The Bell v. The Bunny: A Cultural Easter Battle for the Ages

Full disclosure: I have been waiting since October to post this video in my blog for Easter. Amelia introduced me to it when I went to Paris to visit her, and it has been making me laugh ever since. Also, the following update has not been proofed, so I apologize in advance for any typos and grammar errors--the perfectionist in me really wants to edit it, but it's bed time, and my desire for sleep is winning out.

My last Easter in Europe was spent fleeing Roman rain, sharing a train compartment with a crazy lady who spoke no French yet was going to move to Nice (and who got off in Monte Carlo, for some reason…I hope she made it to Nice eventually), and promptly taking a three hour nap upon arriving in Avignon after a sleepless night. It was time for some new European Easter memories.

The weekend started off early on Saturday morning, when Lauren and I headed to the Marché des Lices. I was determined to have my caramel muffins (they were out by the time I got there last week), so I sacrificed some sleep just to make sure of that. We went to grab some baguettes, and then hung out for a bit at Lauren’s. I was on a mission for cute French placemats (I have never before seen such adorable placemats as French ones) to bring back to the US with me, since those are about the easiest things imaginable to squeeze into a suitcase, so we stopped at a few stores, and then went to get coffee. I had been craving an iced latté, and thankfully Haricot Rouge (which satisfied my hot chocolate cravings all winter) has those. Maybe it was sitting in the sun with a cool drink, or maybe it was the caffeine (it was probably the caffeine…), but I found myself with lots more energy after that. Lauren and I spent most of the afternoon wandering around and stopping in lots of stores. Lauren wanted a new pair of shoes, and we all know how much self-restraint I have when it comes to shoes, so I ended up leaving with a new pair of shoes, as well. They’re pretty freaking cute, and I’m quite satisfied with my purchase. We finally found a store that had placemats that lived up to my exacting standards, and Lauren bought a cute mug set, so the afternoon was a success. I was supposed to go to an assistants’ party that evening, but my stomach was bothering me, so I ended up going home and sleeping.

I managed to get myself up early enough on Sunday morning to do some yoga before heading off to Lauren’s (wearing my lovely new shoes) for our Easter brunch. I wanted to make a strata, but that requires an oven, so we just scrambled all the would-be strata ingredients (onions, cheese, and lardons) with eggs. Fast and delicious! We enjoyed that with mimosas, then pulled out our chocolate. On Saturday we’d bought a chocolate bunny and a chocolate bell, to honor the both the French and American bringers of chocolate. Once devouring most of the bell, we went out for a walk around Thabor…in our new shoes. This was, perhaps, not wise. There may or may not have been bleeding feet involved, but we shall not linger on that. Let’s talk instead about how lovely the flowers were and how it was beautiful outside and how I spent lots of time with lilacs, my favorite flowers in the world.

On weather: I hesitate to say this, for fear of jinxing my last few weeks in Europe, but spring here has been incredible. Brittany’s currently in the middle of a drought, which has most of the area freaking out about the impact on the corn and other agricultural stuff. I, however, have no long-term investment in the area, so I think this drought is pretty excellent. People keep telling me in voices of dismay that it should rain every day in April, and I try my best to look concerned, when in reality I am doing an inner happy dance. I have become much more fond of Brittany ever since the drought started…remind me never again to move to a rainy climate, since apparently that results in me wishing ill on the local ecosystem.

After hobbling back to Lauren’s, we watched 10 Things I Hate About You (which is still one of my favorite movies in life), reminisced about middle school, and mourned Heath Ledger. After whining about how hungry we were for a good hour, it was finally an appropriate hour for the French to eat dinner, so we headed off to an Indian restaurant, which had long been our plan for Easter. Why Indian for Easter, you ask? The decision had a base in tradition—we both wanted lamb for Easter, but we weren’t feeling motivated enough to figure out how to cook it. So where in Rennes do you get good lamb on a Sunday? Indian restaurant! French food doesn’t do spice as a general rule, so I ignored all the warnings on the meal descriptions about how spicy things were—last time I’d been to this restaurant, nothing was spicy. Either they got a new chef or they decided to be serious this time around, because there was some serious spice in my dish. It was good, but a bit more than I expected. Once my mouth was no longer burning, we went back to Lauren’s, watched some Beauty and the Beast, and then fell asleep.

Monday was quiet (Easter Monday is a national holiday in France). Lauren and I finished Beauty in the Beast that morning, did some relaxing around her apartment, and then went for a walk with Amanda and one of her friends, who were passing through. I headed back to farmland later that afternoon.

I leave on Thursday for Copenhagen, and I’ll be back next week. I’m still planning an update about my last weeks at work, but we’ll have to wait and see if that ever gets accomplished. A bientôt!

Printemps and Picnics

I could apologize here for the lack of updates, but I don't know if anyone is still reading, so I may not have anyone to apologize to.

Short version of the last month: crazy nice weather, lots of Lebanese sandwiches, and even more picnics.

We’ll focus in more detail on a few fun weekends. The first weekend of April, Lauren and I returned to Vitré to visit Caitlin. I had a skype interview and wanted to use Catilin’s reliable internet, plus I had some serious baking to do. Caitlin, in addition to having reliable internet (quelle idée!), also has an oven. Ovens are hard to find in assistant-affordable housing, so I had hoarded brownie mix and canned pumpkin for a while waiting to have the chance to bake with it. The brownie batter (which, let’s be honest, is all I was really interested in—you stick it in the oven and it just loses all the fun) was delicious and made me quite happy, and the pumpkin bread was excellent. There was even enough canned pumpkin left over for Caitlin to make a batch of pumpkin scones this week. The rest of the evening was spent dancing and following the first Sox game of the season (which, you’ll all be happy to know, they won).

Saturday we headed back to Rennes, where we had a low-key afternoon and enjoyed some delicious ice cream since the weather was so nice. That evening there was a clothing/book exchange/cocktail party hosted by Kelsey, another assistant. It was a really good idea, since I was way low on books to read in English, and I’m completely sick of 90% of my clothes. I’ve had the same limited wardrobe since September, and I miss my clothes at home! I got rid of a few sweaters and tops, and I snagged one short sleeved sweater and a cardigan. The simple addition of these two pieces of clothing have made my life so much more enjoyable the past two weeks. I was also able to bust out a few pieces of summer clothing, which made my wardrobe seriously exciting. Post-clothing exchange, we all danced for several hours. It was lots of fun. The only downside was that in theory the party was supposed to end pre-dinner, so no one had eaten. Instead, the party went until 10:30, and we all relied on the light assortment of chips and dips and a few strawberries for dinner. This was not quite enough sustenance for all of the dancing, but we were having too much fun to leave, so we just devoured what food there was.

For the second weekend of April, Caitlin, Lauren, and I headed to Fougères to visit David and Amanda, who are assistants there. Back when we had all hung out in Vitré together, we’d decided that a falafel party needed to happen in Fougères, and happen it did. We arrived around 6pm, and we were quite French and enjoyed a little appéro of wine with bread and cheese. Of course, we then ate so much of that that we weren’t hungry in the slightest for dinner, so we decided to go for an evening walk around Fougères and its parks, which was lovely. The sun is staying out really late here—I didn’t realize how much further north Brittany is than Chicago, and that combined with the fact that all of Western Europe’s time is off (when Germany invaded France, they brought them over from the same time zone as England, where they belong, to Germany’s time zone) means it’s light past 9PM. Anyway, after our walk, we headed back to create and enjoy our falafel spread.

Once we got up on Saturday, we all headed to Fougères marché to gather food for a picnic. I stuck to my standard bread, brie, and strawberries, along with an apple cake for dessert.

An aside on dessert: the French are really big on sweet things. I don’t think I’ve discussed this here before, but it rubs off on you. I get used to having something sweet after every meal, and my body gets mad at me if I haven’t had sugar in too long. That can’t be healthy…

Back to the picnic, we found a spot with a view of Fougères’ château, and we ate a leisurely lunch and listened to music. This was one of the first really warm weekends—I’d guess it was about 75, and it felt lovely to feel the warmth and sun! Once we got ourselves moving again, we walked around the château and some other parks, and then we stopped at a café for some drinks before we hunted down food for dinner. We ended up making moules-frites (mussels and French fries), accompanied by a salad, and with ice cream for dessert to celebrate the season. The evening finished with a dance party that went on for some time—I succumbed to exhaustion around 1AM despite the party going on two feet away from me.

Sunday morning we had an American breakfast of eggs and sausage (YUM), and we sat around and chatted until noon, when Caitlin, Lauren, and I went back to Rennes. Caitlin then hopped on a train to Vitré, I grabbed my bus to farmland, and Lauren stayed in Rennes.

Okay. I’m going to post this now rather than trying to catch up even further. Hopefully I’ll be back in a few days with stories of my Easter weekend and some work updates (you know, work? That whole reason I’m in France to begin with?).

Joyeuses Pâques!

summer sun's calling my name

My post on Brussels is still in progress, but I had a lovely day today and therefore wanted to post about that and the weekend before it slips my mind as I try to recall the dozen other things I should post about.

We had a surprisingly gorgeous weekend--a bit chilly (meaning highs in the low fifties), but sunny. Saturday Lauren, Caitlin, and I went to the Marche des Lices, where we picked up some pastries as well as food for lunch (I grabbed some brie, amazingly fresh strawberries, and saucisson sec). We also stopped at my favorite tea place in town, which was lots of fun. Both Caitlin and I slept over at Lauren's on Saturday night, and we made tacos for dinner. SO YUMMY. Someone really needs to introduce France to Mexican food. They have no idea what they're missing out on.

I went to the ice rink Sunday morning, figuring that early on a Sunday morning would be my best bet to actually be able to practice. It certainly was! I skated for a solid hour and a half, ran lots of moves and ice dance, and tried jumping. Unfortunately, my ankle seized up due to the jumping, so I decided to stick to moves and dance. It was lots of fun skating on my own again (this was the longest I'd been off the ice since I started skating), and then Lauren and Caitlin showed up a few hours later and I skated around with them. The downside is that I am still in ridiculous amounts of pain. Being in running three times a week shape is nowhere near being in skating shape. My muscles are so not happy with me for skating, and it's possible I somehow managed to bruise my right ankle just by forcing it into my skate. Why did I pick this sport again?

Amazingly, the weather has stayed sunny (I think at this point we're at four straight sunny days, which is incredible). This has done wonders to change my opinion of Bretagne (which, as recently as a week ago, I considered a godforsaken place due to all the rain). I don't ask for much, just a little sun to keep me happy. Today Lauren and I were off of work in the afternoon, so I went into Rennes and we had a picnic lunch at Thabor. It was no Ile de la Barthelasse, but we'll excuse that for now, because there were no clouds in the sky. We were quite French about the meal--more cheese, bread, saucisson sec, strawberries, and wine. We spent about two hours simply luxuriating in the sun without jackets on, and I think I might've gotten a decent amount of Vitamin D for the first time since coming to Rennes.

So yay for food, friends, and SUN.

The internet's back, and so am I

There were lots of technical difficulties in my life this week--no internet at home, plus my phone credit expired on Monday, and as we didn't get paid until yesterday, I was unable to buy more phone credit unless I wanted to use some of my American money. And I didn't.

However, the internet has made its return, I can call whoever I want, and today was the last day of work before a two week vacation. Life is good.

Due to aforementioned technological difficulties, I have not yet gotten around to writing anything about my nostalgia-filled trip to Avignon last weekend. However, I can tide you over with some pictures!

1) Chateau in Vitre (for all you francophones out there, please mentally insert accents where needed--I currently feel too lazy to copy and paste them into blogspot).


2) Remember that time Lauren and I bought a chicken? Voila. Photographic proof.


3) My lovely cousin Nicole sent me canned pumpkin and a highly entertaining book. Yay Nicole!


4) Avignon, where skies are apparently always blue. I don't think I've seen a sky without clouds since I was in the US last summer.



5) Le Pont d'Avignon revisited!

Celebrating St. Lucia, Visiting St. Malo, and Being Grateful to the Saints for Efficient Bureaucracy.

This is going to be pretty quick, as I am in the midst of packing for my Christmas adventures which (fingers crossed) involve me leaving tomorrow and going to Wales. The Eurostar had a nice little breakdown earlier this week due to a snow storm (one serious to actually let some snow stick in Rennes!), but it seems as if it’ll be back to normal tomorrow.

Last Tuesday I went into Rennes for one of the other assistant’s St. Lucia’s day celebration. I was a big fan of this plan, both because Kirsten was my favorite American Girl Doll in my youth and she celebrated St. Lucia’s day and because I like to ignore the 75% of my heritage that is German and instead focus on the small bit of Scandinavian in me. We drank apple cider and ate sweet rolls (reminded me of all my boller in Norway!) and chatted about the upcoming holidays. It was a lovely holiday gathering!

Friday was a very exciting day, as I finally (FINALLY) finished up the last of my requirements for my French Visa to be official. I’m now legally allowed to leave the country and come back, which is excellent timing as I’ll be leaving the country in just a few days. I had to go to the Office of Immigration and Integration for a medical visit. All of us in Brittany are lucky, as people in other academies had to go to several offices, while we only had one stop. I was expecting that this would be a full days outing with lots of complications and many missing forms and great confusion. In anticipation for this, I arrived almost an hour early, although I didn’t actually expect them to do anything with me that early. Much to my surprise, they only needed four things from me (my letter that gave my appointment time, my passport, a copy of my lease, and a passport photo), and they started with me about five minutes after I arrived. They checked to make sure I’d gotten all my shots, made sure I wasn’t going too overboard with the bread and cheese, gave me my height in meters (1.76, I think it was), and then shuttled me off to another area for my chest x-ray. I’d also heard horror stories about how you had to walk down a hall practically naked for this chest x-ray (which would not surprise me at all), but this was not the case. You went from the changing room to the x-ray room, where there was just a doctor, and you even got to keep your jeans on. After that, I actually had to wait about five minutes for my personal visit with the doctor, and that was the longest I’d had to wait all day. The doctor informed me that I did not have tuberculosis (which is good, because if I DID, I’ve already exposed hundreds of French students to it), listened to me breathe, took my blood pressure, and then sent me back to the main desk, where I got a nifty little paper and sticker to put in my passport. Voila! The whole process took less than an hour. It was efficient by US standards, which is absolutely amazing for French standards.

I had decided it was time for a day trip this weekend, especially since I had four days with nothing to do before my departure to the UK. So on Saturday I headed for Saint-Malo with Lauren. Saint-Malo is a coastal town north of Rennes, and it was absolutely beautiful. The region got a bunch (read: two inches) of snow on Friday, so everything looked very Christmassy. We took the train up and then walked to the old city (the new city is outside the walls, as they discovered that walls are not conducive to cars), which is still walled. Unlike Avignon’s walls, you can walk on top of Saint-Malo’s and look at the ocean. It’s a very popular place in the summer as the city is surrounded by nice beaches. We spent the day walking around the walls, wandering the streets, eating a DELICIOUS lunch of a chèvre salad, lamb with mashed potatoes, and a chocolate crêpe for dessert, and stopping in at several cafés and any cute shops. They also had a Marché de Noël just outside the walls, and we had some mulled wine there while browsing. We stumbled across Père Noël, who was handing out candy to the kids. There was also a group of Guadeloupians (or at least, I assumed they were Guadeloupians as they had sashes that said Guadeloupe on them) dancing, singing, and playing the drums hanging around. It was a lovely day, and while I’d love to go into more details, it is currently 8:33PM, I have to hop on a bus at 7:12AM tomorrow, and no, I’m not done packing yet. So, I leave you with a picture of the lovely Saint-Malo, and I’ll be back after Christmas with a hopefully more substantial update.

Joyeux Noël!

Weather, Work, Winter Solstice, and Wanderings

Weather: The sun just came out yesterday for the first time in two weeks. I wish I were exaggerating. The second of the two weeks was particularly miserable since there was never ending rain. I never thought of myself as someone who minded rain or weather all that much. When we first got our school assignments, a lot of other assistants were complaining about the weather in Brittany. I rolled my eyes and generally felt superior because really, if I could get through 3.5 winters in Wisconsin and another 18 in Chicago, surely some rain wouldn’t bother me. These worrywarts were clearly a bunch of southern wimps who had no idea how bad cold could get or what a real Midwestern winter was like.

Yeah.

Maybe I’m just going soft, but I will now officially state that I was very, very wrong and that everyone else whining about the weather was right. I never think of Chicago or Milwaukee being sunny—you want sun, you go to Provence—but I have since revised that opinion. You do not usually go more than a day or two without at least seeing some sun. And when the windchill is forty below, at least you have sun to look at. Not so, here. Here, even if it doesn’t usually dip below freezing, there is rain, more rain, mist, fog, and then even more rain. Anyway, thankfully the sun is back and hopefully it’ll stick around for a day or two.

In other weather news, we had a fantastic weather diversion about a week and a half ago with the presence of snow. Everyone, everyone, told me that it never snowed in Brittany. Rain, cold, yes. Snow, no. Well, they lied, because there were some definite snow flurries. I was thrilled by this, much preferring snow to rain. I went off to school as normal, quite cheered up by the Christmassy weather. I arrived at school to find that there were pretty much no students.

No, not another grève. Instead, all the school buses had been canceled due to the snow (and at this point no snow had even stuck to the ground!). More than half of the school uses the school buses to get there, so there went that half. And, in the wonderful solidarity the French share, when half the school can’t get there, everyone else decides to stay home, too. My first class had no students, my next class had one, and my last class was canceled because the professor couldn’t make it. You see, in addition to the school bus people being terrified to drive, so was the rest of the region. I had been warned that when it snowed, people didn’t go out, and it turns out that was completely true. It wasn’t exactly necessary that day, but the next day there was actually the thinnest layer of snow on the ground, which had fallen over night and not melted! Naturally, the school buses were canceled again. In all fairness to the French, the area is really not at all equipped to deal with snow, even just the slightest bit. They hadn’t plowed or salted the roads (or the sidewalks, which led to me almost killing myself as I tried to walk into school). I actually had a few students in my first two classes that day, but no one showed for the last one. During a fifteen minute break in the middle of the day there was some more snow falling, and it also managed to stick to the ground for a full, oh, ten minutes before it melted. The students immediately took advantage of this by having a snowball fight outside during the break. I felt bad that they had to scrape the ground to get up enough snow to make a snowball, but they didn’t seem too bothered by it.

Work: As a combination of the snow, exams that were going on a few weeks ago (it was the end of the trimester), and various other things going on this week, I have had a lot of classes canceled lately. Shocker, I know. I’m getting a bit frustrated about how much I don’t get to work, especially because I’ve discovered that I absolutely love teaching high schoolers. I taught a class Monday morning on one of my personal favorite Christmas songs, “I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas.” The class first had to fill in the blanks on a worksheet with the lyrics, while listening to the song a couple times. They were singing along with the song by the second time through, which made my heart happy. We then went over some of the harder constructions and the occasional tricky word before I put them in pairs. They had to write a dialogue between a child who wants a hippo for Christmas and a parent, and then each group performed it for the class. They got quite creative with the dialogues (one girl’s rationale for needing a hippo was that her dear pet crocodile had just died), and I had a great time watching them. Even better, their regular teacher told me yesterday that they absolutely loved the lesson. That was easily the highlight of my week. Now if I could just once work all of the hours I’m supposed to in a week!

Winter Solstice Markets: This section is actually about Christmas Markets, but Christmas doesn’t start with a ‘w’ so for the sake of consonance, and, more specificially, alliteration (awww yeah, who paid attention in English class in HS?), we’re going with Winter Solstice.

The Marchés de Noël opened at the beginning of December, and this week I had a chance to explore them a bit. One reminded me a lot of the St. Nick’s Bazaar at St. Gertrude’s, with lots of people selling jewelry, knickknacks, incense, delicious looking chocolate covered fruits, and, of course, lots of food. I had a delicious galette saucisse, a slightly-less delicious tartine jambon et raclette (too dry and too salty), and, best of all, some tartiflette. Tartiflette is a delicious concoction that consists of potatoes, butter, onions, small pieces of ham, and probably some more butter. The portions of tartiflette are huge, so I brought a bunch back with me and will be enjoying it as a side for my dinners for the rest of the week.

The other Marché de Noël in Rennes is at Place de la Mairie, and it was clearly the more expensive of the two markets. They had artists doing demonstrations, but I was scared to get too close to anything, because the prices were so outrageous. I did not want to be the one responsible for breaking a €300 piece of pottery just to get a glimpse of the potter at work. Though there were some very pretty pieces of jewelry and such, they were all far out of my budget.

Wandering: I decided this week that it was time to forego a Saturday morning run in lieu of a Saturday in the city. Yesterday I returned to the Marché des Lices, which is the only place I’ve found that has romaine lettuce regularly, and while I was there I picked up some Kouign Amman, because I couldn’t resist (I have since discovered that the name, which is in Breton, translates literally to butter cake). I then talked Adriana, the Spanish assistant, into going back to the tea house I was at last time. One of these days I’m going to splurge on some loose leaf tea from them, because it’s amazing.

From there we did a lot of wandering. We stopped by the Marchés de Noël, entertained ourselves in a kitchen store (I so want to own everything in that store, even though that would only be practical if I decided to stay in one place for an extended amount of time), stopping in a grocery store, and ducking our heads in any other stores that called to us (I successfully managed to not buy anything despite the fact that Adriana kept dragging me into shoe stores, which sorely tested my resolve). The other big stop that I had for the day was at the Franco-American Institute, which has a lovely library of books in English. I am going through severe book withdrawal, and so I had decided that something needed to be done before I started ordering massive amounts of books from Amazon UK (books which I would then somehow have to take back to the US…or leave here, and then go and purchase more copies of in the US, because I like having my own copies of books). For some odd reason, several things which are free in the US (such as checking accounts and libraries) are not so in France, so I had to shell out €20 for my library card there. However, I also checked out the second two books in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, and after doing some quick conversions in my head, I realized that if I’d wanted to buy those two books, it would’ve cost me €21. So the library card already saved me more than my initial investment, and now I have a large supply of English books to read for the next five months. Phew!

Weather Part II: I wrote this over several days, so I have another weather addendum. We had exactly one day of sun and one day of partial sun before the clouds came back (yesterday). If anyone knows of any jobs where I can live in Provence for the rest of my life, please do let me know. I miss having months of sun at a time…

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.