Et le vacances commence....maintenant!

Hello all.

Sorry it's been a busy two weeks, which has left me with little time to blog!

The crepe and galette blog will have to wait, but I promise it's coming!

The big highlight last week was the Jason Mraz concert here in Nantes! It was unbelievably good. I can't even express on here how good it was. I was melting all over the place. I'm basically going to marry him, so you all can expect wedding invitations soon :) The only bummer of the night was that my camera died before he even came on...wonderful battery charging planning on my part... But I managed to get some pics of the venue and the opening singer, Marit Larsen who is a singer from Oslo, Norway. Some of the other ones here, I mangaed to get from some of the friends I went with.

Last weekend the Carnaval de Nantes started and it runs through this weekend. It's a lot like a Duk Duk Daze kind of affair, except bigger. Downtown, next to the ancient cathedral, are tons of carnival rides...tilt-a-whirl, pirate ship, etc., and tons of food vendors. Except instead of cheese curds and corn dogs, they have crepes and kebabs. Everything is also extremely over priced, just like home. It's always amazing how everyone gives into the prices anyway, even though they know they're spending too much money. Oh yes, and there is also a huge parade and a kiddie parade, except with very odd floats...

Yes, there is an alien on this one...

Hmmm...a mariachi band in France!

Last Saturday I also ran a 5k for Breast cancer here in Nantes, and I lived to tell the tale! haha... I was a little worried going into it, but I managed a 30 minute finish, and considering I've been running maybe once a week, I'll take that. Below is a link to pictures from the event. There were hundreds of people. It was actually pretty cool. I got a nice pink shirt out of it! :)

http://www.odyssea.info/photos/nantes09/index.html

Sunday morning I found a really nice Protestant church downtown. It has a woman pastor and is so much more laid back than the Catholic mass I had been forcing myself to sit through... It was really similar to home actually, and I really enjoyed enjoying church again. HOWEVER, the service was an hour and half long...an hour and a half!! I mean, really? You could say the pastor got a little winded with her prayers and the sermon and singing all 5 verses of every song... I figure it's better to sit through something I can enjoy and relate to, even if it is an hour and a half, than sit through a service I really don't like and don't really understand either. But we also did something really cool with communion. The entire congregation circled up around the sanctuary so that we were all facing each other, and then the wine and bread were brought to four different sides of the circle, and were passed clockwise until everyone had received communion. It was really unifying. Also a little nervewrecking as my friend and I were one of the first ones to be given the wine and bread, and we had no idea how to go about taking communion...tear off a piece of bread and dip it in the wine? drink from the cup? tear off a piece of bread for the person you pass the loaf on to? We figured it out, but i'm pretty sure the entire church thought we were Christian imposters haha. I'm pretty sure Jesus got a kick out of it though :)

This past week has basically been a blur. I've been scrambling to get some work done before my spring break starts tomorrow! Some work has gotten done, but I'll have plenty to do when I get back...lucky me. I also got 3 midterms back this week and all went really well, so even if I didn't get everything done that I wanted to, I'm feeling good about my French schooling at the moment! We'll see if that feeling stands when I go home in May...haha.

This week we also all received an e-mail saying the University was back on. So we made ourselves go to the FAC (University). BUT when we got there, there were no profs and negative students, besides ourselves of course. The funny this was, it was April Fools day, or Poisson d'avril. Funny joke! Haha we'll see what happens after vacation...

Also, the University is completely covered with graffiti, garbage, fire pits, and odd smells... clean up after all the strikes is really going to take some time... I hadn't been down there since January, but I'm glad I never found myself in the middle of all that while the strikes were actually going on. Scary.

Tomorrow morning I'm heading to Paris to meet my dad! It'll be the start of a two week adventure, and I'm super excited about it! We'll be in Strasbourg tomorrow night, just in time for the end of the NATO conference. My host family keeps telling me I need to go meet Obama! And I keep telling them that Obama is too busy being charasmatic with the rest of the world to meet me...haha. I'll let you know if I run into him. All of Strasbourg is pretty much shut down until Sunday morning though. So it'll be interesting to see all the security measures and such around the city. From Strasbourg, we're going to rent a car and head south on Tuesday morning. We'll be in Geneva by the end of the week and soon after Lyon. Next Sunday night, the evening of Easter, we're going to the Lyon-Maroc soccer game! Both teams are in the top 10 of the league, so it should be a really good game! From Lyon we'll head west, eventually meeting up with my host family at their country home near a village called Castelmaron-sur-lot, which is about 45 minutes southeast of Bordeaux. We'll stay with them until Thursday morning, and then head back to Nantes to finish the trip. I'll have the computer with me, so I will try to plug in a few updates every now and then, and get some pictures up!

Now, I'm off to clean and pack! I wish you all a blessed Easter and a fabulous upcoming few weeks!

Kelsey :)