Four Weekends of Adventure and Travel!

So...Poitiers, yeah. Life is good and busy busy busy.

The last month straight I've been traveling on the weekends. One weekend I went to the Dordogne in the countryside with my host family. That was a blast and really awkward all in one. A massive dinner party for something like 80 people as it was the 18th birthday of some relation of my host dads'...

Then the next weekend I booked it up to Paris to meet Alicia for the weekend. Which was GREAT. The TGV got me up there in 2 hours, through a metro system, getting a bit lost, and finally a shrieky giggly reunion in the courtyard of the Centre Pompidou...yes we did make a bit of a spectacle of ourselves. But so it goes. We had a hotel waaaay out in a suburb to the SW of Paris, sort of a long way on the metro. However, it was quite a nice hotel, and we totally had two bakeries on the street within a block of each other. Which we sampled and reviewed.
Also on the agenda and list of fun: The Eiffel Tower (which was freaking enormous, caused us to crane our necks backwards, use some adjectives that might not be appropriate for polite society, and was very definitly climbed all the way to the top. Kissing couples were actively ignored.) Versailles (pretty and fun, and we did a bit of a waltz in one of the rooms.), the Grand Trianon at Versailles (which was a very happy accident and got Alicia her first fix of fall in three years), and the Louvre! (which was much more fun with two. We wandered around looking at nifty artifacts and pottery and lovely good things.)
We also got laughed at like crazy by some little boys on the metro. We can't figure out why they were...but it was quite a good time.

The NEXT weekend we went to the Loire Valley as a group from the Centre Oregon. A weekend out with a passel of Americans. Oh good times. The only downer was that it was really flippin' cold all weekend. Other than that we had a blast. We all met up, piled in two mini-vans and rolled out of Poitiers by a little after 9 in the morning. By 10am we had pulled into Tours the first city on our stop. And what was the purpose of this stop you may ask? Well, a wine cellar, of course! Drinking before 10 on a Saturday. Oh yes. We had a lovely tour, then played some games that were supposed to help us start to understand the fine craft of wine making. We also sampled about five different wines in this process. So by the end of the game Lucy was nice and tipsy for the first time. Did the wine stop? Nonononono...silly non-French people. Of course it didn't. Then they brought out the good stuff. Champagne, really old well aged white wines, and something called Nectar (and you now understand the phrase "nectar of the gods"). So...yes. A great number were quite quite drunk, including Sylvie (our program leader). I managed to remain within land of tipsy...but that was good wine.
We next rolled on to Amboise and lunch. Lunch first, to sober us all up. Then the tour of Amboise, great Chateau, Gothic and Rennaissance, DaVinci is entoumbed there, and most importantly a really attractive tour guide. I mean...whooa. And then, end tour, and he comes and gets in our mini-van with us. Confusion? Yes. We were apparently giving him, and his bike (oh yes...definilty fits his image) a ride somewhere. Well, turns out he lives or is associated with the rennovated Chateau thing that we are spending the night in. Fun times.
The next day we all get up, bundle up, pile in the vans and go to Chenanceau (not correct spelling there, but I'm too lazy to search for the correct one at the moment), lovely chateau. We then went to a donjon (not to be confused with dungeon... it means Keep). Ancient and gorgeous and soooo cooooool. It was a fortified castle, and then after the 14oos it was a prison. They kept a bisop in a cage there! O.o

The NEXT weekend is the first weekend of a week off. I had a 5 day trip planned with Alex and Aleisha, two girls from the Oregon program. We booked in Saturday morning for Bordeaux, spent two nights there, a day trip to St. Emilion (which was wonderful and I did some wrapping up of an adventure from the first time I was there in high school), booked it down to Bayonne (said: Bai-yun), stayed in Bearriez, and day tripped to St. Jean de Luz (where we beach bummed in the highly unseasonal sunshine!). It was a fantastic trip! I also stole plastic cup from a bar...yes I am now a klepto. Did some dancing in the cobbled streets of St. Emilion with Alex. She and I are both dancing fiends, and they were piping music all over the city. They put on some sort of latin thing, and we both just went for it. I can totally lead made up dance steps! Whee! Bought the french version of "Where's Waldo" called "Où est Charlie" here, and searched while drinking Bordeaux wine. Alex and Aleisha were perfect traveling buddies, and I couldn't have asked for a better vacation. Spending four hours on an evening train to Toulouse, in a compartment like something out of Harry Potter or Agatha Christie, we talked, chatted, laughed, and surfed the corners of the tracks. It was bliss. Thank you ladies!

So yeah, those are the adventures of the last few weekends. Other than that it's been classes, and stress, and life in general. French is fun, and highly challenging. Midterms next week...eeeeps!

whoops.

whoops. I fail. At...updating? At all. Even a bit.

France is keeping me hopping. Still alive, behind on emails, blogs, photos, and homework.

I hope the state of "alive" sticks around. "Sanity" state has departed. Wheeee!