The Weekend in Photos

As I was driving home from work on Friday, along the quiet countryside road that I'm so fond of, I spotted this giant pile in a field.

I do believe it's potatoes. I should have parked the car next to it for a reference, but it had to be at least 15 feet high.

That's a lot of spuds.

When we got home on Friday, we were happily suprised to find two package slips in the mail. One was our licenses, and the other was a surprise.

So on Saturday morning we hopped out of bed and headed out to the temporary post office. It turned out to be in a nondescript converted garage only a few blocks from us, and the line was true to standard.

Finally we received our packages: one self-addressed-stamped-envelope from the prefecture, and one care package from my mom. Oh happy, happy day!

So here are our French driving licenses.

Flimsy, poorly laminated scraps of pepto-bismol pink paper. Dave says they look like a kindergarten project.

What's interesting is that we can't drive a car towing a trailer, but we can drive motorbikes under 125 cc's. And the third vehicle we can drive looks like some kind of goofy camper or bread truck. I dunno.

Our plan is to present our new licenses to the insurance company to negotiate a lower rate (or simply shop around for new insurance), then tuck them away in safe place in the apartment. And if we get pulled over in France, gee, all we have are these US licenses, we're just clueless Americans, and shoot, we don't speak French. Hah!

Here's a photo of some of the contents from the care package. Ever since I left home (even before I left the country), my mom makes sure to send me a Halloween package every year. This year it was especially welcome because of course, we're further away from our families, and any reminder of home is well-loved, but also because Halloween never really took off here in France. There are some stores with Halloween decorations, but there are no mini candy bars or haunted houses or kids running around in costumes.

So the ghost-patterned kleenexes, ziploc bags of PayDays and Reeses (my mom really does know us well), toy bat, and gummy worms made for a fun, happy reminder of Halloween in the States. Totally made my day. Plus, we also got a Halloween card from my gramma in the mail, that's in the photo, too.

For the rest of the afternoon Dave went out running and I went into Paris to visit the used English-language book shop, The Abbey. I wanted sell off a couple of lousy novels to make room on our bookshelf, but the owner wasn't around and the assistant wasn't allowed to buy books.

I spent some time browsing anyway, to see if there was anything I was interested in. The Abbey is a cute, albeit cramped shop, with new and used books stacked on every available surface. I soon learned that customers had to use aging wooden ladders to get to books on high, and alphabetizing by author or title had long ago been abandoned.

And somewhere on the bottom shelf of the travel section I stumbled upon a book with a familiar logo: The University of Michigan Library. It was a brand new copy of In the Arctic Seas. A Narrative of the Discovery of the Fate of Sir John Franklin and His Companions. by Captain M'Clintock.

How odd.

But it was fun to see a piece of U of M in a tiny book shop in Paris, so at least it made me smile.

On Saturday night we went to a birthday party for my French teacher Gil. It's a shame I didn't take any photos, but the food was great and the company warm. We played a fun game where everyone has a secret identity as either a werewolf or a villager and we all go about trying to kill each other. In a purely role-playing, non-physical sense, of course.

Dave was the last remaining werewolf until the villagers had him burned. He thought it was a great game. I played a clueless villager (a clueless villager who didn't speak French, no less), and wasn't as amused, but I did enjoy the Salem-witch-hunt-mob-mentality of the whole thing.

Today I went out to the market early because this morning we had daylight savings. The kitten exploiters were out again, with the usual crowd gathered around. This time they had three teeny kittens, soooo cute, plus a baby pig! He had his front hooves up on the side of the box and let me rub his bristley head and tug on his ears. Ooooh!

After I finished my shopping I went back for this photo. Unfortunately he didn't have his legs propped up anymore, and I just missed an adorable picture of one of the kittens licking his head. In exhange for the photo I took a sugar-coated cough drop from the exploiter and let him ramble on to me in French about them while I understood about 30% of his words. Poor guy, if only he knew what a waste of breath I was!

And then this afternoon a bunch of Dave's work friends came over for lunch, which eventually turned into dinner when it was all over. Pratap, one of his colleagues from India, is finishing his contract in France and going home this Wednesday. He wanted to cook everyone dinner, so we offered our apartment and kitchen.

It turned out to be a daunting task, starting with whole chickens and cooking for 11 people. We ended up with a team of cooks, including myself (I was more of a vegetable chopper than a cook)and Guillaume's wife Indira, who is half Indian.

In the end we had a great meal of Indian food, with "spicy" and "not so spicy" chicken, lemon rice, and roti bread. I wanted to watch and learn how to make it myself, but there were so many crazy spices thrown in there, I was completely lost.

And now, unbelievably, the kitchen is clean, David is watching SpiderMan2 in French, and I am exhausted.

Bises!