Frequently when I come into the room, Kevin (the French soccer player I live with) says happily, "Chi chi!" I always figured this was some form of friendly greeting. But yesterday I asked my moto-cross roommate (Renaud) what "chi chi" meant, & I discovered that it is actually a quite vulgar word that I won't explicitly say here! So I called him out on it yesterday & he got quite a good laugh out of it. I'm sure he wondered how long it'd take me! Kevin has other redeeming qualities (one of them being the fact that he plays soccer with me; the other being a divine olive-mushroom pizza he makes)...so I let his antics slide. After all, would I really be experiencing France if I didn't have a happily foul-mouthed roommate? Je pense que non.
Too bad my French classes didn't teach vocabulary like "hamstring" & "triceps dips" & "reverse abdominal crunches"...
...so it's a little hard to follow the Group Fitness classes at the gym, but I think it's more fun like
that. Because the trainer will come right next to me & tell me a bunch of instructions for my form & just completely guess what he's saying & start adjusting myself until he says, "AH! BON!"
Also, the trainer is really good about shouting
encouraging, motivational things to the class. Unfortunately, I can't understand a word he says. But oddly, I still feel encouraged & motivated when he says them :)
Prisons & Wine &
-We went to Marseille (full of modern day pirates), the 2nd-biggest city in France.
From there we took a ferry to Chateau d'If, which is the famous prison from The Count of Monte Cristo. It was cold & drizzling rain, & appropriately ominous & menacing. (Although the cliffs looked a LOT higher in the movie, & the prison looked a LOT smaller in person)
-I can't wait for it to get warmer so we can go to the beach, because the mediterranean sea already looks gorgeous, even in the cold & cloudy weather--it's that kind of water that is perfectly clear, but with these amazing alternating sapphire & dark blue tints.
-Last night we went to dinner at the house of a woman who teaches the cooking classes. But also, the man who teaches the wine tasting classes at the vineyard (who looks like James Bond with grey hair) also came, & he brought several different wines. So the woman made us dinner (yes, our entire school fits at 1 dinner table)..& at the beginning of each course, the man would open up a new kind of wine & tell us why that particular wine was good with that particular kind of food. One thing's for sure, the wine certainly opened up the arena for conversation topics (e.g. we had about a 15 minute conversation about the possibility of alien life forms). It was all delicious & let's just say that the group's trek back from dinner was punctuated with several slurred & nonsensical comments (e.g. non-sequitur reference to the Abominable Snowman).
