Yesterday, I had dessert 3 times..life is good.

Okay so I know it's been a while since I posted anything, and I'm tired of having a post up about a bad day so I thought I should write something.

This week was the first week of classes, and it was pretty tiring to wake up at 8:30 am every morning. I'm not sure if maybe jet lag is still affecting me, but even if I go to sleep early I still feel tired for most of the day. And the bad news is that next week I will have to get up an hour earlier....zut. Classes have been going well though. I have one that is Oral Expression, and each day we debate about a different topic. Today we talked about the death penalty because no one had any other ideas. The first couple of days, our class was very shy about "debating" and no one made real arguments. We're getting better though, I think. It's kind of hard to debate in French, but it's been helpful in revealing the common mistakes we tend to make in conversation. The other class, Langue Francaise, is mostly grammar/vocabulary and therefore fairly boring. Also it lasts nearly 2 hours... :(

Tara and I are a little more accustomed to Mme V by now, so we stay at the dinner table typically for at least an hour just talking to her and asking questions, etc. We've also been having some delicious food....we had spaghetti one night, ravioli last night, we tried le camembert which was actually surprisingly good, and of course dessert every day :D

We never really know what to expect as far as dinner, however. We always start out with a sort of "appetizer" that is usually some kind of vegetable. On Wednesday night, for example, we sat down at the table and saw a dish full of radishes. There was also some kind of spread/paté that Mme V told us was called "rillettes", which is apparently just mushed pork. Mme V told us to grab a radish, spread some rillettes on it, and then bite it. Yum. Okay, it actually wasn't very good. I don't think I had ever tried a radish before, and probably for good reason. Thank you Mom for never making me eat radishes.

That night as a main course we had mini hamburgers. Except in the place of buns, there were tomatoes. Those were really good, although I had never seen anything like it before. I don't know if the culinary experience we are having in Tours is "typical" French or what, but most of it is definitely new to me (aside from spaghetti and ravioli, of course).

As we were finishing dinner, Mme V noticed that there were about 5 spiders right outside the kitchen window. She then proceeded to pull out the bug spray, open the window, and spray those spiders one by one. Then she would close the window, say "adieu, adieu" and kind of wave to the spiders as they fell off the window. For some reason, it was really funny for us to watch a 70+ year-old woman menacingly smiling while spraying spiders.

Thursday, or the day I ate dessert three times:

On Thursday, I ate dessert. Three. Times. And I also decided that I love France.

After class, Tara, Adam, and I bought lunch and then walked to the Musée des Beaux-Arts, where we had a guided tour at 2:00 PM. After we had eaten our sandwiches, we looked for a patisserie where we could get pastries. I bought a "crumble" (apparently pronounced croomble in French) with raspberry filling...AHH it was so good.

Then we went to the Musée des Beaux-Arts....it was my first visit to a French museum so I was excited. I don't know the first thing about art, but hopefully by December I'll know much more.

That night, after dinner, Mme V decided to make crepes for us (finally! She's been telling us for about 5 days that she had been thinking of making them, but always decided against it. It was torture). But we finally had them and they were delicious.

Later, we went to a "concert pop-rock" with other JYF people. The concert was interesting...the first group to perform consisted of 4 girls, of whom only one played an instrument and the others sang some form of a cappella. It was cool, although weird in some parts. Sometimes they sang a little too high/screamy in my opinion. The next group was a local rock band, which was a lot less interesting than the screaming girls. Well the important part of the night: as we were walking home, we walked past a candy store and bought some candy...(irtokarkkeja, I don't know how to say that in English), so that brought the grand total to 3 desserts. It was a pretty good day.