One late night

Nuit Blanche Sept. 30

I went to the little supermarket in town today (later I learned there is another just at the other end) and looked around. I realized that I didn’t bring any paper to write on and picked some up. I also grabbed laundry detergent and some stuff to mount things on my wall. It was a nice little outing. It takes under fifteen minutes to walk there and I don’t see myself really buying more than a single bag of supplies – so that shouldn’t be a problem.

I tested my ppts out on the school projector – they worked without any difficulty at all. After that, two of the three English teachers planned out my next week. I’ll just being going to classes and introducing myself and a little about Livermore. I’ve been told already that I’ll have to talk slower… which I will have to focus on for at least the first bit since I’ll probably be a smidgeon nervous. Once I finish that, the class can ask me questions and depending on their level, I can ask them things like “What is your name?”

This was a special day, at night there were performances and exhibitions throughout Metz – it’s called La Nuit Blanche (“The All-nighter”). We were having dinner with a friend of Francoise. There were three “kids” – a high schooler, me, and Florence (Francoise’s daughter who is David’s age). We had a small problem finding people and then dinner wasn’t allowed to start until the band showed up… That meant that we didn’t actually sit down to eat until sometime around 10pm… And then the music was so loud that I couldn’t really manage a conversation (all of us kids were pretty tried looking). I’m really doing well with my French, but if I can only hear every 5th word and have a side profile of the speaker (so lips don’t even help) then my French is not so great. I actually wasn’t overly impressed with the food actually – other than my mash potato cappuccino (creamy foamy soup-like mash potatoes).

Dinner finished a little after 11pm and we walked around and looked at the exhibitions. I, again, was not overly impressed, but that might have been ‘cause of the late hour. We started heading back to the car a bit after 1am… and that’s about when all the drunk ppl start fighting so you have to be careful. Then there was an almost 30 minute drive back – so it was bed at 2 am.

I really like talking with Florence – she is very nice and we can do English or French no problem so we actually bounce between the two a lot which is fun. Being out at the event reminded me of how much I liked my little evening walking around Montpellier – really just being able to walk around and late night walks home. We’ll see how things go here – it is not a very eventful town. It is looking a little like I might want to do a lot of Saturday trips, but base out of Francoise’s house rather than my room at school just do to the simple thing of food access potential and ability to cook and see other humans.