So, more catch-up:

Tuesday I mostly spent with Hannah, the German assistant. We met up with some of the other assistants in Croix-Rousse, where there's a big outdoor market. One side of the street is food, and the other side is . . everything, more or less. It's really long. I'm planning to head back there at some point and take my time there - most of it is junk, but among other things they have pretty cheap kitchen stuff, so depending on my living situation that could come in really handy.

After wandering the market and getting lunch, everyone else had places they needed to be, so Hannah and I wandered around the Croix-Rousse area a little longer and then headed back to the 9th to François' place. Neither of us had really had a chance to cook at all since getting here (she's been staying at a hotel until her new room frees up), so we headed to the supermarket and made pasta with veggies. Since he just moved, François doesn't really have much in the way of kitchen stuff, which makes me laugh because when he was at UVA he liked to talk a lot about how Americans don't cook and it's so much better in France. And now I come to France ready to cook, and he has nothing for spices except salt, pepper and parsley. Even so, it was tasty, and the three of us got along well and had a multi-lingual dinner.

There was a really funny moment when we were cleaning up afterward, and François was trying to put away the pot we had used, which he keeps on the top shelf (where I can't reach things at all). He was barely able to reach it, so Hannah said "let me - I'm taller than you" (which is true, but not by more than an inch or so). The look he gave her was priceless: almost offended, but laughing . . . but still, a little offended . . but laughing. So she goes "oh, sorry, I forgot - boys are always taller than girls." :D


After she headed home, François and I headed out to meet up with some of his friends from "cop school." There are a bunch of small boats that are permanently docked on the shore of the Rhône, and several of them are bars or restaurants or cafes. The view around there is really beautiful.


I had fun, but I think bars must be the origin of the myth that foreigners will understand you if only you shout loud enough - it was so loud there, I kept thinking that I might know what was being said if only I could hear at all. But everyone was really sweet, and I ended up talking to a girl named (I think) Mathilde, who did a year abroad in Boston during high school. We wound up talking about prom, hehe. There was also a girl named Yasmine who was really excellent at speaking slowly and using simple words to get things across to me. I really appreciated that - it's a skill of mine, when I'm speaking English to non-native speakers, but I've found that it's fairly rare, generally speaking. Most people will slow down at first, but soon they forget and speed back up again, or get bored or whatever. But she told me a really funny story about how one of the other guys they go to school with had been practicing CPR that morning, and did chest compressions so hard that he actually broke the mannequin. Hopefully I won't need CPR while I'm here . . .

Wednesday night there was a dinner party thrown by two other assistants, which was really nice of them. It was nice to get to know people a little more and to chat in English, though I know I really should stop seeking that out soon. It ended fairly early because the hosts had somewhere to be early in the morning, so four of us headed out to find somewhere to spend the evening (and drink the leftover bottle of wine our hosts had pressed on us). Me, Hannah, and then Michael (or Mickaël as he spells it when he's here, because he refuses to be "Michel") from Australia, and Bérénice from Lyon (she was a French assistant in Scotland a few years ago, and remembers that it was difficult at first, so she hangs out with the language assistants when they come here to make things a little smoother).

The riverbank in the same general area where I'd been with François and his friends the night before is a popular evening hangout, so we sat on the steps to drink our wine and chat in three languages. Michael speaks good German (and I think Bérénice does too, though I can't remember for sure) so once he realized that the rest of us did too, sticking to one language became a completely lost cause. The base language was English, but random words in every sentence kept coming out in other languages. It was really funny, and fun. I don't have all that many multilingual friends back home.

Hannah's blog is in German, but you can see some pictures here. The first one is Bérénice, then Hannah and Michael ("Kamin" means fireplace - in her blog she mentions the fact that she and Michael kept almost falling into the fire pit behind them), then all four of us, then a shot of us walking on the riverside.

A theme of the night was "seeing the elephant," and not in the metaphorical sense I've just learned about from Stryer. In the picture above, in the distance to the left of the dome, you can kind of see the cathedral Fourvière. It's tiny above, but In person you can see it really clearly. Here's a picture (which I didn't take) of it during the day:

So Michael started telling us that when he went on a tour of it, the first thing the guide said wasn't some historical fact or anything about the craftsmanship, but rather: "Everyone says it looks like an upside-down elephant." Bérénice (being from Lyon) agreed, but Hannah and I couldn't see it, and spent the rest of the evening trying to no avail to see the elephant.

Side note: On the way back to the metro (or métro if you want to be French about it), we stopped into a McDonalds to use the bathroom. Did you know that in the rest of the world, they don't pump out that awful nauseating smell?! It smelled like a normal place! It's the little things.

This is too long, so the rest is going into another entry.