Still alive!

Sorry it's been a while since I've posted anything. I've still been busy doing things! I'll try to get a post together tonight. TWO WEEKS UNTIL I AM ON MY WAY HOME I CANNOT WAIT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Thanksgivingy Things... again

On Saturday, I made a pumpkin pie!

I was scared to do it, because not only did we have to use a real live pumpkin (and not that canned stuff), I was also pretty sure MP didn't have any measuring utensils (I was correct).  Not to mention she wanted to cut up the pumpkin into little pieces, remove the skin, and cook it in milk, when I said it might be better to leave the skin on and steam it, then pull the skin off later.  Oh well, it ended up working out ok.  I'm so glad we at least cooked pretty much the exact amount of pumpkin we needed... MP almost decided we had enough already to make two pies, but I insisted that's not how pumpkin pie works.  Phew.  MP really liked it, I thought it lacked cinnamon and pumpkiny taste (probably because of too much milk and salt), and MP's friend also really enjoyed it (we brought it to her house for dinner last night.)  So, without further ado, the photos of the process:

Cutting the pumpkin up.

Cooking it... I still think it should have just been steamed like the recipe said.

The batter.  We didn't add enough sugar either.  MP was concerned it was too liquidy but I assured her it was perfectly normal.  Oh, and she also added a whole bunch of salt before I could stop her... she likes things "sale sucre" (salty sweet) but I don't think it worked here.

Before the oven!

The finished product!

Even topped with some homemade whipped cream (also with a lot of salt and not a lot of sugar).

Faults aside, I'm proud of it.  It tasted pretty good for a first try with real pumpkin, and in France no less.

Oh, and a picture of my Thanksgiving dinner, thanks to my friend Jenny.  Looks pretty American to me! And it tasted good!

Thanksgiving in France

So yesterday was Thanksgiving, as you all know!  As many of you also know, it is a strictly American holiday. Meaning that there was still school (not for me, but I never have class on Thursday), people still worked, and life went on as normal.  Luckily my program thinks of the needs of its American students, so I still celebrated turkey day... with turkey!  (Turkey in French is la dinde, pronounced dahnd.)

I had lunch at a retirement home, along with some other American girls.  They invited us because they put on a Thanksgiving lunch as a cultural event for their residents.  It was funny because they called it "The Christmas of the United States" and a lot of French people seem to think Thanksgiving is actually more important than Christmas!  It was funny to explain that, no, it's really not as important as Christmas, we just are lucky because we get an extra fancy holiday.  One lady thought it was kind of like July 14 (Bastille Day) in France, but I had to explain that no, our equivalent of that is actually July 4.  Thanksgiving just makes no sense to French people!  I have one picture to show, and it is hilarious (I think).

As part of the introduction to the lunch, the director reminded everyone that Barak Obama had just been reelected as President of the US.  She then proceeded to welcome the home's very own Barak Obama.  I cracked up when one of the chefs came out with a flaming turkey, wearing an American flag hat.  So goofy.

We ate pumpkin soup, turkey with cranberries (apparently the French don't eat those either... there was a lot of "Ohh... that's what that is!" going on), some kind of orange puree (possibly sweet potato? possibly carrot?), and pecan pie and coffee for dessert.  I also found it funny that they served kir (white wine with fruit syrup) and red wine with lunch. I feel like that wouldn't happen in a retirement home in the States!

I really enjoyed talking with the residents, and one woman told me she was happy to hear me speaking French so well, since a lot of other Anglophones don't really make an effort to do so, when the French work hard to learn English.  All of us girls had different experiences, since we were all in different parts of the room.  But at the end, one man came up to us and said "Thank you Americans for saving me from a German camp during WWII."  He was 20 years old at the time (our age) and is now 94.  What can you even say in response to that?  We were all kind of dumbfounded, but it was really incredible.  That's Thanksgiving, right there.

Sally, Kelin and I did some shopping after, then I went home and chatted with Mom for a bit on Skype.  Then I went to the Thanksgiving dinner the program had arranged for all of us.  I arrived at 7:30 or a little before, but in true French fashion, the meal didn't start until an hour later than we were told.  Oh well!  We started with more kir (an aperitif), and little finger sandwiches.  Then they brought out plates of turkey, sweet potatoes (SO GOOD), corn, stuffing, and cranberry sauce, family style.  I personally thought it was all really good, but others weren't quite so satisfied I guess.  Either way, we all laughed a lot and had a great time in general.

While it wasn't Thanksgiving at home, it was still a great, great day.  I'm thankful to have had the chance to live here in France and have at least a mostly good experience, and I'm also thankful that I only have exactly one month to go until I am home, back in good old Nebraska!

Carnac

Sunday after Nantes, MP took me to Carnac!

We got lost, I got carsick, and she got agitated about being lost... all to be expected on a car trip with my host mother.  But we finally made it.

Carnac is a town famous for having a huge arrangement of prehistoric monoliths.  In French, these are called menhirs (the single standing stones) and dolmens (the ones that look like tables, such as Stonehenge).  The rocks we saw were 6,000 years old!!!!  No one knows exactly why they were placed, but theories range from burial markers to alien landing strips.  We'll probably never know.

We were lucky to have nice weather.

There were sheep hanging out with the old rocks!

My watch stopped at this time. I noticed it an hour later. Carnac is radioactive or something!

It's a joke. =)

Not a very good picture of the dolmen.

I would have liked to have just sat and been quiet with the history for a little while, but MP wanted to point out every potential rope mark on every little stone.  Haha. Oh well!  After we saw the rocks, we got some more lost and finally made it to Lorient where MP's aunt and uncle live in a home for the elderly. I sat in the car and read Jane Eyre while she visited with them, then we drove home!

Now I've seen Carnac!

Just another niiiight in Nantes

Song lyrics for my title. Oooh yeah.

So first of all, all my tests went really well, I managed to get A's on them all except one (a B in my grammar class), so that's happy news. It's also happy news that my grades will transfer in the French equivalent, because if I scored a 15/20 on a test at Doane, that would not be an A at all.  Different grading systems stress me out!

This most recently past Saturday, I went to Nantes with some friends. We took the train. I enjoy train travel.   The weather wasn't great, but thankfully it didn't pour rain because I forgot my umbrella. Our first stop was the castle of the Dukes of Brittany (even though Nantes isn't a part of Brittany anymore).  That's where Anne de Bretagne was born, and she's important because her marriage to the King of France made Brittany a part of France, no longer independent, and sort of saved it from disaster.

We visited the museum inside, where I learned that Nantes was a major port in the slave trade, and also had a big resistance movement during the occupation of France by the Nazis in WWII. 

This guy made me laugh.  I'm assuming he's a figurehead from the front of a boat, but I'm not sure.

We ate pizza for lunch, and it was very good. We were also all very hungry.  After that we went to the cathedral and looked around. It was pretty, another old cathedral to add to my list.  Ya know.  Then Sally, Jenny, Rachel and I got macaroons (I had a bergamot and a coffee flavored one - YUM!) and we all walked to where La Machine is.  They have a giant mechanical elephant.  We didn't ride on it, but it was fun to see.  It sprayed water out of its trunk, and one little girl started bawling because she took a direct hit.  Sad!

After all that, it was unfortunately already time to go.  It was nice to see another city, though!  Lots of shopping to be done there, apparently.  Seemed like they were about to have a big Christmas market in the near future too.  All in all, a good day out.  I only wish we would have had time to go into the gallery of La Machine... line too long... poor planning.... that's how it goes.

I'm sure I'll return one day.

Stay tuned for a post about Carnac!

My photos

I don't put all the pictures I take up here, because that would take up a LOT of space.  So I've created a site where I can dump all my pictures in a somewhat organized manner.

http://rennesadventure.shutterfly.com/pictures

Cool!  It's not exactly how I want it (as in, most of the pictures don't have captions or anything yet), but I think it will get there.  If you want to check it out, go for it.  If you want to wait until I have everything captioned so you know what you're looking at better, that's cool too, but that will be a while I think.  Maybe not even until I get home. (IN SIX WEEKS!)

There are no pictures of Rennes, the city I'm staying in, at this point. Simply because I have a lot, I want to take more, and I want to put them all up at once. Those might have to wait until I get home too, or my very last day.

Loire Valley... two weeks late

So I realized I never posted about my day trip to the Loire Valley with my host mom. Probably because it wasn't hugely fun... but whatever.  We went there the day after my meh trip to Mont St. Michel.  I was having a very off weekend.  BUT.

Our first stop was in Angers, after two hours in the car, where we thought we were going to have time to see the chateau but thanks to poor planning we got right back in the cars to drive another two hours to another place.  MP is part of a group that organizes outings and carpools to them together, and you don't necessarily know the people it's with... you just go.  I'm not sure I necessarily enjoy that, but I've done it with her two or three times now.  Anyway.

That's the castle we didn't get to go in.  I was really sad because it also houses the Tapestry of the Apocalypse  which would have been cool to see because we talked about it in one of my classes last semester at Doane. Sigh.

Then there was a bunch of madness about trying to eat lunch, trying to pay for the castle entrance, and blah blah blah... stressful.  Then a two hour tour of a castle that was only sort of cool on the inside but had really cool gardens.  Also, the woman who "organized" the whole day, and who doesn't know me at all, had to stop the tour guide in the middle of a sentence to say (in French of course), "We have a young American with us, is there anything you can do to make it easier for her?"  Um, excuse me lady, I've been here two months already, after 7 years of school French which I realize isn't the same thing, but I can still understand spoken French pretty dang well.  Way to embarrass the crap out of me in front of all these people I've never met before.  I almost cried right there because it was already such a bad day.  But I didn't.

Part of the really cool gardens at Villandry.

I guess I didn't take many pictures of the castle itself.

After that lovely experience, Marie Paule decided it was time to leave the group and go off on our own. Thankfully!  We went to one last castle, Azay-le-Rideau, and it was much prettier and much better because we just walked around on our own.  And there was sweet fog on the lake nearby.

Then we drove home along the Loire river at sunset and at least that was gorgeous.  Four hours is a long time to be on the road though!  I guess it was a good experience. I got to see some more neat things.