so today my alarm went off at 7:30am. the healthcare class was at 9am, and it takes 35-40 mins to get the the stanford center. so, i rolled over and reset my alarm for 9:30. i regretted this though, because during my two extra hours of sleep my subconscious told me i liked the healthcare class better than my reformations of europe class. it's ok, i was told the healthcare class was super-boring and that he didn't take attendance. and amy is thinking of dropping it and we're both asian and he doesnt know our names anyway.
we're only allowed two absences. it's pretty brutal.
lunch today was MOULES FRITES. which were fabulous. soooo delicious.
so every day i wash my hair in the mornings i get rained on later in the afternoon and my hair is gross. thanks, WEATHER.
theres a volunteer tutor program that i wanted to do called ebullition, which i think means bubbly. the paris suburbs are actually a good bit poorer than central paris. kind of the opposite of philly (poor inner city, rich suburbs). ebullition is a tutoring program for little kids in the suburbs who would benefit from having good role models and stuff. the problem is, it takes an hour and a half to get there. we took the RER (kind of like BART), only we couldnt figure out that it was selected stops. so we went too far and had to come back the other way. when we got to the address Estelle gave us, we saw this:
and we were like ummm it doesnt look open.... we called zaoi, the director of ebullition, and shes like look for the brown envelope. it was kind of stormy out, so the brown envelope (which was probably taped at eye level) had fallen to the bottom of the grating. my eagle eye spied it, and we opened it and found.....
a map! this was going to be an adventure.
after walking down some random side streets, we finally found the place. the kids were super cute, and even though it was kind of awkward because i suck at french, after they were done their homework we just drew, and this one little girl was super impressed by my drawing skillz. yeah, it was weird. i think she was seven, but her penmanship was amazing and the grammar was kind of hard. like, i wouldn't have been able to help her with it. and i was thinking 'second grade, really?'. i didnt ask her what grade she was in because i dont know how it works here. i think i read somewhere that they count down (first year of school is twelfth grade), but the internet sometimes tells me lies.
so, yeah, i dont think i'm going to do it. the commute is rough, easily an hour and 15 mins. and if i'm going to be there for an hour each time, i'm easily spending 2.5 times the tutoring time traveling.
so, dinner! tonight the lacaines had some people over. i think they thought i had met nicole before, so they didnt introduce me, and over the course of dinner i picked up her name was nicole. rawana, a sicilian girl who had live with them before me and brought her mom (introduced to me as rawana's mom) over for dinner. and, evidently, the mom and brought a squid. i should re-emphasize that my french comprehension is poor and that i tend to just nod a lot....which means people think i understand what they're saying. well, we had risotto made with squid ink. i'm not gonna lie, it looked like tar. but it tasted pretty damn good.
and, so, yeah, dinner was in italian tonight. evidently, francois's mother was italian, so he is fluent; ariane can understand everything but can't speak very well; and arthur knows some. we should play a game called 'how many languages do the lacaines know?' i bet it would be fun.
for dessert we had gallete de roi, which is king's cake! it was really tasty, much less sugary than the new orlean's version.
hrm i'm posting this like two days late. whoopsies.
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