Le premier jour

Dimanche: 1 fevrier
Je. Suis. Fatigue. I’m also very, very full. I’ve been fed so much delicious food, it makes me doubt whether I should continue eating because obviously at this point any food consumed hereafter will be a comparative disappointment. But I am so, so very full, I may just explode. Growing up, I never had that pressure to finish everything on my plate, but somewhere along the lines that got implanted in me. It would be a much easier feat if I saw all the food at once. Dejeuner was between 2 and 3 PM (for sake of reference: 5-6 AM Pacific US time). It began with appetizers, or..uh…the French word for appetizers (desolé, my brain crashed and burned around that time). There were mini pita sandwiches, mushrooms avec la beurre de escargot (not actually escargot, just the butter sauce that usually goes with it), little bread things with an assortments of other things piled on top, then these plastic/rubber sleeve things stuffed full like mini sausages with bread doused in pork blood - actually not as gross as it sounds, but I have a thing about extracting food from a tube, call me old fashioned…and I think there was other stuff. After that I thought, “well, okay, I’ve been generally satisfied hunger-wise, I can get used to this.” But after some time, we moved from the salon (living room) to the salle de manger (dining room), and began our full meal. This consisted of bread (that we had purchased à la boulingerie (okay, I’m not actually sure how to spell most these words, so bare with me here). Then there was this awesome meat stuff that actually stopped me in my tracks. I think it was beef, it may have been pork, though what I am sure of is that it was a life-changing experience. I will not describe it, and unfortunately I do not know what it was called so you can’t look it up for yourself. Oh la la, j’oublier les autre répas (FYI - répas was not the right word to use there).
I would take pictures of my awesome room to show how awesome it is, but I guess we’re not supposed to do that? Because if someone were to see it on the internet, they could be like “hey, their computer is by a window and it looks unlocked, I could totally get in there” (Note - l’ordinateur de ma famille n’est pas près une fenêtre et c’êtrais beaucoup difacile to totally get in there). The tracks lights along the ceiling, the lava lamp on the dresser, the LED lamp on the glass-top desk, the orange neon rave lamp in the corner and that Sharper Image like circle lamp thing beneath by bunk bed (the bottom bunk is my couch/dresser) are all controlled independently by one of two remotes in the room. Ce n’est pas important.
The photo game. This is really cool, and would’ve been much cooler were I not on the brink of passing out from jetlag and general fatigue and were it not Freezing Cold degrees centigrade (it’s pretty much the same for Fahrenheit, if you’re looking for a conversion). I guess ma famille had tried to tell me about this a number of times and I wasn’t quite picking up on it, but I figured out the rules as we went along. So, a bunch of people meet up at this place, then at this place they divide into groups of about 4-6 people (there were 6 groups this time) and then the assignment is given. Three one-word/phrase categories are given out and each group needs to take a picture for each category, then everyone comes back at a certain time, picks their best for each category, then they put those pictures on this guy’s laptop which is connected to a projector. He then projects all the pictures for each category, and after a few times through, everyone votes for their favorite. Then each category has a winner (the group I was in one the first two categories), and then everyone hangs out and eats cake (you know the kind with the toy inside? Then whoever gets the toy est le roi?). The categories this time were Cuoak: it was spelled something like that, it literally means the sound a duck makes, but is used to express something strange or bizarre; Bling - Bling: I guess this also means something strange, or something, I don’t know. I know I’ll get it terribly wrong, so I’ll just say what it means in English: Up and down, or upside down. This last category was the one we lost. Our group was among the several that took some sort of variant of “this picture contains someone who is upside down.” The winning picture was the photograph of the address that had the numbers “69.”
I want to sleep, but I have to use the bathroom and the bathroom is taken…I have to go to school tomorrow…whiny whiny whiny. Good, glad that’s over with. I wondering at what point a torrent of hate and unhappiness and homesickness will hit me.
So I believe that about wraps it up. I know for the first few days I’ll be able to write a whole lot easily, but as time goes on, I’ll probably step down to a weekly schedule.
Merci beaucoup!

Taylor en France