All of my favorite things

I love my life. Seriously, it's not even fair how many good things have happened to me--not only in the past year, but in my entire life. And I've got another one to add to the list: I'm coming home for Christmas--and my cousin's wedding! For a long time I thought that the only possible way for me to go to Kelly's wedding would be to come home for the weekend between my two finals weeks here. Not so! God loves me: I will be home for a solid two weeks. I can't wait!

Okay, so that's pretty awesome, but I'm also going to tell you about how I spent my favorite holiday whilst abroad (Thanksgiving, in case you didn't know). It was a pretty normal day: I woke up, got ready for the day, and then headed over to my friend Bri's apartment to have a baking/studying day. We made a pumpkin pie, but--alas--the evaporated milk I had bought was not evaporated milk. Instead, it was extra thick cream. We made do my halving it with normal milk, and then acting like nothing had happened. It turned out pretty well! It tastes a little different than my usual pumpkin pies, but it could have definitely been worse.

Then I headed over to theater class, which I love, laughed a lot, and then walked home in the pouring rain without a single umbrella among my class. It was fun. I changed really quickly, and walked with my neighbors to the restaurant where our program was going to have a Thanksgiving meal. It took forever to find due to a recent name change, but we found it eventually and ended up having an amazing meal. The turkey was delicious, and the stuffing was the best I've ever had. The cranberry sauce was more like warmed pie filling, but it was good nonetheless. The downer was the mashed potatoes: they were definitely instant, which I don't understand in a refined French restaurant. But oh well.

I saw Harry Potter in French on Wednesday, and it was really, really good! Then Friday, I celebrated my birthday with some of my friends by going bowling and then karaokeing afterward. Bowling was... interesting. Definitely the smallest bowling alley I've ever been in, and half of the balls make a thunk-thunk-thunk sound as they "rolled" down the lane, but we all made it out alive in the end.

Then Saturday, I went with my friends to Marseille to see another professional soccer game, and while we were waiting for the bus, it started snowing!! Which is my favorite thing, and it's only supposed to do that once a year here. But so far, the weather has pretty much mimicked the weather in Indiana, so I'm not sure how much I should believe. Anyway, it made me really happy, and then when we got to Marseille, we went to Starbucks to warm ourselves up. Then after we all got soaked during the game, I came back and watched a Disney movie--another thing I'm convinced I will never outgrow.

I just can't believe how lucky I am. So thanks to everyone in my life for being in my life. You're all great!

Oh! And today, I'm 21!

The End of the Busiest Week Ever

My Colts are coming on in five minutes, so I have to make this quick.

This week has been by far the busiest I have been since arriving in the country. I had something to do every night this week, what with the theater on Tuesday, my French language partner exchange on Wednesday night, then my family dinner on Thursday night. I couldn't understand why I felt so exhausted by the time Friday rolled around until I stopped to look at everything I had done during the week.

School should be settling down again this week. I'm done with all of my midterms now. I only have a project due next week, but I don't feel like that will be quite as stressful as my tests were.

I've got some big milestones coming up in my life:

-Over 1000 views to my blog (just passed this, actually)
-Three months in France
-The Harry Potter movie is coming out
-My 21st birthday
-The beginning of my first Christmas season in France

So obviously I'm very excited about all of this, and I will definitely try to take more pictures of everyday life here.

Also, MAJOR UPDATE: I FOUND CANNED PUMPKIN. So I WILL have pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving. I'm happy!!

French Theatre

Last night, I saw my first-ever French play in a real French theater. The play was fantastic and the theater was gorgeous! Unfortunately, I did not have the foresight to bring my camera, so I didn't get any pictures, but a couple of my classmates did, so I'll have to steal pictures from them. It was really neat; the theater was really old--like older-than-the-United States old. It wasn't huge, but it was gorgeous. (I know I keep saying gorgeous, but the only other word I can think of to describe it is "lovely", and that's a little too demure for this theater. So gorgeous it is.) It had the old-fashioned painted ceiling with cherubs and angels, and in the middle of the ceiling was a humongous chandelier.

The actual theater was pretty small. I think there were probably about 400 seats in total, but I couldn't really see the lower level from where I was sitting. There were four levels of balconies. The first balcony was pretty much how you would expect it, with about a third of the seats of the lower level. The other three balconies were box-seats only, and it looked like it would have been pretty fun to watch from up there.

The play was great! It was called La Serva Amorosa, and I was surprised by how much of it I was able to understand. It was written in the 1700s and it was originally a Venetian play. I think the fact that it's a translation helped my comprehension a lot because it put the dialogue in more modern-day terms instead of the more archaic (but lovely) and fast-paced verse. I laughed the entire time during the play, save the first ten minutes, so I definitely enjoyed it. Every character had funny lines, and the best part was that I was able to understand them!

But in other news, tomorrow is the anniversary of the Armistice of World War I. When I was walking to school today, I was a little surprised to see tanks and helicopters parked in Parc Jourdan, but then I realized what tomorrow is. Since it's a national holiday, we're supposed to have the day off. For me, however, my day is even busier than it usually would be. I have a program class in the afternoon, and then I'm having dinner with my French family right after that.

I also met a French-American girl in one of my classes today. She was born in the US, but moved to France about nine years ago, so she speaks perfect French and English. Not fair. But she's really nice, and she told me where I can find canned pumpkin here!!! So that's going on the agenda for this weekend.

Before Barcelona

I think this is the longest I've gone without updating--and I'm sorry for that, but this week was definitely the busiest school week I've had so far. I had a big presentation in my literature class on Tuesday, so I spent all of Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday morning working on that. Then after that was over, I spent Tuesday night and Wednesday morning studying for my midterm in my Languages of the World class.

My presentation went pretty well, as far as I can tell. I know I made at least one mistake with gender agreements when I was speaking, which was really dumb because I had written in down the right way. But the professor kept referring to what I had said after I was done, and she kept using my examples as really good examples, so I'm hoping that means I got the equivalent of an American A. My midterm was so-so. I don't really have any idea on how well I did because it was a short essay test, and I don't really know exactly what my professor was expecting, so I'll just have to wait and see how I did.

Last weekend, I was playing soccer with my friends at our soccer court. We all take turns playing goalie because nobody likes being stuck in one place for very long, but it's also nice to take a break sometimes. Whenever I'm in goal, the other team usually scores a minimum of two goals. And usually the only reason it's not more than that is because someone switches positions with me before I can do any more damage. My turn didn't exactly end like that the last time, though.

See, I like soccer because I have terrible--and I mean terrible--hand-eye coordination. When I'm in goal, I'm supposed to use my hands to stop the ball, which I have already explained is definitely not my forte. So usually I try to do something involving my feet stopping the ball. I have more success with this than with my hands--usually. So when the ball came to my feet, I thought I had the save in the bag. No sweat. So I didn't exactly watch where I was putting my foot on the ball. Instead of stopping the ball, I stepped on the ball and swiftly wiped out in a weird side-ways, clunking, everyone-thought-I-broke-my-arm kind of way. It wasn't anything too impressive, just a scraped elbow for which I have to use three band-aids to cover the entire wound. It's a nice little badge of courage.

Tomorrow I'm leaving for Barcelona! Despite France being a "secular" country, they still take all of the major Catholic feast days off. So for All-Saints' Day (November 1st), we get a week off of school. I'm going with my friend Bri for the weekend. A few of the other students from our program are also going to be going, so we might meet up with them there. I don't speak any Spanish, so I'm hoping that Spain is like France in that most people are bilingual--with English being the second language. (I know, how terribly touristy of me!) But I suppose if French is the second language I'd be alright, too.

I'm going to be gong to IKEA again this afternoon and then Carrefour to do some shopping. Carrefour is France's equivalent of Wal-Mart--which I hate--but it's cheap, and they have everything you could wish for on the planet, so I suppose I'll take it. It's also my last hope for finding canned pumpkin here, otherwise I'm going to have to go straight for the whole pumpkin, if I can find one.

I'll take a lot of pictures for you this weekend, and I'll get them uploaded on Tuesday sometime once I'm back in Aix, so check back then!

Optimism

Today was a good day!

In case you haven't noticed, I really miss having fall surround me. It's so odd here because I have to really search for the things that are almost obnoxious in the United States because they are so evident. Like Halloween--the candy, the costumes, the excitement. And pumpkins, and Pumpkin Spice Lattes, and pumpkin pie and the trees changing colors. I can't really find any of that here.

So my consolation has been apples, which are apparently a very universal thing. You can do so much with apples! I've never appreciated them so much before now. First, I love apple cider. My mom can make a killer wassail at Christmastime, and I kind of used her recipe to modify the cider here--because the only type of cider I have been able to find is alcoholic cider, which gives it a sort of weird aftertaste from what I'm used to. So I've been heating it up and adding oranges, cinnamon, and nutmeg to it--and voilà! A wonderfully fall-y drink without a weird aftertaste. (I think it also helps that I've been heating it a little longer so it cooks some of the alcohol out.)

Anyway, today a few friends and I went to our outdoor market to buy apples because I really wanted to make apple dumplings. So we bought eight Golden Delicious apples--huge Golden Delicious apples--and went on our merry way back to my friend's apartment because she has an oven. We started peeling and cutting the apples, and it turned out that we had bought way too many, even for eight apple dumplings. So we made eight apple dumplings and an apple tart.

The dumplings turned out really, really well! I always love it when people say that something I make (or help make) is the best thing they've eaten in France so far, which has actually happened quite a few times. But the dumplings were really good. It also helped that we just happened to have vanilla ice cream or milk to eat with them.

It was just a really nice, relaxing day. I absolutely love cooking and baking, and it especially made me happy because everybody kept saying how it finally felt like fall. If anything, that made me happiest. So while the dumplings and the pie/tart baked, we played euchre--which was also really nice because I play euchre a lot with my family and it made it seem like I was at home for a little while. And while all this was happening, my friend Lyndsy came over and made Pumpkin Spice Lattes for us all. It was basically perfect.