Friends

So you wouldn't think we just stared at each other during our downtime (I always win the staring contests, by the way), we wanted to introduce you to some of our friends.
Here is a little din-din we threw at our place. This is Christina, Clemence and Lionel. Poor Clemence was fed hamburgers everyday by her American host family one summer so we tried to introduce her to some of the diversity of American cuisine, like...Italian food.














CHRISTINA'S CLASS
You met Christina earlier at dinner, who is a middle school teacher, and this is her class of 14 year olds. She invited me to visit her class to talk about North Carolina, US Civil War/Slavery, and Cheerleading. You should have heard me link all those together...
They were very polite, spoke great English for their age...can you tell that the boys were a bit more rambunctious than the girls?












TROGLODYTE
This was a wonderful evening out in a TROGLODYTE (cave-dwelling) where we dined on the traditional cave meal...fouaces. This is puffed bread meal with courses such as cheese, mushrooms, navy beans/sausage, and pork rillete (basically shredded pork left to congele in its own fat)
You'll see sitting across from me one of the professors at the school who helped me the most - Brigitte Le Bihan - her husband, Michel, her son (well, he's taking the photo actually) and his two Spanish friends in town for the weekend. This evening was a real treat as Zack and I have been wanting to eat in a cave restaurant for a while. Sorry, Shawn and Lauren, that we couldn't make it there with you. But, Shawn, Zack saved you some pork fat...


LUNCH FRIENDS
These are some of the folks I have lunch with daily at the school. There is Raquel, who does the same thing I do at the school, except that she's from Paraguay so she teaches Spanish. Next to her is Pere Drochon (Father Drochon), a retired priest and scholar. Jean-Paul, across the table, is department head at the College of Chemistry across campus.













FLE GIRLS
Finally, here are some of my tried and true students who've stuck with me the longest. This is Anais, Marie R., Marie H. Two of them are studying to be teachers of French as a Foreign Language (Anais just got a job teaching French in India for a year!) and the other Marie is a Masters student in French Literature. They worked hard to improve their spoken English and it was a delight to meet with them weekly for a year.

...and more travelling...

So April 22nd was our first anniversary. Being the good husband that I am I took my wife to Paris for the day.
We went to church at "The American Church in Paris", which was the first church plant by Americans in Paris over 150 years ago. They built a nice cathedral style building right on the Seine.
For lunch we ate the popular "moules et frites" at one of the brasseries. They say that the Mussels from Brussels are the best, but I'm not sure we'll get to try that before we leave.
Then we went to the Pompidou Center, which is basically the modern art museum in Paris. It was quite modern. I'll leave it at that.
We visited a nice park, got some sun, and then slowly made our way back home.

Later in the week, my brother Jake came to visit. We rented a car for the weekend, and on Saturday we drove to St. Malo, a port town in Bretagne. There is an old part of town that is really just a walled area with well planned buildings and many tourist shops and restaurants. We walked out on the beach to a fort on the rocks and ate lunch. A seagull joined us and eventually managed to beg an apple core off of us. We then investigated the tidepools with all the different types of shellfish and seaweed.
From the port we decided to take a short cruise, but as soon as we got on the boat an extremely thick fog rolled in. We got a few pictures, but the whole ride had a spookeyness because you could hear a lot more than you could see. I was expecting a ghost pirate ship to fade in for a few seconds out in the distance.


From St. Malo we drove to Mont St. Michel, which is a majestic abbey built on top of an enormous rock-island in the middle of a very flat estuary. We did not make it in time to go inside the abbey, but we did walk around the spiraling town street leading up to the cathedral. Of course there were lots of tourist shops, complete with the kind of restaurants that give you watered down wine.


Speaking of wine, the next afternoon we went hunting in our region for a winery. We drove around for an hour stopping at closed winery after closed winery. It wasn't so bad because we got to see a whole lot of countryside that was rather beautiful with all the freshly green leaves. Right after we had given up on our quest we saw a sign that advertised a winery being open on Sunday. We made our way there and learned all about the winemaking process from one of the younger guys working there. They were very generous with their tasting samples, but I had to let Elizabeth and Jake do most of the critiquing. We ended up getting a variety pack of six (yes, a six pack of wine) for about 30 euros and splitting that with Jake. Not a bad deal if you ask me.