December

The first weekend of December (4th-7th) was spent in Angouleme visiting friends. My former spanish roommate Gloria took a train from Madrid, Spain to Angouleme for the weekend to see everyone. Some of our other friends from last year came to visit too, so there was a huge reunion in Angouleme. I arrived Friday evening and stayed the weekend at Misty's apartment, so that's where my fun began. Upon arriving at Misty's we quickly headed to the market to buy some food and alcohol for the weekend. Friday night was suppose to be the "pre-game" night and Saturday night the huge blowout party night. But we didn't exactly follow that plan. Everyone started drinking early and hard Friday night as we all got together and discussed what we did over the summer. We visited a bunch of our "old haunts" from last year, like Kennedy's Pub, Cinq Sens, L'Havana Bar and ended the night at "la Moon" dance club. It was a long night (we arrived home around 6am). Everyone ended up sleeping in Saturday. In the evening a group of us went to a Pizzeria that I'd never visited before. It was really cool because the pizza is super long (about 4 feet long and one foot wide) and with really different types of toppings (how often do you eat potatoes and salmon on your pizza?). We ended up going out again after the dinner to Cinq Sens, L'Havana and La Moon, but everyone was still pretty hungover and broke from the night before so we didn't drink that much. We did dance at La Moon dance club until around 3:30 am though. Sunday was a "chillaxin" day. Misty and me cleaned the apartment a little, made some cookies and in the evening all the girls came over and we had a large slumber party in the living room. Monday morning Nalleli and me took Gloria to the train station to see her off and then headed into town to do some shopping. I was suppose to catch a train back to Montmorillon in the evening, but Nalleli talked me into staying for another night (I'm not quite sure why, because she had a dinner meeting with some professors so we didn't really get to hangout much more). Since Nalleli had dinner plans already I met up with the boys (Beto, Fabien and Benoir) and we all went to "le Souris Vert" (the green mouse) for some drinks while we waited for Nalleli. I took a train Tuesday morning back to Montmorillon because I had class at 4pm. It was a really fun weekend and I'm looking forward to more like it. Pamela (from Scotland) and Celine (from Switzerland) are already discussing when our next reunion in Angouleme will be, since they weren't able to join us for the last one (sounds like probably the end of January or the beginning of February).

The second weekend of December (11-13th) was the "Marche de Noel" (Christmas Market). So we spent Saturday wandering around the different markets and booths, looking at things and trying free samples. We ended up buying ostrich sausage, pear cider and escargot pate. All of it was absolutely delicious. I also bought some books on the history of Montmorillon to aid me in my research for writing my book. There's a carnival in town for the festivities too, but no "fun/adult" rides (boring).

My weekdays consisted of reading, preparing lesson plans, cooking (potato salad = failure; Crab salad = success), teaching, researching info for my book, etc. I received a couple of care packages in the mail (thanks you guys! they were all awesome and very thoughtful) and it snowed for a few days causing some of my classes to be canceled (YES!!). It was Leidy's first time ever seeing snow. The last week before the start of vacation was the 15th - 18th, but all my classes were cancelled from Tuesday on so I ended up teaching on Monday only in Chauvigny (so my vacation actually started Monday evening). Wednesday the 16th I had to go into Poitiers for the day to visit the Immigration office and finish all my paperwork. A stupid pain in my butt, but it is all finished and taken care of so there's no more paperwork for me to do (yeah!).

Yesterday(22nd) Leidy and me were invited to lunch at a co-worker's house. We went and had a wonderful time. They were so hospitable. Jean-Pierre is a librarian in our school and his wife Deborah is an art teacher in the school. They have two children a 13 year old boy and a 5 year old girl who were also pleasant and polite. We started the meal off by having a bottle of white wine (Jean-Pierre is from Bordeaux so he is a wine expert and he explained to us all about wine) and pate (I don't actually like pate, but I ate it anyways to be polite...I almost threw up...I really, really don't like pate). For the main course we had a potato dish that is similar to our scalloped potatoes and some dried ham and a bottle of red wine (with another explanation of how the wine, was made, why they chose that wine for the meal, where its made, etc). French tradition with wine has always amused me. During a typical meal you will go through many bottles of wine, depending on how many courses you eat. Each course requires a different type/flavor of wine to bring out the best flavor of the food. This can also make for a very long meal, because a new course will not be brought out until the bottle is finished. After the main course we had apple tart (similar to apple pie) and a coffee (it's traditional to drink coffee after a meal to help the digestion, in fact they call it a "digestif"). Then we moved to the living room to chat. We ended up chatting for a long time. They are very nice, open-minded people, so the conversation was excellent. We had some tea and cookies before returning home. We'd been at their house for 5 hours. My how time flys.

Anyways, we leave tomorrow evening for Madrid so I've just been getting everything ready for that trip. I'll post my itinerary a little later. LoveYa.