Thanksgiving in October? Alright!

Tonight, I had the honor of celebrating the proud American holiday of Thanksgiving...just a month and a half early! As mentioned in my last post, today is Thanksgiving Day in Canada so the big group of students from Canada had a little picnic outside one of the residence buildings. Nothing beats a picnic potluck on a Sunday evening!

Here's half of the group and half of the food. There were probably around 20 of us in total with myself being the lonely non-Canadian! Here is my friends and my contribution to the group. One brought these tasty appetizer chip thingies (think cheesey poofs but smaller, different flavors, and some round), another purchased some pains au chocolat, I brought strawberries (my first idea of sweet potato casserole had to be scrubbed unfortunately), and helped in creating a carrot and green bean dish with maple syrup!

In the end, we ended up with quite the selection of goodies which included: turkey, stuffing, garlic mashed potatoes, our green beans and carrots, strawberries, mixed fruit, salad, ratatouille, quinoa, salsa chicken, pasta and chicken, bread/crackers and three kinds of cheese (I got to keep the leftovers!), apple pie/tart, pains au chocolat, chips, cashews, almonds,  and instant cappuccinos with cookies to finish off the night! *Notice the pretty plate from IKEA :)

Afterwards, we probably made a couple of enemies with the French students by goofing all while speaking English, but hey it was a holiday! Some of the group ended up playing soccer while I threw around a Frisbee, which I had not done in forever so it was nice to brush up on my skills. I also tried my hand at handstands and cartwheels and even busted out some old Aikido forward rolls!

Mmm...Sleep

Remember how I said I was going to go for a run this morning? Yea...that didn't happen. I set my alarm for early, hoping to have a productive day, but alas I kept hitting the snooze button and pretty soon the snooze was all snoozed out soooo I ended up waking up around 10 because a friend came and knocked on my door. I'm not quite sure why I kept sleeping because it was one of those times where it wasn't even comfortable to keep sleeping, but you just want to. Also, it was really cold so that could definitely be a reason behind it. I'm thinking I'm going to need to buy more warm clothes or invest in a better blanket/comforter, but hopefully when the heat kicks in it won't be too bad.

Anywho, after I quickly woke up and had some coffee it was time for church! I really enjoyed today's 'culte', or worship service. It always throws me off when they say that because in English, it has a slightly different meaning haha. There were surprisingly a lot of people at the service this morning, which is always a good thing. The 'band' was bigger than normal and they even busted out a bass guitar and an electric violin. Throughout the morning, they played quite a few English songs translated into French, the main one that I remembered being 'It is Well'. Funny enough, the lady who introduced the song said that is was a old song only really known by the older generations, but surprisingly enough, just about everyone knew it (she later contracted her statement saying that we are all apparently old haha). Given that all of these songs are in French, it takes a little figuring out in order to sing them, which forces me to pay more attention to the words than just the act of singing. With some of these songs, I know the English version so seeing the differences between the two languages is quite interesting to me. In my opinion, at certain times French has a more poetic version of expressing emotion and situations. It is hard to explain but certain words and phrases have a bigger impact on me than in English.

The sermon itself was given by an American from Oklahoma who has been in France for I believe around ten years. He seems like a really nice gentleman from when I met him about three or four weeks ago. He spent quite a while talking about encouragement and the difference between that and flattery. He included several real life examples that are always a good way to bring the message home. He even had us think about the name of someone in our life that needs some encouragement and had us reflect on how we could help them out. Gotta love deep thoughts! By the way, I am loving my French bible. I do kind of want another translation as well because the one that the pastor had, had slightly different phrases, but that's just me being curious, it's still the Bible and that's all that matters!

Today looks like homework day with graduate school research, maybe watching Harry Potter, and then a Thanksgiving picnic with the Canadians. Happy Thanksgiving Canada! (still weird saying that in October....)

Two points for the weekend!

The past few weeks as I have mentioned have been quite stressful, but things have finally settled down, at least I believe. Let's see, in the past couple of days, I have given a presentation on Samuel Beckett (so I am currently quite in the know on him and Gustave Flaubert!), taken a couple of tests, written some essays, petted a cat who was just chilling in the middle of the atrium at school one morning, emailed graduate school people, researched graduate schools, ran, boxed, finally broke down and pulled some money out of my American bank account, went grocery shopping, cried a little over the fact that sweet potatoes and brown sugar are hard to find and are just not the same, walked past the vanilla extract and wondered why it is 3.50 euros...that's about 5 American dollars, made spaghetti, received my tram pass so I officially can't be kicked off, have NOT eaten any Nutella since Tuesday, and have realized that I cannot sleep past 8 am.

Here's a little lookskie at the spaghettiiiiiiiii...

Delicious! This was my reward for finishing my presentation and it was followed by the most delicious fudge that you can make in the microwave! Unfortunately...it was gone faster than I could take a picture. I mean peanut butter by itself is fantastic. Chocolate by itself is fabulous. When you mix the both of them...well it's just fantabulous. Superman has kryptonite, and I believe the chocolate and peanut butter combination is probably mine.

And just because you asked sooo nicely, I figured I could share the recipe with everyone:

3 Minute Chocolate-Peanut Butter Fudge

1 1/2 cups chocolate morsels
1/2 cup sweetened, condensed milk
1/4 cup peanut butter
1 tablespoon water

Combine all ingredients in a microwave safe bowl. Heat on full power for 30 seconds, then remove and stir. (The mixture should look like it does in the 3rd picture down). Heat again for another 30 seconds, then stir again. Mixture should be smooth by this point, but you may need to microwave it 1-2 more times in 30 second increments depending on your microwave. You can also melt this mixture over a double boiler if you do not want to use a microwave. When mixture is smooth, pour batter into a baking dish and pop in the fridge for 30 minutes or more. When ready to serve, cut into squares. - I'm just going to warn you, it's addicting...


Anyway, back to real life. Sadly, because of my busy schedule, I had to miss boxing all of this week. I was totally planning on going on Tuesday, but I woke up from my nap a little late and when I arrived at the tram stop, I realized I had left my pass in my room. After a nice brisk walk back, it was too late to make it on time, and I have a slight problem showing up late soooo I kept myself occupied with food blogs and my presentation. Fortunately, I was up bright and early (can't sleep in past 8 for some reason) and made my way downtown to the gym. The instructor called me out on being gone for a week, but at least he didn't make me do an extra workout haha. Once we finished up our boxing session, I was dead tired so I took my time walking back. I took this time to take in what was going on around me and how different the architecture and public areas are different from the States. Here's a picture of one of the many churches in the city. I get to walk by this twice a week to go boxing.

It was weird walking back this week because for the past month, the festival has been set up just down the street from where I took that picture, but last weekend was it's last so now it's just a big open area. Overall though, I am quite enjoying the random trees, parks, open areas, and memorials that are quite popular here.

On the subject of the environment, I do miss chilling on front campus at GC&SU, buttttt when you have a field with this view just behind the school, it suffices for now :)

Tomorrow I am going to try to go for a run in the morning, but we'll see if that happens, and afterwards will be church and then those crazy Canadians are having a Thanksgiving picnic so I'm going to have to go crash that. AMERICAAAAA!!!! I know right, Thanksgiving at the beginning of October?! They just don't know how to do things properly...

Blarg

Well today did not exactly go as planned. Last night I stayed up pretty late because I made the mistake of taking quite the long nap so I just wasn't tired. A good thing about this is that I managed to write up my entire presentation for Wednesday! Since waking up today though I have been lacking a lot of motivation and spent a LOT of time looking at food blogs. This is kinda silly because I can't even make half of the stuff I look at because we don't have ovens here :( sad day...but it still gives me ideas for later!

I did get to go grocery shopping but as soon as I got to the store, my tiredness sank in. I got a few items to tide me over for a while, but unfortunately, the stupid scanners at the store wouldn't accept my credit card or my debit card so I had to use the last bit of my cash to pay for it all. Looks like I'm going to be paying the extra charge and withdraw some money from my American debit card! ISEP could just be nice and give me my stipend though! Pretty please!

I then proceeded to take a nap and woke up so I could go to boxing to get some stress out and to be at least a little active. Unfortunately, as soon as the tram pulled up to take me downtown, I realized that I did not have my wallet or my tram pass and since I am lacking hard cash to buy a ticket, I had to trek back to my room. By the time I retrieved my wallet it was too late to make it to boxing on time. I have a problem walking into places late so I just scrubbed this mission and came back to my room where I preceeded to eat away my worries with peanut butter and nutella....this seems to be a continuing trend....

This is super random but it also has been really bugging me recently. French people must really look down upon English speakers because it seems like whenever I speak English to my friends I get the dirtiest glares ever. I've even just been standing there by myself and people just stare me down. Do I have 'American' written on my forehead or something or is it just my red hair?!?! This did getting me thinking though about how we view others especially in American. I feel like we are not as judgemental in the states concerning other cultures and languages but maybe we are. It is kinda interesting looking at everyday life through the eyes of an international minority though. All of this just urks me and I just want to run up to them and scream in French, 'I speak French tooooooooooo'. I think I just need to start forcing myself to speak French all the time in public, but even when I have done this I still get the same looks and French people just respond back in English. Rant over, thanks for listening!

I think I have sufficiently wasted enough of my day to where I should probably get back to working on my presentation. I will have to admit though that the weather here is absolutely amazing. There is a nice brisk wind blowing occasionally signaling the upcoming Fall weather. I'm soooo excited! I just need to find a pumpkin to make the season complete!

Everyone needs a break right?

After my relaxing Sunday of doing absolutely nothing (besides cleaning my room, oh so shiny!), I was unfortunately thrown back into the mix of things and had to attend classes again on Monday. I'm glad I am able to take French classes here and it is definitely helping me with my comprehension skills that's for sure. I was sitting in class yesterday and kind of got blown away by the realization that my teachers are only speaking in French, and yet I am able to understand, well, everything! How many people in the world are able to do that? I definitely understand that I am no where near fluent and that there are so many people that know several languages, but it is still a cool thing to think about. Besides the awesome language being spoken, my classes are getting a little annoying. Since all of my classmates are international students either here just because they wanted to get away, they are marrying/dating a French person (there are three people in my class in this situation), or because they need the credits, most of them do not care whatsoever about their classes. It seems like every day, only half of the class is present on time and then the rest file in anywhere from 5 to 40 minutes late. Really?! Just don't come to class at all if you are going to continually do that. No one EVER does their homework and they ALWAYS forget to bring in the assigned readings with the classic excuse of, oh I didn't get that...rightttttttt. Participation in class is even worse. I'm getting a little annoying with my teacher asking a question, waiting, looking around, and then finally looking at me for help or just flat out calling on me. I don't mind volunteering to give answers, but I sure don't know everything and would like to not be the only one talking. Blarg! Well rant over.

Besides that little tid bit, things are going well and I have a presentation tomorrow in my culture class on Samuel Beckett. Nothing like a little talk on an author who enjoys writing about the absurdity of life and trying to explain the unexplainable! I have already written up the presentation, seeing how I took too long of a nap yesterday so I stayed up until four in the morning finishing it. Granted, the majority of this time was actually spent either on facebook, youtube, or looking at food blogs...all while eating from my jar of nutella. :)

Today I plan on eating less nutella, memorizing my presentation, and boxing tonight. I also finally broke down and bought a monthly tram pass last week so I can ride it whenever I want, so I am definitely going to get my money's worth! On another completely random note, I've been kind of motivated recently to get back into running, but I have a pretty annoying schedule to work around. We'll see how this goes, but I have a plan that I want to follow so hopefully I'll keep it up!

BEACH!

After several stressful weeks, it was time for a break...or so I thought. There is a bus that goes from Nantes to several different towns, many of which are on a beach, so they are quite popular on the weekends. It's quite the nice system for the most part considering the ride there and back is only 4 euros, but little did I know the intensity of the situation as a whole.

The first bus left at 9:30 and the lady at the desk said we would be fine if we got there at 9:15...so knowing how French people operated we decided to get there at 9. Even by getting there early, by the time we arrived at the platform, the bus was already full and driving away, leaving twenty to thirty people behind. Good start right? Fortunately there was another bus coming at 11:45 so we bummed around the downtown area, rode the tram for a while, and came back to the station around 11. By the time the buses (two actually showed up!) drove up, there were probably 100 people wanting to get on these two buses, a.k.a. not happening. Fortunately for us, the bus literally stopped directly in front of my two friends and I, but then the fun began. I would have to admit that this was one of the few times in my life I have been purposefully rude to people. Cross country and martial arts training kicked in so we started throwing bows, leaning against people, making holes (gooooo American football!) and we barely made it. I played nice for a while, but once the other two got on and the bus started getting full I had to kick it into high gear. Miraculously I was one of the last five people on the bus!

The ride itself did not take too long and I managed to get in a little cat nap in before we were dropped off. Relaxed and rejuvenated, we commenced our trek from the bus stop to the beach! Once we got to the port town however, we noticed that the tide was a little low...

I was totally cool with this though because first of all, how often to you get to see boats stranded like that (I would hate to own one and have to wait for high tide to go out) and second of all because that means that there will be more cool stuff to see on the beach! Once we traversed a few roads, boardwalks, rocky outcroppings, and gravel paths, we finally made it!

The little kid on the right hand side was so cute because he would start at the left hand side of the boardwalk and yell to his mom to watch him, awkwardly run down, and then jump into the sand at the end...oh too be young again! This picture was probably taken around 1 in the afternoon, but after about two hours, this beach was packed with people sunbathing, eating lunch, swimming, and playing beach games. The funniest this ever was watching two French guys trying to throw an American football...they thought they were hot stuff...but they never threw it far enough, and never in a spiral. America for the win! Once we found a good spot to camp out, a few people who we met on the bus stayed with our stuff and we went off exploring! As I mentioned earlier, low tide = fun time!

Sooo many starfish!

Nothing like contemplating life on the beach!

You gotta have some fun every once in a while! After all of this hard work of exploring and climbing barefoot over wet, barnacle and seaweed covered rocks (not recommended) it was time for a nice snack break and what do I bring...PEANUT BUTTER!!!! It's quite pricey here, but I just had to have it
.

After about four hours on the beach it was sadly time to head back to the bus stop so we could be sure to make the bus going back (or so we thought). The walk back was just as beautiful as the walk there but with a little added water so the boats weren't so lonely.

We eventually made it back to the stop, which was sadly in the opposite direction of the beach :( and of course we would find more people than came with us on our two buses...great. The two buses arrived and the pushing and shoving began again this time with not so good of a result. 21 people were left stranded in the middle of a random city an hour away from Nantes! A part of the select few who made it on the bus was a middle aged lady who screamed and shoved her way through with the excuse that she was the first one there and that she had two children with her so it was her civil obligation to make this bus. We'll just say people were not too happy about that and even more unhappy when we were told by the bus driver that there would not be another bus. Let's take a minute to think about this logically shall we? They send three buses in the morning, one at 9:30 and two at 11:45, but only send two buses to pick people up at 5:10..hmmmmmm.

Seeing that this mode of transportation was a lost cause, we followed the bus driver's instructions to the train station and bought our tickets (7.50 euros...after already having payed for our return ticket on the bus). We kept a positive attitude though because at least we knew there was a train going back. When the time came for us to board the train we walked by the train and were instantly gratified because the seats looked sooo comfortable and our tired legs were looking forward to a nice break on the way back (or so we thought...notice a trend yet?) This train however, was not ours. Ours happened to be the dinky two car train at the end of the tracks. Instantly, nightmares about bus ride started creeping back up and we just knew we weren't going to make this one either. Fortunately, the French were soooo nice as to let us stand...on an hour long train ride.

  But hey at least it was not too crowded (or so we thought).

This train was not made for standing passengers either. My arm fell asleep twice because I had to reach over peoples heads while standing on one foot to hold onto something to keep from falling over. Fantabulous! But hey, despite all of the hussle and bussle this caused, it was still nice to get away from Nantes even if it was just for the afternoon!

One more adventure to the Carnival!

I know it's been a long time, sorry! The past week or so has been pretty boring. I didn't think that homework, presentations, and administrative stuff would be worth posting about. I did read "Madame Bovary" by Gustave Flaubert for my literature class!  (450 pages in 5 days what what?!?!)

The other day some friends and I decided to go visit a museum in town, Le Musee des Beaux Arts because it will be undergoing renovation for quite a while so they opened it up for free to the public. I was actually quite surprised as to the quality and quantity of paintings that were present. They even had a Picasso!


After spending quite a bit of time perusing the museum, like any good person, we ventured over to the carnival (yes again), walked around, andddd got some yummy food. Can we say crepes and beignets?!?!

I also must share some pictures from the carnival itself. Firstly, the awesome Aquaboule game was up and running!

To go along with this awesomeness, there were a few decorations that I thought were well interesting. Most countries including the United States and France are quite the melting pot of cultures, but I've never seen this combination before.....