Great food and wonderful company

Monday: Monday morning I was so exhausted from the weekend that I missed the first half of my French class – however, we always do student presentations during this time, so I really didn’t miss that much. I arrived at class right after the break at 10am. After class, Dana and I went to go some Chinese food for lunch and then around for a while trying to find a tram stop for me to take to head back home. After that, I spent a little time doing some work at home before heading over to the cooking class that Barbara had arranged for us. We had a cooking class with the same women during the orientation week and enjoyed it so much that we were able to convince Barbara to organize a second time. However, it was hard to arrange everyone’s schedules and so Dana and I ended up having our cooking class with two girls from UVA (Katherine, Janee’s friend that we had met when we met to see the Hunger Games, and another girl) as well as two other girls from Brown. Everyone was really nice and we all had a great time hanging out together. We had a great class. I love the woman who runs these classes. She is so sweet and we make such delicious food. On Monday, we made Cervelles de Canut, a Lyonnais specialty. It made with this cheese/yogurt thing, whipped cream (no sugar), chives, shallots, garlic and tarragon and we ate it with some delicious fresh bread. For the next course, we had Poulet Flambe a l’estragon (tarragon chicken). Finally for dessert we had a wonderfully light and delicious tart with marscapone and blueberries (that were reduced down in olive oil). Overall it was a delicious meal, a fabulous class, and a wonderful time. 

       

      

Tuesday: As usual, I woke up and headed to the market a la Croix-Russe. I had a little bit more success talking with clients, however, it is still quite difficult because everyone is always trying to buy stuff and move on, or sometimes with the people who aren’t, the older people at the market, sometimes their hearing is really bad and they struggle making out what I am trying to ask them, and end up giving me some pretty strange answers… After another lovely day of photographing at the market, I headed home for some lunch. After lunch I spent some time working on my presentation on the old hospital in Lyon before heading to my history of Lyon class. I had a relatively interesting class ( I really enjoy the more recent part of the history of Lyon) and then I headed back home for dinner. Following a delicious dinner of quenelles I spent the rest of the night working on my presentation.

Wednesday: Wednesday morning, I went over to Dana’s apartment because we had to watch a movie together that our professor had lent us for our French class. It was a pretty awful movie because literally nothing happened, but it was at least nice to get to watch a movie together for once. After that I went to tennis class, which was enjoyable as always since it was such a gorgeous day. After that I came back home, took a quick shower and spent the rest of the afternoon reading and working more on my presentation (it certainly takes a lot more time to prepare something like this in French than it would in English!). After that, I headed to Place Bellecour to meet up with the other students on my program for our dinner with a French family that was arranged by Lyon International. The family had a little girl named Mathilde, an 17 year old daughter and a 13 year old boy (who was away skiing). We had a fabulous night. The little girl was absolutely adorable and we had a ton of fun playing with her, drawing and playing with her 8 guinea pigs (they tried desperately to give us one of them since they had just had 5 babies about three weeks ago). For dinner we had chicken quenelles with mushrooms followed by a large cheese course and then a chocolate cake with strawberries, vanilla ice cream and whipped cream. We stayed in their house hanging out with the little girl and talking until almost one in the morning. Overall, it was a fantastic evening!!

Thursday: I woke up and my alarm didn’t go off, so I missed going to the school Thursday morning to teach English. After that I woke up and headed to meet my tutor at the library. We worked together on my presentation about the old hospital in Lyon (l’Hotel-Dieu) for over 2 hours and then I spent another hour by myself photocopying and finding books before returning back to the apartment. I had just a few hours before I had to leave to leave to go to the airport. I made some lunch, took a shower, packed, spent about half an hour discussing politics with the women who comes to help with the housework and skyped with Seth before heading over to take the Rhone Express to the airport to go to Brussels!!