Rain!!

Nothing beats thunderstorms and tea...except maybe thunderstorms and tea in France! :-) Florence said it's really abnormal to have rain this early, but we just got a nice heap of it! And it's still coming down a little bit. And there was thunder and lightning, which I LOVE.

Basically, it was a perfect ending to a really good (and long!) weekend. I didn't have any stage classes on Friday and none of my university classes start until tomorrow, so I had a nice four day weekend. And I kept pretty darn busy, too. On Saturday, I went out with Florence and Matthias. We went to MacDonalds (which killed me a little bit inside, but we wanted to do something fun for Matthias so that he would go to a museum with us...you know how kids are...). Then we went to the Musée des Beaux Arts and wandered around among the 20th century paintings. Also while we were there, we were in the courtyard and there was this couple having their wedding photos taken and the woman's dress was AMAZING. It looked like they were posing for Vogue or something. Pretty snazzy. Anyhoo, after the museum we took Matthias to ride the manège (carousel) before coming home for some siesta time, cuz we were all pretty exhausted. Oh! Except before siesta-ing, I went and bought a plant for my room, becuase it gets lonely and I needed company. Or something like that. :-)

Moving on...on Sunday I got to meet all of Florence's many relatives and see the region that she grew up in (about 45 minutes northeast of Lyon). We went to Mass and then there was a big picnic. It was ridiculous how quickly 10 cars' worth of people produced tables and chairs and food and wine and coffee and set to picnicking. And the food was deelish! It even happened in the proper French style, with appertifs, the main course, cheese and wine, and desert/coffee. And, of course, after it all, all the guys played pétanque while the kids took naps (or at least pretended to). It was hard to keep track of all the brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces and nephews, friends, etc, that I met, but everyone was super nice and made me feel so welcome. It was great. After the whole affair got cleaned up (which also happened surprisingly quickly), we went to Florence's parents house to "do some shopping". Her parents own a big plot of land with all sorts of fruits and veggies growing. I didn't really get to tour around much, but there are orchards and then there were 15 or so big greenhouse type things. Her parents and her brothers maintain the gardens and sell the goods out of a little shop her brother built and at the marché in Lyon on Saturdays. We brought home apples, peaches, potatos, strawberries, lettuce, carrots, and watermelon. Yummy!! It is so cool that the whole process is still in the family and it's all organic and they use traditional methods and such. It's so different than going to the supermarket and buying fruits and veggies from who knows where, who knows how. Plus it all tastes SO good!

Um...today was pretty much getting little things done...I emailed the professors for my classes to make sure there were spaces in my classes and translated the course descriptions to send off to U of O in hopes of getting some sort of credit for my major. I also went and bought notebooks and stuff...all those little things that need to get done before school starts. I tried to meet with our grad teaching assistant about the Portuguese class I want to take, but he wasn't there, so I'm not sure how that is going to work out. I also meant to check out the nearest dance studio to find a dance class, but I didn't make it. It was way too hot and humid today to really be out doing anything useful, so after doing my little bit of shopping, I came home and lazed around reading this book Florence let me borrow and doing other little things.

And here I am...enjoying a cup of tea and listening to the rain, which has mostly died down. I can't say I'm realy looking forward to tomorrow and having to go to class, especially because one of my classes is a three hour long lecture. Can anyone REALLY talk that long??? I mean, really...

I think that's pretty much it.

OH!!! Except that I bought my tickets for MC Solaar and Grand Corps Malade this weekend. I am SOO excited about those concerts, you have no idea. I got some of the last tickets to GCM, so the seats aren't great but I am really thrilled to be going (now I just have to wait a month for GCM and another month for MC Solaar, but at least there's no chance of missing either show *knock on wood*). In all of the excitement of the weekend, I think that I might be most excited about those tickets :-P

And I'm done...gotta get my stuff together for tomorrow and get my beauty rest so that I can stay awake through that three hour long lecture.

*bisous*

ps...there are a couple of new pictures up on my flickr site: http://www.flickr.com/photos/belleaubois/