Holy Freaking Crap, Batman!

It’s been a long, long, long, tough day. I’ve finally sat down to relax and watch my favorite TV show on my laptop. And as I’m engrossed entirely in the world of this TV show… BOOM! There’s an explosion outside my window. And another one immediately after. I nearly pissed myself. I paused my DVD and stood perplexed at my window, looking to the left in fear that I’d see someone lying gunshot in the parking lot of the University across the street (I was watching a crime drama after all). Suddenly, behind me, there’s another explosion. My head whips around to look at the two other apartment buildings across the street, but I don’t see anything out of place except for lights flashing on as people run to their windows in bewilderment. Finally, there’s another explosion, and this time I see the source… There were fireworks being fired off from over by the castle. And dear God they were loud. As best as I could deduce, it had to do with the Journées du Patrimoine this past weekend. At least, that’s the best I could come up with. It was a nice show. It lasted probably about ten minutes. But the grand finale was pretty weak.

Anyway, today was the big French Language Placement Test. It was pretty tough, and I feel like I didn’t do too great on the written part. That may be because I’m intermediate and the test includes questions for people who speak “perfectionnement,” which I don’t. I did pretty well on the oral section of the test. The professor I spoke with actually knew a bit about California… enough to ask if I was from Northern or Southern California and whether or not I was from San Francisco when I said Northern. After the test, I had to go to both Art History and French Literature. So by the end of the day, my brain was pretty fried.

I was walking through the grocery store with Stephanie, basically hoping something would jump off the shelf at me as far as dinner ideas go. I really considered trying horse meat tonight, but it’s kind of intimidating to get it for some reason. But I finally saw something… “lapin sauté.” That’s right, tonight dinner was sautéed bunny. Oddly enough, it really did taste just like chicken, but that may have been due to the sauce it was in, which I wasn’t really a fan of. I really thought that the bunny was going to be the lead story of the day, too, until the fireworks scared the bejeezus out of me.

Good ol' Lapin, he's a good friend.

 I also bought a box of mixed pastries at the grocery store in the hopes that I’d be able to eat those for breakfast instead of going down to the boulangerie in the morning. The problem: it doesn’t seem they’ll survive through the night. Not at this pace anyway. But I took a picture of them so you could see what my daily breakfast tends to look like. These are store bought and therefore nowhere near as good – or big – as the ones from the bakery. But they’re still better than back home. That’s right, Labou ain’t got nothing on France.

And I don't get to talk to the awesome baker...