I'm bored.

Hello. Welcome to my Sunday. I don't have much to do today, and there's no one online to talk to, and I have homework that I'm avoiding. That's pretty much all there is to it.  I can't wait until my literature class drops to only once a week so that we actually have time to do our homework between classes.  I just did half of my homework (which took forever) and now I still have the rest to do. Yay, intensive French courses!


So, this weekend I had my first taste of French ice cream. In Bayonne, there was a little ice cream shop across from the chocolate shop that we'd been at (oh dear, chocolate is another story entirely. I'll get to that next) and I got some violet flavored ice cream. It was really good. Unexpectedly good.  Who ever thought of eating violets? Yesterday, on our way home from San Sebastian, we stopped in Saint Jean de Luz, a French beach town, and we found an ice cream shop there too. I had pistachio ice cream, coffee ice cream, and strawberry ice cream. All very good.  I still need to find Georgio's blue ice cream truck here in Pau, because it supposedly has the best ice cream in the entire town. I guess I need to get into town at the right times... I think I'll be in class at the "right time" tomorrow, which is sad because it sounds so good.


Alright, about the chocolate. Bayonne used to have 35 chocolate shops. They used to have more chocolate shops in Bayonne than in all of Belgium, at one point. Now, supposedly there are only 5 really good chocolate shops left, and 4 of them are all on the same street.  Of the three that were pointed out to us, one has a store in Pau so we decided not to go there. We did go to a shop though, called Paries, that created a kind of kanougas which are "the best caramels in the world" (according to some New York press) so I had to buy some of those. They are delicious.  Then we went across the street to another shop, Chocolat Cazenave, that does this frothed hot chocolate drink that's really famous, a chocolat mousseux.   That was extremely delicious too. I'm glad it's not in Pau, because it was definitely not cheap.


Yes, I just talked a ton about food again. I'm thinking maybe I should continue.  I just thought of a couple new things to talk about.


When we were in Bayonne, our program paid for our lunch (I guess technically we paid the program to pay for our lunch).  We went to a Basque restaurant called Le Victor Hugo.  It was, of course, a French Basque meal so it was the typical three-course lunch.  This lovely restaurant gave me the first salad I've had in France that I actually liked.  It had three separate-but-equal-sized piles of lettuce, shredded carrots, thinly sliced cucumbers and sliced tomatoes.  I normally do not like cucumbers but they were very good in this salad (the tomatoes not so much).  I'm not sure what it was about the salad that I liked but I do know it was something to do with the dressing. Can't any French person make a decent salad dressing?   The second (main) course of the meal was a piece of chicken (skin + bone included) which I couldn't eat very well because I can't pull chicken off a bone with a fork and knife, a ball of rice and a red sauce that had probably tomato, onion and red bell peppers cooked in it.  That was very good. And then for dessert we got this cake thingy, I don't really know how to describe it because I don't know what it was.  It was good though.


The next day for lunch, they also paid for that (kind of) but apparently Spain doesn't have large cafes that can seat 50 people, like France does. So they gave us each 10 euros to spend on lunch.  Jennifer, Susanne, Schyler and I found a Spanish restaurant called "La Vaca" (The Cow) where they had burgers and sandwiches and such.  It was a very interesting place. Susanne got a Spanish tortilla on a sandwich (and I had to explain to her that a Spanish tortilla is more like a potato omelet, not a flat piece of cooked flour/corn dough) which looked pretty good, Sky got a burger that I didn't even see because it disappeared too fast, Jennifer got a weird sandwich with this flat piece of pork, a cooked piece of red bell pepper, and some "local cheese" that she let me taste, it was interesting. I got a delicious sandwich with bacon (European bacon is VERY different), green bell pepper, mushrooms and cheese, all cooked and melted together, in a long baguette-shaped sandwich.  It was delicious, and then there was "ketchup" on the table that Jennifer, Susanne and I put on our sandwiches, but it didn't taste like American ketchup at all, it actually reminded me of Arby's special sauce.  It was really good.  It's sad that it's in Spain, because we all said we'd definitely go back if we could.


There. I just wrote another entire post about nothing but food (and a little bit of school talk, I suppose).  I told my host mom I'd probably go for a walk or a jog or something today, but it's so hot and I had forgotten I had homework, so I might as well just stay and do homework.  Yay, homework!  Tomorrow the IEFE (Institut d'Etudes Françaises pour Etudiants Etrangers, or Institute of French Study for Foreign Students) is buying us breakfast and putting us into our groups based on level of French (as decided by placement tests) and I think they're going to try to encourage us to get to know our group. Then I think we get our French schedules, and I'm pretty sure language classes start Wednesday or Thursday.


On a final note: I use parenthesis a lot (maybe I'm better at explaining things that way).