The Rain in Rennes OR Running Away from Farmland

As it has been two terribly long weeks since my last update, I figured I would attempt to edit down my oh-so exciting life into one blog post. It was remarkably easy. Weekdays, whether or not I worked (I’ve had a ridiculous number of classes canceled lately), I have been in farmland, plugging away at the novel, expanding my repertoire of foods I can cook without an oven (I do a lot of boiling and sautéing), and sneaking in a run whenever there’s a half hour without pouring rain (an increasingly rare occurrence).

I’m afraid I don’t have anything all that interesting to say about work due to the aforementioned ridiculous amount of canceled classes combined with holidays. I only worked one hour on Wednesday, so I ended up having a nearly five day weekend. Thursday I didn’t do much, since there were very limited buses due to the holiday, but I was starting to feel a little stir crazy, so I started to investigate what was going on with the assistants in Rennes this weekend. Quite a few of them seemed to be heading out of town, but Julia (who also went to college in WI—we bonded over stories of cold walks to class) invited me to come in and stay overnight at her apartment. I took her up on this and headed into the city Friday afternoon.

She had a couple of options for the evening, and we ended up meeting up with one other assistant, Lauren, and going to see Les Petits Mouchoirs, a French movie. I haven’t seen a movie since being here, which appalls the French, but I was in the mood to be entertained. It was an emotional rollercoaster of a movie with a large cast. One of the things I love about French movies is how they often have several different plots that are eventually woven together, or that connect in some way. It was a good movie, though if it had been slightly less of an emotional rollercoaster, I would not have minded. There were previews for some other movies that caught my interest (well done, people who put together those previews), so I have a few more I’m hoping to see in the next few months.

After the movie we headed out for a late dinner. I was craving pizza (let’s face it, I’m almost always craving pizza, and since I don’t have an oven, it’s a bit impossible to make my own) so we went to grab pizza at either the best or the second best pizza place in Rennes (it depends which assistant you ask) and split a bottle of wine. It was a lovely meal, the pizza was delicious, and I was content. We then went and had some hot chocolate at Lauren’s apartment while we waited for another group of assistants (including two Spanish assistants visiting from Nantes) to finish their dinner. Once they were done, we met up with them and headed off to a bar called Cactus, which is quite the interesting locale. It has a train that goes around the ceiling delivering shots, lots of music, several TVs showing music videos that do not correspond with the music playing, and occasional screams and yells coming from the rooms in the basement. We didn’t stay too late since it was rapidly nearing my pumpkin hour, plus most of the other assistants were getting up early to head off on various day trips.

Saturday morning I finally got to go to Marché des Lices, a huge market held each Saturday in Rennes. I’d wanted to go for a while, but when you’re out in farmland you have to get your act together to get up on a Saturday morning. Julia and I headed over there to meet Emma, and we wandered around. I got some produce (including ROMAINE, yay!), tried lots of samples, and was introduced to kouign, an amazingly delicious Breton pastry covered with carmelized sugar. Yum. It’s going to be my replacement for Ann Sather’s cinnamon rolls until I make it back to the states, for sure. I also bought a small piece of a chocolate cake that really was more like fudge than cake. I ate part of it last night for dessert, and just so you know how rich it is, I couldn’t finish it. This is possibly the first chocolate anything that has been too rich for me to consume entirely, so that alone makes the cake pretty exciting.

After we finished our shopping, we went to a small tea house that I LOVED. Emma had recommended it, and I’m going to have to start going there all the time. The tea was amazing, the server was really nice, and they had a bunch of tea sets that I’m going to want to buy for myself for the next six months, no matter how impractical it is to transport a tea set back to the US. We stayed there, munching on kouign and chatting, for a good hour, and then decided it was time to switch establishments and find somewhere to have lunch. We went to a tartine bistro and all three of us ended up getting a pesto, tomato, and mozzarella tartine, and all three of us ended up quite happy with our choices. I’d been wanting pesto ever since I’d tried some store bought pesto last week that turned out to be terrible, so I was very satisfied with the choice. After lingering there for a while, Emma headed back to her apartment and Julia and I started to wander back to her apartment. On the way, we stopped at the Franco-American Institute in Rennes. Julia had a few library books from there to return, and I was delighted that they had some used English books for sale. I grabbed two books (for a whopping euro, so my bank account wasn’t too upset with the decision), and hopefully those (as well as a few books I’ve borrowed from English professors) will hold me over for at least a little while.

After we left, we went back to Julia’s apartment for some tea and hung out there for a few hours until I headed back to farmland. It was a quite successful foray into civilization, with lots of good food and company. And now I want to go back into Rennes next Saturday, too, because I’d forgotten the joys of socialization.

So, thus ends this absolutely action-packed update. If I actually get some teaching done this week, I suppose I might update next weekend. Otherwise I’ll be updating after Thanksgiving, with news on how our attempts at a French Thanksgiving go as well as lots of skating gushing. I’m heading to Paris for a day and a half the weekend of Thanksgiving to see Trophée Eric Bompard, a Grand Prix figure skating competition, and I’m very excited. I haven’t seen a senior level skating competition live since I was 12 and I went to US Nationals, and this is my first time at a Senior International event. Fun times will be had.