Playing my guitar has been a special essence to these last few weeks, unlike I expected. I knew I wanted to buy a guitar at some point, but when my host mom brought me to a store a few weeks ago (the night I went over to check out the house and drop off some stuff) I spontaneously scrapped out 100 euro for the perfect guitar! As soon as I met my friends for dinner with my new guitar, I was pulling it out and playing while they sang all night long. Literally. We played and sang at the restaurant, on the metro, on the bus, and then in CISL ("see-sull" as we call it, our hotel-ish place) for another hour or so! Brandon, Janeene and I are goint to start a band called "On Kiff" meaning roughly We like it/We're down/That's cool. One of our new favorite words, along with "nickel" meaning cool/great/sweet also. Hanging with Frenchies is helping every day!
As for French friends right now, I have quite a few! The French seem to come in groups, so I have worked my way into a few. Firstly, we have Yannick and Numa, who met a BUNCH of us at a bar and stuck with J, B, Clare, Lucy, and I for the rest of the night. They guide us around the city to see the beautiful parks and churches in the day, and the fun bars and clubs at night! C'est la vie! They also speak French, English, Italian, and some Chinese! I insist they always speak French with us, but sometimes when we are with all 5 of us Californians it changes quickly to English rapid speed. And for the next group, we have Solene (love that name!), Théo, Grégoire, and Adrien. They were also met at a bar, and came to Brandon and Janeene's Crémaillèire au Paupieres (House-warming party) last night and they show us around the city quite a bit also. SO NICE! Everyone in France is INCREDIBLY nice! It's is hard to believe how welcoming and accommodating they are! (Or a few can be totally stuck up and closed off, total opposites). And then other Frenchies include my friend Geoffrey (thanks to Spenc who met him last year) who took me shopping the other day on some amazing secret streets. He proved to me how much French men love to shop just as much as women, and how they care about what they look like just as much as the girls! (Goodbye Berkeley boys who go to class and parties in sweats everyday!)(Not you Tordles :)) And then I also loved all the concierges at CISL who gave me free chocolate all of the time and pain au chocolate (aka chocolate croissants). Delish real dark chocolate! And of course there have been plenty more, but those are the ones I have spent a lot of time with these last few weeks!
And a quick note on these French men who care about what they look like: they are very nice, very welcoming, and some very good looking of course, but they don't eat! Like anything!!! It makes me crazy! They other night Janeene's potential significant other bragged to me (in French of course ;) ) about how he has never really like to eat much, and then we realized they he has way less body fat than me! C'est bizarre!!!! The French just really truly don't eat that much anyway! They only eat 3 times a day, and these 3 meals are half the size I eat for every meal. I guess that is why they can get away with eating so much bread and cheese and desserts!
The food here is amazing though, simply because everything is SO SO fresh. Everything. Even the packaged stuff in the grocery stores feel better and taste better in my body. And fruit and vegetables are available on every corner of every street, as well as bread and baguettes (sandwiches), because they only last 1-2 days before going bad. And all of these are delicious!!!!
Oops! Host family is here to pick me up. A bientôt!
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