plenouze: Roule ma poule! toussaint pt. uno

whenever i start to complain about how im not a fan of teaching, just remind me that for the year i have the sweetest deal - 5 weeks of work, 10-14 days of paid vacation - and i'll shut up.

for Toussiant (all saints day) i traveled to Stasbourg and Lyon. mandy and i were together the whole trip; will joined us on the leg to the 'bourg (sunday til wed) and guiliana met us in Lyon (fri to mon). Monday afternoon there was an assistant party at the ANAEM office in Lyon, as we (americains, canadienne, nouveau zelandienne?, mexicaine) all had to pass a medical exam for our cartes de sejour. funtimes - seriously.

my lovelies in strasbourg. we're v. mature.

STRASBOURG...is too charming for words. mandy and i were too girly for our own good, cooing "ooh thats soo cuute" every other second. we came close to driving will away, but he knows that we rock...anyway, mandy and i took the train to strasbourg from valence on sunday, 29 oct - about a 6h trip, with a transfer in lyon. ooph. but we had cute (ugh, see? bad habit!) cabin seats and got a lot of reading and journaling done, and of course we enjoyed some AWEsome vending machine cappuccinos in the gare in lyon (no joke, that instant coffee is some of the best stuff around, unless you like the taste of burn a la french roast)Will met us in strasbourg, since he was coming in from Paris, where he'd been visiting friends, and we walked out to our hostel, which was just a few minutes from the gare. the hostel was surprisingly nice for 20E/night - we had a private, 3-bed room (i got to play summer camp in the top bunk) with a shower and really good croissants for breakfast, AND the hostel was very close to the center of the city. we went out for dinner and then just chilled in the hostel, since theres not much open on sundays.

the three of us make for very chill tourists - we were happy to just wander and take pictures, especially since we were all trying to be good about not spending money (we didnt realize that we'd been paid, since none of our schools had told us anything before the break)...we visited the cathedral de Notre Dame and its astrological clock (it's hundred of years old, but the pieces still move on the hour and at noon a rooster crows and the saints go for a walk), la petite france, le musee alsacien (bc it was free. omg, it was the never-ending museum, i kid you not. v cool bc it was in a reconstructed Alsacian house and it was free, but it just kept going and going...we did see some sweet, typical hats and fireplaces, though.), a lot of beautiful canals and bridges, some art galleries...there was a lot of coffee and people-watching, yummy cheese from the best cheese shop ever - complete with an owner that had those curly-cue handlebar mustaches. on tuesday, we toured the Kronenbourg facility and got to taste a bunch of beer, including nice, light girly ones for me and mandy. that afternoon we also met Brett, another american who's studying in Aix - he was traveling alone during the holiday, so we took him under our wing, taught him some key french phrases and hung out for the rest of the afternoon. it was good timing, since will was in desperate need of some manlove. dinner that night was baguette, cheese and a bottle of gewürztraminer by the river - absolute perfection. if there had been accordion music,we would have been a movie. then we went back to the creepy tunnel we'd found that morning - it's this long covered bridge that overlooks the river Ile, but the inside is used as some kind of storage facility for decrepit church statues or something. i couldnt get any good pix bc the lighting was so strange and my camera is a piece of poop, but trust me, it was something out of a low-budget horror flick = great.

wednesday will left us to go dog-sit in paris (ooh paris), but first we took a nice little stroll over to germany. ya know, since it's there. it wasnt too far from the metro, just an interminable bridge over the Rhone. once we got there, though, we felt a little bit of culture shock. unlike strasbourg, where everything was bilingual (and thats not counting the english that permeates everything), Kehl was seulement allemand. or at least, the shops that we visited were. so we floundered our way through ordering coffees (very good, btw) and buying post cards and then we headed back to france. the best part of my german experience was the merry-go-round thingy that was in the middle of the street, that i of course had to play on. will pushed me around and then i pretty much fell off on my face. classy.

once we were without the boy, mandy and i just aww cute'd it up, grabbed tea in THE BEST COFFEESHOP ever (it was jeanette et les cycleurs ou qqch comme ca) - oh! and the 'bourg has the best bikes ever, they are all vintage and lovely and i want one, but my bike is modern. *le sigh* - and went to the movies since it was cold. we saw "le coeur des hommes 2" a manlove comedy, which is to say it was a chick flick for guys. i havent seen the first installation, but judging by the sequel, im not feeling too pressed to do so. hmm, what else? we had trick-or-treaters in our restaurant. strasbourg is a perfect fall-halloween ghost-christmas town, and the little kids running around in their ghost costumes were priceless. for our last night in a decent hostel, we celebrated with a hair dying party - im back to dark, but not nearly dark enough, so there will have to be an encore tres bientot. mandy's, like, professional with the hair-coloring procedure.