Vas ist das?

Last weekend we had an excursion to the city of St. Malo in Bretagne and the Mont Saint Michel, which is technically in Normandie but was at one point in Bretagne, and might still be depending on who you're talking to. We left disgustingly early on Saturday and slept (very uncomfortably) through a three hour train ride to St. Malo. The city is surrouned by huge ramparts that you need to climb stairs to get up to from some parts of the town (some parts are on a higher level though). When we first climbed up them to get a look at the beach on the other side it was low tide and the water was far off with a ton of rocks and tidepools exposed. But later before dinner we came back to find that at high tide the water comes all the way up to the wall. Apparently in storms the waves can clear the top of the wall, which is pretty impressive. Anyway, we ate crepes for lunch as they're traditional Breton cuisine--I had four cheese and then a crepe mont blanc, which was creme de marron (chestnut) with a blob of chantilly the size of my head. We had a surprisingly good guide for our tour of the city; she was equally full of historical facts and ridiculous stories, so I was automatically a fan.

That night our dinner was at a pretty chic restaurant where the waiters were entertaining to say the least. A girl in our program told one of them that, being vegetarian, she wouldn't be able to eat the normal meal. He replied with "Ca va, personne n'est parfait" ("That's fine, nobody's perfect." Good times. The meal was ham cooked in cider, so it was amazingly moist and tasty, with apple sauce (and tons of cinammon) and potato gratin. I'm pretty sure it was the best meal we've had on an excursion, especially the part where you could have seconds. We had baked alaska (which in French is called a Norwegian Omlette...because that makes sense) for dessert, and although it wasn't great the rest of the meal made up for it.

The next day we headed to the Mont Saint Michel which is a little town built vertically upwards from what used to be an island but is now accessible by foot (or car) at low tide. At the top of the mont is the abbey, a gloomy stone structure which seems like it would be unpleasantly refrigerator-like in the winter. Or any time it's not 60 degrees outside. But once you step out onto one of the huge terraces that gives you a view of the ocean and the river that seperates Bretagne and Normandie, it's worth it. The ramparts surrounding the whole thing were fun to wander around, except when the restaurants lining them were super chere. Everything else on the Mont Saint Michel is more or less a tourist trap, some of them more interesting than others. The butter cookies they're famous for were definitely a good investment, even if the cheesy tin featuring the Mont Saint Michel with a giant cookie hovering over it like a UFO wasn't really necessary. All in all the scenery was beautiful, but being there any farther into the tourist season would've been a death wish. As it was the place was packed with people, most of them half-clothed in a very premature attempt to make it seem like summer.

This past friday we found a park in Paris where you can actually sit on the grass. To be fair, one can occasionally sit on the grass in the Jardin du Luxembourg, but after a while they'll usually decide you're not allowed to do it anymore and kick you off because of some mysterious French rule they have about that. Anyway, in the Parc Bercy nobody comes to kick you off the grass, and you can happily picnic there for as long as you want. It's a park build on both sides of a big road, but with bridges that connect the two sides. It also used to be a receiving area for all the wine that was shipped into Paris from other parts of France, so one area, an adorable cobble-stoned street full of shops and restaurants) has little train tracks left over from when they used to transport the wine. There's also a Starbucks, but that's beside the point.

I also realized I've never talked about my writing workshop at Shakespeare & Co., the American bookstore here in Paris. The bookstore, which lodges writers in exchange for working in the store, used to be frequented by Hemingway when it was at its original location. They give writing workshops in the upstairs library, a tiny room with benches and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Every tuesday night Hannah and I spend two hours there with three young Canadians, four English women, an Irish man who I sometimes cannot understand, two French people (the man has the most stereotypically amazing French accent I have ever heard), a German theatre student, and an American librarian. Needless to say reading aloud is always fun because you go through an entire range of completely different accents, some of which are easier to understand than others. But everyone is a young writer, everyone actually talks in class, and the atmosphere has been surprisingly great all along. Throw in the bells of Notre Dame (which you can see from the window of the library all lit up at night) and the sound of somebody pecking away at a typewriter in the other room, and that's my tuesday night in Paris.

I now have one week left until Spring break, which is slightly terrifying because after that I have less than a month left of this semester. After that I'll be staying in France until late June or early July, but that's still not a lot of time. I guess I should probably get fluent, non?