[Written last night, when I was sans internet.]

It turns out I was completely wrong about Anaïs - her English has improved hugely since the last time I saw her, and yesterday she was kind enough to humor me and speak it almost exclusively. She fumbles around for words sometimes, but she's easy to understand, and she very much puts my French to shame. After meeting me at the train station she took me to her parents' house, where I stayed when I visited Lyon before. It turned out that François had to be somewhere until later than I really wanted to stay awake, so I spent a very pleasant evening with Anaïs and her parents. They're some of my favorite people, really kind and welcoming, not to mention patient with my very halting French. Mrs. Bargel was an English major in college, so we can converse easily, which I very much appreciated in my jet-lagged state.

After dinner we watched the second half a two-part movie about, as far as I could tell, a woman named Diane who was a Catholic in love with a Protestant but married to a man who was plotting to kill Henry III, who was (as far as I can tell) in league with the Protestants and angry with the Pope. The Pope was allied, secretly and via some red-haired lady, with the king's brother François who kept trying to kill him and then crying and saying he was sorry when the king found out, and therefore being repeatedly imprisoned and then either escaping or being let out. There was also something about a plot that killed Diane's mother when Diane was still a child, which turned out to be suicide but which was still (for some reason) either her husband's or François' fault, or both. (It should be noted that I lost most of the first half's references to Diane by other characters, since I didn't realize that the French pronunciation sounds like "Jen." And also that I didn't see the actual first half of the movie at all.) Diane and her lover are attacked by a mystery knight who turns out to be her husband, who they kill. Everyone goes to the funeral, but he's not dead! He comes back all covered in blood and takes Diane away. Eventually the king goes to church, dressed only in a white robe and followed by an army of self-flagellants dressed in what I can only describe as KKK robes and hoods for reasons that utterly escaped me, where he is attacked by François' men. But not by François, because he is too busy shooing servants out of the throne room with motions that make him look like a crazy vulture, so that he may sit on the throne and cackle in private. But Diane's lover and some other guy ride to the rescue and save the king. Then they ride to save Diane, which works in the sense that they kill all her husband's men and then her husband, but fails in the sense that they both die too - the lover by first the husband's knife to the gut and then a bolt from François' crossbow. (Why was he there?It's a mystery.) The movie ends after a short series of vignettes in which the red-haired lady shatters everything in her cell and then cries, François is poisoned by Diane pretending to be a servant, and some other things happen that didn't make sense and I can't remember.

If that description seems long, rest assured that the movie seemed much, much longer.

This morning I slept til nearly noon, and thus refreshed, decided that I would give the whole French-speaking thing a go. I suppose I did better than yesterday (when I just didn't speak it), but not by very much. But Anaïs is patient and also doesn't mind when I revert to English, while also not liking English enough that she doesn't immediately go back to French, which is probably the best combination for me right now. We played with her rabbit Pitchou (that spelling is guesswork) and then had lunch with Mrs. Bargel, which was nice. Hot lunch is taken seriously here - it's either unhealthy or uncivilized or both to grab a sandwich or something, so there's always an actual meal. Both lunch and dinner seem to be followed by a choice of a cheese plate or yogurt and then tea (a selection), coffee or hot chocolate. Yogurt, incidentally, is a word that I can't seem to understand even when I am listening for it and know what is going to be said. "Yaourt" is pronounced, as near as i can tell, somewhere between "ya" and "yo."

Anaïs is having a dinner party tomorrow night, so we went shopping at Carrefour. You may remember it as the French department store that the Chinese were boycotting during the Olympics dustup with Sarkozy. I'm not completely sure whether it's a department store within a mall, or whether it is the mall. Basically it's a line of stores (jewelry store, cell phone store, Claire's, etc) inside a building, in front of what I can only describe as a French Fred Meyer's. For those of you who haven't been to the Pacific Northwest, Fred Meyer's is sort of like a Target, but bigger, and it also includes a full grocery store. They're huge and I don't like them because I always get lost, and any given thing is likely to be in one of several places. Today we spent a long time looking for a power adaptor for my laptop, and wandered around in both the computer section and the general electronics section (which had French-to-American ones, but not American-to-French) before we found them with the luggage after giving up and looking for picnic things. Anyway, my dislike of Fred Meyer is well known to my west-coast friends and had been joked about as one of the things I would miss very much when I went to France, and now the first thing I do in France is find a French equivalent. Go figure.

I finally made it over to François' after he got out of class around 7p. He's starting a two-year training program to become a police commissioner, which is less of a high position in the French system than in ours, but it's still really difficult to get - the school has about a 4% acceptance rate. He's more comfortable with English than his sister and less happy to slow down for me, which meant we spoke French for about three minutes, but I think that will change soon. We ate dinner and talked about American health care reform, the various meanings of "conservative" in France and the US, where I should start looking for an apartment and a few other things before he had to go back to school for a meeting, which apparently turned out to be a surprise party thrown by their teachers. I was pretty ready for some down time, so I read for a while, repacked my bags to be useful and now wrote this. And now it's time for bed.

I'm curious to know who's reading this. Leave a comment if you are - and also if this is tl;dr. I won't mind. :)