I'm really bad at this blogging thing

So sorry for the freakishly long delay. I got the new power-cord for my laptop absolute ages ago, and completely forgot to update. So, in the past few weeks, I have:

• eaten "pain frites". The French, in all their culinary ingenuity, decided that french fries make wonderful garnish on sandwiches. And (at least on college campuses) this has been taken even further, and you can buy a small baguette stuffed with fries. I kid you not. I believe it ranks up there with twinkies on the scale of how likely the food is to give you a heart attack
• become obsessed with two French musicals, "Notre Dame de Paris", and "Le Petit Prince", both based on novels. Le Petit Prince is one of my favourite stories of all times. I cry like a baby every time I read it. Notre Dame de Paris is better known as the Hunchback of Notre Dame. Ohmigosh, that show has the most intricate staging and choreography. It's so cool to watch.
• studied the subjunctive tense. Again. There's a wide range of ability in our class, and three or four people hadn't ever studied it before. As it's rather important, we're being drilled on it once more.
• gone to Lyon again. I had to go for a medical exam to get my "carte de sejour" (think the French version of a green card). I got my lungs x-rayed, got weighed and measured, and they checked my vision and blood pressure. I'm all nice and normal! I also visited a bunch of churches while I was there, and we discovered a Starbucks! YAY!
• eaten at "Quick", which is a French fast food restaurant. They make amazing burgers! Definitely a rival of McDonalds ("Macdo" in French) on that front. McDonalds still makes the best fries anywhere. Still trying to find Tex-Mex. I am totally attacking a qdoba burrito as soon as I'm back in the States
  

Other than that, my life is still pretty routine. I started a "Culture and Civilization" class, and an Art History class, and both of those are pretty fun. I've got the same teacher for each class, and she's absolutely insane! She gets so enthusiastic about everything. One of the girls in my Art History class and I decided she's like Professor Trewlany from the Harry Potter books. So that's about the whole of it. For serious, if anyone ever has questions, or ideas about what I should blog about, let me know! I feel all boring, since I almost never go anywhere.

My laptop is busted, so I won't be posting until I can get a replacement power-cord. Hopefully I'll have exciting things to post then!

Surviving

So I found out that despite the warning on the packaging, you can indeed nuke the samosas, and they taste just fine. It was so nice to eat something that wasn't a sandwich for dinner. I'll definitely buy them again. Once I have some oil or butter, I can try frying them, since the microwave makes them more chewy that crunchy.

Also, in France, people put butter on sandwiches, the way we'd put mayo or mustard on sandwiches. It was a big surprise, biting into my sandwich at lunch today and getting a mouth-full of butter. Though apparently this isn't completely uncommon in the US. My friend Erick says that he uses butter on sandwiches when he hasn't got any other condiments.

In other, non-food oriented subjects, class is going well. I feel kind of stupid sometimes, because it seems the more we go over passe compose vs. imparfait, the worse I get. I take heart in knowing that I'm not the only one who has problems with this. And we went over this already! We spent two of the three weeks in the crash course on the same topic. It gets really boring sometimes, but in a class so small, it's hard to let your mind wander without getting caught. It was really gray and dreary today, and the forecast calls for more rain tomorrow and Saturday. I suspect that the weather is going to get steadily chillier as the month goes on. The sun came out for a little bit in the afternoon, though. Not that I saw much of it. I took a glorious nap. I sleep a lot here. Trying to use French all the time is exhausting. I think I'll make an early night of it. I fell asleep listening to my iPod last night, and woke up in the middle of the night wondering what was on my head---my headphones, of course. As is rapidly becoming my custom, I shall end the post with yet another photograph, this time of a sign I saw in Puy-en-Velay, for a "WC canin". A WC is a "water closet", or toilet, and canin obviously refers to "canine" or "dog", so I'm assuming it's some sort of toilet for dogs? I have no idea. It was truly bizarre.