mon dimanche et le Catho

Today is Sunday and I've had a nice quiet day with the host family. I woke up late and read for a bit and as I was downstairs brushing my teeth I heard my host mom calling for me. I walked outside to see that my host dad had come home with a bike for me!! They used to have one for their students but last year it somehow got destroyed, and they realized that the free bike program in Angers was a headache (to qualify I had to get a bank account and to get a bank account I had to have all these documents etc. I had been working on it for a while and was going to try to go on Monday to the bank.) so they just decided to buy one for me! It was a really nice surprise, and Andre spent an hour or so after that working on it for me, because he had gotten it at a flea market sort of place and it needed a bit of tuning. It's very European with the high handlebars and thin little city tires, etc. I'll take a picture of it sometime to show you, it's dark blue with white accents, and it makes me happy.
Afterward he and I drove to pick up Lucie at her friend's house which is in a suburb of Angers and he explained to me how one of the biggest psychiatric hospitals in the region was located there, as well as a bunch of farms that grow flowers to sell. We had lunch outside around 3, which was as always just amazing, and then they helped me with my grammar homework sitting out in the sun as my laundry dried. =] It's been a good day. Everyone else is out on an excursion today (I opted out of because we could pick 2 of the 4 offered and the others looked more interesting to me, which you'll be hearing about later.) but as it turns out staying behind wasn't an issue at all, and I practiced a lot more French than anyone else did today, hehe.


Okay so here are some more daily life photos for you. At the Catho (cat-oh) Notre Dame students get special treatment because our program has been going on for over 4o years (we're SUNDEF 44, that's the name of the ND program, don't ask me what it stands for.) so we have this cute little computer lab just for us. We all have swipe cards to get into it, and I have a feeling I'll be making good use of it. It's just nice knowing there is a locked room that I can drop stuff off in whenever I want, and go pick it up later with complete confidence it'll still be there. Haha. Plus it's on the 6th floor of the building, so the view is definitely nice. Which brings me to my next photo....





This is a glimpse of campus as seen from the computer lab.The main building with the little dome thing-y is currently under renovation, so we don't get to use it at all. =[ Apparently in 2 years CIDEF will be stationed there, which is pretty much just completely unfair. The building I was in as I took this picture is almost as ugly as a building can get on the outside, and thus I probably won't be posting pictures of it. The building on the right is another campus building that houses both the nurse and the dining hall. We get to eat lunch there everyday right now for free, but once real classes begin in October, we just get a once-a-week meal there. The food is amazing and lunch is always served in courses, which is fabulously French.