Interesting, but not as good as the other two.  Then we parted and today I just hung around, did a lot of work, talked to Carl through Skype IM for a long time and then tried to webcam it, but that didn't work, so we IMed for a long while longer, and then I made dinner, and then I talked to my wonderful family for about 5 minutes!!  And that was my week!

I love you all and hope everything is wonderful :)

Kiss Mocha for me!!

Luvvies,
Heather