Last Saturday, I took a little ride out into the countryside with my host mom and her boyfriend. They were visiting a house they're considering buying, and invited me to come along. The weather was cold but sunny, and the drive out was stunning.
We drove southwest, into a hilly region filled with vineyards. A lot of the towns in this area date back to the Roman occupation of Gaul, and some even further back than that. At one point, my host mom's boyfriend pointed to one of the many hills, and told me that it was a dormant volcano. I'm ninety percent sure he wasn't kidding.
Our destination was a little medieval town up in the hills, just beyond the city of Narbonne. Apparently it's fairly well-known as the site of a siege during the 12th century. It's also very popular with tourists, and my host mom and her boyfriend are interested in buying a house there and turning it into a little bed-and-breakfast. They were making this particular trip in order to talk with the owner and negotiate a price.
The town only has about fifty year-round inhabitants, and the place seemed empty. The streets were really narrow and winding, and all of the buildings were made of stone. You know. Like a medieval town.
They're a little hard to see, but check out my host mom's awesome pants.
We had lunch in a small, but surprisingly fancy restaurant. It was one of those places where they give you tiny amounts of food and charge you too much for it. It tasted really good, though, and included things like cauliflower soup. I felt awkward about taking pictures of my food, but I couldn't resist when my dessert showed up.
That's ice cream (vanilla, I think?), topped with whipped cream, topped with a meringue. It was really good.
Then we went and visited the house. It was three stories tall, and very nice, but it seemed to me like it would get really cold in the winter. It was right at the edge of the town, with a garden enclosed on one side by the outer ramparts, and with a view down to the river.
My host mom and her boyfriend talked with the owner for a bit, then we walked around the town a little more, and then we left. I slept most of the way back, only to be awoken by a surprise trip to Ikea. I'd never been to an Ikea before. It was... kind of magical.
When we got back to the house, one of my host mom's adult daughters was there with her young son. They were both very friendly, and she spoke a little English and took the opportunity to practice it with me. Her son also spoke to me a bit, in French, but I had a really hard understanding him. It's the same with most of the other young French kids I've encountered. They tend to mumble and mush their words together enough to make comprehension really difficult. Anyway, we had a really tiny, really good pizza for dinner.
I slept in the next day, which was nice, but also a little awkward, since no one else did. Everyone here seems to go to bed really early.
On Monday, I started another week of class. I felt more confident than I had the week before, and I started speaking up a little more. We also got a new student, from England, which was cool. This was apparently also the end of school vacation, because starting on Monday, my tram stop was swarming with high schoolers. Before then, I'd pretty much had the stop to myself, so this was an annoying development.
Speaking of my tram...
It's so cheerful.
I've gotten very comfortable with the tram system at this point, and have allowed myself more time to walk around the city after class. I've found a nice patisserie where I occasionally buy myself a snack, and I've found a few bookstores. And finally, after some intense searching, I found something I thought I wouldn't have access to until I got back to the US- a comic book store!
I had a mild freak-out, then went in and spent about an hour drooling over comics.
It's a nice store, on an out-of-the-way street a few blocks from where I'm taking French classes. The selection isn't great- they don't have much from any of the current ongoing series- but I can't complain. And since comics are small and thin and wouldn't add much weight to my suitcase, there was absolutely no reason for me not to buy one. Or two.
Mine! All mine! I got a Hawkeye ("Oeil de Faucon") solo issue from the 90s- in French! And I got a JLA: Classified issue I'd been looking for, in English. It was a good day.
It's been sunnier, so I've managed to get some reasonably decent pictures of my neighborhood.
It's a bit like the neighborhood where my Danish family lived, in that it's very enclosed and quiet and safe, and everyone seems to know each other.
I've also been really getting to know my family's pets and, astonishingly, it turns out I'm not allergic to any of them. The cats have taken to chilling on my bed in the evenings, which I love. I've always been a cat person, and I've never really had the opportunity to hang out with any for an extended period of time.
And finally, a slightly blurry video tour of the pets! Note the asthmatic cat and the creepily staring dog.
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