Pizza du Lapin

So unfortunately we did not get cell phones yesterday. We hung out for a while in the house, then headed out into town. There were a lot of people out, probably because of the sales. In France, stores can only have sales during specific times of the year as mandated by the government. This means that things can be really expensive most of the time, but usually the sales end up going as far as 70% by the end of the period that they're allowed, and it's a lot of fun to go shopping then. We lucked out; the sales started the day Valeria, Joel, and I arrived, and go through the first of February. But since it was a Saturday during sales, everything was packed. We decided to go back to the cell phone place on Monday, when hopefully it'll be less crowded. Then we walked down to the Rue Bordeaux, which is a cute little pedestrian street with lots of shops and bakeries, and we got sandwiches to eat on our way back home. I learned that "crudités" (which generally means raw vegetables) apparently includes eggs, since there were eggs on my chicken and crudités sandwich. But that was okay; it still tasted really good.

When we got back, we hung out upstairs some more (it really sounds like we have no life, but there's not much to do). Mathias came and we played with him some; he absolutely adores taking pictures of himself on Valeria's computer. At one point, though, he was chasing Mamie out into the hallway (she was the criminal escaping from jail and he was the warden) and he tripped over the lamp cord and smacked into the ground. It was really worrying when it happened, but ended up being really hilarious after we found out that he was fine. He was even laughing about it, and watched the video over and over again. After a while we got really tired, though, and pretty much everyone went to take a nap. Valeria woke me when Fabiola was ringing the dinner bell. Apparently Valeria found it really annoying; I was too asleep to notice.

For dinner we had paella (is what I've discovered it's called), which is a Spanish dish of rice and seafood. There was octopus, shrimp, and mussels in it, and I thought it was wonderful. Those people who didn't like seafood had a different opinion, but they're crazy. For dessert we had pistachio ice cream with a little bread/cookie thing and a slice of peach, topped with what I think were candied almonds. It was really delicious, although I was a little skeptical since I'd never tried pistachio ice cream.

Afterward we thought we were going to go out again and try to find a discothèque so we could go dancing. We stayed up trying to figure out what we wanted to do, but apparently French clubs don't open until, like, 2am. So you either go to bed really early and wake up early to go, or you just stay up all night and hang out in the bars beforehand. By the time we could've possibly gone to a bar or something we decided we were just tired, and stayed home instead. Unfortunately, a couple people decided to stay up until 4am drinking and being loud anyway, which meant that pretty much no-one could sleep. Also one person in particular decided to go outside for a smoke, and ended up locking himself out. So he rang the doorbell frantically to be let in, and woke up everyone who had managed to go to sleep.

Finally I got to sleep around 5am, and so today I just slept in until almost noon. Valeria and I assumed that brunch would be around the same time, but it wasn't until almost 1:30, by which time we were really hungry. Mathias had come up and was hanging around with us, and we thought he'd said that we were having rabbit pizza (pizza du lapin) for brunch. We thought that was a little bizarre, but when the bell rang we all ran down to eat. It turned out that we were having pizza for brunch, but it wasn't rabbit pizza. The rabbit was for dinner, and they were just cooking it all day.

After brunch, people hung around more. Mamie and Valeria and I sort of napped in our room for a while. Then everyone got ready to go out for shopping and stuff. I've been kind of homesick and spending every minute of every day with the group was starting to wear on me, so I stayed here to have some time to myself. I'm discovering more and more that I really do need my alone time. It was nice to just stretch out, listen to music, and not have to know that six other people were moving around and breathing and making noise everywhere around me.

When everyone did come back after a while, I was much better able to deal with them, and it was once again nice to sit and talk. It is never soon enough for dinner, though, and the rabbit was absolutely delicious! It was rich and juicy and they had these really yummy little potatoes with it too. The only thing that was strange was that it had all these tiny bones that you had to watch out for. It was kind of like chicken, except that it was only dark meat, and I think that was why I liked it. Jacqueline also had a friend over for dinner, a woman that she'd apparently met in college. She was really friendly, and asked us a lot of questions and tried to start conversations. Everyone's still having a really hard time speaking up, whether out of general timidness, unease with the language, or what, I don't know. It's kind of sad.

After dinner we helped clean up, as usual, and we actually sat in the salon and tried to find a game to play. After one round of Spoons, we moved on to the Dhommées' stash of boardgames, and played one called Brainstorm! Basically one person has a card with a topic and a list of things related to that topic, and your team has to try to guess as many of the things on the card as possible. It was an okay game, but we got bored with it pretty quickly and headed back upstairs to bed. Tomorrow should actually be fairly busy; we have to get things done in the morning.

To bed!