I found this lovely little article on french dining. It is SO true and hilarious. The best part is the whole bit about the waiter completely disappearing when you need him to give you the check. This is true all around europe though I find. 

Unfortunately I haven't found the waitress with the mooloo... but I have another month. 

http://www.americansinfrance.net/DailyLife/French-Dining.cfm

When you finally do manage to ask for something, you'll often find yourself waiting an inexplicable 20 to 30 minutes for simple requests, like a pat of butter. You get the feeling that you're order has caught the chef by surprise.

Waiter (sniffing haughtily): Ze customers at table 11 have ordered zom food.

Chef (panicking): Zut alors! Food? Where am I going to find any of zat?

Spring Break Highlights

Last week was spring break so Katherine and I decided to hit up the iberian peninsula and see the cities of Barcelona, Lisbon, and Porto. We were hoping for beautiful weather and time at the beach but had to deal with cold wet rain for most of the trip. We made the most of it and had fun anyways.

Our trip started in Barcelona. First stop: The MAGIC Fountain! It is a fountain that plays music and does a little water show- tourist trap? you betcha! But it was cool and it was a nice night so we enjoyed the show.

Katherine is a flying fish.
We happened upon a good friday parade. And this was the jesus float- for more details head over to my picasa photo albums- i'll put the link at the bottom of the post
Then I turned into a dinosaur and ruined the flow of my blog- it happens.
Some more participants in the procession. 
The virgin mary float. LOTS of candles.
Barcelona has it's own arc de triumf (lacking the Ph but it happens) 
Gaudi architecture is present all over the city from parks
To his giant temple/cathedral which is still being built.
Whitwhicky got attacked by a lion
Gaudi designed this cool looking lizard fountain

Next we went to lisbon...
This is an example of an Azueljos (I most likely didn't spell that right) but it is a mosaic/tiling that is present in a lot of portuguse architechture
That's a view of the city that we found at the top of the tallest hill in lisbon where the sao jeorge castle was.
Danger- be on the alert for slide-tacklers 

This is a crazy summer home built in sintra portugal- about 30 minutes away from lisbon. It had a really cool garden.
This is the cool looking castle where the last king of portugal lived. Of course on top of a hill.
This is whitwhicky looking out over the bay and the not golden gate bridge.
The inside of the monastery. It was really pretty.

Me infront of the tower of belem. 

Like I said more details are in the picasa photos found on this link . I don't know why some of the pictures are small on the blog but they're all big here. 

And I haven't uploaded the pictures of Porto yet- sorry with all these pictures my computer is running low on memory! I'll get around to it later though I promise.

Celebration!

Today I finally received my Carte de Séjour! I've only been waiting for it since November! Now I am free to come and go in France as I please and even get a job. The wonder of a little piece of plastic. The stupid thing is that it isn't the proper size to fit into a wallet. Nor have I noticed that french people have bigger wallets so how do they carry their IDs around? Anyways, I've decided to have a weeklong celebration for this by traveling to Barcelona, Spain; Lisbon, Portugal; and Porto, Portugal with Katherine starting tomorrow. Let the celebrations begin! 

Les Poissons d'Avril!

Instead of April Fool's day in france they have Poissons d'Avril (April's Fish) In the good ole days the citizens of france would stick a little paper fish on the back of friends etc. which was essentially the equivalent of a kick me sign. Malheureusement, (Unfortunately) outside of high school french classes this practice is no longer in use : ( but I did see the evening news paper had a cover photo of a kid with a fish on his back so- not forgotten. AND in my bakery today all the little goodies were fish shaped. I decided to grab one! How cute! Hélas (again meaning unfortunately) the little raisin eye fell off during the swim home.  :( 
On tuesday my friend Amelia needed some shopping therapy after her first french exposé at sciences po- and a week full of other projects. We headed over to the Galleries Layfayette- if you caught the youtube videos Lauren did a little update there (Day 3). Anyways we found this gem of a dress. Sequins and what not looked tacky-licious and it costs- wait for it-   595 euros ($788) due to the price tag they actually have the dress and others like it connected by a cord to the rack! 
Tonight Emily, Ashley, and I took up the opportunity to see a world cup qualifying match of France vs. Lithuania! This is the outside of the stadium. It is very big 80,000 people
can't really tell, but everyone has french flags and were waving them it was pretty crazy (think rally flag night at Turner field- except these weren't handed out for free before the game- the fans are that intense.) I even saw some Lithuanians with their faces fully painted- wearing bright yellow and green walking around the RER station. And if you know anything about Parisians you would realize how bizarre this would be. I stand out because I wear a khaki jacket instead of a black one and my pink and green sweaters are a little bright compared to the sea of black and greys around me.
At the game. France won with 1 goal at 75 minutes the whole game was like OOOh no.... OOOOOOh... no. So close. And the people behind us reminded me of Bobby at a Georgia Southern Game- But louder. 

The fans were also throwing paper airplanes- which made me say "Now let's not start that again" 

Bobby- the french people are so much more intense with their wave, I'm pretty sure you would go insane because before the wave reaches them they all look over to the side and wave their hands out in front of them and go Ooooooooo until it comes down the entire side of their stands. Face it-the wave will never die. It also went around like 10 times.

I also got my grades back this week-suprise I didn't fail- GO me!

Back after Technical difficulties

So it has been a week since I last updated, sorry about that but my internet has been a little shady this past week and if you reading this it means my 8th attempt at this post has finally gone through (although blogger is blinking red saying this will most likely fail grr) Anyways quite a lot has gone down since my last post. Miranda came through town with Katherine and we did touristy things in Paris, and then Katherine and I skipped off to LE mont saint michel last weekend for some touristy things outside of our respective cities. 

Miranda and I on top of the tower of Montparnasse.  Looking out over paris towards the Eiffel Tower.
Miranda's got jump skillz.
Inside the tower Montparnasse- they had really cool lights.
Miranda and katherine were excited to see the louvre and Mona.
They can float over water.
Photos from the strike they are holding signs for CGT the largest communist party in France. Breaking News! Apparently some disgruntled workers have taken their boss hostage!
THIS is LE Mont Saint Michel. Built in 708 AD it is like traveling back in time (well if you edit out the village of tourist shops. But it is surrounded by a Bay that in high tide the water would cover the whole area and make it and island. But we visited at low tide so the water you see is a river going out to see.
It even has a draw bridge- something I find awesome. My house will have a draw bridge- right next to that Louis the 15th architecture.
Me and in the background you can see the sandy bay all the way to the ocean... it's somewhere out there.
The shadow
Katherine is being a pilgrim- they always were hunched over right?
it is like a desert 
we decided to personify falling rocks
ANTM here we come!
Me and my traveling buddy 
This statue is a copy in silver of what the statue in gold is at the top of the monastery. It is the arch angel Michel slaying a demon.
The little church in the village had beautiful stained glass windows. The colors were so vibrant. Much different than Saint Chapelle but I think these might be a lot newer. Reminds me of the beginning of Beauty and the Beast. A movie I've been thinking about a lot actually- maybe it is that whole france thing. 
Katherine is the keeper of Sunsets.
Soccer anyone?
Katherine's favorite spot in france. Ended up that her train was at 4:30 and she spent about 6 hours at the train station- in the little town of Pontorson which we decided was stuck circa world war 2. The whole weekend was time travel. Definitely not the big cities we're used to! I think the town where our BnB was had a population of 30 tops. 

AS Always all of my photos can be found on my picasa page!

I went to a true Japanese restaurant this evening. It was a lot of fun. I know that it was a real japanese restaurant because my japanese friends took me there and there were a lot of japanese already there... and the employees spoke japanese. (Gotta watch out for those chinese people charading as japanese because us westerners typically can't tell the difference) Anyways I'm convinced that I ordered a never ending bowl of noodles. I kept on eating until I was full, but in the end it looked like all I did was eat the meat off the top. My friends said that the longer the noodles stay in the water the more they expand. They must have been doing the same thing in my stomach because I was stuffed- how would a normal skinny japanese person eat it all? 

I discovered that the word wolf is a very strange word and difficult to pronounce don't think too hard about it. 

I also discovered that I have better chopstick skills than my japanese friend. The girls were shocked that my chopstick skills were what they were. (Then we talked about our hello kitty chopsticks haha) 

Anyways  a fun night. Sorry but I didn't take pictures. I should've video taped my bowl of noodles... I might have solved world hunger. 

Next time they promised to take me to a sushi place because I still am not sure about my sushi eating technique.

General Strike Set for Thursday

In response to the way that President Sarkozy has handled the financial crisis, the people of france have planned their second nationwide strike of the year. On Thursday March 19 there is a call for all the people of france to take to the street and protest. The french word for strike is grêve so they have created a play on words by making this strike's anthem rêve générale meaning everyone's dream while calling for a grêve générale everyone to strike. Typically on thursdays I don't have class, but this week I am supposed to go on a tour of the opera with my opera class- I'm kinda wondering if that will work out or if I should ask my professor about it in class tomorrow. The likelihood is that I will receive an e-mail from the embassy telling me to stay inside my apartment and away from the protesters because strikes may become violent and a lot of french people blame the americans for starting the crisis so I don't really want to participate.

Anyways here's a lovely video they made to get people on the streets.