dinner, spring break, and japanese classes

Of all the nerve-wracking things here, I have to say that dinner with my host family is one of the big ones. Here is what normally happens during each dinner (which, by the way, happens around 8 p.m.). When it's time for dinner, my host mom calls everyone to the table. The phrase for this is "À table [ah tah-bleuh]!" Then we all gather, where on the table are plates and silverware for everyone and one or two dishes of stuff (and sometimes a salad of lettuce with this dressing I hate the taste of on top, but I eat it anyway). Oh yes, and they will usually offer me wine, which they buy in a little container with a spout at the bottom to dispense the wine (like a water cooler--hilarious). I assume this is fairly cheap, normal dinner wine--but I accept anyway, because why not? So, the food. Usually my family will tell me to serve myself first (something that I almost wish they wouldn't because then I can't observe others to see how they're doing it!) so I will take some of whatever is there. Now, normally I am a very picky person, and I tried to hide this fact from my host family in Japan but eventually they found out and were obliged to ask me all the time if I could eat this or that and I always felt bad. In France it is very rude not to eat everything that is on your plate, so here I have just decided to suck it up and EAT whatever is there. It is very brave of me, I know. So I have eaten things I would normally have avoided, such as onions, tomatoes, beets, duck, eggplant, etcetera. It actually hasn't been TOO bad (for example, beets are not terrible, eggplant tastes a lot like squash, and duck as it turns out is DELICIOUS. Onions and tomatoes still suck, though). I had to say no when I was offered a cabbage dish, though. Cabbage = terrible odor reminding me of least-favorite Japanese foods = no.

Aaaanyway. So we'll eat the stuff that's in those two dishes, usually my host mom wants us to finish them off so she'll ask everyone to take seconds if they want to, and then that is over and we will bring out the cheese and bread. YES, THE CHEESE. So far we've had about 5-7 different types, it changes every night which kind of cheese we'll have, and they have all been fairly good (one was nasty and tasted like feet, though. I believe it was Camembert). The bread has also been okay, but they like this funky brown bread whereas I'd prefer a typical baguette-type bread, which we've only had once, but whatever. Sometimes we will toast it (pain grillé) and also have butter, or you can just put the cheese on top of the toasted bread and eat it that way (which, delicious). Also, when we eat bread, it NEVER goes on your plate. It always goes on the table next to your plate. Anyone planning to go to France ever, remember that!!! So we will have the cheese course, then usually clear most of the plates and stuff and have dessert, which is usually yogurt from the fridge. Fortunately for me as a yogurt lover, the French also love yogurt, and there are many varieties. I love cherry yogurt... oh so much.

And this isn't even getting into the dinner conversation! Usually my host mom will ask me what I've been up to, classes and so forth, and I'll more or less struggle to give coherent, comprehensible responses (ahhh) but more often my 15-year-old host sister will start some sort of debate with my host parents. One memorable time it was over "Who killed Jesus, the Jews or the Romans?" ....yes. Seriously. My host mom took the position of "the poor Romans, they did nothing wrong" whereas Isabeau (host sister) was totally against the Romans. This actually went on for like 15 minutes... friendly yelling was involved, faux-forceful holding of my host mom's mouth shut so she couldn't protest was involved, the Bible was semi-thumped (and I found out my host family is Christian, though more my kind of Christian, which I fully approve of)... it was pretty damn amusing to watch. But I think the coolest part to me was that, for better or worse!, I understood all of it!

And oh, Spring Break plans... how happy I will be when you are finally all ironed out. Here is the plan at the moment:
Thurs. April 5: Fly to Nuremberg, Germany, arriving around 10 pm. Meet up with Rebecca, and get picked up together by Chris
- flight purchased
Mon. April 9: Leave for Florence, Italy to meet IES friends
- hostel stay booked (it's not the one where my IES friends are staying at, but it's the one close to Kathryn from AC who is studying abroad there, and I plan to hang out with her a lot. I'm in one of those 8-bed female rooms... should be interesting)
- train/flight there not yet figured out (but am thinking a train from Munich to Milan, then from Milan to Florence. Gonna be like 10 hours... ahhh)
Wed. April 11: Leave with IES friends for Rome
- housing reserved (we have an APARTMENT!! It's going to be so cool!!!)
- buy train tickets
Sun. April 15: Leave together for Paris from Rome, using the ghetto airports because we did the cheap-flight route
- flight purchased

OOOHHH once it all gets worked out I can start getting excited and not just worried about it! But it looks like it's gonna be good. :) Can't wait to collect some more stamps on my passport! And ROME! It's supposed to be the cure for people sick of Paris... ;) (It'll also be nice to not have to exchange any money. I have very mixed feelings about the euro--apparently when they adopted it prices spiked all over, and I'm not down with how expensive it is--but you have to admit it's convenient for travelers...)

Then a couple weeks after that I plan to visit in Scotland over a weekend. I would also like to use other weekends to go to Ireland, Nice, Barcelona, and London, but who knows if those will work out (because of time constraints--we only have so many weekends!--and friends' financial situations, etc). If they don't, I guess it won't be the end of the world, but I really want to go to Ireland, and I want to go to Nice the weekend before we leave. I know my friends do too, so it's only a matter of finding affordable ways and getting together to plan it in time. They also, of course, want to go to Amsterdam, so that's probably going to happen one of these weekends too. Marc said he'd be interested in going with me to London, but who knows... ahhh... making travel plans is such a big pain!!

Let's see, what else... on Thursday we had a history field trip to the Latin Quarter, though not the Saint-Michel part I usually frequent, so it was cool to see some new stuff. We went to the church by the Panthéon, St-Etienne-du-Mont, which is where Sainte Genevieve (the patron saint of Paris)'s tombstone is (her remains were burned and thrown into the Seine). THAT CHURCH IS THE COOLEST PLACE EVER. I can't even express how much I loved being there. We walked in, and all of a sudden this awesome music started to play. They have a huge wooden-carved organ up on the wall, and I guess it was coming from there. It was the coolest music I have ever heard and just filled me with this great sense of wonder and awe. It was amazingly cool, and inside it is so beautiful. It totally beats stupid old Notre Dame, hands DOWN. Eee, immediate favorite church in Paris. :D

And my Japanese classes have been interesting. I went to the first one on Wednesday a couple weeks ago, where there were about 4 other students, all around my age, there, and... it was too easy. Ridiculously easy. I knew it was bad when I did a self-introduction and my teacher had to write the words I was using on the board and ask if everyone knew what they meant. So after class she was all "That was too easy for you, huh?" and I was like "yeah..." so she got me moved to the next level, which meets at the same time but on Thursday nights. So I went to that class last week, and everyone there is older than me (30s) and there is a lot of DIFFICULT KANJI I DON'T KNOW. It's kind of... too hard. I'm like freaking Goldilocks here!!! As the teacher of that class said, there's no "choudo ii" (just right) class for me here. So I'm going to stay in the hard class, and just try to work hard and keep up. Not everyone there is amazingly good, of course, but there are these two guys who know ALL THE KANJI EVER. It's insane!!! I don't know how they did it! But they know all these random words I'd never even heard of! And my kanji is already bad... (cries) But I think it's going to be okay. Another difficulty is learning it with French people. Often the teacher will be all "This new word, okay, in French it means ____" and everyone else goes "ohhh" but I'm like "wait, what?" because sometimes I can't understand her Japanese accent when she speaks French and sometimes I just plain don't know the word. But when my mom comes she's going to bring me my electronic dictionary, which should make a lot of things easier, I can look up every word I don't know and find the English translation. mwa ha ha :) And also, I didn't realize it, but when we're learning new stuff, the teacher often kinda steps back and says "So this is how is it in Japan. How is it in your country?" Now that I think about it, this happened a lot in our Meikai classes, we'd be all "Oh, in America it's like this..." But of course, here, she says "Japanese people do this, but what do French people do? Is this how it is in France?" and it surprises me every time. Learning Japanese with French-speakers... it's gonna be interesting. But cool. I just hope I can do it.

I wish I'd been writing down what I do every weekend. Usually we spend the days exploring museums or flea markets (so I've been to the Musée d'Orsay by now, and of course it was amazing with all the Impressionist paintings. It was the strangest feeling turning a corner and "oh, well, there you are" to some famous painting or another. Insane!) and just generally hanging out. Sometimes we will go to Jack's house because he has a basement and his host dad lets us come over and hang out in the basement. Or we watch movies, we've seen a lot so far. The Illusionist (my host family took me to this one, which was really nice of them), Little Children, Babel, The Good German, Inland Empire... etc. I'm going to try to be better at writing about what happens every weekend, just so I can remember. But it was like this last semester too, I didn't get good about journaling until halfway through the semester. I've also been taking some pictures, not a whole lot but some, which I'll get around to posting, well, SOMETIME. hahah.