This past weekend I was quite ready for a break and so rather than going to Paris as I'd previously planned, I decided to stay in Nantes and relax and study for my midterms. And despite the fact that I know Paris would have been wonderful, I know I made the right decision. You can't do it all!
So Friday night I went out with Horance and Hanna for Sushi, which is another food I've just craved since being here. It was a pleasant enough evening; I tried Saki for the first time and found it very good. Coming outside after finishing dinnner, we found that it had started raining, and rather than going with Horace to meet up with other IES folks Hanna and I decided to go back to my apartment and watch a movie.
On the way home, we stopped by a super market and got some great caramel mousse yogurt. Arriving at the house, we said hello to Clotilde and then headed to my room. Which is when we realized we'd need spoons.
So.
This may not seem like any sort of issue at all, but I'm always so unsure of what's normal in such situations. For instance, I've never seen any of them eat anything outside of the kitchen. But we really just wanted to sit in bed and watch tv and eat yogurt. Additionally, I've never seen any of them snacking, and I didn't know how bizarre or not it would be for me at 10 o'clock to be eating yogurt in my room. So the original plan was for me to go sneak spoons out of the kitchen.
And I was scared about it.
Which is why when I ran into Clotilde in the hall I decided to just ask her if I could use two spoons to eat yogurt.
Which is when she started flipping out, in the sweetest way possible.
Saying (in French, of course):
Of course you can have spoons! of course! get some yogurt out of the fridge!
(I tell her me and Hanna bought yogurt)
What?!
You have the right to eat our yogurt! The right! you can eat yogurt anytime! you have the right! go sit in the kitchen and have some yogurt and drink some orange juice or something! are you two idiots? you don't need to buy yogurt!
She was laughing the whole time and so was I and I feel like it was a major turning point, after 2 months of being here, realizing that I can and really should chill out and just relax while I'm at home.
So anyway.
The next day Hanna and I went on a grand adventure to get moules-frites: mussles and fries. There's this little old building in the middle of the Bouffay that sells them that is ALWAYS either closed, full, or available by reservation only. This was our third or fourth attempt to get moules-frites, but it was incredibly worth it.
The building was terribly old and fabulous, very narrow but long, squeezed in between two buildings and obviously from about the 16th century. We sat on the second story and had the room all to ourselves for the first hour. I ordered mussles with cream, and Hanna ordered mussles with some sort of cheese sauce. A minute after ordering, a pound of mussles is placed in front of each of us dripping in delicious sauce. It is accompanied by a bottomless plate of the best fries I've had since being in France. We ate and ate and ate. It was the most satisfying meal of my life, and afterwards I was unbelievably tired. It was incredible.
Walking home, we passed by Clotilde's shop and stopped by. We told her we planned on making pumpkin cheesecake, and she told us that the girl who lived with them before me, Melissa, had left behind some canned pumkin, which is a good thing because you cannot buy canned pumpkin in France. So Clotilde told us how to use the oven and the stove and everything. She also gave us directions on how to get to the Park de Procé.
So going home we called Eliott Le Calvé. He is our new French friend that we met at the Conversation Club. He is very sweet and friendly and terribly in the know about what to do and where to go. He walked us to the park, which was very lovely and nice especially because unlike the Jardin, you're allowed to walk on the grass there.
We walked around there quite a while. The autmn colors are just barely existant, even at this late date, but they were pretty enough. We walked home on a greenway, and then Eliott escorted us to Monoprix to buy grociery supplies.
We had such a hard time finding everything to do with Pumpkin cheesecake. Cream cheese is practically non-existant here and very expensive. We got home and kept running into ingrediants we hadn't thought of that are less commonly used in France. Among them Vanilla and cinnamon. We also ran out of sugar. It turned into a massive undertaking, and the end product was somehow off. It might be the fact that we used a crust Clotilde already had that was not gramcracker. Or maybe it was the wierd consistancy of the cream cheese. Or maybe it was the brand of the pumpkin. Either way, the pie that we poured lots of time and money into ended up tasting kind of funky.
That night, after Clotilde insisted that Hanna and I eat some dinner before heading out for the evening and giving us coupons for the theater, Hanna and I went out again to meet Eliott to go see Le Petit Nicolas. I was a little anticipant as it was the first French movie I've ever watched without having French subtitles to read along with ( I can read French much better than I can understand it when spoken).
But! I am quite pleased to announce that I understood almost everything, other than a sentence or two now and then. I was so glad I went!
And then we took Eliott to meet some IES people at L'Huberloo. I got very animated during the evening talking to Seth about socialism and health care and America in general and was speaking very quickly and loudly. Eliott told me later that "It was great for him to hear because he'd never before heard an American talk in the back of their throat. Like in movies."
So there's that.
The next day all I did was study.
For lunch Clotilde served the Pumpkin cheese cake, which Erwan almost refused to eat, but it was just another one of those growing experiences. Rather than being mortified, as I might have been in the past, I thought the whole thing - them politely not liking the pie and trying their best to get out of eating it without letting me know thats what they were doing - really funny and endearing.
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