Rain, Rain Go Away

Today was another rainy day, it's starting to get old. It's one thing when it rains in Syracuse and I'm stuck inside DD all day and then get to drive anywhere I need to go. Here it STINKS because we're walking everywhere and my shoes, as well as the bottoms of my jeans(because it's been too cold to wear shorts), get soaked. Yuck.

We had class, it went by fairly quickly again. We learned about French hygiene. It might be as bad as some people think. Yesterday we had started reading the article about hygiene that we finished today, and our teacher asked us if we had any questions. I raised my hand and told her that someone (coughmomcough) told me only the prostitutes in France shave their armpits and asked if that was true. She jokingly asked if we wanted to see her armpits and then told us that no, it's not true. But apparently they like waxing their legs better than shaving because it lasts longer, just a fun fact in case you wanted to know about the shaving habits of French Women.

We continued class today with a discussion of what has been shocking to us in France. #1: People don't clean up after their dogs! Ahh it drives me nuts!  And after stepping "les crottes des chiens" twice I have learned to just walk with my head down, alert and ready to avoid piles.  Our professor told us that it is a law to clean up after them, it's just not enforced very well.   Another odd thing: paying to use a public toilet, or even worse: that awful thing they call a bathroom that was at the lake the first weekend (I still need to get the picture of that from Hope, my camera was dead so she took the picture).

After class we ate lunch in the cafeteria today. Then we came back home and just hung out for a little while. Then me and Anna went to the train store to see if we could change our reservations for the train to Paris this weekend. Last week when we went to make them we chose the 16:00ish train instead of the 12:25 train, thinking that we were being good students by not planning to leave class early. But then today we found out that the rest of the group is going at 12:25 so we wanted to see if we could get on that train (we bought our reservations separately because we have Eurail passes and the reservation was only 4,50 E round trip per person). Bad news is that we can't do it, but it's ok, we will be in Paris again at the end of our trip. Then we looked for reservations for our group's trip to Nice in July. There are no more spots so we will just have to pay for that separately and then use up our passes another day, maybe and extra trip while we're in Italy.

After that we met at the Elephants to catch a bus to go bowling. Not a ton of people went but anyone who I would have really wanted to be with went: Anna, Jeffrey, Yvonne, Michael, Liz, and Hope. And then Guillaume and his friend, Nono. The bowling alley was SO nice.  There were couches at each lane to sit on while waiting, it was crazy!  And it wasn't like it was super expensive to bowl.  It was 5,60 E for shoes and 1 game...more than at home but not bad for how nice the place was, I'm never going to want to go bowling in America again!  Later I'll for sure put a bunch of the pictures on photo bucket, but here's one for now:

 

It was a lot of fun.  There were TV screens above each lane with the World Cup on (the Spain vs Switzerland game).  Guillaume was funny to watch bowl, and Nono started off the game with like 2 strikes and a couple spares in a row.  I was struggling to just keep the ball out of the gutter (Guillaume said bumpers are only for “newbies and children”) and I made it a mental goal to just beat Guillaume.  In the last frame Guillaume got a Spare so the pressure was on.  I had a good first bowl, I thought it would be a strike, but only 9 pins fell.  Then I got the last one down (my first mark of the game!).  I needed 4 to tie him and 5 to beat him.  As I was throwing the last ball Michael yelled gutter ball, and that’s exactly what it was.  I was a little bummed but life goes on.

We came back and made some dinner.  Then we got ready for Mojito's for salsa dancing but first went to the pub to watch some soccer again.   I was bored with it by half time and I felt really tired so I just came back home.  There will be plenty more soccer, and Mojito has dancing every Monday and Wednesday, and apparently karaoke Tuesdays and Thursdays, we will definitely be checking that out.

I still can't get over how awesome this experience has been so far.  Everyone in the group gets along so well, it's weird (but great).  The activities the program has planned have also been awesome, I'm so glad we have a little over 4 more weeks!  Classes are going well too.  It's weird, there is no syllabus and the professors are always asking us what we want to learn about, and I have absolutely no idea what I will be graded on.  It's all a little odd to me, and frustrating, but I'm trying to just go with it because our professors don't seem too concerned.   

Well it's bedtime,  I am le tired :-P