Je vais changer l'eau des olives...

Another interesting thing happened! The other night I was invited to a crêpe party here with Sam, another assistant. The person inviting us was an English assistant from last year who lives in Lyon now but whose French boyfriend lives here in Briançon. So off we went, with gifts of red wine and cake, and had such a good night! The guy whose house it was is called Pierre and I'm not going to lie to you I was very excited to make a French friend called Pierre. If only he had been wearing stripes and a beret my day would have been made. Anyway we ate crêpes and drank beer and had a great night chatting in French. I left feeling really proud of the fact that I had been able to converse easily with them, even though they spoke SOOO quickly and used a lot of Patois which of course I understood NONE of! But yeh they were all lovely and we have said we all need to do it again soon. :-) nothing like food to bond over! Also we managed to learn a few new expressions during the evening. I was explaining 'I'm going to see a man about a dog' to them and then was told that the French equivalent is 'Je vais changer l'eau des olives' (I'm going to change the olive water)...yeh I don't get it either. But then again the English one leaves me pretty stumped too. I showed them this video as a little joke but, despite my frantic explanations, they seemed to think this was an attempt to attack them. So they basically thought I was telling them they were alcoholic, food obsessed people who swear and make incomprehensible noises all the time...umm... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edYHlnhxyOI

Trains, Towers and TOO MUCH FOOD

Sorry, it has been far too long since we last spoke. I have been gallivating over the country and sleeping in far too late to even consider blog posts. But all that changes right now! So I am currently in my second week of Toussaint holiday. In order to make the most of our hard earned wages (not hard earned) and our hard earned holiday (not hard earned) Louise, Kathleen and I decided to go on a trip to gay Paris! We took the overnight train there, which, with a Carte Jeune railcard, cost 48 euros for approximately 11 hours of travelling! I have a family friend that lives in Paris and very kindly offered to take us strays in for a couple of days. Then we got to become the one thing that everyone loves- TOURISTS! Oh yes, we went to all the spots, took all the cheesy photos and Louise even bought merchandise from a 'tack shack'. 24 Carat, I <3 Paris wristband wearing, stretch your arm to get the tower in, jumping on a bout tour tourists. And it was spiffing.

The classic pre-voyage photo.

We were very annoyed that this car was there but to be honest I quite like it because it looks like we are in a chic advert.

Ahh yes. Who says you can't take photos in the metro? This was after Louise's instruction of 'act natural'. I feel we achieved that quite well. Another highlight of the day was meeting a new British friend near the Eiffel Tower...

I can not explain his outfit. Perhaps he had just returned from a holiday in Dubai? Anyhoo we did actually do other things in Paris besides sightsee. The main reason we went was because I had seen the line up for Pitchfork Festival and the Thursday night looked amazing with my highlight being JAMES BLAKE. So off we trotted after a full day of being tourists and feeling pretty shattered. To the point where we thought maybe it would be rubbish...WRONG. The night was brilliant! The music was great and the atmosphere was so fun. We bumped into out friend Jimmy, another assistant, and spent the night hanging out with him and his French friend, Florian. I took it upon myself to actively try to stroke the man in front of me's knitted hat (it was so soft), we had a role reversal of nationalities and I even managed to make a joke in French (HE LAUGHED AND EVERYTHING!).

This is the proof of the nationality reversal. Here you can see Jimmy (from Washington) mimicking a 'British boy stance', which apparently is having all of your buttons done up, looking awkward and portraying a melancholy expression. To his left you may also see myself (definitely English) doing my best to illustrate a steretypical American girl pose. This involves simply having the hand on the hip and a smile bigger than any other human. However, my impression is perhaps flawed because on Jimmy's right we can see Kathleen, a genuiiiine American filly, and she looks normal compared to me. Needless to say, American cheerleading movies sometimes lie about American posing. So after 3 jam packed days in Paris, Kathleen went to meet her family to go on holiday and Louise and I went on to Lyon to stay with my friend Alex. Soooo good to see a friendly face from uni here! We had such a good time together too. Mainly involving drinking cosmos, white wine and cooking food. We did actually go out into Lyon one day but still this day revolved around food and drink. Namely, a salad larger than my head and a nutella crepe...mmmmm. Lyon was beautiful and I will definitely be going back there! Especially for the Festival of Lights which I have high hopes for. I'm imagining snow and carols and mulled wine and penguins and reindeer. Fingers crossed.