Validated and Official – Tuesday, Nov. 15th

I went to Metz for my “Medical Visit.” It was not as daunting as it sounded. I had a set of three appointments all within the same 1h15. The first appointment was to have an x-ray of my chest, the second was for them to look at the x-ray and do the basic doctor visit things (weight, height, eyes), and the last appointment was to receive my “stamp” that validates my Visa. There were a number of assistants and we all walked together and chatted, which was nice (almost exclusively in English since a lot of them didn’t know much French). What is pretty cool though is that now – I have an X-RAY of my LUNGS!!!

The grand task of the day was really that I was staying in Metz for the night… and the French student who was letting me crash at her place, seemed… uncomfortable with the idea since she had a class event that night, so I needed to find a new place to sleep. Luckily, one of the other assistants was staying the night too and she had found a hostel, but couldn’t make a reservation ahead of time and was told to just show up before 6 o’clock. Long story short – it worked out and we were able to stay at the hostel without any problems. We were even the only two in our room – so it was like we almost had our own hotel room.

In the evening, the other assistant (Lauren) picked an Indonesian restaurant, which was pretty good and we had a great time talking for hours. It was pretty neat actually because she is one of the assistants who actually wants to talk in French and we talked for hours in French. We’re going to try to do a couple weekend trips together during the year – we’ll just have to plan them a little and pick places to meet up.