my bike, French movies, and more

So this week got off to a good start when last night les monitrices, who are the 10 French college students (all girls) who teach some of our classes, set up a soirèe for us to go out to bar. Thanks to my new BIKE I was actually able to go, so I met some friends at the Catho and we all walked to this really nice and really expensive bar. It had Caipirinhas though! So I was sitting outside sipping on that as this foreign looking guy wearing a Ronaldinho #10 Brasil jersey walked up and joined the group. So naturally I awkwardly stared at him for a while and then pointed to his shirt and mumbled something about liking it, not sure of what languages he spoke. Well in the end he ended up being Brasilian, so then I got to talk the rest of the night in Portuguese! It was fun for sure. Well not the rest of the night actually, after a while my friends and I left the expensive bar and went to one on the designated "student street" which was a lot cheaper, where I socialized with lots of French guys, speaking French to them, and they English to me. So it was a good night for languages.

Riding my bike is definitely a fun experience. It's a little bit scary, not gonna lie, because I have to ride on the road; I could get a $90 ticket for riding on the sidewalk. The European roads almost always have parallel parking on one side of the road, so add that to cars going both directions, and you have problems for bikes. Luckily people are constantly riding bikes here--it's almost always faster than driving the winding, narrow streets--so drivers are used to it. Mostly. It's fine really, except the roundabouts scare me, but lucky on the way to school I only have to deal with one, so it's fine. Plus it's not like traffic is heavy here; on the way home today I think only about 3 cars passed behind me the whole time. Going the other direction there were lots, but who cares about them? Hehee. Oh, and here are some pictures now, of the bike. =]

Today I watched a French movie. Lots of you may know, I'm not one to cry at movies... but I cried during this entire movie. It's really quite beautiful and poignant. Really, really, go find it and watch it. We watched part of it in class and then my teacher said he'd lend it out to who wanted it, and I was the first to raise my hand. =] My host family was ecstatic I was going to watch it; it's very famous here. From the outside, the plot looks somewhat formulaic, but it's really very beautifully done. Of course it's French, so you'll have to read subtitles, and there are a few weird motifs, but really, go rent it. You won't regret it.

For dinner today we went and sat on the steps of the Cathedral that I posted pictures of a few days ago. Here's what that looked like for you. I wish you could see more detail in the picture, but it's a photo, so you can't. I felt very much like a study abroad student, hehe, there were 6 of us in the group eating cheap paninis for dinner, sitting on the steps below a cathedral and looking at this gorgeous view, with these typical French people and houses all around. It was nice. Like, really nice.