Too. Much. Cheese.

Sometimes I forget that excessive amounts of dairy often make me feel sick. Last night, for example, when Valerie made a gratin with five different kinds of cheese, I probably should have known that eating a portion as big as my FACE was a bad idea. The gratin was nothing like the au gratin potatoes that come from a box (and are orange, for whatever reason) that we have in the US. Don't get me wrong, I love me some boxed orange god-knows-what, but the gratin last night was amazing, despite the fact that we did actually screw it up. Basically it was a bunch of thinly sliced potatoes layered in a huge pan with melted butter, a ton of garlic, and five kinds of cheese--chevre, gorganzola, camombere, and I don't even know what the other ones were. Once everything was nicely spread in the pan Valerie remembered that part where you're supposed to pre-cook the potatoes (uh, oops?). So since we didn't want it to take, you know, four hours for them to cook in the oven, we did something "tres americain!" And by that I mean we dumped the whole lot in a microwave-safe dish and zapped it for...well, probably way too long and we're all going to get cancer, but whatever. Ten minutes in the oven and we had ourselves some fabulous gratin, served with green salad and bread, and a tarte au citron for dessert (it was store-bought, we're not that cool).

But the moral of this story is that today I spent the two hours of my Literature and Cinema class being absolutely convinced that I was going to throw up. I guess five kinds of cheese really is too much. Plus I probably didn't help myself out too much when I opted for cereal and MILK for breakfast either. Ugh. Unfortunately now the thought of cheese is still making me slightly ill, which narrows down my lunch options by about 75%. Can't have cheese sandwiches or cheese paninis or cheesey pasta or cheese pizza or cheese tarts or even bread and cheese. At least not for a few days, anyway.

Aside from my cheese-induced nausea, I have too much homework. Not really. It's just that we go through periods of having almost no work here, so when they finally give us something to do I feel as though I should be shocked and offended. At the moment I'm too queasy to work on my Madame Bovary expose, which is why I'm updating my blog.

Saturday was spent at Fontainebleau, a little town about 40 minutes outside of Paris with a forest, a chateau that was a royal hunting retreat, and a restaurant that looks like a magical dungeon. We spent the morning hiking through the forest, where they apparently have reinactments of the traditional chasse-a-courre with people in tricorned hats on horseback with a pack of bloodhounds and the works. Although they do actually hunt a boar, so maybe that doesn't count as a reinactment...just an inactment? Well anyway the point is they're insane and I love them. Our tree-loving tour grandpa apparently takes place in these hunts as well as all the other crazy costumed things they do there, and you'd be surprised to know how many there are--parades, balls...BALLS! Hello, I'm jealous, I want to wear a gown and do the venetian waltz around the cobblestoned courtyard of a palace where Marie de Medici lived, please.

Anyway, the tree-loving tour grandpa was super enthusiastic (he even told us some tree jokes which probably would've been funny in English; in French they were just funny because they were tree jokes. Tree grandpa also said he would carry me if I had trouble with the paths, but I declined.

After our lunch in a magical dungeon (lunch wasn't great, but the dungeon was fun) we headed over to the chateau de Fontainebleau. We had a tour guide who led us through the rooms with these weird little audio earpiece things. The most entertaining thing (aside from the part where we took a Single Ladies picture in a BALLROOM) was the rooms in which everything (no really, everything) was covered in the same fabric. Walls, carpet, bedspread, chairs and little draperies would all be exactly the same pattern. Even if that pattern was hideous, which it was a little more often than you'd think. I'm pretty sure that would've given me a headache, so I'm fairly glad I don't.

After the tour we met up with tree grandpa again because he wanted to give us a tour of the park and gardens. It ended up being Mwantuali, Madame Stevens, four of my friends and myself. Everyone else saw the ominous looking grey skies (and tree grandpa, possibly) and booked it back to Paris. It was a good tour though, because tree grandpa really knew his stuff. AT one point he said "Now just imagine that you're Marie de Medici--" and I immediately burst out laughing because of my epic La Reine Margot dream. Then we had a fun talk about Things You Get and Things You Are Not Allowed To Do If You Are The King's Mistress. I decided that I would want to be the king's mistress if I could be Diane de Poitiers, but probably not if I had to be someone else. I could live at Chenonceau but come to Fontainebleau to chillax in the garden labyrinth and hunt some boars. Good times.

Saturday night we had dinner at Ellen's and indulged in some SNL celebrity jeopardy. Which is really hard to explain to your host family in French, so take my advice and don't try it. I did, and I failed, and now they think I'm insane.