Ces jours recents

Over the last few days, I've been doing a fair amount of school work (booooo), including a ridiculously hard reading comprehension test today. It was an economics article in French! I have trouble with that in English, good grief. However, I have managed to squeeze in some fun :)

On Wednesday afternoon, we went to the beach where I managed to soak up a little sun. I must say, my tan here is improving very nicely. Afterwards, I had the most amazing salad of my life, or at least somewhere close, at a cafe located on the Place de la Comedie. It had bacon, ham, eggs, tomatoes, croutons, lettuce, and oh dear goodness it was just what I had been craving! When I got home my French mom insisted, of course, that I have ice cream. Teehee...I love my family! She also offered to print all of the questionnaires that I need for my research project using the printer at her office. Too nice.

Yesterday, Thursday, the other William and Mary students and I had a fun excursion after school with the William and Mary professor who's leading our program here in Montpellier. She arranged for us to take a behind-the-scenes tour of the Montpellier mansions! And when I say mansions...they're enormous. However, they are no longer single family dwellings and have not been for quite some time. Most of them have been converted into apartments for 6-12 families to live in, if that gives you a good estimate of their size....Others of them have professional offices like lawyers or architects, but generally, they are used as really really nice apartments. The coolest thing about them is that they all have indoor courtyards. The giant door that faces the street is not a door to the inside. Instead, it's a door that leads into an atrium. All of them are unique, but they are all beautiful. They all have outdoor staircases that were once used by the nobility who originally owned the mansion, but now, most of them have several smaller, less grand indoor staircases and/or elevators that lead to the apartments. The other thing that I found really really cool is the fact that they're all a mix of disctinctive styles of architecture from the different centuries that they've stood through. They all have the gothic arches in the courtyard entrance, but sometimes the arches have been converted to a more classical style, sometimes to a more Greek style, but too cool. Window shapes and even the staircases have obvious elements of all the styles in them. Can you imagine living in a building that's from the 1300s??

On Thursday evening, our professor hosted a wine tasting, which felt a little ironic considering that (1) more than half of the group is underage and (2) our professor was actually supplying us with alcohol and encouraging us to drink it. At the end of the official tasting she kept insisting that we have more! We also had some amazing artisan bread and some stinky French cheese. I did try some....but the French cheese here is just too strong. I'm more of a Vache qui rit or Babybel fan, which when I tell French people, I tend to get snickers because those cheeses are so mild that they don't even think of them as real cheese. Anywho, I actually think that I learned more about French wine. I can now distinguish between colors of red and even taste subtle differences between the varieties. I'm so fancy. :holds up pinky finger:

Speaking of wine, I am about to head out to a wine and art festival downtown. I probably won't have any wine this evening since I had some last night. I also am getting up fairly early tomorrow morning to go to a castle all by myself...wish me luck. I'm a little terrified...